by Clive Barker
Sean’s voice grew feeble. “She said—”
“You stupid twit! For women like her, men like you are their ticket out of this godforsaken fucking country.”
Ngao’s voice had fallen to a whisper.
The Frenchman continued to interpret. “So when she went back to the bar, empty-handed, the madam beat her. A young woman with beauty like this is a valuable commodity, eh? The madam called me, you see. She’d been waiting for months for this girl to start bringing in money. So when the girl finally tried, and then failed, the madam sold her to me. Everything must have its due, you know, eh? Everything must have its due.”
A wash of fresh bile bubbled into Sean’s throat with his guilt. He turned toward her. “Ngao! Ngao, I’m so sorry.”
The Frenchman leaned forward. “So how much was this girl’s life worth, eh? How much did she ask for? Thirty American dollars? I can tell you she’ll bring me far more than that.”
She glanced at Sean, sniffling, then looked away. A single tear dropped from her chin like a falling diamond, glistening in the moonlight.
The Frenchman said, “If you had only paid her, she would not be here like this. You would, but she wouldn’t.”
Sean sat up. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. Go back to your bed. Forget about this.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“That is none of your business.”
“There’s nothing I can do to stop you.”
“I suppose you’re right about that, eh.” His cigarette flared as he took a drag. “Some of them are coming with me to Phnom Penh. I’ll look for buyers there. Some of them… will not.”
Sean looked closer at the two women lying motionless in the darkness. “What happened to them?” He staggered to his feet.
“Easy, my young friend. You are not well.”
“I’m not your friend. What happened to them?” Sean took a step closer. Then he saw the dark glistening pools surrounding their bodies, the dark, congealing stains, on their lips, on their legs, around their eyes, around every orifice, strands of their dark hair mired in sticky, congealing pools, their deathly pale flesh like alabaster in the moonlight. “What did you do?” A surge of anger rose in his throat, and his hands clenched into fists.
The warrior loomed closer.
“I did nothing to them. Go back to your bed.”
Somewhere far ahead of them, the train’s whistle cried its long, lonesome wail.
The Frenchman said, “You should go now. Go back to your friend. Enjoy what time you have left.”
“What the fuck does that mean!” Sean’s voice cracked.
An iron hand clamped over his shoulder and threw him down the aisle toward the door.
“Do not come back here.”
Sean scrambled toward the door, toward the light. He tumbled across the space between the cars, falling to his hands and knees in the flickering white glow of the hallway.
His arms could barely support his weight, but he fought to his feet and flung himself down the hallway.
In their compartment, he reached up and shook his friend. “Phil, get up!”
Phil rolled over and squinted at him. “What the fuck, man!”
“Trust me, you need to get up. We need to get the hell off this train.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Something’s wrong with me. I’m going to die if I don’t get off this train now!”
“Man, you’re not going to die, it’s just some food poisoning—”
“No, it’s worse than that. I don’t care if we have to ride a water buffalo back to Saigon.” He pulled his pack down, grabbed his sandals and began to strap them on. “Just trust me! Let’s go!”
“All right, fine. Whatever.” Phil sat up, rubbed his eyes, and began to gather his things.
“Don’t you smell that?”
“Yeah, man, I thought it was your sandwich.”
Just then, Sean noticed that their heated exchange had not disturbed the two inhabitants of the lower bunks. Ragged breathing gurgled from the dark enclosure under his bunk. The other bed was deathly silent. The light from the door fell across a whitish-yellow foot and a thick dark stain soaking the mattress. “No, it’s coming from them! And me!”
Phil stared at the dying Vietnamese man.
“Believe me now?”
Moments later, they were in the hallway. Phil shouldered his duffel bag. “What are we going to do, jump?”
Ngao’s face flashed in Sean’s mind, and he stopped. He couldn’t just leave her with the Frenchman. But the warrior could kill him and Phil both, effortlessly, and not give it a second thought. She was tied up, naked, and under guard. And Sean was not James Bond or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“What is it?” Phil asked.
“You remember the girl from the bar, Ngao?”
“You remember her name?” Phil’s eyes widened. “Yeah, I remember her.”
“She’s on the train. The Frenchman has her tied up naked in the baggage car.”
“Jesus Christ, man. What the fuck are we into?”
“I think it’s even worse than that, but I don’t know how yet.”
“If those guys have a girl chained up naked on this train, they will kill us if we fuck with them. If they can get a naked girl—”
“Seven naked girls.”
Phil rolled his eyes. “Ok, seven naked girls—onto a train, they’re probably carrying guns.”
“But we can’t just leave them.”
“We get off this train, we can contact the police. This guy is probably wanted. They can stop him before he gets over the border.”
Sean sighed. A sledgehammer was pounding on the back of his skull, and his bag felt like it weighed more than him. “OK.”
They hurried down the hallway to the end of the car, and stopped.
Phil said, “Where’s the exit door?”
A cold silent hand clamped around Sean’s heart, and his vision swam.
Phil threw his bag against the blank steel wall. “Where’s the fucking door!”
The exit door was gone, as if it had never been.
Sean grabbed Phil by the shoulder and pulled him toward the door into the next car. “Come on.”
In the next sleeper car, they found the same absence of exits. The places that had once been passenger doors were now blank empty walls. The sleeping compartment doors were all tightly closed. As they passed one, Sean spotted a spreading pool of dark blood oozing from underneath, staining the carpet.
Through three, four, five, six more sleeper cars (Had the train always been this long?) all similar, until they reached the car with the seated passengers. They stood on the threshold of a charnel house.
Decomposing corpses filled the seats with rotting flesh and spreading pools of liquefaction. Clothing and skin sloughed away in great oozing swaths, mouths hanging, tongues lolling.
Except for one man.
His face was still raised to the ceiling, teeth clenched, eyes squeezed shut, one hand pounding his cock like a jackhammer. But now his flesh was splotched and pale. Tears streamed down his face, and his hand and member were drenched in blood. The ferocity of his effort spattered droplets of blood in all directions. His head leaned against the dark window that reflected his pale tortured face back against him.
Sean leaned closer. The dark window. Outside, absolutely black. The tracks rumbled under the train’s steel wheels, but there was no countryside moving past now, no sky, no jungle. Only empty, inky blackness.
Phil grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him away.
As they opened the door to the dining car, that same rockabilly Elvis song echoed from the darkness.
“Train I ride, sixteen coaches long
Well that long black train got my baby and gone…”
The lights in the dining car were out, except for a single spare bulb gleaming behind the counter, casting solid black shadows high on the steel walls.
The drunken polic
eman still sat on his stool against the wall, and he would never move again. Nor would any of the former partiers. They all now lay in haphazard heaps of decaying flesh and bone, sprawling across tables and chairs and each other. The two lovers lay together against the far door, their bodily fluids melding in ways they would never have imagined.
To reach the far door, they would have to wade through the bodies, and then clear them away from the door.
The train whistle shrilled again, and the vibration of the rumble increased, as if it was picking up speed.
Sean grabbed Phil. “Back this way.”
They went back through three more cars with passenger seating before they once again came upon the masturbating man. The cords stood out of the side of his neck, the veins on his forehead, as he strained, yearned, frenzied for release that would never come.
Back through the cars, nine, ten, eleven, twelve coaches. Until they reached the closed black door that led into the baggage car.
Sean stopped before the door, his breathing wet and ragged, warm rivulets of blood dripping from his ears and nose. A single wracking cough sprayed blood from his lips to splatter against the center door.
He pulled open the door, stepped into the space between coaches, and the train lurched, staggering him for a moment. He glanced around at the diaphragm enclosing the empty space, keeping the outer darkness at bay. Sean could feel that darkness outside, rubbing against the train’s glossy black carapace. The dark, membranous diaphragm flexed and shifted like bat’s wings. Black veins trailed across the lighter inner surface, pulsing with… What?
He threw open the second door and stumbled inside. There was no moonlight now to light the way, only utter darkness. No sound but the CLACK CLACK CLACK of the train. He struggled to keep his massively heavy bag from dragging on the floor as he crept toward where he thought the women had been tied. He tried to visualize the layout of the car, armed only with his fuzzy memory.
He heard breathing, the slither of hair, the catch of breath. His hand searched the black until it brushed against soft, velvety strands. She flinched away. He leaned forward and buried his nose in her hair. How could he ever forget that scent?
“Ngao,” he whispered, “Shhh.” She didn’t speak a word of English. He just prayed that she didn’t make any noise. He knelt beside her and felt his way behind her, looking for her bonds. His touch stopped at the strands around her wrists. They felt like exactly the same material as the cargo netting. Warm and pulsing, growing out of the steel floor like ropy tentacles. He tried his strength against them but there was no way.
A metallic snick.
“Here,” said the Frenchman, “Try this.”
Something clattered across the floor and slid against Sean’s leg. A switchblade knife. He snatched up the knife and began to saw at the girl’s bonds. The blade was sharp and sliced deep through the strange sinew. In seconds, he had freed her hands; he went to work on her ankles.
“Just what do you hope to accomplish, my young friend?” the Frenchman said. A match flared, splashing orange across the Frenchman’s craggy face.
“Getting out of here,” Sean mumbled, sawing.
“You will not survive long enough to get out of here. You have already been claimed. You can hardly stand.”
“Why aren’t you sick?” Sean spat at him.
“I ride in the belly of this beast. We have a deal, you see. I help feed it, and it gives me safe passage, away from the eyes of the authorities.”
Sean stopped sawing, his mind reeling. “How…?”
“Once upon a time, after the Americans left, this rail line shipped countless South Vietnamese north for ‘re-education.’ I’ve lived in this part of the world for thirty years, and I can tell you that Vietnamese are some of the most cruel and ingenious little fucks to ever walk this planet. For years the Communists consolidated their control. That kind of suffering, that much pain, it has power, you see. It festers. It does things. It begets more. This train has… brothers, I suspect. In Germany, Russia, China.”
“Don’t they know about it? The Vietnamese government?”
Sean heard the Frenchman’s smile. “Of course they do. They fed you to it, just like all the other ‘undesirables.’ Last night, you picked up a local girl in a bar and humiliated her, caused trouble for her family. And you’re an American. This train is, shall we say, like a bastard step-child they don’t know how to rid themselves of. It just keeps coming round. So they use it to throw away their trash. The old, the diseased, the foreign trouble-makers. Power takes its due. And there is always a higher power. Every time I ride this train, I must give up some of my cargo, a tribute, shall we say. But it is a fair trade, no?”
“Where’s this train going? How do you get off?”
“Ah, my young friend, that is part of the deal. My friends and I are getting off at Nha Trang. But this train doesn’t stop, you see. It, too, must give up its due at the last stop.”
“To what? Where?”
“To even darker powers, of course.”
“Just let us go! Just me and Phil and her. Please.”
“Why on earth would I do that?”
“Because you’re a human being, right? This train is full of dead people now. Isn’t it… full?”
“It doesn’t work that way, you see. Your fate was sealed from the moment you set foot on board. I don’t make the rules.” Sean sensed his crocodile smile. “I just take advantage of them.”
“Just me and Phil and her. We don’t matter to your plans. We can’t stop you.”
“My young friend, you’re dead already! And I don’t think getting off is an option for your friend any longer.”
A flashlight beam shattered the darkness, and Sean blinked away tears. The Frenchman shined his pen light toward the towering warrior a few steps behind Sean. The machete in the warrior’s tattooed fist dripped dark crimson.
Sean lunged toward the Frenchman. The flashlight tumbled to the floor, and in the dancing beam he caught a glimpse of a surprised expression wiping away the smirk on the Frenchman’s dry lips. Sean was surprised at how easily the point of switchblade went into the soft, perfumed throat. A choked gurgle, and Sean shoved in the point until it jammed against skull and spine, then he ripped backward and tore out the Frenchman’s throat like he was cutting a bundle of cords.
The women shrieked and dragged themselves away as the warmth spattered over them.
He felt the weight of the warrior bearing toward him, imagined the machete upraised to take his head.
As the Frenchman’s body fell like a sack of fresh meat, lungs spewing blood from the front of his throat, Sean felt the hard bulge of a pistol in a shoulder holster under the jacket. Sean followed it down, snatching at the butt of the pistol.
The pen light spun in place on the floor. He seized it and shined the dazzling white beam full in the face of the looming brute. The warrior flinched and blinked for a moment, shielding his eyes. Then Sean switched off the light, jerked the pistol free of its holster and slid away into the darkness away from the Frenchman’s body. Spots danced in his vision. The butt of the pistol was warm and hard in his hand. He traced the steel lines with his fingers. An automatic, 9mm or .45. Thanks, Dad. His thumb found the safety, and he eased the bolt back to chamber a round.
The machete blade whistled through empty air four paces away as the warrior flailed for Sean’s head.
Sean raised the pistol, popped the flashlight beam on, bathing the warrior like a deer in the headlights. He squeezed the trigger, and the pistol bucked with white thunder. The warrior staggered once, then lunged toward the light. The pistol exploded into a white-hot hail of bullets, and the warrior’s head exploded into wet gobbets strobing in the muzzle flash.
Sean didn’t know how long he stood there, gasping for breath, trying to ignore the overpowering coppery taste of his own blood.
Until the train whistled, a long, screeching howl.
“Let us go!” Sean screamed at darkness. “You have your due! Le
t us go!” He broke into a fit of wet coughing.
A rhythmic shiver ghosted up his spine, like cold fingers playing a tune on a dead keyboard, a cacophonic vibration like a thousand violins grating in unison. And suddenly he knew it all, felt it all. The train, the scores of dead souls, being digested on their way to their final destination.
He walked over to where Phil lay dead on the floor, his throat slashed to the spine, his head surrounded by a pool of blood. “I’m sorry, buddy.” Somehow the pool of blood was shrinking, not spreading. He spotted movement at the edges of the body and looked closer. Hundreds of bluish-purple tendrils like slimy worms as thick as fingers writhed raw from the steel floor and burrowed into the body, pulsing, sucking, throbbing. Sean stepped away.
Yes, the train would let him go, would let Ngao go and all the other girls, just as it had agreed with the Frenchman. And Sean could live as well. There was only a small price.
Morning light suddenly shone through one of the unpainted windows. The girls staggered to their feet, whispering among themselves, glancing at Sean, rubbing circulation back into their wrists and trying to cover their nakedness.
They looked at him in the feeble, grayish-golden glow, and the train began to slow.
He went through his bag, dug out handfuls of clothes, and threw them to the girls. He did not know what the Frenchman had done with their clothes, and probably neither did they. “Put these on.”
By the time they were dressed, the train was nearly stopped. Ngao looked striking in his yellow Hawaiian shirt, and her eyes were big and confused. The train ground to a halt, and the door to the baggage car slid open, revealing a small, lonesome train platform, little more than a deserted slab of concrete beside the tracks in the middle of the jungle. But the lone, rusting tin sign was written in Vietnamese, not Khmer.
“Go,” he told them, “Get out.”
They did, shuffling, sniffling, limping away as he stood in the open door. Ngao only looked over her shoulder once.
Then the baggage car door slid closed.
He was starting to feel better. Perhaps if he could enjoy himself in Phnom Penh for a few days, he might be able to forget the things he had agreed to do.