Apocalypticon

by Clayton Smith

  Horace looked at Bloom. “I don’t know,” he said. “Do we have a second for that, Bloom?” Even now, on the brink of his demise, he was concerned about appearances in front of the passengers.

  Bloom considered the stowaway’s request. He’d been briefed on Patrick’s project, a hydraulic puncture shield to replace the current static plow. Supposedly he could design one that kept the blood off the windshield. If he could really manage that, it’d be a boon for Bloom and his men. He realized that as much as he just wanted to toss the passengers off and get on his way (except that journalist...she had a potential use, on a train full of pent-up males), he stood to benefit from the stowaway’s plans. Plus, he was offering Bloom a chance to make a decision on how the plow worked. Horace would probably opt for efficiency if he had his druthers, but Bloom wanted it to focus on raw force. “All right. Show us,” he said.

  Patrick looked around doubtfully. Half of the barrels were knocked to their sides, rolling gently with the swaying train. “We’ll need a little more space. Can we go out to the next car?”

  Bloom hesitated. His Red Caps outnumbered Horace’s, but still, if Horace made it past Fredrickson and into the Cap car, things could get messy, and Fredrickson had already proved useless at guarding the way. Then again, the train was fairly confining. If Horace tried to run, he’d have to thread the bottleneck between cars, and Bloom was quicker than the little conductor. “Fine,” he said, to Horace’s apparent surprise. “Make it quick.”

  What a thrilling night this is turning out to be, Patrick thought. Campfires, then a break-in, then narrowly avoiding detection, twice, then a fight between two ridiculous men, and now this. The apocalypse can be so exciting! He never saw this much action back in Chicago. This trip was officially a good idea.

  He hoped he wasn’t swaying too much. Launching yourself into a fight between two ridiculous men isn’t something you do sober. Luckily, the cache of Kahlua on the bottom shelf, along with the vodka he’d already downed, had helped kick his confidence into gear. It had also sparked his brain receptors, because now he had what was colloquially known as “a plan.”

  He led them out the door into the coupler area. Fredrickson, who was pretty decent at counting, looked confused when Patrick burst through the exit. Patrick clapped him on the shoulder. “Good work here. Can we get you to move across the way, there?” The Red Cap looked over Patrick’s shoulder to Bloom, who nodded curtly. He went through the narrow connection and stood at the far door. “Perfect!” Patrick cried. “Now. Let’s see.” He paced the width of the opening. The connector was open on both ends, and a cold wind whipped through the space. He held his hands about three feet from each other and did some quick estimating and measurements. “Hm. Yes, okay. Good. This will work. Horace, can you come stand here, please?” He took the conductor by the arm and led him to the edge of the metal platform, just above the steps. Roland was really building up some speed in the engine; stubbly cornstalks and sharp gravel patches flashed past just beyond Horace’s feet. “And now, you hold this,” he said, handing him the blender jar. “And then...let’s see...” He got on his hands and knees and traced imaginary lines on the floor with his finger. “Calculating the trajectory,” he mumbled, “depending on the kinetic force of the pinion...hmmm...” He rocked back and forth on his knees and studied the invisible markings. Finally satisfied, he nodded and climbed back up to his feet. “Okay. So the first option will give us more efficiency. Bloom, if you could stand over here, please.” He ushered Bloom to the opposite edge of the metal platform. “All four options involve the same basic set-up. We install a reservoir at one end, fixed to the engine,” he said, indicating Horace and the blender jar, “with a cylinder of some sort leading to the plow. That’s you, Bloom. You’re the plow.” The man’s face remained expressionless. “Okay, perfect. Excellent plow face. Now, for efficiency’s sake, we’ll use a shorter cylinder. Bloom, if you take a few steps in. Perfect. The water boils in the reservoir, steam builds up in the cylinder, and we release the valve at the end here...” He mimicked opening a valve. “...and by opening it halfway, the plow moves out at a slightly reduced rate of speed, but we conserve water and steam energy. But see, what we can do, if you want more power--let me see that blender, Horace. What we do for more power, okay, is a different kind of valve, and we cap it, like this.” He turned the blender jar on its side so it represented a hollow cap. “Bloom, will you hold this, please?” Bloom reached out and took hold of the jar. “Perfect,” Patrick said. “Thank you. Now, when the force builds up in the cylinder, we throw the quick valve, and the cap explodes forward.” Then he planted his feet, lowered his shoulder, and heaved forward, connecting hard with Bloom and sending him flying from the train. Bloom smacked into an old crossing post as it whizzed past, splintering his ribs and snapping his right arm in half. He fell, unconscious and head-first, onto the gravel siding and slid down into a shallow pool of trackside muck. The train’s Assistant Conductor drowned in four inches of muddy standing water.

  Patrick turned to the astonished Horace. “Conductor,” he said, making a low bow, “the train is yours.”

  5.

  “Sorry we can’t drop you closer,” Horace said with a frown. “Not sure what happened to the bridge. It was there two days ago.”

  Patrick looked grimly out the train window at what used to be the MacArthur Bridge. Now it was the MacArthur Chasm. Strangely reminiscent of the bombed-out Chicago River bridges, the MacArthur was blackened at its ragged iron edges on either side of the bank. By leaning right up against the window, Patrick could peer over and see a few of the splintered railroad trestles caught against an anchored barge in the yellow foam-crusted river below. “It makes crossing tricky,” he admitted.

  “I can jump that,” Ben said.

  Horace’s bushy mustache twitched. He flipped open his pocket watch and sighed. “This is gonna set us back an hour at least. We’ll need to backtrack up to the interchange north of the MLK and reroute to the secondary track there,” he said, pointing to another line of tracks far below them, at ground level. “I can let you boys off at the MLK or at the Poplar, but you’ll have to hoof it from there.”

  “That’s fine. We can take the Poplar,” Patrick said. “We have a stop to make on 40 anyway.”

  Horace nodded. “Then we’ll drop you above the bridge.” He hustled out of the passenger car and disappeared into the engine.

  “The man loves his schedule,” Ben observed.

  “Which is odd, considering he hasn’t been able to keep to one the entire time we’ve known him.”

  Before long, the train lurched backward and moved at a snail’s pace back up the tracks. Patrick and Ben loaded up with their weapons and packs. Ben struggled under the weight of his knapsack. “How is it that we set out for a probable suicide mission into the barren post-rapture Earth, yet, two days later, we have more food than we started with?” he groaned.

  “The Mother Spirit of the Illinois works in mysterious ways, Ben,” Patrick said, patting him on the shoulder.

  “So the Indian spirit told you to push Bloom from the train?”

  “I believe my hands were guided by higher powers, yes,” Patrick said. “He’s in a better place now.”

  “Where?”

  “Not on this train. Thanks in part to your excellent fire-spelling abilities, I might add.”

  “Not that excellent,” Ben said.

  “What do you mean? You spelled ‘HELL’ beautifully.”

  “I was trying to spell ‘HELLO.’ I ran out of oil.”

  “Well, regardless, it did the trick. And in return for securing Bloom’s expulsion, the least we can do is accept an extra thirty pounds of provisions.”

  “That I’m stuck carrying,” Ben added.

  Patrick shrugged. “You’re a strong person, built for might. I am frail and built for kindling. But if it’s any consolation
, it we ever need to survive some sort of physical attack, you’re at least five times more likely than me to succeed.”

  “Not weighed down, I’m not.”

  “Don’t think of it as being weighed down. Think of it as leveling the playing field.”

  “So we agree, then. I’m not five times more likely to survive.”

  “Not laden down with all that weight, good Lord, no.”

  They secured the last of their weapons and nodded goodbyes to the few Red Caps Horace had allowed back on after the Springfield stop. Most had been tagged as Bloom’s men and had been cast off the train. Calico, the one with the mismatched eyes, hadn’t been found at all. He’d somehow managed to slip off the train sometime between Bloom’s untimely death and the Red Cap Roundup, though not without leaving them a message. They’d found a note that read COMING FOR YOU pinned to a seat cushion in the business class car with a dinner knife. Which was a strange threat from someone who’d apparently jumped the train that was carrying them far, far away. Wherever Calico had gone, he’d moved fast; two minutes after Bloom’s untimely departure, Horace had the entire train secured, and the Red Cap was already gone, the ink on his note still fresh.

  Lindsay stood up from her seat and gave Patrick and Ben each a quick hug. “Good luck, you guys. Thanks for everything.”

  “Good luck with your story,” Ben offered.

  “Thanks!” she beamed. “I’ve made some really great progress, thanks to your help! I mean, Patrick helped, you just kind of glowered a lot, but it was great to be able to talk through my notes with you two. A few more interviews along the trail, then I’ll head back up north and see what else I can dig up in Maiden Rock, and I think I’ll be ready for some final edits and--“

  “No,” Ben interrupted, “I mean good luck finding someone to publish it. Media is dead.”

  That was pretty much it for the goodbyes.

  Horace slowed the train to a stop over Highway 40. “Wow, he wasn’t kidding when he said he’d let us off above the bridge,” Patrick said. The tracks ran high over the pavement below. The highway was choked with cars that had stopped or crashed at awkward angles. Horace reappeared in the passenger car as Patrick and Ben were on their way out. “I don’t suppose you have a ladder,” Patrick said.

  “Sorry to say we don’t,” Horace said. “Think you can make the jump?”

  Patrick peered out the window. “Eh. It’s only bone crushingly solid pavement. We’ll be fine.” He shook Horace’s hand. “Thanks again for the ride.”

  “Please, believe me, the pleasure’s been all mine. You boys really saved my bacon, I hope you know that. There’s always room for you on my route. Oh, thanks also for the cooking oil tip. We’ve been close on depleting the Amtrak fuel supply, the drums along our route, anyway. This was going to be our last full run on these tracks. Looks like we’ll be able to keep at it for a while longer now, thanks to you.”

  “Thanks to the miracle of modern science,” Patrick corrected him. “Just keep the oil warm; it’ll gel up in the cold faster than diesel. Oh! I almost forgot.” He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Here’s the design for your battering ram. I made it pretty detailed. You and your men should be able to put it together easily enough once you find all the materials. You’ll need a reservoir. You could use a big propane tank or an industrial sized boiler, if you can rig it to the engine. Aside from that, a quick-release valve and a long steel tube. You should be able to dig all of that out at a junkyard somewhere.”

  “Or a bombed out Home Depot,” Ben added.

  “Fit the pieces together like this, put water in the tank, use your engine fires to heat it up, and release the valve when ready to blow the hell out of something.”

  “This is great. I owe you a debt of gratitude.”

  “You can repay me by not blowing yourself up. With a barrel of cooking oil boiling in the engine, this thing’s gonna be volatile as hell.”

  •

  They stood on the trestles and waved as the train pulled slowly away. Horace blew the whistle in two short bursts and saluted from the engine. When the train had cleared the highway, Ben turned to Patrick and said, “Please tell me you remembered to pack an elevator.”

  “Yeah, I did pack it, originally, but then there wasn’t any room for my Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, so I took it out. But fear not, young traveler, for I have the next best thing. Rope!” He pulled the nylon rope from his bag triumphantly and let it uncoil over the side of the bridge. It dangled just over the edge of the tracks.

  “Brilliant. You brought a really useful three-foot rope.”

  “Well, I’m going to find a use for it somewhere,” Patrick said, hurriedly stuffing it back into the bag. “You just wait.”

  “You think we could jump it?”

  “Sure. It’s only twenty feet or so.”

  “Are you being sarcastic right now, or serious? I can never tell.”

  “This time, I’m being serious, mostly. Twenty feet isn’t that many feet. It’ll probably hurt like hell, but we’ll live. Probably.”

  “Words every man wants to hear in a world without doctors,” Ben muttered.

  “There are doctors somewhere,” Patrick reminded him. “They’re just not you or me.” He pulled off his backpack and let it drop into the bed of a truck below. The machete and the hammer went next. “I think our best bet is to aim for one of these car roofs. It spares us a few feet, and they have more give than the asphalt.”

  Ben took a deep breath. “Is it going to be a problem that I have horrible aim?”

  “Nah. Even if you miss the car, you’ll be fine if you hit the pavement. Just try not to break anything.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Just tuck and roll. Oh, and do not glance off a car, get twisted up mid-air, and slam head-first into the pavement. That might kill you.”

  “Please stop talking.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  Ben tossed his knapsack and weapons down as well. “All right. I’m aiming for that Windstar.”

  “Good choice. Lots of surface area. I’ll shoot for the blue Expedition.” He bounced on the balls of his feet and swung his arms like a swimmer preparing to dive. Ben rubbed his hands together. “You ready for this?” Patrick asked.

  “Let’s just get it over with,” Ben said miserably.

  “Okay. One...two...oh, by the way, this probably goes without saying, but be careful not to actually miss the highway itself. It’s another thirty feet or so down the gap between the eastbound and westbound lanes.”

  “Why would I miss? The highway’s forty feet wide, I’m aiming for the center of it, how would I miss?”

  “I don’t know! I’m just saying. Don’t.”

  “Well dammit, Patrick, now I feel like I’m going to!”

  “You won’t, you’ve got forty feet to land it, you’re fine. Really. It’s impossible to miss.”

  “Then why did you say to make sure I don’t miss?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought it was important to note that there’s an extra thirty feet of air over there because a twenty-foot drop is fine, but a fifty-foot drop will absolutely kill you.”

  “Goddammit, stop talking about it!”

  “I’m just trying to save your life.”

  “You’re making me want to end it!”

  “Then by all means. Miss away.”

  Ben let out a scream of frustration and threw himself over the side. His arms flailed, windmill-style, and he screamed the whole way down. He belly flopped on the roof of the minivan, arms and legs splayed out at all angles. The roof crunched inward on impact. Luckily, his forehead struck before the rest of his face, and he slammed into the car without breaking his nose. He looked all-in-all like a face-down urban snow angel.

  “Ben? You, uh...you al
ive down there?” Patrick called.

  It took a minute or two, but Ben eventually convinced his arms to move. He pushed himself out of the Ben-shaped crater and rolled over. Why was the sky pink? And why was he able to see sky? Where did all the fog go? “Patrick,” he groaned. “When did your teeth grow wings?”

  “Oh, boy. Hang on, Benny Boy, I’m coming.” Pat launched himself off the trestle. He was five feet into his free-fall when it became very clear to him that he was going to miss the target. He screeched in terror. He slammed into the Expedition’s frame just above the rear window, ricocheted headfirst into the hood of a Taurus, and crumpled to the asphalt in a heap.

  “Patrick? Are you a comet?”

  •

  “Now what did we learn from this little episode?” Patrick asked, limping across the bridge.

  “Find a longer rope.”

  “Yes, that’s one thing.”

  “Did we learn anything else?”

  “I can’t speak for you, but I can say with confidence that I learned to never trust a Ford.”

  The two of them were an awful sight. Ben had received a mild gash in his forehead, and his right eye was now just as purple as his left. His right arm hung limply from its socket, though admittedly, that was mostly for show. Patrick’s arms were covered in asphalt burns, the back of his head already had a knot the size of a baby’s fist, and his left ankle had misplaced its ability to support weight. “Ben, lemme see that bat,” he said.

  Ben held the weapon close to his chest. “No. This is mine.”

  “Come on, I need it. Bemme.”

  “What for?”

  “I need a crutch.”

  “Use your machete.”

  Patrick scoffed. “Use the machete.”