I don’t need this shit, he thought fiercely. But then in his mind’s eye he saw the Girl in her glowing solemnity, the dancer, Christina, and his rage quieted.
Even so, to be able to ride inside like a regular person, to sink into plush seats, or belly up to some nachos in the dining car…
But those inside this train were far from regular.
Which was the whole point of his riding on the outside.
It was the only way he wouldn’t be detected by his tweaked brothers within, the ones so like him in appearance but so alien in mind, with their white Necco-wafer eyes, gray grub skin, needle teeth…and major Bad Attitude.
He’d seen a pack of them let loose on a bull once, and they’d enveloped it like a school of piranha, slashing it to pieces as it screamed, devouring it before it was dead.
That little Viewmaster reel of 3D images in his mind had given him nightmares for weeks.
And he looked just like one of them.
So why was he different? Because he was twelve, not fully grown? No, that couldn’t be all of it.
Maybe it was because there were variations in the breed; though, clearly, you still needed to be some kind of weirdo outsider to become one in the first place. Inigo knew he’d always been most comfortable keeping more or less to himself; he’d never fitted in, never felt like other folks.
And so now he wasn’t. It was some cosmic kind of justice, or at least a rebalancing. Assuming that there were others like him, that not every other grunter in the universe was a ravening SOB.
He’d sure like to meet those guys, if only for variety….
But regardless of that, he knew down to his gnarly gray toes that if his fellow grunters on the Midnight Special realized he was there, they’d tear him up just like that bull. It got into their minds, the Big Bad Thing, did stuff there, twisted them to its will, made the nasty ones even nastier.
It hadn’t gotten into his mind, though, maybe because of the Leather Man, or Papa Sky, or the Dancer Girl. Because maybe he was under their protection…
Abruptly, the train rippled like muscles on a big cat stretching, and it began to shift, to take on a more complicated shape, with all sorts of black protrusions. His fingers felt the front of the roof edge rise up into an ornate lip ahead of him.
The train was picking up speed now, a holy terror. The inhuman screech of the whistle changed timber, not echoing in the open passage anymore, but flattening out as if screaming toward a hard, blank wall.
Papa Sky had told him of this, had warned it would be the worst part, and Inigo scrunched down further, pressed his head behind the lip of the car, exhaling every last bit of breath and holding it.
The whistle howled its rage at the universe, shrieked louder and louder until it seemed it had leeched every sound out of the entire planet.
There was an impact like nothing Inigo had ever known. Big clots of earth blasted back at him, bouncing off the lip, smashing like rocks caroming off each other in an asteroid belt.
It took every ounce of his will to hold on, to not be swept away. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes and focused every bit of attention on his fingertips, on keeping his hands tight to the shifting black metal.
The train was actually erupting from the earth.
Then Inigo felt the kiss of the cold night air, and the train came down flat and hard on wide rusty tracks and kept right on going, screaming like a banshee through the night and over the flat prairie land.
“Welcome to Iowa,” the boy said to nothing and no one in particular-blessedly still alive, even if he wasn’t normal or regular or human.
And he laughed out loud for the second time that night.
Jeffrey Arcott walked westward, away from the town and up toward the lip of the valley and the flatland beyond the highway, where a subdivision had been under construction when the Change came. He followed a dead-end crescent, the half-built houses on each side of him skeletal and black in the light of a rising moon. Beyond the skeleton houses there was a stand of scrub woods grown back since the fires of 1978, low and patchy wild oaks and knee-deep brambles. In the summer you could find wild mulberries here, but the vines had withered with the hard onset of coming winter.
Near the top of the slope, in the clearance under an unused microwave relay tower, he paused and looked back at the town.
The frigid wind bit through his jeans, curled in along the neck of his leather jacket, but he felt powerful here, invisible in the shadows, gazing from a height at the town he had almost single-handedly resurrected from the nightmare of the Change.
He checked his watch, a retro Hamilton Futura with cut garnets set into the rim at precise intervals. It was nearly ten o’clock, almost curfew, power-saving time. He wrapped his arms around himself, cold, waiting.
Time. He imagined generators-his generators, inlaid with quartzite dodecahedrons, coils wrapped on ruby cores-slowing, stopping, their hum diminishing to silence. Bedtime for the dynamos. Ah: there.
The grid of streetlights, the whole valley full of fairy-light, gave way to darkness.
Darkness and moonlight and bitter, unseasonable cold. Last year at this time, he had walked the hills in the kind of cool his mom had called “sweater weather,” listening to the clicking of autumn insects. They were silent now, pounced upon by this stealthy, unnatural winter.
The moon and stars took charge of the sky as Arcott turned away, toward the greater darkness beyond this low ridge. To the old railway tracks alongside Willow Neck Creek, where there should have been nothing at all; but where, just now, he anticipated-or could he actually hear? — the ancient tracks rattling to an unaccustomed presence.
His own private special delivery was out there, hurtling through the night, off in the darkness, still unseen.
He had stepped into the shadow of the trees along Philosopher’s Walk to avoid being seen on the way here. “Keeping himself to himself,” as his father might have said.
Because he was ashamed?
No. Because there were some things that could not yet be divulged, even to Siegel, even to Wade, his confidants, his lieutenants, his good hands right and left.
Sometimes research had to proceed in secret, or at least with due regard for security. They could know everything else about the operation, but people couldn’t always interpret certain facts correctly.
At least for now, at least until the Radio was on the air…
He followed a footpath to the old concrete railway piers. The trees here were bare of leaves. The railroad stretched toward the dark west like a dry river. Moonlight glinted fitfully on the rust-eaten rails.
He caught himself whistling a tune, something from his father’s jazz collection, a half-forgotten Chet Baker song. Bad idea. The sound would draw attention to himself. Better to remain anonymous, even in the empty night.
The cracked concrete piers stood canted at the trackside. These had been loading bays for the gypsum plant that had been abandoned and torn down forty years ago. The slabs, ten feet by fifteen and half as tall as a man, must have been too massive to cart away. Arcott selected the nearest one, hauled himself up onto its abrasive surface, brushed away a layer of fallen leaves, and sat cross-legged. He shivered. His denim pants and cowhide jacket were feeble armor against this graveyard chill.
He saw the train far out on the flatlands. It seemed to grow more substantial, more material, as it approached. Such was the nature of things.
Arcott stood up. He hated these encounters. They were unavoidable, obligations of iron necessity, like the church services his father had dragged him to every week, fundamentally unpleasant.