Engine Zero-Zero: Chapter 14

Miller reloaded his pistol. He wiped a streak of someone else’s blood from his forehead. They following us?

“Can’t. Scattered all their horses.”

“Still that grease on the track.”

“Cleaned it off so we’d have a straight shot.”

“That’s good—that’s good thinking.” Miller went and looked in on the boy, saw him sitting and rocking himself, then went and stuck his head out either side of the engine to double check for any more hangers-on. “What’s our fuel look like? Hey—I said what’s our fuel look like?”

“We got plenty.” Dendri sat down heavily on the floor and tossed away his gun. Miller got his first real good look at him, all covered in blood and engine grease, face all busted up and swollen.

“What’s the matter with your arm?” His left arm hung limp and trembling, all wrapped below the elbow in makeshift bandages.

“Went under the wheels.” Dendri leaned back and closed his eyes. “Can’t feel it.”

Miller leaned against the door to the sleeper car and kept one eye on Junior, one eye on Dendri. “What happened?”

“Went out the window, arm went under the wheels, hit my head. Woke up and the guy beside me was dead. Train was gone. We got any water?” He looked around and Miller handed him what was left of an old pot of coffee, which he drank all in one go. “Saw—” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Saw smoke. Followed it. Saw the camp. Watched it awhile. Saw you let them in the cargo.”

“I didn’t let them into anything.”

“Didn’t try to keep them out of it either. What would you’ve done if I’d never shown up?”

Miller watched Junior rock back and forth. He chalked Dendri’s attitude up to the pain he was in. “I would’ve made do,” he said. “I would’ve did what I had to.”

Dendri nodded and hung his head out the window while Miller stood at the controls and tried to reignite some sense of possession over his machine. There was dried blood all over the gauges and smudges of white paint on the switches. Miller likened it to returning to a woman after she’d been had by someone else.

“Why don’t you go get cleaned up while I mind the controls?”

Dendri pulled his head in the window. “What’s that?”

“I said why don’t you go get cleaned up while I mind the controls?”

Dendri stared at the floor a moment, breathing heavily in and out his nose. He nodded. “I’ll do that. I’ll go ahead and do that.” Dendri pried himself up from his chair and using the wall for support lumbered his way through the engine, the gangway, into the sleeping car. His left arm hung like it’d come unglued from his body. He’d been through worse, Miller told himself. They both had. No sooner had he turned back to the controls when a commotion got started in sleeping car. Junior screamed. Dendri roared.

Miller ran into the sleeping car expecting something to do with Junior but found him huddled up on the bed while Dendri, with his back turned, struggled with something in the shower. Miller clawed his way where he could see and found the man with his hand around a boy’s neck. The fact that his other arm was busted was likely the only thing that’d preserved the child this long.

“Not in front of Junior!” Miller tried prying Dendri from the shower.

Dendri loosened his grip but then that got him kicked in the ribs and set him off again. “What’s the boy going to see he hasn’t already?”

Miller kept working on Dendri, and in between worked on the interloping boy—told him if he settled down the man would let him go. Eventually he managed to get them apart and put himself between them. Dendri went to retrieve his rifle. The boy cowered in the corner on the shower floor.

The boy was naked save his underwear. He was missing a front tooth and there was a long scar running along the top of, almost smack dab in the middle of, his head. He couldn’t have been much older than Junior.

“What’re you doing here?” Miller held his pistol where the boy could see. “You here to cause trouble?”

The boy shook his head

“Then what? What’re you doing hiding back here?”

“Don’t know!” The boy was hoarse from being choked.

“Don’t know? What don’t you know?”

“Don’t know! Just ran! The camp went up and all I did was run!”

“Come on—” Dendri returned waving his gun. “Let’s take him up to the engine.”

“Just a minute.”

“Come on—let’s get it over with.”

Sweat made the blood and grease streak down Dendri’s face; his teeth clenched intermittently in pain. He eyed the boy in the shower like he was medicine. Part of Miller argued for giving way and letting Dendri do what he needed, but then the boy would duck his head and show that long, deep scar like someone’d tried bisecting him, and he was so feeble and repulsive, another part of him argued, that he was already so dead as to preclude killing him. He’d none of the fighting spirit of the riders. And he couldn’t have been much older than Junior.

“He’s the boy taught me how to fly the kite.”

Miller turned. Junior hugged his knees and eyed the boy worriedly. “That right?”

“Yes.”

“What’s his name? You remember his name?”

“David.”

“David—that your name?”

The boy nodded.

Chapter 15