1931 The Grand Punk Railroad: Local

by Ryohgo Narita

  “They get compared to a snake, a slug, and a frog a lot!”

  As they related nonsensical Far Eastern trivia, Isaac and Miria gradually grew more and more excited.

  “Right now, on this ‘tray’—the train—the black suits and white suits and the Rail Tracer are all glaring at each other, right? And so, Jacuzzi! You just have to break down that balance and flip the whole thing over, tray and all!”

  “Then you take over the whoooole train! You’ll be the king! The lord! His Majesty the emperor! The tyrant!”

  “Uh—huh?”

  At this abrupt development, Jacuzzi’s eyes went wide. True, he’d intended to deal with the black suits and the Rail Tracer, but he’d never thought of calling it “taking over the train.”

  “B-but…could I do something like that?”

  “Don’t worry! Even in The Records of the Three Kingdoms, there’s an amazing guy at the end who united Asia that way!”

  “Yes, the champion!”

  “So, Jacuzzi! You become ‘Yoshitsune’!”

  “Yes, Minamoto!”

  “Y-Yoshitsune?”

  “Yeah, Yoshitsune! He’s a fantastic guy who crossed from Japan to China, defeated the three kingdoms, and founded a country called Genghis Khan!”

  “That’s amazing!”

  Isaac’s Asian history was a very mixed bag of historical fact, fiction, and different time periods, but its energy began to ignite an intense light in Jacuzzi’s heart.

  “Do you think…I could…be somebody that amazing?”

  The guy with the tattooed face murmured quietly. Looking him straight in the eye, Isaac nodded firmly.

  “Sure you can! You’ve beat us dozens of times, Jacuzzi, and you’re the defending champ!”

  “Isaac’s really amazing! Since you beat him, you’re amazingly amazing, Jacuzzi!”

  The pair pressed him even harder, on momentum, but Jacuzzi still shook his head.

  Why is it that, when I’m talking to these guys, I can blab away about things I shouldn’t ever say to anybody?

  Jacuzzi nodded slightly, then confessed who he really was to the pair.

  “I do plan to save the passengers and get rid of the black suits, but… I’m not such a great person. I broke the rules and made liquor, and just yesterdayI killed five people.”

  At those words, Donny, who’d stayed silent until now, spoke up in protest:

  “Mrrg, no, we killed, not Jacuzzi. Besides, they killed friends.”

  “It’s the same thing. If I hadn’t done something uncalled for, nobody would have had to die, not our friends nor the guys from the mafia.”

  On hearing that, Isaac grabbed Jacuzzi’s shirtfront and hauled him over. He put his face up close to Jacuzzi’s, whose eyes had gone round, and shouted.

  At first, Jacuzzi assumed he was going to get hit for saying pitiful stuff, and he shrank back, but Isaac’s face wore a smile that was bursting with confidence.

  “Hey, don’t worry about stuff like that! So what?! Cao Cao and Yoshitsune killed lots of people, tens of thousands, hundreds of millions, trillions and trillions of ’em! Even so, if the people around them say they’re good guys, then that’s what they are! In other words, see, good guys or bad guys, it all depends on the feel of the situation, the mood! That settles everything!”

  “Yes, it’s the mood!”

  As if a crazy theory like that exists?! Jacuzzi’s head thought this, but his heart had already been caught by the pair’s mood.

  “So you see, Jacuzzi! We’re saying you’re a good guy! Don’t miss that wave! Even if people object, ignore ’em! You just have to pull ’em right into this current with you!”

  “Hold your head high, and when you get to the end, believe in yourself! But listen, listen, if you want to create a wave like that, you need at least one of the people around you to think you’re a good guy! Then, see, Jacuzzi, that’ll mean you did a good thing! We know! So we’ll make that wave for you!”

  On seeing these two, who were smiling carefree smiles, Jacuzzi felt his own fingers, his hands, his arms, his whole body, tremble. A current of emotion surged up inside him. Was it fear, or…?

  “Thank you.”

  Words of gratitude slipped from Jacuzzi’s lips.

  There might have been something else he should have said, but he couldn’t get any other words to come out.

  Ordinarily, Jacuzzi might have said the word sorry, but he felt as if saying it now would be an insult, both to these two and to himself.

  “But if I’m going to be someone that amazing, who in the world are you two?”

  Slightly bewildered, Isaac and Miria responded to Jacuzzi’s question.

  “We don’t really get it either, but the old guy who told us about The Records of the Three Kingdoms told us…”

  “Listen, listen, it was, ‘Become the southeast wind, you two’!”

  “The southeast wind…? But that’s not a person.”

  “Well, you’re right. They say it’s a wind that carries happiness and despair and all sorts of things, all together!”

  “So we’ll do our best and bring happiness to this train!”

  At Miria’s words, Isaac nodded emphatically.

  “I see. That’s a great idea, Miria. All right, then, let’s huff and puff and blow the Rail Tracer and the Russo gang away!”

  “Faster than this train! Far, far away!”

  Laughing happily, the two started to leave the room.

  “W-wait! Where are you going?”

  Hastily, Jacuzzi moved to stop them. When Isaac and Miria spoke, their faces were brimming over with confidence.

  “Where? To find the Rail Tracer.”

  “Yes, we’ll ask him to leave this train and go home! If he won’t, we’ll get rid of him! If we can’t, we’ll run away and hide somewhere! If dawn breaks while he’s looking for us, I bet it’ll be too bright for the monster, and he’ll go back home!”

  “Aah, monster, probably strong. You get killed. I’d stop, if I you.”

  As you’d expect, even Donny looked worried. However, Isaac and Miria answered confidently:

  “It’ll be fine. I’ll fill the Rail Tracer full of lead with my hundred guns!”

  “Isaac, you’re so cool!”

  Isaac slapped the holsters he wore all over his body. However, none of them held a single gun.

  “A hundred guns? But you’re completely unarmed…”

  As Jacuzzi pointed this out, eyes round, Isaac nodded once: Mm.

  “That’s very true. I hadn’t noticed that,” he said, letting himself be persuaded easily.

  However, his feet were still pointed toward the exit, and he didn’t turn back. Gazing up into empty space, with a significant look on his face, Isaac murmured:

  “It’s all right. As a great gunman once said, long ago—”

  Looking into Jacuzzi’s eyes, he nodded firmly, intently, and said:

  “—‘There’s a gun in everyone’s heart.’”

  “How hard-boiled!”

  “No gunman ever said that!”

  “Really? All right, then I’ll become the first great gunman!”

  “That’s amazing, Isaac! Just like Billy the Kid!”

  Watching the appalled Jacuzzi out of the corners of their eyes, Isaac and Miria quietly opened the freight room door.

  “Seriously, don’t worry! If things get ugly, we’ll run! While we’ve got the Rail Tracer’s attention, you save the Beriams from the black suits, Jacuzzi!”

  “We’ll be fine! Running and hiding are our best talents!”

  Looking at their confident smiles, he began to feel as if there really wasn’t anything to worry about. He also understood that, apparently, it was no use trying to stop these two.

  And so Jacuzzi decided to see them off with a smile.

  “Please don’t die, okay? Promise me.”

  “Yeah, we won’t die, we promise! If we break that promise, we’ll sign in blood or cut our throats or anything you want!”

 
; “You guys, too, Jacuzzi! You mustn’t die, okay?!”

  With that, the pair walked off toward the conductors’ room to look for the Rail Tracer.

  As he watched them go, Jacuzzi swore in his heart that his group would successfully do what they had to do.

  “What selfish, willful people, huh, Donny? I don’t know who those two are, but they’re much bigger villains than I am.”

  Looking up, he spoke quietly to Donny, who stood beside him.

  “Aah?”

  “Yeah, this train is full of villains and hopeless thugs, us included.”

  He stopped and turned back toward Isaac and Miria, just once.

  “Those two are several times more villainous than I am, but I bet they’re several times better people than I am, too.”

  “Mmm, Jacuzzi, you lonely?”

  Without answering that question, Jacuzzi began walking again.

  “Let’s go force our own selfish demands through. We might as well become the biggest villains on this train, right, Donny?”

  Jacuzzi nodded firmly, agreeing with his own words. When Donny looked at his face, he realized the expression it wore was one he’d never seen before.

  “Aah, Jacuzzi, you having fun.”

  All cried out, Mary huddled against her mother, shivering slightly.

  How much time had passed since she’d been caught? The scary woman had left the room a little while ago, but one guard with a gun was still there.

  Come to think of it, what had happened to Czes? Was he all right? He might have gone back to that janitor’s closet after she’d been caught; maybe he was worrying about her. Maybe he’d already been caught and killed.

  Trembling at her own imaginings, the girl buried her face in her mother’s body.

  The tears that should have been dried and gone welled up again.

  Having passed through the dining car and second-class carriages, five black suits ran through the lone third-class carriage.

  All were armed with machine guns, and they were making straight for the conductors’ room.

  “Be careful. I hear Chané and one of the white suits headed for the rear cars.”

  At nearly the same moment as their leader spoke, the violent sound of shattering window glass rang out.

  “What was that?”

  “It came from one of the passenger compartments!”

  The sound indeed seemed to have come from one of the nearby rooms.

  “Where’s the unit in charge of third class?”

  “They say they’ve lost contact with them, just like the freight room and the second-class compartments.”

  The black suits gulped, then decided that two would stay in the car, and the remaining three would continue through to the conductors’ room check.

  After they’d seen the group of three run off, the other two approached the door quietly.

  A short time passed in silence, and then, as one man gave a wordless sign, the two of them kicked down the door to the room. …However.

  “There’s nobody here.”

  There was no one there. Only the sound of the wind streaming through the broken window glass reverberated through the compartment.

  One man cautiously approached the window and used the butt of his gun to carefully knock out the shards of glass that were still in the window frame.

  Once all the glass shards were removed, he stuck his head out, gun at the ready, and looked around.

  When the man looked down, his gaze went fixed for a moment. Then he hastily scanned the area.

  “What is it?”

  “…C’mere a second. Look at this.”

  Prompted by his companion, the man who’d been called over also stuck his head out the window and looked down.

  “Ugkh…”

  The object they could see dimly by moonlight and roomlight was a weirdly twisted human body.

  It was tangled around the metal fittings under the car, and they couldn’t see all of it without leaning out.

  However, even so, the black suits were sure it was a corpse.

  The right arm and both legs had been ripped from the body. …Or rather, they looked as if they might have been chewed off. The right arm was gone from the shoulder down, and the cut surface was extraordinarily dirty.

  It was likely that something they couldn’t see from here—either clothing or the left arm—was fastened to the metal fittings.

  They should have been fairly used to seeing corpses, but the black suits weren’t grimacing because it was a corpse.

  It was because the corpse belonged to a young child.

  On a battlefield, it would have been one thing, but to think they’d have to see something like this in the United States, and on a train, at that…

  Chané and Goose probably wouldn’t have been disturbed, and Ladd might actually have smiled. If Jacuzzi had seen it, he probably would have cried and screamed hard enough to send himself insane.

  The boy’s body had a name.

  A name that was just a little hard to pronounce. Czeslaw Meyer.

  “I wonder if Czes is okay.”

  Mary, who’d finally stopped crying, murmured to herself. Her mother heard her, and she answered her daughter’s question instead of empty space.

  “It’s all right. I’m sure Czes, and Isaac and Miria, and Jacuzzi and all of his friends are just fine. You don’t need to worry. I’ll take all your bad dreams for you, so relax and go to sleep.”

  As she spoke, Mrs. Beriam gently stroked her daughter’s head.

  TunkTunkTak-tunk

  “!”

  Abruptly, there was a sound at the window of the Beriams’ room.

  A sound as though something hard was striking the glass.

  The single guard opened the window, holding his gun in one hand.

  “………?”

  He looked around, but there was nothing.

  He leaned out a little ways, twisting his upper body to see what was above him, and in that instant…

  … a black shadow covered the center of the wide, starry sky.

  “Ngh!”

  Two sturdy boot soles touched down on the black suit’s face.

  The owner of the boots got an underhanded grip on the window frame, then pushed the man’s face down with all their might.

  “W-w-wait! Ah, ah-ah-ah, waaaaaaaugh!”

  The man’s body was pulled through the window, and he fell out of the train. He rolled on the gravel by the rails at incredible speed, and before long, he was swallowed up by the darkness and vanished.

  The Beriams, startled by this turn of events, saw the true form of the individual who’d come in through the window.

  It was a young woman in coveralls.

  Come to think of it, Mrs. Beriam thought, she’d seen this young woman sitting by the window in the dining car. As she was reeling in her memories, the woman spoke to the two of them:

  “You okay?”

  She asked the question in a brusque tone. She was probably in her early twenties. Her coveralls had been old to begin with, and now they were discolored pitch-black by soot or something. The woman was so dirty she couldn’t even be compared to her previous self from the dining car. Yet, she continued speaking to the Beriams:

  “You’re not hurt? In that case, we’re running.”

  New YorkBefore dawnSomewhere in Little Italy

  “… Crap. I woke up too early.”

  Firo looked at the clock. It was only five in the morning. Outside the window, things were still deep black. In summer it might have been different, but now, when the days were short, the starry sky was still clearly visible.

  “Well, I guess it’s okay.”

  Rubbing sleepy eyes, Firo headed for the apartment’s washroom.

  “What’s the matter? It’s so early…”

  Behind him, a young woman’s voice spoke. The voice belonged to Ennis, Firo’s roommate.

  “Oh, sorry, sorry. Did I wake you?”

  “No, it’s fine. I was already awake.”

/>   “I see. That’s good. I’m just impatient for noon today, I guess.”

  “Yes, I’m looking forward to seeing Isaac and Miria, too!”

  As Ennis spoke happily, the corners of Firo’s lips rose a little as well.

  “Yeah, I’m looking forward to that, too. Besides, Claire’s coming in on the same train.”

  “That’s the childhood friend you mentioned last night, isn’t it? What sort of person are they?”

  The question had been asked out of curiosity. In response, Firo thought for a little while and chose several words.

  “Mm… Well, personality will be obvious when you two meet, so… For starters, Claire’s agile, with upper-body strength so good you’d never believe it from appearances.”

  “An amazing athlete, then.”

  “An athlete, hmm? No, Claire used to be in the circus, a long time back. If I had to say, acrobat fits better.”

  Remembering his old friend, Firo began to smile quietly.

  “Right about now, that acrobat might be doing stunts on top of the train.”

  Just like an acrobat, the woman in the coveralls climbed up to the roof.

  “All right, I’m going to lower a rope. Tie it around yourselves and hold on tight.”

  Doing as she was told, Mrs. Beriam tied the rope around her daughter first. While she was wondering where the object had come from, her daughter was pulled up onto the roof.

  Tucking her skirt up and tying it tightly, Mrs. Beriam bound herself securely with the rope when it was lowered back down.

  “Ghk…”

  Partway up, they entered a curve, and her body thumped against the train.

  However, she didn’t let the chance slip past her: She set the soles of her feet against the side of the train and pulled the rope toward her with all her might.

  Finally, after their short separation, the Beriams were reunited on the roof. In addition to the darkness, the soot and smoke were thick, and neither of them could make out the other’s expression well. In the midst of this, mother and daughter embraced each other tightly.

  “Come on. Save the celebrating until we’re safely away from here.”

  Spurred on by the woman in the coveralls, the pair began to hurry over the roof.