One Hell of a Ride

  One Hell of a Ride

  by

  Seanan McGuire

  For Brooke, who loves trains

  Eastbound on the Southern Pacific Railway, 1928

  Jonathan Healy relaxed in the comfort of his first-class cabin, enjoying the feeling of the train moving beneath him, the cool air moving across his face, and—yes—the glorious sensation of not being in Arizona. He was, in point of fact, beginning to believe that the greatest gift that could be experienced by any of God’s creatures was not being in Arizona.

  A foot nudged his leg, none too delicately. “You dead over there, or just sleeping?” asked a female voice in something just short of a drawl. “Either way, wake up, city boy. I’m bored.”

  “Are you ever not bored, Fran?” asked Jonathan, opening his eyes before she could kick him again. “I ask purely out of curiosity, mind, and not because I want to know what you would find amusing at this particular moment in time. I’m still bruised from the last ‘entertainment’ you came up with.” Not to mention the gunshot wound in his left shoulder, which was healing at the usual rate, which was to say, more slowly than would have been convenient. The idea of reopening it for Fran’s sake did not appeal.

  Frances Brown, late the star attraction of the Campbell Family Circus and currently, for no good reason Jonathan could conceive, his traveling partner, snorted. “How was I supposed to know the train would take the corner like that? I’ve never ridden it before.” She flopped into the seat across from him, managing to do so with surprising force, given that she couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. “You’re the worldly traveler. Now entertain me.”

  “Performing their afternoon prayers in the luggage compartment.” Jonathan held up a hand to forestall her next question. “I don’t know who or what they’re praying to, although odds are good that it’s either me or my father. Please don’t interrupt them to ask. I don’t feel like a theology lesson just now.”

  Fran scowled. “You’re not any fun at all.”

  “I never claimed to be,” Jonathan said. Sensing a sulk in the making, he added hurriedly, “You could check on Rabbit. I’m sure he’d love to see you.” Fran’s horse was in the livestock car, despite her frequent protestations that he could bunk just as well with the two of them. In that, at least, Jonathan—and railway regulations—had persevered.

  “I’m sure he would, too, if I hadn’t just come from seeing him,” said Fran. She sighed, turning to look out the window, where the golden plains of America were rolling majestically by. “How much longer before we get to Michigan?”

  “Three days,” said Jonathan, not without sympathy. “Once we get there, you’ll have all the excitement you can stomach, I assure you. For right now, we simply have to make it without starting any trouble.”

  Fran sighed again, more heavily, and settled in for what he recognized as the beginnings of a good long sulk. She was always at her least observant—and her quietest—when she was sulking, and so he took advantage of the opportunity to appreciate a different type of scenery.

  When she wasn’t stomping around, shouting at him, or producing knives from the seemingly inexhaustible supply she had concealed within her clothing, Fran really was one of the most attractive women he’d ever seen. She was tiny, the top of her head barely coming up to his chin, and her life with the circus had left her with a dancer’s build, all long limbs and sinuous grace. Her features were delicate enough to be lovely even when she scowled, which was good, since she scowled quite a bit. Add in big blue eyes and long golden curls, and he had to admit himself smitten…or would have been, if she hadn’t been so damnably, intractably infuriating.

  It wasn’t Fran’s fault that the owner of the circus where she’d been raised had decided to supplement his income by raising a Questing Beast to be part of the sideshow. It wasn’t Jonathan’s fault that killing the Questing Beast had left her without either a home or a livelihood. But it was their mutual fault that he’d survived his encounter with said Beast, and so he felt a certain obligation to see her taken care of—hence her accompanying him back to the family home in Michigan.

  Assuming they both survived to reach it, and one of them didn’t throw the other off the train before they ever saw the Michigan state line. At the moment, that particular outcome was most definitely in doubt.

  Cheering drifted down from the luggage compartment as the mice reached some pivotal point in their ceremony. Jonathan joined Fran in looking out the window, and America, in all its splendor, kept rolling on by.

  Jonathan’s head was resting against the window, his eyes closed and his mind almost fully in the grips of slumber, when the train hit a bump on the track. The impact startled him upright, one hand grabbing for the armrest while the other grabbed for the gun he wore concealed at his belt. The effect on Fran was even more dramatic. She was on her feet before he realized that the train was still moving, a knife in each hand and her blue eyes wide and wild.

  “What was that?” she demanded.

  “This is why my father always recommends I get a private room when travel is required, even if it more than doubles the expense.” Jonathan released the gun, raising both hands to show Fran that he was unarmed. “Put the knives away. It was just a bump on the track.”

  Fran’s eyes narrowed. For a moment, he was afraid she was going to demand he prove that they weren’t under attack. Then she tossed her head in a gesture so like her horse that he had to bite back the urge to laugh, and her knives vanished, like magic, back into the folds of her skirt. “Fine,” she said. “I’m checking on Rabbit. Poor baby’s got to be scared out of his mind, we keep changing things up on him the way that we do.”

  She turned flounced out of the room, not quite managing to slam the door behind herself as she stepped into the main corridor of the train. Jonathan sighed as he watched her go. “Rabbit’s not the only one who’s scared, I think,” he said. There was no one to answer him, not even the mice, who were still engaged in their own private congress. He turned to look out the window again, and froze.

  The golden plains were gone, replaced by a blasted wasteland beneath a bloody sky. The distant mountains remained, but they had been transformed, going from a comforting fence against the sky to a virtual wall of what looked very much like heaped-up bone.

  Jonathan got to his feet and turned to open the luggage compartment. The mice stopped their chanting and stared at him, black oil-drop eyes managing to express surprise and confusion at his disruption of their ceremony. Finally, the head priest stepped forward and asked, in a piping voice, “Is there Trouble?”

  Nobody could pronounce a capital letter like an Aeslin mouse. “I’m afraid so. I need the silver and blessed ash bullets,” he said, and was surprised at how calm and measured his voice sounded.

  “So Mote It Be!” chorused the mice, and swarmed into his valise. Seconds later, several of the stronger members of the colony reappeared with a box of bullets on their shoulders, accompanied by cheers from the rest.

  “Thank you,” said Jonathan gravely, and took the box. “You are to stay in this compartment until I tell you otherwise. This is a commandment.” The mice understood things best when they were couched in religious terms.

  The priest looked at him. “What if you do not return?”

  It was a fair question, and one that every member of the family would be forced to answer sooner or later. It deserved a fair answer. And yet… “I will return,” he said firmly. The idea of the Aeslin trying to make their way in the land outside the train was unthinkable. It would be better for them to die where they were. “Stay and wait for me.”

  Jonathan closed the luggage compartment on the puzzled congregation and began reloading his guns, letting the normal ammun
ition fall uncollected to the seat. It wasn’t important now. What mattered was arming himself against what was in front of him…and getting to Fran before anything else could.

  Jonathan’s cabin was located midway down the train, putting it an inconvenient distance from both the dining and livestock cars. Normally, he would have put his weapons away before making the trek. This was not a normal situation. He kept one pistol held out in front of him as he walked, watching for signs that anyone else was out and about. There was movement from some of the cabins. Judging by the blood leaking from under their doors, it wasn’t movement he wanted to investigate. He didn’t have the bullets to spare.

  One of the doors slid open as he passed. He whirled toward it, only years of training keeping him from pulling the trigger before he saw the terrified eyes of the man in front of him. He put the gun up. “Sir, I need to ask you to return to your cabin,” he said.

  “What in God’s name is happening here?” demanded the man, eyes flicking from Jonathan’s gun to the corridor. “My wife—”

  “Sir, there may be robbers on the train.”

  He knew as soon as he said it that it was the wrong lie to tell. The man’s eyes widened further. “My wife is in the dining car!” He stepped forward, apparently intending to push past Jonathan.

  Jonathan raised his pistol. The man stopped dead. “Security is on the way to clear the dining car,” Jonathan lied. “You can help your wife by going back into your cabin and locking the door.” If the man’s wife had actually been in the dining car, where there was real silver on the tables, she might be fine. If she’d been in the corridors…

  Well. There were things it was best not to say to anyone, least of all a frightened husband.

  “Who are you?” demanded the man, eyes still on the gun in Jonathan’s hand.

  “Security,” said Jonathan—which was true, in its way. He was securing the train. He simply wasn’t doing it while in the employ of the railroad. “Now please. Back inside.”

  The man retreated without another word, closing the cabin door behind him. Jonathan waited until he heard the locks engage before he resumed walking. There was nothing to stop the man from leaving once he was sure Jonathan had moved on, but there was nothing to be done about that, and there was the chance—slim, but present—that Fran was alive. Clinging to that faint thread of hope like a drowning man clings to a rope thrown by a passing vessel, Jonathan kept going. And through it all, the train kept rolling on.

  The coach cars were empty, except for strange stains and the lingering smell of burnt flesh. Several of the windows were broken, allowing the scent of sulfur to drift in from outside. Jonathan put one arm across his nose and kept walking, moving faster now. Still nothing jumped out at him. He was either exceptionally lucky, or whatever had taken the train was patient enough to let the survivors of the initial strike settle into complacency.

  That was one trap Jonathan had no intention of falling into. When he reached the door to the livestock car, he dropped his arm, grabbed the handle, and ducked even as he yanked the door open. Fran’s knife whizzed by where his head should have been, finding a home somewhere far behind him.

  “Oh, thank God,” he said, straightening. “Fran, it’s me! Save your weapons!”

  “Johnny?” Fran stepped out from behind one of the low partitions that separated the livestock car into stalls. About half of them were full, cattle and horses looking toward the two humans in their midst with bewilderment. “Is that really you?”

  “I certainly hope so,” he said, and stepped through the door, pulling it closed behind him. The floor was sticky. He looked down, and saw that the two stalls nearest the door had been inhabited when the transition occurred; one horse, one cow. Both were dead now, eviscerated and left on the floor where they’d fallen. Left on the— “There were no bodies elsewhere on the train. Why are these still here?”

  “It’s a good thing for you that I recognize this as your way of saying ‘oh, Fran, I’m so glad you’re all right,’” said Fran. “They’re still here because the thing that killed them wasn’t expecting me to be armed.”

  “You mean it wasn’t expecting you to be armed with silver,” he said, lifting his head. “How did you know which knives to use? And why were you carrying them?”

  “Silver’s for scaring the rubes. It’s soft enough to blunt easy. When the first two knives didn’t slow it down, I grabbed one of the silver ones by mistake. That stopped it cold.”

  Jonathan decided not to ask whether he was the “rube” she’d been intending to scare. Instead, he focused on the important question: “Where is it?”

  Fran—who had blood spattered all over the front of her traveling gown, and bits of hay caught in her hair—pointed to a tarp spread in one of the otherwise empty stalls. “It was upsetting the horses,” she said, by way of explanation.

  Jonathan blinked. “You’re attacked by a thing you’ve likely never seen outside your nightmares, and your first concern is for the horses? Frances Brown, you are definitely unusual.”

  “I’m taking that as a compliment,” she said. “Now what is that thing?”

  “Judging by the landscape, I’m going to venture that it’s one of the lesser breeds of imp.” Jonathan knelt, peeling back the tarp to reveal a squat, four-armed hominid with dark gray skin and a mouth so filled with needled teeth that it didn’t close. All six of the creature’s limbs sported long, bony claws. One of Fran’s knives protruded from the middle of its forehead. “I was correct. It’s a boundary imp.” He straightened. “Did it touch you?”

  “What? No! And how do you sound so damn calm? What’s a boundary imp? What’s going on?”

  The livestock car had no windows. That had to be how she’d missed the change. “Have you ever heard of a hell-bound train?” he asked, turning to face her.

  “They carry sinners to Hell,” said Fran, without hesitation. Then her eyes widened. “You’re not telling me…”

  “They don’t actually carry sinners to Hell. That’s a misinterpretation, as is the belief that the iron in the railroads will protect us.” Fran didn’t look comforted. Jonathan sighed. “I’m sorry. Let me try again. There are places where the layers of reality don’t sit well against each other, like…like wearing a new pair of shoes. They rub and pull and holes can form.”

  “Holes,” said Fran flatly. “We fell down a hole?”

  “One of the things that can form those holes is speed. Trains go so much faster than men, or even horses, and they weigh so much, that sometimes, they…” Jonathan paused, trying to find words that wouldn’t frighten her.

  “Tear a hole in reality’s sock?” asked Fran.

  Jonathan nodded. “Imprecise, but yes. The iron in the train gives it the heft to punch through the thin spots. They scab over and eventually scar; in the meanwhile, some things get lost. Those who witness a train’s disappearance may report the smell of sulfur, or seeing flame—all marks of the Christian Hell.”

  “We’re not in Hell?”

  “No, just one of the boundary underworlds—hence the imp. They’ll kill anything they can get their claws on, but silver dispatches them neatly. They’re fond of iron. It’s part of what attracts them to the trains.” He grimaced. “Don’t ask why there are train tracks here. No one knows.”

  Fran paused, appearing to consider his words. Then she cocked her head and asked, “How many of the little bastards do you reckon we have to kill in order to get home?”

  Jonathan smiled. “I hoped you’d ask that.”

  The imp had entered the livestock car through the door connecting it to the passenger coach. After convincing Fran that Rabbit would have to remain behind, Jonathan helped her “seal” the car with silver throwing knives, placing one at each corner of the door.

  “Boundary imps won’t cross silver unless they’re starving, cornered, or both,” he said. “With the number of passengers that have already been eaten, they’re not starving, and there are windows along the rest of the train, so they wo
n’t be cornered. They’ll just be angry, and that’s not the sort of thing that inspires them to break down doors.”

  “What do you mean, they won’t be cornered?” demanded Fran. “Aren’t we going to kill them all?”

  “Our train is in their land. It’s not our fault, but it’s not theirs, either. If they’re actively threatening the surviving passengers, we kill them. If they run, we let them go. We can’t wipe out all the boundary imps. There’s no point in trying.”

  Fran frowned thoughtfully. “You mean they’re like rattlesnakes. You kill them in your barn, but you leave them be out in the desert.”

  “It’s not a bad analogy,” said Jonathan. “Now come along. We need to reach the engine.”

  “What happens when we get there?”

  “If the imps haven’t eaten the conductor, we defend him long enough for him to drive this train through the torn spot. If they have, we pray that between the two of us, we have the smarts necessary to keep several tons of American steel rolling down the rails.” Jonathan began walking down the length of the passenger coach, now with both pistols drawn and held in front of him. His left shoulder should allow for basic shooting, as long as he didn’t get too tricky. He hoped. “If we don’t lose too much speed, we should be able to get this train back to our America intact.”

  “What about the people?”

  “The dead will stay dead. The living will be paid handsomely by the railroad to keep their mouths shut.” He risked a glance back at Fran. She looked appalled. “It doesn’t happen often. It doesn’t even happen as often as it used to, when the first tracks were laid. But trains have always disappeared. The men who own the rails know the risks.”

  “The passengers don’t,” she said.

  Jonathan sighed. “I know. God help me, I know.”

  They kept walking. The car was still clear of imps, as was the next one. Jonathan was sorry to see that the occupied cabin he’d passed earlier was empty now, the door standing halfway open. Maybe the inhabitant would be lucky, and make it to the dining car. Most likely not.