Sam Savage doesn’t waste a split second. He bounds back onto his feet, goes to the instrument panel. He spots a big red button-like switch located on top of the panel.
“EB,” he says. “Emergency fucking brake.”
All he needs to do is press it. Making a fist, he punches it . . . and waits. The damn train doesn’t slow down. The switch doesn’t work. He punches it again and again out of frustration. It’s the same damned thing. Nothing happens.
“Shit!” he barks out loud. “Morgan sabotaged the entire safety system!”
“You need to kill the power at its source,” comes another voice. “The supercapacitor.”
It’s Safraz. He’s standing in the open doorway along with Maureen.
“Where’s that?” Sam asks.
“Up top,” the little bearded man says. “You need to climb on top of the locomotive and disable it.”
“How do I know the conductor didn’t mess with that too? He’s covered all his bases by the looks of it.”
“Because, in order for the train to have electricity that supercapacitor, along with the hybrid capacitor, all must be operational.”
“I’ll be damned,” Sam says. “It’s the bastard’s Achilles’ heel.”
“You must act now, Sam,” Safraz insists. “We don’t have much time.”
“It’s going one hundred fifty miles an hour, Safraz,” Sam says. “I’ll be blown off.”
He shakes his head. “It is our only chance for survival. I would gladly do it myself, but as you can see, I am far too small.”
Sam runs his hand over his scruffy face as if it helps him to think. The little guy is right. He wouldn’t last ten seconds up there.
“How much time until we get to the bridge at the gorge, Maureen?”
She stares at her watch face.
“Three minutes,” she says. “We’re not gonna make it.”
“Yes, we are,” Sam says. Then to Safraz, “Point me to the ladder.”
“It’s right outside the door,” Safraz says.
“What am I looking for?”
“It’s a box. Maybe one foot high by two feet wide. It will have wires and tubes coming out of the bottom descending into the powerhouse. You need to remove the cover from the box, then simply cut all the wires. That should interrupt the power feed enough to disable the main powerhouse. In turn, the locomotive will stop since the spark plugs will no longer carry their spark.”
“Simple,” Sam says. “Great.”
He pulls his military grade pocket knife from his belt, opens it, heads for the door.
“Wish me luck, wife,” he says to Maureen.
“You don’t need luck, husband,” she says. “While you’re doing that, Safraz and I will keep working on the emergency brakes in the first three cars. With any luck, you won’t even need to cut the power in the powerhouse.”
“I won’t count on it, baby.”
He kisses her on the mouth before heading out the door and beginning his climb up the narrow metal ladder.
Coming to the top of the locomotive, Sam is immediately slapped by the harsh wind. He feels himself falling backward until he finds a piece of metal protruding from the locomotive’s roof. He pulls himself onto the top and immediately begins searching for the box Safraz described. Knowing it will be located directly above the powerhouse, he shifts himself in that direction.
The vibration of the heavy machine speeds under him, the vicious wind whips against his face, the locomotive shifts violently from side to side as if it is purposely trying to toss him off like a cowboy riding a bucking bronco. He knows the only way to stay attached to the locomotive is to press himself down on the machine’s flat roof.
A quick glance at his watch.
“Two minutes,” he says, his voice only audible inside his head.
He spots a box. The box. It’s black, and its dimensions match those described by Safraz. It’s not mounted on the surface but on brackets so that a space of maybe four inches separates the box’s bottom from the locomotive rooftop. He spots a spaghetti of wires leading from the box down through the machine’s roof and into the powerhouse. No way he can get to those wires with his four-inch blade. He needs to remove the box cover, just like Safraz said he would.
Crawling close to the box, he manages to perch himself on his knees. From there he gets a better view of the river and the Hudson Valley. He also spots something else. Coming up on him is a mountainside. A tunnel accesses the mountain. What he’s not sure of, is how much room there is between the tunnel ceiling and the locomotive rooftop. His heart shoots into his throat, his pulse soars. He could crawl back down the ladder, but there’s no time. He’s coming up on the tunnel too fucking fast.
He throws himself down onto his chest and face as the train enters the tunnel.
Sam’s world goes black. He’s pressing his body as flat as possible against the locomotive rooftop, face down, the wind whipping at his head and shoulders. The negative air pressure inside the tunnel builds inside his ears until his eardrums feel ready to explode. He feels the solid concrete tunnel ceiling brushing against the top of his skull, scraping away his skin and hair. Or is he just imagining it?
He can’t be sure about anything, other than his need to remain completely flat or risk having his head and spine crushed. Then, just like that, the train emerges from the tunnel, and sunlight shines down upon the runaway locomotive. Sam pulls himself back up, happy to be alive. But the happiness is short-lived. Not more than a mile away, in the immediate distance as the track makes a long half-moon arc around a deep gorge, is his worst nightmare. This train’s worst nightmare.
It’s the Catskill Gorge Bridge.