“Do you think something’s wrong?” Peggy asked.
I held up my hand, then reached into my jacket pocket for my glasses. Once I had them on I could see that the gate across the tracks was open.
“Get off the tracks,” I said, looking back at them. “Come on, now.”
“Is there a train coming?” Peggy asked as she stepped carefully over the rail. “Don’t they blow a, you know, make a noise? So you know they’re coming?”
“Yeah, they do,” I said. “But maybe . . . ” I waited for a minute, glancing back and forth between the station and the woods. Suddenly my pack felt very, very heavy.
“What are we going to do?” Sophie asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t understand—they wouldn’t open the gate except to let a train through, but that’s not long enough for . . . ” I turned to look at Peggy and Sophie. “You said your train stopped when they threw you off. How long?”
“I don’t know,” Peggy said, frowning. “Maybe ten, fifteen minutes.”
“Which way was it going?”
“To San Diego,” she said. “Why does it matter?”
“I think somebody else got on that train when you got off,” I said. I lifted my glasses and rubbed my eyes. “Not on the train, but hanging onto the outside. They must have seen that the trains could get through the fence.”
“So what happened to the Rangers?” Sophie asked. “Do you think they’re all . . . ?”
“I don’t know. I guess they might not bother closing the gate if the station was already compromised . . . ” I took a breath, folded my glasses and put them back in my jacket pocket. “We have to get to their radio so that we can tell someone about Sophie, get her out of here.”
“Couldn’t we just stay here, wait for the next train?” Peggy asked. “I’m sure if you explained . . . ”
I shook my head. “The trains that stop here don’t let people on,” I said. “You’re right about one thing, though. You’re staying here, but she has to come with me.”
“No,” Sophie said. She squeezed Peggy’s hand in hers. “I, I’ll come. I’m not scared, but Grandma has to come too.”
“I’m fine,” Peggy said. “That’s just, my mind is fine. A whistle, the word I was looking for is whistle. There, you see? You just forget things sometimes, at my age. Doesn’t that ever happen to you?”
“What did we have for breakfast, Peggy?” I asked.
“Berries,” she said.
“What kind of berries?”
She rolled her eyes. “It was . . . well, summer berries. What you pick in the summer, in brambles with, with prickers.” She looked away and then back at me: her face was red, her eyes glistening.
“There’s a camp just a few hours that way,” I said, pointing the way we had come and off to the left. “You’ll be all right there, and I’ll check on you when I can.”
“No,” Peggy said. “I’m not going. Not until she’s safe.”
For a moment I looked at the two of them standing together, then shrugged. “Fine,” I said. I slid open the bolt of my rifle, making sure there was a cartridge in the chamber. “Let’s go, then, while we’ve still got some light.”
“Should we wait till morning?” Peggy asked.
I shook my head. I had seen too many shapes moving in the bushes, heard too many footsteps and rustling branches. I chewed my lip for a moment, guessing at the distance between the gate and the station—a hundred yards, maybe? “Let’s get through that gate as fast as we can—I don’t want to get caught in a choke point.”
“I haven’t seen any—”
“They’re there,” I said, trying to keep my voice too low for Sophie to hear. “Maybe a lot of them.”
As we neared the gate I fought the urge to run: I could hear the end-stagers in the woods around us, feel their eyes on us as we passed through the narrow space. The fence around the Ranger compound was solid steel, with razor wire along the top to keep end-stagers from climbing over it. The open gate, just wide enough for a train to pass through, let us see glimpses of the other side but concealed much more. I slowed my pace as we reached the gate, letting my finger curl around the trigger of my rifle.
Sophie reached the gate and broke into a trot as she passed through, moving out of view. I caught up with her just as she ran into a man in dark clothes who had been moving in front of the gate on the other side. For a moment I thought he might be a Ranger, until I saw his white hair; he turned toward me and opened his mouth to reveal two rows of teeth, like a shark’s, perfectly white and gleaming.
I raised the barrel of my rifle, getting ready to shoot and run—the sound of the shot would surely bring all the other end-stagers from the woods—but before I could fire Sophie reached into the pocket of her windbreaker, pulled out the biscuit she had saved from that morning, and held it out to the man.
For a moment he just looked at her, his double teeth grinning obscenely; then he took the biscuit and began to chew it carefully, barely able to get it in his mouth. I stood there, watching as he chewed contentedly on the biscuit, and I saw that he was wearing dentures over his own teeth, which were sliding in and out of his mouth each time he moved his jaw.
After a few moments, Peggy tugged on my sleeve and led me away. The cabin was about fifty yards off the tracks, the firewatch tower a short distance beyond that. Once we had passed the chewing end-stager we broke into a run, crossing the distance between the tracks and the cabin as quickly as we could.
The outside of the cabin was not much different than it had been before it was repurposed—there was not much you could do to make a wall of stacked logs more defensible—but the windows and doors had been replaced with shatterproof Plexiglas and steel, the wood-shingle roof long gone in favor of aluminum. I used my momentum to launch myself up onto the cement platform that stood before the door, the only reminder of the screened porch that had once covered the whole front of the building. Peggy hesitated as she neared it and stumbled; Sophie slowed to help her, the two of them awkwardly levering themselves up onto the platform with their hands.
“Stay close,” I said. “We’re just going to find the radio and get out.”
“Don’t you know where it is?” Sophie asked.
“I’ve never been inside,” I said. I took a step back, raised my rifle and waved Peggy forward. “Push it open, then step away.”
“What if it’s locked?” Peggy said.
“Then we knock very politely and ask the Rangers to let us in,” I said, glancing back at the gate.
Sophie grabbed my arm as her grandmother stepped past us, putting a hand on the door handle and turning it tentatively. Peggy leaned into the heavy door, pushing it with her shoulder, and as she did I moved my sights off her and onto the opening doorway. Once she had it fully open I stepped in and then waved the others in after me. When they were both inside, Peggy released the door and it swung back, slamming shut with a heavy thud that made me wince.
The door led into a small foyer that opened into a larger room to the left. I stepped into the room and swung my rifle at the other three corners. Fading light from the window showed a brown leather couch, much-patched with silver duct tape, facing a fireplace on the far wall that held some smoldering logs: in front of it was a wagon-wheel coffee table, its glass top lying in shards on the floor all around, and an eyeless moose head hung on the wall above.
Peggy held her hand to her mouth. “That smell . . . ” she said.
“They’ve been here,” I said. An open doorway in the wall to our right led to a hallway, but it was too dark within to see anything. “Let’s hope they ran out of toys to play with.”