***
It was when Allen was uneasily walking through one of the coach cars that he heard the sound he feared most in the world.
A woman cried out, “What do we do now?”
The woman’s voice was a boulder thrown into a pond, and the shell of murmuring cracked open. The next thing the conductor knew, he was besieged on all sides by questions. For a man who was used to hearing questions such as when they would arrive at the next station, he was not prepared for emergencies such as this. He sputtered for an answer, and when only false starts of words came out of his mouth, the passengers realized that they had to answer their own questions.
“Let’s send a party to Cheyenne!” One of the men cried out. “They ain’t going to know where we’re at, and they ain’t going to know what shape we’re in. By the time they find us, the only shape they’ll need to know is how to measure our coffins.”
As the others jeered in agreement, Allen paddled through the sea of people, desperate for dry land but finding none. Hoping to calm them down – mostly himself – Allen begged, “Please listen to me when I say we are not in any danger as long as we stay here! Anyone who steps foot out that door will never come back, I can guarantee that much. We have an adequate supply of food to outlast the blizzard. When the good people at the station realize that we’re gone, they’re going to search every inch of track until they find us, alive and well.”
“Well, the food’s going to last forever, because it’s going to be refrigerated,” a voice said behind Allen. The crowd died away as everyone turned to see Gordon standing before them, his hands heavily bandaged. Even though he was technically still on the job, he made no effort to hide the whiskey on his tongue as he spoke.
“Our fearless leader is right – we have plenty of food,” Gordon said hazily. “What he’s conveniently forgetting is that we only have enough coal to last us for one, maybe two days. We would have more, but it’s currently buried in the snow at the bottom of the valley. And the way the weather’s looking, once the coal goes, we go. The math’s real simple, I’m sorry to say. We got to do something, and sitting around waiting for rescue is not something.”
Gordon’s words injected the crowd with courage. Allen tried a second time to persuade them otherwise, but by then it was too late. The people in coach were already arguing amongst themselves as to who should brave the cold and follow the tracks the rest of the way to Cheyenne and salvation. They did the math and figured that they could make it to the town and back with a snowplow within two days as long as the weather didn’t worsen.
But in Allen’s world, the weather could only worsen. He remembered, as a child, living deep in the prairies of Kansas. One year, there was a blizzard that suffocated his town like a blanket in July. It hit at the worst possible time too, as it was the middle of the day and the people were out and about and nowhere near home. In particular, a young Allen and a pack of children were sitting in their one-room schoolhouse, learning arithmetic, when Allen looked out the window, bored, and saw the first snowflake fall. Minutes later, the snow was falling so thick that it looked like they were drowning in a pail of cream. Their teacher panicked – although there was a stove at the front of the classroom, there was not nearly enough firewood. Since the school was on the outskirts of town, the teacher decided to risk a walk into town and come back with a rope, to guide the children towards the inn where there was warmth for all. Before the teacher left, she assured her children that she would be right back – if the students were older and wiser, they would have known that she was doomed after saying that. When the storm died the next morning, rescuers came to find the children huddled around the last embers in the stove. It wasn’t until the snow melted weeks later that the teacher’s body was found, just feet from the backdoor to the inn.
All of this went through Allen’s mind as the people talked of going out to find help, but he knew now there was no point in stopping them. At the same time, their list of heroes was narrowed down to five, as they couldn’t spare provisions for any more. There were also two women who had offered to help, but the men refused, secretly afraid of being outdone by them. A collection plate of sorts was passed up and down the aisles of the train, as people donated layers of clothing that the men could put on to protect them against the cold. Even then, nothing in life was as certain as death, and the men grimily wondered if their shapeshift of borrowed clothes would be their funeral suits.
When it came time for the men to step outside, the fear in the crowd had twisted into an emotion even darker, one that had no name. The whole train car watched in silence as the men, led by a round Russian immigrant named Fyodor, swung the door open and hopped out into the snow. If anyone on the train had said a final goodbye to the men, they didn’t hear it – the blizzard’s winds were a gunshot, loud enough for a deaf man to hear. The snow was as thick as scars, and they couldn’t tell if they were about to walk into white or black.
The wind was pushing so hard that the men struggled to get through the door. When the last of the party left, the door slammed shut. Some of the people in the car jumped a little, either from the thunder of the door closing or the sharp silence that followed. Some of them ran to the windows, all in the hope of catching one more sight of the men. But when they reached the windows, there was nothing but darkness, as if the men had dissolved by the acid in the night.