23
Hours later and Miller was growing skeptical of their direction. According to the map they should’ve come around the bend by now but were still going in the direction from which they’d come. He went and brought it up to Dendri, who frowned, scratched where his arm’d been taken off, then made a show of looking over the map a moment before crumpling and throwing it out the window.
“Let me ask you something,” he began. “You plan on working for these people again? They need more cargo, you want to deliver it?”
“Don’t know.”
“Well let me ask you this, you plan on coming this way again? If there’s other people need cargo delivered through here, you want to take this route?”
“Don’t know that either. It’s the quickest way but after everything that’s happened—”
“That’s right!” Dendri unwrapped where his arm used to be and applied a tin of salve all over the wound. “That’s right, it is the quickest! And why the hell shouldn’t anybody go the quickest way? Should we have to go all the way around because of those people out there? Should we have to fight them every time we want to come through? Not just us but every other train or truck—should all them have to go through what we went through? Should they have to go the long way around?” He’d worked himself into a fervor. “There are people trying to build something, trying to get back some of what we lost. Those people that attacked us, all they want to do is destroy. They want to take and destroy from the people actually trying to build something again.”
“What are you getting at?” asked Miller. “Where we going?”
Dendri laid out his plan and by the end of it Miller knew truly and fully what he was dealing with, what cold and ruthless delirium. “You lied about the fog to bring us out here. Boy from Bonneville never did radio us. And that map, what was that—that a fake?”
Dendri nodded. “Wasn’t time to argue about it.”
For a long time Miller just stood and watched the man, looking for something to disprove a feeling of crossing over, of being somewhere there was no coming back from. It was something he’d always expected from the boy—a fit that just never ended, an eccentricity there was no satisfying.
“You know who told me about it, was your boy.” Dendri finished with his tin of salve, tossed it away and rebandaged himself. “Didn’t even ask—he just comes up to me and says, ‘David knows where they all live. David knows where they live if you ever wanted to do something to them.’ He’s getting a real mean streak your kid. Mean—but he’s thinking. I talked to David and he says he can lead us right to it.”
Miller remembered David’s cowering, the bruise above his eye.
“It wouldn’t take but a few hours,” Dendri continued. “Won’t even be there to watch the real work happen. Just a few hours and then we open up the whole damn territory. We’ve got to treat it like war again, Miller. Treat it like war again and then it turns into something you can win instead of something to just go along with.”
Miller turned away and shook his head. He watched them retrace the miles out the window. “Turn us around,” he said, like scolding a child. “Get us back the way we were going.”
“Why?” And like a child Dendri didn’t seem to understand the contention. “I told you the plan—you know it can work.”
“Turn us around,” Miller barked. “This is my god damn train and you’re lucky I don’t—” Miller stopped short and beat a fist against his thigh.
They were quiet a moment, then—
“Lucky you don’t what?” asked Dendri.
But Miller didn’t answer. What he was going to say was, “Lucky I don’t shoot you,” but then remembered he no longer had any gun to do it with. Dendri, he still had his rifle—had sawn off the barrel and the stock so he could use it with just the one hand, so he could wear it on his hip. The man stroked his chin (he’d shaved recently, but poorly) and scratched his neck. He drank from a tin cup full of something that made his face pucker.
“Why don’t we not take this any of the places it could go?” His voice was an unnerving kind of soft—sorrowful. “Why don’t we just not do that? My plan’s a good one. You know it is. And you know it needs done. We’re almost there already; why don’t we just go and get this done and not take it to any of the other places it could go?” He scratched where his arm had been. He rested his hand on his mutilated rifle.
Fiction, etc. by Aaron Ward 
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