Chapter 1

Dee Ligit didn’t care anymore about being a champion. All he cared about was staying alive.

Two competitors were dead already, and the evidence was right there in front of him. Blood-black smears stained the plywood catch basin that was jokingly called “the Moat.”

Getting hurt was one thing—in the sport of rail surfing you broke bones all the time. But these guys were dead. And not just any two rail surfers. They had been two of the greats.

Antonio the Terrible was a legend. Around from the beginning, when kids first started standing atop trains as a sport, these days he was to rail surfing what Michael Jordan was to basketball. He’d been on a hundred magazine covers in his native Brazil. He had his own line of helmets and knee pads. And now he was dead.

Francis the Fran Man had been around almost as long. He was old, like, in his thirties, and he’d been a star of the sport since he was twelve. It was the Fran Man, the grandfather of American rail surfers, who inspired Dee Ligit to stand on top of a speeding train for the first time. And now the Fran Man was dead, too.

“The show will go on,” declared the vice president of programming for the Extreme Sports Network, sponsor of the first North American extreme rail surfing competition-called Pro Train Surf I. “It would be an insult to these brave athletes to stop it now.”

The network gave the media prerecorded videotapes of Antonio the Terrible and the Fran Man. “We all face death every time we strap a locomotive to our sneakers,” Antonio said in his heavily accented English. “I don’t want the sport to stop if something happens to me. Carry on—let the world see the bravery of all professional rail surfers.”

The Fran Man’s video said pretty much the same thing. In fact, Dee Ligit had made a tape just like it, which was a requirement of the games. You couldn’t compete in Pro Train Surf I until you’d made a tape like that and handed it over to ESN.

Dee said pretty much the same words on his tape and he felt oh so sincere at the time. Now he was miserable and afraid. Sure, he was a professional rail surfer, but he wasn’t one of the superstars of the sport. Tony and the Fran Man—they were in a league of their own, right. If they couldn’t surf this course, how could he?

But he had no choice. If he backed out now, his career was over. He’d lose all credibility. He’d never get another promotional fee. Landing his own branded line of surf shoes would be out of the question—who’d want surf shoes from a guy who was afraid to surf? And for sure he’d lose the fifty-thousand-dollar check from the cereal company that was sponsoring him. He really needed that money.

Dee had to surf the course, but that didn’t mean he had to kill himself in the process. He’d take it easy, go casual. As he stood out on the launch platform, he examined the track and tried not to see the plywood gutters.

When he was a kid, he rail surfed for fun. He didn’t let high school or his parents interfere with his passion. He was expelled from school three months before graduation and kicked out of the house the same day, but it was right about that time he won his first big rail surf competition. He couldn’t even count how many contests he had won since then.

Back then the competitions were strictly underground and illegal. A few hundred devotees would meet in the middle of the night to watch the launch. The launch pad was a truck, a parked boxcar or anything else that was close enough to make a jump possible. The surf train would roll alongside, and the surfers would leap aboard. They were always passenger trains, which traveled regular schedules and offered curved, challenging roofs.

After the surfers leaped aboard, the crowds would drive to the finish line. The best contests involved high-speed trains traveling track with a lot of twists and turns.

Sure, it was hard to stay on. Especially on a sharp curve with a speeding engineer. Dee took his share of tumbles and broke his arms and legs, but he had natural talent, and his cut of the wagering pots was more than he’d make at any job he could think of.

A few months ago he had his biggest win. It was in South Dakota, or maybe the other Dakota. The contest started out as nothing special until Dee heard that the sponsors, a bunch of small-time hoods from Fargo, had invited friends from Las Vegas. The friends from Vegas had never seen train surfing before, but they had cash to wager. The stakes grew to astronomical levels.

The train came and the players leaped onto it. One first-timer misjudged his leap and tumbled right off. Dee chuckled when he witnessed the snap of bones as the kid landed. He heard the kid was a Texan. Hell, they surfed on boxcars down there. His grandmother could surf a boxcar!

When the rain started Dee thought he was a goner, but at least he knew how to take a fall. And yet, as the surface of the passenger car grew slick and the other contestants flew off one after another, Dee managed to stay on.

A rain out became official if all the contestants slid off before the halfway point. Everybody assumed this early downpour would be a rain out for sure—and yet the train came into the finish line with Dee Ligit still surfing the top.

Dee was already well known on the underground train-surfing circuit, and that win made him famous. He got his first cover on LocoSurfer magazine. Then he heard plans for the first legitimate, legal rail-surfing event in the U.S.

The new Extreme Sports Network was behind it, and their people wanted Dee Ligit to compete. “We have all the permits we need to make it legal,” the producer told Dee on the phone. “Now all we need is the athletes.”

Dee said sure, he was interested. Minutes later, the cereal magnate called. The man offered to sponsor him in Pro Train Surf I, including expenses and a hefty fee. Dee got fifty grand just to compete, and a lucrative promotional contract if he won.

Dee Ligit felt everything was going right in his world. He dumped his girlfriend to take advantage of his growing base of adoring rail surf groupies. He got all new gear. He did a photo shoot and felt like a star. He flew first class to California, where the cereal company put him up in a nice room in Bishop Hills, the setting for Pro Train Surf I. Then he went out to have a look at the track.

“What is this?” he asked the ESN crew. It was like no track he had ever surfed—a torturously twisted stretch of narrow-gauge rail in the hills the town was named for. One of the producers from the Extreme Sports Network described the history of the steam engine. The train consisted of an antique steam engine and a single old-fashioned passenger car with an ornate, curved roof, refinished to a slippery shine. But Dee didn’t care about the train.

“What’s with this track?” he demanded.

The producer explained that it was a two-mile stretch of mining rail left over from the Wild West days of Bishop Hills.

“Rail surfers don’t surf track like this,” Dee protested. “We have to have a lot longer curves—these are way too sharp. And we surf for miles and miles—two miles is too short”

The producer gave him a superior look and tried to explain a little bit of reality to Dee Ligit.

“Who’s going to want to watch you boys standing there while you go on a Sunday surf through the corn-fields? And how would we go about filming it, anyway? See, this way we have a short, exciting event and we capture every second of it. We have cameras mounted all over these hills.”

He pointed out the steel camera platforms dotting the hills around the track. They had been expertly camouflaged to blend in with the dried shrubs and rock.

“They look permanent,” Dee said.

“They are. ESN is in this business for the long haul, so to speak. We bought the land, bought the track and bought the engine. We own Pro Train Surf, the only professional rail surfing event in the world.”

Dee got the message. Either get onboard with ESN or get out of the sport. “But what’s with the walls around the track?”

Alongside the entire two-mile tangle of rail was the plywood catch basin, also painted in the browns and tans of desert camouflage.

“That’s the Moat,” the producer said with an ear-to-ear grin. “Legal made us put it in. Got to look like we have safety measures in place.”

“We’re pros,” Dee said. “We can take a fall from a train, dude. It’s what we do. This isn’t gonna help.”

The producer shrugged. “It was either a catcher like this or some sort of netting or cushions, which would make you all look like a bunch of pussies.”

So Dee didn’t argue. The competition began. He made it through the first few elimination rounds, which were tough on all the surfers. Nobody was used to this kind of rail. It was the most challenging track ever train-surfed, and competitors were falling off all over the place. Lots of bones broke in the Moat. With every round of the contest, the speed of the train increased, and when they entered the finals the speed became deadly.

Antonio the Terrible lost his footing at the first sharp turn, called Hanged Man’s Curve. Dee thought he leaned into the turn just right, but his feet went out from under him at the apex of the curve. He flew off the train like a rocket and slammed into the Moat at one of the support braces. His impact cracked the wood-like plate glass, but the steel reinforcing rods held it in place. The coroner said there were at least fourteen major bones broken inside Antonio the Terrible’s body—not counting multiple spinal cord fractures.

Extreme Sports Network made the most of the delay. They stayed live, reporting every few minutes on the latest developments and replaying video of the catastrophe twenty times an hour. Abbreviated video clips were released to news networks around the world, which channeled more viewers to ESN. By afternoon, as the on-site investigation wrapped up, the network was registering its highest viewership ever—and the next contestant was ready to compete.

Francis the Fran Man commented briefly on the sad loss of his longtime friend and professional rival Antonio the Terrible. He told the ESN anchor that, God forbid, should he die while competing, he would certainly want the glorious game to continue.

After which he promptly died.

The Fran Man had to have been overcompensating. He leaned less on Hanged Man’s Curve and nearly fell headlong at the same spot Tony had died, but the Fran Man held his balance with a lot of wild arm waving. At the second sharp curve on the track, the Forty-five Degrees of Doom, he leaned too far. He lost his balance. His feet flew up, and the Fran Man slithered over the edge of the passenger train car. He pushed away from the car; one of the first tricks you learned as a train surfer was to get clear of the train if you fell. He started to roll into the fall, but the fall was already over. The speed and sharpness of the curve basically slingshot the Fran Man into the plywood. His head battered through the wood so far that his upper body penetrated.

“At this point, Fran’s body mass loses its forward momentum,” the ESN anchor explained during his three dozen slow-motion analyses of the accident. “His body weight is pretty evenly balanced between the two sides of the catch basin wall, so gravity drags him down onto the broken wood. Fran is still struggling to get his hands free, but he is literally being knifed open by no less than twenty sharp wooden splinters. Wow—now, that’s an extreme way to die!”

Impromptu protests began, across the country after ESN announced that it would continue the high-speed finals the next day, despite the two fatal accidents. A coalition of media conglomerates hurriedly asked for an emergency injunction against ESN.

“In the interest of public safety, we cannot in good conscience allow the reputation of professional sports to be sullied by this reckless upstart network. It would be irresponsible of us as a broadcasting community to allow viewers to see barbaric and violent activity. We broadcasters want to be known for safe, family-oriented sports programs such as professional football and professional baseball.”

The judges didn’t side with the networks, noting that every member of the coalition was threatened with large revenue losses when they lost viewership and dipped below the audience they had promised their advertisers.

A middle-of-the-night meeting between the networks and the governor of California was unproductive.

“I don’t haff duh audority to stop dis contest,” the governor said sleepily. “Besides, why would I want to?”

“It’s anticompetitive,” one of the lawyers explained. “They are exploiting man’s fascination with the grotesque.”

“So call your guhberment rebresendadives. They can pass legislajhun. Leave me oud of it.”

“The governor has refused to terminate the activity of these barbarians,” the coalition lawyer told the media. “It is a sad day for civilization.”

It was a Sunday, and football broadcasts were trying to hold on to viewership by adding their “Profiles in Felony” feature. During a lull in the game, viewers saw a segment with a star football player’s statistical profile of accused, pending and convicted felonies. They took a cue from college football and outfitted all cheerleaders in pasties and thongs.

Even these improvements couldn’t keep viewers from deserting football that Sunday. Nothing could stop the inevitable continuation of Pro Train Surf I and its locomotive ratings.

The first contestant on the last day of finals was Dee Ligit, who felt sick in spirit and sick in body—he was permanently constipated these days.

He should just walk away. But the eyes of the world were on him, and the train was getting nearer. When Dee Ligit heard the steam engine rumble underneath the launch platform, almost without thinking about it he stepped off into space.

He landed on the top of the passenger car and screamed inside as the train whistled and rumbled around Hanged Man’s Curve. The dark red blot on the inside of the Moat was like the cyclopean eye of Satan.

But it wasn’t that bad, really. The train was moving fast, but he could work with G-forces like this. Dee rode through the Curve.

Next came the Forty-five Degrees of Doom, and Dee raised his arms wide and descended into a bouncy crouch, letting his instincts guide him through the vicious twist in the track. He felt good. His feet felt glued to the train car.

Before he knew it, Dee Ligit stepped off the train onto the landing platform. Everybody was cheering, for him. He had surfed the Pro Train Surf finals and survived.

He was taken into a private booth for an ESN interview, and read his responses sincerely to the camera, then tried not to watch the other surfers take their best shot at the high-speed finals. Every time he heard the gasps from the bleachers he knotted up inside. Competitors dropped every time. Dee realized nobody else was making it to the finish line.

“The final contestant is about to surf,” he heard an ESN anchor telling a camera. “If he falls, this competition is over. If he reaches the finish line, then we head into the superfinal competition.”

Dee watched on the monitors as Luke Hey Wayne prepared to surf. “Please fall. Please fall,” Dee prayed silently. He just couldn’t face the superfinals.

Luke Hey stepped onto the train car and surfed down the straightaway. The engineer cam got a close-up of the teenager’s face—terror drew his large mouth into grinch lips as he approached Hanged Man’s Curve.

As he came into the curve, Luke Hey’s arms began spinning and one of his feet flew out from under him. The boy screamed plaintively and somehow managed to stay atop the car as the track straightened again.

Luke Hey was crying like a baby. A hundred million people around the world watched it in close-up, and then they saw Luke do something unthinkable.

He jumped off the train. He bailed. He bowed out. He took a big dive. He slid off the train car, slid into the Moat and slid on his behind for a hundred feet. The boy clambered out of the Moat, crashed to the earth outside it and ran away sobbing.

Luke Hey was never heard from again.

Could have been me, Dee thought.

There was more hubbub. The crowds were cheering for him again. The reason, as far as he could understand it, was that he had won.

He was the first extreme rail surfing champion of the world.