by Eric Flint
"Your secret's safe with me, ma'am."
"Yes." She looked at him closely. "You're good at keeping secrets, aren't you?"
He smiled. "What are you, a mind-reader?"
"I used to know a man like you," she said, with an answering smile.
"Uh-huh. You've got a few secrets of your own, then."
"Mmm." She lowered her eyes, and Trace felt a sneaky, distant pang of desire for her—not only her flesh, but what she represented: God and home and sanctity. Children, maybe. A life more settled, less haunted. He crushed the ache, ground it into numbness with a mental boot heel. Not for him, not again. Bad enough he'd brought Boz into his purgatory.
At the end of the car, someone snorted, turned over. A child whimpered. Trace couldn't see outside, as the berths opened out flat above the windows, but it seemed someone had left the shutters open, because moonlight was spilling onto the floor near the head of the car, where the ladies' saloon was.
The moon's on the wrong side of the train, he thought, and then the eeriest sensation slid over him.
Often when he saw a spirit, he felt it before he saw it, or before he realized it wasn't just an ordinary live person. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck would stand up, as if there was lightning in the air. Lying there in the upper berth of a sleeper car, staring at the moonlight on the floor, Trace felt a sort of pull, like the falling sensation that comes just before sleep. He wasn't asleep, though—his skin tingled all over with that familiar electric charge, sounds and smells were sharper, and his vision cleared as if a veil had been dropped from his eyes. The pale glow on the floor rose into the air and spread, expanding, taking form.
Trace's mouth went dry. The moonlight was forming itself into the shapes of men—small men, with long braids and round hats on their heads, slight bodies and flat faces. A whole score of Chinamen rose out of the pooling moonlight and walked—silent, without seeming to touch the floor—toward the back of the car.
They passed right under Trace's nose, the tops of their heads just even with the bottom of his berth. He watched with his mouth open, unafraid but in awe, and with the dawning realization that the alertness in his mind had been waiting for just such an occurrence.
Then one of them stopped and looked up at him. It pointed back toward the engine-end of the car, its mouth moving, but Trace couldn't make out what it said. The Chinaman seemed to be shouting, the words coming at him in pulses like the whistle of a train across a great distance. Shang-shee, it said. Shang-shee.
"What?" Trace said. "I can't understand."
"Mr. Tracy? Jacob?"
Trace blinked. The car was dark, except for the oil lamps, and Miss Eliza was giving him the oddest look.
"Are you all right?" she said.
And the train whistle began to blow.
The sound was eerie, nightmarish. It echoed off the foothills and bounced back at them, whooo-whooo-whooo-whooo, like a deep-voiced mechanical owl. Then a single short whoop.
Obstruction on the tracks. Apply brakes.
"Holy God," Trace said.
"What? What's wrong?"
"Lie down," he said, hopping to the floor and grabbing for his boots. "Curl up in a ball. Put your pillow over your head and hold it down."
"What?"
"Just do it!" Trace wedged his foot into the second boot, glad he hadn't undressed, pulled the suspenders over his shoulders and yanked his gun belt from under his pillow. He hadn't stashed the Colt with the bedroll, preferring to err on the side of caution, and now he was damn glad he had. The porter was approaching, making hushing gestures and telling him not to start a panic, and all over the car people were sitting up, muttering at the noise, children wailing—
"Shut up!" Trace bellowed over the porter. "You all listen to me now! Curl up on your bunk with your feet braced on the front wall! Put your pillow over your head and try to hold on to the posts!"
He grabbed the porter and flung him into the lower berth alongside Brother Clark, just as there was an awful, screaming, squalling roar that started at the front of the train and progressed backward, shuddering through the car as if the tracks themselves were shaking off their burden. Trace wedged himself in the aisle, bracing his hands and feet against the columns between the berths like Samson in the garden of the Philistines.
He was sure, later, that the collision must've made one hell of a bang, when the second-class car struck the mail car in front of it. He just didn't remember hearing it. The back end of the car bucked like an ornery bronc and Trace was flung forward, his fingers torn from the columns. He landed on his chin and slid down the smooth-polished length of the aisle to end up in a heap next to the wood stove.
He did hear the screaming then, and the tinkling of broken glass and luggage bouncing off bunks and shelves to the floor. A series of blows shook the car, accompanied by the deafening and then diminishing BANGbangbang of each car behind them colliding.
At last the tremors stopped. The children were wailing and no few of the adults. Trace lay where he was for a minute, gripping the wall and floor with ten sprained fingers, checking to make sure he was still alive. The back end of the car was elevated, propped up on the colored car behind it, so he was cradled in the join of the floor to the front door. All manner of trash, luggage, hats, toys, bottles, garbage, and thirty pairs of shoes had slid down to the front of the car and buried him alive. He heard a pop, felt a flash of heat, and looked up to see a woolen stocking had fallen on the stove and burst into flame.
He reached out and flipped the stocking into the ash bin, where it lay smoldering. Then he carefully sat up, shaking off bits of refuse and old luncheons. His hand went automatically to his hip; the Colt was still in its holster. He could taste blood, his front lip was mashed, but no teeth were missing. His jaw felt like he'd been punched.
He got to his knees. The floor sloped up away from him, not too steep to walk but barely; all the oil lamps swung precariously on their hooks. People were trying to get out of their bunks, finding it hard to stand, casting about for clothes and belongings, calling out as to the whereabouts and welfare of companions. The porter was telling everyone to be calm, in a high and panicky voice. Brother Clark was praying and braying like a donkey.
Trace put a hand on the wall behind him, used it for leverage to stand. The front door of the car was buckled inward, about halfway up. He tried the handle and it broke off in his hand.
That left the back door or the windows. Trace started up the slope of the floor, straddling the aisle with his long legs to step up each alternating berth leg, gently but firmly pushing emigrants out of his way. "Stay down," he told them. "Stay in your bunk. We'll get the conductor down here, get the car settled down again. You just stay put."
He walk-climbed as far as Miss Eliza's berth, with Brother Clark and the porter underneath. Martin Kingsley had managed to reach his sister, and they both seemed unhurt and collected in wit.
"Are you all right, Mr. Tracy?" Sister Eliza asked. "You were thrown some distance."
"Nothin' broken," he reported. "Can you see to those that are hurt? Try to get them up, get them dressed. Might have to get everybody off this train."
"Nobody's leaving this train until the conductor says so," the porter piped up. "The safety and comfort of the passengers is the responsibility of—"
"That's what I said." Trace gripped the young man by his jacket and set him upright in the aisle. "You and me are gonna go find the conductor, ain't we?"
"I'm not supposed to—"
"Come on, son." Trace pushed the porter ahead of him, whacked him on the posterior when he slipped on the slant. They clambered up the aisle to the back door. "There any firearms on this train?"
"Firearms? Only the conductor and the engineer are allowed to—"
"Hush," Trace said, holding up a hand and listening. Someone was knocking and scraping on the folding door. The handle moved and the door buckled open a couple of inches. Several sets of brown human fingers curled into the opening. Trace ad
ded his to the effort, braced his feet against the wall of the gentlemen's privy, and shoved.
The door slammed back with a splintering of wood and screaming of metal. There was a whoop from outside, and five Negro faces clustered around the opening, Boz's foremost among them.
"Knew that'd be you," he said, grinning, although Trace saw the raw edges of relief rimming his eyes. They handed him out, then the porter, and Trace stepped carefully down the mangled iron railing and dropped to the gravel of the track bed.
The colored car had not suffered much damage: only its front end was stove in. Trace's car was tipped up, as was the mail car in front of it, and the coal car before that was wrenched nearly crosswise to the rails. The engine was still on the track, but its cabin had been crushed by the coal car, and the boiler was sending squalling jets of steam into the air.
"Folks behind us didn't get much more than a bump," Boz said, gesturing with a thumb toward the third-class car. "All behind that's freight."
Trace could hear the cattle bawling. Closer up, the third-class passengers were hanging out their windows and exclaiming. And approaching, they heard the rhythmic crunch of boots on gravel, dark figure jogging in the moonlight along the pale line of the track bed. Trace and Boz both reached for their guns.
"Ho there! Anyone hurt?" The running figure was human, and carrying a rifle; as he got closer they recognized the conductor, in his short white collar and spectacles. He jogged to a stop beside them. "You're not my brakemen. What are you doing off the train?"
"I told them!" the porter protested, climbing down from the mangled balcony. "I told them not to—"
"Shut up, Willie," the conductor said. "Anyone hurt on your cars?" he said to Trace and Boz, who replied in the negative. "Good, then get back on board and stay out of our way." He turned, scanning the top of the train for men who weren't there. He lifted a whistle, on a cord around his neck, and blew several short blasts.
They listened. Nothing answered, except a far-off crack that might have been thunder, and a yelp that might have been a coyote.
"Gunshot," Trace said.
"Somethin' like," Boz agreed.
The conductor gave him a look of dislike. "Get back on your car, boy, I'm not telling you again. Willie, you come with me."
Willie gave Trace a triumphant look and trotted off after the conductor toward the smoking engine. Trace looked at Boz, then at the colored men who hunkered on the roof and railing of the demolished emigrant car. "You men heeled, any of you?"
A few of them were, with revolvers. One man said there was a shotgun in his baggage.
"Get it," Trace said. "Stay on watch up there." He turned and started up the grade after the conductor.
Boz followed. "What is it?"
"Don't know. But the spirits on this train don't like it none."
The wind was cold and the air thin. They weren't yet in the mountains, but this was definitely higher land. The sky was bright with stars and the moon coming and going behind clouds. Bare-headed and in shirt sleeves, Trace could feel the chill on his skin, but it wasn't getting through to his blood. His heart was thudding hard and slow, and his senses still had that sharp clarity.
The engine cabin was flat as a flapjack and burning.
"Earl!" the conductor bawled into the dark. "Tommy?"
"They woulda jumped," Boz said, low. "Can't be far."
"What'd we hit?" Trace wanted to know.
They trotted to the front of the tracks, stepping over bits of coal and smoldering wood. A sizeable cairn of rocks had been piled across the tracks—from the depth and extent of the scattered debris, Trace guessed the pile must've been half as high as the engine.
"Not a slide, either," he muttered, looking up and around. There was plenty of stone on the ground, but they weren't in an area where it was likely to fall. And there was no tell-tale skid of gravel on the bed above, either. None of the stones was bigger than a man's head. "These were put here by hand."
"You hear somethin'?" Boz asked, head cocked, and started off into the dark.
They found the fireman not ten yards from the train, trying to crawl back through the shale and juniper brush. He was sobbing in that broken, wheezy way Trace remembered from Antietam; his shirt was wet and sticky when Trace touched his shoulder.
"Easy, fella, we got you," Trace said, turning the man onto his back in Boz's arms. The fireman began to scream immediately, and bat at them with his shredded hands. His face was dark and shiny in the moonlight, black with blood that seemed to be coming from his scalp. The rest of him was shaking and cold, the breath rattling in his throat. "Conductor! We got your man down here!"
There was a skidding and scuffling as the conductor and Willie scrambled down the grade; Willie's lantern threw shards of light over the ground and the chewed-up fellow between them.
"Tommy!" the conductor said, dropping to one knee. "Tommy, what happened? Where's Earl?"
The fireman gurgled, hands falling slack away from the conductor's coat. His sleeves had been torn off, and there was a big chunk of meat missing out of his forearm. In the lamplight they could see a flap of torn scalp dangling over his forehead, and one eye was gone. It looked like a bear had bitten into his head.
Trace met Boz's eyes, read the question there, and stood up, looking back toward the train.
"What was it, Tommy?" the conductor asked. "Wolves? Did they get Earl?"
Trace squinted. The windows of the passenger cars glowed dimly from the lamps; he could just make out people moving inside. Two men paced the roof of the colored car, keeping watch. One of them had a spark of fire in his hand, which he raised to his lips.
Something dark was slinking up the gravel grade to the tracks. Something blacker than the sky, darker than the shadows. It moved low to the ground, crawling like a frog but much faster, the size of a man. Another one, behind it. Two more—two cars down. Converging on the train.
Trace skinned the Colt and shot the nearest one.
He knew he hit it. It wasn't a far shot and he saw the thing flinch—worse than that, he felt it squeal, a metal-on-metal shriek that seemed to pierce his skull.
But it jumped—all the black shapes did, and scattered like roaches running from daylight. The men on the roof jumped, too, spun around and looked toward them.
"Back to the train," Trace said. "Now."
"Son, I've got a man down here and at least five missing," the conductor snapped.
"Your train is under attack, mister, and that man's bled out." Trace thumbed another cartridge into the Colt's chamber as he spoke, backing away up the grade, Boz already running for the tracks. "Unless you want to lose more passengers you'd best—"
There was a scream, up near the tracks. Cracks of gunfire followed, sounding thin and puny in the wind. Trace turned and hightailed it up the slope.
He saw the two men go down off the roof of the colored car—one flipped out flat as if his legs had been pulled from under him, and the other jumped. More gunfire came from the other side of the train, and a high, terrified scream. He saw Boz's familiar form ahead of him, leaping across the link between the colored car and the one behind it, and Trace angled his steps to follow but then saw one of those black shapes appear on top of the second-class car.
It perched on the upthrust edge of the roof for a moment, hunkered like a mountain cat or a circus monkey. Its shape was more or less human—head, shoulders, arms—but there was something bestial in its movements and the arch of its back, the way it crouched over its legs. It swung its head to one side, and then there was another beside it, and another, and a fourth.
Trace slowed his steps, watching while they pushed and jostled at each other. They seemed to be talking amongst themselves, like a crowd of young toughs egging each other to take a dare. They nudged the first toward the edge of the roof.
Suddenly it went over—and twisted as it fell, swinging clean through the open door of the emigrant car. Trace shouted and ran toward the car, shooting at the three on the roof. They l
eapt in three different directions, vanishing into the darkness.
From inside the sleeper car came a rolling and screaming and crashing that sounded for all hell like a fox in a henhouse. A man in a nightshirt and boots half-climbed, half-fell out of the door, and was instantly snatched by a black shadow that hauled him down the pale gravel bank to the underbrush. The lady behind him saw it and began to scream, but some panicked soul pushed her from behind and she fell, head-first onto the grade. A black shadow flung itself on her as if it meant to ravish her. She screamed and beat at it, but it caught her up in clawed arms and fastened its jaws on her throat, ending her scream in a choked gurgle.
Trace ran up to the thing and kicked it in the ribs. It dropped its prey and turned on him with a shriek of rage. In the dark and the confusion, all he saw was gaping mouth, filled with teeth and blood, yellow eyes reflecting hate and fire. He shot it between the mouth and the eyes. It rolled over backwards and kept going down the grade—he had no idea whether it was dead or not. The woman seemed to be, her throat was torn out, and the emigrant car was rocking with the force of the battle going on inside.
He clambered up the end of the car, all but throwing people out of his way. He shouted at them to get to the colored car, but he doubted they heard—the ruckus inside was deafening. Trace fell into the car and slid halfway down the aisle before he caught himself; for a moment he couldn't even see the monster. All the berths were still down and the oil lamps were swinging dangerously, people were falling over each other trying to get out of the way, while the eye of the storm surged back and forth across the aisle, something dark and snarling in the middle of it.
It resembled a man, but was gray and hairless, with the bulging flat eyes of a fish and a gaping wound of a mouth. In one of those long, spidery arms it held a child, limp and bloodied, while it used the other to grab those nearest it and fling them across the car. The men were trying to corner it, wielding chunks of firewood, walking sticks and a fire-iron, but the thing seemed to be laughing. It held up the child by its hair and slung the lifeless body at them. The nearest man went down under the weight of it, and the thing leapt over him, took two more down with it and dashed their heads against the floor. One of the men brought the fire iron down on its back, but it only squalled and whipped an arm around, backhanding him off his feet and into one of the berths.