“Get back,” Leland ordered, having enough. He signaled a quick retreat inside the passenger car with his hand. Shorty kept the door open until everyone was in, then Leland motioned for him to close it.
If the raving passengers or the knife-wielding limbs didn’t unnerve them, the rail system held up by nothing surely did. The men stood in the aisle and glowered for a few seconds. Leland sat down in one of the nearest berths and put a hand to his bandaged head. The nearby lamplight deepened his despondent expression, and one could tell he was at an utter loss as to explain the events outside the car.
Chumpchumpchumpchump, chumpchumpchumpchump…
“We’re…” Gilbert whispered. “We’re flying out there. I mean here. Wherever the hell we are.”
“What the hell did we jump on?” a stunned Jimmy Norquay asked, as if he’d taken a punch flush to the jaw. He dropped his winter clad ass into the seat across from Leland.
“And how the hell do we get off?” Mackenzie demanded.
“We can’t get off,” Gilbert blurted. “There’s nothing underneath us! Just goddamn stars. Oh blessed Lord Almighty.”
“What the hell did we jump on?” Jimmy repeated, staring at Leland as if he’d just been gut shot.
“We jumped on a devil train, is what we jumped on,” a rattled Gilbert moaned, his eyes wide and face pale. “We jumped on a goddamn devil train, and we’re going straight to hell.”
“Shut up,” Leland told him.
“Straight to hell, Leland.”
“Shut up, I said.”
“And that’s only if any of those things back there don’t rip us apart first!”
Shorty Charlie Williams aimed his shotgun at Gilbert. Mackenzie also took aim in a clack of metal and rustle of winter fabric. Having been beaten to the draw and knowing it, Gilbert froze on the spot. His trembling attention flickered from one gunman to the other.
“Appreciated,” Leland said to the pair before considering a distraught Gilbert. “I’m only going to say this once, Gilbert. Only once. So you listen and listen real good.”
Gilbert licked his lips and nodded. He was all ears.
“Settle down. Keep your gun ready, and stay alert. But know this…I won’t tolerate another outburst like that. Not from you, not from anyone. But sure as hell not from you. Understand?”
His jaw visibly clenching, Gilbert held up a hand. “I understand.”
“You’re not going to do anything that’s going to upset me?”
“No, Leland.”
“Because right now, at this juncture, we have some very serious thinking to do. And I said ‘we’. That includes you. Now is not the time to unravel.”
The extended lecture caused Gilbert to sigh and roll his eyes, but he kept his mouth shut.
“All right,” Leland said, the relief clear in his voice. He nodded at the two gunmen. “Don’t worry about Gilbert, boys. He’s fine, now.”
Shorty glared at the smaller man but lowered his shotgun.
Mackenzie didn’t.
“Mack,” Leland said.
Mackenzie’s rifle remained steady for a few seconds, but then it dropped.
Gilbert released a relieved sigh as the tension in the car dissolved.
“Watch the back door there, Gilbert,” Leland ordered.
Nodding, and perhaps grateful for something to occupy his mind, Gilbert aimed at the car’s entrance.
“And watch the door here, Shorty, if you please.”
Shorty did just that.
“Now, then,” Leland began. “Let’s deal with this situation, as impossible as it might seem. This car seat is real. I’m sitting here. However, you all saw what waits for us outside, and I’ll be honest, I’m having trouble coming to terms with what it means. Thoughts?”
“I don’t think we’re getting off this train anytime soon,” Jimmy said, a hand to his forehead, as if that helped the thinking process.
That statement darkened Leland Baxter’s face. “We’re getting off this train. I guarantee you. How many of those sticks do you have left?”
“Nine.”
“All right,” Leland said. “We don’t go to the caboose. We get to the other side of the flatcar and use the dynamite on the couplings. If there are couplings, that is. Can you do that?”
The very suggestion got Nathan’s attention.
“I can do that,” Jimmy said after a time.
“You can’t blow the couplings here,” Mackenzie said quietly. “We’re on a set of rails in the night sky. There’s nothing around us. Above or below. I mean… how did we get here? To this point? Where are we going? And if you do blow up the couplings, what happens then? Where does that leave us? Are you even sure we’ll roll back to where we came? I don’t know, and I’m not willing to guess. But I’m willing to take a guess on one thing. If you separate us from the engine, there’s no telling where we might stop, what might happen, or what might be waiting for us.”
That stark assessment quieted them all.
Leland cleared his throat. “What do you suggest?”
Mackenzie had the floor. He looked to a dust-covered window. “We continue onwards. Get to someplace safe. Or safer than here. Maybe we can find out what happened to Eli. Maybe we can find a way off this train. A safer way. But let’s not use dynamite on anything until we have solid ground underneath us.”
“All right,” Leland said. “You make very good points, Mackenzie. We carry onward. Are we agreed?”
Nods all around. Nathan nodded, simply because going forward seemed better that going back, and because he didn’t know what else to do. Mackenzie made good sense, however, and he appreciated the man’s cool thinking. His own mind was racing, and he took a moment to pull his scarf up over his face.
Leland stood, and the others rose with him. He went to the door. “Stay behind me. Watch your footing, and don’t stray from the center of the flatcar. There’re no handrails—none that I saw, anyway. Check the overhead bins for rope or something to tie us together.”
All they found was dust, as if the compartments had never been used at all. This discovery only deepened the mystery of the passengers.
Ropeless, the gang members gathered at the exit. Leland pulled up his scarf and motioned for Jimmy’s lamp. Once he had that, he studied them, as if gauging their readiness.
“All right, stay close,” Leland told his gang. “Within arm’s reach of each other. And for the love of God, don’t slip over the edge. If you fall, there’s no guarantee you’ll stop falling.”
Nathan swallowed, knowing the man spoke the simple truth.
“See you on the other side,” Leland said.
19
That cutting, freezing wind attacked the group the moment Leland opened the exit door. Rifle in one hand and lamp in the other, he stepped out onto the platform, the single flame fluttering despite the protective glass shell. His coat rippled from the gale force, but he didn’t stumble or fall. Mackenzie stepped up behind him, and Nathan after that. Jimmy followed, with Shorty and Gilbert bringing up the rear. In single file, each man stepped over that foot-wide chasm between the two platforms, their coats fluttering in the gale. No one dared to gaze down into infinity, for the very real fear that their minds, and willpower, would break.
They crossed without incident, and stopped once they were all standing upon the flatcar.
“Jesus Christ,” Leland growled against the howling wind, and lowered his head.
Nathan’s hat was already off and hanging from his neck. He looked around, discovering it wasn’t nearly as dark as he’d thought. The night sky was stunning, however, and his breath was a release of vapor. Stars surrounded that rectangular deck, muted only by the black lines and edges of the flatcar. The snow had ceased falling, and thousands—millions—of stars and other celestial phenomena shimmered and twinkled in the now clear night. The six men marveled at that blue-black midnight shine, their wide winter figures easily visible against the cosmic backdrop. Even Leland lifted his eyes to that magical spectacle. As magnific
ent as the heavens were, Nathan’s anxiety returned, reminding him that nothing existed below the train except two strips of steel without any visible means of support.
The thought was incredible. Frightening.
Yet there he was, second from Leland’s back, following him across a long stage darker than anything in the night sky.
Leland stood some three feet ahead, the lamp held high.
“Mind your step, now!” he yelled, words muffled by his scarf.
The gang leader started marching.
Be strong, a woman’s voice whispered inside Nathan’s head, and he knew it to be his mother’s. Be strong.
Mackenzie walked past him, nudging him with his rifle. Gripping his Winchester, Nathan got in line. His boots clattered off the flatcar planks, and the wind, while powerful, wasn’t enough to sweep him off his feet. Leland was a hunched beacon striving forward, seeking safe harbor. Mackenzie was behind him, and at times their outlines meshed together. Nathan found his attention drifting away from Mackenzie’s back, to the tilting, rolling universe all around them.
“Lord Almighty,” he whispered, squinting against the night winds. Space spiraled around the flatcar’s deck, as if the iron fabrication was the very center of a vast globe and God above had gripped it by some unseen handhold and given it a lazy whirl. Stars periodically shot across the heavens. Silky, almost ephemeral clouds masked some of the brighter points of light. Hazes of interstellar dust glowed with color.
Despite all that otherworldly wonder, Nathan was unable to identify any of the bodies of stars his mother had taught him. He couldn’t see the Great Bear, nor the Bowman (which he knew wasn’t the exact name, but the one his mother used) or the Jumping Fish.
Nathan scrutinized one patch of stars and then another, cringing under the wind, while checking on the men ahead. He slowed and expanded his star search by looking over his shoulder.
And saw what lay behind them.
Or rather, before them.
Nathan stopped and stared. His mouth dropped open. His eyes damn near popped from his head.
There, rising above the passenger car they’d just left was the unmistakable face of the moon, and the moon was huge. Impossibly huge. Perhaps almost double its regular size. The moon was no longer full, but bloated. Clear craters shone brightly, vast and shadowed and speckled, as if blasted by buckshot. Steep ridges and mountains jutted out into the black sky, as plain as looking out over the Rockies. The moon was an immense thing, battered and gouged by powers unknown to Nathan, and being so close to that scratched and dented pearl rendered him spellbound.
Jimmy halted and also looked back… and remained that way, staggered by the spectacle rising above the train. That, in turn, created a ripple effect, as the others did the same. The line of train robbers bunched up in the end… and fragmented.
That awesome lunar display charmed Nathan, until the barest thread extending from the moon’s surface caught his attention. He focused on that razor-thin cut, and believed he could make out just another line, parallel to the first.
A fluttering of black rags, just above the roof of the passenger car, broke the spell.
The movement drew Nathan’s eye, and as he watched, the rags appeared to grow longer and thicker. Until the unmistakable outline of a head rose above the roof, and what might’ve been a hand gripped the edge.
“Jimmy,” Nathan said.
Jimmy glanced over his shoulder, distracted from all that wonder.
Nathan pointed.
And Jimmy saw. Gilbert and Shorty were behind him, mere silhouettes against the rest of the inky backdrop that was the passenger car. The heavens and the moon had transfixed them as well. Jimmy pushed on and pointed, breaking their paralysis.
“The hell is that?” Gilbert said, just heard over the wind.
Another head appeared upon the roof, weirdly shaped and… predatory. It took Nathan a moment to realize that the thing had its skull cocked to one side. Then a third head rose, at which point the first two nimbly crawled face-first down the sheer wall to the platform, their flesh waving in the night wind. Clothes, Nathan realized, and his guts went cold. The figures dropped to the deck as others followed in a ripple of heads and backs and flailing arms.
Man-sized shapes gathered at the end of the flatcar.
Many man-sized shapes.
“Shit,” Gilbert whispered and aimed his rifle.
Nathan spread out to Leland’s right, taking aim as well. He discovered that while the wind didn’t move him so much, it did nudge his arms just a little.
“Keep moving,” Jimmy said, even though he readied his own Winchester. “Keep moving.”
The shapes withstood the wind, righted themselves, and charged.
“Jesus Christ!” Gilbert yelled and fired, blowing one of the shadows backwards. The things behind it faltered but swarmed over the fallen. In the background, however, a lumpy tide of knobs and heads continued to pour over the passenger car’s rooftop.
Shorty fired, unloading one charge into the rush, then another. Jimmy opened up and Nathan joined in, working the levers, firing at indistinct figures clamoring forward.
“Keep moving,” Leland shouted from on ahead.
The four gunmen continued shooting as they backed away in jerky steps, mindful of the flatcar’s edges. Shorty took the longest to reload, so he hurried past Nathan and the others.
Nathan blew back a torso, the arms long and pointed and reaching, glimpsing the flash of a corpse-white face.
Jimmy fired two shots into a shape and blasted it back several steps, where it tumbled off the edge of the flatcar and disappeared from sight.
Gilbert dropped to a knee and worked his rifle, reaping a terrible toll among the onrushing force. And, in between the gunshots, a throaty, disturbing wailing grew, just as a figure rose atop the passenger car, its clothing flapping against the face of the moon.
The figure leaped onto the flatbed, disappearing behind the charging mob.
Passengers. Nathan realized. They were passengers.
Crawling over the roof of the train, like cockroaches clinging to walls.
Nathan resumed firing. Then Leland was there, shooting into the mob. Spurts of ink exploded as bullets ripped into torsos and faces. A few squirts even spattered across the starry emptiness of space. Bodies dropped and a few even fell off the flatcar, twisting, clawing at the air with an eel-like fury as they vanished from sight.
Nathan worked his rifle. A head snapped back. A body twirled off its feet. He shot one white-faced passenger in the shoulder and put another bullet into its chest. One leaped over the entire pack in a frightening display of agility and power, only to be flung backwards with a thunderous blast from Shorty Charlie William’s shotgun.
But like a gruesome deluge of sludge and moving offal, the passengers, a continuous stream of passengers, flowed over the train car’s roof and dropped to the platform.
“Back away!” Leland shouted. “Go, Gilbert, go!”
Gilbert did so, clutching at his bandolier as he staggered by Nathan. Jimmy went next. When Nathan’s rifle went dry, he turned and hurried past Leland.
A few steps back stood Mackenzie, taking steady aim and firing with deadly cadence into that black mass gaining ground. The outlines of the other train robbers were behind him, but Nathan could also see, with unreal clarity, the distance to the next car.
He’d thought a regular flatcar would’ve been no more than sixty feet long, and he was probably right.
Thing was, they appeared to be on the first flatcar of at least three.
“Move, Nathan!” Leland screamed as he ran past, no longer concerned with maintaining a careful balance.
Nathan turned, only to be yanked off his feet by the ankles. He crashed onto his chest as a force immediately jerked him back a step. In a burst of frantic energy, Nathan kicked and squirmed onto his back, seeing clawed hands clutching his ankles. A corpse-white face pulled itself forward, needle-smile blazing, lighting up its horrid features.
Nathan whipped the rifle’s wooden butt into that maddening face. He hit it once, then twice more—hard blows that broke skin and spilled oil.
A white hand ending in talons flashed into Nathan’s sights. He cracked his rifle across the arm, released his weapon, and drew one of his Colt Navy 1851 revolvers. His fingers and aim came together in a deadly display of speed and muscle memory, and he put two bullets into the passenger’s head. The thing lost all life, and Nathan kicked himself free.
“Dynamite, Jimmy!” Leland shouted in the distance.
Nathan stumbled to his feet, abandoning his rifle, knowing there was no time to spare. He ran, boots hammering across the flatcar’s surface. The noise of the train and the passengers’ horrible crying engulfed him. The others were ahead, no longer shooting but running. Their shapes were well-defined against the flat darkness of the train, as well as the scintillating beauty of the star field surrounding them.
Leland was no longer shouting. No one was shouting for that matter. Nathan stormed forward, arms and legs chugging, realizing just how much weight he carried in not only weapons and ammunition, but clothing as well. He never imagined having to sprint for his life on a train.
The next car loomed ahead, the vestibule door marked by a dimly glowing window. The sight gave Nathan an extra shot of energy just as that evil chorus of voices seemed closer on his heels. Any moment he expected another set of hands to grab his ankles. Or seize his neck. Or perhaps even just tackle him around the middle and bring him down, holding him just long enough to be swarmed.
The entire gang sprinted for that narrow door—which opened. A wide figure emerged, froze upon the threshold… and started bellowing.
“Run you lazy cock-pulling sonsabitches!”
Eli Gallant lifted his rifle and opened fired.
A bullet screamed by Nathan. More bullets shrieked past, their high-pitched whines filling his ears. One of the retreating gang members reached the door and held it as Eli stepped away, widening his field of fire. The gun runner didn’t blaze away, but quickly aimed, fired, and worked his Winchester’s lever with fluid expertise.
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