This is what the Stick is for. A swift grip and a single knock on a glass pane set into the door, Cale could reach his arm in and find the stubborn lock. Ignoring the slicing of the remaining glass, he twisted the ancient lock and maneuvered around the opening door.
The men who controlled this sat here, he knew this even in the dark. One or two men at a time, he thought, and even under such careful care they would still let them crash. Gently riding metal trains would take curves too fast and collide into smoldering twists of metal that ended hundreds of lives at a time. How easy was it to pilot these machines? Certainly if one or two men could handle the job it wasn’t something so complicated that they should be willing to sacrifice men and women on a whim. Every reminder of the Old Ones’ blunders is a blessing – teach us not their ways.
Cale had seen Old One machinery before, most of those alive today could name and describe cars and televisions, but had no idea about the extent of the Old Ones’ power. Every time a man or woman was born who knew how to turn on the machines Cale saw the world change. Their coming usually heralded a blackened age, where thousands would perish and the face of society scarred. These people were not Freaks, not quite, but were almost always up to no good. Cale had witnessed the rise of emperors on the backs of the dead machinery and was always caught in the middle of the disasters. He did not want to call himself an assassin, but these people did have to be dealt with by someone. But then there were others, often women, who had the affinity that traded in humanism and dealt good fates to others. The last child to turn on power was a small girl.
The girl, her name had been Paige, lived along the ocean on Manh Island, a narrow landmass in the northern regions of the East. She was fortunate in that her family lived on the outskirts of the Sleepless City, so she could be hidden from the populace of the area. Even the rumors of such children were enough to unify the frightened and panicky into small mobs that wanted to punish these little ones for crimes they had not yet committed. They were simply scared. Paige, while sheltered from the outside, scavenged anything that was still in working order, any of the trinkets left behind. Her family could wash clothes in solar-powered machines, they could keep in touch with hand-held radio devices and they could stay safe with stun guns. Paige kept searching though, knowing that none of these things were helping anyone aside from her family. It was always harder for her, looking in places that were ever more and more overgrown. Places shrouded in a recovering woodland and unrelenting forest.
Paige found a crumbling building, darkened by a canopy from species of trees that hadn’t lived on the island for centuries. She couldn’t read it, but the fading signs marked it as South Hampton Hospital. Within the hospital was very little hope, most of the hallways and rooms were crushed and collapsing under the weight of time, but in the basement is where Paige found a treasure trove. There were devices that could restart a stopped heart, machines that could see a man’s insides and almost all of them were portable. Paige had the ability to set up a makeshift hospital in the heart of her small town.
She was a saint to those who came to her for help, a girl of ten who could practically bring back the dead or reverse the spread of ever-present cancers. Paige, though, encountered the same problem that every other child in her shoes did: she couldn’t teach the others. Even when she spoke in the clearest of instructions and made pamphlets and booklets on how to turn things on – how to keep them running – it always came out like gibberish, mandates spoken in tongues to a directionless flock. So she was the only one who could help. Aside from basic first-aid, her nurses were of little value.
So, when men finally came for her, there was no one to help. Every good deed she performed was not enough to convince these gangsters that she would not become a tyrant, that she would not find a cache of bombs and bring Manh Island to its knees. They shot her and while she lay bleeding and dying on a crisp white paper-covered table her heart stopped and no one could bring it back. She died at twelve years old.
Cale could not turn on machines, his knowing what the train did and how it functioned was simply something bestowed upon him for a purpose yet unforeseen.
The skeletons persisted. Bang. Louder now, as if they were being thrown by a great fist instead of charging in on their own. He was running out of time. Cale stretched his hand out and tapped on the glass that he knew was at the nose of the train, it was of average thickness and was done no favors by time. Glass like this always slipped downward like an extremely viscous honey, so the top of the pane was marginally thinner than its base. Bang. Bang. Faster now too.
Moving back to his original car, Cale brought the matches out and struck two sticks with a fast flick of his wrist. Both sulfur heads flared to life and hung on against the wind of his movement. Not needing the small orange glow they provided, he threw the matches down onto the pile of defeated undead. Like before, the pile of ashes and bone blazed into life, battling between the natural orange of the fire and the lime green that breathed out of the risen dead.
Suddenly the train car was fully lit, the smoke beginning to crowd the ceiling, desperate to find a way into the open air. Cale turned from the fire, he moved to the front car. His back against the wall, he grasped the metal cylinder in his right hand, ready to let it go.
Bang.
Bang. Bang. Bangbang. Bangbangbang.
The metal doors flew inwards, shards of bone and skull perforating the air, small whistles that fell onto the green fire. Cale was ready. He pulled the pin and threw the -
(Grenade!)
-around the corner. It struck the ground and bounced once, flying into the empty space of the train car. Through the doors came a black flood, a living oil spill that spread through the air. “JOHHH-“
Cale crouched and covered his ears as the grenade exploded. It was a deafening fireball that devoured the living darkness of the speaker and wrapped him in the soft glove of a blacksmith, a warm and rough embrace. The windshield of his train car blew outwards from the pressure spraying tiny glass knives out onto the empty track – no monsters outside, not yet. In the fractured seconds after the explosion, Cale leapt out the window, never looking back to see if the fire would be enough.
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