The World on Fire by Sheldon Woodbury

Author:Sheldon Woodbury
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: James Ward Kirk Publishing
Published: 2014-08-11T04:00:00+00:00

38

Once again, Louis let the excitement of the moment surge up inside him. He’d worked hard on having each piece of his glorious puzzle fit together perfectly, and this was no exception.

He’d learned about this train before prison, when he was staying underground eluding capture. It was an underground phenomena too, a whispered secret shared only to those with the proper credentials. His bloody resume was his ticket on board.

The history of the train was a mythic legend to those in the know, birthed by the steamy love affair of a railroad tycoon and a prostitute after the turn of the century. When the tycoon died he left his sprawling empire to the love of his life, and that’s when a part of the business plan changed.

The prostitute had lived her life apart from proper society, and she chose to honor that with some of the trains. They became an underground railroad for those who lived their lives in the shadows, away from the rest of the world. Scorned for who she was, she reached out to help her own kind. When she passed away, the mission of the trains continued, secretly carrying illicit cargo across the country on forgotten routes.

Inside the freight car was a pall of darkness, the only light coming from the dashboard in the van. Louis turned off the engine, so now that light was gone too.

“Where are we?” David asked.

Louis felt another tingle of excitement. He could hear the desperation in David’s voice, the barely concealed tone of mounting despair. If he listened hard enough, Louis was sure he could hear something dying inside him, his naive belief that the world was a safe and decent place. It clearly wasn’t, and there was still so much more he had to see.

“Relax, Davey-boy, we’re in a good place. We’ll be safe here, travelling with others like us.”

A door creaked open, a slash of light cutting into the pall of darkness inside the freight car. The train worker who’d opened the freight door and pushed down the ramp slipped through the slash of light and disappeared.

Louis pushed open his door and stepped outside, the others doing the same.

Another figure appeared in the open doorway and stood there for a moment, unsteady on his feet. He was dressed in an old-fashioned train porter’s uniform, but was filthy and shaky, with blood-shot eyes. He looked like he’d just woken up from a brain rattling bender and was still half-drunk.

“Follow me,” he grumbled.

They fell in behind him, the train now chugging and growling again down the tracks. They passed through another dark freight car, then another one after that. As they followed the shuffling porter, they caught murky glimpses of the freight cars’ contents.

There were boxes, burlap bags, industrial containers, animal cages, and even a couple of ornate coffins. The deep growls from the cages sounded like rabid pit bulls. Some of it was labeled, but not in the usual way, mostly with cryptic insignias and strange markings.

The shuffling porter pushed open another door and this time soft light poured out.

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