The Burning

Chambers and Ray Daniels. They had no shapes to speak of and appeared to be formed from fungus and claws. He wasn't even sure how they moved; they seemed to sort of roll and scuttle at the same time. But he was afraid of them, and he instinctively moved back toward the pickup truck, his heart hammering in his chest as though it were about to burst.

One of the creatures reached a young man and woman. College students. The girl had an expensive still camera with a telephoto lens, the guy a palm-sized video recorder. They were capturing events for a college newspaper/TV station, for a class, for their own personal interest or perhaps because they hoped to sell the shots to another media outlet and make some money.

The creature sliced off their heads.

It happened in an instant, before they could even cry out. A shapeless smudge of fungus with razor-sharp talons lashed out and in one quick move cut through first the guy's neck, then the girl's. Both bodies took one extra step before crashing into each other and collapsing in a heap, blood geysering from their severed arteries while their heads landed on the ground. The people around them shouted and screamed as they were splashed with the spurting blood.

Henry felt an ice-cold sliminess slide against his back. It passed through the thick material of his shirt like it wasn't there and for a brief frigid second it seemed as though a gigantic raw oyster were being drawn across his skin. He spun around and saw one of those creatures passing right next to him. Even this close, he could see no details in the blackness, only the vague fuzziness of the mold and the occasional sharpness of randomly jutting claws. It sped by quickly, and he stood stock-still, afraid to move, those around him doing the same until the monster had disappeared into the crowd, into the night. Henry backed away.

The creatures were everywhere, attacking the tourists, the reporters, the cameramen, the technical workers on the news teams. He saw arms lopped off, stomachs rent, people torn apart, as the black shapeless figures passed through the crowd. Oddly enough, what brought it home to him, what made it seem truly real, was the fact that famous people were being killed. Both NBC and CNN had well-known national correspondents on the scene, and to see them die so gruesomely, these men and women who had been on his television countless times over the years, reporting from crime scenes and trouble spots as he'd been eating his dinner, made him realize that this was actually happening. And yet the men of the tribes remained untouched. It wasn't fair, and while he was one of those spared, he felt the unjustness of it, knew it was wrong and felt guilty about it. This had to stop.

He glanced over at Wes, Milton, Antonio and Jack. They and the group of Pimas next to them looked as stunned, sickened and abashed as he felt. And still more trains were coming. The air was moving again. Not wind but the same sort of huge displacement that had heralded the previous arrival. There was already chaos in the crowd from the murderous attacks, but it grew worse as survivors began running frenziedly about, trying to anticipate where the next locomotive would be coming from. For railroad tracks were springing up beneath their feet, rising out of the hard earth, an impossible crisscrossing network that seemed to extend in every direction. Henry nearly fell over as rails and ties pushed up from the ground, and he looked frantically both ways to make sure nothing was bearing down on him.

The dark murderous entities that had been rushing wildly through the crowd and tearing people apart seemed to have disappeared, although perhaps they'd only moved on to another section of the huge assemblage. This area was on a slight rise, and Henry could see all the way to the original tracks. It was dark out there and he couldn't be sure, but it looked to him as though some of the creatures were merging with the eastbound train, the shadow train, not climbing aboard but being absorbed by the locomotive, becoming part of it.

And the train grew darker, more solid.

Fresh screams arose from the south as the new locomotive arrived, barreling through the throng on one of the emergent tracks, running over dead bodies and shoving other people out of its way, sending them flying. Despite its tangible concrete presence, this train, too, made no sound, and though smoke seemed to be belching from its chimney, Henry saw as it sped by that the smoke was comprised of shadows, the hovering forms of those seductive shades who'd been violating his people.

His people.

How quickly he had come to identify himself as Papago after years, decades, of seeing himself as Caucasian and thinking of his father's story as nothing more than a fanciful rumor.

A hot wind engulfed him as the behemoth passed, smelling of sulfur and death, blowing the long hair of the men around him and causing his own shorter hair to whip backward painfully. He saw blood and bits of flesh both on the scoop in front of the engine and spinning around on the wheels. In the passenger cars that followed, the countenances that stared out were rotted and skeletal, the faces of corpses long dead.

From the north, a fourth train emerged from the night, this one seemingly more ordinary, although any real determination was impossible to make at this distance. Its sound and appearance were those of a traditional locomotive, but it was arriving on one of the spider's web of new tracks rising from the plain, so it couldn't have been anything close to normal. Like the others, it drove through the multitudes, over stray individuals, heading directly for the heart of Promontory Point-the spot at which the golden spike had been driven.

Just as they had in 1869, when the lines met and the transcontinental railroad was born, two trains faced each other on the original east-west tracks while a huge crowd watched. This time, however, two other trains on a pair of the newly emergent tracks faced each other from the north and south as well. It was an awesome and frightening sight. The four engines looked like gigantic creatures holding a conference, and in a way, Henry supposed, that was exactly what was happening. For these were not mere vehicles in which passengers were being carried; they were entities of their own, created for a specific purpose, incorporating yet superseding the corpses, shadows, ghosts, mold and whatever else made up their individual components. He had no idea what came next, but it was not hard for him to imagine the four locomotives merging into one, forming a single supernatural force capable of crisscrossing the nation in endless pursuit of vengeance.

The ground rumbled again. None of the trains were in motion, but there was movement beneath the earth, as though something was attempting to break through to the surface, and he imagined an army of corpses emerging from the soil, their skeletal faces frozen in expressions of rage and hate.

Henry smelled smoke, felt heat, although whether it was coming from under the ground or from the engines themselves he could not be sure.

This was it. This was what they'd come for, what the shamans had predicted. It was time for them to take a stand, to align themselves against the trains and the rapacious dead, to reclaim for themselves the power that the Chinese had appropriated. A shudder seemed to pass through the crowd. Only it wasn't exactly a shudder. It was more like a collective shift, a uniform movement that seemed almost choreographed in the way it migrated from one side of the gathering to the other.

Henry felt Wes reach for his hand, and he reached out to hold Milton's. Who in turn grabbed Antonio, who ...

It spread like a wave through the gathering, and Henry watched as all of the disparate individuals who had heretofore resisted any and all attempts at social connection formed a sort of human chain, linking themselves physically with one another, with every pilgrim who had made his way to the Point. This was why they were here. There was a calming effect as he stood between the two men, holding their hands, a soul-soothing emotion that radiated through him as though conducted by the hands holding his, and it felt at once comforting and cleansing.

Along with this came a chanting, words he did not recognize and did not know but that he picked up through simple repetition of the syllables. He joined in, starting hesitantly but growing louder, stronger and more confident with each round of verse. Many of the other men seemed unfamiliar with the words as well at first, and he wondered from which tribe the chanting had originated. He had the strange feeling that it was not from any tribe, that the words were in a language familiar only to shamans, and the thought made him recite more forcefully, suddenly certain that doing so would give the words power.

The calming influence was superseded by an energizing force that likewise seemed transmitted by the hands of the men around him. Transmitted and amplified. He was suddenly filled with the desire, the need, to confront the trains and whoever or whatever lay behind them.

It was time to fight back.