He felt a pang from missing her, and he felt guilty as he tried to ignore it… because he was enjoying himself.
His companion was reticent, preoccupied to the point of gloominess. He seemed to wear a shroud of his own guilt. Todd tried to draw him into conversation as they stood side by side in the crowded engineer cab.
“Who are you?” Todd said. He had to shout over the roar of the furnace and the clatter of the train.
“I already told you.”
“Right. What is your real name?”
“None of your damn business!”
Todd brought more wood.
The train chugged along, hour after hour. Todd and Casey changed to working in shifts with the Gambotti brothers and Rex O’Keefe. As he rested, Casey Jones refused to engage in conversation. Todd sat in the dining car munching tomatoes and peeling the outer leaves of cabbages. Damn rabbit food, he thought. He longed for a thick cut of juicy steak, or even a McDonald’s hamburger, but he didn’t have much choice.
The train tracks led to Fresno and then Bakersfield, cities surrounded by sufficient agriculture that the population could feed themselves, though they had no great amounts of food to spare. Casey stopped the train only briefly to exchange news with the gathered crowds. Todd stood back and watched as they flocked to see the Steam Roller puff into the city, a black-and-scarlet icon of lost technology.
On the second day, a spur of the Southern Pacific railroad hooked west from Bakersfield, taking them toward the Los Angeles metropolis. Casey slowed, allowing Todd and Roberto Gambotti to drop to the ground and run ahead to strain at the lever that switched the track. At first Todd was afraid the switch was frozen, but after laying into the mechanism, the two men slowly muscled the track section about.
Though the boxcars were piled high with fruits and vegetables, Todd didn’t know what that amount of food would do for LA. How many millions of people lived in the huge dying city? But Casey insisted they continue, fixated. Todd didn’t try to talk him out of it. He just wanted to get to JPL.
The men rotated duty during the night. The train moved through the darkness with a hypnotic, monotonous clacking. Twice they hit something on the track, but both times it was too small to even slow their pace.
In darkness, Todd stood by the closed door of the roaring boiler. He could feel waves of heat mixed with counterpoints of cool air gusting through the windows. The moon hung overhead, shining down like a milky spotlight illuminating the silvery tracks ahead.
Exhausted from the day’s labor, Todd wrapped his knuckles around the open window. He stared into the oncoming night, and thought of Iris.
Steam Roller chugged westward, belching steam as it approached the hills around Los Angeles.
From a distance, the city looked frozen into a snapshot. The clusters of buildings grew thicker on the sharp hillsides. Squinting through the locomotive’s soot-smeared front windows, Todd could see crowds emerging from houses to stand in the streets. They squinted toward the railroad tracks as the steam engine puffed clouds into the sky. Some people ran up to the tracks and threw rocks at them, others tried to follow.
Casey Jones, standing at the engineer’s station, reveled in their reception. He hung his dark, meaty arm out the window and waved. Some waved back; many just stared. A few stones ricocheted off the metal casing. Rex O’Keefe raised his wine-filled mug in a toast at the crowd.
Uncertainty gnawed at Todd. They had barely reached the fringes of the sprawling city, yet already they saw vastly more people than had arrived to greet the train in Bakersfield. What if the mob surrounded them and rocked the train off its rails?
The dining car was stuffed with crates of food and produce, but even that much wouldn’t last a day here. It wouldn’t feed a fraction of these people, and every face held a ghost of hunger behind the eyes. Did Casey really think they could just stop the train, distribute the food in an orderly manner, and wait for the grateful men and women to bring them items for trade?
“Okay, Casey Jones,” Todd shouted into the din of the pumping locomotive, “what’s your plan?”
But the engineer just grinned at him and continued looking out at the people. Rex O’Keefe and the Gambotti brothers sat on top of the passenger car and watched as they drank their wine.
In the stillness of a city without traffic, the sound of Steam Roller carried for miles. People lined up on the embankment to watch the train roll by, but Casey continued, pushing ahead until the outlying residential areas dwindled again, and they approached a dirtier industrial section of the city. Going still slower, the train pushed aside debris and wrecks of old cars piled up on the tracks.
Todd looked up. The sky was crystal blue and clear. He could see for miles. “I’ll bet the air of Los Angeles hasn’t been this clean in over a century!” he said. “I guess the petroplague can’t be all that bad.”
Near Pasadena they passed ugly abandoned gravel quarries with mounds of crushed rock and dirt eroding away. Tall metal chutes and rock conveyors stood like pieces from a giant erector set beside hulking dump trucks. The San Gabriel mountains rose sharp and monolithic behind them, grayish with summer.
Steam Roller approached a cluster of warehouses, sheet-metal factories, and industrial-park buildings about the size of airplane hangers—many of which stood black and gutted from recent fires. Delivery spurs split from the main railway line like spiderwebs between the large buildings.
Casey slowed the locomotive as they started into the warehouse complex. Todd saw tongues of brownish-black smoke curling into the air ahead. It make him uneasy; things seemed too quiet….
They rounded a curve and saw three wrecked cars on the railroad tracks. Beneath the hulks blazed a bonfire of scrap wood.
“Whoa boy!” Todd screamed. He reached to pull the emergency brake but grabbed the pull cord for the steam whistle instead, which let out a shriek loud enough to rattle the empty buildings.
Casey Jones bellowed and hauled back on the emergency brake lever. The driving wheels of the locomotive locked. Sparks flew from the metal rails as the Steam Roller tried to swallow its momentum in only a few feet. Rex O’Keefe yelped from the rear.
Todd lost his balance and slammed into the hot front plate of the boiler. He felt his skin sizzle, and he scrambled backward, wincing with pain.
Casey squeezed his eyes shut as if in silent prayer as he threw his weight behind the brake. The wheels made a groaning sound. The boxcars behind the train crunched as they tried to stop, but the locomotive slammed like a cannonball into the wrecked automobiles.
One of the hulks, a red Volvo, was tossed into the air and fell back on its roof. The other two cars tangled in the Steam Roller’s cowcatcher. One rode up to smash the front window of the engineer’s cab. Chunks of burning wood scattered in all directions like embers caught in a draft.
The boiler hissed as Casey Jones swung down from the engineer’s cab and worked his way through the wreckage to see what damage the automobiles had done.
Todd hand throbbed from where he had burned it on the furnace door. He shook his hand, then sucked on the dirty ball of his left thumb where the burn was worst.
The large industrial park was silent, even more so than the rest of the world. A few seagulls spiraled over two of the largest warehouses—
An arrow clattered against the window of the engineer’s compartment right next to Todd’s head.