1931 The Grand Punk Railroad: Local (13 page)

“Huhn? Uh… Ah, aah! Oh, for cryin’ out loud. You mean those idiots?!”

“You’re one to talk. …Quit with the scowl. And? Who are you going to pick up? Say the name, all right? Gimme the name.”

At that, smirking, Berga answered Firo’s question.

“Claire.”

When he heard that name, Firo’s eyes went wide.

“Claire? You mean
the
Claire?”

“What other Claire would be Claire besides Claire?!”

“I see… Well, that’s something to look forward to. So Claire’s coming… Then the Runoratas have as good as lost.”

Firo nodded to himself, predicting the defeat of the Runoratas solely by the existence of this Claire person.

“Nah, you don’t know that yet.”

“No, I know. That natural-born contract killer is coming back. There’s practically no one in this business who doesn’t know the Vino name by now. If you manage to lose anyway, you’re complete idiots.”

He muttered this in an undertone. When you talked about a currently active killer using their real name, it wasn’t the sort of conversation you wanted people to overhear.

“Yeah, well, Claire does awesome work. The genius turns up everywhere and can kill in absolutely any situation!”

“Don’t yell it, moron. Well, true, those physical skills and the ability to assess situations are something else. It seems impossible for those skinny arms to be as strong as they are, though.”

To them, the name Claire seemed to indicate someone who had reached the heights of a certain type of strength, someone who could be said to be the physical embodiment of that strength.

At that point, as if something had just struck him, Firo turned to Berga and asked a question:

“Say, is the train Claire’s riding in on the
Flying Pussyfoot
?”

“Yeah! That’s the one! What, are those idiots on the same train?”

On hearing that answer, Firo suddenly went quiet. After a short silence, he looked up and informed Berga of a certain fact:

“Actually, Maiza’s going to meet it tomorrow, too.”

A little hesitantly, Firo brought his superior’s name into the conversation.

“Huh? To pick up the idiots? Maiza, in person?”

“No, not them. He has another acquaintance on that train…”

After hesitating a little, he muttered under his breath:

“Maiza’s old friend—one of the alchemists who became immortal two hundred years ago.”

Ladd had headed for the conductors’ room to look for Lua. In order to reach it, he had to go through the third-class carriage and the freight rooms. It was likely that the black suits had taken control of the third-class compartments already.

How should he kill them? As he was entertaining himself with speculation, someone squirmed on the connecting platform between the cars.

Ladd leveled his rifle and spoke to the back of the man on the platform.

“Whoops! Don’t move, you giddy bastard. Did we scare you? You’re being pretty sneaky—”

At that point, he realized something: The shadow wasn’t a black suit. It was the gray “magician,” the one he’d seen when they boarded the train.

The magician turned to face him and spoke. He didn’t seem especially afraid of the rifle.

“You’re not a friend of the group in black suits, then?”

It was a man’s voice.

“Not so much.”

Ladd responded to the magician’s words without lowering the weapon. Would he prove to be an enemy or an ally?…

“I climbed up to the roof to feel the night wind, and before I knew it, my room had been occupied.”

From his voice, the man was probably somewhere between forty and fifty. He wasn’t young, but nothing about him seemed particularly old, either.

The connecting platforms on this train didn’t have walls or roofs; all they had were railings to keep people from falling off. There was an iron ladder beside the entrance to each platform, and if they wanted to, it was possible for absolutely anybody to climb up to the roof of the train.

The magician looked up slightly, gazing at the night sky as if reluctant to part from it.

On seeing his eyes, Ladd lowered his rifle.

“Say, Mr. Magician. All the compartments in the second-class carriages are empty now; use whichever you want.”

At that, under the cloth that covered his face, the magician smiled quietly.

“Thank you, man in white. Ha-ha-ha, ‘magician,’ that’s good. Well, I suppose it’s a similar profession.”

With those words, he passed by Ladd, black bag in hand.

“Hmm? What’s in the bag?”

“Would you like to see? I doubt there’s anything that would catch your interest.”

Turning, he opened the mouth of the bag and showed it to him.

Inside were all sorts of large and small medicine vials, implements he’d never seen before, and books in languages Ladd couldn’t read.

“Yeah, you’re right: not interested. Move along. …Oh, right. If you get stopped by anyone who’s wearing the color I’m wearing, tell ’em you’ve got Ladd’s permission. They should let you through then.”

With a slight nod, the magician closed the top of the bag and went into one of the second-class compartments.

As he watched him go, Ladd clicked his tongue softly.

“Aah, dammit to hell. What’s with those eyes? He’s got eyes that look like he could die at any time and be fine with it. Or maybe eyes like a guy who’s already dead. That’s the type I’m worst with.”

After griping for a while, he remembered Lua and decided to hurry to the conductors’ room.

“Although, if he were a dame, he’d be my favorite type.”

Remembering his girlfriend, who had the eyes of a dead fish, Ladd stood on the connecting platform and looked up.

“The roof, huh? Nice…”

First-class compartment

When Goose and his men returned to the first-class compartment with Mrs. Beriam in tow, Spike was in front of the transmitter, a sour look on his face. Goose wanted to ask him, immediately and in detail, about what was going on, but it wouldn’t have been wise to let Mrs. Beriam sense that there was trouble. He ordered his men to take the lady to another first-class room, and then, finally, grilled Spike about the situation.

“What is it? Trouble?”

“No, not with the transmitter. It’s just that there’s no contact from the group in the freight room.”

There should have been three men in the freight room guarding the remainder of their stowed equipment.

Using the transmitter’s handset, Goose sent the code for the freight room.

However, no matter how long they waited, the transmitter’s speaker stayed silent.

Scratching his head, Spike mentioned a likely situation:

“I bet I know what this is. Think those white suits took them out?”

“Spike. Right now, we need to confirm the facts, not speculate.”

Goose put together a new team of three and sent them to check on the freight room.

When he happened to glance at the corner of the room, Chané was gone.

“Spike, where’s Chané?”

“Oh, it looks like she went out to hunt some albinos. She took several weapons with her.”

Chané the Fanatic. Although she was a member of the Lemures, she obeyed orders from no one except Huey, their leader. Even during this operation, she was only cooperating—silently—in order to liberate Huey. She might even have thought she was merely using Goose and the others.

After he was certain that he couldn’t sense her presence in the area, Goose turned to Spike and told him his true intentions.

“Let’s have her make herself as useful as possible. She won’t live past noon tomorrow in any case.”

A couple was walking down the corridor of a second-class carriage. Although the lights were on, the glow seemed fragile in the face of the absolute darkness that enveloped the train.

“Ooh, it’s gloomy! It’s scary.”

“Yes, and it’s cold! And creepy!”

Miria agreed with Isaac’s timid remark in a voice that was quiet, but very firm. In response, Isaac switched gears completely, putting up a bold front.

“Whaaat?! I’m not cold or creeped out! Just relax and follow me!”

“Wow, Isaac, you’re so dependable!”

No one responded to their voices. Only silence weighed heavily on the corridor.

“It sure is quiet. You’d think there was nobody here. I wonder where the guys in white suits from the second-class compartments went to.”

“Yes, and this is the only road there is!”

“The Rail Tracer might have caught up to us already.”

“Yeeeeeeeek!”

“We’ve got to hurry… Even if we’ve got guns, even if we’re tough, nothing will work against the Rail Tracer!”

“Yes, it’s an invincible monster! Frankenstein! Count Dracula!”

“Miria, Frankenstein was the scientist’s name, not the monster’s name.”

“Was it? Then what was the monster’s name?”

“Um, let’s see— Mary Shelley, wasn’t it? Formally, I think it was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley.”

“Wow, Isaac, you know
everything
! …But that sounds sort of like a lady’s name!”

“Ah, but there are all sorts of guys who have names that sound like girls’ names. Besides, it’s a monster! That means anything goes!”

Possibly he’d gotten carried away: He proclaimed this in a loud voice.

The answer came in the form of machine gun fire, echoing in the distance.

“What was that? Was it from the third-class carriage?”

“No, farther than that! It sounded like it came from the freight room.”

Suddenly, the transmitter in Goose’s room began to make noise.

“………≠≠≠……≠≠≠≠…………≠≠lp me! ……≠ght room speak≠…… Fr≠ght room speaking! Somebody, anybody! Come in!”

The static was horrendous, and Spike hastily twirled the knob, adjusting it. Ordinarily, they made contact via telegraph, so the fact that there was an audio transmission at all meant that this was a true emergency.

“Spike here. What’s going on?”

“Help me! Help me! Send reinforcements right away! The other two are both dead! No, I mean, I just can’t see them anymore, so I can’t say for sure, but they disappeared! They’re gone! It made them disappear!”

“What? Who are you fighting?! The white suits?!”

“White suits? N-n-no, it’s nothing like that! It isn’t human! N-no, I mean, I couldn’t see it clearly, but… Anyway, it’s a monster! I can’t win… I can’t…win…”

“Hey, what happened? Hey!”

The voice from the transmitter was getting farther away. Apparently, he’d turned his back on the transmitter and was facing off against something.

“Stop…… Stay back…… Stop, stop,
stoooooooop!
”

From beyond the transmitter, the roar of a machine gun echoed. As it passed through the equipment, the sound was transformed into a weird burst of static that split the air in the first-class carriage.

In spite of himself, Spike clapped his hands over his ears, but the next instant, the gunfire stopped.

In its place, there was the sound of something being thrown to the floor, and he began to hear a tiny, moaning voice. Soon, the moaning stopped as well.

The other side of the transmitter and this side. The double silence weighed eerily on the hearts of the black suits.

However, from time to time, they could hear a sound. A sound as if something was walking through a puddle.

Spike and the others could vividly imagine the truth of the situation. It wasn’t a puddle of water. It was blood, from the body of the man they’d just been talking to.

Something was walking through it. The something that had just killed their comrade. The thing sent an overwhelming sense of its presence through the transmitter, planting a definite fear in the terrorists’ hearts.

“Call back the unit that just left for the freight room.”

Goose’s grave voice sent a shiver through the still air.

Someone besides the white suits was trying to get in their way. With a sour expression, Goose struck the wall with his fist.

However, privately, Goose had a hunch he knew the identity of the something. They still didn’t have enough information, so he was far from certain, but…

The woman in the coveralls who disappeared from the dining car

A stall in a second-class carriage bathroom. In the janitor’s closet beside it, Mary Beriam was holding her breath.

“I’ll go on ahead and see how things look, so you hide here, Mary. Whatever happens, don’t move. It’ll be fine. I’ll be right back.”

With those words, Czes had gone away, and he hadn’t come back. Mary felt as though her heart would burst with anxiety.

After a short while, she began to hear voices from the corridor. Cheerful voices that seemed terribly out of place in this situation.
That’s Mr. Isaac and Miss Miria.
On identifying the owners of the voices, Mary hesitated, wondering whether she should leave the closet.

Just then, she heard distant machine gun fire. Mary flinched, covering her ears and crouching down. The terror paralyzed her, and even if she’d wanted to call for help, her voice wouldn’t come.

While this was going on, Isaac and Miria’s voices had vanished.

“You’ve got to be kidding… What is this?”

“
Muah
, Jacuzzi. What this?”

The sea of blood in the conductors’ room. As he stood there, stunned, Jacuzzi heard familiar voices behind him.

On hearing those voices, life returned to his eyes.

“Guys… Oh, you’re okay. That’s great… I-I’m really glad, really, guh–,
hic
, glad…”

“Donny and I are, somehow.”

“Ah…oh. Now that you mention it, where are Nick and Jack?”

In response to that question, Nice looked down uncomfortably.

“They both got caught. Remember that orchestra group in black? Apparently, they were train robbers, too.”

“Uh—huh?”

“
Aah
, Jack caught. White people caught, too. Nick caught, too.”

“Um…what?”

When he asked them for details, he learned that, first, Jack had said, “I’ll go on ahead and tie up the guards in the freight room,” and had gone from the corridor into said freight room.