Shango shrugged. “I’ll take my chances.” No surprise there, given all he’d said and done.
Shango went off to gather supplies for the journey, leaving Mama Diamond to the privacy of her thoughts.
It had been a busy twenty-four hours, that it had, with many a curious visitor. Soon enough, Shango would be gone and the ghost town would settle back around Mama Diamond like a shroud, with even less in it to remind her she was any different from the parched wood and the dead earth.
Would she ever know what end of the line Shango reached, what conclusion he arrived at? Probably not.
People leave you, and possessions, too.
Mama Diamond walked stiffly to the front of her shop, the lowering sun casting hall-of-mirror reflections off the mostly empty cases. Her fingers trailed the cracked ivory of the mammoth tusk atop the counter.
She had armored herself against the world in tourmaline and agate, morganite and black opal, just as Shango had once armored himself in a black suit and coiled earpiece. But it was the same difference, really. The world stripped away your armor, that was just how life ran…until it ran out.
And whether that whisper came here in Burnt Stick or somewhere else along the tracks was not for Mama Diamond to say. It was just for her to say with whom she might be.
Sometimes you reach the crossroads….
She mulled over these thoughts until Shango reappeared, lugging cans of vegetables and beans, and more bottled water.
“You have transportation?” Mama Diamond asked.
Shango nodded. “Rail bike.”
“Rail what?”
“Come on. I’ll show you.”
Rail bikes, Shango explained, were an obscure form of sporting bicycle, used by hobbyists in Europe and America where abandoned railways lines remained in place. The bike’s modified wheels sat on one rail; an outrigger supported two more passive wheels against the opposite rail. A bicycle modified to fit a railway track, basically. He had not been able to scavenge a true rail bike, but had modified a quality mountain bike in a metalwork shop.
He had ridden this device up to the depot last night, after Stern had gone and while Mama Diamond was sleeping, and concealed it north of town. The bike was an ugly assemblage of aluminum tubes, ungainly seeming.
“Going over those hills, you have some pretty steep grades ahead of you,” Mama Diamond said. “Then you’ll hit the Laramie Range.”
Shango shrugged.
“And no potable water for a long way. Nor food.”
“I’ll manage.”
“You want company?”
That provoked a surprised look. “Ma’am, much as I appreciate-”
“I’m serious. If there’s a chance of getting back my property…” Without benefit of a vocabulary of feelings for a good many years, Mama Diamond thought it best to leave it at that.
“I’m sorry,” Shango said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but at your age-”
“I thought maybe I could help. Well, never mind. You heading up into the hills tonight?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll see how far you get.”
“What?”
“I mean, good luck.”
“Right. Thank you,” Shango said. “I don’t meet a lot of decent people, not these days, not since…”
He trailed off.
“Since the world ended,” Mama Diamond supplied.
At dusk, while the sky was still a vivid and radiant blue, Mama Diamond watched Shango peddle away from Burnt Stick on his ridiculous rail bike. He looked, Mama Diamond thought, like one of those shabby bicycle-riding bears out of some Eastern European circus.
Mama Diamond suppressed a smile.
Then she walked back to her shop-to the makeshift stalls behind the shop, in back of the empty chicken coops.
Achy as she was, exhausted as she was, she knew it would take her some time to saddle and pack the horses. They needed to be fed and watered, too. She had neglected them today. “Settle down, Marsh,” she told the black stallion. “Settle down, Cope,” she told the mare.
Stars filled the sky, gemlike in their indifferent glitter, and the still air grew colder around her.
NINE
A guy could get killed this way, Inigo thought, and actually laughed out loud. Not that anyone could hear him over the lunatic shriek of that whistle.
But then a guy-a completely human one, at least-could never have done this at all.
The blasted-rock tunnel walls were twisting serpentine now and rushing at Inigo with alarming speed; in this center-of-the-earth blackness, a normal kid wouldn’t even have been able to see them, let alone press his funky-ass self tight to the cold metal of this impossible train.
The night train, speeding straight out of hell.
Inigo flattened himself along the surface of the roof as the car banged and rattled in its headlong flight, his big, bony fingers with their huge knuckles gripping onto the front edge of the car with all the strength and determination he could muster.
A sudden sharp curve hit him with centrifugal force like a blow and he was nearly thrown clear off. He clutched wildly and managed to pull himself back on top, gasping as the numbing chill air pummeled him.
Trust the Leather Man to come up with a thing like this. He was always full of surprises, and pure mean dangerous, too. You had to do your damnedest to keep on his good side (not that there really was one…). But Papa Sky tried his level best to keep the big cat honest, if such a concept truly existed anymore in this topsy-turvy life.
Still, as Inigo’s dear departed dad always said, When someone offers you work, you take it.
Of course, his mother had always said wear your rubbers, and look both ways before you cross the street, and don’t ever do anything that might cause you to wake up one morning seriously stone-cold dead.
But then, she was gone, and this freaky world was here, and he was forced to do a lot of things differently.
His teeth chattered from the cold and the vibration, and he fought to still them. To distract himself, he ruminated on what function this channel through the rock must have held before the Storm-certainly not a subway tunnel, not in this part of the country. No, it must’ve been a mine, and the narrow tracks sliding beneath laid for ore cars years and years back, maybe even when Custer and his marauding blue boys came whooping through these parts.
Papa Sky had told him true: The hell train was an adaptable beast, able to negotiate narrow gauge and wide, gobbling up the miles as it drove through the belly of the earth. Because not every place could be gotten to via the shortcut portals that some could open between here and there; sometimes you could only get approximately from one place to another, and then you had to cover ground the old-fashioned way, foot by foot and yard by yard, and so you needed freight cars to haul the cargo…and carry the crew to load it.
Hanging on for dear life, his long, wiry arms aching like a sonofabitch from the effort and the cold, Inigo could feel the skin of the train under him vibrate from more than its furious speed. It pulsed and moved as if alive, with a creepy, itchy feeling he could discern even through thick layers of jacket and sweatshirt and pants. Like black beetles surging over each other in their insatiable, endless combinations.
Shuddering and groaning like an irritated sandworm, the train canted upward as the tunnel began a steep climb under the pitiless miles of rock. The air was rank, and Inigo coughed raggedly, his throat burning from the raw smoky fumes roiling at him from the front of the train. He spat aside a phlegmy mass, intently determined not to have it blow back in his face. The train bounced abruptly and he bit his tongue, cried out in surprise and tasted blood.