Chapter 101

A few seconds after the last of the train cars passed right by his head, the deafening roar of metal scraping hard against rock sounded somewhere up ahead. “Ugh…” Harvey gathered his focus and shut off the pain. Then, though he didn’t get up, he did somehow work up the energy to lift his head from the ground. A bunch of the cars in the front had run off the rails and fallen on their sides; the passenger car at the front had stopped just on the verge of going over a ledge. The coal packed in the freight cars was scattered everywhere, and plenty of it was rolling noisily off the cliff. At the sight of all that disaster in front of him, Harvey heaved a deep sigh. God only knew how many tragic casualties there would have been today if there’d been passengers on board—but fortunately or unfortunately, there weren’t any living human beings on that train anymore. “You alive, Corporal…?” “Yeah. You?” “Just barely.” Once he’d confirmed that the radio he’d landed on top of was all right, Harvey propped his hand on the ground and tried to get up, but his sleeve was torn to shreds and he caught glimpses of bone beneath it at his shoulder and elbow. “Damn…” He tried concentrating on the wounds, but he couldn’t get the regeneration going at anything faster than a snail’s pace. Concentrating all his healing power in one spot gave him a headache and dimmed his sight, so he gave regenerating up as a bad job. He’d blocked out the pain, so there was just a dull tingling sensation all along his left arm. Harvey looked at the old man on the ground next to him. His back and shoulder were covered in deep claw marks, and blood stained his work clothes. Harvey crawled over and peered at his face, then spoke. “Hey, Gramps, you alive?” “D-don’t touch me…!” The engineer cursed, if weakly, and slapped Harvey’s hand away. “Whoa—” Harvey wasn’t exactly steady on his feet himself at the moment; he teetered over and landed lightly on his butt. He ended up just sitting there for a bit, sort of stunned, but the radio angrily piped up, “Wha—you jerk!”, so after a beat he realized he’d been rejected. The old man gritted his teeth and stubbornly tried to prop himself up on his own. Harvey could literally see the bloodstains on his work clothes spreading as he watched. “Come on, don’t overdo it.” “I told you not to touch me, you damn Church lapdog!” He slapped away Harvey’s outstretched hand again, but the force of his own blow made his shoulder give out, and he fell back down. Evidently all the pain and blood loss had left him only half-conscious; after that he just lay there facedown on the ground, unable to get up again, breathing shallowly. “Dammit…Sheesh.” Harvey clucked his tongue. Then he lifted the geezer’s arm to squirm underneath him and tried to load him onto his own back. The radio spat a burst of static in protest. “Just leave the bullheaded jerk alone! You don’t owe him any help after what he said!” “Oh, shut up…” Apparently he was a bit woozy, too; his hearing was dim and the radio’s voice sounded warped to his ears. “Herbie!” “I…” Even his own murmuring voice sounded warped. Harvey found himself complaining, half to himself, “I just don’t want to regret stuff like this anymore…! Why does it have to happen where I can see it? I want to just leave it alone…” He knew he was getting weirdly pissed, but there it was. The faces of all the people who’d died in front of him because he wasn’t able to save them flashed through his mind. It was like that with Christoph. And with those soldiers he’d just shared a casual conversation with, too. If this crap happened someplace else I didn’t care about, I could leave it alone and not care about it! So why do they always die right in front of me? It leaves a bad taste in your mouth when people die right in front of you! You can’t just leave it alone then! Harvey shouldered the old man and tried to stand up, but his knees crumpled. “Herbie, stop it!” “Lay off, I get it…” “What the hell do you ‘get’?! You’re going to collapse! Listen to reason for once!” “I said lay off. You’re usually the one…telling me to help…people, so you can’t…change your tune…now…” The radio’s increasingly fierce voice grated at his ears. And he was irritated at himself, because even though he knew full well it was saying this stuff out of worry, he still reacted by complaining. Lay off, lay off, he chanted over and over in his mind, half at himself. At Harvey, the guy who wanted to leave them alone but couldn’t. When he settled the man on his shoulder one more time and somehow managed to stand up and start walking, something moved in his peripheral vision. Then there was an unpleasant sensation in his abdomen. He unthinkingly let the geezer he’d finally gotten propped on his back slip off. He dropped his gaze to his own body to see five sharp claws on gnarled, misshapen fingers sticking out of his side, plunged straight through him from behind. He could see all the way down to the second knuckle. Sinking to one knee with a grunt, Harvey turned to look behind him. A monster half-crushed by the wheels of the train and not much more than a hunk of meat now stretched out an arm to him from where it lay belly-down on the tracks. The damn thing had just jammed its hand through his stomach, and now its empty, pupil-less eyes were looking at him almost pleadingly, for all the world like it was begging him for help… …Why do everybody and his dog have to die in front of me? That moment of naive hesitation worked against him. The next thing he felt was the jolt of excruciating pain as it wrenched a chunk of flesh out of his side. “Bastard!” A shock wave blasted out of the radio’s speaker. It hit the enemy head-on and sent it flying, but at that same time its arm sliced through the air, and the radio’s cord was caught on its nails. The cord snapped, and the radio fell to the ground. “Corporal!” When Harvey reached for the radio, reeling from the backlash still, the monster trying to stand up brought its foot down right on top of it. KKCHK. The case crumpled, parts flew everywhere, and with one last piercing burst of static like a machine going into the red zone, the sound broke off completely. “!” For a split second Harvey’s entire mind fizzled out and went blank. It lifted one leg for a moment and tilted its head to the side as if it were wondering what it had stepped on. The instant it moved to bring its foot down again, Harvey charged. With a scream of rage, he bore down on the thing; he was hardly able to run through the fire of agony in his side, so it was more of a semicontrolled fall. He knocked it away from the radio with a tackle and then seized the shovel lying next to the track. He shoved the blade into its back where it lay facedown on the ground and slammed the handle down with all his might. There was the sensation of splitting flesh, and then it banged against something hard. Harvey ignored it, gathering up more energy than he’d known he had left to bring the shovel down even harder. “Ahhh…hahhh…” He fell to his knees, panting. The shovel slipped out of his hand as he went. A stone heart rolled out of its body into the pool of its sticky coal-black blood, dragging a mess of severed cables behind it. With both eyes widened vacantly, the thing abruptly stopped moving. Harvey’s mental circuitry was half-numb. All he felt was nausea. “Corporal…” he called in a scratchy voice as he crawled over to the radio, scraping his knees along the ground. Its case was crushed horribly out of shape. There was no answer. “Corp’ral…” Even Harvey heard how incredibly pathetic he sounded. Why was the last thing I said to him “lay off”? Not like that…I don’t want it to end like that. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…Please, answer me…” He dragged himself the last few inches and crouched over the radio, pressing his forehead down into the dirt, prostrating himself, and pleaded. But no matter how many times Harvey called him, not even the feeblest answering static came from the speaker. He sensed a presence above him. He didn’t have the mental or physical strength left to lift his head anymore, but after a little while he did sluggishly roll his eyes up to look anyway. Farther along the tracks at the edges of his blurred vision, several rotting, greenish corpses were crawling out of the overturned train. “Nggnnghhh…” “Nng…ng…” The pained-sounding groans of the literally undead echoed down the mountain railroad on the moaning wind. One by one, the corpses pushed themselves up into a slouch and half-walked, half-drifted like ghosts toward the first prey they saw—in other words, this way. “Damn…it…” Cradling the radio with his arm, Harvey turned to the engineer, but even in his own mind he seriously doubted that he still had enough strength left to shoulder the old man and run. He tried to stand up and his foot slipped. He fell to his knees. Just then— Whump! The sound of a thick gunshot like a blast of heavy compressed air rang out. A hole opened up in the body of the corpse leading the attack, and it fell flat on its face. More shots, a whole series of gunshots rang out, and one by one the corpses were blown away, collapsing to the ground like useless broken dolls. Don’t tell me— Still crouching on the ground, Harvey raised his head and squinted down the track. The track itself was wavering in the haze created by the shimmers of heat in the air, but far along it he made out a group of human forms. Forms in clunky full-faced armored robes, pure-white ones that stood out against the jet-black muzzles of the big-bore rifles they all carried— A pack of grim reapers in monochrome.