Until now.
The bright Colorado sunlight began filtering through the gathering clouds. Scott felt for the first time today that he was catching a break.
But the clouds were too low as they wafted overhead.
No, not clouds. Smoke. The steam wafting above him was mixed with darker wisps of smoke. Scott smelled a sweet burning smell. It brought back memories of Panama, the Philippines, Honduras... none of them good.
Ominous hissing came from the hulk of the engine as the boiler cooked, steam leaking from ruptures. Scott could see a body pinned beneath the locomotive. Could it be Jimmy? He tried to remember where he had last seen his partner, but he could not think beyond the collapse. Whoever it was, his flesh was now being seared by the runaway furnace of the locomotive, just as he was about to be deep-fried by the tar.
Scott turned his head enough to see the cars scattered down the ravine. They burned, the fire growing stronger and fiercer with each passing moment, climbing the sharp incline of wreckage and broken trees and feeding on the destruction. He could feel the hot wind from the fire whipping at him like a tornado.
Panic once again welled in him. He wanted to scream and struggle. The dull pain of the beams on his legs grew sharper. His mouth was dry, his brown wool shirt and khaki pants tom and sticky with sweat and blood. The air became filthy with smoke and it was hard for Scott to take a breath.
Leverage. He needed leverage. He laughed... it had taken him this long to figure that out. Some engineer. He laughed louder, a little too hard and too long.
It occurred to him that he might be losing his mind, which, given his circumstance, might not have been such a terribly bad thing.
He looked for something to use as a lever among the nearby rocks, dirt, and debris. There were dead bodies. He saw his plans for the trestles, which the wind from the firestorm picked up with the dust, sending the blueprints whipping around him. But nothing that could be used as a lever.
Boiling tar above him. Fire below.
“You’d better find something soon, boy.” Scott wasn’t sure if he thought it or said it, but he knew it was true. He dug frantically through the coal and gravel ballast scattered around him. Deeper into the spilled pile his hand went, until it touched something metallic.
Scott gasped with new hope. As fast as he could, he pushed the coal aside, uncovering the object until he could see a bit of green under the black grime of coal dust. He reached for it, just able to grab a thin metal handle, and pulled it out.
Dusting it off, Scott saw that it was the odd green lantern Jimmy had insisted on bringing on board the train. According to Jimmy, it was supposed to be good luck. Some good luck—Alan had held it in his hand when he and Jimmy had felt the incredibly unnatural feeling of the locomotive falling from under their feet, then disbelief at the tumbling, followed by the blackness.
Scott’s first thought was to use the lantern to dig under his legs, but the angle was too awkward. Besides, the lantern had no sharp edges. It would take too long to pound it against the heavy timber pressing on his legs, too short to wedge between the tarred, pressure-treated wood.
It was useless to him.
The tar oozed like black lava down the slope towards Scott. To his back was the heat of the fire, giving the twilight shadows of the ravine an ominous, red flickering glow.
So Scott decided to do what others would have considered the most logical, but he, even in his suffering and fear, could not bring himself to do until now. He called out for help. Once he started, he couldn’t stop. All he heard in return were the echoes of his own desperate cries. After a while, he could hear laughter, only to discover that it was his own.
He lay back, just laughing now. He was really going off the rails. “Off the rails.” More laughter. His friends were dead. Funnier even still. He laughed until he choked and coughed. Then, as if the circuit breaker to his madness had been thrown, he lay still in quiet contemplation, his strength sapped. He lay back, looking up at the sun and sky. A red tail hawk circling overhead seemed to taunt him with its easy freedom.
So close.
He couldn’t stop the tar. He couldn’t stop the fire. He could not free himself from the wreckage. He could only accept the inevitable and await his fate. His hand dug under the flap of his flannel shirt pocket, past the neatly folded and snugly tucked telegram (“Alan—please consider my offer... ”) and pulled out a crumpled pack of smokes. He lay back and lit up a Lucky Strike with the brass Zippo Irene had given him last Christmas, took a long deep drag and slowly blew the smoke out in a long silent sigh. Of all the damned bad luck. It was all going to be so sweet.
It was then that the lantern spoke to him.
CHAPTER
4
6
8
“Like now,” Scott said.
But as he saw the proud man crawling and the look
4
It looked curiously pristine sitting in the dirt and debris, with its peculiar green hue and odd design that was alien in a way beyond other terrestrial cultures. It simply did not belong here and Scott could not imagine a place where it would fit in.
It was only a little disturbing to Scott that the lantern spoke to him. He assumed that he had gone, or was at least in the process of, going insane. Train wrecks can do that to a man. The talking green lantern only confirmed it.
He was no stranger to hallucinations. During his travels as a railroad engineer he’d experienced much worse from lack of sleep, overloads of heat, fear and work, and on binges of everything from Mexican mescal to French absinthe. He assumed surviving a train wreck and being surrounded by the bloodied, bruised and crushed corpses of his men would do things to his mind.
What did bother him was that the lantern didn’t seem to particularly care for him. It spoke to him as if it were obliged to, its tone
harsh and judgmental. Scott was definitely not in the mood to hear what it had to say.
“Save yourself,” it said.
Scott sighed. “What the hell you think I’ve been trying to do?”
“This began with you.”
Scott shook his head and closed his eyes. “This was an accident.”
“You are the only one alive.”
Scott had nothing to say about that, so the lantern continued.
“You must begin anew.”
“And how the hell does that happen with me all wadded up like this?” Alan replied with heartfelt sincerity.
He didn’t like riddles. He wanted comfort, a soothing voice, someone to tell him it would all work out, or maybe something to incite him, a verbal kick in the butt that would motivate him to get out of this mess.
But the lantern wasn’t providing this. Instead, it turned out to be a righteous bastard. Still, as a hallucination it was excellent-vibrant and real. Scott noted that it had his voice. Was he Edgar Bergen and the lantern Charlie McCarthy? But though it sounded like him, the tone of the lantern was one that he didn’t recognize, sounding like a dispassionate observer of his thoughts and actions, who did not seem to care about him one way or the other. Scott felt an uneasiness beyond his absolutely comforting certainty that the last hour’s events had driven him mad.
He decided, for the hell of it, that he’d try and talk to it, reason with it. The four-hundred pound pole crushing his thighs into the ground made sure that he wasn’t going anywhere. He’d pass the time by making the damn lantern see things his way. The gift of gab had been his knack since Willoughby House. It worked on investors, inspectors, politicians, employees and women. Why wouldn’t it work on a lamp?
“You’re blaming me for this?” Scott asked.
“Who else?”
“7 didn’t make those trestles collapse,” Scott said, masking his own worry.
“A mistake was made. Out of pride,” the lantern said with great certainty.
Scott couldn’t believe it. The damned hallucination was getting to him. Or was he getting to himself, projecting his fears through
“The bri
dge was strong. I know that as a fact,” Alan declared.
“The flaw was not within the structure.”
Alan swallowed. “What are you hedging at? Get to the point.”
“Tell me your secret,” the lantern said, accusingly.
“You wanna know my secret? I talk to lamps,” Alan replied.
“Admit the truth,” the lantern countered.
Everything was beginning to hurt, so Scott stopped playing. “What the hell are you that you know so much?”
“I’m of the Starheart.”
“You lost me there.”
The lantern glowed and its voice changed, sounding unearthly, less language than pure thought. Scott did not so much hear as immediately understand what it said next. It was as if he had acquired an instant memory, images and sounds and feelings flashing through his mind, for a moment fusing consciousness with unconscious mind.
“My being is that of the Green Flame of Light,” The lantern imparted to Alan. “I exist because of the Guardians of the Universe, who sought to contain my energy. The last Guardian to wield my energy, Yalan Gur, was corrupted by power, and the Guardians turned against him.”
Scott had instant memory of the lantern’s journey, beginning as the life force of the powerful Guardian known as Yalan Gur, the purity of his power that led to his descent to evil, and his ultimate destruction at the hands of the humans he had enslaved. His power concentrated into the meteorite which, through fate, good luck and misfortune, had become the green lantern sitting now before Alan Scott.
Scott blinked. He knew the origin of the lantern and had no doubt of its veracity. Its history had become as tangible to him as his own memories. To question its existence would be to question his own.
The lantern sensed this. Its glow grew brighter.
“His will is contained within me. Three times shall I flame green! First, to bring death! Second, to bring life! And third, to bring power!”
“So which purpose is this? Death?”
“No. Life.”
Scott tried moving himself. “That’s some good news for a change. You want to bring life? Help me get the hell out of here.”
“You must believe.”
“Boy, you picked the wrong guy for that one.”
The lantern seemed to glow a deeper green, pulsating angrily. “Tell me your secret,” it demanded.
The tar was dripping onto the log now, soon to spill onto his legs. Still, Scott could not admit to what was tearing his soul apart.
“I’ve got no secrets, Mister Lamp. I’m an open book. The Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and Alan.”
The lantern said nothing and Scott hated it. It seemed to know that it didn’t need to respond.
The molten tar dripped like gravy down the side of the spar. Scott watched it fall onto his pant leg. A few seconds passed like an eternity as the tar seeped into the twill, then through it.
Scott felt the searing heat.
Unable to stop himself, he shrieked as the skin of his shin burned and blistered under the molten tar, fusing it to the pant cloth. He could hear the clicking of the broken bones of his legs as he writhed and pain came upon pain. More tar dripped onto his knees and thighs, oozing and deeply burning rivulets into his skin, blistering the surface and cooking the fat beneath. Scott felt the nuances of each layer of pain, the dull ache of the broken bones, the sharp, exposed pain of the bone shards digging into the muscle, and the horrible, slow, deep torture of the scalding tar. It was the tar that was making him crazy. And through the haze of agony, Scott realized that it was slowly forging a burning path to the soft tissues of his crotch.
“The wreck is my fault! It’s my fault! The design failed!”
He could not get the confession out fast enough. It echoed up the ravine. Scott blacked out, lucky to be able to slip into the sanctuary of the unconscious.
Again the sun. Scott opened his eyes and blinked. The sun was
closer to the horizon and not as strong. Other than that Scott had no idea how much time had passed.
He rolled over. Then he realized he could roll over. He was no longer trapped.
The realization of his freedom snapped him to full consciousness. He sat up. He was still in the ravine, but he was free of the log, which was now covered by the molten tar, filling the impression where he had been pinned. How did he get free?
His right hand was gripping a thin metal handle. It was the green lantern.
He looked at his legs stretched out before him. They were unbumed, unbroken, as if he had simply sat down to rest for a while. Not believing it, he probed them with his left hand... he was unwilling to release his grip on the lantern for fear of returning to the dream or reality of what he was suffering through. His hands confirmed what he saw... his legs weren’t even bruised.
What was this? Was this real or an escape from reality? A sudden flash of a young woman’s face; soft and pale, with beautiful long blonde hair but distance and madness in her eyes. The image of her sent a shiver down Scott’s spine.
He could only think that the pain had shoved him into insanity’s abyss, or that he had imagined the entire incident from the shock of the crash. But the memory of Yalan Gur still resonated in him, as did the pain in his legs, like memories of long ago incidents.
Either way, he wasn’t taking any chances. He was going to get the hell away from the wreck. But first he would force himself to find the cause of this disaster.
Even though he dreaded it, he gave himself no choice but to confirm where his design had failed. He was not used to such feelings of utter defeat and anxiety, but they occupied his mind, dreadful and real.
As he climbed his way past the grease and fallen timbers, Scott saw the entire enterprise—like his life—flash before him. The surveying, the cutting and hauling the pine trees, dynamiting and shoring up the embankments, testing the stream bed for the trestles. The days of good, hard work, of frustration and progress, the tension and pleasure of overcoming a thousand problems to build a bridge that could dependably support the weight of endless freight trains passing over its trestles. He worried over his revolutionary new design that enabled them to build the bridge faster than Dekker’s team. The design is what won them the contract and it was to be a true triumph of engineering.
But the terrain proved more difficult than Alan and Jimmy expected, and they fell behind schedule. Ultimately they were forced to a hasty testing of those supports with the weighted cars. But Scott’s anxieties were swept away by the cheers of the crew as the locomotive’s whistle blew in triumph as it crossed it on the first and only test run.
...And now all of it lay at the bottom of the ravine, destroyed. Scott tried swallowing but his mouth was dry. He wiped the back of his hand over his cracked lips.
More dead men lay in his path, some burnt, some in pieces or involuntarily contorted like circus freaks in the accident, others lying peacefully as though merely napping. Although he held had no hope for survivors, Scott dutifully checked each for signs of life, and left them as they lay.
Scott continued to climb towards the trestles, which stuck out like shattered bone from flesh. He tried to remember the exact moment the world went dark, turning topsy-turvy, then light again as the train tumbled downward.
Scott stopped and leaned against a pine. The mountain altitude left him breathless and light-headed. He closed his eyes and, taking comfort in the tree’s clean scent...
... A scent replaced by the acrid smell of burning coal. He could feel a cool steady wind whipping through his hair, the train moving under his feet. He could hear the steam engine chugging, the rapid metallic clacking of the locomotive. The train was heading for the trestles. He looked down at his hand on the throttle. The train picked up speed.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. Turning around, he saw Jimmy’s dark features, creased with worry.
“Not so fast Alan,” Jimmy said tightly.
Scott grinned easily, trying to mask his own concern. “Nervous?”
Jimmy wasn’t having any. “Yeah. I am. We shouldn’t push it—it’s our first fully-loaded run across the bridge.”
Scott shrugged, keeping his hand on the throttle. “The weighted cars tested fine.”
“But we’ve got the crew on board.”
“Goddamit Jimmy—I know what I’m doing. The design is fine.”
“Slow it down.”
“What the hell’s gotten into you?” Scott snapped.
“We’ve got enemies, Alan.”
“Who? Dekker? We beat him out of the contract, fair and square.” “Don’t be a jerk,” Jimmy said. “A guy like that isn’t going to leave us alone.”
“There’s nothing but shadows out there, my friend.”
“Men like Dekker won’t let someone like me beat ‘em,” Jimmy said with quiet certainty.
“Like you?”
“Like me—a Jewish kid from the gutter.”
Scott rolled his eyes. “Get over it. It’s business, Jimmy.”
“C’mon, how long have we been going head-to-head with guys like that? At Willoughby house. When we started getting contracting work in Gotham. Rich guys like that sneering at us, treating us like scum because we don’t have the same blue blood. You think this is business? It ain’t for guys like Dekker. This is about keeping other men down.” Jimmy squinted into the rushing wind as the train hurled forward.
“You think he hates you that much?” Scott said.
“No, he doesn’t hate me at all, Alan. You don’t hate roaches. You just kill ‘em.”
“Is that how you think he sees us? As bugs?”
“Not you. Me.”
Scott waved his hand in dismissal but it didn’t stop Jimmy from continuing.
“A guy like Dekker looks at me, he doesn’t see a human. The rules of fair play don’t apply. He’ll be damned if he lets a guy from the streets beat him. He thinks that if he does there’ll be more like me coming and pretty soon he’ll be the one down for the count and we’ll be on top. That’s what he’s thinking. You saw him eyeing us
Green Lantern - Sleepers Book 2 Page 4