With a look out the window, he said, “Ma’am, we could, but it might not do us no good. Look.” He pointed, and she saw that he was right.
The Shenandoah was coming up around the curve, wending up the arc of its own track, closing in on the pass. There was a gap of maybe a hundred yards between the end of the Dreadnought and the beginning of the next engine.
Mercy breathed, “Oh God.” And at the same time the captain said, “God help us.” Horatio Korman said nothing.
The porter said, “We’re already too late. Here they come, and here’s the pass. We’re right up on it.”
Besides, as the porter explained, the real weight on the train came from the forward cars and the snowplow attachment-which was to say, the fuel and ammunition car . . . and, as Mercy, the captain, and the ranger privately assumed, the car stuffed with gold bars. But a lighter train meant a faster train, never mind the food stores or the stoves or the cooking units in the caboose. It had to go. All of it had to go. They could grab a new one of everything in Salt Lake City, provided they ever arrived there.
Mercy shoved one arm up underneath Malverne Purdue just as the captain ordered her to do so. She lifted him like an unhappy calf, and heaved him across the couplers into the third passenger car. “Come on, now,” she told him. “And if we get a free minute or two, I’ll do what I can to close up that wound.”
The scientist didn’t object, but he didn’t help her much, either. She dropped him into a seat and patted him down quickly for guns or other weapons. Finding only a small derringer and a boot knife, she took them both and pocketed them. And when she was reasonably confident that blood loss and lack of agency would keep Mr. Purdue out of trouble, she stood up and went back into the aisle.
There, she nearly collided with Captain MacGruder, who said, “Get the inspector over there to help you get him to the next car.”
“What?” she asked, but Inspector Galeano was already at her side, taking the man’s other arm and lifting him back up again. “We’re moving him again?”
“I’ll help,” the inspector said.
“All right,” she replied dubiously, and grabbed the stray, flopping arm of the scientist, who was becoming more rag doll-like by the moment. “If we don’t set him down someplace soon, and for good, we’ll lose him yet.”
Captain MacGruder overheard this, and he said, “Now ask me if I care. Move him up to the second passenger car, and set him down there. If he lives, he lives. If he doesn’t, I’ll shed a little tear and move on with my afternoon.”
He continued to shout orders up and down the line, though since it was he and the ranger who had worked out the coupler disconnects, these two men returned to the gap. In less than a minute, the caboose unhitched and sadly, slowly, slipped away into the Dreadnought’s wake.
The two men flung themselves back inside right before Mercy and the inspector opened the forward door, and she heard him delivering more orders every which-a-way behind her. Then she understood. They weren’t just leaving the caboose and the rearmost hearse car; they were leaving this last passenger car, too.
“Everyone, forward!” she heard the Texian cry, and between herself and Inspector Galeano, they wrestled the inert Malverne Purdue into the second car.
Mrs. Butterfield and Miss Clay were startled by the sight of the bleeding man, though neither seemed moved to help settle him someplace. Mercy took care of that herself, lying him down in a sleeper car and feeling at his neck for a pulse, which came more faintly with every breath. The man’s skin had gone white, with a bluish gray around the creases at his eyes and mouth; but the nurse stood by her original assessment that he could yet be saved . . . even if it was only for a court-martial and hanging.
Mercy stuffed a handkerchief against the wound and dashed to her seat for her satchel, from which she grabbed gauze and wrappings. She applied them to the best of her ability while the inspector served as a silent assistant-taking what she discarded, holding what she needed, and generally doing a damn fine job of staying out of her way. She thanked him with murmurs and tried to ignore the frantic hollers of the passengers, soldiers, and porters as the train lost one more segment and the third passenger car drifted away behind them.
“It’s madness!” Mrs. Butterfield declared. “Where will all of us sleep?”
To which the Texian said, “Out in the snow, with the coyotes and the mountain lions-if we don’t keep this train ahead of that one,” and he pointed out the window.
The old woman gasped like she might faint, and Theodora Clay stepped up and slapped the ranger across the face. “How dare you!” she exclaimed, not really asking a question but making an accusation. “Trying to frighten an elderly lady like that!”
“I’ll frighten her and worse, if it gets her out of my way,” he said, unmoved and apparently unstartled by the prim but sharp attack. “Now look out that window and tell me you think we’re going to beat them through Provo.”
As he said it, the pass loomed up and swallowed the train, car by car in quick succession. The shadows from its immense walls were cut sharply up, and as high as the sky to the right . . . and up to the clouds on the left, where the Shenandoah was not gaining as swiftly as before, but remained close on their tail.
“Everything that can go, is going,” the captain chimed in. “Now make room.”
Though three passenger cars had made for a fairly spacious arrangement for two dozen military men and half that number of civilians (plus the conductor, rail men, and assorted porters), reducing that number down to two cars made for cramped quarters, and Mrs. Butterfield had a point: only one of these cars was a proper sleeper. Mercy couldn’t imagine anyone being so narrowly focused as to be worried about that fact right this second; but a glance at the matron, with her sour face and her arms crossed and clenched around her bosoms, told the nurse that she still had a whole lot to learn about people.
With much more shouting, ordering, and cramming of people up and forward-and into the next car up, where there was temporarily more room-the Dreadnought shed the third passenger car as smoothly and strangely as the previous two and picked up speed.
Mrs. Butterfield complained as she looked out the back window, “Soon you’ll have the lot of us sleeping in the coal car.”
Horatio Korman said, “No ma’am-just you.” Then he immediately returned his attention to something the captain was saying, and to the window beyond the captain’s shoulder, where the Shenandoah was drawing up nearer, ever nearer, clawing up to the Dreadnought’s pace by feet-not by great leaping yards, not anymore, but still coming. The ranger said, “It’s not a bad idea, actually.”
Captain MacGruder said, “Are you kidding me?”
“No, I’m not. And I’m not just talking about her. I think we could fit the lot of them into that car just past the fuel car. The one with the special armor inside,” he said, flashing a meaningful look at the captain.
Mercy caught it, too. She said, “Yes, Captain. There’s only-” She did a quick count. “Eight civilians-or ten if you count the inspectors, but I don’t think you should. I don’t know about Mr. Portilla, but Mr. Galeano looks like he knows his way around a gunfight, and he has his own pistol.”
“Nine, if we count you,” he pointed out.
“So count me. You might need me, and there’s nobody else, if anybody gets hurt. But you can stack these eight folks up inside the-” She almost said the gold car, but stopped just in time. “The car up there. They’ll be safer there than anyplace else. Who cares if they see what it’s carrying?”
This perked ears all around, and loudly voiced questions of, “What’s it carrying?”
The ranger said, “There ain’t much time. Get them out of the way, and the rest of y’all can fight your war like civilized killers.”
Mercy almost expected MacGruder to keep fighting, but he decided in a snap, “Fine. Do it. Comstock, Tankersly, Howson-get these folks up to that car. You know the one.”
“What? Now where are we going?” Theodora Cla
y demanded.
“Someplace safe,” Mercy said. “Safer, anyhow. Just go. Take your aunt and hunker down.”
“I think not.”
“Think whatever you want, but would you at least get Mrs. Butterfield up front? I doubt she’ll let anyone else take her.”
Miss Clay hesitated, but she flashed a glance out the window at the onrushing train, and recognized the truth of their words. “Fine. But I’m coming right back.”
Hastily the handful of leftover civilians was loaded, shoved, and urgently led to the front of the train, where the former car of mystery was waiting. It had been cleared out by the time they arrived, so that something like an aisle was open in the middle of the floor. Seeing the arrangement as she helped with the last of the evacuation, Mercy was glad for the quick improvisation of the soldiers.
Morris Comstock asked her, “Are you coming?”
She realized she and Miss Clay were the last civilians there. “Yes,” she said.
Miss Clay said, “I’m coming, too.”
But Mercy beat her to the door and slammed it shut, closing herself and Comstock out onto the coupler passageway. She drew a bar down and fixed it, effectively locking the whole group into the car. She took a deep breath, turned to the private first class, and said, “I hope I’m doing the right thing.”
Morris Comstock looked at the irate face of Theodora Clay, her gloved hands beating against the window as she screamed, and he said, “The best thing that can be done, I expect. They’ll be safe in there,” he added, speaking loudly so that he’d be heard over the wind.
“I hope.”
“If they aren’t, there’s not much we’ll be able to do for them, anyway.”
Together, as if they’d had the same idea at the very same instant, they each gripped the vibrating iron rail and leaned out to see how close the front of the other train was. It was staring straight ahead up the track, coming right for them.
The far side of the pass was a cliff as cutting and certain as the one to their immediate right-so close that, sometimes, Mercy was quite positive, she could’ve reached out a hand and dragged it along the icy boulders if she wanted to lose a few fingers. But the sides of this astonishing pass rose up so high that they shut out the sun and cast the whole man-made valley into shadow, and through the veil of this shadow the face of the Shenandoah was an angry thing. She could make out its round front with the streamlined pilot piece and its billowing stacks. And when a faint curve of the track allowed for something less than a head-on view, she could also see one side of the pistons, which pumped the thing faster, harder, and with greater efficiency than the engine that drew her own train forward.
Morris Comstock said, “This is going to be bad,” as if Mercy didn’t already know it.
“Hurry,” she said, opening the next door and letting them both back into the first passenger car.
Morris Comstock spotted Lieutenant Hobbes and said, “Sir, the civilians are secured in the forward car,” with a snappy salute.
“Glad to hear it. You-” He pointed at Mercy. “-the captain wants you back in the next car.”
“I’m going,” she told him, pushing sideways past Morris and shuffling through the narrow aisle, alongside the rows of men setting up for trouble-lining up by the windows, lowering them as far as they’d go, and breaking them out if they’d frozen shut. They ducked down low behind the passenger car’s protective steel walls and waited for someone over there, on the other track, sidling up close, to fire the first shot.
In the second car, Mercy seized her poor, battered satchel and slung it across her chest, where it bumped against the gunbelt she’d been wearing all morning. Until the bag bounced and reminded her, she’d completely forgotten about it. But whom was she going to shoot? The Rebels, if they got close enough? No, of course not. No sooner than Horatio Korman would’ve shot at them. The Union lads on the train? No, not them either.
But given the havoc and the horror of the moment, being dragged along a track at impossible speeds, and chased and harried around every bend and up every craggy plateau, she wore them. They were loaded, but they remained unfired for the time being.
“Captain MacGruder?” she called, not seeing him immediately.
He stood up from behind one of the sleeper compartments, where he’d been hovering over Malverne Purdue. “Over here, Mrs. Lynch. Tell me, do you think you can fix him?”
“Jesus couldn’t fix him,” she said under her breath. “And I don’t know if I can patch him up, if that’s what you’re asking. I wonder why Ranger Korman didn’t just go for the heart.”
“There’s no telling. Or, I don’t know.” The captain shrugged, using his foot to nudge at Purdue’s limp leg. “He moved real sudden with that gun. The ranger’s good, but there were two men to shoot. In all fairness, the bastards both went down.”
Mercy said, “I’ll make him comfortable. That’s all I can do.”
“I didn’t ask you to make him comfortable. Put him on a bed of nails if we’ve got one. But I’d like to see him survive long enough to explain himself.”
“I’ve done my best,” she said. The captain went away, back to the front lines on the southern side of the train, where the windows were all open now-wind pouring through them, blowing everything that wasn’t nailed down all over the place. And snow came inside with the wind: it had begun as a faint, spitting bluster of tiny shards of ice, but it was becoming something denser, something with more volume and sting when it slapped against faces and into eyes.
Convinced there was nothing more she could do for the unconscious Purdue, she left him, drew the curtain to close him into the compartment, and stood up so she could see what was going on. It was almost enough to make her want to dive back inside and join the scientist in a defensive huddle.
The Shenandoah was so close she could see it now, its engine straining and speeding along, the pistons churning and pumping. She could also see faces-that’s how close it had come-faint but definite, lining the windows in a mirror of the men on the Dreadnought. Men also dashed to and fro along the Rebel engine and its scant number of cars, climbing with the certainty of sailors on masts or cats along cupboard shelves. It was strange and awful, the feeling of pride combined with horror Mercy felt as she kept her eyes on them, tracking one after another like ants on a hill.
While she stared, and while the mountain shadows flickered and flew across the pass and across the trains, a tense pall settled upon the men and women of the Dreadnought. Maybe, Mercy thought, the same moment of hesitance was making the Shenandoah quiet, too. It was one final moment when things might possibly go another way, and the confrontation might end in some other fashion-or never occur at all.
And then, with the sound of a planet exploding, the moment passed and the battle came crashing down upon them.
Eighteen
Mercy could not be certain, but she believed the first blow happened simultaneously, as if both trains’ patience simply exhausted itself, and everyone shot at once-taking a chance on starting something awful, rather than receiving something awful without kicking back.
Or maybe the Dreadnought fired first.
And why shouldn’t it? The Union train had the most to lose, being stuffed with gold and paperwork and soldiers, and being an expensive piece of war machinery to boot. Heavier, slower, and more valuable, the Dreadnought had one primary thing going for it: immense firepower. As Mercy scanned the cars of the Shenandoah, tugged behind one another like sausage links, she saw only one fuel car and only one vehicle that looked remotely prepared to move armaments and artillery. The engine itself was armored and reinforced, yes, but its gunnery lacked the forethought and sophistication of the Dreadnought’s assault-oriented design.
So the Dreadnought’s strategy was simple. It had to be simple, for the options were so strictly limited.
Stay ahead of the Shenandoah. Don’t let it outpace us.
Blow it off the tracks if you can, or if you have to.
Fire.
The nurse would play the moment over and over in her head, on an infinite loop that would surprise her sometimes, startling her out of a reverie or out of her sleep, for the rest of her life.
And she would listen to it, watch it, scrutinize it through the windowpane of her memory and wonder if it mattered. Surely it didn’t matter who fired the first shot, or what small action caused the event to begin. But merely knowing that it might not matter did not make it bother her any less, not at the time and certainly not in retrospect, and it did not keep that moment out of her waking nightmares.
Her terrified and very human reaction was to duck down, to dodge, to lie on the floor and pray.
Ears ringing, she staggered to her feet and tried to hold that position-upright, still crouched, out of the line of fire. But the train was reeling. It rocked on the track even as it hauled itself forward, keeping that pace, not letting the Shenandoah come up too close but throwing everything it had at the other train. The recoil from the engine’s cannon, the unevenness of the track, the gathering clumps of snow that must surely have knocked the balance here and there . . . these things made it hard to stand and hard to concentrate, never mind how the sound of war and windows breaking compressed and reverberated within the steel and cast-iron tubes.
Gunpowder smoke accumulated despite the errant wind, and driving snow collected inside the car-dusting the seats and the corners, and drifting wherever it found a relatively quiet eddy in the raucous, rattling mayhem.
It was hard to breathe and even harder to see, but one of the sharpshooters was sharp-shot, and he tumbled backwards off the seat where he’d braced himself. Mercy ran to his side. She knew the soldier on sight, but didn’t recall his name. His face was surprised, and stuck that way.
Someone shouted. Mercy couldn’t make it out; but someone tripped over the corpse and nearly kicked her in the shoulder, all by accident, all in the calamity of the moment. Sensing a way in which she could be useful, she drove her arms up underneath the dead shooter and man-hauled him backwards across the aisle and against the far wall beneath a window that faced the sheer cliff.
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