“…?” He turned around with one foot on the steps. He sensed something move in the shadow of the freight cars behind him. There were about ten of the roofless freight cars packed with brown coal, but as far as Harvey could tell with his still slightly unfocused vision, there wasn’t anything particularly out of the ordinary about them. The very last one was blurred from view by a dim mist. “Harvey?” Kieli stuck her face out a window in the first passenger car to look for him. No sooner did he grab the railing and haul himself up onto the deck than the train began to pull away from the platform with light vibrations and a heavy billow of smoke. Before he stepped inside, he turned around to take another glance at the line of freight cars behind him, but he didn’t see anything especially unusual. My vision’s starting to get worse… He pressed his hand over his left eye and shook his head a little. The nerves of the left eye he’d been given by the strange-looking beast—Mane—that they’d met in the gorge in the northwestern mining district were hooked up, and it was technically usable, but it was deteriorating faster than he’d thought it would. Sometimes the image there would even cut out for a second. His right eye’s sight wasn’t completely healed either, so sometimes it were as though he was inside a video screen filled with noise. He needed it to hold out for a while longer. Harvey took one last look at the line of graves erected along the edge of the platform like a jagged picket fence. They receded from view, and even at this distance they already looked like nothing more than blackened matchsticks stuck haphazardly in an ashtray. He wondered if there was a grave marker for Christoph somewhere in there. Even though he didn’t know where to direct any prayers—for just a second, he closed his eyes and was silent. When he entered the train through the rear of the second passenger car, Joachim was already gone. Three soldiers turned to look at him from where they’d taken over the front sets of seats on both sides of the aisle to play card games. One of them let his hand slip in panic, and his cards fluttered to the floor in all directions. Harvey ignored it all and kept walking. The soldier who’d bent down to pick up the scattered cards yanked his hand away with a start, although Harvey hadn’t intended to deliberately step on him or anything. He was a comparatively young soldier—the one who’d been on watch duty in the front car a little while ago, whose saber he’d borrowed (or stolen). All the soldiers watched him leave suspended in midmotion, as if they’d been nailed in place. Harvey merely spared them a glance as he walked at his normal pace along the dead center of the aisle. When he reached the forward connecting door, though, he stilled his steps. Apparently, the soldiers had let themselves relax for a moment; when he abruptly turned back to them, they all stiffened again. Harvey imagined he’d hear frightened gulps any second. He mentally shrugged. Something Joachim said popped into his mind. Always looking all wise and enlightened all the time—he didn’t think of himself as enlightened one bit, but it was true that while he took issue with Church Soldiers and the Church itself, he’d never particularly felt any hostility or anything. To put it plainly, he didn’t see much point in harboring bad will toward people who didn’t actually matter to him. “Is my face scary?” he asked them, jerking his shoulder to indicate the sore on his left cheek. And then there was the bonus fact that his eyes were different colors. No one volunteered to be first to answer, so Harvey narrowed down his targets and focused his eyes on that young soldier squatting in the aisle, who immediately looked flustered. “K-kind of,” the kid blurted. “‘Kind of’?” He faked a hurt look, and the soldier corrected himself pleadingly: “I…N-no, not really.” Harvey didn’t think he’d done anything to the kid to make him that scared. He lost interest in hearing any more answers. But when he sighed and turned back to face the connecting door, a tentative voice spoke up behind him. “Um…does that hurt? I heard that Undying soldiers never feel pain…” On the verge of leaving the train car, Harvey turned around once again. Maybe the soldier thought Harvey was turning to glare; he immediately tried to drop his question. “That is, er, please excuse me.” Bam! Harvey cut him off by punching the connecting door behind him. The soldier who’d asked him, along with the other two, went pale and froze. “We’re the same.” His voice and the faint vibration of the train wheels echoed through the tense air of the car. “We’re the same as you. When we’re injured it hurts, and when something’s funny we laugh, and we feel scared sometimes, too, and you know what? We even play cards.” He dropped his eyes to the scattered cards on the floor, then raised them again and lifted the corner of his mouth in a tiny smile. “Wanna play sometime? But I’ll warn you, I’m good.” “Y-you’re on!” the oldest of the soldiers declared vehemently. “No way am I losing to some Undying!” The younger two were clearly rattled, but he accepted Harvey’s challenge, face flushed. While this man might still be full of prejudice, he wasn’t pointlessly freaking out, either. Satisfied at having finally managed to get someone to respond to him like an equal, Harvey left them with an honest smile. He stopped for a moment on the deck connecting the first and second passenger cars. The wind lashing and rebounding against the walls of the cars turned turbulent, whipping his hair every which way. He looked up at the patch of sky he could see from between the cars. The same sky hazed with thin, sandy clouds, the sky that hadn’t changed on this planet for decades, probably even centuries, was still just floating boundlessly above him the same as ever. It never showed him which way to go next. Jude…am I at least not too far off course right now…? At the sight that met his eyes the instant he opened the door to the front passenger car, Harvey was struck with a violent fit of dizziness. Joachim was squatting in the middle of the aisle with a chocolate bar at his feet, trying to balance what looked like a bucket over it with a stick. It was obviously some kind of mousetrap or something, but Harvey couldn’t for the life of him see what Joachim thought he could trap that way…The soldier standing guard next to the connecting door and Kieli, who was sitting in a seat near the middle of the car, were both watching coldly. “…What are you doing?” he asked with the same cold eyes as Kieli, and Joachim lifted his face without standing up. “Isn’t this how you tamed her and won her over?” “Like hell, you moron.” How serious is he being? The scary thing about the way this guy’s mind worked was that he might really, actually be serious. Sullenly clearing away his trap, Joachim whined, “I want a dog, too,” in exactly the way a kid would beg for a toy. “I’m not a dog!” It was when Kieli finally snapped and stood up from her seat to object that it happened. Owoooo… A muffled sound very much like a dog’s howl echoed somewhere out of sight. Then came several men’s voices, not quite wailing but not quite bellowing, and the resounding clash of swords. With a start, Harvey turned back to the deck he’d just come from. “What’s going on?!” Growing red in the face, the soldier on guard duty dashed out through the connecting door. “Hey, wait—” By the time Harvey’d run out to the deck after him, the guard was already reaching to open the connecting door to the second car. And then something hit the door’s little window with an ugly, wet smack. No, not “something”: the bloody palm of a human hand. The hand slid down the glass and vanished below, leaving behind a sticky bright-red print of all five fingers and the palm. In the same moment, an arm stabbed right through the window, shattering it, and seized the throat of the guard standing frozen in front of the door. Long, bony, misshapen fingers and green skin, as though the cells had rotted and started melting off— “Harvey!” “Don’t come out! Stay inside!” he barked back at Kieli automatically, and reached behind him to shut the door to the first passenger car. Cut off by the door, Kieli’s voice calling him grew faraway. The moment he hopped onto the second car’s deck, he seized the saber of the soldier being held in a choke hold, and— Shunk. —plunged it with the full force of his body weight at the window. The unpleasant sensation of his weapon piercing flesh traveled heavily all the way up his arm. “Ngggnngghhh…” The low, shaky moan of a beast. The arm sticking out of the door slackened, releasing the soldier, who slumped down onto the deck. The door came loose and skewed outward—along with the saber stuck through it and the thing leaning against it on the other side. Something wrapped in nothing but dirty scraps of cloth. Something that could only be described as a rotting, greenish corpse. Its unfocused eyes rolled around emptily, and then it turned toward him. That’s… Harvey made a frustrated sound at himself. This was the presence he’d felt before coming inside the train, then. So it sneaked onto the train while we were stopped…The saber Harvey’d stabbed it with through the window had gone dead through the center of its carotid artery, but it grabbed the blade of the sword piercing itself with its bare hand, as if that hadn’t even slowed it down. Harvey let go of the hilt just in time to avoid getting dragged in close. “No hard feelings!” he shouted, and with a yell he slammed his shoulder into it with everything he had. The rush of wind created by the moving train hit the exposed door full-on and blew it clear off its hinges. Its giant body was thrown off the deck with it when it went. Harvey almost got thrown off the train right along with them, but at the last moment he managed to cling to the railing. When he turned his head to look over the flapping ends of his coat at them, it and the broken door were tumbling end over end into the rock surface along the side of the track. They bounced off and were flung out of sight behind him almost before he could register it all. Breathing raggedly, he crawled back up over the railing and onto the deck. When he checked on the fallen soldier, the man’s cervix was broken; he was already gone. …For the moment no emotion was coming to him. Maybe his brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen. When he stepped a little unsteadily into the second passenger car, though, it was still too much; he stopped in the doorway and choked back the urge to vomit. The second passenger car was a sea of bodies and blood. The corpse of the soldier who’d left his handprint on the window of the connecting door lay at his feet. It was the same young soldier he’d been talking with just minutes ago. The soldier who’d asked Does that hurt? in a hesitant voice—whom Harvey’d been talking with just a few minutes ago. And the other two—one was lying facedown in a pool of blood in the aisle in front of him. The last one, the man who’d be the oldest, was slumped heavily in his seat. He looked almost as though he were just hanging his head, asleep, but the windowpane next to him was thick with dripping gore. His skull must have been smashed into it. Simultaneous powerful waves of nausea and dizziness attacked Harvey. He staggered a little, leaning against the door frame and clamping his hand over his mouth. Emotions he didn’t really understand started welling up inside him. Anger, regret, maybe even something you could call mourning. While he hadn’t felt any hostility toward these people, he hadn’t had any particular goodwill either; if anything, he guessed they’d been in midconflict. Still, they were people he’d been talking with just a minute ago—whom he’d talked about playing cards with sometime—who’d tried to act cool and said No way am I losing to some Undying—and now their pitiful corpses were lying right in front of him. If he’d paid attention to that presence he’d felt a little sooner, this wouldn’t have happened… Something creaked. Harvey tensed, straining to sense the slightest presence around him. There’s another one. A shadowy form darted across his peripheral vision. When he turned around with a start— Crash! —the window of the rear connecting door at the other end of the aisle smashed in from the outside. For the last few minutes she’d been hearing a sort of scritch-scritch-scritching against the wall of the train car. “Corporal, there’s something out there…!” “Make sure you don’t let go of me, Kieli.” “R-right.” Kieli wrapped both arms around the radio and darted her eyes around the train car fearfully. Harvey and the soldier on guard duty hadn’t come back since they’d dashed out the rear connecting door. Kieli thought she heard the sound of something running along the roof directly above her head. When she edged backward, hugging the radio tightly, she bumped into Joachim behind her. She whipped around, reflexively moving away as she did so, only to see Joachim half-shrug at her and actually prop his cheek against the seat back, playing the idle spectator. “Sounds like we’ve got a pretty troublesome stowaway on board, huh?” Joachim said, sounding unconcerned, as if it wasn’t his problem. Kieli glared daggers at him. Apparently unruffled, he only dropped his head back in disgust and gazed at the ceiling, thinking. “Well, it’s not our problem, is it? Why is he putting so much energy into it? Since when is his hobby rescuing people?” “Harvey’s not like you!” As Kieli moved to stomp on his foot, annoyed by the cynical way he’d said that, she heard a loud grating sound coming from outside the train car. She stepped away from him and shrank in on herself, looking around her. Creak, creak—as if the entire train car were being throttled. Where is it? The wall? The roof? As she looked left and right, trying to sense it, something shot through one of the windows along the side wall, breaking right through the glass. At the sight of the thing crawling through the window frame upside down like a spider, Kieli’s eyes widened. Greenish, slack body, two lidless eyeballs that reminded her of an invertebrate’s compound eyes, long limbs with the flesh wasted away until the joints stood out unnaturally as it crawled over the window frame and into the train—it really seemed so much like some kind of land crab that Kieli felt a gut-level hatred that made her flesh crawl. She unconsciously took a step back, tripping and hitting her back against the seat on the other side of the aisle as she fell. A shock wave shot out of the radio in her arms at the same time she stumbled and collapsed into the seat. However, the blast of air missed its mark, only lightly grazing the thing’s arm before slamming into the wall. Stretching out its folded limbs like springs, it jumped at her. Kieli screamed. As she cringed where she lay sprawled in the seat, it suddenly stopped moving just above her head. When she hesitantly raised her face to look, still covering her head— “Dammit. Guess I can’t let the goose who lays the golden eggs get all banged up, can I?” Joachim griped, as if this was all such a pain in the neck. The folding knife in his right hand was plunged into its chest. It struggled, gurgling painfully, trying to pull out the knife. The more it struggled, though, the farther the knife was pushed in, Joachim’s right hand quickly burrowing into its chest. Kieli watched the whole thing with her eyes as round as saucers, frozen in place. A misshapen stone heart peeked out of the center of its chest where the knife had gouged out the flesh. Twitching the corners of his mouth up in a twisted smile, Joachim put even more force behind his right hand and started to pull out the heart. Kieli heard a bizarre creaking sound she couldn’t believe could really come from inside a living creature’s body. And Joachim was changing, too. Starting at his right hand around the thing’s heart and moving up his arm, his blood vessels bulged out and his skin began to fester and peel. He still wore that warped smile on his cheeks, but the blood vessels bulged out on one of them, too, and the skin there crumbled away until she glimpsed the flesh underneath. Seemingly unfazed by what was happening to his own body, Joachim wrenched off the bio-cables connected to its organs and yanked out the heart with his bare hand. It stumbled back, writhing in what looked like pain, hit the window, and collapsed to the ground like a broken doll. The sight of its lidless eyes vacantly roaming the air as its body twitched fitfully made Kieli feel sick. She clamped both trembling hands over her mouth to hold the vomit in. After several seconds it gradually stopped moving, as if its springs had run down. Joachim turned to her, still casually holding a clump of bio-cables and a stone heart dribbling tar-black blood in his right hand. When he wiped his cheek with the back of that same hand, the melted skin peeled right off, and Kieli gave a small shriek. Joachim’s right cheek, already starting to regenerate mere seconds later, twisted into a thin smile. “Scared?” “…I-I’m not scared…!” she answered boldly, though the effect was spoiled by the fact that she was backing away from him, hugging the radio. That was about when the forward and rear connecting doors both flew open at the same time. “What are you fussing about now?! This time I’m throwing you off the train!” When the elderly engineer came out the forward door brandishing his shovel and saw the state of their car, even he stopped shouting for a moment. Through the rear door, Harvey came back. Kieli’s face brightened in relief. Harvey, on the other hand, didn’t even spare a glance at what their car looked like. Instead, he slammed the connecting door violently shut and jammed the saber he was carrying through the lever. Immediately afterward, a green arm broke through the door’s little window, its sharp nails clipping Harvey’s cheek as he jerked his head out of its path. The door bolted with the saber shook loudly from the outside. “Get going!” Harvey shouted as he ran toward them, abandoning the door that looked as if it would break any second. Joachim turned on his heel in a good grief sort of way and made a break for it, dashing past the old engineer, who was standing stock-still with his shovel raised overhead, and through the door. “Kieli, you okay?” “Y-yeah.” Harvey came up to the seat where she was crashed out in exhaustion. He grabbed her arm and helped her up, and then she started running, too, spurred on by a push at her back. Just as they made it through the forward connecting door, shoving the old man through it with them, the rear connecting door jerked violently and came loose from the frame to reveal them. Two? No, Three—? Before Kieli’s eyes could confirm, she was already across the deck and they were all diving together into the locomotive at the head of the train. “Wh-what the heck is going on?” called the young apprentice, sticking his head out the door suspiciously. He screamed when he saw the monsters in the passenger car behind them. “Detach us, fast!” “Wh-what?!” While the apprentice didn’t seem to grasp what was going on, at Harvey’s order he nevertheless obediently dashed to the coupler connecting the locomotive to the front passenger car and hastily started working the coupling pin. Nervousness made his hands unsteady, though, and he just couldn’t seem to get it uncoupled. They passed through the passenger car and bore down on them amid all the commotion. “I’ll show you, you damned monsters!” The one to raise the war cry was the elderly engineer, who up until then had just been letting them push him along in a stupor. Yelling like a man possessed and brandishing his shovel, he dashed out onto the deck and started swinging it around wildly. “You idiot! Come back!” shouted Harvey, but he paid no mind. One of the monsters grabbed the end of the shovel on the next swing and dragged him into range. The old man disappeared into the passenger car with it. “Dammit!” In the same moment that Harvey cursed and started to run out to the deck after him, there was a jolt and a clang as the coupling pin finally lifted. “Harvey, no!” Kieli instantly reached out her hand and grabbed the back of Harvey’s coat. Harvey turned, stumbling a little, and laid his hand over hers where it clung. “You go on ahead. If I don’t catch up to you by the end of the day, head to the capital by yourself. I’ll catch up with you later.” “No!” Kieli shouted over him, loudly enough to be heard over the wind screaming through the air all around them. “Kieli—” “I don’t want to be alone! I won’t go! I won’t!” “Go on, just go.” “I don’t want to!” As she yelled, shaking her head, it came home to Kieli just how immature she really was. No, no, don’t leave me alone!—her fourteen-year-old tantrum-throwing child self was bawling in her mind. She hadn’t grown up one little bit since she was fourteen. She was childish, and stubborn, and a tantrum thrower, and all she did was cling to Harvey’s coattails wherever they went. But…but she didn’t want them to be separated anymore. She kept feeling as if this might be the last time—as if she might never be able to see him again. “Kieli.” Her clinging hand was forcibly peeled off. Harvey leaned in close to her and started to whisper. The wind blowing on the exposed deck formed a wall of sound around them, and Harvey’s low, quiet voice was the only thing she could hear. “I promise you: I’ll come get you no matter what. And then—” Clang. There was a hard shock as the cars began to separate, and the last thing he said was half-swallowed by the wind, hard to make out. And then he yelled “Joachim!” and she was shoved back onto the locomotive-side deck and caught by Joachim, who was standing behind her. “That dolt…! Kieli, please, throw me!” cried the radio’s voice through the heaving gusts of wind. “Stop, please go back! Please!” she shouted, turning to look into the car. But the apprentice engineer cried back, “That’s impossible! And you know what, I don’t want to!” before dashing back to the driver’s chair. Kieli turned to face the retreating passenger car one more time. Left on the passenger-side deck, Harvey’s face was growing farther away in the blink of an eye. No. This isn’t the same as that time, she told herself. She wasn’t the same as she’d been at fourteen. “Let’s take care of all our business,” that’s what Harvey had said. So come on, Kieli, think about what you have to do, what you should do right now, and figure it out. Pressing her lips tightly together, Kieli gripped the radio’s cord in both hands. “Harvey!” He was about to run back into the passenger car when he heard her call. He stopped and turned around. “Wait!” And before the word was even out of her mouth, the radio was flying out of her hands and straight toward him, screaming, and—whack. It hit him square in the face, and he went blind for a moment. “Gah! What the hell?!” Harvey shouted, peeling the radio off his forehead. “Oh—I-I’m sorry!” Kieli was still leaning out over the edge of the locomotive’s deck in her pitcher’s pose, face white as a sheet. Behind him, Harvey heard the old man’s husky voice cussing out the monsters. He glanced over his shoulder at the passenger car and grunted in frustration, then turned back toward the locomotive car one more time, held the radio up in the air, and gave her a little smile. To tell her Thanks. It’s okay. To make sure she knew. “Joachim! Pull anything funny and I’ll kill you!” he spat at Joachim (who was standing aloof behind Kieli, making a big show of acting as if the whole thing had nothing to do with him) in parting, and then he turned on his heel and dived into the passenger car, hanging the radio around his neck as he ran. The old man’s shovel was lying in the middle of the aisle. As Harvey ran past, he dipped down and picked it up in his left hand. He saw the old geezer himself at the far end of the car, hoisted up by the monster with its talons piercing through his shoulder, still showering his opponent with meaningless invective. “Take this!” Letting momentum add to his force, Harvey hit the thing attacking the geezer with his shovel as hard as he could. His enemy tottered back and fell through the doorway out onto the deck, where it was immediately knocked off the train. Its large body tumbled end over end until it was crushed under the wheels. The violent bump and the rasping sound of mincemeat being made sent all the hair on Harvey’s body standing on end. With a great shake, one side of the train rocked up into the air. The force of it made the old man collapse in the aisle. Harvey jogged over and was just kneeling to help him up when a burst of static and a sharp warning came from the radio. “Herbie! There’s another one!” Startled, Harvey looked behind him. Immediately afterward, an arm shot out of his peripheral vision and clocked him in the side of the head. He fell over and rolled out onto the deck with the old man in his arms. Once they’d somersaulted a couple of times and crashed into the wall of the car behind them, the rushing wind caught them off balance and they were tossed from the train. Harvey could see the side walls of the cars streaming by right next to him. Fortunately, cut off from the locomotive, the rest of the train had already slowed down a good bit. Though he’d bounced along the rock face several times, still holding the old man, and then skidded a pretty good distance with his shoulder scraping hard along the ground, he managed to come to a stop before he rebounded back onto the tracks.
Chapter 100
23 min read