The Majestic 311

by Keith C. Blackmore

  Nathan swallowed thickly and sweat slid into his right eye. He pulled away his scarf and wiped his face, unable to tear his attention away from the door and the fingers there. The glass window exploded, and a multitude of arms reached in like a bouquet of lunging snakes. Teeth snapped around the edges, or what Nathan thought were teeth. A face appeared, its mouth opened wide in a snarl of hate and hunger, a split second before it was shoved aside and replaced with another arm.

  “The hell are they?” Leland asked, his rifle sure and steady.

  “Damn sight flexible,” Mackenzie muttered.

  “Contortionists,” Shorty said, surprising them all.

  “Well, hell with this,” Gilbert said and fired, working the Winchester with a killer cadence. The blasts exploded in the interior, as loud as cannon fire. Arms quivered upon being shot. Blood spritzed and spattered the frame. Growls became pained, piggish squeals. Ruined limbs were withdrawn but new ones replaced them. Another face appeared, howling and clearly pissed off, and Gilbert put a bullet through its nose that shoved the whole head back into the nightmarish glut of limbs.

  The door lurched open an inch more.

  “What do we do, Leland?” Mackenzie wanted to know.

  “Hold this line,” the leader ordered grimly. “Don’t fire until I do. And when I do, shoot anything that presents itself as a target. But make. The shot. Count.”

  Gilbert hunkered down in his seat and began plucking replacement shells from one of his bandoliers. Nathan took a firmer grip on his own rifle.

  “Go back,” Leland suddenly shouted at the passengers, scaring the shit out of Nathan and, considering the head jerks and flinches, most the others as well. “Go back whence you came! I command you in the name of the Father and the Holy Ghost and Christ our Lord and Savior! Go back!”

  It didn’t seem too strange for Nathan to hear a train robber call upon the Almighty to help out in their current situation, but the passengers hammering away at the door didn’t appear too discouraged by the mention of the Heavenly Father.

  The door creaked open another inch, and more palms and forearms wormed their way through, applying more pressure upon the barrier, searching for the impeding spike. The door jolted another stubborn inch, and Nathan’s guts went cold.

  The passengers, or the things that were once passengers, were teeming in the narrow space beyond, filling the vestibule completely.

  The door jerked open another two inches. Then it skidded open enough for one head to pop through the middle, wailing with a resounding bass, until the mindless passenger managed to get its arm and shoulder through.

  Leland shot it through the face, and the entire upper torso flopped dead.

  The rest of the men opened fire.

  Bullets tore into that gap, exploding flesh and heads and shoulders. Chunks of meat and cloth flew. Blood sprayed in forceful arterial lines. Bone split apart and shattered. One face had an eye burst and the entire head switched off. Near the ceiling, a woman in a white dress pulled herself through the door right to the waist in a frightening burst of speed and strength before Jimmy Norquay put three bullets into her. Her form jerked from behind as the door opened almost to the halfway point, revealing an inhuman swarm of faces and limbs.

  The sight damn near paralyzed Nathan.

  “Leland,” he said over the rapid fire and clattering of reloading weapons.

  The passengers were coming through.

  Leland saw it as well. “Get back, all of you! Shorty, you stay with me. Jimmy get to the door and get out your dynamite.”

  Jimmy was already running. Gilbert was right behind him, and Nathan didn’t need any more encouragement. He bolted, retreating all the way back to the next door where Gilbert stood, and started firing.

  Nathan turned around as Leland and Shorty started screaming.

  Both men were tearing up the aisle, running as if hell itself was tickling their boot spurs.

  And it was.

  A foul, humanoid pestilence wearing the colors of the grave erupted from the distant breach, spreading, flooding the rear in an impossible surge of bodies. Eighty passengers? Nathan’s mind questioned in a shriek. Ninety? Was that what Leland had figured on?

  Behind the two men in full frantic retreat, there had to be hundreds of the things.

  “Jimmy!” Leland roared as he thundered down the aisle. Shorty matched him as the things in human skin pursued in a thickening mass of spidery quickness.

  Gilbert opened the vestibule and entered. Nathan stopped just inside and held the door back, while a crouching Jimmy worked upon the destructive sticks.

  Leland raced through.

  The eager hissing of lit fuses scratched the air, and Nathan didn’t think he’d ever heard a sweeter sound.

  Shorty lumbered inside, lowering his head as he squirmed past the men and continued onward.

  “Jimmy?” Nathan said, his eyes wide and staring at the multitudes bearing down upon their position, racing along the ceiling and bounding over the seats. Berths were swamped. Heads rapped off low compartments. And the sounds coming from them…

  Jimmy chucked three sticks of dynamite upon the car floor.

  Nathan slammed the door shut, barring all those livid, pallid faces.

  Both men raced to the open door of the next car. No sooner was Nathan through when Gilbert slammed it closed.

  The explosion shook the train.

  16

  “And that’s that,” Jimmy panted with grim satisfaction, eyeing the closed portal.

  “Holy shit,” Gilbert muttered in awe. “Is there anything back there now?”

  “Good question.” Jimmy met Leland’s gaze.

  Nathan placed an ear to the door. “Can’t hear anything. I mean, I can hear the damn train, but I don’t hear anything like before. None of that throaty shit.”

  “That throaty shit was disturbing,” Mackenzie said.

  “Where’s Eli?” Leland asked.

  They looked to Gilbert.

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “He was going on ahead, to drive the passengers back to me and Shorty. I don’t know what happened to him, if those things got him or not.”

  Jesus, Nathan thought, remembering those bleached faces and the needle teeth. The memory prompted him to lean against the nearest wall for support. He didn’t care much for Eli Gallant, but he wondered if the man deserved to be taken down and killed by those things.

  “All right,” Leland said after a thoughtful moment. “We’re going back in there. Guns up. We’ll go as far as we can, and if we find him, excellent. If we locate the payroll car, that’s excellent, too. Otherwise, we go for the caboose.”

  “What about those monsters out there?” Mackenzie asked for them all.

  Leland regarded each of his gang in turn, studying their faces. Nathan could see they were shaken up by the frightening encounter with the passengers—he certainly had a tremble in his own ticker and lower legs—but God bless their outlaw hearts, none of them had curled up into a ball, or run screaming to the ends of the train. They were strained but not torn. They were holding on, just like they were holding onto their rifles—and in Shorty’s case, shotgun—and nowhere near breaking down into mindless terror. Jimmy’s dynamite had helped with their morale, and Nathan had to admit that knowing the man had such power at his disposal was comforting. Knowing those things could die helped as well.

  “Bullets stop them,” Leland said and started reloading his rifle. “I saw more than a couple drop dead just as sure as anyone taking a bullet. As for the dynamite… we’ll soon see how many were killed in the blast. Nathan, get ready to open that door.”

  The others reloaded their Winchesters, drawing strength from the activity.

  “All right,” Leland said. “You all ready?”

  Nods all around. Nathan held his loaded weapon while one hand gripped the door’s handle.

  Leland stood about five paces back from the portal and aimed his rifle. Jimmy and Shorty stood on either side of him, while the oth
er men took up flanking positions among the seats. All gun barrels were pointed at the door.

  Leland gave a squinty-eye nod and Nathan yanked back the slab of metal with a rumble and a squeal.

  Icy winds buffeted the men, carrying snow.

  “Well, god…” Gilbert trailed off.

  The vestibule had been blown away. Completely. The next car had its face equally blown away, wiped clean in the fearsome blast, leaving almost a quarter of its length as bare as a flatbed. In that space, the passenger car’s square metal frame, beautifully constructed overhead compartments, and the comfortable seats, had disappeared. There were ragged edges, scorched wood, and twisted, upturned bars of metal some fifteen feet in, where the remaining walls and roof still held. Tatters of green upholstery raged in the wind, as if trying desperately to get free of the wreaked berths. Streamers of white flailed along the edges. It appeared to Nathan as if the Lord himself had reached down and tore a section of the car away, as if it were no more than a fistful of snow. And that wasn’t all. Torn metal and blasted woodwork were now decorated with torsos, limbs, and an unmoving stew of bodies farther back in that open wreckage. A few rags of clothing stirred amongst the corpses heaped into the berths and aisle, but nothing else.

  “Damn,” Gilbert finished for them all. “We don’t haveta walk through all that, do we, Leland?”

  “Looks like we do,” Leland answered.

  “Through all that?”

  Leland looked back at the Albertan gun runner and partner of Eli Gallant. “Yeah, through all that. I’ll go first, to alleviate your mind. Just follow me a’ways back and keep your eyes open. On any of those… things. Just in case.”

  From what Nathan could see, none of those things looked as if they might be playing possum.

  Rifle first, Leland carefully stepped through the doorway and onto the scorched iron of the platform. Wind pulled his coat one way and then the other, but somehow the elder gunman and gang leader managed to keep his hat on as he navigated the floor. He hesitated once, actually teetered, before righting himself with a quick step to the next car’s floor. Leland swept his weapon from left to right and back again, ignoring the various ribbons waving around him.

  Nothing moved to attack.

  He advanced a few more paces, inspected the blasted floor and berths, and even lifted his face to the unseen heavens. Having ascertained all was as well as could be, he waved the others forward.

  Nathan was taken off-guard by the strength of the wind. He set his stance wide and advanced. The vestibule had been destroyed, leaving only the moving plates attached to each car. At the very center was a gap, right where Leland nearly stepped. The scrunch and grind of the wheels were louder there. The couplings were fused as before, two great knots of contrary metal that the dynamite couldn’t part. Below that, snowy ground streaked by, framed by two lengths of black steel. Nothing prevented him from falling over the edges, so he quickly crossed the exposed gap, despite the mounting gale.

  Leland had stopped up ahead, near the thickest of the piles of dead.

  “Holy shit,” Gilbert said somewhere behind. “You do all this, Jimmy? Did you do all this?”

  “The dynamite did all this.”

  “And how many sticks you used?”

  “Three.”

  A sheet of static gray sped past the section of missing roof, already frosting the destruction of the car and the dead things filling it. The wind’s high-pitched screaming replaced that of the unnerving passengers. A single oil lamp burned in the distant corner, failing to light up much. Snow and night swept over the exposed bits, and a powerful gust caused Nathan to grab onto a headrest.

  He didn’t look at the occupant of the seat directly—a young man with the blackened mask of dead rage. Instead, he merely made a note of how the body was missing both legs and an arm. A stink of manure and raw flesh lingered below all the dead things, but the wind kept the worst of it away.

  “This way,” Leland said while plodding over the bodies filling the aisle. Nathan and the rest followed. It was hard going. They stumbled and fell, staggering over detached limbs. Gilbert stumbled, thrusting out a gloved hand and having his arm sink to the elbow in a sludge of dead flesh. Nathan passed a grandmother type, splashed in inky gore but otherwise looking normal.

  “Don’t pay them too much mind,” Leland instructed as he struggled along. “They’re all dead.

  “Can’t be all dead,” a distracted Jimmy said from further back. “This car was full of people.”

  “These bastards and bitches weren’t people,” Gilbert said.

  “You know what I mean. And I’m not sure three sticks would have killed them all.”

  “Looks all dead to me.”

  “I hear what you’re saying, Jimmy,” Leland said, standing a few paces away from the door that he’d spiked only minutes earlier. “You’re saying, you’re asking, really, where did the rest of them go?”

  “That’s it.”

  Nathan glanced back at the whole section that had been torn away. The windows had all been destroyed the entire length of the car. “Maybe they got blasted from the train?” he suggested. “Tossed out on the tracks?”

  “Maybe,” Leland said.

  They regrouped at the far exit, where the bodies thinned out to nothing. The only light fluttered in that right corner, as if assuring the gang it was doing its part. A few bodies littered the intact vestibule—the monsters that had taken bullets and died—right up to the closed door of the next car.

  Leland led his men to the closed entrance.

  “You boys ready?” he asked over the train’s chugging.

  Nathan was ready, and he felt the others were too.

  “Jimmy?”

  “Yeah, Leland?”

  “Get a stick of that wonder stuff ready,” Leland advised quietly. “Just in case.”

  Jimmy opened his coat and rooted around inside. Mackenzie was next to him, watching him dubiously. “You think that’s wise, Leland?” he asked. “We can’t be blowing the train apart one car at a time.”

  “Like hell we can’t,” Gilbert said.

  “The train’s in sections,” Leland explained. “You said it yourself. Connected, but still in sections. One stick might be enough to clear the way. Certainly can’t do what three sticks did. We’ll chance it, but I’m not going to be overrun like before.”

  That silenced Mackenzie.

  “All set, Jimmy?”

  “All set.”

  “Then here we go,” Leland said, and hauled open the door.

  Darkness filled the train car’s interior, as the lamps had all either expired or forcefully doused. Faint outlines could be seen a few feet away, but beyond that, nothing. The lack of light uneased Nathan, who’d wished they’d brought along an oil lamp of their own.

  “Great,” Gilbert said, shaking his head at the sight.

  “All right, now,” Leland said in a low voice. “We’re going through. Just mind where you’re walking and check the seats, in case I miss something.”

  Nathan’s pulse quickened, and his heart hammered in his chest, reckoning he was stepping into a full graveyard at midnight. Leland slipped into that vault-like pitch, his figure barely visible, and inspected the seats on either side of him. Nathan followed, rifle at the ready.

  Chumpchumpchumpchump, chumpchumpchumpchump…

  And damn if the train seemed to be moving faster than ever, though rocking less. Nathan wondered if the wheels might’ve hit a smoother part of the tracks, but that didn’t feel right to him. He focused on the task at hand and followed Leland deeper into the interior. As his eyes adjusted, dark, uneven petals protruding from the seats appeared. The fabric had been ripped all to hell as the passengers made their way through the train.

  Leland walked ahead, carefully, checking each berth before proceeding to the next. The five men crept behind him, spaced evenly apart and watchful. Shorty Charlie Williams guarded the back, constantly glancing over his shoulder.

  “Nothing,”
Mackenzie whispered.

  “Seems that way,” Jimmy agreed.

  Leland reached the exit without incident, and he stopped and gripped the door handle. He motioned for Nathan and the others to take aim. When the gang was in position, he pulled open the door.

  The vestibule beyond appeared empty, and through the window set within the next door, a weak light glowed.

  “Not a sound,” Leland quietly observed. He motioned Nathan forward.

  Squinting, his face sweaty, Nathan forged ahead, keeping a shoulder against that flexing leathery wall encasing the vestibule. He sidled up next to the entrance but couldn’t see anything inside because of the dirty glass. Leland stood behind him, while Gilbert got down on one knee and took aim.

  Leland nodded and tapped Nathan on the shoulder—who opened the door.

  Another empty car, with one solitary lamp flickering on a distant wall, like a torch casting a dour light over an empty dungeon.

  “Nothing,” Leland said. He moved ahead, sliding around the corner and taking up position just inside. “How many cars you say you went through? Before you reached passengers?”

  “Nine or ten,” Gilbert reported.

  “All empty?”

  “All.”

  “Damnation,” Leland whispered, peering ahead. Nothing could be heard over the low ruckus of the train. Leland stepped softly, cautiously, leading the men down an aisle flooded with darkness. Light from the distant lamp outlined his head and shoulders.

  The gang leader halted and cocked his head.

  “Something wrong, Leland?” Nathan whispered just behind him.

  Leland held up one hand, wanting silence.

  The lone light at the far end continued to flicker, as if tormented by a ghost’s breath.

  Nathan was about to ask what was wrong, when he heard it.

  A soft clinking of bottles just ahead, as if a crude wind chime had just caught a breeze.

  Nathan gripped his rifle tighter.

  Leland crouched upon hearing the noise repeat. Rifle first, he took another step when a knife-wielding hand whipped out from one of the berths and slashed at his leg.