The train whistle sounded again, closer now, and the huffing of the engine grew in volume.
Eli stumbled, went down with a grunt of “Jesus Christ,” and stayed there until Gilbert kneed the man’s shoulder. Shorty was behind them both and urged them on with a glare and a cocked shotgun.
The group eventually hauled themselves onto the rail bed and performed a quick dust-off, stomping and wiping at themselves and then each other.
“You three over there,” Leland ordered Eli, Gilbert, and Shorty. “We’ll board from either side of her. Be faster that way. Space yourselves out, but not too far or you’ll risk being outpaced by her.”
The group split apart and faced the tunnel mouth. Nathan felt a rush of excitement, momentarily imagining himself to be a lawman ready for a gunfight. Then the reality of what he was doing struck him full-on, and his excitement wilted just a little.
The light of the approaching train hung in the dark, a miniature moon of pure white that seemed to intensify with every passing second. The whistle sounded again, a raspy, almost breathless thing. The iron horse’s wheels rumbled over the rail joints in a steady rhythm, pulling itself forward from the deep black. The beat was a minor thing, a faint percussion, but growing stronger.
“Here she comes,” Leland called out some ten paces ahead.
Nathan barely heard him over the approaching din of the locomotive. He adjusted his hat, then his scarf, and took in the night sky overhead. That same blue-black field of stars lit up the heavens. It wasn’t the first time he’d gazed upon the night sky with a deep, appreciative wonder. Many a time he’d camped out on a prairie, with just his horse, and simply laid back and stared at the heavens before sleep took him. But there was something about the mountain air that sharpened the stars, polished them, elevating their beauty to a level of purity that was just mesmerizing. Perhaps it was the altitude that put that final sparkle upon the sky, remembering folks said a person was closer to God up in the mountains.
Perhaps he was.
The whistle sounded again, a long-winded piping that filled the gulley before petering out. A steel beast growing weary of the dark and eager to be free of it.
“They’re laying on that horn awful fierce, aren’t they?” Nathan said.
“Just warning folks to stay off the track,” Mackenzie explained a couple of paces behind him.
“Y’mean like what we’re doing now?”
“Yeah, like what we’re doing now.”
“Animals, too,” Leland called out, while staring at the approaching light. “You’d be surprised what wanders onto the tracks.”
“At night?” Eli asked with a note of disbelief. “Up here? God-damn.”
“Can’t be any more surprising than a pack of gunslingers,” Mackenzie said, hefting his rifle.
The light grew larger in the tunnel, straightening ever so slightly, as if aware of the seven men waiting on the rail bed. Even at that distance, Nathan found himself squinting at the harsh brightness. He looked back to the night sky and blinked.
The stars…
The stars were larger. More prominent. As if the entire night had dropped a hundred feet or so. Or the land had risen. The sight bewildered him so much, he arched his head to seek out the moon and found it hanging in the sky over his right shoulder.
Nathan’s mouth dropped open.
The moon looked bigger by some unknown margin, but it had definitely grown, enough to notice. An eerie yet spectacular halo encircled that moon’s face—a great spectral ring that he hadn’t noticed before. Nathan had to blink a couple of times just to take it all in, to give his mind time to appreciate what he was seeing.
The ground beneath his feet began to tremble.
Ice and snow rattled free of the rails, as if the very tracks themselves decided to shake themselves off, revealing their dark lengths right up to the tunnel mouth.
“Hey, uh, Leland?” Nathan asked, raising his voice.
“What?” he answered, focusing on the approaching train.
“Look up.”
Leland glanced a question at Nathan before doing so.
Mackenzie said it first. “Holy shit.”
Mutters of disbelief came from the others, and even Jimmy Norquay’s usual stoic demeanor was shaken by the sight overhead.
The whistle sounded again, much, much closer than before, and the great machine’s laboring grew even louder. A mechanical, repetitive puffing then, along with a discordant, underlying screech of metal that pierced the night and rubbed each man’s eardrums raw. That steely huffing and clatter distracted the train robbers. To Nathan, it sounded like a person playing the cymbals in a grand orchestra, slapping the metal plates together, while rusty pistons struggled to keep pace with the rising tempo.
And that didn’t seem right to him, either.
The grade was uphill.
The train should be slowing down.
Before him, Leland Baxter held a hand up to shield his eyes against the growing might of the locomotive’s eye.
“Awfully bright,” Mackenzie declared over the rising raucous. And it was.
Incredibly bright. And becoming brighter.
Blinding even.
Enough to make one believe the great train was right on top of the group of seven, but that was far from the case. The gang still remained fifty or so yards back, but the light continued to grow from within the tunnel, until it seemed like the sun itself was emerging from the brickwork exit. The ground shook something terrible, and a rock or two tumbled down from the mountain slope to land harmlessly in the nearby powder. A blast of steam and snow whorled from the tunnel mouth, preceding the thing about to emerge.
Nathan widened his stance—out of fear of slipping, but also in wonder, utterly transfixed by the machine’s headlight—until he had to shy away from the painful glare. The engine’s laboring increased tenfold, becoming the breath of not a train, but a mechanical monster.
“Christ Almighty,” Eli Gallant shouted, as he lifted his own hand to protect his eyes. Beside him, Gilbert and Shorty Charlie Williams turned their whitened faces away. The light bleached the color from the entire gang, rendering them as pallid figures frozen by the beam. Nathan saw his shadow stretch out behind him, and then watched as the snow shook and sparkled around it. A January blizzard swept over him, stabbing at his exposed bits, as if summoned by the train.
Mackenzie grabbed him and pulled him back.
The train rolled by Nathan, missing him by a mere foot, its ominous weight startling him with its closeness. The three men on the other side of the tracks disappeared, replaced by a ribbed profile of black iron and chrome. No longer blinded by the headlight, Nathan glimpsed the train’s collection of tubular pipes, animated rods, and whirling discs comprising the profile of the great machine. The locomotive steamed by, pushing tirelessly forward, mounted atop a series of great wheels that whispered metallic whale songs. Bars of steel rowed and churned, moving that great ominous bulk along.
A cloud of steam engulfed Nathan, warm and moist and laced with a scent of engine oil and something else. A chuffing, wintry maelstrom swallowed him up and flung ice and snow into his face. Nathan again lowered his eyes as the train rolled on past, billowing coats and causing hands to secure hats.
The engineer cab flashed by, and Nathan glimpsed the glow from a single lantern through the engineer’s open window.
And a hunched figure, all gone in a second.
“Come on!” Leland shouted, readying himself upon the rail bed’s shoulder, searching for the stairs.
The wind and fury whipping up the snow diminished for a second, and an open car bed of chopped wood became visible. Hoarfrost partially concealed the numbers and lettering painted on the side. Nathan looked from the passing car to the dark form of Leland, closing with the moving train. A railing popped into sight, and Leland latched onto it with one arm before hoisting himself up. His struggling figure was black against the snow squall.
Then it was Nathan’s turn, and he had
no time to think about it.
The train, oddly enough, wasn’t moving as fast as he’d initially believed, and time seemed to slow as he reached out and grabbed onto the rail. He got one foot on the lowest step, and then the other.
“Get up here,” Leland’s shadowy figure commanded as he climbed up onto a platform, where a single door led into the first passenger car. Lamplight shone from a glass portal set high into the door. Two drooping guard chains, hanging between the cars, were the only barrier keeping someone from falling onto the railbed.
There wasn’t much room upon the platform, and there would be even less very soon, especially when Eli Gallant finished pulling himself up on the other side. Gilbert was right behind him. Leland stepped toward the wood car’s platform and gripped the lip of the filled bin.
“Over here, quickly now,” Leland ordered, clinging onto the bin while still holding onto his Winchester.
Nathan scrambled after him, sensing that impossible slowing of time right to his bones, where each fleeting second stretched into three. He stepped onto the wood bin platform and grabbed on, taking a huge settling breath and catching a smile on Leland Baxter’s face.
“Nothing like it, is there?” the gang leader asked.
Nathan smiled back and shook his head.
Shorty Charlie Williams was the last to board. He stopped at the lower step as Jimmy Norquay did the same on the other side. Steam and snow blasted by, distorting or concealing the gulley walls. The men clung to the railing, their shoulders set, their faces lifted to the partial roof that extended from the passenger car over the platform, which provided some measure of protection from the elements.
If the elements had been coming from the sky.
In the pale light of the car door, the gang settled down while the train chugged onwards, gently rocking them.
“Hard part’s over,” Leland informed them all. He looked back towards the main engine. The wood was piled high, and the billowing steam all but hid the locomotive’s forward parts.
“Wasn’t so bad,” Eli remarked, clutching his rifle in one hand while hanging on to the railing with another.
“Wasn’t so bad,” Mackenzie repeated, but his tone suggested it had been bad, as if he’d somehow been scared quite badly.
For Nathan, however, that odd sense of time had disappeared, and he was fully in the moment.
“All right then,” Leland barked and nodded at the others. “There’s the passenger car. Control the car and everyone on board.” He glanced back toward the engineer’s cab and received a face-full of stinging snow.
“The hell this snowstorm come from?” Eli asked, placing his back to the passenger car door and chancing a quick adjustment to his hat.
“Just blew in, I suppose,” Mackenzie answered.
But that didn’t feel right to Nathan.
“Never mind the snow,” Leland said. He nodded toward the passenger car. “Get in there and do your jobs. We’ll be back once we secure the engineers and stop this thing. And, Eli?”
“Yeah?”
“Just reminding you is all. Don’t do any shooting unless you got to.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Gilbert stood behind the man and slapped his back for encouragement, all to the rising tune of chump, chump, chump, chump as the train’s tempo gradually increased.
“All right then,” Leland said to Nathan. “Let’s stop this thing before she picks up any more speed.”
With that, the outlaw leader skirted toward the outer side of the wood bin. Dipping his head into the rising wind, he held onto the steel lip and shuffled along the narrow platform.
One careful step at a time.
Nathan heard the passenger door slide open behind him. The five men there went inside, one after the other.
The thing that caught his attention, just as he grabbed the rail and leaned into the rising gale, was that there were no gasps or screams of any of the passengers as the group of armed men filed inside the car. Nathan didn’t dwell on it. He concentrated on threading his way along the walkway running to the engineer’s cab, clinging tight to the railing.
4
“What do you want to be when you grow up, Nathan?” his father asked, drawing a forearm across his balding head and soaking up the sweat there. The August sun beat down upon the parcel of farmland that they currently worked, drying out the soil faster than the water they sometimes had to dump over it. His father pulled out a handkerchief from his stained overalls and applied it to his right temple, then left.
Squinting in the sun and getting to know firsthand how damn hard farming was, nine-year-old Nathan squinted back at his perspiring father and smiled. “A lawman!”
That was met with silence.
“A lawman?” his father asked, placing an elbow upon one of the hoe’s handles. The leather reins drooped and ended at the harness of one solitary workhorse his father had named ‘Amigo.’
“Yup,” Nathan replied.
“Not a farmer?”
“Nuh-uh.”
That answer seemed to crease his father’s tanned face in puzzlement, and maybe in a touch of sadness, too. Nathan didn’t want to make his father sad, however, but didn’t quite understand his mistake. Then it occurred to him what he’d said wrong.
“I mean… I want to be a farmer, too,” he explained, “but also a lawman.”
That put a smile on his father’s worn face. He chuckled, his smile missing teeth but pleasant all the same. Once he got his little laugh out of his system, he shook his head and applied his handkerchief to the back of his neck. He grimaced at the sun.
“Don’t you worry, son,” he said in a voice neither offended nor sad, but quietly content. “Don’t you worry. Being a lawman is a fine idea. Just fine. But it’s just as tough as being a farmer, don’t you be mistaken.”
“It is?”
“Yes, it is.”
Nathan looked to his feet, reconsidering his career choice.
“But it’s a fine profession all the same,” his father said. “And I know you’ll make a fine lawman if you become one.”
That perked up Nathan’s spirits mighty fine, and under the terrible summer heat, he and his father smiled at each other.
*
Snow swirled and battered Nathan’s face as he shuffled his way along the walkway, boot toes to bin wall. He leaned over the upper lip of the bin, and the wind fluttered his coat and strove to rip his hat from his head. That wasn’t happening, however. That felt hat had belonged to his father once, and though he had fastened the chin string, if the wind did manage to take it, well, Leland would have to stop the train all by himself.
Because Nathan would go after the hat.
Chump, chump, chump, chump… The train’s pulse beat, pushing the machine forward as it let out steam.
A sheet of white powder whipped over the woodpile, conjuring up snowy demons that lashed at Nathan’s face. He lowered his head and wormed his way along, peeking every now and then to check on Leland.
Who was nowhere in sight.
In fact, there was nothing in sight. It was a complete whiteout. Or, as it was night, a complete and chilling blackout. All that was left in the world was a bin of wood and a train robber hitched to its side. The snow subsided just a touch, and somewhere far ahead, much farther than anticipated, was Leland’s dark silhouette, stopped and waiting.
Then he was gone, rounding the wood bin’s corner. Nathan hurried at best speed, hampered by his rifle and wishing he’d had the sense to attach a strap. He reached the corner and saw Leland within the engineer’s cab.
The engineer himself was bent over in front of the open fire box, where wood and shovels of coal would be tossed inside, feeding the locomotive’s terrible hunger for fuel. A circular iron plate was pushed to one side, the surface dimpled in a pattern of riveted seams. Above that was an assortment of gauges, dials, levers, and hand wheels, all below a narrow collection of brass piping and blackened knobs that reminded Nathan of a grasshopper’s face. A ratty-
looking coat hung from a peg. A shelf held a pair of dented metal mugs and a smudged oil can between them. A frayed seat, the cushion imprinted over the years by a sizeable ass, lay to the right. A lamp burned on a secured perch, behind the seat and overhead. The light played off the snow streaking past the two open windows.
Despite the cold Nathan had just endured, a wall of heat radiated from the firebox and hit his face hard enough to make the cold seem like a comfortable retreat. Leland glanced back at his companion as he slunk inside the cab and righted himself. The older man had his rifle pointed at the engineer’s back, who was oblivious to his half-frozen company.
“You okay? Leland asked Nathan, over the chuffing of the train.
“I’m okay.”
Leland nodded and indicated the engineer, who still hadn’t turned away from the firebox.
“You there,” Leland ordered. “Turn around. Nice and slow.”
The engineer continued looking inside the open firebox, where red coal glowed. The heat was considerable where Nathan stood, and he thought it incredible the engineer stood practically with his nose hairs upon the fire box’s threshold.
Chump, chump, chump, chump…
“I said, turn around,” Leland ordered.
Nathan brought up his own rifle and aimed it from the hip.
The engineer stopped staring into the firebox. He closed the small door, slowly righted himself, and then checked on a gauge.
“Relaxed old bird, ain’t he?” Nathan smiled behind his scarf.
“He’s relaxed all right,” Leland agreed. “Probably stone deaf from working this engine. Hey. You. Turn around.”
The engineer’s head cocked at that, as if finally catching wind of something after all. With an elderly man’s grace, he took a moment to compose himself, straightening out his well-used gray uniform before lumbering around.
Chump, chump, chump, chump.
The engineer’s face was completely removed of its flesh, and the nearby lamp colored his skeletal features a harsh orange. The sight stunned both men, but Nathan felt the time warp again, a sensation of turning around underwater, where the seconds stretched themselves out much longer than a pocket watch’s comforting tick. All the while, the heat in the cab did nothing for the paralyzing chill of his innards that had seized up completely.
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