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“Excuse me, but the station master told me they needed to see you in the office before you go.”
He lowered his hand slowly. “I got a schedule to keep.”
I kept my posture meek and apologetic. “Sorry, sir, they said it was urgent.”
He turned his back on the two humans and advanced toward me. Despite his small stature, his angry expression told me he had every intention of punishing me for interrupting the beating he’d meant for his prisoners. I glanced over his head at the pair. With their tormentor’s back turned, they stood a little straighter. I raised my brows at them and prayed they understood the signal, but before I could move, the conductor’s fist slammed into my belly.
I gasped and doubled over. The second blow landed on the side of my head.
“I told you I had a schedule to keep.” More blows punctuated his words, but his voice remained calm, as if violence was simply a language to him, instead of the product of anger.
A blur of motion signaled Wu’s arrival. He pushed me out of the way and went at the conductor with his makeshift knife. Male grunts and the wet sound of Wu stabbing the conductor’s fat belly filled the engine.
“Start it up,” Wu shouted.
I turned to the pair of prisoners. “Help me.”
The stared at me blankly, as if they didn’t understand the words. I shouted at them, “Coal, now!” The anger in my voice seemed to help them understand what I wanted. While casting curious glances at the fight, they scooped piles of coal into the firebox.
The engine’s control panel lay before me like some sort of alien technology. Before the Blood Wars, humans got around on high-speed, electric trains run by computers. But once the vampires took over, they shunned most human technology, worried we might be able to take them over in the same way they had overthrown us. So it was back to basics with modified coal engines of their own designs. The panel in front of me didn’t have any handy digital monitors with instructions. Instead a series of handles and knobs with no labels mocked me.
“Bravo,” Wu yelled. “Any time now.”
A glance over my shoulder revealed that Wu had the vampire pinned to the wall. The vamp’s torso was a mural of bloody stab wounds, but he wasn’t dead. He wouldn’t die without his brain being destroyed somehow, and Wu’s little knife couldn’t get that job done. His only choice was to keep the vampire so wounded he couldn’t stop us.
I grabbed one of the humans. He was taller than me, but backbreaking labor and starvation had wasted him to little more than skin stretched taut over bones. “How do I make the train go?”
His eyes were blackened, as if he’d withstood a recent beating. Those twin black holes blinked slowly at me. I shook him. “The train? How do I make it move?” I dragged him toward the panel. “Which one?”
He looked at the panel and back at my face. Maybe at one time he’d been a person with dreams and a family. Maybe he’d told jokes with his friends and laughed so hard his sides hurt. But now, the lights were on but the house was abandoned. I grabbed his arms and shook him. “Listen to me, if you help us, you’ll be free. Understand?”
Behind us, the only sounds were the wet slurp of knife to open wound and the methodical whoosh of coal sliding into the furnace. The man next to me with the blackened hands and the empty eyes didn’t move. In my gut, fear and frustration boiled over into rage. I slapped him, hard.
He didn’t blink, he didn’t shy away, and he didn’t speak. I shoved him out of the way because I couldn’t stand to look at him anymore. I should have felt guilty, but I didn’t. Guilt could come later, when I had the luxury of a conscience again.
“Bravo, we’re running out of time,” Wu said.
“I’m on it,” I snapped. Giving the panel all of my attention, I stared hard at each button and knob. None were labeled, of course, but after a moment I realized that one of the buttons was more worn down than all the others. I punched it and a loud hissing sound immediately filled the air. The prisoner pushed me out of the way.
“You’re gonna make it explode,” he said.
I was so shocked to hear him talk, I fell back out of his way.
He grabbed a lever and wound it several times. “The reverser,” he said. He moved another lever. “Release the break and wait for the valve to reach enough pressure.”
We both watched the valve reach twenty-one. He nodded. “Release the throttle. Easy, now, don’t want to flood it with steam.”
I nodded and released the throttle a couple of inches. The train lurched forward. I yelped from both surprise and excitement. “Thanks, uh, sorry, I don’t know your name.”
He smiled, revealing lots of gums but few teeth. “Stellen.”
“Faster,” Wu yelled. He’d stopped stabbing the vampire but still had his hands full holding him down.
I turned to my
new ally. “How do we make it go fast?”
He rejoined his friend by the firebox and began shoveling again. With double the coal, the train gradually started moving faster, but nowhere near fast enough to barrel through the large gate looming a quarter mile ahead.
