Page 50
I do. As fast as I can, but I’m exhausted. I reach the platform, can barely climb the stairs. The train is halfway down the platform, pulling away. I see David and Jacob climb into the nearest train car, lower Sissy to the floor. The train is already picking up speed. Epap and I are going to have to run for it. From behind us, a cry of anger. I steal a quick look back. There’re about a dozen duskers way ahead of the pack. They’ll be on us in less than ten seconds.
Jacob jumps out of the last car, sprints back to Epap and me. He pulls my arm over his shoulder, drags me. “C’mon Gene, come on, help us. ”
“Drop me,” I say. “There’s no time. ” I’m right, and they know it. We’ll never make it to the train, not with me weighing them down; the duskers will get to us before then.
Jacob suddenly lets go of me, starts sprinting ahead. “Keep going, don’t stop, get into the train!” he yells. And he bends over, picks up a hose from the platform. As we push past him, he flicks the ON button of the generator. It hums to life. Water shoots out, a strong propulsive force.
The duskers bound up the steps onto the platform. As they do, Jacob turns the hose on them. The jet of water smashes into their misshapen bodies. Their flesh—partially melted and made pliable by earlier exposure to the sun—is hosed off their bones in seconds, splattering off in a wet explosion of chunks. Not even their skeletal structure is spared. The jet of water obliterates their bones, sending fragments and chips flying into the air. The duskers disappear in a mist of bone and flesh. Jacob drops the hose, races to catch up with us.
And then he trips over another hose. Goes sprawling onto the platform floor.
A trio of duskers leap up the stairs. In seconds, they are upon him.
“NO!” Epap shouts. He drops me to the platform floor. Even as he vaults over a large container and picks up a nearby hose, the three duskers are already hunched over Jacob’s body, fangs sunk into his neck and thigh, eyelids fluttering with rapture. Epap turns on the hose. In seconds, the duskers are obliterated. He runs to Jacob, picks him up, slings him over his shoulder. Doesn’t look to see the damage he knows has been inflicted.
I’ve gathered strength in the meantime, enough to scramble to my feet and kick aside hoses on the platform that might trip the approaching Epap. He draws even with me, and together we run for the train.
I can feel the heat pouring off Jacob in droves. Even without looking down, I know he’s turning, and rapidly. Bitten and infected by three duskers, his turning will be exponentially swift.
“Faster! The train’s pulling away!” David shouts, hanging out of the last train car.
Fear injects both Epap and me with adrenaline. We explode forward in a burst of speed. As we draw even with the train, David sticks his arm out of the still-open door. He pulls in Epap and Jacob, then me, and we go crashing onto the train floor. Sissy is lying next to us, still unconscious, surrounded by a group of kneeling village girls. The girl with freckles looks at me, then casts a panicky look back at the duskers giving chase.
“No, no, no!” Jacob says. He’s beginning to shiver, sweat beads pouring out. I see his punctured neck, not just two tidy holes, but a slew of fang marks polka-dotting his neck. He’s turning with exponentially accelerated speed.
He knows it, too. He looks at Epap with frightened eyes.
“You’re going to be all right, Jacob!” Epap says, stroking back Jacob’s hair. “Everything’s going to be just fine. ”
Outside, we hear the manic cries of the duskers as they charge toward the train. It’s gradually picking up speed but the doors are still open.
“Where’s Ben?” David screams, looking back.
Jacob spasms, a film of sweat glimmering over his cold body.
“How much more speed?” I shout to the girl with freckles. “Before the doors close?”
“Soon!” she answers. “I think we’ve almost hit the critical speed. ”
And then, sure enough, there’s a mechanical click, and the door begins to slide shut.
At the sound, Jacob turns to see. A haunted, terrible expression crosses his ashen face. “I’m turning,” he says. He stares at the closing door. And he realizes what none of us have yet to fully grasp. If the door locks shut and he turns inside, everyone in this train car is dead.
Jacob springs to his feet. A second later, I realize what he’s about to do. My hand shoots out to stop him, to tackle him to the floor. But I freeze. And in that hesitation, he takes three strides and is leaping through the closing gap. And then he is gone. The door clicks shut.
“NO!” David cries out, and he is already at the door, trying to pull it open. But it is locked and will be, until we reach the destination. “JACOB!” he shouts, “Jacob, Jacob!”
And Jacob has picked himself up, his face shuddering with fear and shock. He is out there in the world all alone for the first and only time in his life. It is more than he can stand, and he runs alongside us, if only to tenuously be with us a few seconds longer. David stretches out his arm between the bars, and for a moment, Jacob is able to sprint fast enough to catch up and hold his hand. His hair is flopping up and down, his cheeks are bouncing, his eyes are full of tears, this boy who dreamed of carousels full of galloping horses and leaping frogs and flying dolphins. He looks so small out there. He is alone and there is nothing we can do about it now.
The train picks up speed and Jacob can no longer keep up. Their hands begin to separate.
“Jacob!”
Their hands part.
And still he sprints as fast as he can, his arms swinging wildly, his legs a blur beneath him. He doesn’t want to be alone, he doesn’t want to fall away into the night, he doesn’t want to lose sight of the only family he has known. But he is losing ground, the train now accelerating.
And then he trips and falls. I can barely look. He is a pale pebble on a beach of darkness. A tide comes from behind, swallowing him up.
* * *
The metal bars of the car start to vibrate. Not vigorously, more like a hum thrumming up and down the bars. But it increases, until the bars are shaking in my hands as if they’re coming to life. And then it’s not just the bars; the whole train starts pitching side to side.
A hard drumming noise fills the night, the sound of a thousand horses galloping. But these are no horses outside, gaining on us. Horses do not emit a pale fleshly gleam off their skin, do not hiss and spit and drool, do not howl and wail, do not emerge from darkness with the whites of their eyes glowing like demented moons.
A scream. A dusker has leaped onto the car, catching a small girl—who’d been leaning against the bars—by surprise. It rips her out through the bars, more or less in one piece, bones broken, joints pulled out of sockets. On the ground outside, it balls around her, silencing her screams.
“Move away from the sides!” I yell. The freckled girl starts throwing girls from the side into the center of the car. A dusker suddenly flies out of the darkness, splats onto the side, hands wrapping around bars with the dexterity of an ape, then reaches in, its arm slashing through the air.
“Duck down, stay down!” the freckled girl shouts, and a moment later, a dusker lands on the roof. We cower, flattening ourselves against the floor, just as its arm swings from above like a poisonous vine. It hisses in frustration, gobs of saliva dripping down onto us. I leap to Sissy, still lying unconscious, covering her neck bites from the dripping saliva, tucking in her arms and legs, making sure none of her limbs stray within reach of a dusker arm. Her skin is cold as ice, her arms jerking spasmodically.
Yet another dusker smacks against the side of the car, then another, rattling the car like a birdcage. And still they fall upon us, covering the exterior of the car until their collective pale skin drapes over the entire caged car. The translucent, membranous blanket of skin is a vision of hell. Dotted intermittently in this unbroken cover of skin, like a teat on a dog’s underbelly, is a dusker face, hiss
ing and snapping, eyes wide and gaping.
The train rattles on, speeding toward the bridge.
Under me, Sissy murmurs, her lips struggling to speak, her eyes closed. As if uttering a prayer. Or ministering last rites. To me. For now I feel the pain on the side of my head, and when I gingerly touch it, my fingers come away with blood. Where Ashley June had clawed me, had opened me up. With nails dripping in her own saliva.
The train rumbles forward, the duskers scream their strange howls at us, and the only thing I find myself capable of doing is tucking in the strands of Sissy’s hair, carefully, obsessively, behind her ears.
The tracks start to rattle with a different tempo. We’re crossing the bridge. Throok-throok. Throok-throok. The clacking of the rail tracks, passing underneath. And then we’ve crossed the valley and are heading down a steep decline, picking up earnest speed now. Throok-throok, throok-throok-throok, throok-throok-throok-throok.
I gaze back at the bridge through thin gaps between hanging duskers. On the other side of the bridge, I see swarms of duskers bottlenecking at the entrance to the bridge, dozens pushed and spilling over into the canyon.
And we pull farther away, gathering more speed, until we curve a bend, and the bridge, and the Mission, are no more.
44
THE JOURNEY THROUGH the night feels endless. We huddle together at first from the duskers who, refusing to let go, remain strapped onto the cage. Then later, we huddle for warmth against the bitter cold. We move boxes of supplies around us, cocooning ourselves within the tight perimeter. Nobody sleeps, nobody can, not with the gobs of deadly saliva dripping down on us, not with the intermittent screeches of anger and desperation from the duskers.
Sissy is burning hot, sweating profusely. Spasms shake her every so often. She is turning slowly—and I do not understand why it is so slow—but in a day or two, the disintegration will be complete. We cannot allow her to turn in here. When her turning progresses too far, we will be forced to do the unthinkable. We will have to move her to the side of the train car where, within reach of the duskers still draped on the bars, they will do what we cannot. No one mentions this but it weighs unspoken on all of us. On Epap most of all. He has not slept all night, has only stroked Sissy’s hair again and again, his face taut with grief and worry, his other arm over David.