Bentley Little - The Burning

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 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.