He felt something under the fingers of his leading hand. Brought both hands together.
It was a long line in the steel wall. Still unseen, a seam that could have been a trick played by a mind that needed it to be there.
But he had heard Aaron leave. Had seen the light come in.
And he hadn’t heard a lock, had he? Had just heard the cowboy slide something open, then slide it shut.
The car thrummed under his feet.
Give up. Give in.
Ken pulled. There was nothing to hold onto, at least nothing that he could feel, and he was loath to leave the spot he had found. All he had was the friction of his palms.
He pulled again. The flesh felt like it was tearing off his hands.
The wall slid to the side.
A bright crack of light speared into the darkness. He was blind again, though for a different reason.
Then sight returned, and he almost wished it hadn’t. Sometimes it was better to be blind. Sometimes sight was a curse.
14
On their honeymoon in Kauai, Ken and Maggie had spent a lot of time on the ocean, and significantly more time in their hotel room.
They had also hiked a good deal of the island. One of the hikes had led them to Waimea Canyon.
Waimea Canyon stood out in Ken’s mind ever after as being exactly like the Grand Canyon in terms of size and magnificence. The only difference was that where the Grand Canyon was painted in sunset tones of oranges and yellows and pinks, Waimea was done primarily in tropical greens, with hints of red island soil peeking through. It was an awesome sight, full of life and seeming to stretch away forever, a crack in the land that extended until the low-hanging mists of the island swallowed it into a dream.
At one point, Ken became curious about how far down it actually was to the bottom of the canyon. He hopped a guardrail and, immune to Maggie’s concerns about becoming a widow on her honeymoon, leaned over a cliff and looked straight down.
Then, satisfied that it was every bit as high as he had thought it would be, he hopped back over the guardrail, into Maggie’s arms, and then they returned to the hotel room and did not come out for a good number of hours.
The heights hadn’t bothered him. Hundreds of feet, and he hadn’t blinked an eye.
Now he leaned out the side of the freight car and saw the ground only a few feet below him. It fell quickly away to a slope that dropped an additional five or six feet into a dry wash that could have been a riverbed at one time, and perhaps still was during the wettest parts of the year.
Only a few feet. And he felt like falling back into the womblike darkness from which he had just gone to so much trouble to escape.
To stare down an unmoving cliff, a piece of land that had been there tens of thousands of years and had trees that had taken root in its face: no problem. To look down and see the scrub sweep past, the dirt a blur below the train as it screamed over the tracks, to realize all at once the awesome weight of the train he stood on, and that if he fell beneath it the thing wouldn’t so much as lurch in recognition of his passing: a very big problem.
He felt like throwing up. Probably would if he didn’t wrench his gaze away from the land being chewed up beneath the passing cars.
Give up.
Give in.
The wordless shout was still there. Still getting stronger, bit by bit.
Ken looked straight ahead. He didn’t know where he was, didn’t recognize the land he was passing through. Not sure whether that meant they had been going for a long time, or if this was just a vantage point he had never had before: not often that he got to look at Idaho from the side of a speeding train.
The train wasn’t actually going that fast. Barely pulling ahead of the slow-moving thunderheads that dotted an otherwise bright sky. That made sense. The train he had seen for a few seconds before being ambushed by Aaron had been a freight train: a locomotive at the front that somehow managed to look both sleek and boxy, with a cab to the rear for the engineer and conductor, followed by two more locomotives with different body types. The center one was flatter; it looked like a squat box with another cab, this one toward the front, almost the whole thing surrounded by a walkway that extended a bit farther over past the rails than the other two engines did. The last one in line, the shortest engine, was a rounded thing that looked almost like what Ken pictured an old-fashioned caboose would have looked like. And the whole trio was trailed by a string of flatcars and boxcars that extended into the distance.
It was the kind of train that kept people cursing at crossings as it lumbered past for an eternity, so long it seemed to have been constructed less for hauling than simply to irritate commuters in a hurry to get to destinations in a busy world.
Ken wondered for a second if they would have been so upset when the trains passed if they had known how very quickly that world would end.