Chapter 22
Indigo returned to D’naia in the cattle car. The other unhumans there remained silent and still, unable to sleep but too exhausted to stir. All except for the taxidermist who dozed in blissful serenity beneath her lantern, her Gaian’s Bible under her head.
“What happened?” asked D’naia
“They took me to see Mr. Lever.”
“Did they hurt you?”
“No. We talked.”
“What about?”
Indigo held back. He didn’t want to tell D’naia that their freedom could be bought for the price of delivering Staley… and their immortality. He didn’t want to know what D’naia’s response would be. D’naia was pure. She was a woman of integrity. If Indigo was to tell her of the bargain he had discussed, he feared she would urge him to do it… to hand Staley over. That would ruin his perception of her and he feared it would poison his love for her. “We talked about our future.”
“I didn’t know we had one.”
“Apparently we do. If we behave correctly.” Indigo knew D’naia was a keen perceiver. He knew she knew he was holding back. He waited for her to pry.
“Does that mean we will live?”
“Yes,” Indigo answered, directly. But he wanted to answer “for a little while” instead.
“What do I have to do?” D’naia asked.
“Nothing. Nothing except keep away from the undermen.”
“And what about you? What do you have to do?”
“It’s difficult.”
“Do you want to ask me if you should do it?”
“No. I need to own this. All I want is for you and the baby to be safe.”
D’naia searched Indigo’s eyes for some hint. She knew it was awful. She had a pretty good idea what it was. “I won’t ask you about it. I know you’ll do what is right.”
The train continued to ascend for another five minutes before it happened. An ear shattering ping followed by a jolt sent everyone tumbling to the front of the cattle car. Then a long violent buffeting threw the unhumans about the box. Each lunged for fixed bars and boards and posts and anything else to cling to. The pummeling worsened, as if the wheels of the train were running on the ties. The engine finally slowed but the unhumans could feel the cattle car begin to list. In the darkness it was not known if they would merely tip onto one side or tumble entirely off the edge of a canyon wall and be smashed on the rocks far below. Everyone screamed for their lives as if screaming might right the compartment and save them. And just as the teetering boxcar was about to fall over, it was as if the invisible hand of God intervened. The cattle car righted itself just as the engine ahead ground to a full stop. The screaming was replaced with hyperventilating and sighs as the unhumans untangled themselves and caught their breath. The oil lantern above the taxidermist had broken and started a small fire but Indigo managed to stamp it out. It was utterly dark then with the only visible thing being the deepest blue of the starlit sky leaking in between the wood planks of the car.
“What happened?” asked one of the unhumans, his voice unpinpointable in the darkness.
“We’ve derailed,” Indigo answered to the shadow.
The taxidermist groaned somewhere nearby.
“Are you hurt?” Indigo asked.
She answered only with more groaning.
“Where are you? I can’t find you,” Indigo asked.
“Keep away from me you doppelganger,” she answered.
“I’m just trying to help you,” Indigo begged to the darkness.
“You don’t want to help me. You want to kill me. Listen! Listen! They are coming! Your savages are coming!”
Someone started to weep in another corner of the darkness.
The taxidermist kept at it. “They’ve done this to us. They’ve derailed us. The savages! The cannibals! And now they’re coming for us. They’re coming! Gaia help us!”
The other unhumans began to whisper and whimper in the darkness.
“The savages! The savages are coming to rip us out and devour us. Cannibals!”
“Shut up,” barked another voice.
“We’re all gonna die! Their gonna eat us alive! String us up by our ankles and carve off our flesh while we scream in agony! Savages!”
Someone covered the taxidermist’s mouth in the darkness.
A breeze of cool night air blew through the cattle car. The unhumans listened for the footfalls of approaching cannibals outside but there was just the wind, the winter wind swirling through the trees. And then, as if carried in by the wind, there came the high, eerie howls of coyote that trailed off into a flurry of yips and echoes. The taxidermist let loose a wail muffled by some muzzle in the darkness. To her, coyotes were an omen. She wailed her deadened wail, stifled by the palm of another human hoping desperately that silence might spare them the agony of having their eyeballs jabbed out by savages. They were out there. They were coming. The wind, the freezing wind ripped through the cattle car again, shilling their bones. The terrified unhumans prayed for their lives. They called out for the Overmen to protect them from the cannibals. Why weren’t they shooting? A chorus of high pitched yelping and howling and huffing built up again into a symphony of chaos. They were close.
BANG, BANG, BANG, came the sound of rifle fire.
The coyotes stopped.
The cool wind whistled again through the slats of the cattle car.
Indigo held D’naia. She was shivering. Their blind eyes darted about in the darkness.
Footfalls.
Footfalls darted through the gravel just outside the boxcar.
The taxidermist ripped off the hand and let out a wail, “There right outside! Cannibals!”
“Shut her up,” ordered Indigo into the darkness.
More footfalls in the gravel.
BANG! BANG!
Silence. The wind. Footfalls moving away. The taxidermist growled under her new muzzle. More footfalls in the distance.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
An iron clang. People outside, running through the ballast.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
A squeal of rusty iron. Then the train began to vibrate, then move, yes, it was rolling again. Outside came panicked voices. Men were scrambling about trying to stop the cattle car arms. But the cattle car was gaining speed. Men were running full speed through the aggregate to keep up. A thump! Someone jumped on but he had no way to unlock the door. The car accelerated. Faster, faster, backwards down the slope. The unhuman occupants watched the silhouette of the guard against the starry backdrop through the cracks in the slat wall. Was he armed? They all asked themselves.
“Help us! Help us! Save us from the cannibals!” cried the undermen in the locked car. It was of no use. He lost his nerve and jumped off, landing with a fading scream of pain.
Faster, faster and faster still they rolled. Back down the hill. It wasn’t known what was outside. A cliff? A forest? A field? How fast could the car go before it slipped the rail and tumbled off that cliff that no one was exactly sure was there? The taxidermist started to pray.
Faster, faster, faster, faster still. The decent was steepening. Down they plunged into some unknown abyss. Indigo held D’naia closer. She still shivered silently in his arms.
Faster, faster, faster, faster, faster. The cattle car rolled and its steel frame groaned and squealed. The wood slats creaked and snapped under the torque. Indigo was certain they would take the first bend too fast and the wooden box would tumble off into the woods and down an embankment and explode into a million shards of brittle pine and femur bones and severed limbs.
The taxidermist threw off her muzzle again and screamed. It’s pitch was blood-curdling, guttural, not the voice of an old maid but the voice of a wraith. She ran out of air. Then she sucked in a huge breath and screamed again but this time it was cut short by the snapping of pine.
Indigo thought of God.
It surprised him, the idea of a supernatural being, omniscient and omnipotent…wait, that’s impossible, he thought. If one is all knowing than one must know the future. But in order to know the future, one must be helpless to effect it which rules out omnipotence. Never mind that! He argued with himself. Are you ready to die? He thought that same thing while he was in the dying Astarte but that was different. That was a slow, silent, grim dread of the end brought on by dehydration and radiation poisoning. This was death coming at him at eighty miles per hour with a screaming lunatic taxidermist whom herself was strangely not resorting to prayer.
“We’re dead! Dead! It’s over. No more. Our one chance at eternal life is gone!” Oh Gaia, why have you forsaken me? I curse you, evil Mother!” She screamed.
Indigo, with nothing left to lose, began to mumble…
“Oh God, if there be something beyond this mortal coil, please consider that, in my final moment, I reached out to you in humility.”
Although Indigo did not pray to survive or even to be spared a mangled, lingering death only to be eaten alive by coyotes, he sensed the cattle car immediately begin to slow. The squealing of the steel dissipated and the snapping of the boards ceased. The cattle car calmed, decelerating, easing to a stop.
Indigo got himself up and put his eyes to a gap in the slats. There was nothing to see except black. He tried the handle on the sliding door but it remained locked.
“What are you doing?” asked the taxidermist.
“I’m trying to get us out of here,” Indigo answered.
“Stop that. You’ll just let the cannibals in. Stop!”
“I’ll take my chances out there with them.”
“You’re endangering us. The Overmen will come and rescue us.”
Indigo pried at a loose board hoping to break it free.
“They’ll be here any minute with their hovercraft.”
“I doubt it,” Indigo replied after giving up on the board.
“They’ll swoop down like angels and get us out of here before the cannibals come.”
“So they can murder us themselves?” asked D’naia.
“You give them too much credit,” Indigo answered. “It’ll be hours before they get here, if at all.”
“You lie.”
“I know what they can and can’t do. They have nothing way out here.”
“He’s right,” answered D’naia.
“No one’s talking to you, whore,” barked the taxidermist.
“You shut your mouth,” Indigo answered, “or I’ll make sure to tie you up to a tree out there in the woods after I find a way out of this cell.”
Indigo walked the interior of the dark cattle car, probing the walls in the darkness with his hands and kicking the lower boards with his feet. Despite all the creaking and snapping of boards, the walls remained impenetrable. He looked up and noticed that a crack in the roof had opened up but he had no up way to reach it. He finally gave up and found his way back to D’naia.
“What was that?” asked the taxidermist.
They all listened intently. Something was again outside the car.
“They’re back!” the taxidermist shouted. “They’ve come back for us!”
“Shut up,” whispered Indigo.
Something climbed onto the back of the cattle car and took hold of the handle to the end door but the lock held. The taxidermist started to hyperventilate. Rebuffed, whatever it was climbed onto the top of the car. Indigo listened to the footsteps as they shuffled lengthwise down the length of the roof. They stopped at the crack in the roof. Two hands reached in through the hole and tore the boards loose creating a portal up through which Indigo could see the stars. Whatever was on that roof was coming in. The undermen in the cattle car backed away and into the farthest corners of the cattle car. Indigo and D’naia held each other again. She had stopped shivering.
A silhouette appeared above, blotting out the starlight. It dropped into the car from the ceiling and landed with a thud in the middle of the car.
The taxidermist screamed another guttural scream. Indigo clung to D’naia. He could not make out what it was in the faint starlight. He listened and stared with blind eyes.
Click
A white light filled up the person of the intruder. The intruder was a man in a spacesuit which glowed of its own white phosphorescence which is a handy feature to have when you are floating about in the void and expecting someone to keep an eye on you. Indigo knew that it was Staley which was confirmed when he removed his space helmet.
“It’s you,” Indigo remarked.
“You were told that I would come for you.”
“We had given up.”
“You have so little faith.” He turned to the others in the car. “Come with me if you want life.”
Someone on the outside pried off the lock on the sliding door and slid the door open. Outside were a dozen unhumans, dressed in canvas and hides and carrying crude weapons. They all left the cattle car except for one, the taxidermist, who wished to remain behind and wait for her Overman hovercraft patrol to pluck her from the wilderness and haul her off to her salvation of virtual immortality. Staley obliged her and assured her that no ‘cannibals’ would visit her that evening.
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