“This was during the holocaust,” Edmund said. “What more death could it want?”
“All of it. Every single person on the face of the earth. It wasn’t satisfied. But then I came along, right when it was starting to plan how to end all life.”
“Just how would it do that?” Edmund asked.
She shrugged. “I suppose it’s doing it. Like that.” She pointed up to one of the screens right after Lena switched channels.
A group of men—non-military by the looks of them—were firing at something offscreen. They nervously backed up, and then from the right side, Otto came running, the alligator wrench held high, and he lopped off the head of the nearest man. The others still fired, but the bullets had little effect on him. They turned and ran, but it didn’t look good for them. No sooner did they flee from the corner of the screen did the train zip by, filling the whole video with dark smoke.
“You think if it kills enough, adds enough cars to the trainset, it’ll wipe out humanity?” Edmund shook his head, unable to believe such nonsense.
Lena and Matilda just exchanged looks. The old woman said, “That’s all we have to go on right now. But no, I think the train will be limited if that’s the Entity’s plan. I’m sure there’s lots of places it won’t be able to reach, no matter how powerful it becomes. This tactic didn’t work too well for the Führer.”
“How so?” Edmund asked.
“He tried to control too much land. And it was his downfall. By stretching himself thin, he left himself weak and open to attack.”
“Do you think it could really cross the ocean?” asked Sophie.
“I wouldn’t be brave enough to assume not,” said Matilda.
“Are we safe here?” Edmund asked.
“For now,” Lena said. “It’s always been weak against Krakus House. We have what some would call dark magic, but really we only have power against Entities.”
“So what now?” Sophie asked. Edmund had never seen the girl so scared, not even when the train was bearing down on them.
“Now, we wait,” said Matilda. “We are quarantined, possibly because the government is trying to contain the train, but they don’t know how it works. The more men who come to fight it, the more who die—and those deaths are as good as the coal and kindling that once fueled its engine.”
Lena shook her head solemnly and played with the hem of her shirt. “I fear that the train will encircle Poland, without a gap in its trainset—the engine’s pilot touching the bumper of the last car.”
Like a giant ghostly snake, thought Edmund.
Matilda stood up, gave herself a stretch and then walked by Edmund, heading back upstairs. “You all are welcome to stay here. I wouldn’t advise you going anywhere else right now. And we have prepared for such things. We have food and drink and plenty of firewood.”
“I’m surprised Bill hasn’t tried to get a taxi out here,” said Edmund.
“He may yet. I should go check on him.” She got up and walked out behind the old woman. Now, it was just Edmund and Lena down below.
The silence hung in the air for a moment, and just as Edmund contemplated following Sophie upstairs, Lena asked, “Have you already contacted your family about what’s happening?”
“We’ve talked. But about the train? No.”
“Is there a girlfriend back home?” she asked.
It was such a strange turn of questioning, but then again, that’s the type of thing people asked when they were being friendly. Edmund hated talking about things like that—almost to the point that he acted embarrassed to have a girlfriend.
“There is.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, playfully. “That was quite the hesitation.”
“We aren’t serious.” It was the same thing he’d just told the old woman because it was his default answer where his love life was concerned.
“I see,” she said. “That’s unfortunate, I suppose.”
“Not really. I’ve never dated much. My dad always said I was a loner.”
“That’s a sad existence,” she said, pushing the conversation to a very grim tone. She saw how it had dismayed him and squeezed his knee, just before getting up. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “I’ve learned to live with this sort of detachment.”
“Is that really what you want with your life?” she said, hovering near the stairs.
He shrugged. “It’s easier. If someone breaks your heart, you don’t cry if you never really cared, right?”
“Heartbreak is good for the soul, though, Edmund. I know that’s a crazy notion, but heartbreak separates us from things like him.” She was pointing to one of the screens, where Otto was hanging out the engine’s window and chasing down a group of pedestrians.
“Maybe you’re right. But there’s benefits to feeling soulless.”
Lena rolled her eyes and smiled. “Oh, Edmund. You aren’t soulless at all. If you were soulless you’d be in Romania by now.” And Lena let that stew in the air as she climbed the steps, leaving Edmund surrounded by Ghost Trains.
***
That evening, things began to change rather quickly. At approximately four o’clock, a pair of motorists who’d been turned away at a checkpoint on the 655, south of Suwalki, saw the train hammer through a collection of houses and a parking garage before slamming headlong into a power substation. The explosion was felt for miles, the giant fireball rising into the waning sunlight, and beneath the cloud of black smoke, the train barreled through.
Initially, electricity flickered out for almost sixteen-million people.
Three minutes later and over seven hundred kilometers away, was the tiny ski resort town of Karpacz. Alexi Jelenia watched from his office window as the train headed up the mountain toward the POL-1 uplink site. The train was billowing black from the smokestack as it climbed a near-vertical pitch, engine screaming for blood. It charged right through the main building, collapsing the walls and knocking over enough towers and dishes that people came out of their homes to watch them roll down the mountain. Alexi couldn’t be sure, but he thought the train simply melded with the cascading snow and fog before it made it up the mountain, and when the debris collected at the bottom, the Ghost Train was long gone.
In only five minutes, half of Poland was without communication and electricity. By the time the sun went down at Krakus House, the whole country would be a desolate, black island.
***
They were sitting in the common room when the power finally did blink out. They still had enough light to see by, enough to find candles and become secure in their surroundings to get up and move. The girls—who Sophie had learned were here from Sweden—were named Gerta and Margo, however they were not sisters, but school friends who just had an uncanny resemblance. Bookish Guy turned out to be one Timothy Baker, who was on holiday from Leeds, and oddly enough, passing through East Poland on his way to Lithuania to attend a concert by his favorite Scandinavian metal band. Edmund was perplexed that he’d got such a bad reading on both parties, but that was hardly anything new.
They lost the television when they lost electricity, but the small radio Matilda produced from behind the bar lasted a whole twenty minutes before it too drowned in static. But in that short time, they had gathered a few bits of local happenings, like looking through the keyhole for the bigger picture.
The government was spinning the Ghost Train as a coordinated terrorist attack. This seemed to work for most people because the train was so fast, so agile and all encompassing, that it was almost as if it were attacking multiple places at once. Large parts of Poland were on fire, and troops were coming across the border from Belarus and Czechia. The news scared Edmund because for the first time he saw the train as a thinking, calculating Entity and not just the blunt edge of a club. It had the forethought to attack telephony services, to cut the power, to make people panic. It was doing exactly what Lena had feared: Creating a giant, ghostly ring around Poland.
Edmund didn’t fully trust
the information from the radio. Back home, three out of four news stations were pure garbage—the worst propaganda since the Cold War. That could be the case here. While he did believe the train was out there causing all sorts of problems, he thought—and hoped—that the frantic voices on the radio were embellishing. He didn’t get to wonder for long because the radio died, just after they’d said the Ghost Train (referred to as the extremists’ weapon of destruction) had rammed straight into another passenger train, sending cars flying all over the place.
Timothy was the youngest in the group, and as darkness crept across the land, and the shapes that were once harmless in the day became long with shadows, he started to panic. His car sat just in front of Krakus House—a tiny two-seater that was so nondescript that Edmund couldn’t even begin to figure out the make and model. Timothy lingered on the porch, arguing with Matilda as she pleaded that he stay inside.
“You don’t have to pay for your room or food. Please, just stay till morning. This old lady wouldn’t sleep well tonight if you left in the middle of all this.”
“I would rather take my chances in Lithuania, ma’am. No offense. This is a beautiful little pla—”
And as everyone had gathered around him on the porch, to see this fool really run off into the night, his words were cut off by two screeching shapes flying high overhead. By the time they were a mile out, Edmund realized they were jets—and just like jets were wont to do in such uncertain times, they rained down death and destruction against a faraway enemy. The firebursts were clear on such a dark night—two giant plumes of red shot into the sky as they dropped bombs and then parted in opposite directions.
Even from miles off, they could see the ghostly line of the trainset, unblemished by such conventional weapons. It slithered across the Polish landscape, cutting a line of spectral essence between the ground and the sky. The silence returned, and then the steam engine blared so loud that they held their ears. Timothy’s face had gone as white as those crammed on the train, and he just nodded to the old woman without saying anything, and went back inside.
Edmund watched the train until the end, until it was completely gone from sight.
It may move across Poland but it’s never far from Polvec . . .
***
For the next three days and nights, they did all they could to stave off boredom. Edmund looked at photos saved on his phone until the battery died and he had no way to charge it. He and the girls played cards, an assortment of games, some of which he knew and many he didn’t. Playing cards seemed to be the universal language of all societies.
Bill hardly said anything to him, nor to Sophie which troubled Edmund more than he cared to say. It was one thing to be mad at the guy who prolonged the proposal, but don’t take it out on someone whose only crime was being caught in the middle. Edmund stepped in to let Sophie vent and, on the second night, cry. Bill had shut down on them both, and Sophie was lonely. It was an alien concept to Edmund but he never left her side until it was bedtime. Everyone was scared, and rightly so.
The third night, most of the group was playing cards at the main common room table, thick tallow candles arranged so sporadically that they looked as if they were ready for a séance. Lena and Matilda had already gone to bed—the two proprietors of Krakus House did most of the day’s work, and Lena slept in a room on the third floor while the old woman often fell asleep in the chair down in the War Room. There was nothing useful down there now, not without electricity. Edmund thought he saw the old woman with her head bowed, as if praying.
Bill was also absent. He wasn’t much for socializing now, and to Edmund’s recollection, hadn’t even spoken a word to the Swedish girls and Timothy. Most of the days (and nights) he spent in bed, reading one of the few English books that Lena had available.
Gerta and Margo were trying to teach the group how to play a card game called Vändtia. It was confusing to Edmund because it seemed to borrow from many familiar games like Rummy and Poker, but also had sprinkles of a classic game from his youth that his dad called Crazy Eights. Only in this game the tens were special.
Both Edmund and Sophie threw their cards down, not sure what they were doing, but having fun pretending they could keep up. At least Timothy was just as clueless, probably never having held a deck of cards in his life. It was comical to see how serious he took the game, and how when he was unsure of a particular rule, he’d question the girls. They found him just as humorous as the Americans.
“Do you remember playing Go Fish on the train?” Sophie asked.
The word struck him funny for a moment, because these days whenever someone mentioned a train, it wasn’t a normal one—it was the one currently swimming the waters of Poland outside their door.
“Yeah. Seems like a lifetime ago.”
“It wasn’t even two weeks ago,” she said. “Dammit, we were supposed to be having fun.” She was trying to keep her voice steady, but Sophie was coming undone.
“We couldn’t anticipate this,” he said, drawing from the pile of cards. “Bill will come around.”
She nodded and swiped tears away from her eye so fast that Edmund barely saw them.
The world was quiet. Poland had always been remarkably silent but now, there were no sounds of industry, nor of nature. The train had made it all go away. And because Krakus House was so still, they all heard the floorboards as Bill emerged from the room and looked over the railing. Both Edmund and Sophie gave him a warm wave of the hand, but he barely threw his own up before turning and walking off to the bathroom.
Sophie looked at Edmund and just shook her head, as if she were about to cry. He turned to Margo and said, “Deal me out this hand, please.” And then, to Sophie, “I’m going to have a chat with him. Be right back.” Her eyes were pleading and he couldn’t tell if that meant she was begging him to do it or imploring against it.
He pushed out from the table, headed up the steps, and caught Bill just as he was on his way out of the bathroom. Seeing Edmund on the steps gave him a slight pause, but he still offered up a weak grin and a nod before he headed off to the room he and Sophie shared.
“You should come check out this game,” Edmund said. It was mostly to Bill’s back since his friend was walking so fast, obviously trying to put distance between the conversation and himself. “It’s hard as hell to figure out but Sophie’s getting a kick out of it.”
“No thanks,” Bill said, about to close his door.
“Hey man, can we talk?”
Bill lingered with his foot in the doorway. “I don’t really know what there is to talk about, Ed.”
“You don’t? How about the fact that we’re all stuck here because of a train full of ghosts?”
“Stuck because of you,” he said. It came out more venomously than Bill had meant, and the flash of regret in his eyes was quick, but it had been there. They’d never argued like this. “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight. It’s not your fault. I’m just having a hard time with stuff.” He tried to shut the door but Edmund moved closer and held it open.
“What stuff?”
He relaxed, let go of the door and breathed a little easier. “Life, Ed. Life. I don’t know what’s wrong. I just feel like this whole ordeal has made me realize that I’m not a kid anymore. That dad can’t bail me out when things go wrong. For all his money, it can’t do a thing for me right now.”
“Same with me.” Bill had pushed back into his room a little and now Edmund was standing in the doorway, the sounds below becoming quiet because he was so intent on understanding his friend. “It happens to the best of us. We’re growing up, and we can’t stop that no more than we can stop the train. But you know what we don’t do? We don’t give up. And we can’t shut down. We have each other and we can’t let the train take that away.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Bill said, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“You know I am.”
Just then, the train whistled, but it was distant. Bill and Edmund walked over to th
e window—it looked out in a different direction than Edmund’s room and the scenery was just as uneventful, more so now that the train was prowling. They couldn’t see it though, and the whistle went dead toward the end of its cry, as if it had slipped into that otherworldly dimension.
“I guess it’s making its rounds again,” said Edmund.
“I wonder if the military could airlift us out of here?” Bill wondered.
“Who knows. How many people do you think are left? We’re here, right? Could be lots of others.”
Bill shook his head. “I think we’re special. The train doesn’t like to come near Krakus House. But it’s gone manic, just ramming into stuff. Like a vampire under bloodlust.”
“That’s a colorful way to describe it,” Edmund said.
“Sophie would love that.”
“Yeah, she would. Do you want to come down and play with us? No sense in anyone being alone right now.”
He smiled gently and sat back down on the bed. He pulled out a thick, red paperback as if that should have been enough of an explanation. “I’m good. I just want to sleep and wake up in a different place.”
That one made Edmund snort. “Good luck with that.” He was backing away, sensing that Bill was done talking. The hostilities were over with, now his friend just needed a little space.
“Ed?” Bill said as he turned to leave. “Tell my girl I love her?”
“Sure.” He pulled the door shut and headed back downstairs.
His first thought upon entering the common room was that it was rather cold but the two fireplaces were both burning fiercely, so perhaps it was the added electrical heat that was causing a nip in the air. Edmund’s attention was drawn to the bottle sitting between the girls and Timothy—it hadn’t been there before so he assumed one of them (probably the red-faced man from Leeds) had hopped the counter, found the old woman’s stash of vodka, and helped himself. The girls’ shrill laughter was akin to skinning a cat. Because all of these things had first grabbed his eye, he didn’t realize until he’d sat back down that Sophie wasn’t in her chair.
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