Treacherous (Kindle Single)

  “Get away from the train,” Luke ordered. “As far away as possible. It could move again any minute.”

  “Now you,” he said to Fiona. She slithered toward him, was half way out of the window, when from the other end of the car they heard a muffled cry for help. They froze, lifted their heads, listening, hoping to locate the source of the sound.

  “It’s coming from the front of the car,” Fiona said at last.

  “You keep going,” Luke said. “I’ll check it out, catch up with you in a minute.”

  Fiona climbed back inside the train. “We can do it faster together,” she said, moving slowly toward the sound of the man’s voice. Luke was right behind her.

  TWELVE

  Hayley was curled up in her favorite chair, cocooned in a terrycloth robe two sizes too large for her. She took the last bite of her sandwich, wiped the grease off her hands and washed it down with the last drops of her Coke.

  “A perfect meal,” she said. “Fat, salt, nitrates, and whatever they put in Coca-Cola to make it so yummy. You may be a genius.”

  “I keep telling you that, but you don’t believe me,” he said, winking at her.

  “At least your wasted youth taught you something. And, of course, if I ever need a car hot-wired I know where to go.”

  “It’s a gift,” Mikey said, flipping through television channels with the remote. “How do you feel?”

  She thought for a moment. “Actually, I might live. You should have ordered something for yourself.”

  “I don’t feel right about you spending money on me, if you're that hard up.” He gave her his sweetest, most sincere smile.

  “I can afford to buy my little brother a sandwich.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, settling on a wrestling match.

  Hayley sat quietly, thinking about the debacle the day had become. She tentatively touched her hair, or what was left of it. Although she thought no haircut was worth eight hundred dollars, she had to admit it was easy to handle. After her shower, all she had had to do was towel it dry and it fell back into place.

  What does it matter, she thought. No one looks at me anyway.

  “What’s up, kiddo?” Mikey had been watching her keenly, attuned to her moods. She didn’t respond. “Hayley, you okay? You look like you lost your last friend.”

  “Maybe I did,” she said, “now that I think about it.”

  “You and Fiona have a falling out?”

  “Would you shut that thing off? It's making my headache come back.”

  Mikey snapped off the television, looking hurt. “Are you going to tell me what's wrong, or are you just going to bark at me?”

  “Let me ask you something,” Hayley said. “Do you think I'm sexy?”

  “Jeez, Hayley, don’t be gross. You're my sister.”

  “I’m talking in general. Do you think I’m a woman a man would find attractive?”

  “What man?”

  “Any man, you idiot.” Hayley stormed into the kitchen with the dishes.

  “Don’t get mad,” Mikey said, following her. “I think you’re pretty. And you’re funny. What’s not to like?”

  Hayley had her back to him and didn’t respond.

  “Did some jerk make you feel bad? Cause if he did—”

  “Let’s drop it, okay?” Hayley cut in and tried to get past him to the living room, but he blocked her way.

  “Are you crying? Hey, you’re crying. You never cry.”

  “That’s right, Mikey. I never cry. I never feel anything. As a matter of fact, I’m a robot.”

  “Jeez, is it that time of the month or something?”

  “Michael. Close your lips, okay? Do not speak. Just go back to your wrestling match. Forget we ever had this conversation.”

  She marched past him into the living room, and turned on the television, with Mikey on her heels.

  “Women are weird. What did I do?”

  “Nothing. You did nothing. Now sit down and watch your show.”

  She tossed him the remote, and he immediately started channel surfing.

  “I know what will cheer you up. It’s time for your boyfriend’s program!”

  “Turn that off! I don’t want to watch Luke right now,” she exclaimed, heading for the bedroom once more. “I’m going to bed.” She slammed the door behind her, and had just curled up on the bed, when Mikey started calling her.

  “Hayley! Hayley! Get in here fast!”

  Hayley buried her head under the pillow, but Mikey was at the door, banging on it.

  “Something’s happened to Luke!” her brother shouted.

  Hayley jumped out of bed and rushed past him into the living room. It was the desk Luke always sat at, but another reporter was in his place. Her heart clenched as she stared at the screen.

  “…and we have a helicopter over the scene now. Here’s what we know. The four o'clock Acela, from Penn Station in New York City, to Union Station in Washington, D.C., derailed just as the train crossed the Delaware River, from New Jersey into Pennsylvania.”

  The images on the screen made Hayley stiffen. She was rigid as the aerial shots showed train cars scattered all over the landscape. The scene shocked her. It looked like a toy train had been tossed in a fit of anger by a five-year-old. Nobody had lived, she was certain.

  Some of the cars were on their sides, a few were completely upside down. One car, the last one apparently, had not made it off the bridge. It was now resting precariously on a small cliff that hung over the rushing river below.

  The reporter’s voice penetrated Hayley's numbed brain. “It is believed that our own Luke Thompson was aboard that train. Staff members report he always rides in the last car.”

  Hayley let out an anguished scream. “Oh, God! Oh, God! No, no, Luke can’t be dead. He can’t,” she wailed.

  “He’s been in tough places before,” Mikey answered, but not too convincingly. He was also worried. That wreckage he saw on the screen was enormous.

  “Rescue workers from surrounding cities are converging on the scene. Unfortunately, their efforts are being hampered by the fact that this is farmland. There are few roads the first responders can take to reach the crash site,” the TV reporter continued.

  “Fiona!” Hayley whispered. “Fiona is on that train too.” She began to sob.

  Mikey endeavored to console her, without much success. His sister was growing more distraught by the moment. And when the reporter brought up the suggestion this might be an act of terrorism, she began to shudder, and her sobs grew louder. Mikey was frightened himself and tried to comfort his sister. But the situation looked hopeless to him. Nobody could’ve lived through that, he thought, not even Luke.

  THIRTEEN

  Fiona and Luke had worked out their own triage system. People with the most serious injuries went first. After that they took those who were seated closest to the window Luke had kicked out. The dead were left where they were, until the living had been helped.

  They worked seamlessly together, with few wasted words. It went unspoken, but they knew it was only a matter of time before the train car lost its fragile grip on the cliff. Thankfully, the first-class carriage had not been crowded.

  They had a routine in place. Fiona would take one arm and Luke the other, and they would slide the injured person on their back, as gently as possible, until they reached the window. There was no time to follow standard procedure with accident victims – to make sure moving them wouldn’t be harmful. Staying aboard this train was far more dangerous than any injury caused by getting them out.

  Charlie, the conductor, and several of his co-workers had made their way to the cliff where the last train carriage rested. When Fiona and Luke could get a person to the window, these crew members could pull them through.

  Every move Fiona and Luke made had to be properly coordinated. The train car was perched so precariously on the cliff that one wrong move could unseat it, sending it plunging into the river below.

  They were moving an elderly man to the
window very gently; he appeared to have multiple fractures. He was so frail that it felt like he could splinter into a hundred pieces at any moment.

  “Leave me,” he whispered. “I’ve lived my life. Help the others.”

  “You’re the last one,” Fiona said gently. “And what a story you’ll have to tell your grandchildren.”

  “You and your husband make a good team,” he said. “It’s lucky when you fall in love with your soul mate.”

  Fiona and Luke looked at each other. Neither bothered to correct the man’s impression of their relationship. At the window, Luke was able to pick up the fragile man and hand him out to Charlie.

  “That’s the last of them, I think,” Luke said.

  “It’s a wonderful thing you two have done. Amazing,” Charlie said, holding the old gentleman carefully. “Let me pass him down the line, and then I’ll come back for you.”

  “I’m just going to make one last search, to make sure we didn't leave anyone,” Luke told him. “Fiona, you go. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “No. I’m staying. You check the front. I’ll check the back.”

  Before they had time to move away, the train car wrenched free from the cliff edge and began its slow slide down the hillside toward the river. A scream involuntarily escaped Fiona’s lips. The train workers were running after the carriage but were powerless to stop its deadly progress downward.

  “Give me your hand!” Luke shouted.

  Fiona was just able to grab hold of his wrist, and he began pulling her up toward the end of the car, toward the vestibule where they had shared Krispy Kremes. A lifetime ago, it seemed.

  The carriage continued to slide down. Luke and Fiona were at the door to the vestibule now. It took both of them to push it open. The door was bent from the accident, but they managed to crawl out into the vestibule.

  “Now what?” Fiona gasped.

  “We’re going to jump,” Luke answered, leaning out of the carriage door.

  “Are you crazy?” she asked. “We’ll land in the river.”

  “It’ll be fine. Haven’t you ever seen ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’?”

  And with that, the carriage suddenly started to freefall. He reached his hand out to her, just as he had earlier at Penn Station.

  “Jump,” he said. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  And so she jumped.

  FOURTEEN

  Hayley was frantic. She had been calling Fiona’s cell phone non-stop since she had seen the news of the crash on television. She had tried calling Luke as well, but both phones went straight to voicemail.

  Getting to the crash site was the only thing on her mind. But so far, trying to accomplish that had become a nightmare. It was impossible to find a rental car, at eight o’clock in the evening in Manhattan.

  Hayley was just about to ask Mikey to go down to 86th Street, and borrow one, like he used to do when they were kids. Luckily, she finally located a car rental in an obscure parking lot, on the West Side of Manhattan.

  The next problem facing her was how to get to the remote area where the train crash had taken place. The authorities were warning people to stay away, and had stopped giving out details of the location. It had taken time on her iPad to cross-check the Acela route, with the list of bridges that crossed the Delaware River from New Jersey into Pennsylvania. But nothing was going to keep her from getting to that crash site.

  She begged Mikey to go with her, but he had to “see a man about a dog,” which in Mikey-speak meant he had to make a payment on one of his many outstanding loans.

  It was nine o’clock before she was ready to flag down a taxi, and head for the West Side and her rental car. She had planned to pay for the car with the cash she had taken from the bank, meant for gratuities for the serving staff from last week’s event. But when she looked in her checkbook at the garage, she realized she was four hundred dollars short.

  “Damn you, Mikey,” she muttered to herself, remembering how he had refused a sandwich because he didn’t want to spend her money.

  She got out her credit card. She had no time to deal with him right now; she had to get to Pennsylvania. She must find Fiona and Luke. When she finally got in the car and headed for the West Side Highway, she was determined nothing and no one would stop her.

  The lights from the oncoming traffic were blurred by tears of frustration and regret. How could she have been so stupid! How could she have been jealous of Fiona, her best friend in the whole world? Of course there was nothing going on between Fiona and Luke. She’d never even met him before today.

  “You’re turning into a psycho,” she shouted at herself, as she sped through the Lincoln Tunnel, heading for Morrisville, PA, wherever that was. She just hoped the GPS on this heap was working.

  FIFTEEN

  It was dark. Nonetheless, the massive lights set up by the rescue teams gave the crash scene an eerie luminosity.

  Helicopters swept up and down the river, focusing their searchlights on the water and the shoreline, looking for any sign of life. Or anything to indicate there had been more loss of life.

  So far, there had been no sign of the train carriage. Nor of the two passengers, who were on board when its long, terrifying slide into the water began.

  The last of a fleet of ambulances were making their way to area hospitals with the injured. They had to travel on narrow, rarely used country roads, which offered the only access to the remote site. The more seriously injured were helicoptered to the nearest trauma centers.

  A giant crane, brought in to right the overturned train cars, was lumbering through a barley field, crushing the early crop.

  Scores of investigators from the NTB, AMTRAK, the FBI, as well as the National Guard, plus dozens of state police, were milling around the scene. The local police were trying, mostly in vain, to keep the burgeoning press corps at bay.

  Train traffic on the entire Northeast Corridor had been suspended, with the usual consequences. There were traffic jams on the roads, and crowds at the airports, as stranded passengers searched for alternative transportation to their destinations. Experts were trying to work out a route for trains that would bypass the crash site, but that could take days.

  The casualty list was long and disturbing: eleven dead, fifty-four injured, twenty seriously. The missing passengers, Fiona Chambers and Luke Thompson, were being credited, by those on the scene, with saving nine passengers who had been trapped in the ill-fated first-class railcar. These acts of heroism took place before the carriage had plunged over the cliff into the Delaware, with Luke and Fiona presumably still on board.

  There had been reports, unsubstantiated as of yet, of two people jumping, or falling, from the car as it hurtled toward the river. But it was feared that even if the two had survived the force of the fall, the cold swirling waters of the Delaware would have swept them away.

  The outside temperature had dropped to forty-two degrees, typical for this part of the country in April. Hayley, wearing only a light jacket, was oblivious to the cold as she hiked through the barley field. She was heading toward the site of the accident, using the tracks made by the crane.

  It hadn’t taken as long as she thought it would to find the place. She had made it here from the Tunnel in a little over two hours. Once she was across the bridge from New Jersey into Pennsylvania, all she had to do was point the car toward the lights that swept the night sky. And let the GPS do the rest.

  Reaching the actual crash site was another matter entirely. There were road blocks everywhere, and state troopers were turning the cars of the curious around. But a little thing like law enforcement was not going to keep Hayley Martin from finding her friend and the man she loved.

  It was on the drive that she had finally admitted to herself that she did love Luke. She always had. She also decided she was going to tell him so. Why had she been so coy, pretending not to care, telling everyone who would listen that she and Luke were just friends? Why was she waiting for him to make the first m
ove? This was 2013. Women were allowed to go after what they wanted.

  When she saw the road blocks ahead, Hayley abandoned her car, and set out across the fields in a jog. She was glad she had pulled on jeans and sneakers before leaving New York. The ground was soft, and bristles from the crushed crops scratched at her ankles. Finally she had the good sense to tuck her jeans into her socks.

  As soon as she was closer to the crash scene she slowed down, straightened her jacket and walked ahead of the big crane, ordering people to make way, to move aside, in a very official manner.

  She approached a railway employee, and said she must confiscate his flashlight to lead the machine in. She claimed hers had been lost in the field.

  Armed with the long, official-looking torch, she made her way through the wreckage to a cluster of officials who appeared to be directing operations. In the chaos of the moment, it was difficult to tell who belonged and who didn’t. Hayley put her talent for disappearing in a crowd to good use. No one challenged her, or even seemed to notice she was there.

  What she swiftly learned chilled her to the bone. Fiona and Luke had been on the train when it went over the cliff. So far, three more witnesses had come forward, reporting that they saw the two jumping free of the car. But the consensus was that whether they jumped, fell, or went into the water with the train, what officials were now calling a search and rescue mission would soon become something else. A quest to recover the remains of the two passengers from the unforgiving Delaware.

  A team of divers from the Coast Guard would go into the river at first light. A search party made up of police officers, National Guardsmen and volunteers would be deployed to search every inch of the shoreline on both sides of the river. If no one was found by afternoon, they would commence dragging the river. Barges were being brought in to raise the train carriage once it was located.

  Her heart in her mouth, Hayley extinguished her flashlight and faded away into the night to say a prayer. It was something she hadn’t done in a long, long time. But at this moment it was the only thing she could do.