by Carrie Patel
Malone set her report down and looked up.
“Sato’s summoned you to the train station,” she said, stopping halfway to Malone’s desk.
“I didn’t realize he’d returned,” Malone said.
“Neither did I. But he apparently wants you over there right away.”
Malone eyed the paper between Farrah’s fingers. “What’s this about?”
“How should I know?” Farrah bit her lip, twisting and turning the folded paper in her hands and finally surrendering it to Malone. “Take a look yourself. He just said he wants extra security for the delivery this afternoon, all right?”
“Fine,” Malone said, reading the same thing in the note. She hadn’t heard of riots or unrest around previous deliveries – presumably Covas’s troops had seen to that – but she could understand the concern. She gathered her coat while Farrah returned to her desk, masking her own vague distress with a frenzy of activity.
Before Malone left the station, she gathered twenty of her more experienced inspectors.
“We’re running security?” Inspector Wallis asked.
“That’s what I’m told,” Malone said. Her tone put an end to further questions.
The way to the train station was clogged. Increasingly, venturing through Recoletta was an exercise in extremes. It was either a ghost town, the winding, brick-lined tunnels abandoned and unswept, or it was plugged with the concentrated excesses of humanity.
Sato had set up a distribution system at the offices near Dominari Hall – he’d been careful to avoid the feeding-trough madness of parceling out the goods anywhere near the train station. But people came still, whether in anticipation of a riot, to see that the much-needed shipments actually did arrive, or simply because there was little else of note going on at the moment.
Her inspectors bunched around her as they navigated the thickening mass, making their way with loud shouts and sharp elbows.
Malone had gotten better at reading the mood of a crowd. There were moments, as now, when the teeming swell of humanity was so focused on a singular goal that she could have been invisible to them. Their focus made them predictable. They shoved and milled around one another, only dimly aware of each other as warm, moving obstacles.
But that could change in a heartbeat. Their bovine single-mindedness could turn feral, turning on anything and everything in their way.
So Malone kept an eye on the vacant gazes around her and an ear to the steady, discontented murmuring.
They finally reached the train station, packed full with people. Only the loading platforms next to the tracks were empty, and that was because station staff kept shooing people back, waving off reaching hands and bull-rushing any who dared approach the steps.
But something didn’t look right.
“Chief,” one of the inspectors shouted in her ear. “Where’s all the soldiers?”
Where, indeed. Malone looked around, but the only people she saw apart from the gathering crowd were the station staff, sweating in their bright coveralls.
“Pair up and spread out,” she said, turning to her inspectors. She kept her feet wide and planted as the crowd bumped and crushed around her. “You eight, take up positions around the platforms. Everyone else, disperse and take up positions around this station. On your alert, but keep them holstered unless you’ve got no choice. Understood?”
Twenty heads nodded in response. As the inspectors scattered, Malone turned and shouldered her way to the nearest loading platform.
She reached the stairs, and the man patrolling the broad platform nearly shoved her back into the crowd until he saw the silver seal in her hand.
Instead, he sighed with relief and reached out to help her up. “Thank God, the cavalry’s here,” he said, wiping his shining brow. “Don’t tell me it’s just you.”
“I’ve brought twenty of my best with me,” Malone said, feeling the hollow promise of those words.
He blinked, patting down a thin, wiry thatch of hair. “You’re joking,” he said. “What the hell are twenty of you supposed to do?”
“Twenty-one,” Malone said calmly, “and we’ll do everything we can, but it would help if you could tell me what needs to happen.”
“I don’t even know where to begin. For previous shipments, we’ve had a whole battalion of soldiers to keep things in line.” He shook his red, round dome. “See that track there?” He pointed, and Malone had to squint between the writhing masses to see the faint shape of a shallow channel. “Needs to be clear. ‘S where the wagons roll up. We load ’em and they cart the goods off to Sato’s storehouses. But good luck clearing this lot out of the way. And even if you managed that, I’d bet you my rations that they’ll have the carts turned over before they clear the station.”
It was a formidable problem. As for what Sato could have been thinking in pulling Covas’s troops and dispatching Malone and a handful of inspectors, she could only guess. “How long before the train arrives?” she asked.
“It’s almost twenty minutes overdue,” the man said, pointing up and to a wide, round clock that, amazingly, still worked. “The deliveries have been pretty regular until now. Could be some real loons have overrun the tracks. Or maybe Covas’s soldiers are dealing with the hold-up.”
Malone opened her mouth to reply, but a new tide of emotion had started moving through the crowd. It was subtle at first – rising voices and a quickening of movement – but by the time Inspector Chilson, stationed in front of the platform at Malone’s feet, looked up at her, the crowd was at full surge.
They were shouting about something, though it was impossible to tell what. They didn’t seem to know where to direct their fury, either – they turned to the ceiling, the empty tracks, and one another, teeth bared. A fight broke out near the back of the crowd, but most in the surrounding mob ignored it.
“What’s going on?” Malone asked the station attendant.
“How should I know? Maybe it’s just other people piling in. Pushing from behind.”
But Malone didn’t believe it, and he didn’t appear to, either.
The mob was getting rowdier, spasming with little fits of fighting and shoving. Chilson and the other seven inspectors she’d stationed around the platforms were pushing against the swell, keeping the bodies back, if just barely. She could see about half of the other twelve across the station. She motioned for them to come forward.
She was already cursing herself for splitting them up and Sato for not giving her a warning of what awaited them. If she’d only known–
Just then, shrieks rose from the back of the crowd. Somewhere, a gun went off. Not one of her inspectors’, she hoped, but in the boiling mass, it was impossible to tell just what was happening.
Something slammed against the platform. A protester, either charging at full tilt or shoved by the people behind him. And he wasn’t the only one. The whole crowd seemed to be rushing the platform, and their anger was wheeling and turning in the same direction, as laboriously and unstoppably as a herd of beasts.
Chilson and the others, she saw, were fighting a redoubled effort from the men and women at the front of the crowd, dodging fists and shouting down the mob. They wouldn’t last much longer.
She was dimly aware of the red-faced station attendant standing beside her and shouting into her ear, begging for direction. His hand clamped down on her shoulder, and she looked at him blankly.
Malone pointed at the other inspectors stationed around the loading platform, their shoulders just rising above the edge. “Help me get them up here,” she said.
The man scuttled off – she’d be lucky if he had the presence of mind to help, but at least he had something to occupy him now – and bent down to grab Chilson’s shoulder, shouting at him to retreat to the platform. It was a miracle he heard her, but he turned around allowed her to hoist him up by his outstretched arms. Without a word, he jogged further down the long platform to help the rest of their fellows up.
Malone almost laughed with relief when
she saw Angelo and Wallis shove their way to the front of the platform. She reached out for Angelo while Wallis gave his partner a boost from behind.
“Saw Gupta and Klemsky back there,” she shouted as she cleared the lip of the platform. “Good twenty-five feet behind us before we lost sight of ’em.” It was part apology and part explanation. In that roiling throng, twenty-five feet might as well be a mile.
They’d reached down to grab Wallis when the man’s eyes went wide in shock and pain. He was just short of them when he slumped forward and crumpled at the base of the platform, something seeping from the back of his uniform. A man standing behind him glared up at Malone and Angelo, his knife and the hand holding it glistening with blood.
“Shit,” Angelo whispered.
The mob surged over Wallis almost as soon as he fell.
“Watch the stairs,” Malone said. “Keep an eye out for the others.”
Angelo nodded dumbly and rushed over to stand guard at the top of the narrow steps. Chilson and the station attendant were halfway to the end of the platform, where it ended at the mouth of the empty tunnel from which the train should have emerged. Between them, they’d pulled up most of the other inspectors, who had in turn fanned out to pull more of their brethren to safety or push back bolder members of the mob.
It was a valiant effort, but even if everyone but Wallis made it to the platform – an assumption that grew unlikelier by the second – they couldn’t hold the position forever.
Feet thundered along the wooden planks toward Malone. She turned to see Velez and Hsu – two more from the crowd – jogging down the platform toward her. Martin had joined Angelo at the top of the stairs. It was almost everyone.
“They got Thomas,” Velez panted, angled forward with his hands on his thighs.
Malone leaned toward them. “Any sign of Gupta or Klemsky?”
Hsu shook her head.
Malone looked out over the station. Fighting their way out the way they’d come would be almost impossible. The crowd was fast clotting into something impenetrable, and anyway, the mob’s once-idle wrath had latched on to Malone and her comrades. That only left–
Two shots rang out, loud even over the roaring of the crowd. Malone looked back toward the stairs in time to see Inspector Martin, his revolver in hand, pulled off of the platform and into the mob. Angelo reached for him, but it was probably a lucky miss for her. He disappeared in a tangle of arms and legs.
“Get back!” Malone shouted.
Angelo retreated, and it was only the crowd’s newfound confusion and fixation with Martin and the men and women who had pulled him down that kept them from following her.
“He fired into the air,” Angelo said, her voice shaking. “He was furious over Thomas. Meant to subdue them, but he just stirred them up.”
“Chief, we can’t stay here,” Hsu said.
The other inspectors – and a few station attendants – were already making their way toward Malone across the platform. Back where Martin had fallen, the stairs shook as members of the crowd began climbing two and three abreast, wedged tight and pulling one another back as they fought for passage on the narrow steps.
There was only one way left to flee.
“Into the tunnel,” Malone shouted at her officers.
The red-faced attendant hurried over to Malone, bellowing. “You crazy? If that train shows up, we’ll have nowhere to run.”
“We don’t have anywhere to run now,” she said.
The officers were already lowering themselves over the edge and picking their way down the scaffolding. There was no noise from the depths of the tunnel, but it would have been difficult to hear anything over the roar of the crowd.
Malone knelt at the edge and climbed down herself. The beams and poles juddered as the crowd pressed against the other side of the platform and finally poured over it. She could only hope that anyone climbing up after them was of the same mind to escape.
Her feet reached the smooth stone of the tunnel, and she dropped the last couple of feet to the tracks. The inspectors ahead of her were already jogging toward the tunnel.
Malone did the same as the scaffolding above her creaked and groaned under the increasing weight of the mob.
The tunnel ahead was dark, but lights flickered and glowed to life as some of the inspectors at the front of the group stopped to light their hand lanterns. Malone kept up a quick trot as she passed into the shadow of the tunnel, feeling grit and gravel crunch underfoot. With the clamor of the crowd still blaring behind her, she didn’t dare slow down.
The attendant she’d spoken with earlier caught up to her. “Tracks continue about two miles like this before they break to the surface. Got service tunnels every half mile or so, but lately they’ve been locking ’em to prevent some fool from sneaking onto one of the trains. Or from fleeing the city that way.”
“One of you has keys, right?” Malone asked.
The motion in the darkness looked like a shrug.
The inspectors and attendants ahead had slowed down enough for Malone and the rest of the stragglers to catch up. The commotion from the station still echoed down the tunnel when they reached the door to the first service tunnel, and the attendant shook his head.
“Probably just drop us right back into the thick of it,” he said. They kept jogging.
As they regrouped, Malone counted the survivors. She saw thirteen of her own inspectors. Of the seven missing, she’d seen Wallis and Martin fall, and Gupta and Klemsky had never made it to the platform. That left three others who had either perished before the others could pull them up or who had never made the climb down from the platform. In addition, they’d picked up eight uniformed station attendants.
A cold, calculating part of her mind recognized that twenty-one survivors was more than she’d had a right to expect after the catastrophe that had unfolded at the station. But that knowledge didn’t lessen the sting of losing seven officers.
The noise of the mob receded to a dull roar. By the time they reached the second service corridor, the disaster felt distant enough to risk a slow trot.
“Hold up,” Malone called.
The other inspectors and the station attendants turned to look at her, their faces blank but for the exhaustion of a burned-out adrenaline rush. Many of them looked grateful for the stop.
Malone walked over and tried the handle of the door. Locked. “One of you have the key?” she asked, making sure to look each of the station attendants in the eye.
A woman with a stringy ponytail pulled a key ring from her pocket. She tried a new-looking key of shiny brass, which glinted in the lamplight as she turned it. It made a half circle that ended in a metallic thunk, yet when the woman pushed on the door, Malone heard the same stubborn resistance that she’d felt.
“It’s locked from the other side,” the woman said.
“Let’s keep going,” Malone said, still too raw to feel surprised.
They continued on. They had yet to hear or feel any sign of the late train, but halfway into the tunnel, Malone didn’t dare express relief just yet. The rest of the group seemed to be in the same state – they hadn’t sped up from a brisk walk since leaving the last door, and they hadn’t said a word, either.
When they reached the third door, the attendant tried her key again, and to no one’s surprise, it stayed wedged shut.
Malone didn’t realize how heavily she was breathing until she stopped to listen again for the noise of the mob. It echoed down the tunnel, sounding more distant and harmless by the minute. Thinking back, it was amazing that none of them had followed her group into the tunnel.
Perhaps even they weren’t crazy enough to wander onto the tracks with a train long overdue.
“Almost through,” Malone said. “Let’s pick up the pace.”
The rest of the group followed her lead, listless and exhausted.
The tracks sloped upward. Gray, ghostly light filtered in from somewhere up ahead. They had just left the third door around a slow
bend when Malone heard a distant rumble.
She wasn’t the only one. “What’s that?” Hsu asked, skidding to a stop and holding her arms out as if to feel a disturbance in the air.
“Train,” Angelo said.
“Can’t be,” Malone said. But she was already calculating the remaining distance and wondering how many of them could make the half-mile sprint uphill.
“It’s not a train,” the red-faced attendant said. He didn’t sound relieved.
“Then what else?” Angelo said, straining to hope.
“No idea.”
“Come on,” Malone said, jogging again. “Hurry.”
The others didn’t need any goading. They dashed after her, panting and grunting in the fading dark. As they got closer, Malone thought she could feel the commotion under her feet. It didn’t seem to be moving, which was a relief. But Malone was certain she heard screams and cries – not the ravings of a mob, but something else entirely – over the labored breathing of her companions. An icy splinter of fear wedged itself into her heart.
They didn’t bother to stop as they passed the last door. The mouth of the tunnel was a circle of gray, backlit clouds up ahead. Aimed at the sky, it gave no clue as to what waited on the ground.
Minutes blitzed by as the mouth of the tunnel widened around them. Finally, it was a yawning, luminous portal, and the sounds of screams were unmistakable.
So was the smell. Burning fumes, fuel, and something else.
“What is that?” Angelo asked. No one dared spend the breath to answer her.
They reached the lip and topped the rising ridge of the tracks.
Hunched over, their hands on their knees while they caught their breath, they saw the train.
“Shit,” Angelo muttered. “Shit, shit, shit.” No one else said anything.
A few hundred feet away, the train lay on the tracks, bent into two trailing sections like a broken-backed animal. The dozen or so cars, and the grass around them, burned, belching noxious smoke into the air.
Yet movement flickered from the belly of an open compartment.