This Dark Earth (32 page)

“You think we should be headknocking?” he asks. “Maybe
we should just push them back onto the others and not kill them.”

“Huh? Why?”

“They aren’t dragging their fallen away, that’s for sure.” He sets down his hammer, goes to the hopper, and gets an armful of logs and brings it near the furnace. It’s really getting hot in here, and I’ll need water soon before I pass out from dehydration. My back, ass crack, crotch, armpits, and chest are all sodden with sweat under my armor, which is about the same as wearing a bear suit, without the bear head, if not as bulky. I really should have on my helmet.

I’m becoming inured to death. Even the possibility of my own.

I peek again out the window at the ladder side. A shambler that had been working his way up senses me and reaches up a hand to grab my face. He falls back, on top of his compadres, and stays there. Other shamblers bat at him, and he floats off on a sea of arms until he hits a low-density area ten yards off and falls, finally, to the ground.

So they
are
dragging the fallen out of the way.

“No, let’s keep braining the damned things. I just saw one surf the mosh pit. And it’d be a shame not to kill them when our position is so superior.”

He snorts, most likely at
superior
.

I look at him, and he gives a terse nod. Then he pulls his canteen and drinks, shakes it, and hands it to me. I follow suit.

It’s been close
to three hours, and the gauge is at seventy now. I can see wisps of steam coming from loose solders in the pipes snaking toward the front of the locomotive. One blackish-red pipe leading to the roof and a string-activated whistle is positively bubbling.

“We’ve got some pressure.” I rub my jaw. There’s stubble there, and for a moment, I’d kill for a shot of Joblo’s moonshine. Okay, maim. “A little more than half the pressure that’s needed to roll.”

Klein peers at the marker on the gauge.

“Those gauges are nearly two hundred years old. No manufacturer’s marks for recommended level. Think the red mark could be for maximum pressure? I mean, it’s in red, for chrissake. We could be sitting in the sweet spot.”

“No way to know for sure.”

“Other than crank the handle.”

“If it’s under pressure, cranking the handle could—”

“Not do shit.”

“We’d lose pressure.”

“I’m willing to risk it.”

“It might blow a gasket. A solder. A seam. We’d be dead in the water.”

Klein grimaces, turns, and lashes out with his hammer. With a loud crunch, another zombie skull distends, splits, and sends ichor flying. The zed slumps, hangs on the sill a moment, and then flops.

“If it’s gonna bust a seam, won’t that happen even if we get to recommended pressure? Which we don’t even know?”

He’s got a point.

I go to the drive handle, grip it, and pull.

The cab lurches, shifts, and then shudders to a stop. We both spread our feet, and our hands shoot toward the cab ceiling as if we were on the New York subway.

When I get to the gauge, it reads forty.

Klein curses. “Looks like the red mark is the recommended temperature.”

“Yup. Looks like.”

By my count,
when the gauge reaches 120, I’ve brained 170 zeds. Klein says he’s at 180, but there’s not a lot of time for talking now. I’d be hard-pressed to say who’s Legolas and who’s Gimli. I’m taller and gay, so I’ll take the elf.

The locomotive is making a loud hissing mingled with the dull roar of the fire burning in the chamber. It’s starting to sound like a train.

With over a thousand shamblers struggling to climb into the cab with us—just a guesstimate—it looks a little hairy in here. Out there. Fuck, all around. We take turns stoking the fire while the other does his best to shove the bastards back on their brethren. They’re coming over the sill three, four at a time. For the moment, we’ve still got the advantage.

The boom, when it comes, is deafening, rocking us back and giving the zeds on the ledge a boost. I see a rising plume of smoke and a fireball roiling on the ridge, back up the wooded slope, in Eureka. A gas station or building went kablooey. Big time.

What the hell?

The sound of the explosion confuses the zeds, sending them into some bizarre collective spasm. The three climbing cough up strange, oily sounds, gaining some bizarre strength to pull themselves up and over the ledge. Klein lunges, headknocker out, and it glances of the shambler’s cranium, knocking him to the floor. The other dead man falls to the floor and I flail at him, but somehow can’t get a good shot at his head. He’s moving about erratically and it’s hard to give him a good braining. My arms feel like lead, heavy and dull. I’ve done this hundreds of times already in what feels like the last few moments. The shambler rises, half falling, half tottering, and smacks into me, jaws wide. I try to push him off, but he has the inexorable strength of the dead. He plants his face on my shoulder and begins to gnaw. Turns out zombie chompers work great on flesh, but not so much on Kevlar. He leaves behind a smear and a few black bits I have to assume are teeth.

I swing again and connect with his jaw, separating it from the rest of his skull, but not dislodging it from his face so that it hangs in the sack of skin that surrounds chin and cheek meat. Klein rushes at him, knocking him back. He hits the side of the engineering room and flips backward, back out into the general populace of dead.

Klein whirls and clobbers the zombie on the rail, crushing its skull. It slumps backward.

“We
cannot
let them start getting in here. Once they do, it’s all over.” He shifts, swings, crushing another noggin popping up over the railing.

“No shit,” I say. “Tell me something I don’t know. Like what the fuck was that explosion?”

He laughs. “Dap. A diversion—see?”

The mob shifts, moans, and begins to lose some cohesion. The zeds packed closest to the engine sink down, still scratching at the side of the locomotive.

“Dap!” I say. Never done this before, but I whoop and smack my thigh like I was a cowboy myself. “Dap did it!”

But Klein isn’t looking at the zeds. He’s staring at the engine. “She’s ready, Broadsword. Look at the gauge! She’s ready!” He’s yelling now, too exhausted to act cool anymore. Klein is a machine, I must say. It’s good having him with me.

“You want to do the honors?”

Klein grins and jumps at the drive handle. I move to the window and risk a look.

They’re all back on ground level now. No moshing. But the zeds that turned away because of the explosion are coming back. With the sounds the engine is making, they’ll be spilling through the windows again in no time.

“Let’s do this,” I say in my best tough-guy imitation, and I grab one of the window bars.

Klein grips the handle, depressing the latch, and slowly pulls it all the way to his chest.

The train shudders, chuffs a huge bellow of white smoke, and begins to move.

There are times
and things you can never forget. Your first kiss from someone you love. The first time you have sex. Your first broken heart.

And then there’s the first time you ride a steam locomotive through a horde of zombies.

I’d rank it up there with first kiss. Maybe even sex.

We ride north,
swaying with the movement of the train, in order to get on the North Arkansas Line that runs west to Fayetteville. There, somehow, we’ll turn south on the Arkansas Missouri Line until we hit Fort Smith, then east to Tulaville on the old Rock Island Line.

Klein turns the cab over to me, lies down on a bench, and begins snoring almost immediately.

The train takes the wide curve joining the NE Line before I know it. We’re lucky—the train points west. It very easily could have gone east and we’d be screwed.

I stand at the window, ignoring the drying ichor crusting the sill and walls, and let the wind whip my hair and blow the stench of wood smoke and the dead away.

Gauges read steady, but the water supply is dipping and I have no idea how we’ll resupply. In Westerns, there were always big wooden tanks by the stations, but I haven’t seen one since we steamed out of Eureka.

It’s hot. I drink water from the canteen and watch as deep pine forests, oak trees, and the rolling face of the Ozarks flow by, a stately procession.

I catch sight of a bear standing on its hind legs in the gloom of the wood, looking at me, watching the train, and I involuntarily raise my hand to wave, connected to the beast by some invisible thread, tenuous but distinct—the
brotherhood of the living. The bear vanishes, and I have to wonder if the creature was a figment of my sleep-starved imagination.

I stoke the fire and keep watch.

I slow the
train—moving the drive gear closer to the neutral position—when signs of the Fayetteville train yard become obvious.

Most of what I know of trains comes from living in Boston, riding the T when I was an undergraduate. And Westerns. Joblo, whose knowledge of everything mechanical is prodigious, would know exactly what to do as we approach the city.

I have to rely on my common sense.

As we come through the ruins of the city—burned shells of buildings, streets filled with derelict cars, tall grasses and saplings growing in the middle of streets—I become more conscious of the noise of the train. No use worrying. Nothing we can do about it anyway.

“When I was seventeen,” Klein says, and I jump at the sound of his voice, “I got sick of watching my mom drink herself to death.” He’s got his arms crossed behind his head, and he’s looking at the roof of the cab in a thousand-yard stare.

“So I ran away. We were living in these apartments . . . oh, pretty decent at the time, I guess. Not trying to paint it like I was living in the ghetto. Mom was pretty, but she drank and smoked, big time. And had a lot of boyfriends that kept us living pretty well.

“We argued one night. She caught me sneaking vodka out of her stash and went ballistic. I mean, yelling, screaming, and threatening to call the cops. Shithouse rat crazy, you know?”

Does he want me to respond?

A warehouse passes on the right, and suddenly there’s another set of rails running parallel to the ones we’re on. Ahead, I can see the maroon and blue boxes of shipping containers. There are fewer saplings here, and I see a few shamblers ambling around on the asphalt.

We’re definitely coming to a train yard. Here’s my plan, and it’s the best I can do: head south, try and stay on the left-hand track, if I can. It’s all I can do. I’m trained as a civil engineer, for chrissake, not an Amtrak engineer. Before the Big Turnover, my job consisted of checking the structural integrity of state bridges and the tensile strength of I beams. Monitoring construction sites and taking data back to the big brains. The closest I’ve been to a rail yard is my old electric train set.

From what I remember of that, there were switches, little toggles that made your choo-choo transfer from one track to another.

“I couldn’t figure out if she was pissed at me for sneaking her vodka because she was running low or because it was wrong. She acted like it was wrong, but . . . she was a drunk. I was furious at her for being such a hypocrite. And told her. She slapped me.”

He stops, breathes deep, and then sits up, hands on his knees. Looking ahead, I see a strange little abutment from the
track that has a sign and a long-dead light on it. And beyond it, another double rail peels off to the left.

A switch.

I put the drive handle in the neutral position, and our train slows.

“We lived right across the highway from a spur of the old Little Rock Line, so . . . after I packed my bags, I just ran across the road, crouched in the bushes, and smoked cigarettes until a train pulled in. Hopping in a container and pulling the door shut was simple.”

He sings a little snippet of song that sounds familiar but is hard to place.

“‘Train, train, take me on out of this town.’”

Klein has a deep, rich voice, like a man who’s spent years in a choir.

“That’s what I was singing when the train pulled out. Blackfoot, you know. Fuckin’ great band, Blackfoot. In my mind, I was gonna ride that bitch all the way to Memphis and visit my old girlfriend. Fuck, Broadsword, I was free. Free of my mother, free of everyone holding me back. Riding the rails.”

He stands, checks his headknocker, and picks up his shotgun.

“When the train stopped fifteen minutes later in a depot and a security guard roused me, cuffed me, and delivered me to the police . . . let’s just say I was a little disappointed.”

He laughs, and I laugh with him. It feels good.

“Switch?”

“Sure.” I turn the handle over to him. “But first I gotta—”

“Switch? I’ll do it. You cover me and stoke the fire.”

I nod, and he unbars the door, reverses, and climbs down.

“It’s pretty slimy on this side of the train,” he calls. “We really did a number on them.”

The train chuffs big breaths. No shamblers in immediate sight, but that won’t last long if we keep sitting here.

He trots over to the switch, goes to the far side, and then tugs at something I can’t see very well. He braces himself with a boot and tugs again.

The rail shunts move, and the switch flips.

When he’s back in the cab, I engage the gear and we roll.

“‘Train, train, take me on out of this town,’” he sings.

When the tracks
start taking us north, I slow the train, push the drive gear all the way opposite from me, and reverse her until we’re back to where we started from, before the switch.

A few shamblers are stumbling over tracks and shuffling between derelict railcars.

“Take your gun. Don’t bother with a headknocker,” I say.

Klein grins like I’ve just given him a birthday present.

He runs back to the switch, waits until one crusty zed gets close enough, and blows its head off. Then he sets down the gun, tugs on the switch’s handle, and the shunts slide away, disconnecting from the rails once more.

He doesn’t sing this time.

Once the train
angles south, it’s my turn to sleep. If I dream, I have no recollection of it.