Kieli watched the conductor hurry off and looked back at the place he had been standing. It was in front of the couplers that linked the two cars. She held her hair back as the wind blew it every which way and looked down at her feet. The image of the track filled her view as it ran past, vibrating fiercely, and for a moment she felt dizzy.
Right in front of her shoes, the couplers, shaped like two large fists clenched together, rattled as the metal fittings struck each other. They collided with each other so violently that they jumped in time with the moving cars’ vibrations.
She stood there, not grasping the meaning of the situation right away, when a voice came down from above her head.
“It’s broken.”
Kieli pointed her chin straight up and looked above her. Harvey was peering over her head at the couplers. He said it so matter-of-factly he might as well have said, “Toaster’s broken. Guess I can’t have toast this morning”; so for three more seconds, she still didn’t take in the significance. After looking back down at the couplers, she finally realized that the fittings that held them in place were broken.
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“I dunno. If they’re not careful, the train could derail.”
Thinking, And isn’t that dangerous?, Kieli looked incredulously back at Harvey and asked, “What should we do?” Harvey took on a thoughtful expression, like he was thinking something as trivial as, “Well, I can just have cereal instead of toast,” and simply said, “If it starts to look really bad, I can just jump off, right?”
Kieli couldn’t respond immediately; she gaped up at the face above her.
“Why you…So you don’t care as long as you can get away?” the radio interjected in place of the speechless Kieli. Harvey blinked, apparently surprised that anyone was complaining, and looked down at the radio in his hand.
“No, I could carry you and Kieli.”
“Never mind,” Kieli said, not wanting to listen to this nonsense any longer, and she shoved aside the heartless giant who was blocking the door. She had to hurry and warn the conductor — the living conductor this time.
The instant she returned to the passenger car, the vision of the overturned car spread before her eyes. She froze for a second, but, realizing that the ghost conductor’s memories were still on loop, she frantically shook the scene from her mind and ran down the aisle. The passengers in the real seats chatted peacefully, overlapping the illusion of the injured, looking up and sending dubious glances in her direction.
She kept going straight through the car she had been sitting in to the last car, finally catching up to the conductor’s spirit.
The conductor stood still. Before his eyes lay his own dead body, part of his chest crushed in the accident. As he stared down at his corpse from his own memories, the conductor froze in terror.
The conductor hadn’t made it. Most likely, he had discovered the broken couplers and run back to stop the train but didn’t make in time and met his end here.
Kieli didn’t stop; she ran past the conductor. The conductor may not have made it then, but Kieli could make it now — so that these tragic memories wouldn’t become reality again.
“Mr. Conductor!” Kieli arrived at the conductor’s room and slammed the door open. The other conductor, who had apparently been enjoying a leisurely breakfast, looked up in surprise.
“It’s terrible! The couplers are loose! That car back there!” In broken sentences, Kieli, out of breath, frantically tried to explain the situation. The conductor, a sandwich stuffed in his mouth, wore a blank expression and said something like “Wha ha maher?” Kieli nearly exploded with frustration and waved her arms violently up and down.
“I said the couplers are broken! Hurry and stop the train!”
Perhaps her fearsome rage overwhelmed him, because the conductor picked up the intercom that connected to the engine room. He gulped down his sandwich, pounded his chest, and cleared his throat, then turned to the mouthpiece and drawled, “Uhh…” Kieli couldn’t wait any longer; she snatched the transmitter from the conductor.
“Slow down immediately! There’s going to be a big accident!” she barked curtly and shoved the phone back at the stunned conductor. She flew out of the conductor’s room with the same force with which she had run in, and dashed back toward the front car, shouting, “We’re making an emergency stop! Grab onto something!” to the passengers on either side of her.
Harvey, gazing at the train tracks, realized that they had put on the brakes. At the same time, he also realized that they probably wouldn’t stop in time. The front cars were approaching a gentle right-hand curve.
“Herbie!” the radio urged from his hand.
“Harvey,” Harvey sighed briefly. “I’m not really a friend of the people, serving the public for no compensation. For that matter, I’d actually prefer mankind be destroyed. Every night, I pray to the heavens that an asteroid will hit the planet, but my wish never comes true.”
“Kieli does everything she can. I like that.” The radio’s answer didn’t really connect; apparently he didn’t want to talk about the destruction of mankind.
“What, you’re getting attached? Didn’t you want to go back to your grave?” Harvey asked maliciously, a smirk rising to his lips. The radio stayed silent.
Heaving another sigh, Harvey reluctantly started to tie the radio’s cord to the deck’s handrail. If I hadn’t gotten mixed up with that girl, I wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble. He didn’t want to take anyone with him in the first place, and if the Church found him out, it would be trouble. Now that he thought of it, he did have the option of shutting her up permanently — but of course at this point in the journey, he didn’t feel inclined to do that.
“Gah, what the hell am I doing…?” he moaned. When he finished tying the radio to the rail, a strong centrifugal force pulled him to the left. The rattling sound from the joined couplers came to an abrupt stop and the car opposite him floated upward.
“Damn it, my arm just healed,” he grumbled to no one in particular as he took the rail with his right hand, planted himself firmly on the deck, and reached for the couplers with his free hand. He grabbed the coupler from the other car and forced it back to the one in front of him, and held them together with the full weight of his body. “Stupid! Just go back…!” The intense shaking traveled through his arm and rattled his brain. As he put the couplers together, they caught the skin of his fingers and tore the flesh off. He lost concentration for just a second when he felt a sharp pain run through him, like his fingers were being twisted off, but he soon gathered his wits and shook off the pain, leaving only a faint, unpleasant throbbing sensation in the core of his brain.
Suddenly, the brakes kicked in, and the radio hanging from the handrail swung violently. When he caught sight of the radio’s cord coming undone and the radio flying into the air, Harvey involuntarily let go of the handrail and grabbed the cord.
“Ah…” Damn, he thought, as he and the radio slid sideways and were thrown off the deck. “Herbie, you idio —” the radio’s jeers were lost in the high-pitched screech of metal scraping metal.
“Harvey!” He faintly heard a girl’s voice through the ear-shattering din and stopped breathing as, without warning, something squeezed his neck from behind. Kieli had jumped through the car door and was clinging to the hem of his jacket. She strangled him with such force that any normal person would surely have suffocated as she pulled him back toward her, and he fell to the deck, taking the small girl with him.
It looked as if time had stopped temporarily as one of the cars remained suspended in the air and then thudded back onto the track.
The train had stopped.
The screech of the brakes, the shaking of the cars, the howl of the wind — all sound stopped abruptly, and a terrible quiet fell over their surroundings. After a few seconds of silence, the murmuring of the passengers — some anxious, some relieved — finally reached their ears.
“…What the hell am I doing…?
”
Still lying faceup on the deck, Harvey let out all the breath he had been holding, just as his exhaustion overcame him. “Harvey, you’re heavy.” Kieli struggled under the arm he had flung to the side, but he was tired and chose not to move it for a while.
Kieli was told that they wanted to send her a letter of thanks, but since this was of course the first time in Kieli’s life that she had had such an experience — and on top of that, she was not used to receiving so much praise — her first reaction was to politely decline.
“And how can we ever thank you, sir?” The conductor (the one who was eating a sandwich) took off his hat and bowed deeply to Harvey. “I’ll call the rescue party right away. We have to get you patched up.”
Harvey acted indifferent to the thanks paid him and Kieli, but when he heard the second part, he yelped in panic. “No, that won’t be necessary. And I don’t want your thanks, either. If you have men with enough time to waste writing thank-you notes, why don’t you put them on the maintenance team?” Kieli couldn’t tell if Harvey’s refusal was polite or rude, but he dragged her off, just as she was starting to think it might not be so bad to get a thank-you letter, and ran away from the conductor.
The long, gray train stood on the wilderness tracks like a dead snake. Railroad company emergency cars from the east and west sandwiched the train, and the company was about to start investigating the accident.
The passengers had been forced to disembark and stood in circles near the track, complaining about the accident and confirming each other’s safety. Kieli heard, from fragments of their conversations, that a similar train accident had happened in the past. Apparently a pair of couplers had been broken, and every car behind the break had derailed; many people had been killed or injured. One of the victims had been the train’s conductor.
Kieli was in danger of falling as Harvey dragged her along with his left hand, his stride easily twice the length of her own. She noticed that his hand was covered in blood.
“Harvey, are you okay?”
“Why?” Harvey slowed down a bit and turned around. After following Kieli’s gaze, he looked as if he was only just noticing it himself. He said, “Oh, sorry. I got your coat dirty,” and let go.
“I don’t care about that. Let me see it.” Kieli took his blood-covered hand back in hers and pulled it toward herself. The skin from his fingertips to his palm was stripped off, and it was bright red with fresh blood.
She started to look away from the awful state of his hand, but when she looked closer, she saw that the bleeding had mostly stopped. Instead, the blackish liquid, like coal tar, was oozing out and starting to coil around the wound the way it did when his neck got hurt at the old station.
“That can’t be fun to watch,” Harvey said gruffly in response to her stares. He pulled his hand away and shoved it into his coat pocket.
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Eh, I can ignore it. I’ve been trained that way.”
Harvey had quickened his pace again, and he soon left Kieli behind. She hurried after him and looked over Harvey’s shoulder at his profile. Kieli didn’t know what it was like to be able to ignore pain, but she figured that didn’t equal not hurting. While she thought about it, Harvey went back to the bags they had left by the side of the track and, his left hand still in his pocket, used his other hand to pick up his backpack and the radio.
“We’re walking to the next station. Is that okay with you?”
Kieli stopped for a moment and whined in protest. She had heard that the emergency cars would be taking groups of passengers to the next station.
“I don’t want them asking annoying questions. It’s not that far.”
Kieli doubted whether or not something that “wasn’t that far” for Harvey’s long gait would be “not that far” for her, but Harvey showed no interest in hearing her opinion and started walking. Feeling that if she sulked too much, he would say something like, “If you don’t like it, you can ride the train by yourself,” Kieli sped up and followed him.
As soon as she started walking, she felt someone watching her from behind and turned around to see the conductor’s spirit standing in the distance. Still wearing his kind smile, he stayed beside the train as if protecting it.
The conductor removed his hat and bowed deeply in thanks. She felt as though she could hear a voice say, “Thank you.” Under her breath, Kieli murmured a good-bye.
“Kieli. If your legs are too short, I’ll carry you.”
“I’m coming. Wait up.” Kieli didn’t really understand what Harvey had said, but his words urged her on, and she trotted up to him. They started walking on the track, side by side.
The train track continued in a straight line through the wilderness to the horizon hung with sand-colored gas. Far in the distance, she could just make out the next town.
CHAPTER 3
CHEERS FOR THE BLOOD-COVERED CLOWN
As night approached, people filled the main street, literally to overflowing, and no one knew how in the world the town could accommodate them. Instruments played in cacophony, and decorative lights with practically no sense of unity painted a scene of festive excitement that spread throughout.
Night shops selling toys and junk food lined the streets; passersby were called with shouts to see the shows at booths; cheers and jeers were given to roadside magicians and fire-ring jugglers; musical troupes paraded by as each member played his own melody on his instrument — it was as if someone had turned a toy box upside down and then jumbled everything up even more. Seeing it, Kieli forgot the exhaustion of the day and spent a while staring in amazement.
As expected, Harvey’s definition of “not that far” was completely unreliable, and they had walked at least half the day since the train accident that morning. They finally arrived at the station close to evening. They checked when the next train would be leaving. Harvey and Kieli went into town a little before sunset.
It was a run-down country town; the cold wind from Easterbury’s eastern wilderness blew through the litter-strewn streets. They walked for a while along the quiet main street and found a cheap hotel. The unfriendly man at the front desk took his time checking them in, and they had to wait thirty minutes before he produced a key from behind the reception desk. By the time they made it into their room, night had fallen completely.
Kieli slowly dragged her leaden feet onto her bed, but just as she figured the town seemed pretty boring and she might as well go to sleep, the streets under her window appeared to hold a different world than they did half an hour ago.
Apparently, during the Colonization Days holidays, lots of peddlers and entertainment troupes gathered in this town to hold a carnival every night.
Kieli sat on her pillow with her chin on one knee, looking out her window at the streets below. “Let’s go take a little look. Since we’re staying here tonight anyway,” she said, looking back at the room. Because of the accident, the train that was supposed to be leaving that night wouldn’t be running, and the trains weren’t going to start up again until the next morning. Even the passengers who had taken the emergency cars and arrived in town one step ahead of them were stuck there until the next day.
But, in contrast to Kieli’s high spirits, a weary voice leaked out of the radio sitting on the side table: “Give me a break. I’ll pass. There are too many loud, showy thoughts in this town. It makes my eyes spin.”
“Old men don’t do so well in showy places,” Harvey added, lying on the bed on the other side of the table. He pulled a box of cigarettes out of his pocket, caring neither about the radio’s retort of “You’re one to talk about people’s ages,” nor the rusty plate on the side table that read “no smoking in bed” and looked like it had already been burned.
Before Kieli could even ask, “You’re going, aren’t you, Harvey?” he shot her down with “I’m passing, too. It’s too much trouble, and I don’t care.” Kieli felt like the only one rising above the room’s weary atmosphere, and after a few moments of
silence, she muttered, “Fine. Then I’ll go by myself.”
She sat on the edge of her bed and began to put her shoes back on. They were black leather boots that matched her uniform, and while she took time to tie up the laces, Harvey, who had gotten into bed with his shoes still on, breathed a sigh and got up.
Kieli looked blankly up at him, still bent over.
“I’ll go with you as far as the front door. I’m out of cigarettes,” Harvey said, throwing his empty, crumpled cigarette box into the wastebasket and reaching for his coat. Kieli hurried as fast as she could to tie her shoes.
When they set foot outside of the hotel entrance, they were smack in the middle of the festivities on the main street. The temperature had gone down with the sun, but once Kieli entered the crowds, the cold no longer bothered her, and wrapped in the heat from those around her, she was actually quite warm.
A mass of people had formed on the shoulder of the road right next to her. A gentlemanly looking peddler wearing a tall chapeau and bowtie was standing in the center of the ring of people, selling something. Kieli’s interest was piqued; she poked her head between the tall adults and peeked in at his booth.
The man in the chapeau was selling something that appeared to be a small, cubic box. There was a peephole in one side, and as people held the boxes and looked inside, they sighed in admiration, laughed, and sometimes screamed. She watched for a while, wondering what it was, and eventually the peddler noticed her, beckoned her over, and offered her a box.
Tilting her head in curiosity, Kieli followed the example of the others and put one eye up to the peephole.
“Wow…” She let out a noise in spite of herself.
The Dead Sleep in the Wilderness Page 7