On the High Road to Oblivion

Chapter 4—Steel Highway

At no time did Dodge allow Anya to move out of reach, but despite the fact that she was for all intents and purposes his prisoner, he felt like he was the one chained to her. She revealed nothing about their ultimate destination. Even when he booked two tickets for a Pullman berth on the Broadway Limited, a passenger train operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad that offered service between New York and Chicago, with stops in Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Baltimore… even with his tickets in hand, he was no closer to learning where they were really going.

While they waited for the train, he stopped at a Western Union kiosk and dashed off a telegram to Hurley.

The message was short not because of the need for brevity, but because he really didn’t know what else to say. As an afterthought he added:

He pondered this question in silence while he and Anya waited at the station, and then as they boarded the train for its 2:55 p.m. departure. He had never heard of the man, but based solely on Anya’s description of him, he sounded, at worst, like any other industrial capitalist. Had it originally been Barron’s plan to snatch Newcombe at gunpoint? Would he now threaten the scientist with violent consequences if he didn’t deliver the desired results? Or would the man instead have stepped forward with a polite job offer? Dodge imagined his core values—vis a vis the influence of modern day robber barons and war profiteers — were probably closer to those espoused by the revolutionary, but when it came to putting those beliefs into practice, they were miles apart.

“Tell me something,” he said, breaking the long period of quiet. “If you and your friends had succeeded today, what would you have done with them — with Doc Newcombe and Lafayette?”

She didn’t look him in the eye, but instead gazed out the window at the passing landscape. “We planned to take him to a safe house and keep him there. We felt certain that once we explained what Barron wanted, Dr. Newcombe would have voluntarily remained with us, in order to avoid having his work perverted. But we were prepared to hold him against his will, for as long as necessary to prevent his knowledge from being used for evil ends.”

Dodge didn’t think she was telling truth, but he did not challenge her. “Why did you grab Lafayette?”

This time, she turned to meet his gaze. “That was a mistake. I told Sergei and Ivan to get the scientist and the writer, but they misunderstood. You see, we meant to take you.”

Brian “Hurricane” Hurley read the message on the yellow paper again — he’d lost track of how many times — and breathed a silent oath. It had been a rotten day, his head hurt like the Dickens — in fact, his whole body felt like one great big bruise — and now Dodge had changed the play.

He and Nora had stayed with the wrecked vehicles for more than an hour, fielding a barrage of questions from the police and deflecting the really important ones about where Dodge and the blonde kidnapper had gone, and why. Hurley suggested that the woman had escaped on foot and that Dodge had gone off in pursuit, and while this didn’t quite agree with other accounts, the officers on the scene weren’t inclined to doubt the word of an upstanding citizen and hero like Hurricane Hurley. With their statements given, Hurley had retrieved his guns and a few other possessions from the Speedster, and then made the arrangements to have it towed to a repair shop. It had been his intention to send Nora home in a hired taxi, but she would have none of it.

“I’m not letting you out of my sight, buster,” she had told him defiantly. “Not until this is over.”

Hurricane had grumbled, but all things considered, he didn’t mind her company. Better her than “Lightning Rod” Lafayette. When he and Nora arrived at the Empire State Building, the note from Western Union was waiting.

It was just like Dodge to run off headlong into danger; it was one of the things he greatly admired about the young man. But that didn’t ease the sting of being left behind to tend the home fires and worry. Add to that the fact that Dodge was in the company of one of the people who had, earlier in the day, tried to blow them all to smithereens, and it was a recipe for an ulcer.

“Going to find Newton,” he muttered. “Like you have the slightest idea where they’ve taken him.”

He turned to Nora, who was gazing breathlessly out the large window at the vista of the city below. “My goodness, this is your office?”

“It was. I’m afraid it’s sort of outlived its purpose, but we signed a lease.”

The view was about the only thing to recommend the office space on the seventy-eighth floor of the world’s tallest building. Aside from the enormous windows, the room was virtually bare. There was no decor to speak of, only blank white walls. The furnishings consisted of a few chairs and a long folding banquet table, both supplied courtesy of building management. Of course, even when it had served the purpose to which Hurley had alluded, there hadn’t been much in the way of creature comforts.

Dodge and his friends had rented the space a few months before, solely for the reason of studying an artifact they had recovered from the ruins of an ancient outpost in Antarctica. That artifact, a rod made of an unidentifiable metal, had been the key to an amazing technology that imbued its holder with a range of uncanny abilities, including the power of flight, an invincible energy field, and even a weapon that could cast directed bolts of electricity. Although their possession of the relic, which they had called simply “the Staff,” had been wrapped in secrecy, a foreign agent had learned of its existence and launched an audacious campaign to seize control of the artifact, and ultimately the Antarctic outpost. A thief in the employ of that villain had breached their elaborate security measures and absconded with the Staff, doing considerable damage to their impromptu headquarters in the process. The battle scars had all been repaired, but in the final struggle with their foe, the Staff had lost its unique properties, obviating any further need for a special facility in which to study it.

Hurley sank wearily into one of the chairs, and he waved the telegram at his guest. “Walter Barron? Does that name ring any bells?”

“No, but that’s easily enough remedied.” Nora picked up the telephone, which sat innocuously on the floor near one wall, and brought it over to the table. She lifted the receiver from its cradle and held it to her ear, as she dialed the operator. “I’d like the Clarion newspaper office please.”

Within a matter of minutes, her call was put through to the Clarion morgue. If Hurley was amazed that it was possible to have a question answered simply by picking up the telephone, then he was also a little disappointed when, after about five minutes of searching, a negative answer came back. She put the earpiece back on its hook and frowned. “Why do you suppose Mr. Dalton wanted us to find out about this Barron fellow? Do you think he’s behind it all?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, miss. Dodge obviously didn’t know either.”

Nora’s face scrunched up in thought, then she reached for the phone again. “Operator? Brooklyn, please. Floyd Bennett Field.”

Hurley watched with mild amusement as he listened to Nora work her magic. He could only guess at the reaction on the other end of the line. “How do you do, sir… Sam, is it? Nora Holloway, with the Clarion, here. I’d like to know about autogyros… No, I know how they work. I want to know who makes them.”

As she spoke, she reached into her clutch and produced a pen and notebook, in which she jotted down the information she was getting. “And where are they located?…Spain? Well, that’s no good…Pennsylvania? Yes, that is a good deal closer to home…Right. One last question for you, Sam. Do you know of anyone who owns two autogyros? Newer models, judging by the look of them…Thanks, Sam, you’re a champ.”

She was smiling when she hung up again. “Well, Mr. Hurley, do you want the good news or the very good news?”

Hurricane chuckled. “I think I’ll defer to the lady’s judgment.”

“A regular southern gentleman, you are. All right, hang on to your hat. The autogyros we saw were probably Cierva C.30s. The design is from the parent company in Spain, but there are a number of companies that have the license to build the aircraft, and one of them is Pitcairn Cierva, located in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.”

Hurley nodded. “As good as place any to start looking.”

“Hold your horses, big boy. That was just the good news. The really good news is that an American businessman recently purchased, not one, but several C.30s for his company.”

“Barron?”

She flashed a grin. “Sam at the airport didn’t know the name of owner, but the company is called Royal Industries. Care to guess what they make? I’ll tell you: war machines! Guns, munitions, battle tanks.”

Hurley put his fingertips together in thought. “I can think of a few reasons why a weapons manufacturer would want to get his hands on one of the world’s leading scientists.”

Nora nodded her head excitedly, and then promptly called the Clarion morgue again. This time the search was not fruitless. “Royal Industries’ main office is in Pittsburg. I guess they buy a lot of steel.”

“Pennsylvania again. Maybe a coincidence, but like my old friend the Padre always said, ‘There are no coincidences.’ But that’s well beyond the range of those gyros, especially with the added weight of extra passengers.”

“Wait, there’s more. Royal Industries also has a hangar at Lakehurst, New Jersey.”

A grin split Hurricane’s craggy face. “Excellent work, Miss Nora.” He stood and headed for the door.

Nora was on her feet in a flash, and hastily interposed herself between him and the exit. “And just where do you think you’re going?”

“I should think that was obvious to a bright lady like yourself.”

“So you’re going to go crack some skulls until someone tells you where Rod and Dr. Newcombe are?”

Hurricane chuckled. “If it comes to that. I find the mere possibility of a cracked skull is often a better tool for persuasion.”

“And just how do you plan to get there?”

“Why I’ll just…” He frowned. “I guess I’ll have to hire a taxi.”

“We could take Rodney’s car! It’s parked at the Clarion Building.”

“We?” Hurricane’s brows drew together. “I don’t suppose there’s any way I’m going to talk you into staying here and minding the store. Dodge may try to contact us again, and it would be nice if there was someone here to pick up the phone.”

Nora put her hands on her hips in a defiant pose, as if bracing for a fight she had no intention of losing. “Not a chance, buster. Besides, I’m the one who’s done all the work so far.”

“You do have a point there, Miss Nora. But something tells me that very soon, we’ll be moving into territory where I’ll have a chance to be a bit more useful.”

Shortly after the train chugged out of Pennsylvania Station, Anya folded down the bed and stretched her tall frame out on its flat surface. She closed her eyes immediately, and judging by the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest, Dodge guessed that she had gone to sleep almost as quickly. Lying in repose, she reminded Dodge of a cat; sublimely confident, showing no sense of vulnerability, and able to fall asleep seemingly as she pleased. Though he was tired and felt like a mass of bruises, Dodge felt no similar inclination to let his guard down.

As the miles rolled by beneath them, the rhythmic rumble of the steel wheels made keeping his eyes open nearly impossible. He struggled to occupy his mind with the details of the attack on the Clarion Building and everything that followed. If Anya was telling the truth, then Newcombe and Lafayette were already in Barron’s clutches. But was Barron the villain Anya presented him as? Even if he was intent on building a “death ray” device, as improbable as that sounded, how was that any different than the ambition of gunsmiths and engineers the world over? Perhaps Barron intended nothing more than the construction of a weapon to add to the arsenal of the United States military.

By the same token, he had only Anya’s word that she was who and what she claimed to be. And if she was part of a worker’s revolutionary movement as she purported — anarchists, as Miss Holloway might say — then who was to say that she and her co-conspirators weren’t equally interested in possessing a fantastic new weapon.

He was pondering these riddles, or at least thought he was, when a flash of movement startled him back to wakefulness. It took a few moments for him to become fully alert, a moment to realize that he had fallen asleep, and another to make sense of everything that was different now. His last memory was of daylight — it was dark now.

“How long was I out?” he mumbled. He glanced at the pull-down sleeping berth, and felt a surge of dread as he realized what else was different.

Anya was gone.

Dodge bolted out of his seat and leapt for the door. He threw the sliding panel aside and burst into the narrow corridor, all the while berating himself for having let his vigilance fail. He glanced to the right first — saw a man in a gray suit hastening toward him — then left, where he caught a glimpse of Anya’s flaxen ponytail, visible just for an instant as the door at the end of the car swung shut. He immediately gave chase, passing through the same door a few seconds later.

As he stepped onto the landing, he was almost overwhelmed by the choking exhaust fumes and noise of the train’s progress along its steel highway. Beyond the guard rail that ringed the landing upon which he stood, there was only absolute black — not the velvet textured night sky, shot through with pinpoints of starlight, but the complete lightlessness of a premature burial.

We’re in a tunnel, Dodge realized, as he dashed nimbly across the articulated steel plate that joined the sleeping car to dining car. Maybe I wasn’t out for as long as I thought.

He opened the second door and immediately saw the object of his pursuit striding briskly down the narrow path that led between the tables. A few heads had turned to follow her, but as soon as Dodge noisily intruded, all eyes were on him.

No point in trying to be discreet now, he thought, and sprinted headlong down the length of the car. Anya never looked back, but she did quicken her pace and a moment later disappeared through the next door. At a near sprint, Dodge reached the door before the latch clicked shut.

He caught another glimpse of the woman as she crossed to the next car, but now she too was running. As he entered the third class compartment, Anya had dashed to its far end, once more widening the gap. Dodge raced down the aisle, ignoring the curious looks of passengers in the rows of bench seats, and threw open the rear door.

He half expected to find yet another door closing behind the fleeing woman, but to his dismay he discovered that he had run out of train. Only the brake car — more commonly known as the caboose — remained, and a heavy gate stretched between the rails of the landing at the end of the third class car. While the gate could easily be surmounted, Dodge suspected the door to the brake car would almost certainly be locked; it was firmly closed, suggesting that Anya had not utilized it moments before.

What did that leave?

He glanced to the side, into the impenetrable darkness of the tunnel, and realized where the woman had gone.

He felt a mixture of admiration and disbelief. Captain Falcon and his band of heroes had jumped from moving trains in the stories Dodge wrote, but it was almost unthinkable to him that anyone would actually choose to leap from a vehicle moving at close to fifty miles an hour, and into the total darkness of a tunnel, no less.

His next realization rode in on a wave of dread and apprehension; if he was going to bring Anya to heel, he would have to leave the train by the same route.

“Oh, boy,” he whispered gazing out into the darkness. He found that his breathing had quickened; he was almost hyperventilating. He felt rooted in place, as if some desperate animal part of him believed that by staying still, the problem might resolve itself. And it would, he knew; with every second that passed, the distance separating him from his quarry increased. If he didn’t act quickly, she would be lost to him even if he did manage to jump. Steeling his nerves, he grasped the side rail and started to climb over.

At that exact moment, the train burst out into the open. The sky was darkening; the sun had already dropped behind the hills to the east, but after the impenetrable black of the subterranean passage, the dim light was a welcome relief. Or rather, it was until he looked out at the passing landscape. Now that he could actually see what he would be jumping into, his dread only increased.

The train track rested on an elevated mound which sloped steeply away from the rails, probably a good five feet higher than the surrounding landscape. The mound was built entirely of rocks, each one at least as large as both of his fists put together. The jagged rocks disappeared into a bramble of grass and brush, interspersed with stunted pine trees. The brush might cushion his landing; the trees certainly wouldn’t.

The rhythmic thump of the steel wheels hitting track joints reminded him that the distance separating him from Anya was still growing, and he tore his gaze away from the passing scenery, and focused on climbing down from the landing.

He reckoned his best chance of surviving the leap was to get as close to the rocky rail bed as he could. Using the side rail like a ladder, as well as other protuberances that sprouted from the landing, he lowered himself down until his feet dangled only a few inches above the rail bed.

“On three, Dodge,” he told himself. “One… two…”

Just as he was about to unclench his fingers, he glimpsed something tall and solid whizzing past behind him: a telephone pole. He glanced back down the track and saw dangling telephone wires suspended between a chain of stout poles, running parallel to the rails. It was impossible for him to judge the distance between them, but if he timed his jump wrong, he would almost certainly wind up wrapped around one of those poles.

Great. Like I needed one more thing to worry about.

Another pole flashed by and Dodge started counting. Five seconds later, the train passed another pole. Five more seconds, and another. That was the narrow window of opportunity in which he would have to act. Hesitation would spell disaster.

Dodge breathed a curse, then searched for some vestige of courage to do what he knew he had to do. Another pole whizzed by and he let go.

He knew better than to try and land on his feet. Instead, as he pushed away from the train, extending his body out perpendicular to the rails, he covered his head with his arms.

The impact was like the worst football tackle he’d ever taken, magnified a thousand times. The explosion from Anya’s co-conspirator back in the Clarion conference room was a pat on the shoulder by comparison. For a few seconds that seemed like an eternity, he felt as though he’d fallen into a giant rock crusher, with mechanized hammers pounding every square inch of his body. He rolled, lengthwise, dozens of times before crashing into a bramble. Even then, his momentum carried him several yards into the thicket where thorny branches tore at his clothes and flesh.

Then, mercifully, the motion stopped.

How long he lay there, he could not say, but when he finally dared to open his eyes, the noise of the train had diminished to a mere whisper. Perhaps because he expected his leap from the train to result in broken bones or worse, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that he had suffered nothing more than scrapes and bruises — a lot of scrapes and bruises, but nothing worse. He gingerly got to his feet and disentangled himself from the thicket, then made his way up the slope to the rail bed.

In the descending twilight, he could only just make out the silhouette of the mountain through which the tunnel had passed, perhaps half a mile away. Anya was in that tunnel, though why she chose that place to make her escape, Dodge could not fathom. He lurched into motion, trying to coax his battered limbs into a run, and managed instead only a halting jog. After a few stumbles, he managed to match his stride and pace to the spacing of the wooden ties, and once he fell into a routine, he found it easier to ignore his myriad aches and pains. In no time at all, or so it seemed, he arrived at the ominously gaping mouth of the tunnel.

He stopped abruptly there, as if the blackness beyond exuded a repulsive force field. Only now, as he stood poised on the threshold, did it occur to him to think about what his quarry was doing out here. Miles from the nearest town — probably hundreds of miles from the nearest city — what had Anya hoped to accomplish by jumping from the train, particularly in the benighted depths of the tunnel? Dodge was still pondering this when he heard the footsteps.

His first thought was that he had caught her, that Anya was herself running out of the tunnel toward him. But no, the footsteps were definitely coming from behind him.

Did I pass her?

The thought, barely formed, lasted only as long as it took for him to turn around. It wasn’t Anya.

It took him a moment longer to recognize the man in the gray suit, the man who had been standing at the far end of the sleeper car when the mad chase had begun. Dodge had only glimpsed him for the merest fraction of a second, and the figure shambling toward him now did not exactly resemble that man. His suit was dirty and torn, his face — Dodge faintly recalled thinking that the man had looked Chinese — was all but completely obscured by a mask of dust, sweat and not a little blood, evidence that he too had leapt from the train.

A question formed on Dodge’s lips, but went unasked. Something about the man’s expression told him that polite conversation was out of the question. Instinctively wary, he widened his stance and braced himself to meet the impending attack.

The man stopped abruptly, only a few steps away, stamping his left foot, and striking a fighting stance that was all too familiar to Dodge. It was a te stance — the curious Oriental martial art he had written about and even seen practiced by Father Nathan Hobbs — or something very much like it. The man’s hands came up, and then with a fierce cry, he launched into motion.

Dodge threw up his arms to ward off the blows, but the man’s open hands, flat and rigid like knife blades, swept through his defense and slammed into his torso. A blow to his solar plexus stole his wind away, and another strike knocked him flat on his back between the steel rails.

He flailed his arms in a futile attempt to rise. His assailant remained upright, lapsing back into his ready stance, both hands extended forward in preparation to attack again. Then, to Dodge’s utter surprise, the man spoke. “Where is the woman?”

His English was perfect, without any trace of accent, but there was something different about it; an almost sing-song quality that Dodge associated with the Far East. Not Chinese, Dodge thought. Something else. Japanese, maybe?

Dodge’s mouth worked to form his honest answer — he didn’t know — but there was no breath to form the words. He shook his head and raised one hand in a gesture that he hoped wouldn’t be misinterpreted as a challenge. His other hand grasped one of the rails, in preparation to pull himself back to his feet, but as soon as his fingers made contact with the sun-warmed metal, all thought of getting up was forgotten.

A faint vibration tingled against his palm. Something was sending a tremor through the steel track, and as he held on, the sensation grew more intense, spreading to the ground on which he lay. Something was moving on the tracks.

Impossible, he thought. The train just passed.

There was no sign of another train coming from the west, and no tell-tale chugging of a locomotive, but the tremor was getting stronger.

He found his breath in that moment, just enough for a groan of dread as he looked over his shoulder, into the black hole of the tunnel, and saw movement. Something was coming… something big.