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The blast erased most of John Lee Ray from existence. What parts of him that were not vaporized by the explosion joined with the spray of steel shrapnel that shredded the entire upper section of the rail car.
On the lowermost tier, Dane and Alex were sheltered from the deadly spray, but the concussion in the enclosed space felt like a slap from God. Dane had covered up and remembered to open his mouth at the last second, a precaution, albeit a desperate one, to survive the sudden expansion of air spaces in the body from the heat caused by the overpressure wave. It must have worked because he didn’t die, but for a few seconds he thought that might have been a preferable outcome.
His awareness returned almost as abruptly as it had left. He felt Alex moving beneath him....
She’s still alive. Good
But then he felt something else as well, a tremor that vibrated up through the floor. He struggled to a sitting position. The damage to the car was so extensive, he felt a momentary dislocation. All the windows had blown out and the roof had peeled back like the lid of a sardine can, opening the car to the night sky. A blast of frigid air hit him in the face, and only then did he finally grasp what all of these disconnected sensations were telling him.
“We’re moving.”
Alex stirred and then looked up at him. She seemed unhurt and after looking around for a moment, her mouth moved but Dane couldn’t tell if she’d said anything. He got to his feet and peered through the nearest side window.
The dark landscape was rushing by, much faster than he’d seen it move during his earlier ascent. Dangerously fast. They weren’t just moving, he realized, they were out of control.
With a steadying hand against the sidewall, he clambered up the steps to the damaged upper portion. The end of the car had been almost completely destroyed. Nothing remained of the operator’s booth. Through the gaping hole, he saw that the open air platform he’d climbed onto only a few moments before, was now dangling precariously, held in place by a single twisted metal bracket. As it bounced and clattered noisily along the railway ties, he glimpsed something else trailing behind the car, a length of cable, frayed at the end where the platform had severed it.
Now he understood why they were moving. The funicular functioned by connecting two equally weighted rail cars with a cable; the cars acted as counterweights for each other, providing both motive and braking force with just a little extra energy from the drive motor at the top of the line. With the drive cable broken and the onboard safety brakes evidently disabled in the explosion, the car was essentially a roller coaster, hurtling down the track, accelerating to the physical limits of its rolling wheels, which far exceeded safe operating speed. Dane didn’t know the length of the upper line. The lower line, from Schwandegg to Mulenen was just over a mile, and he recalled the operator telling the passengers that the upper section was shorter.
Calculations raced through his head. If the car was traveling just thirty miles an hour, they had less than a minute before reached the end of the line. He and Alex might survive the ensuing collision, might not, but his bigger concern was the passing loop at the halfway point.
The funicular was a single track—a pair of rails—except in the middle where the line split briefly to allow the cars to pass each other. At normal operating speed, the diversion was barely a bump in the road, but at terminal velocity, there was a good chance the car would jump the tracks and go tumbling down the mountain. That was something he didn’t think was they would survive, and he had less than thirty seconds to do something about it.
Jump?
The tracks were elevated, so if they tried jumping out the side, they would fall maybe a couple stories onto an uncertain surface, while still carrying all the forward momentum of their journey. They could jump onto the tracks behind the car, and probably suffer nothing worse than a lot of broken bones. Not his first choice, but an option.
Stop the car, or slow it down. How?
He looked around the destroyed interior for anything he could throw out in front of the wheels to create some friction braking, but saw nothing...except for Hancock’s body.
He leaped down the stairs and hastily searched the pouches on Hancock’s vest, found what he was looking for.
“Get up to the top,” he shouted. “And find whatever cover you can.”
Alex stared at him blankly until she saw him prep the grenade. “You’re not—”
“Go!” He stripped off the safety band and pulled the pin.
Alex scampered up the tiers to the top. There was nothing to hide behind, but she flattened herself on the floor and covered her head.
Dane rolled Hancock on his side and placed the grenade into the space between the body and the corner of the car. He let the spoon fly, dropped the grenade, rolled Hancock back, and then scrambled away, all in the space a single second.
The car continued to jolt and rattle along the track for what seemed like an eternity. The grenade had a five second fuse—Hancock had probably cooked his off for a couple seconds before throwing it to ensure that Ray wouldn’t have time to kick it back at him—and five seconds seemed like an eternity.
How far away was the passing loop? Would they hit it before the explosion? Would they—
The second blast felt nothing like the first. The earlier damage to the car allowed much of the pressure wave to radiate harmlessly away. Hancock’s body caught most of the shrapnel and what little got past was directed straight up; none of it came anywhere near Dane and Alex. The explosion however, did exactly what Dane hoped it would. The front end of the car burst open like a balloon, throwing pieces of metal and plastic debris out onto the tracks ahead of the car. None of the pieces was large enough to derail it, but the debris quickly piled up in front of the wheels, supplying just enough friction to slow the downward plunge.
But not enough to stop it.
Dane lifted his head and looked out behind them. The railroad ties were still flashing past, though not too fast for him to distinguish each one. How fast then? Twenty miles an hour? Less?
It would have to be enough.
He pointed to the platform still dangling behind the car, skipping along the tops of the tracks. “We’re going to climb down onto that!”
She nodded to signal her comprehension.
He made the first move, reaching his foot out cautiously, as if attempting to cross a stream on stepping stones. Too slow, he told himself. Too cautious.
His foot came down, his weight pushing the platform onto the rails. The damaged bracket holding it fast shrieked in protest and for an instant, he thought the added friction would cause the whole thing to tear away. He eased back, and instead threw his body forward, diving onto it, arms and legs spread out so that he wouldn’t fall off.
The platform shuddered beneath him as it was driven down onto the rails, but he rolled over and shouted, “Jump!”
Alex made the leap into his open arms just as the bracket tore free. He caught her, hugged her close, even as the platform skittered chaotically across the tops of the rails.
The runaway car pulled away from them, and then abruptly veered to the right. It had reached the passing loop. There was a screech of metal as the car’s momentum forced the wheel flanges up against the sides of the rails...and then over them. The rail car shot out into space, and a moment later slammed into the mountainside with a hollow-sounding crash. A second impact followed as the car tumbled, splintering trees, and then another and another.
Dane, still holding Alex tight, kicked away from the sliding platform before it could follow the car. The ties juddered painfully beneath them for a moment, but then the hammering stopped, or more precisely, they stopped.
Dane lay there for several seconds, listening to the rail car plow a furrow of destruction down the mountainside. His entire body felt like it had gone ten rounds with an industrial-sized meat tenderizer, his head was pounding and his ears were ringing...and he was grateful for the pain because it meant he was alive. When he felt like he could open his mouth without throwing up, he asked Alex if she was all right.
“Not really,” was her weak reply, but the trace of laughter in her voice told him otherwise.
They lay there together a couple minutes longer, staring up at the darkening sky and the startling visible swath of the Milky Way over head, until the will to move again returned.