At first, the flatcar barely budges. The wheels, mired in the undergrowth, slowly rip through tangles of weeds, squeaking noisily. Lilly puts everything she has into the limb, pushing as hard as she can. She feels the train car breaking free of the kudzu and wild ivy and ironweed, and the steel wheels beginning to turn on the rail.
More walkers arrive, clamoring to claw their way onto the car.
Tommy slams his boot down on a small female, staving in her skull as he pushes the car away from her. The diminutive body collapses and falls under the conveyance, the rear wheels slicing her legs in two. The flatcar picks up speed. Now Lilly finds herself pumping the limb as though rowing a boat, pushing and lifting, pushing and lifting, making the car roll faster and faster down the main branch. Near the front, Tommy also furiously prods his limb against the ground, until something unexpected happens.
“We’re going downhill!” Lilly yells from the rear, the wind in her hair now, the car vibrating wildly as it picks up speed on the downward slope. She drops her limb. Tommy drops his bough and crouches down, holding on to an iron bolt to steady himself.
The track gently curves to the right. A few walkers along the edges of the rails stumble into the car’s path, and get mowed down. The wheels thump over mortified flesh. Tommy screams as a severed arm tumbles across the car’s deck, spewing a leech trail of blood.
The flatcar rolls faster and faster. The woods on either side start to blur past them. Lilly guesses they’re already traveling thirty or forty miles an hour. The wheels drum on the rails, a syncopated beat, the tempo speeding up. Tommy starts to giggle, and then his giggle builds to outright manic laughter, and then his manic laughter builds to a triumphant wail: “TRY TO CATCH US NOW, YOU FUCKERS!—EAT SHIT!!—YOU PUS BAGS!!—YOU SLUGS!!”
Lilly glances over her shoulder and sees the herd receding in the distance. Just like that. They have slipped free of the plague of locusts.
She turns and sees the car careening down the gentle decline, and all at once she finds no humor in their situation. She finds nothing to celebrate.
They are on a runaway train car, with no way to stop.
* * *
“Hold still! Please, Glo! This is the only way!” Bob Stookey crouches in the claustrophobic rear bench-seat area of the Dodge Challenger as the car climbs past sixty in the northbound lanes of Highway 19. Bob has his pack open between his legs, his makeshift surgical instruments on an old newspaper spread out across the floor mat in front of him. Gloria lies on her back, her shoulders pushed up against the far door, her legs sprawled across Bob’s lap.
“I don’t know, Bob.…” She clutches his arm, writhing, drunk with terror. “I don’t know—I don’t know—I don’t know about this!” She covers her face with her hands, her tears leaking through her fingers. It sounds as though she’s giggling. Her visor has come loose and dropped to the floor, and her graying, dyed hair is matted with flop sweat. She hyperventilates. “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t—”
“Okay, honey, look at me.” Bob gently turns and cradles her face in his hands. “You have to try and breathe and stay as calm as possible. We only have a few minutes here … and there’s no other option. It’ll go down a lot easier if you just stay as calm as possible.” He strokes her hair. “Look at me. Gloria. It’s old Bob. You can trust me. You’re gonna make it, and you’re gonna outlive us all. Now, sweetie, I want to hear you say it.”
“What?! You want me to what?!”
“I want to hear you say you’re gonna outlive us all. C’mon, say it!” He finds a small plastic bottle between his legs, squirts liquid sanitizer onto his big, gnarled hands, and rubs it in. Lying on the newspaper between his feet are many of the items they found in the miners’ office, including the acetylene torch, the rubbing alcohol, the first aid kit, the can of axle grease, and the hacksaw. He looks at her. “C’mon, Gloria, say it.”
“Good try, Bob.” She lets out a dry, mordant little giggle. She sounds intoxicated—woozy with fear. “Good fucking try.”
“Hey!” He drops the bottle and grabs her by the shoulders, shakes her a little, and speaks crossly. “Who’s the medic here? Three tours and an honorable discharge in Iraq!—I may not be able to make a soufflé rise, but when it comes to emergency field surgery I’m a goddamn Florence Nightingale! So do what I say and repeat after me, ‘I’! Say it! ‘I’!”
She swallows. She looks at him, her eyes groggy and disoriented. “I…”
“‘I am going to outlive all you guys!’”
Her voice breaks, crumbles into a half sob. “I am going to … outlive you guys.”
“That’s exactly right! And when you’re right, you’re right. So now I’m gonna—”
A voice from the front interrupts: “Sir?” The young car thief pipes up from behind the wheel, calling out over the roar of 426 cubic inches. “Can I make a suggestion?”
“Make it quick!” Bob reaches down to his belt buckle, unclasps it, and quickly pulls it free from his pant loops. “Gonna need all hands on deck in a second.”
“Sir, I’m not trying to tell y’all what to do.” The young driver gazes nervously up into the rearview at the action in back. He does this while simultaneously weaving around standing wreckage, a maneuver that would send most drivers careening off the road and into a ditch. “But there’s a rest stop coming up where we can pull off, and maybe you can do this on a picnic table or inside the shelter.”
“No time for that!” Bob grabs Gloria’s wriggling leg and holds it still, grasping it about two inches above the wound. The bite mark has already turned livid, a ringworm of red around the kernel-sized gouge. It has been Bob’s experience—especially when dealing with gunshot trauma on the battlefield—that sepsis can spread within minutes. It can cause blood pressure to plummet, bring on shock, and make organs fail like the winking out of streetlights in a storm.
Unfortunately, he has no standard of reference by which to triangulate the relationship between his lifetime of experience with infections and trauma and the time it takes for a person who has been nipped to ultimately succumb. “Just keep heading north on 19 as fast as you can without rolling this thing,” he orders the young driver. “Keep an eye peeled for Hannahs Mill, and that’s where you’ll turn west on Jeff Davis Road!”
“But what about—?”
“Just stay on course!” Bob’s voice is as taut as a piano string. He palpates Gloria’s leg, feeling along the tendons below her knee for the pulse of her peroneal artery. “I need to get her back to the infirmary we got set up in the tunnel as soon as possible—I can only do so much out here in the sticks!”
The woman in the passenger seat twists around and aims her calm, friendly eyes at Bob. “You want to give her the rest of that hooch? ‘Bob,’ was it?”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s right. Sure. That would be good.” Bob nods and starts winding the belt around Gloria’s leg, making a field tourniquet as best he can. He guides the end through the buckle and yanks it back hard, cutting off the blood flow to the site, making Gloria moan softly, murmuring something that nobody hears. Five minutes ago, they had given her half the pint of Mad Dog that Norma Sutters stashes in her purse, along with a couple Seconal tablets that Miles Littleton keeps in his glove box. Now the narcotics and booze have begun to dampen Gloria’s nerve endings.
“Here ya go.” Norma leans forward and thumbs open the glove compartment. She fishes through the contents, pulls out a couple of small objects, turns, and proffers the pill bottle and the half-empty pint of Mad Dog as though they are peace offerings between two tribal elders. “She takes a couple more of them Seconals with the rest of that Mad Dog … oh Lordy, she ain’t even gonna remember what year it is.”
Another terse nod from Bob. “Okay, fine, good … Let’s get them down her gullet quick.”
They give the narcotics and booze to Gloria, who coughs and chokes, but eventually guzzles it all down. She burps and hiccups and heaves a couple of anguished sobs, and manages to say, ?
??Never thought I would be partying with Bob Stookey quite like this.” She laughs. Actually, it’s more of a pained honk than a laugh, and it comes out on a breathless sigh, narcotic-fueled, feverish, and shot through with morbid irony. “Partaaaaay!” She giggles, and giggles, and her giggles deteriorate into garbled muttering that soon trails off.
Bob positions a towel under her foot. He picks up the hacksaw.
“Would you care to dance, Mister Stookey?” Gloria slurs her words now. “Come here often?” More giggling. “Haven’t I met you somewhere be—”
Bob saws into the meat of her ankle.
* * *
“GET READY TO JUMP!”
Lilly’s voice, barely audible in the wind, reaches Tommy Dupree’s ears an instant before he sees the bend in the tracks a couple hundred yards away. He lies prone, on his belly, clutching an iron lever mounted to the side of the flatcar, squinting against the gusts, as the flatcar plunges toward the sharp curve, the drumroll noise of the wheels rising, the undercarriage beginning to shudder and quake. He can see Lilly Caul ten feet away, also on her belly, holding on to the iron apparatus mounted to the front of the car.
Tommy realizes Lilly is absolutely right: They’re going to fly off the rails as soon as the car hits that turn—and they’d better bail, and quickly. Tommy manages to lift himself up without losing his heavy pack or getting swept off the edge of the car. He crouches with his skinny legs pinioned under him, coiled and ready to spring. The wind stings his face, makes him squint.
“ON THREE!”
At the front of the flatcar, Lilly also rises to a crouch and prepares to vault off the hurtling conveyance. For one insane moment, crouching there in the wind, his brain crackling with panic, Tommy thinks of Saturday morning cartoons. He remembers the Road Runner occasionally going over a cliff, perhaps on a boulder or a log, and at the very last possible instant (as the boulder is about to crash to earth) executing a graceful little jeté and hopping off the rock at the perfect moment in order to land safely next to the enormous crater formed by the impact. Is what they are about to attempt just as physically impossible? Is Lilly’s crazy gambit here equally antithetical to the basic laws of physics?
“ONE!”
The bend in the track looms closer and closer, a hundred yards away now. Tommy lowers his center of gravity and prepares to make his Road Runner–worthy leap. Reflector poles and tree trunks flicker past them as though they’re approaching light speed.
“TWO!”
Tommy grips the iron lever beside him so tightly now that the vibrations travel up his tendons and strum his funny bone, sending jolts of electric current through him. He holds his breath and focuses on the blurry figure of Lilly, her back turned to him at the front of the flatcar. Tommy straightens, girds himself, tells himself he’s ready to rock and roll. The sight of Lilly Caul—ten feet away, her shoulders tense and hunched over the front end, her legs cocked under her, her knees pointed outward like a baseball catcher’s—fills Tommy Dupree with a sudden and unexpected injection of courage.
To paraphrase his late father, Tommy would follow this woman into the valley of the shadow of death.
“THREE!”
Lilly’s piercing wail sends a bolt of fresh electricity through Tommy as he jumps.
Arms flailing, legs churning, Tommy soars through space, and for the briefest of moments, the entire length of the enormous conglomeration of wood, iron, and metal beneath him seems to plummet away from him, as though the earth has suddenly fallen away, or perhaps opened up to swallow the flatcar into its bottomless maw.
Tommy lands hard on his shoulder and rolls, his backpack tearing open and spilling its contents of tortilla chips, Life Savers, toenail clippers, disposable razors, toothbrushes, lint rollers, and travel pillows across a half-acre stretch of turf. The pain slams through him, a sledgehammer to the small of his back. He lands at an awkward angle against the trunk of a live oak. The impact knocks the breath out of his lungs and sends Roman candles across his line of vision. Gasping, trying to sit up, he sees Lilly landing next to him, the weight of her own huge knapsack slamming down on top of her, causing her to let out an agonizing grunt of pain. A tremendous thud rattles the ground, followed by a metallic shriek, and then silence.
Something blocks out the sun all of a sudden, something enormous in the sky, which rips Tommy’s attention up to the heavens directly above the treetops. The entire sixty-foot-long flatcar has gone airborne. It rotates lazily in midair for a brief moment as it arcs out across an adjacent clearing—creating a surreal sight worthy of a Magritte painting, a locomotive in a fireplace—and then it crashes down in the grass beyond the bend.
The ground shakes.
Tommy lets out a sigh of air—half shock, half relief—as he watches the massive train car roll another hundred feet or so before shuddering to a stop, several of its axles and wheel assemblies broken loose, lying in the tall grass behind it. The air fills with a nebula of dust, which rises over the crash site and quickly dissipates in the breeze. Tommy lowers his head and lets out another breath of relief. Lilly has already managed to rise to her feet about ten yards away from him. “You okay, buddy?” she asks as she limps over to him.
“Yeah, I think so.” Tommy levers himself up to a standing position. Dizziness makes him reel for a moment. “That was … yeah.”
She inspects him for wounds. “Looks like you’re fairly unscathed.”
“Whaddaya talking about? I’m totally scathed. That was totally messed up.”
She manages a tepid chuckle. “Yeah. Totally. But it was better than the alternative back there.”
They hear a noise. Maybe a twig-snap somewhere behind the trees. Maybe shuffling footsteps.
Lilly looks over her shoulder and doesn’t see anything … yet. “No time to pat ourselves on the back,” she says, indicating the shadows of the woods. “All the noise of our little derailing incident is gonna draw the swarm. C’mon.” Lilly starts picking up the goodies that fell from Tommy’s pack. “Let’s get this stuff squared away and get the fuck outta here.”
* * *
Gloria’s shriek erupts in the enclosed space of the Challenger’s interior with the force of an air-raid siren. Blood backwashes all over Bob, and the car swerves. Bob bears down on the ankle, the handle of the hacksaw getting greasy from all the blood gushing up across his arms, down into his lap, and into the seams of the seats.
He knows he has to hurry. The slower he cuts, the more agonizing the pain.
Gloria screams louder—a raspy, keening howl, the sound of it almost metallic—as Bob feels the serrated blade of the hacksaw catch suddenly on the bone, the teeth seizing up, getting caught on the hard, brittle core of the ankle. He bears down harder. Gloria passes out, her body going limp. “Almost, almost, almost,” he utters between grunts as he tries to hack through her ankle, making her entire body jiggle with each nudge of the blade. “GodDAMNit!” Bob barks as he pulls the blade loose. “Gotta get better leverage!”
“Oh dear Jesus Lord, Lord, Lordy-Lord,” Norma Sutters murmurs desperately into her lap, shaking her head, her shoulders slumped with sorrow.
Bob awkwardly pulls himself out from under the bloody mess of Gloria’s legs, and he struggles to reverse his position, squeezing around between the seat-backs and Gloria to face her and then quickly finish the job. She moans. Partially conscious, delirious with pain, her head lolling, she manages to utter a name.
“I’m here, darlin’,” Bob softly replies, and then says, “You gotta bite the bullet one more second and then it’ll all be over.”
Time seems to slow down, and suddenly stop, as Bob saws through the remaining few centimeters of Gloria’s bone and finally wrenches the woman’s right foot off, along with three inches of her leg above the ankle. It slips out of Bob’s blood-slimy hand and splash into the puddle of blood that has formed on the floor mats. Blood floods the seats. Bob quickly grabs the torch and the lighter, and thumbs the acetylene on, and sparks the nozzle.
The faint thumping sound of the blue flame makes Norma Sutters jerk in the front seat, despite the fact that she’s looking away, having averted her gaze for most of the procedure.
Bob cauterizes the ragged, oozing stump. The odor wafts, and it’s terrible—a black, acrid fume—but the worst part isn’t the smell. The worst part is the sound. The sizzling of burning flesh will live in the memories of each inhabitant of that Dodge Challenger from that day on. Bob feels something coming undone inside him, and lifts his finger off the torch’s trigger, extinguishing the flame and leaving a black tarry cap on the stump.
* * *
Somehow, Miles has managed to keep the car at a steady fifty miles an hour throughout the entire procedure. Now he glances in the rearview at the aftermath in the rear seats. “Is it done?”
“Yeah, it’s done,” Bob says, looking down at the severed foot, wiping his blood-slick hands on a towel. “Get us home as soon as you can.… We ain’t out of the woods yet.” He regards the profuse amount of blood that has gathered on the floor mats, on the seats, and even across the inside of the windows. It looks like an animal was slaughtered. He drops his towel on top of the amputated foot and then tenderly puts a hand on Gloria’s cheek.
She tries to speak, but all that comes out of her is a thin, wispy whistle of a sigh.
“You’re gonna make it, kiddo,” Bob tells her softly, stroking her feverish cheek.
She barely utters a labored response. “I’m sorry, Bob … but … I would … I’d … rather not.”
Bob looks at her. He tips his head to the side in confusion. He’s not sure he just heard what he thinks he just heard. He leans down and puts his ear next to her quavering, blood-spattered lips. “Say again, sweetie?”
The words come out on a sigh, a dwindling volume to the voice. “I would … prefer to … just … you know … have this be … the end of the whole mess for me.”
THIRTEEN
“Wait.… What?” Bob Stookey stares down at the face of a woman at peace, the eerie calm setting into her pug-nosed features. Bob panics. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”