Can you get top-forty on this thing?
“. . . his name is my name, too, and whenever we go out, the people always shout—”
“Will you shut the hell up?!”
“Oh, come on! I was just getting to the good part! You can join in—I don’t mind.”
“This is not summer camp, and we are not ten years old!”
“Did something horrible happen to you at summer camp when you were ten years old? Because you’re getting awfully upset about one little song.”
“It’s not one little song! It’s all the little songs! It’s the teapot song and the dreidel song and the cat that never came back song and the man on the MTA song—”
“I never got that one, really.” I stopped for a second to scratch my head, but started moving again before Tall could get within swatting range. I’d already learned my lesson. “He’s stuck on this train, right? Because he doesn’t have enough money to pay the exit fare? And his wife hands him his lunch every morning as the train goes past? Why doesn’t she include a nickel or whatever it was so he get off the damned train? Does she secretly hate him, and enjoy seeing him trapped in there? And wouldn’t the MTA workers eventually kick him off for riding around and around on one lousy fare?”
Tall didn’t respond for a second. Not a word. Not even that jaw-grinding he’d been making for the past half hour or more—I was afraid to see the state of his molars when we finally reached our destination. He’d be lucky to manage gumming Jell-O at this rate. But even that sound stopped. Then he spoke, finally.
“I hate you,” he said softly. “I really, really hate you.”
“Aw, don’t be like that,” I told him. “I’m just trying to keep us all entertained and distracted while we make this fun-filled trek across a speeding train hurtling through outer space. I bet you forgot all about the risk of explosive decompression while I was singing, didn’t you?” A faint gurgling sound and some more grinding were my only answer.
“Hey Ned,” I called ahead, “what car are we on now?”
“Four hundred and twenty,” he shouted back. “Only three left and we’re at the head car!”
“Nice!” I glanced back at Tall. “See? Doesn’t it feel like we only just started crawling?” He glared at me.
“The DAE have been remarkably quiet these past few cars,” Mary pointed out. “We must be especially careful. They may have realized we are no longer within the bus proper.”
I knew what she meant. For the first hundred or so cars we could hear those crazy little dinos running around shooting at everything—more than once their wild shots pierced the bus roof and we had a peek at the chaos within as we crawled quietly past. We’d also seen plenty of things—and people—get shoved or kicked or shot out the sides. Most of them hit the shields and bounced back in. Some were too big or too heavy or simply going too fast, and slid right through the shields. They were whipped away before I could even really register their shapes. It was like riding in a really quiet car with a really smooth ride going really fast—you completely forgot you were doing two hundred-plus miles an hour until you saw some idiot hitchhiker on the side of the road and they blurred by even before your brain told you they were there. I was trying really hard not to think about just how fast we were going, or what would happen to us if we stuck our heads up too high, which was why I’d started singing. It’d helped calm me down. And hey, it really had distracted Tall. Whether he wanted to admit it or not.
But after a while the shooting had lessened, and recently we hadn’t heard any shooting at all. Maybe the dinos had gotten bored, decided I must have jumped or been vaporized by a stray ray gun blast, and gone home. But I doubted it. They still seemed really pissed off about that stupid flower.
“So what do we do?” I asked.
“We keep moving,” Mary replied. “There is little else we can do. Just stay alert.”
No problem there—the crawl hadn’t been hard, though it was tedious and my neck muscles were straining from holding my head above the hull but below the shields. I wasn’t likely to lie down and take a nap just now.
Zap! Pow!
“What the hell—?” I shouted, glancing back over my shoulder as Tall cursed and fumbled for his gun. Two streams of colored light or plasma or silly string or whatever the hell they were had just gone past us. And behind Tall I could see the reason why. “Two dinos! They’ve found us!”
The cold-blooded little bastards—that’s a fact, not just an insult, at least not the cold-blooded part—must have found or cut a hole in the last car we’d passed, and they’d pulled themselves out and onto the roof. Now they were laying on their stomachs, their ray guns held in front of them with both hands, and they were shooting at us.
Fortunately, though they had evolved a long way from their big T-rex ancestors, they still had some design flaws to work out. Namely, though their arms were now roughly the right size for their bodies, their heads were still several times too big. I can totally relate. But what it meant was that, laying down like that with their arms in front of them, their own snouts kept interfering with their aim. Which was definitely a positive as far as I was concerned.
Still, they were bound to get lucky sooner or later. And we didn’t exactly have anything to hide behind.
Ned had apparently realized that too, though. “Follow me!” he shouted back at us. Then he began crawling at an angle, still going forward but also veering off to the left. Mary swerved after him and I was right behind her. The view hadn’t gotten any less appealing for my staring at it repeatedly. I was sure Tall was following us too, and I could hear the bang as he fired his gun back at the dinos.
We cut a spiral path around the train, like a big loose corkscrew, and if I could have reached him I’d have kissed Ned on his little green head. He was a genius! We were magnetized, so our hands and feet—and other parts too, I’d discovered to my discomfort—clung to the hull. The dinos didn’t have that going for them. They cursed and whined and roared as we slid around the train’s side and out of sight, but there was no way they could follow us. Safe!
At least until, halfway down the car, several more dinos cut a hole in the train floor, stuck their arms through, and began firing wildly in all directions.
“Back up!” Ned hollered, and we hurriedly curved back out a bit. Now we were on the side of the train, which seemed like a good plan to me—too low for the roof-climbers and too high up for the floor-gunners.
Too bad the dinos weren’t stupid. And too bad they clearly talked amongst themselves. Holes started appearing all down the car at random intervals and random heights. Some were in the ceiling, some in the floor, and some along the walls. And each hole quickly sprouted one or more arms, all wielding ray guns. Bigger holes even had whole dinos popping up to take shots at us. This had quickly become one of my least favorite duck-references ever—those little tin ducks at a shooting arcade.
“We need some kind of cover!” Tall bellowed. He took a few more shots before putting his gun away again. It hadn’t helped much.
“Maybe we should climb back inside,” I suggested, but Mary shook her head.
“That is what they are hoping,” she explained. “Out here they cannot reach us. Inside they would mob us. We would have no way to escape.”
“Well, can we find some way to cover those holes?” I asked. “Or some way to force their hands back inside? Something that makes their guns stop working? Anything?”
Ned paused for a second and scratched his double chin. “There might be a way,” he commented, “but it’s dangerous, for us as well as them.”
“We’re not exactly danger-free as it is,” I pointed out. “What’s the plan?”
“Well,” he fiddled with one of his tools, “I can adjust the shields somewhat.”
“Okay, and what’ll that get us?”
“I can’t turn them off, but I can reshape them slightly. Focus them all on one side or another—and pull them right up to the hull everywhere else.”
I thought about that one for a second, well aware that Mary and Ned were waiting patiently and Tall was smirking. “So anything stuck out of the train on those other sides would get ripped right off. Which would mean they could only attack us along one side.”
“Exactly!”
“It’s gotta be better than playing Dodgeball with ray guns. I say we try it!” Mary nodded, and so did Tall.
“Okay,” Ned agreed. “The question is, which side?”
“Top,” I said right away.
“Why the top?” Tall asked.
“Did you get a good look at those guys?” I asked him. “They’re short. Really short. Like four feet or less. And the train’s at least, what, ten feet high? So climbing up that high’s gotta be tough for them. Actually,” I glanced at Ned, “in space up and down don’t matter much, right? I mean, we’re on the side of the train but it feels like what’s beneath us is a floor because it’s below us.”
“Sure,” Ned agreed. “What about it?”
“So instead of the top, could you do the upper right corner? You know, curve the shield around a bit so we’re actually at an angle rather than straight up and down?”
“Not a problem.” Ned grinned. “And that’ll make it even harder for them to hold themselves up to shoot! Brilliant!”
I don’t know that anyone’s ever called me brilliant before. That was kind of cool. I enjoyed it while I could—I was sure it wouldn’t last.
Ned didn’t waste any time, either. Mary took the lead and guided us up a little higher than we were while Ned tapped and twisted and even bit first one and then a second tool. “Got it!” he said after a minute of muttering and spitting out little bits. “We’re all set. Don’t stray off this path, whatever you do—it’s only about six feet wide. Everybody ready?” We all nodded. “Here it goes!” He jabbed one of his tools down against the train and it was like somebody took the world off mute.
Ever open the window of a car when you’re going really fast, and then close it again because the sound of the wind rushing by was deafening? That’s exactly what happened here. There was a tremendous rushing sound, so loud I thought it was going to tear my head off. There were screams, too, and things flying past, but I tried not to notice those. Then the sound suddenly faded again—I could still hear it whooshing by but it wasn’t as close or as loud.
“Come on,” Ned said. “We’ve only got two cars left.”
He took the front again and we followed him quietly. I wasn’t in a singing mood anymore. Besides I’d run out of camp songs and would have had to start on the drinking songs next. And those are no fun at all when the nearest alcohol is a couple hundred light-years away.
Dinos were still blasting through the train’s hull to try shooting at us, but they quickly realized it wasn’t safe to stick their hands out so they contented themselves with glaring at us and trying to zap us as we crawled past. Having a few hundred little purple dinosaur-men all giving you the hairy eyeball isn’t a lot of fun, believe me. It was a good thing we didn’t have to do much more than crawl in a straight line, because just knowing they were all there, and seeing them every time we passed a hole, made it hard to concentrate properly.
Then something beeped quietly and Ned said the scariest word in the English language:
“Uh-oh.”
Actually, is that even English? Or really a word? Is it two words, “uh” and “oh”? Is this why no one ever wants to play me at Scrabble? I thought it was because every time I lean over to see the board clearly my bill knocks all the pieces off.
Regardless, his muttering made my blood turn cold.
Though not as cold as it would if I were on the wrong side of the shields, in the sub-zero of outer space.
Because that would be cold. Really cold. This wasn’t like that. I mean, my blood was still flowing normally, but I had one of those little chills that makes your whole body shiver.
You know what I mean.
“What’s wrong?” Mary, Tall, and I all asked at the same time. If we’d had one more we could have been a barbershop quartet of queries and concern.
“They’ve figured out how we’re staying out here,” Ned muttered. “They’re demagnetizing the hull!” I suddenly felt a static charge wash past me along the train’s surface—and then my hands and feet started drifting loose. “Hang on!”
“Hang on?” I shouted, scrabbling at the way-too-smooth surface below me. “Hang on to what? There’s nothing here to grip! It wouldn’t have killed them to put a few little decorative bits along this thing, like door moldings and windowsills and flying buttresses?”
“Just relax!” Ned hollered back.
“Relax? We’re on an outer-space train speeding along at millions of miles an hour, inches from instant death by decompression and überfrostbite, being shot at by the dinosaur midgets from Crayolaland, and you want me to relax?”
“Go limp!” Ned corrected. He spread-eagled himself, arms and legs out wide, and let his whole body relax as he floated up off the train’s surface, into the shield—and bumped up against it gently before drifting back down.
“Oh. Why didn’t you say so?” Limp I could do—I’d had lots of practice at limp. Who knew all those late nights drinking would actually be good for something besides making my credit card company dance for joy?
I let my body go limp, and struggled not to panic as I wafted up off the train. But it worked—I’d seen before that the shields kept things in as long as there wasn’t too much velocity involved, and with us completely unresisting we touched it light as a feather, then our own momentum carried us back to the hull. Of course we still couldn’t grip it, so we just floated there, touching it but not actually secure.
“Now what?” I yelled up at him.
“I’m working on remagnetizing the hull,” Ned assured us. His fingers were a blur as he worked on those devices of his. I bet he was great with a remote, and could flip back and forth between several games without missing a beat. I made a mental note to invite him to my next Superbowl party—assuming we lived that long.
Suddenly a giant hand slammed into my back, flattening me against the train. It was crushing me down onto the flat cool surface, so hard I couldn’t breathe. Lights swam before my eyes.
“Too . . . much . . .” I heard Mary gasp ahead of me.
“I . . . know . . .” Ned managed to reply. A second later the pressure eased enough for me to lift my head and gasp for air. “Sorry about that. The initial burst to restore its magnetic charge was a little strong. We’d better hurry before they figure out what I did and erase it again.”
We clambered after him as quickly as we could, checking our hands and feet every second to make sure they hadn’t started drifting loose again. Halfway down the last car they did exactly that, and again we went limp, bounced, settled back down, and groaned as the new charge slammed us into the train a second time. At least this time we knew enough to take deep breaths first.
Then we were crossing the seam between that car and the front car. We’d made it!
There was only one problem. This car was as featureless as all the others we’d passed. And it looked like the dinos hadn’t gotten this far yet, so there weren’t any holes.
“How do we get inside?” I asked.
I could see by the panicked look in Ned’s eyes—and the matching stares from Mary and even Tall—that they didn’t have a clue either.
“There isn’t an access door?” I shook my head. “An escape hatch? A trash chute? Something?”
“There’s a secure hatch between it and the first passenger car,” Ned admitted, “but we’d have to backtrack and cut in through that car to reach it. And even then I’d have to bypass the security to get us through.”
“Can we shoot our way in?” Tall asked. He had his gun out and pointed down.
“NO!!!” This time I was the one in chorus with Ned and Mary. “You could kill us all!” I shouted at him. “That bullet would probably just bounce back up and take out one or more of us before it cut through the shield—and who’s to say we wouldn’t all be sucked out with it before the shield could repair itself?”
“Oh.” I hadn’t seen Tall look embarrassed before. It made him look almost human. “Right. Sorry.” He holstered his gun.
“There’s gotta be a way in, right?” I glanced at Ned and Mary again. “Did anybody bring an electric can opener?”
Ned stared at me for a second. Then he grinned. “DuckBob, you’re a genius!” That was the second time he’d called me a genius—I was really starting to doubt his intelligence. “That just might work!”
“What might?” Yeah, I’d confused myself. Trust me, it happens a lot.
“If I reconfigure the shields on this car,” Ned explained, “I might be able to dip them below the hull’s surface for just a second. That’d let the train’s own velocity punch a hole right through it.” He had three different doodads out and was messing with all of them at once. I had no idea eyebrows could be prehensile. “The trick,” he muttered, “is to keep the displacement extremely focused, so it only effects a single spot and not the entire car.”
“Oh. Yeah. Because cutting the shields all along the car would be bad.” I nodded. I think I’d moved beyond fear and into shock, which at least meant I was calm about the chances of our violent and messy death. Hey, if it happened it’d be kind of like having yourself cremated and your ashes scattered, only it’d be over several galaxies and there wouldn’t be any burning or, y’know, peaceful sleep beforehand.
“I think I’ve got it,” Ned announced after a minute. “Hold on!” He kept saying that, but there still wasn’t anything to hold onto, so I grabbed Mary’s hand. She glanced down at my hand on hers but didn’t say anything and didn’t pull away. Hey, that was further than I got on most first dates. Then again, we’d gone a lot further for this date, too.
The first of Ned’s little devices made a high-pitched squeal, like a pig spotting an especially nice mudhole. Then the second one beeped and the third one chirruped. It was like his own little orchestra there, comprised of electronics and barnyard animals. But it worked. I felt a mild tingle across my back and over my head as the shield shifted, and ducked down to be safe, and then watched as an area a few feet to our right buckled and vanished, torn clean off in an instant. The tingle faded, and Ned beamed.
“We’re in! And I’ve reset the shield so we can approach it safely. Once we’re in I’ll pull the shields in tight on this car, so the DAE won’t be able to follow us.”
“You rock, Ned.” I meant it, too, as we followed him over to the hole. It was maybe three feet across and roughly circular, so all of us fit through without too much trouble, though I did have to tilt my head way back for my bill and Tall did have to suck in his shoulders a bit. Then we were all inside and looking around.
What a dump!
The walls and ceilings and floors were the same as the train cars we’d seen already, smooth and metallic but brushed instead of shiny, with some kind of faint light coming off them so the whole space had a nice even glow. But there was crap all over.
Okay, not literally crap. Just wires and circuit boards and monitors and other random electronics. It was like an IT department had gone completely Exorcist and just started spewing gadgetry across every available surface.
Ned, of course, was in hog heaven. “This is amazing!” he gasped as he stumbled through the forest of circuitry, running his fingers along this or that bit. “The tech they’re using is unbelievable!”
“I’m glad you’re happy with it,” I told him. “Now can you find this emergency call button we actually risked our lives to reach?”
“Oh, sure.” Ned glanced around. “There it is.”
The rest of us all made a beeline for the thing he’d gestured toward. It was a small box affixed to the wall just inside the door from the next car, actually, and it had a big red button on it.
“So, what, we just push it?” I stared at the thing suspiciously. It seemed too easy. And too easy usually translated to “completely wrong.”
“Yep.” Ned was disassembling something that looked like a futuristic neon coffeemaker gone rogue and didn’t even glance up.
“You’re sure this is it?”
“Absolutely.”
“Ned!”
That made him look up, finally. “What?”
“You’re sure this is it?” I pointed at the button.
“I’m sure,” he confirmed. “What else could it be?” I heard him mutter as he turned back to the space-age Mr. Coffee.
I looked at Mary and Tall but they both shrugged. “Ned is the expert,” Mary pointed out. “If he says this is the call button, I must assume he is correct.”
“What’ve we got to lose?” Tall added.
“Okay, fine. Just remember, if something goes wrong, we all agreed to this,” I warned them.
Then I pushed the button.
Squeak!
There was a tremendous scraping noise, like a giant with titanium claws attacking an equally large chalkboard. It set my bill on edge and sent spikes of pain through my head. Then the whole car shuddered and shook, hurling us against the door. The grinding continued—I wanted to tell Tall to knock it off but this time I knew it wasn’t him—and the shuddering grew worse.
And then it all stopped.
All the sound. All the noise. All the shaking.
The car was completely quiet.
Oh, and dark. No lights. And no soft “whoosh” of air, either.
I picked myself back up and helped Mary back to her feet as best I could. Hey, I couldn’t see—is it my fault my hands may have strayed a bit? A few times? Tall I let get himself up.
“What the hell just happened?” I demanded.
“Um.” We heard a cough from the direction Ned had been in before. “Well.” Then we saw a faint glow—he had one of his doohickeys up, and it was putting out a soft light. “I may have been a little hasty in my assessment,” he admitted, not looking at us.
“Meaning what? What the hell was that?” I shouted. The words were really loud without any other noise.
“It wasn’t an emergency call button, that’s for sure,” Tall commented.
“No, apparently not,” Ned agreed. “I think—I think it was actually an emergency brake.”
“I thought you said this thing didn’t have an emergency brake!”
“Actually, no, I never said that. Though I would have if you’d asked.”
“I said it,” Mary reminded me. “And I believed it to be true. The train is fully automated and does not make unscheduled stops for any reason.”
“Yet here’s an emergency brake.”
“Yes.”
“How do you explain that, then?”
Mary shrugged. “I was wrong.” That one was impossible to argue so I turned back toward Ned.
“So we’ve stopped?”
“Yep.”
“Completely?”
“Yep.”
“Why aren’t there any lights? Or any air?”
“The train’s motion powered everything else,” Ned explained. “With it stopped the other systems all shut down.”
“The shields?”
“Still active for now, but those’ll fade too after a while.”
“And then what?”
“Then we freeze to death. If we don’t suffocate first.”
“I thought we couldn’t suffocate,” I asked. I glared at Mary. “Isn’t that why you jabbed me with that great big horse needle before we left?”
“It is, and under normal conditions it would provide sufficient oxygen,” she agreed.
“So what’s the problem?”
In answer, she gestured around her. “This room,” she said. “It is a vacuum.”
“It is?”
Ned looked embarrassed. “Helps keep the equipment running more smoothly,” he told me. “Sorry.”
“Great.” I turned back to the door behind us. “Get this thing open.”
“Why? It’s just as bad in the other cars.”
“Yeah, but the dinos are out there. If they see me they’ll shoot me. And at least that way I won’t have to sit around and wait for it.”
“You’re a pessimist,” Ned told me. “Look on the bright side.”
“What’s that?”
“I found the emergency call button.” He held up another little silvery box with a big button, but this one was blue.
“Great. Hit it and get us some help.”
“I can’t.” He tossed it aside. “No power.”
“Oh. Right.” I sank down to the floor and put my head in my hands. “So what now?”
Ned reached into his coveralls and pulled out a small green flask. “Do you know any good drinking songs?”