“Is everyone okay? Voices, please, I need voices!”
Allen launched his voice down the corridor as he strode through each of the train cars. There was a tremble in his voice, although he didn’t know if it was from the adrenaline or his likely fractured rib. He needed to know if any of his passengers were wounded or worse. The passenger manifest was lost with the locomotive, but he remembered the train being booked to capacity, with eight crewmembers, twenty passengers in the first-class car, ninety passengers spread out among the three coach cars, four marshals and one prisoner. One of the crew was already dead, and Allen did the rushed math in his head: 122 souls left. He never cared for Patton, and he knew that the engineer would be forgotten. But every other person who died would bleed consequences for him.
And there were going to be consequences. There was a passenger dead in first-class, having cracked their head on the sink in the washroom, as well as two wounded. In the coach cars, there were three dead and eleven wounded. He groaned as he watched a doctor onboard lay out the dead on the floor of the baggage car, burying each with the dirt of a white sheet. There were newspaper editors back east who wouldn’t consider it beneath themselves to spray a picture like that across the front page. He could already see the headlines that they would write. They would paint him as a monster when he was just trying to be a hero. And the company that he had worked for since he was a teenager will now certainly fall because of him.
As Allen’s brain kicked around paranoid thoughts, he walked away from the open door leading into Nellie Bly’s sleeping compartment. Nellie, Ian, and Selina were seated inside, looking solemn. Fortunately, the derailment was blunted for them, as they were thrown against the mattress in the room. Besides a bruised shoulder for Ian, they looked fine on the outside. Inside, though, they had thoughts churning like cream.
“What if something had happened to Martin?” Selina asked in a voice so afraid that she didn’t believe it to be her own. Martin Coburn had still not appeared, and she was beginning to suspect the worst.
Nellie shook her head. “The conductor said that the dead placed in the baggage car have already been identified.”
“They’re still searching the train, though, aren’t they? And if he’s alive, he would have shown up by now,” Selina said quickly, moments away from hysterics. Any moment, she was going to realize that she was all alone in a strange world, she just knew it.
Ian was about to say something reassuring when he realized that he didn’t know how to comfort people. So he stayed silent as Nellie wrapped an arm around Selina’s shoulders. “It’s going to be fine. Your husband didn’t risk everything he had just to die before he could enjoy a life with you. They’re going to find him with just a bump on the head and calling out your name.”
“That’s the problem. When we first got married, he was as optimistic as a candle. But over the past few days, he’s been talking funny.”
Ian raised an eyebrow. “When you say he’s been talking funny, do you mean in a humorous or disturbed way?” Before Selina had a chance to respond, Ian answered his own question. “Well, what’s the difference really? I mean, laughter is a cathartic release of anxiety, so really, humor and mental illness are both shades of the same color – it’s just that humor is a shade brighter.”
Selina looked at him like she had just discovered some new, bizarre bug. Nellie just looked at him curiously. “Where did you learn to talk like that?”
“I thought we already established that whatever I say, you aren’t going to believe.”
“I keep forgetting,” Nellie said, amused, before turning back to Selina with a serious look. “You think he’s going to do something that he’ll regret?”
Selina shrugged, feeling helpless. “I don’t know. All I know is that we’re newlyweds, we’re out in the frontier, and we don’t have much money left to our names. Martin’s father has likely already cut him out of the will back home. As fast as the train was moving, I think reality has managed to catch up with us.”
There was a hard silence in the compartment before Ian finally said, “Well, I can’t speak for your husband, but I for one am worried. An old gypsy once told me that I would die in a godforsaken place – it might as well be Nebraska.”
Ian said that, hoping for a laugh, but the two women just stared at him. It took him a moment to realize that they weren’t staring at him but past him and so he turned. Standing in the doorway was Martin, his face stone, his hands shaking with electricity. His hand was clenched tightly around his pocket watch, leaving a tattoo in his palm.
Selina didn’t stand up and run over to him, mostly because she was afraid that she would spontaneously slap him rather than hug him. Instead, she sat poised in her chair and demanded, “Where were you?”
Martin stared at her through a dew of tears. Then, he just said sadly, “Selina.”