“Stay here, Shorty,” Eli said. He marched forward, his rifle planted firmly against his shoulder and pointed generally at the seated passengers. Men and women whimpered, cringed, and lowered their gaze. The children fled the aisle and buried their faces into their parents’ torsos. The weakly lit compartment appeared comfortably filled, and the sight of all them people secretly gladdened Eli Gallant’s black heart. He was getting goddamn worried there for a while and hated to think he’d climbed on board the wrong fucking train. That shit simply would not do.
The floor of the aisle was nothing more than a shadow in the poor light, but Eli saw just about every seat full with someone. Some of the men watched him, calmly even, and he stopped just long enough for them to look away.
“The hell you lookin’ at, peckerface?” Eli demanded of one long–nosed man wearing a light dress jacket, shirt, and double-knot tie. Two little girls clung to the mother sitting near him. The mother visibly swallowed and gazed ahead. The husband did the same a second later.
“Yeah, thought so,” Eli said and turned his rifle away. “You got something to say?” he asked of another not-as-scared-as-he-should-be individual and pointed the rifle barrel in the man’s face. That got results every time.
Eli moved along, verbally unloading on the more contrary-looking of the lot. “Get that dangerous look out of your eyes, darlin’, and don’t make me fuckin’ ask twice. You too, Henry. Look away while you still got ‘em. You got something to say there, Alice? Then eyes front before I knock them from your fuckin’ head, and don’t think I wouldn’t, ‘cause I would. Damn right I would, and with a smile on my face. Hey, Jedidiah, you swallow your chaw or something? Then get goddamn happy right now before I blow your greased head clear off.”
Gilbert followed a few steps behind as Eli tromped down through the aisle, slinging threats and taking aim where needed.
Crowd control, Eli scoffed as he neared the next door. He was a goddamn expert at crowd control. When he reached the end of the passenger car, he stepped to one side to allow Gilbert to pass by. Shorty Charlie Williams stood near the front, his outline shadowy in the dark car. Eli waved and Shorty waved back.
“All right, listen up then,” Eli shouted at the dark, sundown-hued collection of upraised hands and backs of heads. “My partners here are going to keep watch, so don’t try anything foolish. You hear me? Any one of you sorry cocktuggers tries something contrary and I swear to Christ above you’ll get a bullet either in the front of your face or in the back of your head. You all understand me?”
A flurry of nods.
The results satisfied Eli. He traded looks with Gilbert, who might’ve been smiling under his scarf. Then it occurred to him to get some information, so he went to the nearest gentleman sitting with his elderly wife. The pair resembled Mr. and Mrs. Santa Clause, but instead of a merry red livery, both wore fine-tailored clothing of whites and fetching grays.
“Hey, Father Christmas, I wanna talk to you.”
Father Christmas stared back, his bearded mouth open in a perfect little ‘o’, while his wife pressed her face to his shoulder.
“How many passengers on this train?”
“I don’t know,” Father Christmas rasped.
“Are there more?”
“Most definitely, yes.”
“Next car?”
“Yes.”
“Where the hell is all them other folks?”
“Beg your pardon?”
Eli scowled. “Beg your ass if you don’t listen, you cotton-chin bastard. Don’t make me pull that fluff off your jaw and use it as my shit rag. You heard me. Where are they? We must’ve walked through nine or ten empty passenger cars before we got to this one, and not one person in any of them. So where the hell are they?”
Father Christmas swallowed and shook his head.
“You don’t know?”
Another headshake.
“You actually tellin’ me you don’t know? Way back here where you are? You don’t fuckin’ know?”
“I don’t fuckin know!” Father Christmas erupted into tears. The man wailed something terrible and pitched forward into his wife’s hair, burying his face in her winter shawl.
Gilbert gave Eli a look of disdain.
“Don’t get on my nerves,” Eli warned his partner. “Just tryin’ to get answers is all. Not my fault the hairy bastard took a conniption fit. Come on, then. We’re on a roll.”
Eli opened the door to the vestibule, exposing the short walk to a window even more dimly lit than the last.
They entered another full passenger car, the occupants oblivious to what had just happened. Once again, Eli Gallant grabbed the bull by the dangling rosebuds and wrangled the entire lot of them without a word from Gilbert. After an opening barrage of curses, threats, and profanity-laced instructions, Eli jumped up on one green seat and took aim at each face as the passengers stood, one-by-one, row-by-row. They marched down that dark aisle with their heads down and palms up, towards Gilbert, who stood at the front, right next to the door.
“Get ‘em all back into that other car,” Eli yelled. “Squeeze ‘em all in. I don’t care if you got a dozen to a berth, just squeeze them assholes in and keep ‘em quiet.”
Gilbert waved, signaling he’d heard.
Eli left him then, his thoughts already on the next cattle load. Leland’s voice sounded off in his head as he remembered how many people he might have to control.
About twenty passengers to each car. That seems comfortable. Roughly four cars. Say, eighty people, thereabouts.
Well, Eli figured. Seeing as how their great leader was dead-wrong about the number of cars to begin with, he was willing to bet dollars to dimes that eighty people wasn’t right either. Especially considering Shorty was guarding almost thirty people in one car, and he’d just sent on nearly another thirty. Eli scoffed at Leland’s information, and hesitated at the next door.
Sixty people almost.
And two gunmen to guard the works.
A tingle of unease settled into the back of Eli’s skull then, right at the base, where his spine slunk up under like a snake getting out of the sun. He thought about maybe waiting for Jimmy and shithead Mackenzie to show up, but seeing as how they’d all gone to the front, who knew when they’d get back.
Hell with it, Eli decided and gripped the next door. He was equal to three men with the number of guns he was carrying. He was bad intentions walking, and willing to knock a person down if needed. What was another thirty head of cattle? Only twenty or so were adults, and of that, only ten were men, and only a fraction of that again might be dangerous and in need of watching. The children were nothing if not just taking up space. Perhaps Leland was only counting the men and women and forgot about the kids.
Didn’t matter.
There was over three hundred thousand dollars on this piece-of-shit train. And Eli Gallant meant to have his share of it.
He opened the door and went inside.
12
“What the hell is that?” Leland Baxter said, controlling his horrified surprise much better than Nathan. Nathan stood next to him, on the platform extending from the first passenger car, while Jimmy Norquay remained on the much narrower wood bin. Steam and snowy gales pommeled the men and whipped up their coats. Between the platforms and a foot below, barely visible, were the couplings that kept the section connected.
Except, in the flashing dark, there wasn’t any ice to hammer free of the metal, nor were there any pins to extract with the tongs.
“I can’t see correctly,” Leland said as he peered down between the platforms.
Mackenzie stood nearby and held the passenger door open, to allow some light onto the situation.
“I can’t see any pins,” Jimmy said, also staring into that flashing gulf.
Leland handed off his rifle to Mackenzie and got down on his hands and knees, being careful of the edges. Nathan got clear of the light, and took a handful of the gang leader’s coat, ensuring he didn’t have a nasty sp
ill.
“Well, Jimmy,” Leland said calmly. “The reason we don’t see any pins is because there aren’t any.”
“What?”
“There aren’t any. Look for yourself.”
Jimmy stepped across the gap, all to the steady chugging and rocking of the speeding train. He dropped to his hands and knees, then flat on his chest, and peered below.
“Well, shit,” the man gently released. “It’s all one piece.”
“That’s what I’m seeing,” Leland agreed. “Except, look at that.”
The pins and links might have been separate at one point in time, but were now fused together into an intimate knob of iron. There was movement between the two cars, a constant but mild swaying, but the couplings themselves appeared like weird sculptures once subjected to an intense heat. Below that, the speeding gray-white of the ground.
“There’s no way to unhitch the train,” Jimmy said after a sobering moment.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“What did you say?” Nathan asked.
Leland stood up and indicated Nathan take a look. The sight both confused and horrified him.
“The hell we do now?” he asked, rising to stand with the others.
“In here,” Leland said. He stepped inside the passenger car. Once they were all out of the elements, Mackenzie closed the door.
“So much for that,” Jimmy stated in a sour tone.
“All right,” Leland said, going over the facts in an attempt to muster the troops. “We can’t unhitch the train… because there aren’t any coupling links to unhitch. They’ve been melted and hardened into lumps.”
“But what did that?” Jimmy wanted to know. “I’ve been on plenty of trains and I’ve never seen anything like that out there. Never heard of it happening before.”
“I don’t know what did it,” Leland admitted wearily. “But we can’t worry about what we can’t control. We can’t unhitch the train from here, but we might be able to somewhere else. Maybe the caboose. I propose we continue on, meet up with the others, find out where those passengers are, and above all, get to the payroll car. We’re on this horse, so we might as well get paid for riding her. Once we do all that, we can focus on getting off.”
“The caboose?” Nathan asked.
“The caboose,” Leland repeated. “We get there, and we see if we can unhitch the train. Let the rest of her drive off into the mountains while we drift to a stop.”
“And if the couplings are melted?” Mackenzie asked. “Like the ones out there?”
Leland paused before answering. “Let’s just hope that was just some strange act of nature.”
Nathan picked up his Winchester from where it rested against a seat. Leland and Jimmy rearmed themselves with their own rifles.
“Leland,” Jimmy said. “What happened with the engineer?”
Leland hesitated.
“What happened?” Jimmy pressed.
So Leland told him.
13
Eli burst through the passenger door and took aim at about twenty or so faces, excluding the children freezing in their tracks. “All right you bunch of sorry assholes, hands up. Get your hands up. Way up, where I can see them, and if I see anyone go for a gun, I won’t shoot them. I’ll shoot the person nearest and that’ll be on you. So get your fuckin’ hands up in the air and so help me Lord, don’t fuckin’ twitch unless I say so. Hands up, hands up!”
A multitude of hands flowered over the passengers’ heads, every bit as pretty as a field of daisies blooming under a summer sun.
Hands up, Eli mentally projected. And fuck you too, Bill Miner.
He took aim at the nearest face. “You best hope they all listen.”
The man in question looked like a banker, dressed in a fancy suit with a waxed mustache trimmed to the thickness of an eyebrow. Eli didn’t like the style, believing if you were going to let hair grow on your face, you let it grow. The banker froze upon staring down the Winchester’s barrel, and the woman beside him looked positively mortified.
“All right, now,” Eli muttered, taking in the shadowy interior. “Jesus. Ain’t the conductor been around to fill them lamps? It’s darker than the crack of my ass in here. All right, then, now here’s what we’re gonna do. You’re all going to file on out to the next car behind me, and start walking until you meet some friends of mine. You’re all going to do this one row at a time. And if any of you chicken fucks try anything funny, just know I’ll shoot Mr. Banker here.”
That jarred the man Eli was aiming at.
“Ah, excuse me,” the man said. “I’m not a banker…”
“Shut the fuck up,” Eli snapped before turning his attention back to the crowd. “All right, you folks right behind Mister and Missus Banker. You stand up and walk through that door. Keep on going until you find the others and don’t you goddamn dare stop or try anything funny. If you do, I swear I’ll shoot someone dead.”
The faces, all shaded by degrees, stared back at him.
“Move your asses,” Eli ordered at the second row.
The family of three sitting there stood up and did as ordered.
“That’s right, get on,” Eli barked as they marched by. Then came the next row, their heads lowered and hands up. They marched by with a couple of kids following Eli’s orders quite nicely. After that, the car gradually emptied of people as they left their seats.
All the while, Eli watched and urged them on, keeping his rifle trained upon Mr. and Mrs. Banker.
“You enjoy your steak, I see,” Eli muttered sardonically as a portly man shuffled by. He cocked an eyebrow at some of the more attractive mothers, ignoring the children being led by the hands. “I can see why you have three kids, Ma’am,” he said to one attractive lady, who kept her head down as she walked out the car door.
“Hell,” he added when she was gone, “I’d be willing to go for a dozen more if’n I was married to her.”
Mr. Banker didn’t smile at that. Neither did Mrs. Banker.
Eli tucked away his own amusement. He didn’t mind the lack of humor. He knew he was being an asshole.
“Goddamn, you’re an ugly bastard,” he muttered as one heavy-jowled individual waddled by. “Your folks must’ve called you fugly, just so the neighbors would look at you.”
And he didn’t stop there, taking shots at anyone that took his interest.
“Get that shit shaved off your chin there, Mister,” he said to one man passing by. “I don’t mind beards, but what you got growing looks like the crusty fuzz swingin’ from a grizzly’s ball sack.”
“Fuck you staring at, you old codger?”
“Fuck you staring at, old bitch?”
“Fuck you staring at kid? I ain’t your daddy.”
And on it went. In fact, Eli had a parting thought for each passenger as they all appeared rightly upper-class to him. Well dressed, impeccably mannered (or so they liked to believe), and full of shit. Their very skittered demeanor pissed him off something wicked, and part of him wanted them to just try and test him.
The last few folks meandered down the aisle, and Eli glanced at Mr. and Mrs. Banker. “How you folks doin’?” he asked all nice and civilized.
“Not too well,” Mr. Banker replied from between his upraised hands.
“Yeah, well, I don’t give a shit.” Eli slapped the barrel of his Winchester off the bottom of a woman headed out the door. A crackle of metal came from the open vestibule, but Eli wasn’t worried about that. The door rolled closed, and he eyed the last two passengers passing the midway point of the aisle. Dressed in tailored wintertime blacks and grays, the couple were older, gray-haired, and not as spry as they might’ve once been.
“Get along there, Sweet Jesus,” Eli said and backed up to the empty seats across the aisle from Mr. and Mrs. Banker. “Feel like I’m going to die of old age before you two. Hell, if’n I’d known…”
He trailed off, staring at the last approaching couple.
Even though the light in the passenge
r car was dim, there was still something off about the elderly pair approaching him. It puzzled him so much that he was momentarily distracted from the Banker couple.
“Don’t you be gettin’ any ideas over there,” Eli warned Mr. and Mrs. Banker. “Just ‘cause I don’t have my eyes on you don’t mean anything. I squeeze this trigger and there’s gonna be a mess all over those fine seats. Not to mention a hole in that window that’ll sound like your lady taking a quick suckle off your dingle.”
A terrified Mr. and Mrs. Banker stayed as still as they could, keeping their tired hands in the air.
Eli studied the nearing couple, feeling that familiar tingle of unease at the back of his skull, like a rattlesnake making itself known. And, as God was his witness, the old folks coming his way were keeping their heads down a little lower than needed, their hands strategically placed so as to conceal their features just enough so that Eli wouldn’t see them.
When he realized that, he swung the rifle barrel away from Mr. and Mrs. Banker and aimed it at the old folks.
“Hold on there,” he rumbled, suspicion lacing his voice. “I swear… you two look like a couple of weasels trying to crawl up a chicken’s shitty asshole. Stop right there and drop your hands.”
The old couple stopped but wavered with the second order.
“I said drop them hands,” Eli warned. “I ain’t sayin’ it again.”
The hands lowered.
And Eli squinted at the two senior citizens. He blinked and even hunkered down a bit, to best use the light available to him. His mouth went dry, and he swallowed thickly. “What the hell…” he whispered, stunned at what, at who he was seeing.
Because even though their clothes had changed, there was no doubt in his mind he was staring at not-so-merry Father Christmas and his wife.
And the way they were looking at him, they knew he knew.
Chumpchumpchumpchump, chumpchumpchumpchump…
Eli swallowed again before speaking. “How did you…” He faltered, still not quite believing, but knowing what he saw. “How’d you get back here?”
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