The Burning

helpless, powerless, useless.

'Maybe we should leave,' Derek's mother suggested.

His brother, Steve, nodded nervously. 'Yeah.'

'No,' Angela and Derek said simultaneously.

They looked at each other and smiled. Where there's humor, there's hope, she thought. She wondered what her parents were doing right now, wondered what they would say if they knew she was here and why. She hadn't talked to them for the past two days. For all she knew, they thought she'd been kidnapped, and were calling Flagstaff police to send a search party after her.

The sun was starting to go down.

'What do we do about sleeping arrangements?' Angela asked. 'I don't think there are any hotels around here.'

'I don't even think there's a bathroom,' Steve said.

Derek shrugged. 'I guess we'll just sleep in the car.'

The temperature was dropping, too.

Angela looked around at the crowd of Native Americans. They all seemed to be men, but they were old and young, fat and thin, crew cut and ponytailed. One thing they had in common was that they completely ignored one another. The communal spirit usually present at large events like concerts and football games was absent. It was as if thousands of individuals with absolutely nothing in common and no interest in one another happened to find themselves in the same place at the same time.

Between the crush of bodies, she thought she saw a portion of railroad track.

It's coming, she thought. It will be here tonight.

She said nothing to Derek. But when he took her hand, she squeezed it tightly, hoping to stop her trembling.

The second day passed slowly. They had run out of things to talk about and none of their immediate neighbors seemed in the mood for discussion, so mostly they sat around silently and waited. Henry wished he'd brought some reading material, but he hadn't and no one else had either. He could have spoken to reporters, given them his take on the situation for broadcast. But he had a career to think of after all of this was over, and it was more important to maintain his credibility than provide himself with diversions. Toward the middle of the day, he hiked around a bit, surveying the surroundings and trying to strike up conversations with other sojourners to no avail. He returned hot, tired and frustrated.

Lookiloos arrived, conspiracy buffs and New Age ninnies attracted by stories on the newscasts who'd come to see for themselves what was going on.

'They're in for a surprise,' Wes said simply.

The others nodded.

The temperature dropped as the sun went down. Shadows grew long and then blended into the darkness as dusk became night.

Henry'd had a lot of time to think things over, to ponder what he'd learned and what he'd been told. It seemed to him that the Native American peoples had had a symbiotic relationship with the Chinese massacre victims from the beginning. Since both had been exploited by white men and the railroad, their interests converged; they each had a vested interest in taking revenge on their persecutors. The Chinese even seemed to have adopted some of the native beliefs for their own purposes. He recalled the first time he had dreamed of the twins and then when he had initially seen their shadows. They had revealed themselves slowly, seducing him, and while he had known nothing about them, and had found them profoundly alien and frightening, the shadows had from the beginning acted as though his capitulation was not only inevitable but preordained. He understood now that the shades had been gaining strength for well over a century this way, and Henry had no doubt that initially the arrangement had been agreed to by shamans or chiefs or even the native peoples themselves. But over the years, knowledge of any such pacts had been lost and forgotten, and the current generation not only resented and objected to being used but rejected the very premise of the massacre victims' resurrection. What was past was past. And wrongs could not be avenged, only righted.

From somewhere in the night came the sound of a train.

The hair prickled on the back of Henry's neck and arms. The mournful cry of the whistle was familiar .. . yet there was an added dimension to it, a fullness, an eerie haunting quality that gave it far deeper resonance than expected. Around him, people were getting uneasily to their feet, their faces blanched, their eyes filled with fear.

It was coming.

The ground rumbled as the train approached. The air shifted, growing warm, then cold, pressing forward and backward, though it was not wind and disturbed very little. Even the thin hairs on the top of his head remained unmoving as great blocks of air were displaced. He had no idea from which direction the train was coming or where it would eventually stop. He knew only that the waiting was over.

The whistle sounded again, and this time it resembled the crying of a beast.

The wheels on the rails emitted a monster's roar.

And then they saw it. From the edge of the plain to the east came a hulking black shape that sped along the tracks toward them, a vortex of darkness that seemed to suck into it all of the ambient light from the moon, the stars and assorted flashlights and lanterns. It looked like a train.

Looked like a train.

But wasn't.

As it grew close, Henry could see that the massive object hurtling toward them was made of writhing bodies, hundreds of them, covered with what looked like black mold and contorted into impossible shapes that fit together like parts of a jigsaw puzzle. The portion of the crowd that had gathered near the tracks was parting, people frantically dashing to one side or the other in order to get out of the way, leaving behind tents, cars, coolers and chairs as they tried desperately to get as far away from the onrushing train thing as they could.

He knew without being able to see faces that the squirming bodies were Chinese. They had built the rails and now they were using them, gathering victims from across the country and bringing them here, to the site of their greatest triumph and greatest tragedy.

The giant black shape did not brake or slow down or gradually halt. It did not have to follow the traditional laws of physics. All of a sudden, it simply stopped. There were none of the after noises associated with

real trains, none of the steam hissing or mechanical clanking. It sat there in the center of the gathering, at a standstill, ominous and silent.

The bodies were no longer moving. Although they'd been constantly writhing while the train was in motion and had appeared almost alive, they were now very definitely dead. Their eyes were closed, and the layer of thick black mold that coated them bound them together and sealed them in like a cocoon.

News crews were yelling, shouting, hauling equipment, shoving their way past people, moving through the crowd to get to the train.

Or trains.

For there was another one now, coming from the opposite direction. This one was silent and shadowy, and Henry shivered as he saw the silky way it moved along the tracks. It reminded him of the twins. It may have resembled a mechanical object, but as impossible as it seemed, there was something sensual and seductive about the oversized form.

The two trains bumped, touched.

He and the other Papagos made no effort to move any closer. Indeed, most of the individuals on the periphery of the crowd remained where they were, and quite a few of the men who'd been closer to the tracks were now moving outward and away, trying to distance themselves. It was only the news crews and the tourists who were excitedly rushing forward, who appeared not to understand the seriousness of the situation-or the danger.

They all seemed to be white, Henry suddenly noticed.

They were the enemy.

As if on cue, the Others came. They did not emerge from either train, did not come out of the sky or the ground. They were just there one moment, moving through the throng of people, on the hunt. Henry did not know what they were, but these were the beings responsible for the killings, for the deaths, for slaughtering Laurie