Captain Quad (39 page)

Will's earlier unease came oiling back, beading him in a rank, unpleasant sweat, which the night instantly chilled. For no apparent reason, he found himself wanting to leave the plant. Just pack it in. Never mind punching out or changing back into his civvies or saying good-bye to Sully. Just go. So strong was this impulse, he was twenty yards past the train before he could arrest his own urgent stride.

He turned and looked back at the smelter, now a bulking silhouette against the purple night sky, and his formless apprehension fell away. There was no heartbeat here but the thrum of buried turbines, no sigh but the steady vent of steam. His dark vision was doubtless inspired by some unbidden trace memory of life without Kelly, for more and more in the void of her absence he had viewed it as no life at all. There was nothing sentient in this sleepless factory, save the men who peopled it.

Nothing. . . evil.

"Let's get this old whore rollin'," Sully said, gliding out of the dark like a wraith.

"Jesus, man," Will cried in alarm. "Don't do that."

But Sully had already boarded the train.

* * *

The trip to the dump was routine. At the base of the last long climb, as always, Will idled the locomotive while Sully hopped down to throw a switch, said switch being designed to prevent a runaway from barreling back into the smelter, diverting it instead into the shallow basin of the railyard, where its deadly momentum would be exhausted in a series of harmless back-and-forth runs. It was full dark now, and Sully's frame was quickly consumed by the night. His return was uncommonly prompt—Sully had never been one to rush on company time—and when he climbed back aboard, Will commented on it.

"That was quick," he said conversationally.

But Sully just glowered at him, and Will decided to leave him be. Though customarily jovial, Sully was a private person. If he wanted Will to know what was eating him, he'd say so in his own good time. Maybe he'd called home from the line shack during their break and had gotten into a tiff with his wife. Will didn't know. All he knew was that it was good to be back out in the open. For some strange reason the smelter had given him the creeps, and he was glad to be out and away from it.

Two more runs, he thought delightedly. Two more runs and he'd be heading for Kelly's warm bed.

He threw the locomotive into gear, wincing at the wheeze of pistons as the engine battled inertia. After a few lagging moments the rig began to chug forward, bumping the cars ahead of it, slag slopping over the rims. Lulled by the steady clack-a-clack-a of the rails, Will settled back in his seat for the ten-minute ride to the top. The grade was gradual but constant.

At the dump site, Will gave his customary blast on the whistle. A gusty breeze had picked up, and when Jack Miller stepped down from the trailer his silver asbestos greatcoat belled out behind him. He yawned hugely, then slouched off toward the nearest railcar.

"Think I'll go join him," Sully mumbled, jumping down before Will could reply.

Debarking himself, Will stepped off the train and unzipped his fly. His bladder had inched its way up to his navel, and he stood there pissing forever. When he was done, he climbed back aboard and settled into his seat to wait.

"'Evenin', Jack," Sully said as he strolled past the dumper.

Jack grunted and twisted a flywheel. In response, a system of gears began to grind and the first of the pots tilted forward. This was followed by a huge splashing sound and an intense rush of heat as tons of molten slag slopped down the embankment on the opposite side. Tugged by the breeze, a bank of noxious blue smoke swirled up, breaking over Sully's body and sending sulfurous tendrils up his nose. Though long accustomed to the gas, Sully felt his windpipe cramp down to the bore of a drinking straw. He angled his face away until the worst of it had passed, then turned and watched the river of slag.

Lighting up the night in an orangey Halloween glow, it coursed down the slope in divergent streams before coalescing into a steaming, crackling pool a hundred yards out on the flat. Roosting gulls flapped up in alarm, and a bright, baking heat threw the night sky into shriveling waves.

There was a fresh whine of gears, and then the still-glowing empty straightened up, the rime of cooling slag that lined it tinkling like shattered glass. Heat belched out of the pot's fiery interior in a surge. From his vantage ten feet away, Sully could feel it roasting his skin.

Then he moved.

Without ceremony Jack shifted to the next pot in line and began working a new set of gears. The pot tilted forward, its payload gushing out—then a hand flicked across the coupling and laid hold of Jack's arm. With a fierce yank it dragged him across the coupling. On the way past, Jack's head clipped the side of the overturned pot, the impact numbing him to the pain and the stench of his own scorching hair. He caught a dream glimpse of Sully's baked face, brick red and utterly blank, then went airborne over the embankment. He landed on his back in the lava flow, suddenly hellishly alert and screaming.

In his seat on the idling locomotive, eyes gently closed in a catnap, Will heard nothing save the fitful whicker of the wind.

Jack rode the torrent down the slope, twirling like a kid on a water slide. For the first several seconds his asbestos greatcoat spared him, but the slag quickly scorched its way through. From the side of the train above, Sully watched him go. He seemed to melt, like a lump of butter on a tilted skillet. By the time he reached bottom, there was nothing left of Jack Miller but a puddle of grease and a pair of smoking workboots.

Sully stepped over the coupling, righted the empty pot, then moved to the next one in line. Skin from his scorched palms stuck to the flywheel like bark on a flaying birch. Slag spewed down the slope.

While Jack leveled the first pot, Sully had slipped past it on the embankment side of the train. Had his timing been off by a hairbreadth, he would have been cooked by the soup from the second pot. As it was, the soles of his boots had melted through to his socks when he tiptoed over the spill, and the skin of his face was blistered by the radiant heat.

Shedding more skin, he discharged the next pot of slag, then the next, all the way down the line, working his way closer to the locomotive. As he finished each dump, he reached behind the flywheel and tugged loose a short length of neoprene tubing, disabling the pressurized brakes.

When Sully got back to the locomotive, he found Will dozing. As capable an engineer as Will—they often traded jobs to ease the boredom—he slipped the train into gear.

Will's body jerked and he opened his eyes.

"Relax, man," Sully said in a hoarse whisper, his gaze directed out the window. "I'll take her down."

Will nodded gratefully, thinking idly that Sully must be coming down with a cold. Maybe that was why he seemed so cranky all of a sudden. He glanced back along the flank of the train, intending to give his habitual wave to the dumper, but Jack was nowhere in sight. He leaned back and closed his eyes again.

When they'd gained some speed, Sully twisted a valve and gradually bled off the air brakes. Inside of a minute the train was doing twice its normal descent velocity and rapidly picking up speed.

Will opened his eyes. He looked up at Sully, whose face was still turned away, then out at the blurring nightscape. "Hey, man," he said, alarm skidding like an ice cube down the back of his neck. "You'd better slow her down."

Sully didn't respond. They had already topped thirty miles an hour, and at this rate they would easily double that speed before the track leveled out again.

Will started to get up, but Sully rounded on him and shoved him back in his seat.

Will was totally flabbergasted. "Have you gone fucking crazy?" he shouted over the deafening rumble of the train. "Slow us down!"

"She's mine, asshole," Sully said through puffy lips, and Will noticed then that his face was covered with blisters and his boots were steaming with smoke. And that was not Sully's voice. . .

But there was no time to argue or to ponder this bizarre transformation in his friend. Sully had lost his mind—that much was certain—and he was going to get them both killed if Will couldn't slow the train down. A quick glance outside told him that to jump would mean certain death. The rocky embankment sloped away at a treacherous angle on either side. His only chance was to stay with the train and pray that the brakes had enough juice to slow them down. There was a tricky spot back near the switch point, a tight curve where the train might derail at this speed. If he could make it past that, they'd be out of danger. Beyond the switch point the train would behave like a marble in a shallow bowl, rolling back and forth until friction ground it to a halt in the natural basin of the railyard.

Then Sully would have some tall explaining to do. If he was suicidal, he could fucking well do it on his own.

Working against the acceleration of the train, Will charged wildly at Sully, driving him backward into the controls. Apparently unaffected by the attack, Sully slammed a fist into Will's face, mashing the ball of his chin. Stunned, Will collapsed to the floor. Beneath his back the floorboards bucked and strained. He tried to sit up.

Then Sully was kneeling astride him, raising his fist like a bludgeon. The fist came down—and then Sully's eyes cleared. He gaped at Will like a man kicked awake from a nightmare.

"Wha-what. . . ?"

"Get off me!" Will howled. "Get off!"

Sully rolled into a corner and huddled there, taking blinking glimpses of the deadly situation he'd created.

He doesn't remember, Will thought as he lunged at the forward controls, and somehow that made this crazy situation all the more terrifying. He was totally out of it. It made him think of the first time he'd slept with Kelly, that period of temporal dislocation and the unexplained traces of their union.

Will tried the brakes. They were dead.

He shot a glance through the windshield. There was no speedometer on the train—under full power its top end was only twenty-two miles an hour—but he estimated their current speed at about fifty.

And they were coming into the curve.

"Brace yourself!" Will shouted, his voice all but swallowed in the clattering pandemonium of the train. "Brace yourself!"

Like a huge and remorseless hand, centrifugal force leaned against the inner flank of the train. Positioned over the inward wheels, Will felt their rumble cease as they parted company with the track.

We're going over!

There followed a sickening moment of what felt like free-fall; for a split second the rattling din of the train simply ceased, and all that was left was the eerie whine of the wind. In his mind's eye Will saw them going over the edge, like a runaway freight train in a Saturday afternoon western.

Kelly's face floated up in his mind, clean and beautiful, and in his extremity he cried her name.

He tensed for the impact. . .

Then the world was filled once again with the screeching Babel of friction, the tortured strain of the couplings, the bone-deep shudder of the train.

Gradually that tilting hand was withdrawn.

Will let out a triumphant whoop and scaled his way back to his feet. They were past the curve now and closing in fast on the switch point. They were still gaining speed, but the angle of the rightward track was not all that sharp. Once they blew past that they'd be fine—

The train veered left, toward the smelter.

Will swung on Sully in furious disbelief. "You didn't make the switch?!"

Sully climbed to his feet, bracing himself like a man in a falling elevator. At the sound of Will's voice, the white and confused horror in his face fell away, and he smiled.

"That's right, Bubba," he said.

Then he leapt through the open door.

"Sull-leeeeee!"

In the starlight Will caught a glimpse of his partner's body breaking apart on the rocks. Then it was gone.

Slack with horror, he stumbled to the control panel and began desperately working the levers. . . but it was pointless. The brakes were dead.

And now the smelter loomed into view.

Alternatives streaked through Will's mind like tracer bullets, all of them ending in catastrophe. Incredibly, the train was still gaining speed, and he'd already seen what would happen if he jumped.

There was only one hope, and it was a slim one.

Will threw himself into Sully's seat at the back of the cab. It was like a bus driver's seat, low and padded, bolted to the floor on a metal disk. There was a seat belt, old and frayed, and Will looped it around himself, his fingers fumbling before driving the tongue clasp home.

Seizing the armrests, he planted his boots on the floorboards and, through eyes as big as silver dollars, watched the smelter race toward him.

He prayed that the next set of pots had not yet been loaded.

* * *

The first man to spot the runaway was the transportation supervisor, Chet Spinrad. He glanced up the line and saw the yellow locomotive thundering out of the night toward him like a phantom. He couldn't believe his eyes.

"Ho-leee shitfire!"

He hauled out his walkie-talkie, thumbed the talk button, and jerked the mouthpiece to his chin. "Hey, Bernie!" he shouted, aware that his voice was scaling up the ladder into unintelligibility but unable to stop it. "Hey, Bernie, you readin'?"

Bernie was the slag skimmer; it was his job to load the pots. "Yeah, Chet. I'm here. Whatcha squawkin' abou—"

Bernie's voice was eaten by the roar of the train. It screeched past Chet not ten feet from where he was standing, tossing up cinders, rocking like an all-night disco. Chet caught a glimpse of the cab's interior, but he could see no one aboard.

"Get your ass out of the loading bay!" Chet bellowed when the train had passed. "There's a runaway comin', and it's movin' like a bat out of hell!" He began to sprint toward the smelter, his scuffed white hard hat jouncing on his head.

"Y'don't need to tell me twice," Bernie sent back. Then his voice got chewed up in static.

On board the train, Will braced himself. He had thought he might lose some of his speed on the flat, but it hadn't worked out that way. He was highballing now, sailing on air, and a terrible exhilaration suffused him. As he rounded the last bend before the loading bay he opened his mouth and screamed, a low curdling hoot that pitched upward into the shriek of a startled chimpanzee.