The Burning

destination if they really were riding on a train. But sometimes it felt as though he'd been in here over a week- and sometimes it seemed that only hours had passed by.

They made no stops, at least not to his knowledge, but other people wandered into the passenger car periodically. People like himself. Living people. Chinese people. They seemed as confused as he had been upon entering, and, as with him, the ghostly man sat next to each of them in turn and explained things, showed them scenes outside the blackness of the windows.

Afterward, the newbies came to sit by him, either drawn by his warmth or repelled by the others' cold.

What was happening was wrong, Dennis knew. He recognized the reason for the rage, even felt some of it himself. The desire for revenge was understandable and perhaps even justified given the circumstances, but two wrongs didn't make a right, and no matter what various religions said, the sins of the father should not be visited upon the sons.

Not everyone agreed. One of his fellow travelers was a college professor from Denver, another an elderly housewife from Oregon who reminded him of his mom, and both of them believed retaliation was entirely appropriate. They had been told and shown the same things he had, but it seemed that they had known already. Like the old man he had seen in the Selby cemetery, they had been practicing rituals handed down from their parents and grandparents, rural rituals from old religions that were intended to lead to the very end they were experiencing now: the resurrection of the dead. Their people had been grievously wronged, the professor said, not merely exploited but murdered because of their ethnicity, and those who had died deserved the chance to strike back at the society that had fostered such hatred. Whatever punishment might be meted out was more than deserved. Dennis definitely did not agree, and he thought perhaps it was a generational thing, or maybe it was because he considered himself more American than Chinese. He was relieved when another young man-a medical student from Las Vegas-seemed to be just as clueless and horrified as he was.

The odd thing was that none of them seemed to be freaked-out by the fact that they were riding in this phantom train-himself included-and he wondered if the others had experienced the same sort of subliminal pull that had compelled him west, that had led him from state to state, town to town, and finally to here. He wondered if, like himself, they looked at this dark ride as the logical continuation of a journey they had already been on.

At some point, the train would reach its final destination. Probably sooner rather than later. He was not exactly sure what would happen there-well, he knew what, although he did not know how-but he realized that he needed to find some way to stop it. He thought of what he'd seen out the windows. An army of Native Americans was waiting for them at Promontory Point. Aligned originally against the white society that had abused them both, the Native Americans had gone from allies to enemies over generations due to the all-consuming hunger of the Chinese dead. Dennis had no idea how the men of the tribes had discovered that it would happen at the Point, the burning place, or what was behind their gathering; all he knew was that if they failed, the dead would have free rein and no one would be safe. He could not allow that to happen. In school, in the ethics class he'd taken the semester before dropping out of college, there'd been endless discussions about how choosing not to act was still a choice and choosing not to act against evil made one complicit in that evil. They had all sworn that were the opportunity to arise, they would take a stand no matter what the personal consequences.

Now he had the opportunity to act on that promise.

If he could only figure out how.

He wished Cathy were here. His sister might be young, but she was smart and good at thinking on her feet.

On an impulse, he tried his cell phone, but it didn't even turn on. There was no light, no beep, nothing. He pressed his face to the window. On the other side of the glass, no historic scenes were replaying themselves for his benefit. There was only darkness.

'Dennis.'

He looked over at Malcolm, the medical student. 'Yeah?'

'You think it's all true?'

Dennis nodded. He did. Like that of any other minority group, the known history of the Chinese in America was pretty bad. To discover that it was even worse and more brutal than he'd been led to believe was not exactly a shocker.

'But it's still not worth retaliating for?'

'Against people who had nothing to do with any of it and don't even know what happened? No.' He frowned. 'Why? Are you changing your mind?'

'No. No, not at all. It's just that ... why are we here? What do they need us for? What do we bring to the table? You know what I'm saying? There must be a reason. But ... what is it?'

'I don't know,' Dennis admitted.

'It worries me,' Malcolm said.

Dennis nodded. 'Yeah. Me, too.'

Thirty-three

Promontory Point, Utah

What surprised Angela most about the gathering was its size. The shots on television had not done it justice. There it had looked like the crowd of an ordinary football game behind the reporter. Viewed here from the road, however, there seemed to be enough people to fill five or six stadiums. The sight was impressive ... but also a little creepy. The fact that this many individuals had suddenly, inexplicably and simultaneously walked out on their ordinary lives and used whatever means necessary to get to this place left her feeling not only frightened but overwhelmed. If whatever they were dealing with had the power to summon thousands of people over such a broad geographic area, they had no hope in hell of combating it. They might as well turn tail right now and run as far away from here as they could get.

The car approached the edge of the gathering. A brown sign by the side of the road read golden spike national historic site. Somewhere in the middle of this massive assemblage was a visitors' center, were roads and parking lots that led to the structure, but the amorphous nature of the crowd and its incredible scale had engulfed those permanent fixtures and temporarily changed the topography of the land. She could not tell where anything was located.

Derek pulled next to a CNN news van. A satellite dish atop a long pole protruded from the center of the van high above the gathered throng. Black wires and cables ran in bunches from within the vehicle's open center door outward into the crowd.

'The train's not here,' Derek said.

'Yet,' Angela emphasized. For she felt certain that it would be. And soon. She had no clue as to why it was late or what detour it could possibly have taken, but she knew in her gut that the corpse-hauling locomotive would arrive. This was where it was headed; this was its destination.

She unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car. Her legs hurt from being cramped in the same position most of the day, and she stretched gratefully, thankful to have freedom of movement once again. As Derek, his mom and his brother got out of the car, she walked over to the news van to see if she could find out what was happening. Poking her head in the open door, she saw banks of electronic equipment and a row of six small television screens showing six different shots of the crowd, but no person inside the vehicle. She glanced from one screen to another, looking for some kind of clue, something that would give her an idea of where to go and what to do, but there were only scenes of campers and crowds, people milling around.

'Can I help you?' someone asked behind her.

She pulled her head out of the van to see a clean-cut young man only a few years older than herself carrying what looked like a video camera and an extra length of coiled cable. 'Uh ...,' she stammered, caught off guard. 'I, uh, was just wondering ... uhm ... no,' she said. 'Sorry.' She moved away to let the man into the van.

'What now?' Derek asked, coming up next to her.

'I don't know,' Angela admitted.

'These are close quarters. If that train gets here, if those . . . zombies come out and that mold starts infecting people?' He shook his head. 'It would spread really fast.'

She'd been thinking the same thing, but she had no idea what they could do to prevent any of it. She felt