Xeno Sapiens (45 page)

Hogjaw laid on the air horn and added its
long, ear slitting bray to the roar. He held the cord tight, no
sign of let up forthcoming.

“
My side! My side!”
Hub cried.

Bobo reeled across the cabin and stood by
Hub, crowding onto the step with him.

Shocked by this skewed re-enactment of an
1880's train robbery where the Indians and bandits had been
replaced by black clad cossacks and the steam engine supplanted by
a three hundred ton, high tech diesel-electric monster, Neal
watched in slow disbelief as one of the riders swung toward the
train. There was a rattling clatter not five feet away from him and
a now riderless horse peeled away from the train.

“
To your right! To your right,”
Bobo
yelled over the screaming of the wind. Hub spun to his right and
fell backward against Bobo. A crackling shot rang out. A high
pitched yell was cut off in mid shriek and a black shape went
tumbling across the open doorway and plummeted to the ground,
tumbling through the snow and plowing gouges in its unsullied
white.

Neal watched the man's body bounce and skid
and roll away from the train in a bone-breaking tumble. If the shot
hadn't killed him, the subsequent fall would. He snapped his head
back front and saw the flaming barricade looming in front of the
train. This close he could feel the heat from the flames blowing
into the open doors, mixed hot and cold. The smoke smelled thick
and cringing and oily. Orange flame glow flared in the engine's
cabin, overwhelming the already dim lights and painting
stroboscopic shadows of men in a life and death struggle splashing
on the inner walls of the cabin.

Bobo and Hub struggled to right themselves
from the attack and keep from falling to the ground themselves.
Bobo hugged the railing like the last, providential handhold on a
precipice, his feet dangling inches above the ground speeding by
below him. Hub had hold of Bobo's heavy coat, his red face colored
an impossible purple by the orange of the fire. Bobo's legs
air-danced in a mad dash and he was finally able to swing himself
back up onto the step.

Neal stood without thought to grab onto Bobo
and Hub. His eyes fixed on the doorway on the opposite side of the
cabin. A wild figure swung into the wind split chasm. A pale,
unhealthy face glowed sallowly in the fire glow. The man grinned a
sickly grin and Neal saw in the erratic light that the man's teeth
had been filed into points. The figure held onto the doorway with
his left hand. In his right he held a long, thick bladed knife.

Forgetting about Hub and Bobo, Neal lunged
for the gun in Hogjaw's lap at the same instant the train crashed
through the barricade in a tornado of orange sparks and splintering
wood.

The mass of the barricade was too pitifully
insignificant to slow the train an inch, but enough to knock
everyone off their feet. Hub and Bobo fell in a new, interlocked
tangle on the loco's step. Hogjaw pitched forward in his seat,
completely oblivious to the threat on his left. The unwelcome
boarder stumbled but remained upright, shielding his eyes from the
tumbling timbers and flying sparks with his left hand.

Neal lunged forward on his hands and knees,
scratching for the gun in Hogjaw's lap. He cried out a garbled,
nonsensical warning from deep in his throat and Hogjaw finally
looked to his right. His eyes widened in surprise and curiosity as
he saw Neal on his hands and knees, his right arm stretched toward
him.

Neal snatched the pistol from Hogjaw's lap
and used both hands on Hogjaw's right shoulder to push himself up
and away. He skidded backward until his back hit the bench. Hogjaw
pitched sideways off his seat, just in time for the intruder's
arcing knife blow to hiss through only empty air over his head.

The train careened through the night,
leaving the demolished barricade burning in exploded fragments
behind it. The intruder gathered himself for another blow.

Neal pointed the gun and pulled the trigger,
knowing that Hogjaw's only hope was that it was primed to fire.

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

Three quick shots echoed in the cabin. The
reports slammed back and forth in the tight space, seeming to
stretch the metal of the cabin with their savagery. Blood and flesh
sprayed from three sudden holes in the intruder's chest. The slugs
knocked the intruder backward in stuttering steps toward the open
doorway. The intruder flung his arms out and slapped the door
jambs, but the slipstream was too much. He held on for a split
second, then slipped backward into the night like a piece of litter
tossed from a car window.

Instead of rapidly returning darkness in the
doorway, Neal saw something else. The gun fell from his hand and
bounced on the floor. His heart hammered harder and a new kind of
fear -not primitive fear for his life, but fear of a more
intellectual kind- stole the last of his strength.

A towering, white body literally filled the
doorway; some light being of immense proportions. An intense,
diamond-fire glow radiated from the being's forehead, but the white
face was hideous. A huge, hooked Indian nose stood out above the
fleshy lips. The lips were okay on the thing's right hand side, but
on the left they curved down grotesquely almost to the tip of its
pointed chin. Eyes as pale and cold as arctic ice stared at Neal
with a narrow cunning. The white light in the doorway that
surrounded it seemed to shimmer liquidly as with some kind of
energy. And then, as capriciously as it had appeared, it vanished.
The doorway was as pitch black as it had ever been.

Hogjaw was up from the floor in an instant.
He crossed the darkened cabin in a flash and knelt down by Neal.
Too stupefied for immediate reaction, it took a few moments for
Neal to register that Hogjaw was shaking him and screaming in his
face.

“
Did you see it?”
he demanded. The
wind had whipped Hogjaw's hat away and his steel gray hair swirled
in the wind.

“The face,” Neal whispered weakly. “The
white
...”

“
Aww, shit...,”
Hogjaw muttered. He
seemed about to say more when a rattling and banging announced the
arrival of Bobo and Hub into the cabin.

“Hogjaw! Get on that throttle! Now!” Bobo
reached down and hoisted Hogjaw from the floor.

“He
seen
it, Bobo,” Hogjaw said and
his face was as white as a ghost's. “Holy God, he
seen
it!”
Hogjaw's trembling lips began to move in silent prayers. Bobo
slowly shifted his gaze from Hogjaw's face to Neal's.

“Did you see it, boy? The white star?”

“White star? I don't know.
Something
white...”

Bobo and Hogjaw lifted Neal from the floor
and sat him on the bench while Hub closed the doors. The flaming
barricade was well behind them now and the entire episode of the
murderous horsemen, though only seconds before, seemed like it
might have happened a year ago. Bobo and Hub sat on either side of
Neal on the bench while Hogjaw retook command of the train and
steadied it down.

“What happened back there,” Neal asked
shakily. “That man.
I shot a man!”

“That man would have killed you,” Bobo said.
“You did nothing no other man wouldn't do. Here, let's get a
blanket on you.”

Neal hadn't realized it, but he was
shivering openly, his body spent with cold and an adrenalin rush.
Hub pulled a blanket out of an overhead compartment and draped it
on Neal. Neal wanted to talk about what had just happened, but was
unable to force words through his chattering teeth.

“Don't, Neal,” Bobo admonished. “Don't even
think. Don't play it over in your head.”

Bobo turned to Hogjaw who was already on the
radio.

“How long?”

“Forty-five minutes, maybe,” Hogjaw said.
“Too late for
him
, though.” And the oddest thing about that
statement, Neal was to reflect later, was that Hogjaw had sounded
sympathetic.

Hub had poured a cup of hot coffee from a
thermos and Neal slurped it down gratefully. It suddenly seemed too
hot in the cramped cabin and Neal tried to throw his blanket off
and stand up, but the two men gently, but firmly, held him
down.

Neal's eyes roved from one man to the next.
“Tell me what's going on,” he asked in a near whisper. “I just
killed a goddam man and I'll have to answer for it. I've got a wife
and a kid on the way! I can't go to jail!”

The three other men exchanged a silent
look.

“Finish your coffee, Neal,” Hub said gently.
Neal looked at him as if he were crazy. Hub gave Neal a hopeful
look and he slowly drank the last of his coffee, looking between
Bobo and Hub.

Then they told him how it was and why he
could never say what had happened that night.

By the time the train chugged to a halt at
the depot the next stop down the line, Neal was already off the
train and running for the office. The silent patrol car sitting in
the depot parking lot told the rest of the crew all they needed to
know.

By the time the rest of the crew trudged in
after Neal, he was in tears, the patrolman standing by him as if
wanting to give comfort, but knowing his job prevented him from
doing so. Neal looked at Hub, and Bobo, and Hogjaw.

“She's dead,” he said. “How could you
know?”

The three crewmen remained silent. They had
already given him his answer.

They watched him as he climbed into the
passenger seat of the patrol car, a young man whose entire life had
been irrevocably altered in an instant.

“That's the last we'll see of him,” Hub said
knowingly. The other men silently agreed.

But they were wrong.

Two weeks later, after a proper period of
grief and mourning, he was back. He walked slowly and deliberately
into the depot with his satchel in his hand, still a twenty year
old kid, but with an indefinable aging to his features, as if he
had been through hell itself and made his way back not whole, but
alive. He stopped by the bulletin board and looked up there, the
first smile in two weeks creasing his lips. Someone had found a
photograph of him and pasted it on the board right there amongst
Hub, and Bobo and Hogjaw. Written on the bottom border, the
nickname,
“Deadeye”
.

Condolences passed among the crew and they
boarded the train. And this time, on the approach to Essex Pass,
nobody had to ask Neal to take up his position.

He had brought his own gun.

Doyle Rathmun couldn't believe his luck.
Twenty-four hours before he had finally been pinched and locked up
in a twelve-by-twelve holding cell with a bunch of drunken southern
sots, now he was a free man. On the run, but free.

He'd started his Southern odyssey a week
before, fleeing his home town of Boston during the first snow fall
of the year, when the native Bostonites engaged in the singular
Bostonian ritual of flocking to the ice cream shops. The cops had
begun to get too close. A string of rape murders that had started
with an eighty year old woman named Joanna Michaud and ended eleven
corpses later with twelve year old Susan Kelly had somehow been
tied to him.

The Boston PD had eventually netted a sad,
simple minded man named Albert de Salvo for the run of murders. But
even the thick, Boston cops already suspected that De Salvo, if he
had committed any of the murders, certainly hadn't committed them
all. The twelve stranglings had been evenly divided between strong,
young women, and defenseless old women and children. De Salvo
looked good for the murders of the healthy women, but the steely
eyes of the law had already looked beyond De Salvo for the murderer
of the elderly women and children.

Doyle knew his own mouth was to blame,
recalling that he had bragged to one of his coworkers at the rubber
plant, one George Nasser – a man as twisted and sadistic as he-
that as long as a woman had “two tits, a hole, and a heartbeat,”
she was within his range of acceptability. And once the cops, in
their plodding, foot dragging way, had finally chased down enough
leads to get a bead on a few suspects, a remark like that would
likely land him in their net. They had already scooped up Nasser
for questioning.

On the run from the heat in Boston, he had
driven south in his '58 Chevrolet. It was the first car he'd ever
owned or driven, a virtual land yacht with huge, wide-whitewall
tires, automatic transmission and standard AM radio. He had no real
aim or plan other than to put distance between himself and the
Boston PD. He was no career criminal; had never spent a day in
jail. Maybe the killing was caused by the steel plate in the back
of his head, compliments of a Chinese mortar shell in Korea. The
bone had never completely mended, leaving a two inch indentation
that was covered only by steel and skin.

He made his way more by accident than
anything else to this mountainous area of North Carolina. When the
local legal beagle had put the light on him just as darkness was
falling, he had remained cool. Nobody knew him here.

He watched in his rear view mirror as the
heavy southern cop squeezed himself out of the cruiser and
meandered up to his driver's side door. He lingered near the rear
of the car, taking down the license number on a notepad.

“Evening, officer,” Doyle said cheerily.
“What seems to be the problem?”

“I need you to turn off your engine and step
out of the car, please, sir.”

Doyle's cheerful exterior wilted a
little.

“Officer, I...”

“Do it now, please, sir.”

The look in the officer's eyes left no room
for argument. Doyle switched off the engine and stepped out of the
car.

“Somethin' I need to show you,” the officer
said. “Step to the rear of the car, please, sir.”

Doyle accompanied the officer to the rear of
the vehicle.

“You've got a taillight busted out.”