29
CASSANDRA
For what felt like the thousandth time I ran up the aisle of the train, passing from car to car. I was sick of this goddamn train. When I got off—if I got off, the darker part of my mind said—I was going to find a thick tree and wrap my arms around it and savor something stationary.
The other passengers were delirious with fear now that the full reality of the situation was taking hold. Many huddled together and whimpered, while others shared private arguments.
“I just don’t see why we can’t jump…” one woman said in the dining car.
Then, in the first sleeper car: “It wasn’t a fucking hallucination, Janet! We all saw it! WE WERE ALL THERE.”
Onward I went, with the kind old man following with the Uzi in his hand, entirely at odds with his otherwise kind appearance. The pain on the bottom of my foot was worsening with every step, and I’m pretty sure I left a trail of red behind me like a giant injured slug.
We got to the final sleeper car, and a dark head poked out of one of the rooms near the end. James stepped into the hall, wearing only his underwear and with his hands still bound in front of him.
“Got ‘em,” I said, shaking the key ring for emphasis.
“Alright!”
I passed him in the aisle, and then the old man growled, “Is he…? Son of a…” and I heard a loud THWACK.
I turned in time to see James falling to the ground; the old man had the Uzi in one hand and now held a knife in the other, and had struck James in the face with the handle of the latter. It looked like the curved wing-shaped dagger Sebastian had threatened him with. James groaned on the ground and put his tied hands up to his now bleeding nose.
“Bro…”
“That’s for hijacking the train,” the old man said.
James tried to talk, but with a broken nose it made it sound like he had a cold. “Hey! I surrendered!”
“Punk,” the old man muttered.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked over my shoulder.
“It was on the ground! I wanted a souvenir. Something to show the grandkids.”
I reached the door to the engine car, and stopped to examine the ring of keys. It looked something a janitor would wear on their belt; how was I supposed to tell which was the right one?
I tried the biggest one, but it didn’t fit. Size eliminated a third of the keys, but that still left about 40. I tried one; didn’t work. Next; same thing. My hands were shaking now, and I wasn’t sure if it was from adrenaline or panic or even blood loss.
“Why in God’s name are there so many?” the old man said over my shoulder.
“Good question.” I paused, and turned around. “James! Come here!”
He got to his feet and remained a safe distance away. “No! He’s going to hit me again!”
“I promise he won’t.”
“I won’t promise that,” the old man growled.
“We need him!” The train rocked for emphasis.
James approached warily. Blood still fauceted down his dark face, and his eyes were pools of white. “What?”
I shook the keys in his face. “Which is the right one?”
“Umm.” He stared at them. “It was gold, I think. Or brass? All I remember is it wasn’t silver.”
That narrowed it down well; there were only five or six brass keys on the ring.
“Ohh…” James moaned, pointing with his bound wrists.
I looked out the window. The tracks curved gently far ahead, allowing us to see the next mile or so. There was a rectangular building next to the tracks, with a large overhang and dozens of twinkling police lights.
The next station. And judging from the look of the overhang, our damaged observation car would smash into it.
“Fuck,” I said, fumbling with the keys. “Fuck!”
The first brass key didn’t work, nor the second, or the third. I was about to question James’s memory when the fourth one slid into the slot with perfect harmony, and when I twisted I heard the lock disengage.
“Yes!” the old man grunted.
Through the partition, and then we were in the engine car itself. Everything was louder here, with the engine so close. I moved through a narrow hallway with compartment doors on either side, and into the engine room itself. There were two captain’s chairs in front of a large bank of computers and instruments; it reminded me of an airplane cockpit, but with an order of magnitude fewer buttons. Above that were the two square windows tilted toward us aerodynamically, giving a few of the tracks and terrain whizzing by.
On the ground behind the chairs were two men tied together with their hands bound behind their backs. Their heads were slumped against their chests, and one of them had tried blood on his scalp.
I knelt in front of one and gently shook his arm. “Hey. Are you conscious? Hello?” He moaned, but didn’t bother moving his head. “James,” I yelled, “slow the train down!”
“Do what? I dunno how! I just guarded the door!”
The old man was squinting at the controls like they were written in Chinese.
I gritted my teeth and got back to my feet—which sent new pain up my poor feet. I leaned over the dashboard and examined everything: even if it wasn’t as complex as an airplane, it was still overwhelming. My eyes locked onto a lever that looked like it could be throttle… but next to it was another one, and then a third next to it, and on the right wall was an entire bank of levers in various positions.
“Uhh…”
On the dashboard was a dial that looked like a speedometer, and when I leaned in I saw that it was around 55. If that was miles per hour then we were in business; all I had to do was try levers until I found one that made the speed go down.
One of the middle levers was already pushed halfway forward, so I wrapped my fingers around it and then pulled back gently. The engine noise increased in pitch rapidly, so I panicked and pushed it the other way, but the speed never flickered.
Okay. Maybe this was more complex than driving a car.
“Man, hurry up!” James yelled. The old man turned around from helping the engineers and aimed the butt of the gun, which made James take a few steps back with arms raised.
“How do we slow it down?” the old man asked the unconscious men. “Wake up!”
Ahead of us, the station was growing rapidly. How long did it take a train to slow to a stop? Probably more than we had.
I grabbed another lever and moved it; this time the speedometer dropped to 45, and I felt the train lurch gently in response. “Yes!” I shouted, steadily pulling the lever. But even when it was all the way back, the speed stayed at 45 and dropped no further.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Just pull ‘em all!” James shouted.
I threw aside caution and did just that. I pulled the next two levers at the same time, and nothing happened except a bunch of red lights flashed on the dashboard angrily. I turned a dial that said, “Internal pressure,” to zero, and the speedometer flickered and began dropping one slow millimeter at a time. James came forward and used his tied hands to do the same, sometimes reversing a switch I had just thrown, but I was too flustered to care. I pushed buttons and flipped switched that said anything close to what might be needed to stop the train, but we continued racing toward the inevitable crash.
Working my way around the dashboard, I came to a lever that was partially obscured underneath the desk. It was flush against the metal surface, with a round black ball on the end of the lever. There were three settings etched into the metal behind the ball: RELEASE (the current setting,) FULL SERVICE, and EMERGENCY.
This was as much an emergency as anything, so I grabbed the round end of the lever and shoved it to that position.
After trying all the other controls with no success, I wasn’t prepared for it this one to work. Still hunched over, I was thrown forward into the dashboard, head smacking into one of the computer screens so hard my vision went white as I fell to the ground. I heard the old man and James cry out beside me. A deafening hissing sound filled the air, with the deeper sound of metal screeching against metal. Everything vibrated: the air, the controls dashboard, the ground. Getting to my feet was like trying to stand up in a cement mixer.
Somehow I managed, leaning on the dashboard to steady myself.
“Oh dear,” the old man said, eyes wide as he stared out the window. “Oh my…”
The station was rapidly approaching. We were close enough to make out details: lights flashed from police cruisers around the tracks, and on the platform itself tape had been strung up to keep civilians from getting too close, with police spaced along the length.
One thing was terrifyingly obvious: there was no way the train would stop in time.
“Get away!” I screamed, waving my hand at the window as if they could magically hear me. “Get back!”
“Oh God,” James prayed behind me. “Oh sweet Jesus, I’m sorry…”
The old man lowered himself into one of the captain’s chair and fastened the harness over his chest; I mimicked him because it was a much better idea than standing. James followed suit in a third chair up against the back wall.
I twisted in my chair and gestured at the two unconscious engineers. “Hold their heads. Don’t let them bang around.”
James maneuvered his legs to create a cushion for them, and then held their head in place with his bound hands.
The screeching wheels were painfully loud; I pictured orange sparks flying in all directions underneath us. People on the station platform realized what was happening and began fleeing; first in an organized shuffle, but then with the frenzy of panicked souls. The police on the platform backed away slowly, unsure of what to do, hands on the holsters of their guns. One of them gave in and turned around to run.
Above the tracks, the station overhang loomed. It was made with thick beams of steel, I could now see. I imagined the peeled-open top of the observation car striking it like a sword swung at a lamppost, and in my imagination the sword didn’t survive.
Okay, I thought to myself. This is it.
The train had slowed considerably by the time it reached the platform, but it was still too fast by far. The platform and police whizzed by in our narrow view, and I prepared for the moment of impact, hands gripping the arms of the chair so tight I expected the plastic leather to tear.
I waited, and waited, and waited, cringing the entire time.
The sensation was like rear-ending someone on the highway; I was thrown forward against the straps of my chair, my head whiplashing forward and down. The sound was terrible: metal crunching and warping unnaturally, the groans of iron giants devastated by the massive industrial engines of mankind. I felt someone smack against the back of my chair and hoped it wasn’t the engineers, or that at the very least they didn’t get hurt too bad. After the initial lurch came a new trembling, side-to-side, and with a sudden bump our view through the window twisted sideways away from the platform as we finally derailed. I couldn’t stop myself from screaming as we hopped our tracks and straddled the adjacent rail, the entire engine car bucking like a bronco, throwing us out of our seats for quick, weightless instants. I clenched my eyes shut against the impossible trauma I was experiencing, hoping that if I could block it from my eyes it might go away entirely.
I couldn’t tell when we stopped, but eventually I opened my eyes and realized that we had.
The view through the window was diagonal away from the platform. Everything was wonderfully still. I twisted to look at the old man, and he looked back at me with surprise, then happiness.
“Holy Toledo!” he said, awestruck.
I unbuckled my harness with shaky fingers and then rose. James still sat in his seat, his eyes wide and his chest heaving as if he were having a panic attack. The two engineers had indeed fallen forward against my chair.
“He hit his shoulder,” James said in a monotone voice. “But I think they’re alright. I think.” He blinked rapidly. “Are we alright?”
“We’re alright.” I knelt to the engineer and cradled his head; everything looked okay, though I wasn’t medically trained. I lowered him gently and hoped they hadn’t injured their necks.
Suddenly, James threw off his harness and bolted to his feet. He got halfway down the hall before the old man stood and yelled, “FREEZE, PUNK!”
James slid to a stop, then put his tied hands over his head. The old man giggled.
“I always wanted to say that. I feel like Dick Tracy!”
Shouts drifted outside the train; men giving orders. “You might want to put the gun down,” I said, “before the cops board the train. They might get the wrong idea.”
The smile was wiped off his face in the blink of an eye; he made an O shape with his mouth and quickly dropped the gun like it was a hot pan. “Oh dear…” He kept Sebastian’s curved dagger tucked into his belt, though.
James took the opportunity to resume fleeing. He got as far as the door before it opened and police entered with guns drawn.
I used my foot to kick the Uzi forward toward the cops—which was a painful reminder that my foot was more blood than skin—and then put my hands in the air along with the old man. The police officer came down the hall slowly, her pistol still pointed ahead of her.
“Thank God you’re here,” I said. “Can I hug you? I really want to hug you.”
“MA’AM, PLEASE STAY BACK.”
“Yeah, sure, okay, no problem!” I squeaked.
“We were able to gain entry to the engine and stop the train,” the old man told her. “We found the engineers tied up and unconscious. That man,” he pointed with his chin at James down the hall, “was one of the four hijackers. Two more are somewhere at the rear of the train.”
“And the fourth?”
“He’s, well… He’s gone,” I said.
“Gone as in dead? Or gone as in escaped?”
The old man and I looked at each other. “The truth is going to sound really crazy.”
“What, like he turned into a dragon and flew away?”
I blinked at the cop with my jaw open. She’d said it without any hint of sarcasm or mocking.
“Half of Chicago is on fire,” she explained, then shook her head. “This whole day feels like one bad dream. Please exit the train with your hands in the air.” She began relaying our information into her shoulder-radio.
We obeyed, pressing ourselves against the hallway wall to allow a medic to get past us. Then we were at the partition, which had torn apart by the crash and was being used by police to enter the front of the train. Two officers helped us down to the tracks, then another guided us up a ladder and onto the station platform itself. I winced with each step but didn’t call out for help; there were probably passengers more injured than me.
I got my first good look at the train: the cars had come off the tracks in a zig-zag pattern, each one pointing in a different direction, while somehow still remaining connected. The peeled-open roof of the observation car had smashed into the station overhang; it was now bent backwards with the end still touching the underside of the overhang.
“My grandchildren are never going to believe this,” the old man said.
Overwhelmed with emotion in the aftermath of everything, I turned and wrapped him in a big hug. It felt good to feel the touch of another human, even though I was shivering from the adrenaline wearing off.
“Oh dear!” he said, pulling away but keeping his hands on my arms. He rubbed them up and down. “You’re freezing cold!”
I began to shrug it off, but stopped myself. There was something strange about this feeling: it was like I had been dipped in ice water from the legs-up.
Realization crashed into me harder than the train into the station.
Orlando!