Tracks

by K. M. Tolan

There was plenty of time for idle chatter while maneuvering from one trail to another, and she proved up to the task despite the long trek. Samantha talked like she hadn’t had anyone to share her life with in ages. Conversation eventually led to the last true friend the baron’s estranged daughter remembered.

  “I was eight when I met Katy,” Samantha explained while they rested in the clearing of a felled tree. “She wasn’t known as Freedom back then. I used to sneak down to the yard and watch the trains. I heard her crying. Grabbed the bottle I saw them put her in and ran up to my room. Didn’t know what else to do. At the time, my father was using steam children in his power plant. Even then, I guess he was trying to figure out how to make money off them. Anyway, I wanted to save her, so I released Katy inside a miniature steam engine my father put in my room for me to play with.”

  Rare amusement rippled through her voice. “I made the engine bigger over the years and started adding things to it. Even put in a steam-powered organ, which Katy loved to play. Father kept thinking I was the one on the keyboard, and congratulated me on combining music and engineering. He never did catch on.”

  “You kept Katy cooped up?” Vincent asked, his voice quieting with the horror of such a thing.

  An apple core from a previous snack bounced off his head. “Of course not, stupid. As far as I was concerned, Katy was my sister. The steam engine wasn’t a closed system like the diesel. She came back. She always came back.”

  “Until the day she didn’t,” Vincent added, hearing the lost tone in her voice.

  “Until she didn’t,” Samantha repeated softly, looking away from him. “I can’t blame her. Your sister did the right thing. I deserved it.”

  “You keep saying that,” Vincent observed.

  “What?”

  “The bit about not deserving this and that.”

  She faced him with the same deadpan earnestness she’d had when trying to get him to cut her father’s throat. “I’m what my father made me. I know exactly what I deserve.”

  He stopped on the trail for a moment, ensuring he had her attention. “I’d say you rate better.”

  She only smiled back at him and kept walking.

  Sometime in the early morning, he found out more than he wanted to about her self-loathing. Despite a temperate night and adequately warm fire, Vincent woke to what he first thought were her chattering teeth. Grabbing the rolled-up duster, he went to cover her. Vincent paused, realizing he was listening to was her teeth grinding instead. Samantha was in the throes of a head-tossing nightmare, her face straining against some imagined horror while her hands clenched and released in spasms.

  Then he saw her inner torment reveal itself. Dark vapors coursed across her face and arms in serpentine tendrils. Swearing softly, he backed away, not knowing if he should wake her or start running. Yegg. Boy, do I know how to pick ’em. Now everything she said earlier about herself made terrible sense.

  Her body writhed as if trying to squeeze itself out of whatever hell Samantha found herself in. Was this how it was with yegg? Good verses bad, with the bad winning? There had to be some good inside her since his sister managed to find a friend beneath Samantha’s hardness. Was this what drove Katy away?

  “You just can’t catch a break, can you, Sammy?” he whispered with a grimace, feeling the wall he’d put between himself and her soften with this realization. No wonder she ran from home—and was still running. Trouble was the monster ran with her.

  He reached through the blood-warm mist surrounding her and shook Samantha’s shoulder, and then jumped back at her shriek.

  Samantha’s cry finished the transformation. Leaping up in a whirlwind of bleak miasma, she did the one thing he had never seen a yegg do—scramble away from him in obvious fright. She disappeared into the night, her wail caught between a howl and a sobbing admission of guilt.

  “Samantha, wait! I’m not going to hurt you.” He raced after her. Bushes swiped at his legs and chest. This is a really bad idea.

  A snarling rendition of her voice slashed back through the undergrowth. “Hurt me? Stay away.”

  “A gentleman doesn’t do that.” His excuse sounded like bullshit, but he wasn’t about to have her run off half-hysterical, yegg or not. The pain in her voice wouldn’t allow him to give up on the girl trapped inside the darkness.

  “Please stay back. Please!”

  He swept aside a swath of thin branches, making out the black spot huddled beneath a tree under the sparse illumination of a crescent moon. The thing was a spasm of shadow and form, as if undecided which path to take. Vincent made out a head turned back toward him, Samantha’s hair writhing in a black nimbus around anguished eyes.

  “Go back. Don’t look at me.”

  Vincent eased himself down into a sitting position across from her, hoping to appear nonthreatening enough to avoid a more personal look at those talons appearing and disappearing on trembling hands. “What in hell did your father do to you?” he wondered aloud.

  “This,” came the childlike admission. Slowly, the Samantha he knew regained herself. The vapors receded to reveal the baron’s daughter curled up in a fetal position. She began crying—a slow resigned sobbing worn down by time and too much familiarity. She stiffened when he tried easing forward to comfort her. “No. Just go. Go away.”

  He was tempted, having no desire to see the woman get her dander up and take a flying leap at his throat. Vincent frowned. Yeah, head back to the fire and chalk her misery up as somebody else’s tough luck. Just as he had with his father in that alley. “I’m not going to do that, Samantha. Not to you. I’ll sit here and keep watch until you get past this.”

  “You don’t get past this.” She slowly uncurled. He felt the burn of her eyes boring into him. It was anyone’s guess as to what was going on behind those piercing orbs.

  “I could bring the camp over here, I guess,” he offered, wanting to keep her mind off darker paths.

  Samantha wiped her eyes and sat up, clutching herself as if fending off blows. “Is that all you’re going to do?”

  He shrugged. “You mean, get up and start hollering? Grab a pitchfork or torch? I’d say you had enough crap without me adding to it. Besides, I never saw a yegg cry.” It was prudent not to mention his last observation was the main thing keeping him from hightailing it.

  Samantha scooted herself back against the tree in a miserable heap. “Yegg don’t cry. I guess I should count myself lucky.”

  His wasn’t the only life unraveling through tragedy. Vincent dwelt for a moment on their common ground while letting the sigh of wind-tossed branches fill in the silence. He breathed in the forest’s green scents. “That’s shit for luck if you ask me. Nobody deserves this sort of thing. Especially someone who fights so hard against it.”

  She thumped her head against the bark. “Fight? I’ve done things I can’t even think about without wanting to scream. Stuff that comes back to me in my dreams like it did tonight. I lied about the mayor’s son, by the way. I wanted to marry him, too. I guess it was stupid to realize he’d find me like this one day. I didn’t expect him to be the first one volunteering to light the fire when they decided to burn me.”

  Vincent risked some humor to counter the brittleness in her voice. “Not sure we’ve enough wood on the fire for that.”

  “I was half hoping you’d kill me.”

  “I was half hoping there was enough of you inside to avoid that. Guess I was right.”

  Her tone strengthened. “So now what?”

  “So next time I’ll use a long stick to poke you awake. Look, Samantha, I don’t know what to say or do. You could’ve jumped me instead of running. You didn’t. The rest…hell, I don’t know about the rest. I’m not tying you up at night, if that’s what you’re wondering. I am going to watch my back, though.”

  She tried a smile. “Now it’s my turn to say I won’t hurt you.”

  A memory struck him across the face. “You were the yegg who threw me from the train.”

  She su
cked in a breath. “What was I supposed to do? We were about to miss our stop. There wasn’t time to get your conductor out, and from the look on his face, I doubt he would’ve let me anyway. Father won’t hurt him. He doesn’t want trouble with the conductor’s union, and believes Timepiece can still help him force Freedom’s cooperation.” A measure of the old Samantha steeled her face. “I will help you free both Timepiece and your sister before anything happens. I promise.”

  “As the new baroness,” he guessed.

  “If it comes to that,” she admitted. “Not everyone’s anxious to have Uncle William come back, myself included. He walked away from the family and let my father take over…and do this to me.”

  Vincent shook his head. “The baron’s breeding program.”

  “You’re looking at his first experiment.” She struggled to her feet.

  He chanced getting personal and put an arm around her as they headed back to the fire. “You look like you could use some coffee. I damn sure won’t be getting anymore sleep.”

  “That makes two of us,” she agreed, not shrinking from his touch.

  Using a trick she had introduced him to during their first meeting, he poured some ground coffee beans from Samantha’s supplies into a clean spare sock. He dipped the impromptu strainer into a can of boiling water. They settled into an uneasy silence next to each other, save for sips from their tin cups.

  “I’m not like the rest,” Samantha eventually ventured, her eyes still on the cup in her hands. “Not completely, at least. I still have some control.” Her voice dwindled. “Mostly.”

  He set his coffee aside, unable to imagine struggling with such a thing. “So, what’s it like?”

  “Ever play monster as a kid? Imagine yourself running around, tearing everything, and everybody apart. Truth is, we all have beasts inside, right? Haven’t you ever wanted to do something horrible, but knew better than to let it out?”

  “Fair enough,” he agreed. “So when it happens you don’t know better? Is that it?”

  “I do, but it doesn’t matter. Most the time it’s anger, but sometimes...” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Sometimes it’s just me giving in because I want to.”

  He held her until her sobbing stopped, not knowing what to say. Yeah, right now he wanted to tear someone up too. “Your father did this to you?”

  She pulled away, her demeanor hardening. “One might argue that point. He had my mother raped by a yegg. All so he’d end up with an heir who wouldn’t walk away like Uncle William. He wanted someone with less compassion, and preferably a son. At least I was able to disappoint him on the last part.”

  Vincent took another sip from his coffee, letting that little bit of information curdle inside him. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What kind of man would do that to his own wife?

  Samantha reacted to his silence by hanging her head even lower. “You don’t have to tell me I’m an obscenity.”

  “Not what I was thinking. There’s an obscenity behind this, but it ain’t you. Next time you tell me to kill your father I’m going to listen to you.”

  Her chin rose until her eyes were level with his. “You could cut his throat a hundred times and it wouldn’t be enough.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t.”

  “Why? I’m no better.”

  “I’m not much for that sins-of-the-father bullshit, Samantha. I’m thinking I was wrong about you from the start.”

  “You have eyes. You see what I am.”

  “Easy,” he cautioned, holding up a palm. “I also heard. As long as you’re willing to keep fighting what’s inside you, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. There’s got to be a way to beat this thing.”

  “Maybe there is,” came her guarded answer. “But right now we have to concentrate on you. Until Red Socks teaches you, you’re a gandy dancer in name only. If you want to get a piece of the Rock Candy Mountain for your sister, you’ll need to know how to get back.”

  “Right now I’ll settle for getting back to Hobohemia. We can save the impossible for later. Westbound’s a one-way ride. People don’t come back from the dead.”

  She leaned forward. “Who said anything about being dead? Freedom said a gandy dancer could ride the Westbound and return. Your father did it once.”

  “That what she said?” He frowned at the memory of Dad on that ghost train. After having damn near accomplished the deed himself without any training at all, this wasn’t some hobo tale he could dismiss. What else did his sister know? “If someone hadn’t tossed me from the train, Freedom might have told me how Dad figured it out. Saved us some trouble.”

  “She didn’t know how, and stop looking at me like that. My throwing you out of the car saved your neck. Jake is a boss yegg. He would’ve killed you.”

  “Not if you had helped,” Vincent countered, trying to keep an undeserved accusation from his voice.

  “By doing what? Killing him? Take one good guess who my actual father is.”

  Vincent forgot about his coffee. “Jake? Your natural father is the baron’s right-hand man?”

  She nodded. “Jake’s job included teaching me how to accept this thing inside me. One day he told me the truth. Thought it was funny, I guess.”

  “Hilarious,” Vincent embellished with disgust. “The baron found out?”

  She shook her head, her eyes measuring him. “You’re taking this pretty much in stride, aren’t you? You shouldn’t.”

  He offered a comforting smile in turn. Trust me. I’m not. Just the same, your father’s not getting his hands on you again.

  They reached the Sandusky River after two long days—a winding stretch of water lined with steep banks and occasional rocky washes. Fortunately, Samantha spent her nights without further incident, as if the revelation of her hidden nature had taken the steam out of the nightmare factory plaguing her dreams. Food wasn’t a problem. Reedy mud flats supplied enough wiggling bait to lure up an eager bass or perch to Vincent’s makeshift spear. Samantha’s skillet proved a useful asset.

  They spent their second night along the river beneath a hastily built lean-to nestled under an old oak, the necessity courtesy of a late afternoon shower. A chorus of frogs kept rhythm with the raindrops. Samantha scrunched up next to him against the tree, eyeing him with a demur smirk. “Any chance I can borrow some blanket?”

  “Go right ahead,” he agreed, spreading the brown duster out to warm them both.

  She apparently caught his second glance. “It’s all right, I won’t bite.” Her amusement soured. “Okay, so it’s not so funny.”

  He caught her by the shoulder before she moved out from under the coat’s warmth. “You’re fine, little lady,” he returned with an exaggerated drawl. “I won’t take advantage of the situation.” Vincent dropped to a more serious tone, having warmed to a girl who could face down a very real demon inside her. “Seriously, it’s okay.”

  “You don’t strike me as the type to take untoward advantage of any young lady,” she said, curling back against him. “Not that I’m much of an expert on the subject. Men are like mirrors. You see yourself in how they react. I don’t like mirrors.”

  “Ain’t much different from this side,” he admitted. “I’m not too keen on what I see in a mirror, either.”

  She rested her head against his shoulder. “Something in common, for once. So, what’s your world like?”

  “I guess you’d consider my place one of the fallen lands, as Timepiece puts it. Indians lost and corporations won—and kept winning.” He reluctantly talked about how diesels were the norm and cabooses a relic of the past. In many ways, his home sounded a lot like what the Taylorists were trying to do here. He didn’t need much encouragement to let her talk instead.

  He let her tell him more about this version of Ohio where the United States was a lot smaller and managing to co-exist with the northern tribes. Samantha held few kind words for anyone back at Red Sticks, and less for the Arboreal religion with its firm heel on women’s necks. You could change go
ds, it seemed, but not people’s behavior. Still, she’d tried to make a life here rather than go back to the baron, speaking volumes about which choice she despised more.

  “By the way,” she finished, her voice slurred by encroaching sleep. “I’ll let you call me Sammy.”

  “Freedom calls me Vin,” he returned, but doubted Samantha heard him.

  Her chest rose and fell in even breaths, much to his relief. No nightmares tonight. He allowed himself a moment to admire her while she slept. Peel away the hunted look, comb the hair, and you might end up with one of those dark-eyed bookish types who didn’t kill people. Maybe there was hope for her yet. She deserved a break. He settled back against the tree, listening to the rain spatter against the lean-to until sleep took him too.

  Salvation from their long trek came the next morning with a thumping echo rebounding off the river’s banks.

  “Helicopter,” Samantha said, staring up at a clearing sky. “Sounds like it landed downriver.”

  “Not too far away, either,” Vincent agreed, hearing the engine whining down. “Let’s see if we can catch a ride.”

  They didn’t have to run through reeds and undergrowth for very long. She nodded toward where the water coursed around a wooded bend. “There he comes.”

  A waspish air machine floated toward them on faded green pontoons, a red maple leaf emblazoned on an opened door. The pilot lounged on one of the floats with a fishing pole, his brown hunting vest hanging off one of the helicopter’s blades.

  “Shawnee Forest Service,” Samantha said with a grin, stepping out on a rocky lip. “Bezon!”

  Twelve

  Vincent braved a blast of dust and twigs to wave his thanks to the helicopter lifting into the afternoon sky. Not only did the pilot erase weeks of travel, he brought them directly to Red Socks’s small ranch outside Neekanuh. Much of the credit went to Samantha’s cajoling, along with a little bartering.

  She raised her arm in an appreciative salute. “I’ll miss that skillet.”

  “It wasn’t yours anyway,” he joked, his humor lost on her dwindling smile.