The three other trains started rolling, backing up, trying to escape. If they had succeeded in moving any length of distance, they would have crashed through and broken some portion of the chain, but already they were dying, stalling, stopping. The closest lost its substance, lightening into a shadow, then faded into the surrounding night. The engine and passenger cars next to it melted like ice cream, the black mold that was this railroad's essence seeping into the rails and ties beneath it. The train made from bodies, the one he suspected was the true train, the father of all the others, got a little bit farther along its tracks, but the figures that made up its components were wailing in agony and gnashing their teeth, squirming about in obvious torment. Those who were the wheels went first, collapsing, falling sideways off the tracks, causing everyone above to disengage and revert to their normal shapes, hundreds of bodies raining about and sliding down the slight slope. They, too, were covered with mold, and the mold melted off them, oozing into the ground. Beneath the black fungus, the dead were little more than ragged corpses, and in a matter of seconds they came apart, as though it was the mold that had held them together individually as well as collectively. Suddenly bones were everywhere, and Dennis saw one skinny Native American man, grinning and chanting, kick a skull across the ground as though it were a soccer ball.
This all happened simultaneously. His own train stayed intact a little longer, perhaps because he was touching it-either drawing power from it or putting power into it-but finally it, too, succumbed, breaking into pieces as though the bolts that had held it together had all disappeared. The panel he'd been palming dissolved beneath his hand, turning into a powder that felt like crumbling dirt, and he wiped it on his jeans.
Other men were kicking bones now, and Dennis felt a small flash of anger. That wasn't right. He looked up, and the figure towering above them seemed more solid now, as though the demise of the trains had granted it strength. It grinned at him, and his anger faded. The face of the thing was still hideous and terrifying, but, damn it, its smile was infectious, and as creepy as it might seem to someone looking on, Dennis stared up at the spirit and grinned back.
As a park ranger, Henry had to be familiar with a host of Native American beliefs, particularly those held by the older lost cultures who had settled the Southwest and left their mark upon the land in the form of ruins, pueblos, drawings and carvings. But despite the rumors and suspicions concerning his own ethnicity, he had never really felt kinship with any of those beliefs.
He still didn't.
He was like a foreign visitor here, but he could not fail to recognize the power and efficacy of what had just happened. Coming together, holding hands, chanting the shamanistic words, had not only exorcised the shadows that had been plaguing them; it had somehow made the trains either disappear or fall apart. There was no doubt in his mind that, given more time, those locomotives would have drained dry every man here and gone on to kill who knew how many others over who knew how many years, the Chinese dead cutting a broad swath across the land in their quest for vengeance. Would white America even have known how to handle such a scenario? Would police and other law enforcement agencies have been able to figure out that there was something supernatural afoot, or would they have doggedly continued looking at everything in a literal fashion, refusing to see associations, assuming all of the deaths were random and unconnected? It was impossible to tell, but it was a moot point anyway. The trains had not progressed to the next level.
They'd been sent back to hell or wherever it was they belonged.
Henry looked down. The tracks were glowing beneath his feet, glowing, not white, yellow, blue, green or any of the other colors associated with luminescence, but black, the gray steel rails radiating a jet darker than obsidian and somehow sharper than any hue was meant to be. He wondered if, from above, the tracks formed some sort of pattern. He looked up.
And saw a face.
It was a terrible visage that looked down upon the scene below it with a mixture of approval and disgust.
The spirit of the land, he thought instantly, but it was such a stupid cliche that he pushed it out of his mind.
His shoe felt hot, as though the section of railroad tie touching it were made of lava, and he jumped aside, finding sandy ground, trying not to touch any of the tracks. Other men were hotfooting it, too, some of them crying out in pain.
The tracks disappeared the same way they'd come in, sinking back into the ground; only this time, Henry noticed, they seemed to disintegrate as they submerged, not going under the dirt but becoming part of it, as though they had been conjured forth from native elements and were reverting to their natural state.
Henry looked up again at the face in the sky and saw that it was more than just a face. There was a body as well, although its components were parts of the surrounding landscape, which made it difficult to see. It was a creature of some sort. A monster, he wanted to say, but that was not right. This was something to which he felt connected, and he found himself thinking of all of those spirits and desert gods the old tribes had worshipped and to whom they had often appealed for assistance. He'd always assumed such stories were the way a primitive people would explain natural phenomena they did not understand, but for the first time he found himself wondering if there were not more things under heaven and earth . . .
Wes clapped him on the shoulder, grinned at him. "It's over, man. I think that's it."
"I think so, too," Henry said. He pointed up at the sky, intending to show Wes the creature towering above them, to ask whether he knew what it was, whether it was some sort of native deity or earth spirit that had been conjured by their chanting. He had the feeling that it was something else entirely, that they had not conjured it but rather that it had brought them to this place. "What do you think-?" he began. But the figure was gone.
By the time Rossiter arrived, it was ending. He saw only the thing in the sky and the black tracks sinking into the ground and those nearly made him turn tail and run like a pussy. He was thankful to have missed the action this time, and he could tell from the body language of the agents surrounding him that they felt the same. They stood on the hillock next to their cars, and tried to make sense of the chaos in front of them. No one said a word, and Rossiter realized that the other men were afraid to do so. They were silent out of deference. He was the expert here, he was the boss, and the knowledge made him stand taller.
He looked out at the tremendous gathering, doing his level best not to glance upward and see that moonlit monster face. It was impossible to judge the size of the crowd in the darkness, but there was a sea of bodies out there. It looked like one of those marches on Washington. Many of the men seemed to have been holding hands, and that seemed odd. Was there some sort of religious element here?
He didn't know, but he'd find out soon enough.
Rossiter breathed deeply, thought he smelled smoke beneath the dust. And mildew.
What the hell was Saldana doing? he wondered. The other agent hadn't checked in at the appointed time, and that had already been-Rossiter consulted his watch-a half hour ago. He wanted to believe that it was because the man had forgotten, a lapse for which Rossiter would happily chew out his ass, but until that point, Saldana had been as regular as clockwork.
Something had happened in Bear Flats.