30

Riding a horse was hard enough, but it was worse with a broomstick in your right hand and a seven-ton rope weighing your left shoulder down. “Do I have to carry this thing?” Corey grumbled.

“I got a great price—who’da thought? New York City?” Quinn said with a laugh. “You’ll thank me for this when I teach you some roping. You need to know these skills. They’ll come in handy someday.”

“I’m sure,” Corey grunted. As they rode from the horse shed to the train terminus, he was feeling pain in muscles he didn’t know he possessed. Being a West Side cowboy was the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

At least he and Quinn had both caught a good long nap. During the day, the Better Ridgefield hadn’t seemed so creepy. And Quinn was a lot less nervous now that she’d confided her big secret to Corey. “Hey, there she is—she’s a beauty,” Quinn said, gesturing toward a locomotive that faced north. She cupped her hand around her mouth and shouted, “Well, howdy there, Mr. Conductor!”

“Do you always have to be so cheerful?” Corey grumbled.

There were two men in the cab of the locomotive, a younger guy busily shoveling coal into a chute, and a silver-haired older guy with his hand on a lever. As Corey and Quinn approached the train, the older man leaned out his window on a deeply tanned elbow. His face was cragged and angular, his eyelids at half-mast, as if they had lost their will to stay open. He let loose a jet of brownish-black spit into a wooden bucket just a few feet from where Paisley now stood. The horse shied and backed away.

“Guess the old nag doesn’t like surprises,” the man said. He looked Corey and Quinn up and down and raised an eyebrow. “Well, well. Two of youse, huh?”

“We work well as a pair, sir,” Quinn explained. “I do the rope work, he clears with the precision lance. Complementary skills.”

“If you’re looking for compliments, this ain’t the right place.” Chhhhppwwtt! Another bull’s-eye, right into the bucket. This guy was an Olympic-class spitter. “How old ya say you are?”

“Thirt—seventeen,” Corey said.

“Eighteen,” Quinn added.

“Yeah? So how come your voices ain’t changed yet?” Chhhhppwwtt! “I know why. It’s the food youse kids eat these days. Tell ya what I’ll do—but only if you play yer cards right. Once we get past Gansevoort, I’ll flip youse a little hunka somethin’ that’ll put hair on your chests. Maybe some pork loin. Or a slab of chuck.”

“Thanks?” Corey said dubiously.

The guy’s face twisted into a smile slowly, as if he wasn’t used to doing it. “Don’t let nobody say Mugsy Coleman ain’t a genuous soul.”

“What’s ‘playing our cards right’?” Quinn asked.

“Two words,” Mugsy replied. “Clear. Them. Tracks. The last kid on the job, he got too confident, too far ahead. So some wino wanders on the track behind him and heads to the train like he wants to kiss it. I slam on the brakes. Now, we go pretty slow, but it takes a lot of time to stop this monster. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say, they have to cart the bum away in three bags. Plus I derail. Got me?”

“Got you,” Corey replied. “But that was three words, not two.”

“What?” Mugsy said.

“‘Clear them tracks,’” Corey replied. “Three words. Another thing? It’s either genuine or generous. There’s no such word as genuous.”

“’Zat so?”

Chhhhppwwtt!

That one landed outside the bucket, an inch from Paisley’s hoof. The horse shied, jerking its neck back and nearly unseating Corey. Quinn reached out to steady Paisley’s reins. “Don’t be so smart,” she whispered to Corey.

“Yer friend is making good sense,” Mugsy said. “Time to work.”

The train let out two small toots. Corey and Quinn both spurred their horses onward, heading uptown. For the first time, Corey looked upward into the skyline and really examined it. The city’s profile was dense and low-slung. All the markers Corey was used to—the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, the glass towers along the river—were gone. The stone and brick buildings along Eleventh Avenue had orderly windowed surfaces like crossword puzzles, and in the setting sun those windows blazed fiery orange.

Corey rode to the right of the tracks, the city side. He tried to use a modified standing position, which eased the pain. Paisley liked to veer toward the buildings, but Corey kept pulling the reins. Riding Thunder, Quinn took the left side of the tracks, closer to the river. “Looking good, Corey,” Quinn cried out. “You’re a natural!”

“Th-th-thanks,” Corey said through clenched teeth as he bounced in the saddle. “Can’t wait to use . . . my precision lance. . . .”

Quinn laughed. “It sounded better than broom handle.”

“I don’t know . . . how long I can . . . do this. . . .”

“Think about that nice fat five dollars,” Quinn said. “That oughtta get your energy back!”

“Where I come from . . . five bucks would get . . . an energy bar . . . ,” Corey said.

Behind them, the train let out a horn blast so loud and deep that Corey could feel it in his spine. Paisley reared with a startled neigh. Letting go of the reins, Corey slid down the saddle.

With a yell, he landed in the dirt.

“Get back on!” Quinn screamed. “Just get back on!”

Corey scrambled to his feet, stepped into the stirrup, and nearly overshot the horse. As he settled into the saddle again, his heart was drumming. “I thought you said you could pick horses!”

“I can. I didn’t know Paisley was like this.” Quinn was looking over her shoulder, her face lined with disgust. “But I’ll bet they knew, the bums.”

Still shaking, Corey turned. Through the soot-stained window of the locomotive, he could see Mugsy Coleman and his assistant cracking up with laughter. “They did that on purpose?” Corey said. “That was a joke?”

“Next time,” Quinn murmured, “let him say genuous.”

Corey chased away three chickens and a highly offended rooster. He poked away a tree branch and an empty bottle.

Quinn lassoed a garbage can, a broken chair, and an old, sleeping dog.

With every little success, Mugsy tooted the horn softly to celebrate. Paisley flinched each time, but Corey held tight.

“Hey, people in the future don’t dump their trash like this, do they?” Quinn asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Corey replied. He squinted at the track ahead. As the sun sank below the horizon, colors began to wash out to shades of gray. It was hard to tell shadows from real objects. Squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and rats darted across the tracks in search of food.

“Feeding time for the critters,” Quinn remarked as a fat old rabbit lumbered toward the river. “Ever had one of them?”

“Had, as in tasted?” Corey said. “No.”

“Tastes just like chicken.”

“Which is why we eat chicken and not bunny rabbits.” Before the words could leave Corey’s mouth, Quinn unhooked the rope from her shoulder and twirled it over her head. “Well, it’s the wrong size rope for this, but I’m seeing some free supper!”

“No, Quinn,” Corey said. “Don’t—”

The rope hurtled through the air. It landed on the startled rabbit, who hopped straight upward in surprise. But the rope was a little thick for the body of a small animal. The rabbit slipped through and began hopping away, down the street toward the river.

Whooping and laughing, Quinn spurred Thunder on and gave chase. They disappeared around a factory building en route to the waterfront. The train horn blasted again, and again Paisley shied. From behind him, Corey could hear Mugsy shouting angrily but couldn’t make out the words.

Enough. This was not what Corey had bargained for. His body felt like it was going to split in two, his companion was off on a wild rabbit chase, and Mugsy was getting his kicks out of scaring a horse. This was not why he’d traveled into the past. None of this was getting him a step closer to going home.

“Quinn!” he shouted. “Will you get back here—I can’t do this alone!”

As Paisley veered away from the track, Corey could hear the screech of the train’s brakes. Mugsy’s assistant was leaning out the window, his eyes bugged out, his arm pointing at something up the track.

“MAN AHEAD!”

This time Corey heard the words clearly. He spun in the saddle. To the right, about fifty yards ahead, a gate in the protective fence had been left open. A guy in gray baggy clothes was stumbling toward the tracks, past a tall cement shed. His toes jutted from his shoes, his hair was like a nest of loose wires, and he was having a lively conversation with a small bottle he held in his right hand.

Corey shouted at him, but he was too far away. As the man reached the track, his toes caught on the rail. He stared down for a moment, teetering. Then he dropped facedown into the path of the train.