Jim Baen's Universe

Introducing: Stories by new authors

End of the Line

Written by Holly Messinger

Illustrated by Joey Jordan

The planks of the depot trembled under Trace's boots, as thirty tons of iron and steam snorted and wheezed to a stop alongside the platform. Small children screamed in delight or terror, depending on inclination. The air smelled of hot metal and dust, coal and creosote, horse shit and unwashed bodies. Emigrants crowded the platform, most of them carrying little more than what was on their backs, rucksacks and valises packed with dreams of winning gold or souls or fertile farmland.

The crowd surged toward the train like cattle scenting water, but the conductor held up a hand and a clipboard, shouting orders no one could hear. Trace held back; he knew from experience the third-class passengers would be loaded first, as the most unruly cargo the railroad had to handle. The second class passengers wouldn't be let on for some minutes. He nudged the saddlebags at his feet with one toe and stole a sideways glance at Boz.

Boz was mad. His lips were buttoned up so tight the pink was almost lost in his dark skin. He was not speaking to Trace, which meant he could be silent for an entire five minutes of spite at a time.

At least the weather was pleasant—cool and light, the kind of early April day that could make you forget about the six weeks of sleet and foggy damp that came before.

Boz let out a sigh as strong as the steam engine's. "We really gonna do this, huh?"

"Don't see as how we have much choice," Trace said, looking at his boots.

"Bullshit," Boz said. "You said enough times we don't need her money."

Trace grunted. "Told you, you were welcome to stay behind. Find work for yourself. I won't turn down your half of eight hundred dollars."

Boz looked away, and Trace felt ashamed of himself. Not just because they were partners. Decent work wasn't an easy thing for a black man to find, even in St. Louis—Boz'd probably end up in the slaughterhouse, knocking steers between the eyes with a sledge. His skills were better suited to the trail than to town life, although he would have made a fine banker if given the chance. Trace sometimes thought Boz should just cut ties and go to Kansas or California, where the rules were looser and colored folk had a fighting chance to live decent lives.

"Young man!" A trumpeting voice cut between them, followed by a short blocky man in black broadcloth. "Have you offered your soul to Jesus?"

Trace was definitely not in the mood for this. "Matter of fact I did, but He sent it back."

The stocky man wedged himself between them, forcing Boz to take a step back. The preacher was quite red in the face, perspiring and waving a Bible under Trace's nose. "I can tell by your clothes you live a rough life of sin and depravity," he announced. "Scrabbling for work in one low place after another, spending your wages on drink and vice, consorting with companions of an inferior race! Turn your soul over to Jesus, man, and He will show you the path to true prosperity and life everlasting!"

"Get that book out of my face," Trace said, in a quiet but dangerous tone. "'Fore I show you a foretaste of hellfire."

"Sinner!" said the preacher shrilly. "God will show you his vengeance! The day will come!"

Trace took a step forward, his fists clenched, but Boz's hand clamped over his sleeve and pulled him away. "Come on, Boss. Ain't worth it. They're callin for second-class to load up."

"He who walks with wise men will be wise," the preacher said. "But the companion of fools will be destroyed."

Trace swung up his bedroll from the ground. "In his own eyes he flatters himself too much to see his sin," he said, and took satisfaction at the surprise and outrage on the man's face.

Trace shouldered his pack and followed Boz to the edge of the platform, down onto the hard-packed earth alongside the rails. Heat radiated off the cars, reflecting the bright spring sunshine. Mostly box cars: a few passenger cars near the front, but no fancy Pullmans, the palaces-on-wheels. These cars were for transporting cattle—on two feet or four, it made no difference, except the steers had food and water troughs in their cars to prevent weight loss during transit.

The conductor punched their tickets and handed them back to Trace. "Colored car is two cars back," he said, and waved them on.

Trace stopped where he was. "Colored car?"

"'Less your man means to ride with the drovers," the conductor said.

"Since when do colored folks get their own car?" Trace said.

"Since the passengers made a stink about it and the owners decided to make the passengers happy," the conductor snapped, glaring over his little square spectacles. "Now find your car, son, before I have you banned from this train."

Trace turned away, fuming, to meet Boz's wooden expression. Without looking to see if Trace would follow, Boz turned on his heel and started marching down the platform.

Trace hustled after him. "Where you goin'?"

"Where they put me."

"Don't you take that from the likes of him. You paid for a second-class ticket—"

"And that's what I am," Boz said, no rancor in him at all. He said it calm, reasonable, as easily as he might have said his shirt was red. "In their eyes." He inclined his head slightly toward the line of people moving onto the train.

"Shit, Boz, don't say that."

Boz shrugged with one shoulder. "Don't change me none. 'Sides, I go sit back there I don't get some swell spittin' on my hat as he passes by."

"Yeah, but—" Trace's eye was caught by movement between two cars, the bent-over shape of a switchman lifting a massive link with one hand and shoving the pin home with the other. "—if you give an inch, pretty soon they'll take a foot, and next thing you know coloreds'll make themselves slaves again without anybody . . ."

Trace's voice trailed off, as the switchman finished his chore and stood upright, half in the shadow of the car on his right: that part of him was solid. His left leg, shoulder and arm were in the sun and they were ephemeral, transparent. The dead man turned, as if sensing Trace's notice, and Trace winced to see the grotesque twisting of his torso, the dragging of the useless leg from a crushed pelvis, the chest pinched nearly in two when a foot had slipped, or the signal came too late, or the eye misjudged.

Trace looked quickly away, suppressing a shudder. Injury and blood didn't bother him; the idea of getting lost between heaven and hell did.

"What?" Boz demanded, noticing the flinch. It wasn't all that long since he'd found out about Trace's curse, and he got spooked every time Trace twitched, even if it was just horseflies. "You see somethin'?"

"Railroads," Trace said shortly. "Graveyards on wheels."

"Shit," Boz said. That had been his comment on everything for the past day and a half, ever since Trace announced he had a new job from Miss Fairweather, and he was going to take it. He stared at the space between the cars for several moments, while Trace tried not to look. "You reckon that's why she's sendin' us?"

"Me, Boz." Trace drew a deep breath of iron-tinted air that tasted like blood. "She's sendin' me. You don't have to come."

Boz looked shocked, then wounded. "Is that any way to talk to me?"

"It's me she wants," Trace said, embarrassed by the words, their simultaneous arrogance and complicity. "I don't know why, but—" It was hard to explain. He knew Miss Fairweather had sought him out because he could see the dead, but he didn't know yet what she wanted from him, and her answers were slippery. "I just got a feelin' this is gonna get bad."

"Then why you doin' it?" Boz said. "All your talk about not movin' over, not givin' an inch—how come that don't apply to you and Miz Fairweather? How come you're lettin' her push you?"

****

He'd tried. God knew he'd tried to find other work. There just wasn't that much wagon traffic going out of St. Louis these days. Even the folks headed for Oregon rode the rails as far as they could, then outfitted in Colorado or Dakota Territory. The papers said the line from Utah to Oregon would be finished in three years, and that would pretty much be the end of Trace's trail-guide days.

He'd even asked around the stockyards, offering himself as a drover or extra hand for the branding, but for the first time in memory there were too many hands, too many men like himself, displaced by the war and the depression, come from the south looking for work; come from the north looking for opportunity. All of them seemed to cross paths in St. Louis.

But he wasn't taking any more of Miss Fairweather's money. He and Boz were agreed on that. Her money was tainted, bloodied, and the things she asked them to do could put a man's soul in danger, let alone his life.

Miss Fairweather was clever, though, and patient. She knew money wasn't what Trace wanted most. When her first two letters failed to elicit a reaction, she sent a third, hand-delivered by that Chinese of hers to Jamison's Post and General: Please come by at your earliest convenience. I have been investigating your condition and may be able to help you.

The bitch. She knew nothing would fetch him faster. In the first years after the war, he'd sought out carny fortune-tellers and parlor spiritualists and even a hoodoo woman down in Lafayette, hoping to find one who could tell him how to get rid of his "condition," or at least control it, but all of them had been frauds or fools. Miss Fairweather was different: she had sought him out because of his gift, she seemed to know something about it, and Trace could not let that go until he had wrung some answers out of her, though it seemed more like she was the one doing the wringing.

He fought her lure for two more weeks, a fortnight of approaching men with wagons, shaking hands and offering his services, hearing again and again, We're going by rail, or worse, If you'd just gotten here a couple weeks ago.

Then he met the Baptist.

Kingsley was his name, Martin Kingsley, taking a couple dozen Bible-thumpers out to save the souls of the settlers in Oregon. John Jamison got the story from them while they were rigging out at his store, and he passed along Trace's name as a guide—Jamison was good like that, reliable.

Trace set out to meet Kingsley's party with a lightened heart, thinking it was a sign—this was the job he needed, a source of nourishment and a shield against temptation. He didn't even mind they were Baptists.

Kingsley seemed a decent fellow, small and sturdy like a little Mexican burro, with a round jolly face and serious blue eyes. "Pleased to meet you," he said, shaking Trace's hand. "I hear you've made this trip a few times before."

"Three years in a row," Trace said. "Had the same partner through all of it—used to be a supplies sergeant in the army." He always neglected at this point to say Boz had served in one of the Negro regiments. "He can take a look at your supplies, fit you out proper. Save you time and space both."

"That's mighty kind of you," Kingsley said, shaking his head. "It's just a shame to have to tell you this—hate to waste your time, since I indicated to Mr. Jamison we'd be needing your services . . ."

Trace's heart seemed to sink into his liver.

"It's just we received a love donation last night . . . from a sister in faith. She had her servant deliver it specially, because she's in poor health and can't travel. She purchased railway tickets for the entire party and our cargo, so we could arrive at our destination and set up our mission that much faster. She even offered a generous portion for building our church in the wilderness—"

It was the words in poor health that roused Trace's suspicions—she'd used that same excuse with him. "This servant—was he Chinese, speaks real good English?"

"Why, yes. Do you know Sister Fairweather?"

Trace nearly choked, trying to keep the harsh laughter in his throat. "She's a regular angel of mercy."

****

Trace had never been one to claim all Orientals looked alike, but he would admit to some difficulty at reading their faces. He could have sworn Miss Fairweather's manservant was smirking as he showed Trace into her house.

Miss Fairweather's house was one of the finest and oldest in St. Louis. It had been built by a cattleman around 1830, and bought by a railroad man just after the war. The railroad man had died young, and the place stood vacant for nearly a decade before his wife's family sold it.

It was large and grand and dark, in the quiet, still way of a mausoleum. Trace had already seen one spirit in it. He took care to keep his eyes on the Chinaman's back as they walked deeper into the recesses of the house.

They climbed to the third floor, then up a narrow staircase into what had surely been servants' quarters at one time. The door at the top, however, opened into a large, bright, open room that ran the entire back half of the house. The sudden onslaught of sunlight made Trace blink.

The north face of the roof was entirely glass, sealed with lead between the panes, braced by girders that slanted back into the gables. Trace looked up into the overcast sky. The clouds rushing overhead teased his balance and he grabbed the nearest cabinet for support.

There were a great many cabinets along the wall, and wide trestle tables down the center of the room. Some of these were wood, painted black, but one was a single slab of white marble, and another supported a shining tin basin as big as a wagon bed.

All manner of curious objects surrounded him: glass apothecary's jars, bins and boxes, glass tubes and rubber hoses. Against the wall opposite the glass ceiling was a row of cages and tanks, in which small creatures flopped and fluttered and whistled.

Trace had seen Miss Fairweather's library, he knew she had a capable and curious mind, but he'd had no inkling of this. He moved deeper into the room, trying to look at everything at once. The animals chattered at his approach.

About halfway down the inner wall was a fireplace with extended wings, onto which was grafted a network of ovens and copper piping. Trace bent close to it, intrigued by the high-supported water casket and the leather bellows built into the hearth. It seemed water was heated in a copper drum over the fire, from which steam could be directed through various conduits, either to the tin basin or the marble table. Above the water drum, a vent opened every few seconds to let out a puff of scalding vapor.

He touched one porcelain valve handle with the tip of his finger and it turned easily, letting a spill of water into the tin basin behind him. He heard it patter on the metal, and turned to see it run down a series of grooves, to a trough at the end of the basin, and down a tube into the floor.

A throat cleared gently behind him, and Trace stood up fast, guiltily, as if she had caught him peeping in her window.

Miss Fairweather was tiny and pale, with thin wrists and colorless lips. She wore her fair hair scraped back in a knot, as if she were too impatient to do anything else with it. Her gowns tended to be dark: of fine cloth and workmanship, but plain in design and trim. Trace was beginning to understand why.

"So good to see you again, Mr. Tracy," she said, a touch of mockery in her voice. Her eyes were pale and reflected the gray of the sky. "I was beginning to think you had taken a dislike to me."

Trace licked his lips. It wasn't in him to be uncivil to a lady's face, whatever he might think of her in his mind. His indignantly prepared accusations seemed to leave him. "This is a, uh, interestin' place you got here."

"I find it so," she agreed. "Do you?"

"Ma'am?"

"Are you interested in the study of natural science?"

Trace worried his hat in his hands. "I don't guess I ever thought about it." In his youth he had spent too much time preparing for the next world to contemplate this one, but a few years of trail riding had turned his attention the other way. "Don't suppose I'd be much of a trail guide if I didn't know a bit about the beasts of the field."

She smiled her chilly smile. "Well put, Mr. Tracy. I wonder if you would give me your opinion on this specimen I've acquired." She inclined her head for him to follow.

Trace didn't. "You said you had somethin' to tell me?"

She stopped, head cocked like one of the birds in the cages. "Did I?"

"In your letter. The one you sent through Jamison's store." She was looking at him with polite inquiry, and Trace squirmed like a schoolboy. "You said you'd been investigatin' my condition . . ."

"Your condition? Are you ill?"

Trace clenched his jaw. She was toying with him, that was all, trying to make him look foolish, or maybe wanting him to beg for her help. He locked his teeth together and glared at her.

"I think you'll be interested in this," she said, turning again toward the far corner of the room, which was swathed in black fabric like a tent. Her sleeve brushed the cages along the wall, and Trace noticed all the birds crouched and fell silent as she passed, the furred animals retreating into corners and balling up.

He followed her into the black tent in the corner, having to bend almost double to pass under the flap she held up for him. The interior was dark and close, lit by a small electric lantern with a pierced tin hood. As soon as she dropped the tent flap, something swooped at his head.

"What the devil—" He ducked and swatted at it with his hat, caught something small and light in the crown of it. He peered into the hat, reached for the small crawling thing, but she put a hand on his wrist.

"You don't want to do that. I can't be certain this group isn't rabid."

Bats. Trace snatched his hand back and shook the thing out of his hat. Bats. He looked up, saw the flickering of wings darting from one corner tent pole to the other. Unconcerned, Miss Fairweather crossed to a worktable, on which rested a long glass box, like the display cases in Jamison's store. There was a single bat in this case, small and drab. Trace had seen plenty of them on the prairie, especially down near the Mexico border, while droving cattle.

"That's a bloodsucker," he said.

"Indeed. Desmodus rotundus, in the Latin. A torment to livestock in the southern parts of this continent." She drew on a pair of cattleman's heavy gloves as she spoke. "There are thousands of species of bats all over the world, but this one appears to be unique in its method of locomotion. Not only can it fly, which is remarkable enough in a mammal, but it can also run. Observe."

She reached into a small canister beside the glass case and drew out a bit of something red and dripping—liver, by the smell. She opened a small door on top of the case and dropped the morsel inside, leaving a smear of blood down the side of the glass.

In a flash, the bat in the cage leapt toward the treat, levering the bony tips of its wings on the floor and swinging its hind legs between, like a man on two crutches, covering an amazing amount of distance in a single stride. Four leaps and it was to the end of the case, hunkered over the dark tidbit, pale tongue lapping eagerly. Other bats swooped down from the ceiling, drawn by the smell of the blood. Miss Fairweather slipped off the gloves and dropped them on top of the case.

"It's an extraordinarily efficient means of travel," she said. "Twice the length of its body in a single leap. Imagine the distance a human could cover at that speed. It's almost a pity our limbs aren't proportioned for it—look here."

She reached across the box and lifted a small tray into the circle of electric light. In the tray was another of the animals, wings stretched wide and pinned to the cork beneath it, teeth bared in a rictus of agony.

Its torso had been neatly flayed to the bones, the skin and muscle pinned open like a show curtain. Trace could clearly see its heart fluttering.

He recoiled. "Is it alive?"

"Of course. Observe the connection of the long muscles, across the breastbone to the wing—where a man's pectoral muscles are located."

Trace had a sudden revolting image of a man pinned just so on her tin-topped table, cut open like a rabbit but without its neck broke first.

"Its shoulder and back muscles are terrifically strong—designed for flight, but also serving well to propel it along the ground." She took up a tool, slender and pointy, and jabbed it into the creature's tiny armpit, causing a jerk of the wing and a squeak.

Disturbed, Trace turned away. There was a small folding table beside the door-flap, on which rested a kerosene lamp and a flurry of papers. A notebook, half-full of Miss Fairweather's spidery handwriting, lay pinned open by a crystal paperweight and a stack of pamphlets. The top pamphlet showed a man in a greatcoat, the capes ruffling like crow's feathers, his face distorted in an animal grin as he menaced the young lady beside him. Varney the Vampyre, was the title.

"The physiology of this animal is of course merely coincidental to my work," Miss Fairweather said. He heard her skirts rustle as she moved closer behind him. "I am studying the transmission of diseases borne in the blood. A fascinating subject, though frustrating, as it is continually bound up in myth and superstition." She watched as Trace lifted the Varney booklet. It was old and yellow, messily printed, with a price of two pence in the upper corner. "A good example of type—that particular drivel was serialized for almost three years, widely read by the masses in London. Do you know nearly every culture in the world has a myth about evil creatures or spirits that drink blood? Even the ancients recognized the necessity of blood to life. Nearly every culture has a taboo against its consumption, except those which permit it in ritual. You may have that booklet, if you wish. I have finished with it."

Trace looked at her. "Ma'am, I don't mean to be rude, but do you have a job for me, or not?"

Her eyes narrowed in on him, coolly amused, pitiless as a hawk's. He had the feeling she was poised with a sharp tool, examining him for a soft place to stab.

"Have you engaged in any further communications with the spirit world," she asked, "since we last spoke?"

Trace dragged his gaze away from hers. He saw spirits all the time—whether he was looking or not. They seldom spoke to him, and when they did he tried not to answer. People tended to wind up dead if he did. "Not that would interest you," he said.

She made an amused sound and flung back the tent's black curtain. Trace's eyes watered at the sudden light, but he followed her out. She crossed to one of the black trestle tables and pulled a folded paper parcel from under a landslide of foolscap. "Rest your mind, Mr. Tracy, the assignment I have for you should not involve any communication with the dead. Unless you perhaps think it will help." She gave him a thoughtful look, then a tiny shrug and spread out the contents of the packet as he moved closer to see. "This is the proposed path of the Union Pacific's Short Line to Oregon—you were aware of its construction?"

"Yeah." Damn right he was. When it was done he'd have to find a new job.

"Teams of workers are carving a path for it through the northern Rockies—mostly Chinese immigrants, a few Irish, living in mobile camps that progress along with the grading and track-laying crews. This is, of course, one of the last holdouts of the Native American Indian—I believe there are still Ute and Shoshone living wild in these mountains?"

"Last I heard."

"In recent months there have been several attacks on the worker's camps. The railroad managers blame it on Indians or wild animals, but the attacks are too random for the former, too well-organized for the latter."

Trace felt a sudden mad urge to laugh. "And you want me to go find out what it is."

"Not exactly, Mr. Tracy. I want you to bring back a specimen."

****

The seat vibrated under Trace's butt as the engine continued its grind up the gentle grade, ever higher across the Plains before the final lurching mount over the Rockies.

The emigrant sleeper car smelled of sweat and smoke, stale farts and tobacco, burnt coffee and dust. Always dust—it eked in through the windows even when they weren't open, blew in through the sliding car doors as the porters came and went. Trace's ears and nostrils felt coated with the constant grit of it; it was ground into his skin beneath his collar. His handkerchief and towel were stained yellow with it.

There were thirty-four souls in his car, eight of them children. The littlest ones had been restless and cranky at first, weary of the long confinement, but after seven days they were broken-spirited, listless, hanging over their seats, sitting in the aisles, staring out the windows.

The adults weren't in much better shape. Everyone had been chatty and excited across Kansas, exchanging names, handshakes, hometowns, dreams and photos if they were to be had. The two families with children were meeting relatives out west, as were some of the single men and one newlywed couple. Twelve of Trace's fellow passengers were the Baptists, including Martin Kingsley and the importunate little fellow from the St. Louis depot, who was called Brother Clark. Kingsley was gracious and apologetic, glad to hear that Trace had found other employment and professing delight at finding themselves on the same train.

"You have an honest face, sir," Kingsley said to Trace. "If you find yourself in need of lodging or company when we reach Seattle, please know you're welcome to join our camp."

"Thanks," Trace said, pretending not to hear Brother Clark's sniff.

Weary though they were of the confinement—and Trace was probably worse off than most, since he was a head and foot too tall for the seats and sleeper bunks—it was hell and away easier than hauling wagons and oxen through rocks and gulleys and swollen rivers. He'd made this trip three times before, taken two solid months to cover the distance they'd ridden in six days. It boggled the mind.

Not that they didn't have adventures along the way. They had wasted a half-day in St. Joseph, sitting and fuming on a side track, while their engine was changed out, stock cars were uncoupled and new cars linked on. At each depot and whistle-stop, there was a mad scramble off the train for food and privy breaks, and there was never enough time for both. More than once, passengers paid in advance for a meal and heard the all-aboard blow before they could consume it. After the fourth time this happened, Trace saw the father of the three smallest children seize a whole turkey off a serving platter, tuck the bird stuffing-and-all under his arm, and thrust his free hand into his coat pocket as if he had a pistol. The man and his family backed hastily out the door and made a clean getaway back to the car, where they divided their booty with as much whooping as a tribe of red Indians.

Trace had learned during his army days that the best meals to be had were from local farmers, who hawked their wares at each depot. The prices were outrageous, but he had more than a hundred dollars in his pocket, the advance paid to him by Miss Fairweather, and he spent her largess on bread and milk, hard-boiled eggs and cheese, sausage and the odd bit of pastry. It was too early in the year for fresh produce, but one farmer's wife sold him a pint each of pickled beets and tomatoes, which he shared with Boz.

Boz seemed enviably comfortable in the colored car, where all the passengers were men and no one cared if the others took off their boots and vests or smoked cigars. The short, railed balcony outside the colored car was also more comfortable than the gentleman's lounge in the second-class car. Out here was fresh air, and room to straighten his aching knees, and no raised eyebrows if he chose to smoke and socialize with his friend.

Trace was no stranger to the rough beauty of the Rockies, but always before there had been the need to hurry, to worry about nightfall and snowfall and rockfall. Now there was only to ride, and look, and try not to think about the possibilities of damnation and torture on a tin-topped table. The mountains were blue and regal, capped with snow and gilt with gold that made him think God's grace still touched the earth.

"This is a lot easier than the last time we came this way," Boz said, echoing Trace's thoughts.

"Yep." He took a long drag on his stub of cigar, the last one Miss Fairweather had given him. She had given him cigars when he set out on the last job for her, as well. He wondered if it was her way of giving a condemned man a last smoke.

"What's eatin' you tonight?" Boz asked.

"We're gettin' close," Trace said. "Furthest of the attacks was just south of Eagle Rock."

"Oh, that. Can't see as we've got anything to worry about on a movin' train. When we get off at the next stop, then I'll start worryin'."

"Fair 'nuff."

The wind filled their ears for a few minutes. Then Boz said, "We catch this killer, how we supposed to fetch it back to her?"

"Dunno," Trace said. "Figure on crossin' that bridge when we come to it."

"It's got to be omething' human. Indians tearin' up the bodies to look like animals."

"You ever see Indians do that while you were ridin' with the Ninth?"

"No." Boz exhaled smoke. "Indians like to mark their kills. But they ain't stupid. You put anybody in a corner they fight harder. Figure they got no strength left, they fight dirty."

"Most things do," Trace agreed.

The back door of the emigrants' car opened, and a man stepped out onto the short railed balcony—Mr. Flanders was his name, with his little daughter Tess on his arm. They were both bundled up warm, and the little girl squealed with delight, flapping her hands at the fresh air and the bright sunset. The wind whipped her fine curls around her face.

"That ain't all of it, though," Trace said after a while.

Boz followed his line of sight. "The passengers?"

"Yeah."

"You know for sure she was the one bought their tickets?"

"She owned up to it," Trace said grimly. "Said she tried to help the less fortunate, and give to good causes, and encourage the civilization of the West, and a lot of other horse shit. Then she said, 'I know you won't let those poor people ride into danger unknowing and unprotected.'"

"Shit," Boz said, with horrified awe. "You told me that in the first place, I wouldn't'a rode you about it."

"Huh." Trace rolled the cigar between his fingertips. There was more to it than that, but he didn't want to pursue the issue of his malleability where Miss Fairweather was concerned. Not yet. "She might've been bluffin'. What she told me about these attacks is true, they ain't attacked any of the passengers nor inside the towns, yet."

"But she ain't always told us everything straight."

"No," Trace agreed. He took a last long drag and flicked the butt over the railing.

****

Trace couldn't sleep that night. Not that sleeping on a train was ever a sure thing, what with the cramped space and continual jostling, but tonight his mind would not rest. He wasn't worried. He wasn't preoccupied. He was simply awake.

After a while he turned on his side and pulled back the curtains of the sleeping berth to let in the small amount of light from the oil lamp overhead. He reached for his vest, hanging on the hook outside, and felt around until he found the little Varney pamphlet folded in the breast pocket.

He hadn't intended to keep it. It was pretty awful reading and only included chapter eighty-eight, so it was impossible to make heads or tails of the story, except that some foreign feller named Lord Varney was a vampyre and the rest of the characters were too silly to do anything about it.

Miss Fairweather's notes in the margins were far more intriguing.

Commonalities:

Consmptn. of blood

Exceptional strength

Nocturnal/sunlight averse reactn

Diff. to kill; possbl purifying methds—fire, water, pure metals/woods, medicnl garlic, salt?

She'd claimed to be studying diseases of the blood, and dismissed the vampyre myth as superstitious nonsense, but as Boz had noted, she seldom told him anything straight. She did seem to tell him things for a reason, but he usually had to puzzle out the reasoning for himself.

She wanted a specimen, she'd been studying bloodsucking bats, and she'd given him this story about a bloodsucking man—because she suspected he'd find something like?

Trace let out a soft chuckle that was equal parts disbelief and admiration. If she'd told him straight out he was going hunting for a giant vampire bat, he'd have told her she was crazy.

"Is it a joke you can share?" a voice asked softly, and Trace looked up to see he was being observed. Miss Eliza, Martin Kingsley's unmarried sister, had the berth across from Trace. Her curtain was likewise open, her long hair falling over her shoulder in its braid, her head in her hand.

She was younger than her brother, but a few years older than Trace, with a face round and smooth as a girl's. Her dark hair had a single long streak of silver, sweeping from her right temple back into the braid. Her eyes were warm in the lamp-light.

"Not a joke, just a bit of foolishness," he said, stretching to hand the little book across the aisle.

She looked it over slowly, turned a few pages, an amused curl to her lips. "I used to love these penny dreadfuls when I was a girl," she said. "Fairies and ghosts, especially. When Father would give me pennies for the collection plate, I always held one back. Then when I had stolen enough, I bought a book in secret." She passed Varney back to Trace. "Are you quite shocked?"

"You're a downright reprobate, Miss Eliza," he said.

She chuckled. "I'll be glad when we reach Seattle. Even though the hardest part is still to come, at least I'll be occupied again. This forced idleness is maddening."

"Have to agree with you there."

"Why are you going to Oregon, Mr. Tracy? My brother said you'd found work, but you didn't tell him what it was."

"I'm supposed to bring back some cargo for a rich lady in St. Louis," Trace said, and paused. "Doubt I'll even go all the way to Oregon."

"I wish you would. Martin thinks highly of you, and you seem to be a practical man. We have a lot of zeal, but not a great deal of practice at living in the wilderness." She sighed. "I sometimes think my brother's zeal outweighs his good sense. Now you mustn't tell him I said that."

"Your secret's safe with me, ma'am."

"Yes." She looked at him closely. "You're good at keeping secrets, aren't you?"

He smiled. "What are you, a mind-reader?"

"I used to know a man like you," she said, with an answering smile.

"Uh-huh. You've got a few secrets of your own, then."

"Mmm." She lowered her eyes, and Trace felt a sneaky, distant pang of desire for her—not only her flesh, but what she represented: God and home and sanctity. Children, maybe. A life more settled, less haunted. He crushed the ache, ground it into numbness with a mental boot heel. Not for him, not again. Bad enough he'd brought Boz into his purgatory.

At the end of the car, someone snorted, turned over. A child whimpered. Trace couldn't see outside, as the berths opened out flat above the windows, but it seemed someone had left the shutters open, because moonlight was spilling onto the floor near the head of the car, where the ladies' saloon was.

The moon's on the wrong side of the train, he thought, and then the eeriest sensation slid over him.

Often when he saw a spirit, he felt it before he saw it, or before he realized it wasn't just an ordinary live person. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck would stand up, as if there was lightning in the air. Lying there in the upper berth of a sleeper car, staring at the moonlight on the floor, Trace felt a sort of pull, like the falling sensation that comes just before sleep. He wasn't asleep, though—his skin tingled all over with that familiar electric charge, sounds and smells were sharper, and his vision cleared as if a veil had been dropped from his eyes. The pale glow on the floor rose into the air and spread, expanding, taking form.

Trace's mouth went dry. The moonlight was forming itself into the shapes of men—small men, with long braids and round hats on their heads, slight bodies and flat faces. A whole score of Chinamen rose out of the pooling moonlight and walked—silent, without seeming to touch the floor—toward the back of the car.

They passed right under Trace's nose, the tops of their heads just even with the bottom of his berth. He watched with his mouth open, unafraid but in awe, and with the dawning realization that the alertness in his mind had been waiting for just such an occurrence.

Then one of them stopped and looked up at him. It pointed back toward the engine-end of the car, its mouth moving, but Trace couldn't make out what it said. The Chinaman seemed to be shouting, the words coming at him in pulses like the whistle of a train across a great distance. Shang-shee, it said. Shang-shee.

"What?" Trace said. "I can't understand."

"Mr. Tracy? Jacob?"

Trace blinked. The car was dark, except for the oil lamps, and Miss Eliza was giving him the oddest look.

"Are you all right?" she said.

And the train whistle began to blow.

The sound was eerie, nightmarish. It echoed off the foothills and bounced back at them, whooo-whooo-whooo-whooo, like a deep-voiced mechanical owl. Then a single short whoop.

Obstruction on the tracks. Apply brakes.

"Holy God," Trace said.

"What? What's wrong?"

"Lie down," he said, hopping to the floor and grabbing for his boots. "Curl up in a ball. Put your pillow over your head and hold it down."

"What?"

"Just do it!" Trace wedged his foot into the second boot, glad he hadn't undressed, pulled the suspenders over his shoulders and yanked his gun belt from under his pillow. He hadn't stashed the Colt with the bedroll, preferring to err on the side of caution, and now he was damn glad he had. The porter was approaching, making hushing gestures and telling him not to start a panic, and all over the car people were sitting up, muttering at the noise, children wailing—

"Shut up!" Trace bellowed over the porter. "You all listen to me now! Curl up on your bunk with your feet braced on the front wall! Put your pillow over your head and try to hold on to the posts!"

He grabbed the porter and flung him into the lower berth alongside Brother Clark, just as there was an awful, screaming, squalling roar that started at the front of the train and progressed backward, shuddering through the car as if the tracks themselves were shaking off their burden. Trace wedged himself in the aisle, bracing his hands and feet against the columns between the berths like Samson in the garden of the Philistines.

He was sure, later, that the collision must've made one hell of a bang, when the second-class car struck the mail car in front of it. He just didn't remember hearing it. The back end of the car bucked like an ornery bronc and Trace was flung forward, his fingers torn from the columns. He landed on his chin and slid down the smooth-polished length of the aisle to end up in a heap next to the wood stove.

He did hear the screaming then, and the tinkling of broken glass and luggage bouncing off bunks and shelves to the floor. A series of blows shook the car, accompanied by the deafening and then diminishing BANGbangbang of each car behind them colliding.

At last the tremors stopped. The children were wailing and no few of the adults. Trace lay where he was for a minute, gripping the wall and floor with ten sprained fingers, checking to make sure he was still alive. The back end of the car was elevated, propped up on the colored car behind it, so he was cradled in the join of the floor to the front door. All manner of trash, luggage, hats, toys, bottles, garbage, and thirty pairs of shoes had slid down to the front of the car and buried him alive. He heard a pop, felt a flash of heat, and looked up to see a woolen stocking had fallen on the stove and burst into flame.

He reached out and flipped the stocking into the ash bin, where it lay smoldering. Then he carefully sat up, shaking off bits of refuse and old luncheons. His hand went automatically to his hip; the Colt was still in its holster. He could taste blood, his front lip was mashed, but no teeth were missing. His jaw felt like he'd been punched.

He got to his knees. The floor sloped up away from him, not too steep to walk but barely; all the oil lamps swung precariously on their hooks. People were trying to get out of their bunks, finding it hard to stand, casting about for clothes and belongings, calling out as to the whereabouts and welfare of companions. The porter was telling everyone to be calm, in a high and panicky voice. Brother Clark was praying and braying like a donkey.

Trace put a hand on the wall behind him, used it for leverage to stand. The front door of the car was buckled inward, about halfway up. He tried the handle and it broke off in his hand.

That left the back door or the windows. Trace started up the slope of the floor, straddling the aisle with his long legs to step up each alternating berth leg, gently but firmly pushing emigrants out of his way. "Stay down," he told them. "Stay in your bunk. We'll get the conductor down here, get the car settled down again. You just stay put."

He walk-climbed as far as Miss Eliza's berth, with Brother Clark and the porter underneath. Martin Kingsley had managed to reach his sister, and they both seemed unhurt and collected in wit.

"Are you all right, Mr. Tracy?" Sister Eliza asked. "You were thrown some distance."

"Nothin' broken," he reported. "Can you see to those that are hurt? Try to get them up, get them dressed. Might have to get everybody off this train."

"Nobody's leaving this train until the conductor says so," the porter piped up. "The safety and comfort of the passengers is the responsibility of—"

"That's what I said." Trace gripped the young man by his jacket and set him upright in the aisle. "You and me are gonna go find the conductor, ain't we?"

"I'm not supposed to—"

"Come on, son." Trace pushed the porter ahead of him, whacked him on the posterior when he slipped on the slant. They clambered up the aisle to the back door. "There any firearms on this train?"

"Firearms? Only the conductor and the engineer are allowed to—"

"Hush," Trace said, holding up a hand and listening. Someone was knocking and scraping on the folding door. The handle moved and the door buckled open a couple of inches. Several sets of brown human fingers curled into the opening. Trace added his to the effort, braced his feet against the wall of the gentlemen's privy, and shoved.

The door slammed back with a splintering of wood and screaming of metal. There was a whoop from outside, and five Negro faces clustered around the opening, Boz's foremost among them.

"Knew that'd be you," he said, grinning, although Trace saw the raw edges of relief rimming his eyes. They handed him out, then the porter, and Trace stepped carefully down the mangled iron railing and dropped to the gravel of the track bed.

The colored car had not suffered much damage: only its front end was stove in. Trace's car was tipped up, as was the mail car in front of it, and the coal car before that was wrenched nearly crosswise to the rails. The engine was still on the track, but its cabin had been crushed by the coal car, and the boiler was sending squalling jets of steam into the air.

"Folks behind us didn't get much more than a bump," Boz said, gesturing with a thumb toward the third-class car. "All behind that's freight."

Trace could hear the cattle bawling. Closer up, the third-class passengers were hanging out their windows and exclaiming. And approaching, they heard the rhythmic crunch of boots on gravel, dark figure jogging in the moonlight along the pale line of the track bed. Trace and Boz both reached for their guns.

"Ho there! Anyone hurt?" The running figure was human, and carrying a rifle; as he got closer they recognized the conductor, in his short white collar and spectacles. He jogged to a stop beside them. "You're not my brakemen. What are you doing off the train?"

"I told them!" the porter protested, climbing down from the mangled balcony. "I told them not to—"

"Shut up, Willie," the conductor said. "Anyone hurt on your cars?" he said to Trace and Boz, who replied in the negative. "Good, then get back on board and stay out of our way." He turned, scanning the top of the train for men who weren't there. He lifted a whistle, on a cord around his neck, and blew several short blasts.

They listened. Nothing answered, except a far-off crack that might have been thunder, and a yelp that might have been a coyote.

"Gunshot," Trace said.

"Somethin' like," Boz agreed.

The conductor gave him a look of dislike. "Get back on your car, boy, I'm not telling you again. Willie, you come with me."

Willie gave Trace a triumphant look and trotted off after the conductor toward the smoking engine. Trace looked at Boz, then at the colored men who hunkered on the roof and railing of the demolished emigrant car. "You men heeled, any of you?"

A few of them were, with revolvers. One man said there was a shotgun in his baggage.

"Get it," Trace said. "Stay on watch up there." He turned and started up the grade after the conductor.

Boz followed. "What is it?"

"Don't know. But the spirits on this train don't like it none."

The wind was cold and the air thin. They weren't yet in the mountains, but this was definitely higher land. The sky was bright with stars and the moon coming and going behind clouds. Bare-headed and in shirt sleeves, Trace could feel the chill on his skin, but it wasn't getting through to his blood. His heart was thudding hard and slow, and his senses still had that sharp clarity.

The engine cabin was flat as a flapjack and burning.

"Earl!" the conductor bawled into the dark. "Tommy?"

"They woulda jumped," Boz said, low. "Can't be far."

"What'd we hit?" Trace wanted to know.

They trotted to the front of the tracks, stepping over bits of coal and smoldering wood. A sizeable cairn of rocks had been piled across the tracks—from the depth and extent of the scattered debris, Trace guessed the pile must've been half as high as the engine.

"Not a slide, either," he muttered, looking up and around. There was plenty of stone on the ground, but they weren't in an area where it was likely to fall. And there was no tell-tale skid of gravel on the bed above, either. None of the stones was bigger than a man's head. "These were put here by hand."

"You hear somethin'?" Boz asked, head cocked, and started off into the dark.

They found the fireman not ten yards from the train, trying to crawl back through the shale and juniper brush. He was sobbing in that broken, wheezy way Trace remembered from Antietam; his shirt was wet and sticky when Trace touched his shoulder.

"Easy, fella, we got you," Trace said, turning the man onto his back in Boz's arms. The fireman began to scream immediately, and bat at them with his shredded hands. His face was dark and shiny in the moonlight, black with blood that seemed to be coming from his scalp. The rest of him was shaking and cold, the breath rattling in his throat. "Conductor! We got your man down here!"

There was a skidding and scuffling as the conductor and Willie scrambled down the grade; Willie's lantern threw shards of light over the ground and the chewed-up fellow between them.

"Tommy!" the conductor said, dropping to one knee. "Tommy, what happened? Where's Earl?"

The fireman gurgled, hands falling slack away from the conductor's coat. His sleeves had been torn off, and there was a big chunk of meat missing out of his forearm. In the lamplight they could see a flap of torn scalp dangling over his forehead, and one eye was gone. It looked like a bear had bitten into his head.

Trace met Boz's eyes, read the question there, and stood up, looking back toward the train.

"What was it, Tommy?" the conductor asked. "Wolves? Did they get Earl?"

Trace squinted. The windows of the passenger cars glowed dimly from the lamps; he could just make out people moving inside. Two men paced the roof of the colored car, keeping watch. One of them had a spark of fire in his hand, which he raised to his lips.

Something dark was slinking up the gravel grade to the tracks. Something blacker than the sky, darker than the shadows. It moved low to the ground, crawling like a frog but much faster, the size of a man. Another one, behind it. Two more—two cars down. Converging on the train.

Trace skinned the Colt and shot the nearest one.

He knew he hit it. It wasn't a far shot and he saw the thing flinch—worse than that, he felt it squeal, a metal-on-metal shriek that seemed to pierce his skull.

But it jumped—all the black shapes did, and scattered like roaches running from daylight. The men on the roof jumped, too, spun around and looked toward them.

"Back to the train," Trace said. "Now."

"Son, I've got a man down here and at least five missing," the conductor snapped.

"Your train is under attack, mister, and that man's bled out." Trace thumbed another cartridge into the Colt's chamber as he spoke, backing away up the grade, Boz already running for the tracks. "Unless you want to lose more passengers you'd best—"

There was a scream, up near the tracks. Cracks of gunfire followed, sounding thin and puny in the wind. Trace turned and hightailed it up the slope.

He saw the two men go down off the roof of the colored car—one flipped out flat as if his legs had been pulled from under him, and the other jumped. More gunfire came from the other side of the train, and a high, terrified scream. He saw Boz's familiar form ahead of him, leaping across the link between the colored car and the one behind it, and Trace angled his steps to follow but then saw one of those black shapes appear on top of the second-class car.

It perched on the upthrust edge of the roof for a moment, hunkered like a mountain cat or a circus monkey. Its shape was more or less human—head, shoulders, arms—but there was something bestial in its movements and the arch of its back, the way it crouched over its legs. It swung its head to one side, and then there was another beside it, and another, and a fourth.

Trace slowed his steps, watching while they pushed and jostled at each other. They seemed to be talking amongst themselves, like a crowd of young toughs egging each other to take a dare. They nudged the first toward the edge of the roof.

Suddenly it went over—and twisted as it fell, swinging clean through the open door of the emigrant car. Trace shouted and ran toward the car, shooting at the three on the roof. They leapt in three different directions, vanishing into the darkness.

From inside the sleeper car came a rolling and screaming and crashing that sounded for all hell like a fox in a henhouse. A man in a nightshirt and boots half-climbed, half-fell out of the door, and was instantly snatched by a black shadow that hauled him down the pale gravel bank to the underbrush. The lady behind him saw it and began to scream, but some panicked soul pushed her from behind and she fell, head-first onto the grade. A black shadow flung itself on her as if it meant to ravish her. She screamed and beat at it, but it caught her up in clawed arms and fastened its jaws on her throat, ending her scream in a choked gurgle.

Trace ran up to the thing and kicked it in the ribs. It dropped its prey and turned on him with a shriek of rage. In the dark and the confusion, all he saw was gaping mouth, filled with teeth and blood, yellow eyes reflecting hate and fire. He shot it between the mouth and the eyes. It rolled over backwards and kept going down the grade—he had no idea whether it was dead or not. The woman seemed to be, her throat was torn out, and the emigrant car was rocking with the force of the battle going on inside.

He clambered up the end of the car, all but throwing people out of his way. He shouted at them to get to the colored car, but he doubted they heard—the ruckus inside was deafening. Trace fell into the car and slid halfway down the aisle before he caught himself; for a moment he couldn't even see the monster. All the berths were still down and the oil lamps were swinging dangerously, people were falling over each other trying to get out of the way, while the eye of the storm surged back and forth across the aisle, something dark and snarling in the middle of it.

It resembled a man, but was gray and hairless, with the bulging flat eyes of a fish and a gaping wound of a mouth. In one of those long, spidery arms it held a child, limp and bloodied, while it used the other to grab those nearest it and fling them across the car. The men were trying to corner it, wielding chunks of firewood, walking sticks and a fire-iron, but the thing seemed to be laughing. It held up the child by its hair and slung the lifeless body at them. The nearest man went down under the weight of it, and the thing leapt over him, took two more down with it and dashed their heads against the floor. One of the men brought the fire iron down on its back, but it only squalled and whipped an arm around, backhanding him off his feet and into one of the berths.

Trace took the opening and fired. The first shot hit it high in the shoulder, the second just under the ribs. The sound it made was truly awful, a scream Trace had heard only in nightmares, but it crumpled, fell back in the aisle and slid down a few feet.

He dry-fired twice more at it, advancing by slow steps, while frantic people huddled on the berths and cowered in the aisle. It didn't seem to be moving, and neither did several of the passengers—Trace saw at least six lying in pools of blood, and the little girl with her neck bent at a terrible angle; an old man with his chest torn open, as if the thing had shoved a fist in and pulled out his heart—

It was Martin Kingsley. He had the fire-ax still clenched in his hands, a surprised expression on his face. Miss Eliza huddled on the