CHAPTER 6
The sound of the collision and derailment was like the world ending. There was a titanic booming noise, like a bomb, and Reginald felt himself thrown forward as the front of their car crumpled and bent like a tin can. Seats sheared away as roof met floor. Glass shattered and peppered the air. He struck something hard and felt his right arm crushed and pulled off; a bulkhead (some massive piece of metal, anyway) screamed toward and smashed his face and then for a while, everything was black while his eyes healed. Gravity shifted; he felt himself alternately flying, floating, being thrown forward and up, whipping toward the back of the car as, presumably, the whole thing spun end for end.
He didn’t think to slow his mind (the time-stopping trick, if he could manage it in his rusty state) to analyze the minutia of the experience. This was something he wanted to end as fast as possible. His mind called out to Nikki and Maurice and even Karl, who he’d never before been able to feel. He couldn’t find them, but he could hear screaming, and he felt relatively sure that at least some of it was in his head — which, as long as it didn’t cut off suddenly, was actually a good thing because it meant that they were alive. There were many, many human noises. Most were like thumps of meat being struck with a hammer. He heard yells and panicked screams. There was an odd sensation of hundreds of people holding their breath, unable to breathe as the cars upended and tumbled. As the cars landed and rolled and he fell up and down and then up again, many of the human screams ended and new ones began, but even those didn’t last for long before going silent. There was more booming, more crunching of metal. The car was jerked forward suddenly, everything in it slamming into what was barely still a rear wall. Everything had become sharp protrusions and crushing vises. His vision came and went.
Maybe four seconds had passed. And then, for a while, blessedly, there was nothing.
Reginald awoke to find his head clear but everything below his chest in agony. Apparently the trick his body sometimes had of shutting off pain in perilous situations was also rusty, because right now everything hurt. He raised his head, which was whole and without a scratch on it, and looked down to see that he had a gigantic metal fin protruding from his torso. The car had folded more or less in half and had split along the crease, creating a forest of sharp protrusions. Reginald seemed to have landed on one of those protrusions. He looked toward his legs and found them whole but half naked. There was a huge pile of gray ash beside the left leg with fabric lying on top of it that looked like his pants, and Reginald wondered if, while he’d been blacked out, he’d lost a leg and re-grown it.
There was an itch in his mind. Something he couldn’t quite put a finger on. Something was wrong that had nothing to do with the actual crash itself. He needed to get off this fin so that he could escape.
Reginald shifted his weight and found that the pain, as he tried to move, was beyond the world. It would be better to just stay where he was, he decided.
No. Move.
There was urgency behind that thought, but things were still too foggy. All that mattered was getting out.
He tried to put his hands under himself and push, but one of his arms refused to come along. He looked over and saw that the arm on one side was crushed under what seemed to be a luggage compartment. There was still luggage inside. He could see a Samsonite suitcase that had survived just fine, just as Samsonite promised. There was an ugly bag near it that looked as if it were made out of carpet, and this one hadn’t fared as well. Reginald could make out a wallet, a loose drugstore card, an annihilated cell phone, and a danish wrapped in cellophane. For one comic-horrible moment, Reginald imagined himself squirming over and, without use of his arms, sucking down the danish like Popeye did with spinach whenever he got into a jam. His belly would bulge and color would return to his limbs and he’d then split the car in half with his corpulence, freeing them all.
Hurry.
And that thought was insistent, but what was becoming more insistent — even more than the giant metal fin that had almost bisected him — was finding the others. They had to be here. They couldn’t have been impaled by wood, so as long as they’d managed to avoid a direct beheading, Nikki, Maurice, and Karl would still be alive, probably trapped like he was. And why not? Reginald could still hear humans making noises. Plenty of them, frail as they were, seemed to have survived. For now, anyway.
Nikki! he thought.
He reached out his mind. They hadn’t quite gotten the hang of true telepathy, as Nikki’s vampire enhancements hadn’t gifted her mind as strongly as they’d gifted his. But if he concentrated, he could always find her. And then, after a moment, he did. He slipped inside of her head, knowing that it was a violation but deciding that the situation excused it. He saw a crushed leg, Nikki’s own. She was working herself free. Then he reached out for Maurice and found him, too. Maurice was already free, already searching. But he wasn’t searching openly, and that gave Reginald pause. He was hiding behind felled seats, moving from place to place warily, as if playing a war game. Maurice wasn’t looking for Reginald or Nikki. He could feel that Reginald and Nikki had survived. Instead, he was looking for Karl.
Reginald looked at his pinned arm. Just thinking about it hurt. He wondered why his panic response wasn’t kicking in. Then, in a regression into Eeyore self-loathing, he decided that it was because he was Reginald and that Reginald’s body had always betrayed him.
He wasn’t going to be able to pull himself off of the metal fin without his arms. And he wasn’t going to get his arm back without…
Ugh. He didn’t want to think about it.
The arm wasn’t hanging on by much. If he could sever it, it would regrow on the end of the stump and he’d be free.
He looked at the fin sticking through his middle.
Well, free-ish, anyway.
Reginald rolled away from the pinned, mostly severed arm in its pool of blood and pulp, then tried to use his weight to jerk it hard enough to snap it off. But every time he tried, the fin cut something in his torso and lit his mind up like fire. It would almost be easier if he weren’t a vampire, if he couldn’t heal. The fin hurt especially bad because he was cutting the same flesh open over and over again, causing fresh gluts of blood to roll out and down his shirt. And each time afterward, he healed everything except the part where the fin was, clamping him to it tightly.
The other problem was that most of his abdominal muscles had been severed. He couldn’t sit up or roll well at all. Core musculature was mostly out of the picture.
Maybe he could stand off of the fin.
He bent his legs up, planted his feet, and pushed. But he didn’t budge, and when he looked down, he realized why. His legs weren’t bent up at all. His feet weren’t planted at all. He tried to move his legs again, but they didn’t move. Apparently his spine was also bisected.
Awesome.
He lifted his other hand, thinking that maybe his surprisingly strong fingers could peel the fin, or rip it off. But the hand flopped like a dead fish — wholly intact but with its tendons and supporting musculature severed, making it useless.
He was running out of options.
There’s only one way to do this, and you know it, said a heckling voice in his head.
Reginald closed his eyes, took as deep of a breath as his lungs would allow, and leaned toward his crushed arm. He flicked out his fangs.
Then, making faces of revulsion, he went to work.
Nikki found him a few minutes later. She climbed a mountain of human gore and detached seats and arrived just as Reginald was heaving himself off of the giant metal fin using his newly grown arm.
“Thank God,” she said. “You’re alive.”
Reginald spit, then wiped at his mouth with his sleeve.
“I just chewed my own fucking arm off,” Reginald replied, making a disgusted face and indicating the pile of ash under the luggage compartment. Once the arm had collapsed to ash, the compartment laying on it had shifted, causing the cellophane-wrapped danish to tumble out. Reginald had taken it as a sign. He was unwrapping it now, preparing to devour it as if he had a grudge against it.
“Do you know where Maurice is?” she said.
“I could feel him around. He’s free. Looking for Karl. I don’t know where.”
Reginald felt his strength — what he had of it — returning. The danish seemed to be helping. So it was like with Popeye.
“Your boobs are out,” he said.
They were. So were Reginald’s. If they’d been humans, they’d both be dead, but as vampires they’d been able to take the slashing abuse that their clothes couldn’t, leaving them alive but exposed.
Nikki made a halfhearted attempt to pull her slashed bra over her breasts, then tugged at what had become a belly shirt. It didn’t help. Reginald continued to stare, fully aware of how inappropriate it was under the circumstances.
“We derailed,” she said.
“So you’re saying this isn’t the Avignon stop?”
Nikki’s eyebrows furrowed. “We aren’t anywhere near Avignon.”
“Because that’s what’s important right now.”
Nikki flicked her head around nervously. “Karl said earlier that there are several other vampire and human dignitaries on board. Very seriously doubting the humans survived. I guess this puts a crimp in the summit. Son of a bitch stroke of bad luck.”
“It wasn’t bad luck. We were deliberately derailed. I thought you knew that.”
“How would I know that?”
Reginald thought of her wide, terrified eyes just before the crash.
“Never mind. We have to…”
But then he stopped, because there was a loud, rending noise below them.
Because of the way the car had bent, Nikki and Reginald were up on a peak in the middle of the car. Nikki had come through a hole in the next car and had climbed up, following a kind of homing radar that they shared. It was what Reginald was about to use to find Maurice and hopefully Karl when he’d heard the noise. Without the radar, Nikki wouldn’t have easily seen him. He was above, in a fold. Most of the car’s contents, including a handful of still-living humans, were lower down.
Reginald peeked around the edge of the luggage compartment that had trapped his arm. Nikki, her hand on his shoulder and her bare breasts pressed into his back, peered over his shoulder.
The rending noise had been a man in a vintage-looking black suit opening a hole in the side of the car with his hands, peeling the metal back like a can of sardines. He had a thick black goatee, large, severe eyebrows, and a shock of black hair that was sticking more or less straight up. He strolled through the hole he’d made and looked around as if inspecting racks of clothing at a department store.
Reginald could see a group of three humans (they looked like teenage tourists — European, judging by their clothes) look toward the man as he came in. They didn’t seem to find it odd that he’d opened a hole in the car with his hands. All they cared was that he was here to rescue them.
A girl with long blonde hair who seemed to have only sustained a broken leg hobbled up and reached toward him and began speaking in French, all nonsense syllables amounting to Help us and Save us and Please and Please. Everything came out amongst pained sobs, her hair in her face, snot running down her upper lip.
The man in the black suit grabbed her by the throat in a movement that was too quick to see, then used both hands to hold her up to his mouth. There was a crunching sound and a scream, and then the vampire drank as the girl went limp. Her two companions began to scream and thrash, but they were both more injured than she was and could only crawl, and within moments he’d disposed of them, too.
Nikki’s hand tightened on Reginald’s shoulder. They both slunk back further, out of sight. Reginald could feel Nikki’s breath on the back of his neck. Nikki might be able to take on the newcomer, but she’d have to stumble through the wreckage to get down to him, and that would give him time to turn and respond. Besides, Reginald could tell from her body language that she was too shocked to do anything. Plenty of vampires killed humans, of course, but Nikki had always been so careful to “sip and ship” — glamouring her victims and sending them along instead of letting them die. She’d always vowed, privately to Reginald, that she’d never forget that she herself had once been human, and that she’d once been frightened of the world’s monsters, too.
The man in the black suit walked across the length of the train car, stepping over the three new bodies, wiping his mouth and goatee on a hanging blouse from someone’s spilled suitcase. There was carnage everywhere. Too many dead humans to count. Too much twisted metal and broken luggage and detritus to believe. The man walked across the piles of bodies and wreckage, casually scanning the seats. As Nikki and Reginald watched, he found two more survivors and killed them using only his hands. He didn’t bother to drink. Then he reached the end of the car and, finding the door jammed, kicked it hard enough to punch a hole in the metal. He widened the hole with his hands, stepped through, and was gone.
“What the hell was…”
But Reginald put his finger to his lips, his pulse quickening. His heartbeat was loud enough in his ears that he felt like it might give him away, and for the thousandth time, he wished that vampire lore had turned out to be true. He should be a beautiful, thin corpse by now, not a fat nervous wreck.
“What?”
Reginald tapped his finger more insistently against his lips, his eyes widening. It was the silent version of yelling at her to shut up, irritated that she hadn’t taken the point the first time.
He pointed.
Two more black-clad vampires — a man and a woman — had entered the car through the hole made by the first. A second man then climbed in from the outside through a shattered window — a shocking accomplishment, since the windows weren’t made of glass. All three of the new vampires wore the same vintage black suit as the first man, but these three were being far more thorough than he had been. They were peering under every pile of debris, checking every seat. They were opening compartments and moving aside huge pieces of metal as if they weighed nothing. The first vampire had been a quick initial pass. This was the cleanup crew, here to make sure that nothing survived.
The first thought Reginald had about the crash that didn’t involve pain and blood had been that this must be the work of vampire radicals — the kind that had stormed his old office and killed those inside because they were “only human.” This was supposed to be about rebellion and panic and the preservation of the great vampire race… but that was all it was supposed to be. Kill some humans. Cause some chaos. Have some laughs. It wasn’t supposed to be so methodical. So deliberate. So cold.
He watched the three vampires, all in suits that matched perfectly enough to be uniforms. He thought of the two-pass strategy — a blitzkrieg attack followed by a careful second sweep to finish any surviving enemies.
This is an extermination.
And here they were, hidden but in no position to fight. Reginald was useless even under the best of conditions, and right now he didn’t even have his spooky pain invulnerability to give him a layer of protection. Nikki could fight, and in theory, Reginald could guide her as he had back in Columbus, and make her better. But he didn’t trust himself. Everything had felt new again recently. His strategic mental muscles felt tired and rusty. He couldn’t block pain. And worst: even if he could direct Nikki to dodge and weave and evade and kill as needed, they’d never make it down to where the vampires were without alerting them. And no matter how much he could slow things down and move Nikki like a puppet, that wouldn’t change how prepared they’d be to take her on if she gave them enough time during her descent.
No, they were trapped. As long as they could hide in their nook they’d be safe, but what were the chances that they could stay hidden?
“Check under that pile,” said the first man, who was as tall and thin as a scarecrow. He had an angular face and big, blue eyes.
“Don’t tell me how to do my fucking job,” said the woman. There were undertones in the way she said it, and Reginald suspected that the tall man had been nagging her for a while, probably pointing at every pile in every car they’d come through.
“Just do it. Nobody has found Stromm yet.”
Nikki turned to Reginald and mouthed: Karl.
Reginald nodded.
“They won’t,” said the woman. “Jesus, this is stupid.”
“It’s not the main reason he did it, Wynona. Chances are that Stromm healed and ran. But would you like to be the one to tell him that Stromm was in fact here, pinned somewhere, and that we just missed him? So stop bitching and check under that fucking pile.”
The man pointed again and the woman glared at him. She was half his size, but that meant nothing. Maurice looked like a hollow-chested teenager, but at two thousand years old, few vampires could stand against him if they met on equal footing.
Finally, with a huff, the woman and the tall man broke their tableau. The woman blurred to the pile of debris. Reginald watched as she hunched over it and, with the air of a child having a tantrum, seized a collapsed bulkhead with one hand and pulled it upward so fast and so hard that it exploded through the top of the car, sending bits of new debris raining down. The impact jolted the entire compartment and the two other vampires fell to the ground, sprawling over the bodies of the French teenagers.
“Fucking cunt!” yelled the tall man, righting himself. He was across the car in a blur and had the woman by her black vintage lapels. Then they spun and he pushed her hard into the exposed metal wall of the car, denting it outward with a pop. “Do you think we have all the time in the world here? Do you think that there might not already be human authorities on their way? Are you trying to expose us?”
The woman, a small, wry smile on her face, nodded her head toward the place where the collapsed bulkhead had been laying.
“He’s not under there,” she said. Then she grabbed his crotch and began to rub.
The third vampire
(Claude)
was watching the fight / grope session. He rolled his eyes and said,
Knock it off, dammit.
“Knock it off, dammit.”
The woman looked at the man, who was was built like a brick wall. His shoulders were so wide and his back so thick that he transformed his formal dress into an oddity. It was as if someone had dressed the Incredible Hulk in a suit just so that they could watch him rip the seams and burst out of it.
“You want some too, don’t you, Claude?” She made a gripping, stroking motion in the air toward him.
The sooner we can finish the sweep, the sooner we can get out of here.
“The sooner we can finish the sweep, the sooner we can get out of here,” he said.
Reginald realized he was hearing the big vampire in his head before the man spoke. He looked at Nikki and mouthed, Can you hear that?
Nikki: What?
Reginald enunciated more clearly, exaggerating the movement of his lips: Can. You. Hear. That?
Nikki, aloud, in a whisper: “What?”
The big man named Claude jerked his head upward at the sound. But that was okay, because Reginald had heard Nikki’s voice twice — once in his own ears and once through Claude’s. And with that, he knew what it all meant.
Claude was the vampire who’d stood on the tracks, who’d taken the collision and derailed the train. It was Claude whose eyes he’d seen through before. And because Reginald was sharing his thoughts, that meant that somehow, in some way, Reginald’s blood was related to Claude’s. And that meant that if he wanted to, Reginald could control him.
“There’s someone up there,” said the tall vampire. His big blue eyes looked up toward the fold in the car. And the tall vampire began to climb.
Climb, Reginald told Claude.
The big vampire began to climb up the nearly vertical seats in the folded section of the car.
I’ve got this, Reginald thought.
Claude climbed over while moving up, putting himself between the other vampire and Reginald. Then he put a hand out, placing it on the thin vampire’s chest.
“I’ve got this,” he said.
“I want a taste if there’s anything human up there,” said the tall vampire, smiling a humorless smile as his fangs popped out.
Keep searching.
“Keep searching,” said Claude.
Now come up, Reginald commanded, and look me in the eye.
Claude’s big face came into view in front of Nikki and Reginald. He had a square jaw and a massive scar curving from his forehead down to his neck — a souvenir he must have gotten before turning and would be stuck with it forever. Reginald found himself wondering with fascination how Claude, as a man, had gotten the scar and how the injury hadn’t killed him. (Or, Reginald amended, maybe it had killed him.) His eyes were hazel. His face seemed almost friendly.
Reginald watched Claude’s face, watched his own face through Claude’s eyes.
There’s nothing up here, Reginald thought at him.
“There’s nothing up here,” Claude shouted to the others.
Now go. You saw nobody.
Claude jumped down to the bottom of the car in one big leap, landing on what might have been a severed arm and faltering before righting himself. Then he moved on, toward the hole in the other end of the car.
The others followed him. A few moments later, they were gone and Reginald and Nikki were alone.