It was a man’s voice.
“Not so much.”
Ladd responded to the magician’s words without lowering the weapon. Would he prove to be an enemy or an ally?…
“I climbed up to the roof to feel the night wind, and before I knew it, my room had been occupied.”
From his voice, the man was probably somewhere between forty and fifty. He wasn’t young, but nothing about him seemed particularly old, either.
The connecting platforms on this train didn’t have walls or roofs; all they had were railings to keep people from falling off. There was an iron ladder beside the entrance to each platform, and if they wanted to, it was possible for absolutely anybody to climb up to the roof of the train.
The magician looked up slightly, gazing at the night sky as if reluctant to part from it.
On seeing his eyes, Ladd lowered his rifle.
“Say, Mr. Magician. All the compartments in the second-class carriages are empty now; use whichever you want.”
At that, under the cloth that covered his face, the magician smiled quietly.
“Thank you, man in white. Ha-ha-ha, ‘magician,’ that’s good. Well, I suppose it’s a similar profession.”
With those words, he passed by Ladd, black bag in hand.
“Hmm? What’s in the bag?”
“Would you like to see? I doubt there’s anything that would catch your interest.”
Turning, he opened the mouth of the bag and showed it to him.
Inside were all sorts of large and small medicine vials, implements he’d never seen before, and books in languages Ladd couldn’t read.
“Yeah, you’re right: not interested. Move along. …Oh, right. If you get stopped by anyone who’s wearing the color I’m wearing, tell ’em you’ve got Ladd’s permission. They should let you through then.”
With a slight nod, the magician closed the top of the bag and went into one of the second-class compartments.
As he watched him go, Ladd clicked his tongue softly.
“Aah, dammit to hell. What’s with those eyes? He’s got eyes that look like he could die at any time and be fine with it. Or maybe eyes like a guy who’s already dead. That’s the type I’m worst with.”
After griping for a while, he remembered Lua and decided to hurry to the conductors’ room.
“Although, if he were a dame, he’d be my favorite type.”
Remembering his girlfriend, who had the eyes of a dead fish, Ladd stood on the connecting platform and looked up.
“The roof, huh? Nice…”
First-class compartment
When Goose and his men returned to the first-class compartment with Mrs. Beriam in tow, Spike was in front of the transmitter, a sour look on his face. Goose wanted to ask him, immediately and in detail, about what was going on, but it wouldn’t have been wise to let Mrs. Beriam sense that there was trouble. He ordered his men to take the lady to another first-class room, and then, finally, grilled Spike about the situation.
“What is it? Trouble?”
“No, not with the transmitter. It’s just that there’s no contact from the group in the freight room.”
There should have been three men in the freight room guarding the remainder of their stowed equipment.
Using the transmitter’s handset, Goose sent the code for the freight room.
However, no matter how long they waited, the transmitter’s speaker stayed silent.
Scratching his head, Spike mentioned a likely situation:
“I bet I know what this is. Think those white suits took them out?”
“Spike. Right now, we need to confirm the facts, not speculate.”
Goose put together a new team of three and sent them to check on the freight room.
When he happened to glance at the corner of the room, Chané was gone.
“Spike, where’s Chané?”
“Oh, it looks like she went out to hunt some albinos. She took several weapons with her.”
Chané the Fanatic. Although she was a member of the Lemures, she obeyed orders from no one except Huey, their leader. Even during this operation, she was only cooperating—silently—in order to liberate Huey. She might even have thought she was merely using Goose and the others.
After he was certain that he couldn’t sense her presence in the area, Goose turned to Spike and told him his true intentions.
“Let’s have her make herself as useful as possible. She won’t live past noon tomorrow in any case.”
A couple was walking down the corridor of a second-class carriage. Although the lights were on, the glow seemed fragile in the face of the absolute darkness that enveloped the train.
“Ooh, it’s gloomy! It’s scary.”
“Yes, and it’s cold! And creepy!”
Miria agreed with Isaac’s timid remark in a voice that was quiet, but very firm. In response, Isaac switched gears completely, putting up a bold front.
“Whaaat?! I’m not cold or creeped out! Just relax and follow me!”
“Wow, Isaac, you’re so dependable!”
No one responded to their voices. Only silence weighed heavily on the corridor.
“It sure is quiet. You’d think there was nobody here. I wonder where the guys in white suits from the second-class compartments went to.”
“Yes, and this is the only road there is!”
“The Rail Tracer might have caught up to us already.”
“Yeeeeeeeek!”
“We’ve got to hurry… Even if we’ve got guns, even if we’re tough, nothing will work against the Rail Tracer!”
“Yes, it’s an invincible monster! Frankenstein! Count Dracula!”
“Miria, Frankenstein was the scientist’s name, not the monster’s name.”
“Was it? Then what was the monster’s name?”
“Um, let’s see— Mary Shelley, wasn’t it? Formally, I think it was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley.”
“Wow, Isaac, you know everything! …But that sounds sort of like a lady’s name!”
“Ah, but there are all sorts of guys who have names that sound like girls’ names. Besides, it’s a monster! That means anything goes!”
Possibly he’d gotten carried away: He proclaimed this in a loud voice.
The answer came in the form of machine gun fire, echoing in the distance.
“What was that? Was it from the third-class carriage?”
“No, farther than that! It sounded like it came from the freight room.”
Suddenly, the transmitter in Goose’s room began to make noise.
“………≠≠≠……≠≠≠≠…………≠≠lp me! ……≠ght room speak≠…… Fr≠ght room speaking! Somebody, anybody! Come in!”
The static was horrendous, and Spike hastily twirled the knob, adjusting it. Ordinarily, they made contact via telegraph, so the fact that there was an audio transmission at all meant that this was a true emergency.
“Spike here. What’s going on?”
“Help me! Help me! Send reinforcements right away! The other two are both dead! No, I mean, I just can’t see them anymore, so I can’t say for sure, but they disappeared! They’re gone! It made them disappear!”
“What? Who are you fighting?! The white suits?!”
“White suits? N-n-no, it’s nothing like that! It isn’t human! N-no, I mean, I couldn’t see it clearly, but… Anyway, it’s a monster! I can’t win… I can’t…win…”
“Hey, what happened? Hey!”
The voice from the transmitter was getting farther away. Apparently, he’d turned his back on the transmitter and was facing off against something.
“Stop…… Stay back…… Stop, stop, stoooooooop!”
From beyond the transmitter, the roar of a machine gun echoed. As it passed through the equipment, the sound was transformed into a weird burst of static that split the air in the first-class carriage.
In spite of himself, Spike clapped his hands over his ears, but the next instant, the gunfire stopped.
&nb
sp; In its place, there was the sound of something being thrown to the floor, and he began to hear a tiny, moaning voice. Soon, the moaning stopped as well.
The other side of the transmitter and this side. The double silence weighed eerily on the hearts of the black suits.
However, from time to time, they could hear a sound. A sound as if something was walking through a puddle.
Spike and the others could vividly imagine the truth of the situation. It wasn’t a puddle of water. It was blood, from the body of the man they’d just been talking to.
Something was walking through it. The something that had just killed their comrade. The thing sent an overwhelming sense of its presence through the transmitter, planting a definite fear in the terrorists’ hearts.
“Call back the unit that just left for the freight room.”
Goose’s grave voice sent a shiver through the still air.
Someone besides the white suits was trying to get in their way. With a sour expression, Goose struck the wall with his fist.
However, privately, Goose had a hunch he knew the identity of the something. They still didn’t have enough information, so he was far from certain, but…
The woman in the coveralls who disappeared from the dining car
A stall in a second-class carriage bathroom. In the janitor’s closet beside it, Mary Beriam was holding her breath.
“I’ll go on ahead and see how things look, so you hide here, Mary. Whatever happens, don’t move. It’ll be fine. I’ll be right back.”
With those words, Czes had gone away, and he hadn’t come back. Mary felt as though her heart would burst with anxiety.
After a short while, she began to hear voices from the corridor. Cheerful voices that seemed terribly out of place in this situation. That’s Mr. Isaac and Miss Miria. On identifying the owners of the voices, Mary hesitated, wondering whether she should leave the closet.
Just then, she heard distant machine gun fire. Mary flinched, covering her ears and crouching down. The terror paralyzed her, and even if she’d wanted to call for help, her voice wouldn’t come.
While this was going on, Isaac and Miria’s voices had vanished.
“You’ve got to be kidding… What is this?”
“Muah, Jacuzzi. What this?”
The sea of blood in the conductors’ room. As he stood there, stunned, Jacuzzi heard familiar voices behind him.
On hearing those voices, life returned to his eyes.
“Guys… Oh, you’re okay. That’s great… I-I’m really glad, really, guh–, hic, glad…”
“Donny and I are, somehow.”
“Ah…oh. Now that you mention it, where are Nick and Jack?”
In response to that question, Nice looked down uncomfortably.
“They both got caught. Remember that orchestra group in black? Apparently, they were train robbers, too.”
“Uh—huh?”
“Aah, Jack caught. White people caught, too. Nick caught, too.”
“Um…what?”
When he asked them for details, he learned that, first, Jack had said, “I’ll go on ahead and tie up the guards in the freight room,” and had gone from the corridor into said freight room.
Of the three freight cars, the orchestra was using the foremost one, which meant that the treasure Jacuzzi and the others were after was in either the second or third car.
Nice and Donny had waited for Jack in the second car, but no matter how long they waited, he hadn’t come back.
Then, when they’d gone to see what was up, Jack had come out of the freight room with his hands tied behind his back. Not only that, but a man in black carrying a machine gun had appeared behind him.
“Jack and the other man came toward us, so first we hid in the shadows of the room, but then Jack got tossed into the second freight room.”
“Oh, but, and then, two more guys with machine guns came out into the hall. Then a white man and woman came. They got caught. Last, Nick came running. Got caught. That all. The end.”
“D-d-don’t end it! What happened then?! Are Jack and Nick okay?!”
“Calm down.” Nice sighed. “Right now, one of the three men is guarding the hostages. Since they’re guarding them, it means they’re not dead, so I think they’re probably both okay.”
Apparently, at first they’d thought Jacuzzi might have been caught as well. They’d kept an eye on things for a short while after that, but when they realized that the black suits showed no sign of moving, they’d decided to check the conductors’ room first.
“—And so, when we got to the conductors’ room, we found this horrible scene. What happened? I know you didn’t do it, Jacuzzi, so relax.”
“Wah, thank you, b-b-but-but it’s terrible: It’s Rail Tracer, the Rail Tracer came! We have to get out of here fast or we’ll be erased, too, so let’s save Nick and Jack somehow and then run—”
Just then, from far away, they heard the sound of a machine gun.
“They’re firing…?”
Behind Nice’s glasses, her single eye warped slightly.
“Wh-wh-what was that? What was that gunfire? What did they shoot? Did somebody die? C’mon, tell me!”
The roar had seemed to split the air. What did it mean? Various guesses were born inside Jacuzzi’s head, then rapidly boiled down to a conclusion.
“Waah, wah, hic… Niiice, Donnyyy…”
They had to run. They had to escape from this train as soon as possible. His brain had a solid grasp of this fact. However, at the same time, his heart had begun to settle on a different conclusion.
Fang’s and Jon’s faces rose in Jacuzzi’s mind. They were followed by the faces of Isaac and Miria, Czes and the Beriams, and the faces of people he’d merely passed by in the dining car. Then the corpses of the conductors that lay in front of him rose in his mind, overlapping with the scene before his eyes.
Before he knew it, he’d swallowed the answer “run away,” and other words had surfaced.
“Let’s run the group in black and the Rail Tracer off this train… Hic. Huh? Wh-what did I just say? No, no, we really need to get away, but, but”
They were a gang of hopeless delinquents; they’d made and sold liquor, and even if the other guys had been mafia, they’d been people, and they’d killed them. Then and there, they’d become inexcusable villains. And he was the cause of everything.
However, all along, Jacuzzi had only done what he thought was right. He’d thought the law that banned liquor was wrong, and he’d hated the way the mafia used it to rake in money and kill. In consequence, he’d tried to sell cheap, good-tasting liquor on his own. That was all. And yet.
Before he realized it, ne’er-do-wells had collected around him, and he’d become their boss.
Their friends had been killed, and they’d fought the Russo Family tooth and nail. And yesterday, although killing them hadn’t been Jacuzzi’s original intention, as a result, they’d avenged their friends.
Now Jacuzzi was on this train. He was here to steal a certain something from its cargo. It was something Nice had wanted, and if they just threw away the contents, it would be safe to sell it. Most important, they couldn’t let “that thing” arrive in New York.
If “it” reached New York, it was likely that lots of people would die. He’d hated the idea of knowing that and doing nothing about it. It made him a terrible hypocrite. Even Jacuzzi knew that. Still, it felt as though, if he didn’t do it, his existence would lose all value, and it scared him.
And now, he was on the brink of pulling his friends into yet another hypocritical act.
I want to save the passengers. For the leader of an organization—someone who needed to make his comrades’ lives top priority—not to mention the leader of a gang of robbers, this was a naïve, foolish thought, the sort of idea he must never have.
However, Nice and Donny would probably smile and agree to it. He knew this. He knew it and was planning to use their personalities. It was so hypocritical it made even him fee
l nauseated, but even so, he didn’t care.
I broke the law and killed people. I’m a bad guy. All I’ve done, this whole time, is try to stick to my path. At this point, what does a little hypocrisy matter?
He was finished with his excuse. There was no chance anyone else would accept one that convenient; Jacuzzi knew this better than anyone. Still, he made the excuse to himself. The logic couldn’t have been more selfish, but he didn’t care.
After all, in the end, he was nothing but a bad guy.
After a short silence, he made a declaration. How much courage had he focused into this one moment in order to put his resolution—the sort of resolution that so-called allies of justice could probably have said without even thinking—into words? As usual, Jacuzzi’s eyes were brimming over with tears. Even so, the fear had completely disappeared from his gaze.
“Let’s get rid of them, by ourselves. The black suits—and the Rail Tracer.”
The doubt had vanished from Jacuzzi’s face. The light had disappeared from his sharp gaze, and in combination with it, the tattoo on his face looked even better.
After confirming that Nice and Donny had smiled and nodded in agreement, Jacuzzi left the blood-dyed room behind him.
His tattooed face wore a devil’s expression, while the tears he cried were hotter than anyone’s.
Mary was unable to stir from the janitor’s closet.
It had been quite a while now, but Czes showed no sign of coming back.
Could he have been captured?
In the darkness, her unease grew and grew, and tears rolled down the girl’s cheeks.
After another short while, she heard footsteps approaching in the corridor. Could it be Czes, or maybe Isaac and Miria, or maybe?
In an attempt to hear the footsteps better, she tried to put her ear closer to the wall. Just then, part of her body touched a mop, and it fell.
Tunk. The sound was small, but it carried well.
Mary thought her heart might explode. That was how clear and loud her heartbeat had become.
Please don’t let them have heard that…
The girl’s wish was in vain: The footsteps stopped.
1931 The Grand Punk Railroad: Local Page 10