What did they do? Nathan thought, slinking along in the dark. And what happened to them… because of what they did or didn’t do?
Boot heels clicking, he trudged on, stopping every now and again and reaching out for a wall, touching only air. He actually extended his entire arm and felt nothing. He felt very much alone at that point, but not lost. Not in the least. As long as he could put one foot down, in front of the other, he figured he was walking towards something.
The notion that he was no longer in the belly of a sea serpent took root in his mind.
A pinpoint of twilight caught his attention, a knot of non-dark far off in the distance. Nathan stopped and listened, noting that he wasn’t dripping so much anymore, and that the air had become much warmer and drier. That gloomy, not-quite light grew increasingly more distinct as he drew closer, and he hefted his rifle to his shoulder just in case.
Voices stopped him in his tracks.
“So what do we do now, Leland?”
Eli Gallant.
No mistaking that man’s long tongue, and Nathan even caught the sound of Leland Baxter’s reply, but failed to hear the exact words. Knowing Leland’s temperament, however, he was probably asking if Eli understood the meaning of being quiet, or something of the like.
Nathan started running.
“I’m here,” he yelled. “I’m on my way out!”
The voices ceased.
Nathan continued racing until the ground became more uneven. His boots hooked in a rocky protrusion and he tumbled. The opening ahead was no longer a neat pinhole, but rather a crooked gash, with a figure standing before it.
“It’s me!” Nathan shouted again while rising.
“It’s Nathan,” Leland informed the others. More figures crowded in, dimming the light even more.
Nathan hurried forward, feeling the land gently rise beneath his feet. In time, he slowed down, seeing the familiar outlines of his fellow gang members. It remained twilight, but there was a hitch that Nathan couldn’t identify just yet.
“I see him,” Leland said.
“Hell, ain’t no need to see him,” Eli grumped. “I can smell the shit stain.”
Nathan let that one go, being too glad to see his outlaw companions.
“Hello, boys,” he said with a relieved smile. “Don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see your ugly faces.”
That was met with a resounding silence.
“That was only a joke,” Nathan explained, close enough to see their grim expressions. “Hell, why didn’t you wait for me?”
“Wait for you?” Eli grumbled with an air of incredulity. “The hell you talking about, Rhodes?”
Nathan stopped not five feet away from the opening—a cavern mouth, which was no taller than his shoulders, and just a bit wider.
“Why didn’t you wait for me?” Nathan repeated, giving back as good as he got. “What part of that did you not understand, peckerhead?”
“Watch your mouth, Rhodes,” Eli said with a narrow-eyed glare. “‘Cause let me tell you something, you’re about as funny as a stitched-up asshole.”
“Bet you know all about them.”
Leland held up a hand, calling for a truce. “What do you mean, Nathan? Exactly?”
“Took me ten minutes at least to find you sonsabitches,” Nathan said in an offended tone. “Those things might’ve come straight through the door and—”
Leland held up his hand again. “Ten minutes, you say?”
“At least.”
“From the time we left you?”
Nathan studied the gang leader’s face, then the wary looks of the others. “What?” he finally asked.
Mackenzie stood just behind Leland. “We only just got here.”
“What?”
“Only just.”
Nathan was speechless for a second. “That’s not right. How the hell could you just get here? I was walking in that tunnel for at least ten minutes. Heading towards this.” He indicated the tunnel opening.
“We all came through no more than thirty seconds ago,” Mackenzie said with this usual scholarly patience. “Been standing here ever since.”
“Figured you were right behind,” Leland added, “but we didn’t hear anything from inside the tunnel. So, we were going to form up a defensive line in case you were being pursued when you came out.”
“Well, why didn’t you?” Nathan asked, still sore about being left behind. “Form up that defensive line.”
“We were distracted,” Leland said, and pointed. “By the sky.”
“And the sand,” Jimmy Norquay threw in.
“The what?”
“Get out of the way, boys,” Leland said before removing himself from the tunnel mouth.
Nathan saw then, and the sight left him thunderstruck.
The sky was an apocalyptic shade of sundown, a deep velvet purple that encompassed the entirety of the heavens, and not just an evening coloring of an errant cloud. It was purple, with distinct, almost fibrous lines of orange and pink arched across that great expanse as if unraveling. Stars twinkled throughout and that seemed well enough, but some of the stars were overly large, disturbingly so, in fact. There was a horizon beneath it all, as black as the whaler’s hull that had captured and killed the great serpent, but not a shimmer of water in sight. In fact, the air was bone-dry and still, and carried not a sound except the thumping of Nathan’s own racing heart.
Unblinking, he stooped to clear the tunnel opening, his mouth hanging open as he took in the scope of the scene before him. His feet sank into black sand that sparkled in places as if sprinkled with ice. The sand stretched out before him in all directions, meeting the heavens in a distant but easily discernable horizon. He checked on the tunnel behind him and saw how it was located in the face of a mound.
“My Lord,” he whispered, once again transfixed by the sky.
“No moon, either,” Mackenzie pointed out. “Nothing.”
“So what does that mean?” Eli asked.
“I don’t know,” Mackenzie admitted with a shrug, studying all that moody color overhead.
“Maybe we got here just after sunset?” Jimmy suggested.
“Maybe we’re on that beach?” Leland added.
Word of the beach broke Nathan’s wonder-induced paralysis. He took it upon himself to trudge up the side of the mound, climbing to the top. Once there, he steadied himself and gazed out over the heads of his fellow outlaws, looking one way and then the other, ignoring their upraised faces.
“I don’t see a damn thing,” Nathan declared. “Except that black crest of hills or mountains or whatever the hell it is on the horizon. Sure as hell ain’t no water in sight. Not even a shimmer.”
“That means no beach, then,” Leland said.
“One thing’s for certain,” Nathan said. “We’re not in the Rockies anymore.”
“We haven’t been in the Rockies for the last hour or so,” Eli scoffed, “in case you forgot the train we were on, on a set of tracks where the goddamn ground was missing.”
“Or the sea,” Mackenzie added as an afterthought.
“I know one thing, we’re in a goddamn steam bath,” Eli grumped, opening his winter duster and plucking at the upper buttons of his inner shirt. “This ain’t natural.”
Mackenzie dropped to a knee and placed a hand to the ground. “It’s the sand. Hot to the touch. Not burning, but close.”
“Where in the world do we have sand hot to the touch?” Leland asked. “Black sand?”
No one answered.
“And purple skies,” Mackenzie said with a nod. “Ain’t never seen a purple as deep and fine as that. No place on God’s green earth has a sky like that. Least, not that I know of. But I know someone who does… or who has an idea.”
“Who?” Leland asked.
“Him.” Mackenzie gestured at Nathan, still standing upon the mound.
“Him?” Eli snorted. “And here I thought you were the smart one, Mack.”
“Say what you will, bu
t Nathan has an idea of where we are. He already said it once, back when we were riding the serpent.”
“So what is it?” Leland asked.
“Go on, Nathan,” Mackenzie said. “Tell them what you said. What you told me. Back when we were underwater there. When Leland warned us not to lose control else he’d put a bullet in us.”
That earned a frown from the gang leader.
Nathan sighed and rubbed at his own overheating neck. “I said… I said we’d gone down a rabbit hole.”
Against the black sands and purple skies, no one said a word.
Then, Leland spoke. “What?”
“A rabbit hole,” Nathan said.
“You actually said wet rabbit hole,” Mackenzie reminded him.
“I know what I said,” Nathan snapped. “That was because we were under water. That’s all. Nothing more. But… we’ve gone down a rabbit hole. A place that leads from one place to another.”
“In this case,” Mackenzie interjected, “one world to another. Or many worlds.”
The men traded looks, mesmerized by the revelation.
“How do you know this?” Leland asked. “This rabbit hole?”
“My mother,” Nathan replied. “She used to read to me. Bedtime stories. Where people go from one world to the next, through holes in the ground. Or other such things. They leave their own world and walk into another. Weird places, sometimes dangerous, sometimes not, but always different from where they left. Where people aren’t really people at all, but maybe… talking animals. Or, Jesus, I don’t know, people who sound like people, I mean talk like us, but they know different things. Different ways of doing things.”
“Jesus Christ,” Eli scoffed under his breath, but Leland put a stop to anything more with one stern look and a raised finger of warning.
“Continue, Nathan,” Leland said.
“That’s it. I don’t know anything more. I mean. It was just a bedtime story. Something to put me to sleep. That was it.”
“That’s probably the best possible explanation we have right now,” Mackenzie said. “All things considered. We’ve gone down a rabbit hole, or in this case, climbed aboard a ghost train that’s been missing for years. The Majestic 311. The very train that disappeared upon entering the Spirals. The one we mistook for the 5409. Maybe… just maybe…that train, for whatever reason, went through a rabbit hole—that was the tunnels—and disappeared. And now it’s come back, just in time for us to climb aboard, fumble about searching for a payroll, whereupon it…” Mackenzie faltered, attempting to make sense of his own speculation, “…traveled back into the rabbit hole, or some other tunnel. Or portal. Or opening. Taking us with it. Completely unawares.”
The scholarly outlaw waved at the surrounding landscape. “To this place. And the ocean before it, and the… place where the train traveled upon steel rails but nothing but empty air beneath that. Places no mortal man has witnessed.”
For once, Eli Gallant didn’t say the word horseshit. Or goddamn.
“How does the bedtime story end, Nathan?” a surprisingly reserved Shorty Charlie Williams quietly asked, holding his shotgun in the crook of an arm.
“I don’t remember.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Mackenzie said. “Not really. The story’s only an analogy. To make our present situation easier to understand.”
“The fuck’s that mean?” Eli asked.
“What?”
“An analogy.”
“I just said, something to make our present situation easier to understand.”
“Well, why didn’t you say that?” Eli complained. “Instead of making my head hurt, you fucking dandy. I swear, I’ll shoot you yet for using them big educated words.”
“All right,” Leland said. He swallowed thickly. “So if what you say is… true. If we have gone down a rabbit hole, or whatever, aboard a train…”
“The 311,” Mackenzie clarified.
“…then where are we going?” Leland questioned. “For how long? And will we ever return to the Rockies? I have matters to attend to back in our world. Matters of great importance. Urgent, even.”
Mackenzie shook his head. “All that, that reality—our world— is behind us somewhere, Leland. And the only way I know of reaching it is by marching straight back through that tunnel. Back into the belly of the great serpent, where Archie Willmoore is no longer a man even though he called himself a conductor. Where the passengers intended to do us harm, and we stood upon a railcar that rode upon air. Considering all that, I’d strongly suggest you accept what this place is. Until further notice.”
Nathan came down from the mound. “Archie said that we were part of the serpent. That the train was part of the serpent. What does that mean. For us?”
Mackenzie considered that. “He was part of the serpent. About the train? I don’t know. I mean, we were on the train. We walked into the serpent’s belly after going through a passenger car door. And we got back out. We’re not underwater anymore. Not in the serpent’s belly. We’re someplace entirely different, and yet… I suspect, somehow, yes, we’re still aboard the 311.”
On impulse, Nathan turned and stuck his head into the tunnel mouth. He walked inside a few steps, before a low-hanging mantle of rock swept his father’s hat off his head and onto his back. Nathan took it off and held it while he skirted a few more paces forward. He soon discovered that the tunnel was narrowing instead of widening.
Before coming to a dead end.
“See anything, Nathan?” Leland called.
Nathan didn’t answer.
“You all right in there?” the gang leader asked.
No, Nathan thought. I most certainly am not all right. I’m as far from being all right as anyone can expect. He suddenly felt a very long way from home, from anything remotely as comforting as his own bedroom way back in his parents’ house.
But what he told Leland was, “The tunnel’s gone.”
“What’s that?”
“You heard me, Leland. The tunnel’s gone. Come see for yourself.”
He did. They all did, squeezing inside, each having a go at prodding the rocky ending to a corridor nowhere near the length that Nathan had passed through. Once they’d confirmed that, yes indeed, the door they’d dropped through was no longer there, they’d returned to the sandy desert and stood in shock, gawking at the unchanged sky. Their winter clothing, soaked and dripping, weighed heavily upon their shoulders, and the kiln-like heat pressed down upon them with equal force.
“We’re fucked,” Jimmy Norquay said quietly.
No one argued that assessment. Not even Eli Gallant.
Yet somewhere, at the back of Nathan’s mind and just above the base of his skull, underneath bedrock layers of silence, he thought, just for a second, he heard the constant, pulsing chump chump chump of a train…
27
“All right,” Nathan said, having his fill of the moody silence. “We can’t go back that way. But that doesn’t matter. If the way is gone, that means those whalers can’t come after us. So, look…” he waved at the horizon. “We got all this open space. All we need to do is decide on a direction and get walking. If we opened a door to get here, maybe all we have to do is open another door to leave.”
That idea was met with resounding silence.
Mackenzie took off his hat, twisted up the felt, and wrung out water. “Nate’s got a good idea there. We can’t stay here. Nothing here, anyway. The 311 disappeared years ago only to come back right when we showed up. Maybe… maybe the train came back more often than that. Maybe we just have to get back on a part of the train, at such a time when we can get off. When it’s back in our world.”
“So you think we can get back?” a hopeful Leland asked for them all.
“After all this? Possibly. One thing’s clear to me, we won’t get back if we stay here. As Nate said, maybe all we have to do is open another door.”
“That’s just a guess.”
“That’s the best I got right now.”
; That quieted the whole bunch.
“The caboose,” Leland finally said. “At least that part hasn’t changed. We get to the caboose.”
Nathan supposed that part of the plan hadn’t changed at all. Not yet, anyway. But what concerned him more was the slight trembling to Leland’s once rock-solid voice, a barely audible waver that suggested this whole nightmare had affected the gang leader to his core.
Perhaps even his mind.
Leland Baxter was the glue that had held the gang together. The authority within their lawless ranks. Nathan didn’t want to think what might happen if Leland’s confidence started to crumble.
Jimmy Norquay threw off his winter duster, distracting the men from the purple skies overhead and the black, starry sand underfoot.
“The hell you doin’?” Eli asked.
“What’s it look like?” Jimmy said as he unbuckled his belt and pulled up the tails of his doubled-up shirts.
“Looks like you’re strippin’.”
Jimmy didn’t bother commenting.
“Goddammit, Leland,” Eli complained. “Tell your henchman to keep his fuckin’ clothes on.”
“In this heat?” Leland asked, his features just barely visible in the awesome twilight. As answer to his own question, he shrugged off his coat and went to work upon his wet clothes underneath.
Eli looked away in annoyed disgust. “Knew there was something off about all of you. Not you, Gilbert, so keep fuckin’ quiet.”
“We start walking,” Leland explained as he undid his belt buckle. “I don’t care which way you all want to go. But anywhere’s better than here. I don’t know if the sun’s going down or coming up, but if it’s this warm now, we’ll fry when it’s daylight.”
Nathan couldn’t argue that bit of logic, so he got to removing his winter gear as well. He stripped off his duster, two shirts, two undershirts, and two pairs of rough cotton pants. The material around his knee was filthy with dried blood, from where he’d taken the cut from the knife-wielding arm. Just seeing the wound made him aware of the dull ache he’d been carrying around there. He kicked off his boots to remove his pants, but wasn’t sure what to do with the doubled-up stockings. A quick glance around informed him to take those off as well. Once done, the sand was uncomfortably hot under his bare soles, so he hip-hopped from one spot to the other.
The Majestic 311 Page 17