While the thermometer leaked mercury outside, inside of the dining car the weather felt like a warm summer day. The glow from the chandeliers overhead left the car in a perpetual afternoon, and the heat of the privileged rinsed the walls. It was a late dinner for all of them, and Charlotte Johnston was starving.
With her long, black hair brushed to the side and her eyes the color of blue coral, she was a night swim in the bay and every bit as cool. As she dissected her turkey with pomegranate sauce, her companion, Adele Rowe, looked at her dumbfounded. Her own chicken salad was still intact on her plate.
“Where do you put it?” Adele asked.
Charlotte laughed. Her slim green dress showed no signs of tightening. “In my mouth, obviously.”
“Seriously, though,” Adele persisted, her mouth as tight as bun of blonde hair.
Adele was as prim and proper as Charlotte was relaxed. The woman in the green dress said in her thick Scottish accent, “I’ve found that thinking happy thoughts helps with digestion.”
“And what are those?”
Charlotte slipped a little smile. “They’re thoughts that aren’t sad, obviously.”
Adele shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. What are these happy thoughts of yours?”
“Oh, when I rescued myself from a father who loved the drink more than he loved his family and a mother who was afraid of everything.”
“You mean when your husband rescued you by marrying you?”
Charlotte’s eyes narrowed. “I just let him think he was rescuing me. It’ll take more than a doctor to patch up his pride if he thought otherwise.”
“We’ve known each other for a few weeks now – are we friends enough that I can be frank?” Adele asked abruptly.
“Of course.”
“Your husband lost everything when he married you. He lost his good standing, his place in his father’s will, and his title. At least give him some credit.”
“I don’t think of it as him losing out on all of those things, and they are just things. I think of it as him gaining me. We are making a fortune together that he couldn’t on his own. Besides, it’s better to take than to be given.” Charlotte then added, “What are your happy thoughts, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“My family – what I can remember of them anyway.”
“Are they dead?” Charlotte asked casually.
Adele was taken aback by this. “No, but they might as well be.”
As she said this, she glanced nervously at the back of the train car. Curious, Charlotte’s eyes followed her gaze. Standing by the door was a man built like a gladiator but who was dressed as a businessman. He wore a suit that threatened to split at the seams and had a haircut with a military precision to it. He looked as if he had never smiled in his life, and even from a distance, the women could see a rippling darkness in his eyes.
“Your husband’s bodyguard?”
“He’s like a prison – not only does he stop people from getting to us, but he stops me from getting to people.” That was all Adele said, although she wanted to say so much more. She wanted to talk about how she hadn’t seen her mother and her sisters in years because her husband Clark wouldn’t allow it. She wanted to talk about how Clark had his bodyguard, Ethan Vaughn, follow her everywhere she went “to keep an eye on her,” as Clark had once ambiguously ordered him. If Ethan’s job was to keep Adele safe, she felt that he was doing an awful job at it.
“And how are you ladies doing on this fine evening?” A voice boomed from above them. Adele and Charlotte looked up from their seats to see the conductor, Xavier Allen, hovering over them. Allen was a pudgy man who had attempted to comb his hair earlier but gave up halfway through.
“We’re doing just fine, Mr. Allen,” Charlotte said with a fake sweetness. “I’m just enjoying this fine turkey “
“Personally, I’ve always been partial to steak, which is why I’m trying to get us to Cheyenne as quickly as possible. There’s a fine steakhouse there with a tab under my name.”
“Well, we do appreciate that. I for one can’t get home fast enough,” Charlotte replied.
“Is…” Allen paused as he took a look at his pocket watch, “…six hours soon enough?”
Charlotte pouted. “That long?”
“Any faster and we might as well be shot out of a cannon,” Allen said with a jiggling laugh. It was the only joke he had, and he was once told that he either had to find new jokes to tell old people or old jokes to tell new people. Lucky for him, his life was surrounded by strangers. As he said this, he saw out of the corner of his eye a man with a square jaw and a red grizzle on his face like embers. Usually, William Gordon was all smiles, to the point of being obnoxious. The fact that his face was dressed for a funeral meant something. The engine stoker was usually drenched in soot from working in the locomotive, but he had taken the time to wipe off as much of the sticky smoke as he could. There was still a patch of soot tattooed on his neck that he had forgotten. The passengers in the first-class car looked at him oddly, thinking that he had forgotten to evolve with the rest of them.
“Mr. Allen, can we talk somewhere more private?” Gordon asked through clenched teeth.
Allen gave him a sideways look that bordered on the incredulous. “When in history has anyone ever willingly agreed to question like that?”
“Let’s make history then, sir.”
The engine stoker walked the conductor through the crowd and out onto the vestibule at the end of the train car. Although there was a sheath that covered the gap between the cars, the cold somehow still bled through and drained the world gray. Allen rubbed his hands together briskly as Gordon closed the door behind him.
Before Allen had a chance to say anything, Gordon said, “We’re going to have to slow down this train.”
The conductor was surprised by this. “Why? Is there a problem with the engine? Are we running low on coal?”
Gordon shook his head. “Everything’s fine, but it won’t be.”
“Nobody likes a man who talks in riddles.”
“A bit earlier in the evening, just before the sun set, we were looking out the front when we saw something. There’s a big nerve of storm clouds sweeping in from the west. And you may think that the black clouds in summer are terrifying, really there is nothing scarier than gray clouds in winter.”
Allen snorted. “They say that seeing is believing, but in this case, I wouldn’t believe it, Mr. Gordon.”
“Sir?”
“I read the weather reports before we left Iowa. They were reporting some bad weather coming in from Canada, but that it would likely dissipate because there’s another front coming in from the Rockies.”
“I know we aren’t meteorologists, but we know bad when we see it. One of the crew said he saw the same sort of clouds before a blizzard hit Kansas a few years back. He said that the storm that followed was like God scrubbing the world clean. We’re thinking…”
“Thinking what?”
“We’re thinking that we should stop the train until we know where this storm’s going,” Gordon said hesitatingly. “At the very least, we should slow down a bit.”
“Nonsense!” Allen exclaimed. “I’m not about to jeopardize my record because I’m surrounded by people afraid of snowflakes.”
“You’re going to jeopardize a lot more than your record if you keep on pushing ahead like this.”
“And what, exactly, do you intend to do about this?” Gordon asked, refraining from adding, “Besides whine about it?”
“All you do is smile and punch tickets. I make the train run.”
“Is that a threat?” Allen asked.
“I’m just stating the facts,” Gordon said with a shrug. “If you’re threatened by reality, that’s your problem, not mine.”
“Reality cuts both ways. You have your paycheck waiting for you in Cheyenne, and you’re never going to see it if you stop this train.”
“Funny, I though
t we still got our pay from the company headquarters back in Kansas City,” Gordon said, half-seriously.
Allen rolled his eyes. “I meant in the metaphorical sense. If you stop the train, you might as well go and join the third-class passengers. William, you have a wife and kids – are you willing to risk your family’s future on your meteorological skills?”
Gordon stared at him for a long moment before sighing. He shuffled off to the locomotive, leaving behind Allen in the ball of the rattle. As the railroad tracks clacked beneath him, Allen’s brain swam in the cesspool of his thoughts. He thought of the company’s most recent financial report, which read like the Bookkeeping of Revelation. Revenues were plummeting because of rising competition, and there were record expenses due to repairs from their rail yard being flooded. The end times were coming for their company, and if they were late pulling into the station, that would only hasten the company’s bankruptcy. He could just imagine the public relations nightmare if he was the conductor onboard the company’s first late train.
As Allen thought this, a suicide of dark snowflakes fell from the night.