Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  Boysie knew no stop was scheduled, and was immediately alarmed. He ordered all guns at the ready, knowing this must be the preamble to an attack. Peering through the rifle slits cut in the boxcar’s side, he could see no one near the train, but indistinct voices came to him from the locomotive’s cab. Warning his men to remain on alert, Boysie climbed up onto the tender, and saw what it was that had caused the halt. In the entrance to the snow shed stood a mockery of Leo Brannan’s elk, its body a rain barrel, its legs taken from a table, the neck a piece of bent pipe, the head a narrow wicker basket, the antlers two broom heads.

  Boysie watched the area around the train, anticipating gunshots. Rifle barrels protruded from both boxcars like porcupine quills. Boysie wondered why the barrier was such a flimsy thing, when a stack of railroad ties would have been more difficult to plow aside, then realized he was confronted by intelligence of a high order; the wooden elk was so unexpected, so bizarre, it had done what ties and boulders would not have—caused the engineers to stop the train.

  “Keep going!” he yelled. “What the hell did you stop for …!”

  A snowball hit him in the neck. Turning, Boysie saw three figures advancing from behind cover, and barely had time to notice that one was a woman before the first rifle was fired, at which signal every other rifle on that side of the cars began firing. The three figures spun and fell, the larger of the men rising again before being cut down by so many bullets parts of his clothing disintegrated.

  No answering fire came from any part of the mountainside near the tracks. Still atop the tender, Boysie asked himself how anyone could be so foolish as to mount a robbery with only three persons, and one of them a female. And not one of them had been carrying a gun. It could not be reconciled with his past experience of criminal mentality, and he did not know what to do next. The four men in the cab were looking at him, their faces blank with shock.

  Boysie waved his arms frantically. “Go ahead! Go ahead! Keep going!”

  Lyle did not want to go ahead. The comically grotesque wooden elk stood guard over an entrance to some kind of hell, as surely as Saint Peter stood by heaven’s gate. Despite its flimsiness, Lyle knew the thing facing his locomotive was a warning not to proceed further. The snow shed was a trap. Disaster lay waiting inside. A creature of darkness lived in the shed, a serpent three miles long, wanting them to enter its square mouth and pass willingly into its belly. Lyle was afraid of the serpent, and dismayed that a woman had been shot down before his eyes, and could not think straight anymore, only express by his inaction a reluctance to do anything but wait for an instruction to throw the train into reverse.

  “Go ahead!” screamed Boysie. “What are you waiting for! Go ahead now!”

  Boysie’s legs were trembling. He had no understanding of the events that had followed the stopping of the train, and was aware of his own reluctance to enter the darkness presided over by the outlandish creature planted on the tracks. He tried to think of a reason why he could legitimately order the engineer to return everyone to Leadville, but no reason came to him. The engineer and the fireman were not moving to obey him, and his own men in the cab were standing as if turned to stone. Boysie aimed his pistol at the driver, and when this was not enough, he thumbed back the hammer. Lyle released the brakes, then eased open the throttle.

  The Baldwin edged forward, and its snowblade shoved aside the elk, whose legs broke off instantly. Boysie jumped from the tender down into the cab, and was immediately surrounded by smoke forced down by the shed’s low roof. As the train moved further inside, darkness gave the oily smoke a sinister thickness. The engineer switched on a carbide lamp that washed the cab in white light, and ignited the acetylene lamp on the engine’s nose. Boysie saw the tunnel walls ahead slowly moving to engulf the train. Every man aboard was being swallowed alive. It was a fantastic thought, but he could not rid himself of it. Heat from the firebox was making him sweat. He wanted to think about the three fools who had done what they did. Boysie was unsure now if they had intended anything more threatening than some kind of stupid prank. How would he explain this to his superiors? It had not been his fault that someone in the first boxcar had opened fire without orders to do so, but ultimate responsibility for everything would devolve upon his shoulders, he knew; that was how the company operated.

  The man beside Boysie was whimpering. Boysie knew he should have been shocked at such unmanly behavior, but he was not. All accepted laws governing reality had been left behind with the sunlight. Replacing them were causeless fears, an intangible sense of being drawn toward the locus of some dreadful event beyond imagining, a thing that lay in wait up ahead in the darkness beyond the engine’s beam of yellow light. Whatever its nature, it would happen soon, Boysie was sure. His order to proceed into the tunnel was what made the thing a certainty. He could have avoided it by deciding on a return to Leadville, but he had chosen the way ahead, and now must face the event his decision had made every man aboard the train a part of.

  The smoke thickened even more. The engineer and the fireman had slipped bandannas up across their noses and lowered the goggles from around their caps to shield their eyes. Boysie and his men had no such protection, and all three began to cough. The smoke was visible in the carbide lamp’s intense light, coiling and streaming around them like phantoms. The engine crew were like masked demons from some mechanical netherworld, and the sound of the locomotive, laboring to make up the speed and momentum it had lost by being stopped on a two-percent grade, was amplified by the wooden walls sliding by until it became the panting of a great beast. The air itself was exhaled breath, noxious and repellent. The train was moving too slowly, crawling to its own extinction in the gut of the beast. Boysie heard vomiting nearby, and saw one of his men collapse on the cab floor.

  “Go faster!” he called to the engineer. The sooner they were through the snow shed, the sooner they could all breath again. The man at the controls ignored him. Boysie grabbed at Lyle’s arm to make him pay attention. The arm was like rock, made rigid by some inner tension Boysie could not shake loose from him. The fireman collapsed suddenly, muscles in his neck jumping like trapped fish.

  The train seemed to be slowing down, and there was another sound now, of screaming from the boxcars. Boysie knew there was nothing wrong back there, nothing that could be seen and shot at; it was the same in the engine cab, where an encroaching terror without form or substance was being inhaled along with the greasy smoke, choking reason, swamping the senses with panic. Boysie felt it too, this nameless force, and made himself resist adding his voice to those reaching him. The men were going crazy; he should have been back with them, calming them, assuring them it was a trick of some kind, this mania gripping them all, a result of smoke inhalation. How, he wondered, could railroad men pass through the snow shed on their scheduled runs without experiencing such waves of dread; did their bandannas and goggles make a difference? But the man at the controls was frozen with fear, and his fireman had lost consciousness. Boysie now thought the thing that had attacked the train had been set loose by the three fools who had thrown a snowball at him. They had somehow laid a trap that went into effect even without their presence, maybe a gas of some kind to distract the senses and derange the mind temporarily. Boysie liked the notion, and wanted to tell someone, explain away the disorientation they all felt, but he could not move, and for the first time became aware of his own body’s response to the gas; his fingers were locked hard around a handrail, as if he anticipated being swept from the cab by terrible winds. He tried to remove them by willpower, and failed, and knew then that he could do nothing whatever to assist or lead his men through the terror entering their bodies with every breath, growing stronger inside them minute by passing minute as the train continued to crawl forward.

  Eyes streaming with tears he could not forestall, his lungs filling with smoke and shame, Boysie set aside a small part of his mind to contemplate the end of his career. He was finished with the Pinkerton agency if he could not deliver the e
lk and his men to Glory Hole without mishap, and he doubted now that any such thing was possible. He could not be sure how far into the shed the train had come, but it could not have been any more than a mile; another two miles of the same unique assault would result in someone’s death. Boysie thought the fireman might already have died, he lay so still on the metal floor.

  Gunfire came from the boxcars, the men surrendering to the enclosed space and the miasmic gas and their own confusion. They were shooting at invisible presences. The shouting and screams that followed, and the increased rate of fire, a fusillade of gunshots from within both cars, attested to their wild aim. This was the event Boysie had anticipated once the shed was entered, the disaster that had given him a foretaste of itself as the first coils of smoke licked around the cab. He had denied the feeling, and taken everyone inside to meet with disaster. It was his fault entirely, and he would eat the blame like a man, if he survived.

  The gas, he thought, his hands still clenched around the rail, the gas was killing them with their own bullets, and the smoke, if they didn’t pull out of there into clean air, would finish them all off with carbon monoxide poisoning. But the train was moving at an even slower pace, the firebox unfed, the engine driver frozen at his controls, unable to build up speed against the grade without additional power.

  At last the shooting stopped. Boysie felt himself begin to pass out, but the smack of his forehead against the wall of the cab ran a steel rod of determination through him. He signaled to the two men on their knees nearby, jerking his thumb toward the tender. “Cut it loose …,” he gasped, “loose from the engine! Let it all roll back … back out!”

  One man was able to understand, the other was not. Boysie and the first man began climbing up onto the tender and across the piles of coal. The smoke was thicker there, near the roof of the shed, and they climbed down onto the front blind of the first boxcar with a sense of relief, even if the air at that level was also fouled by smoke and fumes. Together they yanked at the coupling pin, but it would not shift. “Back to the next one …,” said Boysie, and they entered the boxcar.

  Several bull’s-eye lanterns had been lit, and the scene revealed in their glare was like some lurid illustration from the Police Gazette, a tableau of twisted bodies with terrible gunshot wounds, and the staring, frightened faces of the witnesses to what had happened. Even here the smoke was a visible presence, swirling around the living and the dead in eddies created by the still-open doorway.

  “Jesus …,” breathed the man with Boysie.

  “Everyone who can move,” said Boysie, struggling to keep his voice calm, “get back onto the flatcar. We’re cutting it loose and rolling back out of here. Move, damn you!”

  His order resulted in a sudden surge toward the rear door. Men who had been afraid of the nameless things assailing them from the darkness outside now clawed at each other for the privilege of being first onto the flatcar with the golden elk. Their bull’s-eye beams jabbed across its flanks and antlers, granting the elk illusory movement, a stag caught wide-eyed among streamers of smoky darkness at the edge of a forest fire.

  “Pull the pin …! Wait!” Boysie commanded, but no one would. Every man rushed past the elk and began crowding through the end door of the second boxcar. Boysie attempted pulling the pin himself, wanting to take the flatcar and elk with him, but again, the coupling would not part. He yanked at it, swearing, damning his men for their cowardice and panic. The metal bar and chain attached to the pin jerked and jangled, but would not dislodge the one thing coupling the flatcar to the boxcar ahead. Pausing to catch his breath, Boysie heard similar janglings and curses from the rear of the flatcar, and knew that his men were attempting to separate the second boxcar and the caboose from the rest of the train, regardless of his orders and his presence on the section that would be left connected to the still-advancing locomotive. Boysie could stay with the elk and risk asphyxiation, or run back to join the rest. He heard the rear pin fly out of the coupling, stood, and ran.

  The second boxcar was already separated from the train by several feet as he reached the flatcar’s end. The men were stepping back from the doorway, giving him room to land safely if he chose to jump, and Boysie jumped. Hands grabbed him and hauled him inside. The boxcar and the caboose had almost stopped moving by then. Boysie turned to watch the flatcar receding into the darkness ahead. He had tried to take it with him, but had failed. He was no less a coward than his men, and his career was over. The boxcar stopped completely, then began rolling slowly backward. One man was left in the locomotive cab, along with the engineer and the fireman. If any of them died, it would be on Boysie’s conscience forever.

  Drew had already begun his walk into the snow shed with a lantern when the sounds of shooting came to him, echoing along three miles of snowbound tunnel. He stopped and tried to count the shots, but there were too many, a staccato barrage without distinction, blurred and softened by distance. Something had gone wrong. Nothing was supposed to happen until the train was well inside the snow shed. Could the three drunks at the far end somehow have been responsible? They had seemed unlikely robbers when Drew and Clay spied on them, but there had to be a reason for such a multitude of shots.

  He began walking again. Drew’s part in the holdup was to meet the train as deep inside the snow shed as he could, by which time Omie’s special magic would have rendered the Pinkerton guards insensible. Drew was himself affected by the aura of fear swirling in the darkness around him. He knew it was baseless, that the only thing he need be fearful of was the narrow space between the shed walls and the locomotive when it passed him. Clay had said to him, before Drew began walking, “Whatever strange things you feel in there, ignore all of it, and concentrate on not getting run down by that train, understand? There’s nothing in there, but you’ll think there is. It’s just empty space with railroad tracks through it, remember that, and don’t panic.”

  Drew had to remind himself of those words every few minutes as he advanced. The shooting had probably lasted no more than fifteen seconds. He could not hear the sound of the locomotive, which should have been inside the shed by then, and his concern over its precise location along the track was magnified by Omie’s manufactured waves of terror into a worry that gripped at Drew’s innards like an invisible hand. He told himself it was nothing; the train would soon be coming toward him, gunshots notwithstanding. He told himself the darkness around him was benign, unpopulated by demons or goblins; it was a man-made cavern he hurried through, not some underground place of bats and stalactites. He had only to keep walking, board the locomotive when it approached him, and his job would be done. Drew knew what levers to pull, what handles to grip in a locomotive cab, having brought several to a halt during his work with Lodi. His task was simple, and would be successful if only he could continue to ignore the leering darkness around his lantern’s inadequate glow.

  Now he could hear the engine’s steady chuffing, and knew it was well inside the snow shed. Encouraged, he began walking faster toward the sound. No matter what had prompted the outbreak of shooting at the shed’s far end, the train had proceeded according to schedule, and every man aboard it would begin to experience what Drew was obliged to wade through on foot, a kind of terrible molasses in the air, unavoidable, inexplicable, a thick soup of nameless terror that would go straight to the heart of any man who was not cognizant of its source.

  Drew was aware that his niece had filled the shed with formless dread, but he was obliged to stop anyway, a half mile in, and vomit. He was in awe of such ability; Omie was the possessor of powers beyond Drew’s comprehension. Clay had explained as best he could the peculiar relationship he had shared with Omie for years on some other plane of existence, but Drew had not fully appreciated the nature of the family gift until now. Zoe had told him of their mother’s ability to see things from afar before they happened, Drew having been too young when Nettie died to remember any of it, and he accepted the fact that even though he was not himself gifted, Omie certainly
was, to the extent that Drew was prepared to believe in her plan for taking the golden elk with a minimum of risk to everyone. He had elected to go into the snow shed himself, fearing that Clay, who had proven himself overly susceptible to Omie’s etheric emanations, might succumb to the atmosphere within and fall down on the tracks, to be killed by the train when it came through.

  He could hear it with more clarity now, a constant chuffing of steam pistons, but it was slower than Drew expected, and he wondered if the engine driver had been overcome too soon by Omie, before having built up a sufficient head of steam to bring the locomotive all the way through. He calculated he had come more than three-quarters of a mile into the shed by then. The plan called for him to rendezvous with the train at least a mile inside, allowing a full two miles for Omie to have worked her influence upon the men aboard. If the train was proceeding at a slower rate than anticipated, he might have to go further to meet it. Drew increased his pace, his high-heeled boots stumbling across railroad ties in the semidarkness.

  The sound of more shots reached him, reverberating with greater volume than before. This time there were fewer, and these were more widely separated. Drew could hear screaming also, and this made his skin crawl; was Omie’s spell too powerful, too terrifying? He had left her staring into the darkness he was now penetrating, her features molded into a mask that aged her face twenty years; Omie was a little woman with a need to punish her erstwhile father for his misdeeds, and she had made herself a conduit for otherworldly influences to that end. Drew doubted that any amount of shooting or screams could penetrate the veneer of invulnerability Omie had fashioned about herself. She would continue pouring mortal fear into the shed until she saw the lamp of the approaching locomotive; only then could she allow herself to let the effluvium of fear passing through her begin to ebb away.