But they stare back vacantly, unaffected by the urgency in my voice. Except for one. She looks petrified.
“They made it back?” I ask her.
She nods.
“Where are they?” I say.
“At the train station,” she says quietly. “Most of them.”
“What do you mean
most
of them?”
She clenches her skirt, balling the material in her hand.
“What’s going on?” I demand. Alarm rises in my heart.
“I can’t say any more. I can’t,” she says, her body going rigid.
“What’s going on around here?” I demand. And when no one answers, when no one even meets my eyes, I start running for the train station.
“Get to the train now!” I yell back at them over my shoulder. “If you want to live, you need to get on the train!”
* * *
The train station bursts with activity. Seemingly half the village is here, unloading the train cars.
Still
unloading the cars.
“Sissy!” I shout.
Faces turn, round face after round sleepy face. But no sign of Sissy or the boys.
“Epap! David!”
Everyone stops moving, turning to look at me. Surprise flits across their faces, but nobody speaks.
And then, on the far side of the train, I hear her. Sissy shouting, “Over here, Gene! Over here. Hurry—” She’s cut off by the sound of a smack.
That sets my feet afire. I race down the platform, pushing aside containers and generators, leaping over hoses left curled on the platform floor. A group of elders is congregated down at that end, bunched up in a tight group.
I stop in front of them, breathing hard, sucking in gulps of wispy air. The elders spread out, blossoming like a Venus flytrap, encircling me. That’s when I see them. They’re all tied up inside a train car. Sissy and the boys. Almost all the boys.
“Where’s Ben?” I say.
“Krugman’s got Ben in his office,” Sissy says. Her face is bruised on one side. Her hands, chafed and raw, are tied above her head, and looped around one of the metal bars. “They wouldn’t listen to us. They grabbed us, forced us onto this train.”
Next to her, David is shaking, almost in tears. Jacob is tied on the other side of the train. I can see the knotted ropes tying them to the bars. Epap looks to be in the worst shape. Alone in the corner, his eyes are purpled and swollen shut. He’s slumped over to the side, barely conscious, arms tied behind his back. And I see someone else tied in the other corner. A girl, her eyes blazing with renewed life. Clair.
I turn to the elders. They’re grinning, leering at me. “Okay, okay,” I say. “You got us. We give up. We’ll get on the train. We’ll leave now.”
Their faces frown. They’re expecting pushback, not surrender.
“Just get Ben. Then you can send us on our way.”
“Fine,” says one of the elders. “Get on the train now.”
“Once you bring Ben here,” I say. “Then I’ll get on.”
The elder’s face breaks into a warm smile, laugh lines rippling out. “Oh, okay,” he says. “Whatever you say. But it might take, oh, maybe an hour or two to bring him here. Give or take three hours.”
The circle of men breaks out in guffaws.
I look at Sissy. She shakes her head.
It’s not going to work,
her eyes tell me.
I try a different tack. “Listen to me very clearly,” I say. “Let me spell it out for you. We have to leave now.”
“How do you figure that?” the elder says.
“They’re coming.”
“Who?”
“The duskers.”
The elder smiles. He points at Sissy. “That’s what she claimed. Ohhh … we’re so scared. Ohh … the duskers are floating down the river on pretty little boats.”
“You should be scared.” I stare at their smiling faces until their smirks disappear. “Because I’ve seen them. They’re on the mountain now. Sprinting toward us as we speak, blanketing the face of this mountain like an avalanche of black desire. They’ll be on us in minutes.”
For a second, two, three, they’re silent. A silence that is broken up by uproarious laughter.
“Oh, well played, sir, well played,” the elder booms out. “I have to admit you nearly had us there for a moment.” Then he stops laughing, his tone turning on a dime. “But not good enough, not nearly by half.” His face hardens. “Now get on the train.”
“First bring Ben. In the meantime, the girls should start getting on the train.”
“What do you mean?” one of the girls asks. It’s the girl with freckles. Her voice is timid and afraid, distrusting even herself. She ignores the elders glaring at her. “Tell me.”
The elders turn to glare at her. “You be quiet—”
“We all have to leave,” I shout, now directing my attention to the girls. “The train is the way you survive. The
only
way.” I see the girls listening intensely, leaning forward. “You think the dusker in the Vastnarium was scary? Imagine dozens of them. Imagine hundreds of them tearing through this village!” I shout, and she flinches back. “Now imagine them grabbing you, eating you. As they surely will within the next fifteen minutes.”
A short girl standing close to us, no older than seven, starts crying. The freckled girl puts a comforting arm around her shoulders, but it is pale and trembling.
“Don’t listen to him!” an elder shouts. “Don’t listen to these barefaced lies!”
“Listen to me!” I shout over him. “Start the train engine. Start lowering the bridge. We have to leave now!”
Nobody moves.
And then: the only thing that would have worked.
A full-throated scream howls across the night sky.
It is not the sound of a wolf or an animal, nor is it the bay of loneliness. It is the sound of pining and a deranged impulse. It is soulful but not human. A second later, and it is joined by another wail, then another, until an explosion of bestial howls is flinging across the darkening skies.
The elders’ faces drain pale, their eyes widening with the realization of a lifelong nightmare. Then they do something strange. They do not order the girls onto the train. They do not themselves get on the train. They simply turn around and silently shuffle away like performers booed off the stage, their faces shell-shocked. The elders trundle back toward the village, through the black grassy meadows. Toward the howls.
“What are they doing?” Clair asks. “Where are they going?”
None of this makes sense. The village girls, initially following the elders off the platform, stop and gaze quizzically at one another. Their faces are pictures of conflict: a struggle between their base instinct for survival and their conditioned submission to the elders.
Another scream. Not a dusker howl, but a human cry. The scream’s distance from us—the farms on the far side of the Mission—does little to diffuse the raw terror in it. Full of horror, squeals that pierce the fabric of night. In my mind, I see the farm girls fleeing into the butchery, grabbing hold of cleavers and choppers to ward off the duskers. They do not realize the futility of defense, do not realize that the sight and scent of blood in the butchery—even if only that of an animal’s—will only serve to incense the duskers even further.
“If you want to live, get on the train right now!” I shout. The freckled girl steps forward. Voice shaking badly, she tells the girls to get on the train. They need no further prodding; they move as one into the train cars with surprising quiet, only an isolated sob or muted cry escaping their mouths.
A girl picks something off the floor of the train car. It’s the girl with pigtails, and in her hand now is Sissy’s dagger belt. She kneels down next to Sissy, unsheathes a dagger. A second later, she’s cut through Sissy’s ropes. Sissy stands, rubbing her wrists. She gives the girl an appreciative look, then unsheathes another dagger from the belt. Together, they start cutting away at the other ropes restraining the boys and Clair.
“How do we get this train moving?” I ask the freckled girl.
“There’s a control panel at the end of the platform,” she says. “It controls everything. A sequence of buttons that sets the train on autopilot. From there, it takes fifteen minutes to rev up, then all doors to the train lock, brakes are released, the train sets off, the bridge is lowered. The process cannot be reversed. Not until it reaches the destination, the Civilization.”
“Do you know how to work the panel?” I ask her.
She nods, her eyes steady on mine. Unexpected strength there. “I’ve watched the elders work it many times,” she says. “It’s all very simple, everything color-coded and labeled pictorially.”
From the village come more howls, louder now, interspersed with screams of pain. Bloodletting has begun. I may not be able to smell it, but I can feel it in the air. The night’s blackness is doused with death.
“Go now,” I say to her. “Start the engines.” She scampers off toward the panel, fast as her lotus feet can take her.
I see David whispering to Jacob, urgently. They spin around, readying to take off.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I ask, grabbing them by their jackets.
“To get Ben,” David says, punching my arm away.
“No way. You both stay here.”
“We’re not leaving him behind, Gene.”
“I know,” I say, clenching my jaw. “That’s why I’m going for him.”
“You and me both,” Sissy says.
“I work better alone,” I say.
“Not this time. It’s Ben we’re talking about.” She turns to David and Jacob. “You two stay here with Epap, make sure he’s okay. Those two girls”—she points to the girl with pigtails and the one with freckles—“are capable. Get behind them.”
And then Sissy is leaping off the platform, cinching her dagger belt around her waist. Moments later, I’m right there with her, sprinting down the meadow. More screams sound from the village. Terror has been unleashed in the streets, in the cottages, full-blown. And we’re running headlong into it.
“Why did Krugman take Ben?” I say.
She shakes her head, eyes filled with fear. “I don’t know.” Her feet pound the ground faster, harder.
Halfway there, I throw a quick look back at the station. A loud mechanical click explodes in the air, followed by a burst of light gray smoke snorting out the engine car. The train’s revving up. Fifteen minutes. That’s all the time we have. Assuming we even make it back alive.
At the first cottage on the village periphery, we lean up against the wall, peek around the corner. The street is empty. From behind, the sound of someone running toward us. It’s Clair.
“Going any farther is suicide,” she says, panting hard. “Listen to the screams! Come back to the train.”
“We’re going for Ben, in Krugman’s office,” Sissy says. “I’m not leaving without him.”
The two girls stare at each other. Clair spits to the ground. “In that case, I’m coming. I can help. I know the quickest way there. And back.”
“Clair—” I say.
“C’mon then,” Clair says. “There’s no time to waste.” She races off, knowing we’ll follow, dashing in and out of the alleyways, slipping in narrow spaces between cottages. Agile and nimble, she quick-cuts around tight corners, sprints through cottages, leaps over fences. Every so often, we bump into a group of girls fleeing down the streets, screaming, going as fast their lotus feet can take them. “Go to the train station!” I order them. But even as I see them hobble off, I know they have no chance of outracing the duskers.
Who are everywhere and nowhere. I have yet to see a single one even though their howls pierce every corner of the village. By the gathering volume of their cries, I know they are still pouring in, an endless stream of them. They are incited by the coppery scent of our blood as they race through the streets, through the cottages, through our clothes, through our skin, through our muscles and fat and internal organs and blood vessels.
“This way!” Clair urges, her voice hushed, and we race faster down the street.
Two cottages ahead of us, a girl rushes out the front door. The screams have panicked her out of her hiding place inside. She’s confused and uncertain as she turns toward us. She never sees—
—the black wind that takes her. In the blink of an eye, an indiscernible black shape swoops in from the side, swiping her off her feet and back into the house, the door smashing into smithereens. The girl’s screams intermix with the duskers’ howls, an eerie, interlacing intimacy.
I grab Clair’s hand, pull her away. Her arm is limp, her feet dragging with shock.
“Krugman’s office, that’s all you think about, okay, Clair? Take us there!”
She nods, but her body is betraying her. She starts to shake, her eyes darting from side to side, trying to make sense of a world gone dark and black and bloody. She pulls off her scarf, wraps it around her head.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“My white hair, it’s giving our position away in the dark.”
“No. It’s the smell of blood that’ll draw them,” I say, removing her scarf, wrapping it around her neck again. “And that’s our advantage right now. We know exactly where they are. Wherever there’s screaming, there’s blood, and that’s where they are. We stay away from the screams.”
She nods frantically, her lower jaw juddering.
“You stay with me, Clair, and you’re fine. Because I know these things, I’ve survived their attacks before. I know how they move, where, when, why. Look at me, Clair, look into my eyes!”
She does, and I pour all my resolve into her eyes, into those pools of fear. I can almost hear the blood rushing through her veins. She nods, slowly, takes a deep breath.
“This way,” she says. “We’re almost there.” When she takes off, she’s found her legs again. Screams—sometimes solitary, often in groups—scald the night sky and we’re forced to circle or backtrack around them.
Hazy dark shapes dart through the village, disconcertingly close. Two girls, trying to escape out of a cottage by squeezing through a window, scream for help, their eyes beseeching. They are wedged in the window frame, and their arms lash against the outside wall. Their bodies suddenly arch straight and taut, their mouths screaming silent cries, their eyelids disappearing behind their eyeballs, exposing the whites of agony. Then their bodies collapse, dangling limp from the window like hung laundry, before being whipped back inside.