The Burning

Most of the men weren't responding, were trying to chase the shades away, and even those who did succumb seemed to be fighting it, desperately attempting to keep their clothes on, to stop themselves from interacting with the spirits. Henry was thankful for that. And relieved. Surrounded by those like himself, their moral support granting him a strength he did not possess when alone, he found that he was not aroused by the twins when they came to seduce him. Once again, he was able to see the female body for what it really was: a collection of nerve endings and orifices with grotesque physiological functions. And while the twins did not exactly have bodies, the idea was enough to dampen his already wan libido.

As strange as it might seem to someone else, it felt good to be himself again.

One of the Chinese twins-they were Chinese; he knew that now-sidled next to him, running her left hand slowly over her voluptuous breasts even as her right hand reached out. The other sister stood in front of him, rubbing herself between her legs, her body undulating in time with the movements of her hand.

He was not aroused in the slightest.

And, as before, he could sense under the surface sensuality an anger, a seething rage hidden beneath the sexual behavior.

Henry looked up at the bed of the pickup where Wes and Milton were trying to shoo away the full shadows of two slight boyish-looking teenage girls.

'It is our life force,' Wes explained. 'That is why the dead crave our seed. It gives them what they do not have.'

To Henry's right, one older man had succumbed and was masturbating furiously, pants around his ankles. As he reached his climax, a horde of shadows flew about him, attempting to ingest his semen. Henry's twins fled there as well, and he watched in fascination as their forms seemed to change, became more like the rounded buxom matron seducing the elderly man before they merged into one figure identical to the man's seductress.

From here and there, throughout the crowd, came cries of anguish or remorse, grunts of pleasure, but gradually those noises were supplanted by the rhythms of conversation, by the sounds of radios, tape decks and CD players being cranked up as men turned away from the shadows, ignoring them in favor of the mundane trivialities of ordinary existence. This continued for the better part of an hour, the shadows growing ever more frantic and desperate in their attempts at seduction until finally, as one, they departed, not retreating the way they had come but fading away, blending into the night. They made no noise-they never did-but from the earth itself came a strange rumbling sound, a howl of frustration muffled by layers of dirt, and it was then Henry knew for certain that they had been thwarted in their efforts. He felt good, proud of himself and the others around him.

'Thank God,' Wes breathed, brushing back his hair.

They looked at each other, and Henry thought that they would talk about what had just happened, finally have a heart-to-heart about why they were here and what they were going to do and ... everything.

But they didn't. Either of them. They fiddled with their sleeping bags, they got cans of beer out of the ice chest with Milton, Antonio and Jack, and all of them stood or sat there silently as the night deepened around them.

And they waited for the train.

Thirty

Washington, D.C.

Promontory Point.

Rossiter watched the DVD of spliced-together stories from four network newscasts and six local stations that Agent Saldana had quickly burned and brought to him. Pathetic, he was thinking as a bland man with blond hair reported from the site. With all of its massive intelligence-gathering capabilities, the FBI was relying for information on Cal Perkins, third-string feature reporter for one of Salt Lake City's independent television stations?

So much for the conspiracy theorists who imagined the FBI as a monolithic well-oiled machine with unlimited resources that was secretly and effectively compiling information on every individual in the United States-although this did give ammunition to the other side, those critics who saw the FBI as a bunch of ineffectual know-nothings who falsified evidence to justify incompetent investigatory work and who couldn't solve a crime if it bit them on the ass.

Shit.

They just couldn't win.

Rossiter forced himself to smile at the junior agent.

'Good work, Saldana. You're thinking out of the box. I like that.'

'Thank you, sir.' The agent beamed as he walked back to his desk.

Rossiter had been honing his interpersonal, organizational and leadership skills over the past several days. It was still too early to know for certain, but he had the feeling that a promotion might be in the offing after this. Smiling while offering encouragement and words of praise did not come naturally to him, but putting on a happy face was a small price to pay if it meant moving up the ladder.

Although with all of the speculation in the press about the physical damage to the White House and the president's questionable decision to stonewall rather than deal honestly and publicly with the situation, the pressure was on. If he didn't wrap this up and quickly, his ass was out.

He replayed the DVD, watched it again. He had no idea why all of those men from all of those tribes were gathering at Promontory Point-no outsiders did, and the men who were there weren't talking-but the fact that that was where the two sides of the transcontinental railroad had met meant that it was an important site in the history of trains.

And though Lincoln had signed the Pacific Railroad Act, the railway had actually been completed during Grant's tenure.

Trains.

Everything was coming together.

Sort of.

He sifted through printouts of other reports that had been gathered for him, incidents that might be related, might not. One group in particular stood out.

In several states for the past month or two there'd been sightings of mysterious black trains speeding by on disused rails or even on Amtrak routes. Concurrently, in quite a few of those towns, ghosts had been heard, mysterious disembodied voices in homes or stores or, in one instance, a gas station restroom. They were always described as speaking gibberish, some incomprehensible babble that one churchgoing woman in Missouri said sounded like 'a gay man speaking in tongues.'

Only yesterday, in Bear Flats, California, a police officer had come across just such an incident in a house where a gruesome murder had recently occurred. He'd had the presence of mind to record it on his cell phone, and the recording had buzzed instantly around the Internet, catching the ear of Ron Banks, one of the agents on Rossiter's team. Banks had conducted a follow-up interview, filing a report, and Rossiter looked over the printout now. He'd glanced at it less than half an hour ago, just before Saldana had brought in the DVD, but something about it nagged at him, and he read through Banks' summary again.

Chester Williams.

That's what it was. The name Chester Williams rang a bell, although he'd been so overloaded with reading and bogged down with research since being assigned to this case that he couldn't remember where he'd read or heard the name before. He circled it on the page so he'd remember when he came back to it.

He hadn't had a chance to actually hear the recording of voices that the police officer had made, so Rossiter went over to his computer and called it up. The sound was muffled and crackly at first, with ambient noise from the officer's breathing and footsteps that was louder than anything else, but gradually the voices came to the fore. Two of them: a man and a woman.

The ghosts were speaking Cantonese.

He recognized the language instantly. It had been over ten years since he'd made a name for himself in Rio Verde, Arizona, but those few weeks had been etched upon his consciousness with a razor, and one of the things he remembered clearly was the unique cadence of Cantonese. He had no idea what they were saying, but he knew what language they were speaking.