Engine Zero-Zero: Chapter 13

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13

Junior tried screaming but a black hand clamped tight over his mouth. A pair of eyes like wet marble cut through the dark.

            “Wake your father,” the thing in the darkness hissed. “Shake him.”

            The boy did as he was told and his father rolled over, was startled a moment, then seemed to recognize the thing in the dark. It let go of the boy and came in through the window, hunkered on the bed, where it passed the boy’s father a knife, then touched down quiet as darkness onto the floor. It reached up and put out the lantern, and while the boy never saw the riders die exactly the moonlight recorded the course of the thing and his father’s blades across their throats. He could hear their muffled gasps and their barefoot jigging on the floor.

The boy’s father came and knelt beside him.

            “Stay here and keep quiet.” His father’d taken on the voice and manner of the thing in the darkness. “You do like the last time, and no matter what you see or hear, stay here and keep quiet.”

            In a moment the boy was alone and he did something he hardly ever did, which was he disobeyed his father. He stood up from the bed and groped his way toward the last streak of moonlight, eventually making contact with something warm and wet and slick. He searched around with his fingers and penetrated some warm, wet ingress, retreated, then proceeded upward, where he was able to translate through touch a chin, a mouth, cheeks, a nose. He could find one ear but not the other.

Junior didn’t weep or cry out or shrink back. A dead thing was almost preferable because it made no loud noises or sudden movements; it wouldn’t make any demands or take anything away. He went and investigated the other two riders, filling his pockets full of smooth, round rocks. He understood enough about death to know it was permanent.

            The boy went to the window and looked out into the dark. He was cold. He didn’t know the sound of an owl and thought it was some other consequence of dying. Humming a tune he’d invented, he leaned forward and squinted at something moving through the dark, doing what sounded like washing. The one went this way, the other went that way, doing with a bucket, a rag. The boy couldn’t smell the diesel or the kerosene.

            Junior’s humming grew louder, more needful, as a fire sprung up and cut a swath over the ground. Up went one, another, and in a moment, in bright, sudden madness, the camp was rung and criss-crossed in flame. The screaming and shouting got in the way of the boy’s humming so he covered his ears. Some of the people tried getting in the train, beating on the doors, but a barrage of gunfire paired them down—women and children alike. Junior watched a horse catch fire and trample a boy. He watched another go up and struggle through someone’s tent. There was pageantry in the way they died; there was something hypnotic about the way their manes turned to fire in the wind. Walled in by the flames the riders could only run so far, and the ones that didn’t burn were easy pickings for the guns. The boy could see his father with a pistol just outside the camp, and while he couldn’t understand his face there was still something familiar about it. His father killed the way he made breakfast in the morning, the way he laced up his boots or tightened a screw. The thing in the dark meanwhile did with his rifle the way his father played cards or had a nightmare. The boy wondered if they might be the same creature but pulled apart somehow.

            After enough of the camp had burned, died, ran away the boy’s father ran up into the engine and started the train, started them moving. The boy hoped they might leave the thing in the dark behind—assumed he would just stay there and kill forever—but then it leapt through a wall of flame and joined his father up in the engine, where it continued killing from the window. Some residue from the camp—a woman and her daughter, a pair of vengeful riders—clung to the train but then those were dispatched and they began their separation proper from the screaming and the fire and the death. The boy stuck his head out the window and marveled as a loose kite twisted, burned, up into the air and was consumed into a quick balletic wisp and then nothing. He drew in his head from out the window, sat down on his bed, nodded and hummed to himself.

Chapter 14