by Jeff Provine
Locomotive fireman, Nate Kemp, uncovers a conspiracy around the miraculous Newton’s Catalyst, a powder that makes fires burn hotter than they should—secretly releasing the fires of Hell. Now, more is beginning to slip through, and the Rail Agency tries to tuck him away in a mental institution. Nurse Ozzie Jacey helps him escape. They must warn the capital, Lake Providence, before Hell literally breaks loose.
HELLFIRE
Jeff Provine
Published by Tirgearr Publishing
Author Copyright 2016 Jeff Provine
Cover Art: Cora Graphics (www.coragraphics.it)
Editor: Sharon Pickrel
Proofreader: Barbara Whary
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away. If you would like to share this book, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not given to you for the purpose of review, then please log into the publisher’s website and purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting our author’s hard work.
This story is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
DEDICATION
For Courtney
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to alternate historian, Robbie Taylor, for inspiration on the state of Gloriana.
HELLFIRE
Jeff Provine
Chapter One
The fire threw cinders into Nate Kemp’s eyes. If he hadn’t been wearing his helmet, it would have blinded him.
Sparks flashed against the dark, glass plate that hung down from the thin, metal cap over his head and disappeared. He wore a heavy, leather apron and thick gloves reaching past the elbow. His upper arms, even under his cotton shirt, were covered in pale scars from past burns.
Nate sneered at the fire through smoky stains left on the glass by the burned-out cinders. Through the shadow, he could almost see faces in the flames sneering back at him.
Despite all the burns over the years, the sound of the fire was worse than the pain. It was like a crowd of thousands all screaming out at him. The sound got under his skin and into his head. Sometimes, even when he wasn’t near the fire, he could still hear the screaming.
Nate banged his shovel against the firebox wall.
The fire wailed back at him from its box.
Nate struck it again.
“Easy there,” Jones, the engineer, warned.
Nate turned to face him. Jones was tall and slim with blond hair streaked black with soot. They had worked together for three years on the mail train running freight of all kinds west of the Mississippi toward the Texas Trail and back. The thousand injuries Jones had made through the years suddenly flooded into Nate’s mind. The times Jones had laughed when Nate struck his head on the cab roof. Jones smacking mouth at his lunch with horrible huge bites that anyone would have known were too big for a civilized man. His thin smile sometimes seemed to mock Nate as he spoke.
Nate shifted his shovel in his hands. He could see himself burying it in Jones’s head in one, swift stroke, like an axe. It would come down, crack the skull, let blood spurt and pour. All Nate had to do was kick the body under the wheels of the train. Nobody would be able to tell what he’d done from the mangled mess.
Do it.
Jones pulled up his goggles and blinked his blue eyes. “You all right?”
You will be, something told Nate, when you end his life.
Nate shook his head to chase away the bad thoughts. He’d worked fifteen years without Stoker’s Madness, and he wasn’t about to let it get to him today.
Nate kicked the foot-release at the base of the firebox wall. Two half-circle heavy iron doors fell into place with a clang audible even over the grunting rhythm of the train’s pistons. He couldn’t hear the wail of the fire anymore. Silence settled in his head. The chuch-chuch-chuch rhythm of wheels ground on him.
“That’s better,” Nate muttered.
“You all right?” Jones asked again.
“Just need a minute.”
“Right.” Jones put his goggles back over his eyes and laid his own gloved hands over the lever for the throttle. “It’s been a long day.”
Nate grunted in agreement and let out a long sigh. He set down his shovel in the corner of the train cab. His hands felt almost weightless without it.
Nate stretched his arms above his head, interlocked his fingers and pushed against the sky. The sore muscles tensed for a moment, and then he let them go. Twin sweet waves rolled down his arms as he brought them back to his side.
“I’m going to get some air.”
Jones nodded without a word.
Nate stepped over the low safety rail at the back of the cab and clambered up the wall of the small tender car that rode behind them. It was mostly empty; the coal already shoveled into the hungry belly of the fire that never lost its appetite on the day-long journey.
The small train cab he shared with Jones was one of iron and heat, barely enough room to move back and forth as he scooped up appropriate amounts of coal and fed the firebox. Jones had his gauges and levers to guide the locomotive, but it was Nate’s weary back that actually drove it.
On top of the tender car, the world opened up around Nate. He stripped off his helmet, and the world burst into bright color. The life and beauty of the countryside came alive. Through the dark glass, everything seemed gray and brown, like one of the newfangled photographs everyone was clambering to make.
Nate preferred the real world. The air was smoky from the black column that reached up from the locomotive’s smokestack. Away from the smoke, the warm, musty scents of the bayous roamed the breeze made by the train passing down its track.
They rode through the proud state of Gloriana, which stretched north of the stagnant swamps near the Gulf to the hill country of Ozarka. Nate turned away from the black smoke pouring from the stack and looked out over the rolling green. Farms and roads were carved out of the trees, which grew dense on the shores of the Ouachita River. Hawks floated in the blue sky, sliding near the updraft of the hot smoke for lift. Nate had seen the landscape all his life, but it still stole his breath away.
He filled his lungs with a gulp of the fresh air. It was cool, the first cool thing he’d taken in all day. Whenever he opened its doors, the firebox belched out its reeking heat onto every surface in the cab. Even his lunch, wrapped in cheesecloth, had gotten warm inside its pail in the June sun. The air at least turned cool as the sun began setting in the west.
Like Jones said, it had been a long day. It was every day. Nate was up before dawn to get the fire stoked and the locomotive’s water boiling in time to head out as soon as there was enough light for Jones to see that the track was clear. The fire hadn’t wanted to start today, and he had to sprinkle it with Newton’s Catalyst twice before it leaped up from a normal fire to the hot yellow, egg-stinking blaze that made the engine run.
They ran the mail route from the docks at Lake Providence out to Shreveport, where the parcels and envelopes would be shipped up the Red River or put on the next train heading down the Texas Trail. Sometimes passengers in a hurry or couriers came along on the route, but today was one of many days where it was just Nate and Jones riding alone across the bayous, stopping long enough to turn around and load up in Shreveport, and then heading back home. The expresses ran over the Mississippi across Burr Bridge and barely stopped in Gloriana before rolling out West.
Nate stared into the western horizon, across the green forests that eventually gave way to the prairie and then desert, all the way to California where men had becom
e millionaires digging in the dirt for gold and silver. “Go west,” the man had said, but Nate liked his life in Gloriana well enough. He had stoked fires since he was twelve, when his father had died. The pay at the bakery back then wasn’t good, but once he was big enough to work the railroad, he earned so much his mother and sister could make a living just by taking in laundry. There was even some to tuck away each week, something he could show off to a girl’s father when he proposed one day. That serving gal at Tacker’s Saloon, the one with the dark eyes, maybe she—
“Kemp!”
Nate jerked his head back toward the cab.
Jones waved at him. “Pressure’s getting low! Temperature must be dropping off!”
A rumble of hate for the firebox rolled through Nate. That fire was going to be the death of him.
He shimmied down the ladder and jumped into the cab with his helmet in his hand. While he juggled the shovel up into his hands, he checked the big pressure gauge. Its needle already neared the ochre warning of too little pressure to keep driving the engine pistons.
Nate shook his head. He had just broken his back feeding the bright maw. “That ain’t right.”
Jones tapped the glass with his gloved hand. The needle jumped, but fell steadily back to its low spot.
“Fire’s acting up today,” Nate told him. It had been spitting cinders and never seemed warm enough. He’d been shoveling almost continuously since dawn.
The wails seemed worse, too. Some stokers stuffed their ears with cotton, but Nate had seen too many men never hear a loose coal pile start to collapse before it was too late. The old men, the ones who had lived long enough without either accidents or getting the Madness, always stuffed their ears out of superstition.
Nate didn’t have time to be superstitious. He plopped his helmet onto his head with one hand and stuck his shovel deep into the coal in the tender car. It was heavy, but lifting and tossing were so natural to him now that he sometimes did it in his sleep.
He stomped on the pedal to open the firebox gate. A torrent of bright, hot air struck him, toasting the bare patch of his neck between the helmet’s glass and his leather apron. It stank of sulfur and rot. The wailing was worse. It was as if he could hear the screams of individual voices crying out from between the bright flames.
Nate flung the coal deep into the hazy brilliance of the furnace. He waited a moment more for it to catch and then looked for the temperature gauge to roll upward.
It didn’t move.
Nate squinted into the flames. He had thrown in good Fort Smith coal. At least, the coal looked good. Maybe some swindler had sold a boatload of lignite rolled in oil to the company. There wasn’t anything he could do about it now, though. His job was to burn it, whatever it was.
He turned back to the tender and threw load after load of the coal into the firebox before settling back and panting the hot, stinking air. Through his helmet’s dark glass, he could see the coal lighting, burning as it should. The needle on the thermometer rose somewhat, but Nate fought uphill. It had all the fuel it needed, and the vents were clear, but the fire wouldn’t cooperate. He supposed it needed a little boost.
Nate set down his shovel and peeled off his gloves. The Newton’s Catalyst rested in a little paper sack between the rail map and a chisel.
He didn’t want to do it. The stuff was expensive, imported from a factory in England where they made it under a shroud of secrecy. People whispered there were strange rituals and dark oaths for the people who worked there. Other rumors said that there were folks inside the factory that went in and never came out.
Nate didn’t care how they made the catalyst, just that it worked. For whatever reason, it made fires burn extra hot. The catalyst powered everything from stoves to foundries to engines in factories. Every locomotive got an allotment of catalyst for the week from Doc, the quartermaster. The other stokers complained that it was never enough, and they complained more at Doc’s suggestion they could have some extra out of their pay. Nate had always worked well with what he had. The others might, too, if they spent the time to sift out their ashpans and collect some catalyst from the last trip. He unfolded the paper and let the amber crystals fall into his palm. Nate let them linger there a moment, feeling the grainy shards on his skin.
There was something about the catalyst, something that felt like cheating. It was the same feeling Nate had as a kid pulling a girl’s pigtails while they played.
Nate measured out a little more of the catalyst and squeezed his hand shut around it. He could feel the grains crushing together. Gingerly, he took his shovel and poured the crystals through his fingers onto the warm iron. He carefully changed his grip and threw them deep into the firebox.
The fire’s wail grew louder and higher, almost like a screech. Flames belched out of the firebox.
Nate and Jones both jumped backward. Jones made a cry Nate could see but couldn’t hear. He ducked beneath the fire and stomped the release pedal for the gate.
The iron doors fell shut with a stiff clunk. Hissing hot air blew through the cracks in the metal.
“That did the trick!” Jones called, pointing at the gauges. The needles slipped happily upward on their dials.
Nate looked up at the engineer, but didn’t say anything. His throat was dry.
The fire had exploded as if he’d thrown gunpowder into it. Newton’s Catalyst was more like a dense log than kindling: burning hot for hours. Nate had never seen it blow up like that in his fifteen years of shoveling.
Something banged inside the firebox.
Nate’s blood ran cold.
“What was that?” Jones asked.
Another bang, softer this time, rang out. Three or four more followed. It wasn’t just drumming out pockets of popping gas with the new heat. Nor could it be a clinker, the fused rocks of leftover matter when the coal had burned; that would have started off small and built up. It was as if something was moving around inside the impossibly hot firebox.
Nate gritted his teeth. “Maybe the ashpan’s come loose.”
Jones yelped. Nate looked up to see him pointing at the needles.
They jumped back and forth, as if unable to get a reading. The steam pressure leaned too close to the dangerous field of red.
Jones grabbed the cord for the steam whistle on top of the train and pulled. A long, high squeal came from the engine, gradually settling the needle. The firebox banged again.
“It’s going to overheat the boiler!” Jones warned. He jammed the valve control open, letting the engine scream as it charged down the track.
“We’ll be all right as long as we’ve got it open,” Nate called back.
Even with the imminent danger of an exploding boiler, he didn’t care. Something about the banging in the firebox just wasn’t right. He picked up his shovel from where he had dropped and edged toward the firebox door.
Jones called after him. Nate didn’t hear what he said and waved at him with a bare hand. All he could hear was the banging from inside.
He stepped forward and gradually pressed his boot onto the pedal to open the gate.
The screams grew louder. Dark yellow flames leaped out, the color of vomit when the only thing left in a sick belly was bile. A wave of hot, stinking air rolled out.
“Whew!” Jones shouted and clamped his glove over his nose and mouth.
Nate ignored the smell. He leaned closer and squinted through the dark glass of his helmet.
It was difficult to see anything in the overwhelming brightness of the firebox, but, in the middle, somehow, there was a shadow. It wafted from one side to the other, speeding up to slam into the iron sides of the box with a bang that sounded over the wailing roar of the flames. It wasn’t a broken piece of the ashpan or anything else. It almost seemed alive.
“What on God’s green earth?” Nate mumbled. He bit his tongue. The Lord’s name didn’t seem right for whatever the thing was.
The shadow turned among the flames again. It stared right at him.
&n
bsp; Chapter Two
Even with the gushing hot wind from the furnace, Nate shivered. He lifted his boot from the pedal and let the doors swing shut again.
“Everything all right?” Jones called.
Nate shook his head slowly. “No. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not right. There’s something in the fire.”
“Can you dump it with the ashpan?”
Nate kept shaking his head. “I don’t think so.”
A jarring bang rang from the firebox doors. Nate jumped back and held up his shovel like a weapon.
The doors rattled again, and then the one on the right shifted open just a crack. A fresh sound of wailing poured into the cab. Something not quite black and not quite gray slithered out like a headless snake.
“What is that?” Jones screamed.
Nate swung at it with the shovel, whacking it with the dull side. A roar like the wind out of a cave came from the firebox.
Jones screamed louder, “What was that?”
The tendril grew longer and pushed back the firebox door. Steadily, fighting the weight of the heavy door, the thing climbed out of the firebox. The tendril was like a tail reaching from a shoulder. Its five other legs were segmented like a spider’s, but its body was fat and grotesque like nothing Nate had ever seen. It had eyes, shining, black eyes that blinked all over its bulbous body.
It cleared the door and fell to the metal plate floor of the cab. Sounds came off it: gurgling, whining, and guttural spitting. Nate stood frozen, watching the horror as it squirmed.
Jones jumped forward and stomped it with his boot.
The thing squealed and wrapped its legs around Jones’s boot, somehow bending them backward by twisting its own knees out of socket. Jones gave a horrified shriek. He stomped again and again, but the thing didn’t seem to get hurt.
Nate shot forward with his shovel. “Hold still!”