The PuppetMaster

by MacNair, Andrew L.

  The shriek of the final whistle jolted me like a starter’s pistol, and a single thought flashed into my mind--the train could not reach the bridge, it must be stopped. I pictured Uli waiting patiently to have coffee with me, Jitka finishing breakfast, and a thousand others resettled in their places, and I jumped.

  The locomotives, coupled back to back, were a hundred and fifty meters from the edge of the divide and nearly the same distance from me. It was an angled race between a hundred thousand tons of steel and me—speed versus mass. I had to alert the engineers before the train began moving too fast to brake.

  Impatient milliseconds later and my feet were churning across earth and grass. Twenty yards into my sprint the driving wheels of the engines lurched forward with a mechanical hiss. I waved an arm, frantically screaming in English, “Stop! Stop the train. There’s a bomb!” The wheels jerked forward a second time with sluggish but obstinate force. No engineer’s face appeared at the window. I screamed in Hindi this time.

  To my left, along the line of the tracks, I saw three figures, a conductor with a rolled up signal flag swinging into the doorframe between two cars, and further down, two members of the RPF, the Railway Protection Force, walking with all casualness in the same direction as the departing train. One of the officers either heard my screams or saw me running insanely toward the locomotives. He motioned to his partner, and they both began jogging towards me, their rifles swinging in bouncing motions from behind their shoulders around to the front. I was forty meters from the front engine when a rifle shot cracked across the field. I looked left, without slowing. The policeman closest to the train had fired a warning round above my head.

  Instantly, I understood, and in that same fractioned second, knew I had a choice. The policeman, in ironic misconception, had decided I was attacking the train, now thirty meters from my pounding legs. Perhaps he had heard the word ‘bomb’ above the rumbling of the machinery and had reacted the only way he knew how, reflexively with his rifle. My decision was instantaneous. I didn’t stop. I kept running directly toward the locomotives, jabbing my fingers toward the river. I screamed in Hindi again, “There’s a bomb on the bridge.” In my peripheral vision I saw the policeman lowering the muzzle of his rifle, but only enough to aim directly at my chest.

  I crouched, sheered right, and anticipated the bullet smashing into some place in my torso. Then, with a whisk of breeze, I felt it pass by me, a nugget of lead inches from my waist. The delayed sound cracked a second later. With a turn of my eyes I saw both rifle barrels now taking a bead on me. The engines and cars were gaining momentum, no longer jerking spasmodically. I was eight meters from the front engine, with nothing between me and two trained riflemen.

  My mind didn’t process. There was no decision, no deliberation, only reaction that comes from hours and weeks and years of training. I dove forward into a low summersault, head and right arm tucking loosely into my chest. Two shots, so close together they sounded as one, ripped the air above the back of my neck. My right shoulder and upper back hit the ground lightly as I tucked and rolled forward and up onto my feet in single, oiled motion. I took a step and a half and leapt up to the curve of a handle on the cab door. It represented every commonplace object I had ever caught in the casual games of my life—a Frisbee, softball, a hoop, a tossed orange. My right arm stretched out, and out further, muscles, tendons, every sinew seeking the centimeters of steel. Then, my fingers wrapped around it like a gymnast’s ring, and at the same time my left side smashed sharply against the side of the door.

  My feet peddled across the empty air above the gravel of the tracks until one of them kicked onto the top step below the half door of the cab. The window had been lowered into the frame to let the cool air in, and inside the cab two engineers stood in distracted concentration, unaware of anything but pressure dials and the rhythm of the engines. Sucking a lungful of air, and thrusting my chin toward the bridge, I screamed four words, “brake, there’s a bomb.”

  The train was less than sixty meters from the incline and the foot of the bridge and it was now rolling at mid speed. Both engineers stood like statues, startled by the monkey-ferenghi hanging outside the engine compartment screaming like a lunatic. I dove through the window, fell onto the metal plates of the cab floor, and pulled myself to my knees. The man closest to me was readying to throw punches or kick at me, when I yelled in gasps, “The bridge is wired. Sutradharak, the PuppetMaster.” I pointed to the sinister looking Mercedes parked beneath the acacia on the opposite side of the river. That got their attention. They knew the name well, and what came with it. One of them instantly yanked back on two long handles rising up from the floor. A mass of engines, cars, and people jerked and shuddered in deceleration, wheels screeched desperately on the rails. But even I could tell it wasn’t enough. The engines, forced by the tons of weight behind them, were sliding helplessly onto the bridge. How many passenger cars would follow? It was anyone’s guess.

  I pulled on the door handle, but it didn’t budge. The man next to me, with total panic in his eyes, leaned across to push the latch forward and lift the handle. Below us, wheels slid in a long, rabid shriek down the tracks toward the bridge. It felt like skiing on crystal ice. I stepped onto the outer tread and leapt from the cab, my momentum pitching me into a sideways roll that twisted my ankle as soon as my foot touched the dirt. The first engineer tumbled half on top of me as he fell. The second managed to land running and remain on his feet.

  Then, at that very instant, the center of the bridge erupted in a volcanic cone, its spine curling skyward like a bristling cat. The explosion thundered across the plateau, shattering glass in the station windows. Three-fourths of the span lifted upward, hung as if held by strings, and then dropped in a single heap of bolts, girders, rail, and planking into the churning water below.

  My ankle was sprained, but not badly enough to keep me from running desperately toward the first class compartments. Uli and Jitka, I hoped with all hope, had gotten to the door and were getting out. I ran alongside the engines, and two freight cars, toward one of the policemen who had moments earlier been trying to blow part of my body into the dirt. This time he heard every word I screamed. “Get the people off!” He turned and jogged along the containers of human cargo, smacking the barred windows with the butt of his gun. Used to giving orders, he wasted no breath on words. “Out, now,’ he shouted, and inside, the cry was taken up like a litany by the passengers. Ever sort of rider, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs began jumping in pressed trousers, saris, and loongis from the only available exits, the doors between the cars. It all moved like a sluggish dream.

  The train was slowing, but the front engine was still being pushed liked a reluctant child toward the severed end of the bridge. With a horrific crunch it broke through the girders and rail twisted like a turnstile above the river. There was a grinding, screeching of metal on jagged metal and for an eerie second it grew quiet.

  Down the line people were leaping frantically from doorways. A few canvass bags and suitcases flew out, but mostly a frenzied stream of bodies tumbled onto the seedlings of the newly planted field. Mothers yelled for children, husbands for wives, and then an explosion of water erupted like a geyser behind me. Echoes rumbled through the ravine. The lead engine and its companion had dropped like enormous toys and jack-knifed into the water. But they weren’t toys, they were masses of iron and alloy with a single purpose—to pull themselves and the humans behind them smoothly along the track, and as if that was a fixed task, a mission they couldn’t ignore, they tugged just enough in their fall for the two baggage cars to come to the edge . . . and tumble into the gorge. But like rigid sticks, the freight cars didn’t drop onto the engines now filling with river water; they dropped into the mud at the edge of the current. Fortune, or fate, or maybe one of Sahr’s constellations, snapped the coupling between the freight cars and the first-class passenger cars. They were tumbling in twos. The momentum drew the first-class cars past me and out onto the bridge. In an act of fut
ile instinct, I reached out a hand to try to stop thousands of tons of steel. Inside the second car I saw figures piled in the rear—human silhouettes against the windows. Then Jitka rolled out the door with her backpack onto the field. Uli will be next, I thought with relief. But she wasn’t. A Hindu in black slacks and blue shirt stepped of the top step and fell like a sack of rice. The cars slid past me like unstoppable beasts.

  She must have jumped out the opposite door. I ran to Jitka and lifted to her feet by the frame of her pack. She was shaking visibly.

  “Where is she?” I screamed.

  “I don’t know, Bhim.” She slumped to her knees. “She didn’t come back.”

  I started to ask what she meant, but the front compartment rolled persistently to the edge, and with a deafening screech, the front wheels clicked off the tracks into empty space. For an instant, I thought it would come to rest on that flimsy fulcrum. Inside the compartment someone screamed, and as if the mere vibration of that sound tilted the weight, the box twisted slowly and dropped over the precipice. The shift jerked the second car and the entire length of the train slid forward again. Uli! My mind screamed frantically. It was our first-class compartment, and it slid across the jagged edge, twisted on the same slow axis, and snapped away from the others with a crack of splintered steel. It fell forty feet, slid down the embankment to crush the corner of one of the cars below. It spun a hundred and eighty degrees and came to rest in the water at the river’s edge. The current swirled angrily through the barred windows of the lower half.

  Directly in front of me the two second-class cars had derailed, the right wheels resting on the ties, the left wheels mired deep into the earth. Three more cars slid off and tilted precariously to one side. I lifted Jitka and held her at arm’s length. She stood on her own weight and seemed unhurt other than a dirty scrape on her elbow from the jump. “Where is she?” I asked again.

  She stared back disoriented, bewildered. “She didn’t come back when the train began to leave, Bhim. Oh Gott, I thought she was with you. It all happened so fast.”

  “What do you mean she didn’t come back? Where did she go?”

  Jitka squeezed her eyes shut and then looked at me more clearly. “She left right after you went for the paper. I thought she was going to find you.”

  I looked at the mayhem--behemoths of twisted steel and the tons of scattered debris of terrified travelers. To my left, along the platform, dazed Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and a few disparate ferenghis huddled in ragged groups. Families, couples, and lone passengers searched for bags or relatives, looking to reorganize something, anything. Luggage flew from doorways and railway officials began running and shouting, and no one understood at all what had really happened. Except me. To my right, near the foot of the bridge, people were sobbing or staring over the precipice. She got off before it left the station, Bhim. She got off. She’s safe. She’s here in the crowd. Just need to find her. “I just need to find her,” I heard myself whispering. But she wasn’t there. I searched the faces, the hair, clothes, but none of Uli’s features came back to take away my growing fear.

  The other side, she must have gone out the other side.

  I scrambled to the opening between the slanted cars and leapt to the top step in one stride. Through the space I could see figures on the opposite side, bodies crawling on the earth, people wandering, moving numbly in the direction of the bridge and incline. She’s here, I know it. She is. But she wasn’t. I jumped to the other side and saw only the trousers and silks of Indian first-class. My brain screamed. I looked into the second-class car, but knew she wouldn’t be there, and the ache that had left, the one that had wrapped itself so coldly around my heart for so long flooded back in. I tripped, fell to my knees, and then to all fours. No, no, no. That one word, the one that denied she was gone, railed against my fear. It repeated and repeated in my head, cried out, then slowly, gradually, it grew quieter. And fell silent. Then, there was no voice, no scream, nothing but emptiness. My head sank until my forehead touched the ground. I clawed at the dirt of the field. With a faint perseverance the voice whispered. No. The wreckage below, maybe she’s alive. No, it whispered. I raised myself and dragged myself towards the edge. She’s gone.

  The engineer who had fallen on top of me when we tumbled from the cab, trotted towards me, waving his hand in the direction of the warehouse across the river. “He’s getting away.” I looked into the distance to see the black Mercedes turning onto a frontage road that paralleled NH 24, the east-west highway. Sutradharak was slithering into obscurity. He had been forced to demolish the bridge before he had intended, perhaps when he saw the train slowing or me running like a madman across the field. He hadn’t succeeded; he had failed to murder the grand number he had wished for.

  But he has destroyed me, I thought. I stared at the receding bumper and felt only the total despair that comes from losing love. I had felt it before, and it hurt no less now. Uli had been right. Mej was pure evil and I had been too naive to see it. My hands dropped; my head sank to my chest. The victory of yesterday, the discovered cure, it was all erased. Adam was wrong. It wasn’t the light of a million suns growing brighter; it was only darkness. And it was closing over me. I walked silently past the engineer to the edge of the slope and stared down at the mass of twisted engines and cars.

  Seventy-Three

  The vagaries of memory are mysterious and indefinable. Critical elements, like the scent of perfumed hair, a hummed melody, the color of an iris, the touch of a moist lip, or the curve a smile, can all be triggered to return in finely wrapped packages. They burst in complete recollection into the mind with the insertion of a just single key. The totality of a person, a lover, returns fully, and all it takes is a key, a catalyst, or a spark. For me that spark was a wisp of cloth.

  The engineer was rambling diffusively about the escaping Sutradharak, when a ripple of pale-blue reached my eye, and for a moment, my mind didn’t comprehend the source. Then a mud-stained sea horse emerged and fluttered in eel grass. I blinked. It was coming from the partially submerged first-class compartment at the edge of the river. Her backside appeared first, then the tail of her kurta, and then all of Uliana Hadersen stood. She was straining to pull a small man up through the front door--which was now angled upward to the sky. Her skirt and kurta were torn and drenched. Her hair was smeared with grime and muck of the river, but she was alive . . . and saving people’s lives. Helping. Every recollection of Uli came back, every kiss, caress, and sweet consummation.

  I leapt down the incline in incredibly long bounds, my ankle ignoring the swelling pain, my feet slurping in mud, my eyes blinded with tears. I sprinted past the toppled freight cars on the lower slope and into the deep mud of the riverbed. My shoes sank into ooze that clawed and pulled at them tentacles. I struggled across the flats to the first class cars, lying on their sides twelve meters apart, perpendicular to each other. The furthest, with my Uli somewhere inside it, lay with its lower half sunk deep into the water. A group of Hindus, dazed and bleeding, crouched below the protruding wheels. Two women were cleaning blood from a man’s face with the ends of their saris. A young Muslim man climbed down the undercarriage, which was now an eleven-foot wall up to a single exit at the top. I stepped onto an axle assembly, then onto broken hydraulics, springs, and shafts. As I reached the wheels near the top, I heard her voice. “Hello Mein Schatztki.” I looked into her face, eyes like sapphires and marigolds. Her look told me she knew that I had thought she had died. It showed in my eyes.

  Her hand stretched out for mine. “I could use you help.”

  Fingers slipped around mine and that touch, the electricity of it, woke me from the nightmare of pain I had been in a minute before. I climbed onto the side of the car and stood. “Uli, what happened? Where…”

  She touched my cheek with wet fingers and pulled me toward the opening that led down into the passenger car. Sideways “Later, Sweets. Right now we need those strong arms and legs of yours.” Then she disappeared through
the doorframe.

  I lowered myself into the space and peered into shadows. Above, the barred windows provided a muted light onto a ruin of luggage, breakfast trays, bedding, and three desperate people. Half way down the compartment a young woman in drenched silk was struggling with a sobbing boy in her arms. She was trying desperately to climb over the jumble of twisted bunks to the freedom of the door. Behind her a familiar figure lay trapped in eddying, black water. The gentleman who had purchased our breakfast was pinned at the chest by the metal bars of a sleeping berth, his left side and shoulder held tightly below the surface. He sputtered and gasped, his body contorting against the bar like a pinned serpent. Uli was trying unsuccessfully to lift the frame. It flexed in begrudging centimeters. I reached out and pulled the woman by the elbow, lifting her and the child past me toward the skylight door. Then I threaded my way further into the gloom. Halfway down, on the left side, amidst a crush of sleeping berths, two bodies--an older man and woman--were wrapped in each other’s arms. Their eyes stared sightless at each other.