The Burning

Chain.

Everything that had led them here was part of a chain, a chain of events set in motion well over a hundred years ago. He was part of that chain, and he grabbed the hand of the squat man, then reached around and held Malcolm's hand. For a brief second, he worried that Malcolm might think he was gay- years of social conditioning didn't just disappear, even in a time of crisis-but then Malcolm grabbed the hand of the professor from Denver, who grabbed the housewife's hand behind him.

Dennis considered joining the chant, imitating the words being spoken all around him and echoing to the skies, but it did not feel right. Next to him, Malcolm started his own chant in Mandarin, something that sounded like a prayer to the ancestors, and Dennis followed suit, speaking in Cantonese, repeating the first thing occurring to him that sounded anything at all like the rhythm of the chant: an old nursery rhyme his mother had taught him as a small child. Behind them, the others began doing the same, chiming in with their own personal contributions.

It felt good to be doing this, but it didn't seem to have any real effect. On impulse, he glanced back and saw the end of the line. All of the living were attached, were connected, but . . . but something was wrong; something didn't look right.

The gap.

Yes. There was a gap at the end of the line between a long-haired young man and the train. A missing link in the chain. He was just standing there, right arm dangling uselessly at his side, while the passenger car stood less than a foot away.

The two needed to touch: the line of people and the train. He knew it instinctively, although the feeling was reinforced by that spirit in the sky. Along with the waves of anger and displeasure he sensed from the gigantic being came an understanding, a knowledge that these two opposing forces had to connect.

And it could be done only by someone Chinese.

There were a lot of factors at work here, a whole host of individual actions, links in a chain, that taken together constituted a unified movement, a surging riposte against the power of the past. He looked up at that face in the sky and felt like a game piece on a chessboard. The Native Americans had not conjured up that monstrous spirit, he realized. It had led them here just as it had him.

He let go of the short guy's hand and pulled Malcolm closer, placing the two men's hands together. Neither objected and neither stopped chanting, and indeed Dennis realized he himself was still repeating the nursery rhyme.

He dashed over to the long-haired young man, took the man's right hand in his left ...

Then shoved his own right hand against the side of the passenger car.

The results were immediate. What felt like a bolt of electricity passed through him, although whether it was going from the train to the people or from the people to the train he could not be sure. He knew only that the energy using him as a conduit was powerful, would no doubt, in other circumstances, fry him until he was nothing but a charred pile of ash.

The three other trains started rolling, backing up, trying to escape. If they had succeeded in moving any length of distance, they would have crashed through and broken some portion of the chain, but already they were dying, stalling, stopping. The closest lost its substance, lightening into a shadow, then faded into the surrounding night. The engine and passenger cars next to it melted like ice cream, the black mold that was this railroad's essence seeping into the rails and ties beneath it. The train made from bodies, the one he suspected was the true train, the father of all the others, got a little bit farther along its tracks, but the figures that made up its components were wailing in agony and gnashing their teeth, squirming about in obvious torment. Those who were the wheels went first, collapsing, falling sideways off the tracks, causing everyone above to disengage and revert to their normal shapes, hundreds of bodies raining about and sliding down the slight slope. They, too, were covered with mold, and the mold melted off them, oozing into the ground. Beneath the black fungus, the dead were little more than ragged corpses, and in a matter of seconds they came apart, as though it was the mold that had held them together individually as well as collectively. Suddenly bones were everywhere, and Dennis saw one skinny Native American man, grinning and chanting, kick a skull across the ground as though it were a soccer ball.

This all happened simultaneously. His own train stayed intact a little longer, perhaps because he was touching it-either drawing power from it or putting power into it-but finally it, too, succumbed, breaking into pieces as though the bolts that had held it together had all disappeared. The panel he'd been palming dissolved beneath his hand, turning into a powder that felt like crumbling dirt, and he wiped it on his jeans.

Other men were kicking bones now, and Dennis felt a small flash of anger. That wasn't right. He looked up, and the figure towering above them seemed more solid now, as though the demise of the trains had granted it strength. It grinned at him, and his anger faded. The face of the thing was still hideous and terrifying, but, damn it, its smile was infectious, and as creepy as it might seem to someone looking on, Dennis stared up at the spirit and grinned back.

As a park ranger, Henry had to be familiar with a host of Native American beliefs, particularly those held by the older lost cultures who had settled the Southwest and left their mark upon the land in the form of ruins, pueblos, drawings and carvings. But despite the rumors and suspicions concerning his own ethnicity, he had never really felt kinship with any of those beliefs.

He still didn't.

He was like a foreign visitor here, but he could not fail to recognize the power and efficacy of what had just happened. Coming together, holding hands, chanting the shamanistic words, had not only exorcised the shadows that had been plaguing them; it had somehow made the trains either disappear or fall apart. There was no doubt in his mind that, given more time, those locomotives would have drained dry every man here and gone on to kill who knew how many others over who knew how many years, the Chinese dead cutting a broad swath across the land in their quest for vengeance. Would white America even have known how to handle such a scenario? Would police and other law enforcement agencies have been able to figure out that there was something supernatural afoot, or would they have doggedly continued looking at everything in a literal fashion, refusing to see associations, assuming all of the deaths were random and unconnected? It was impossible to tell, but it was a moot point anyway. The trains had not progressed to the next level.

They'd been sent back to hell or wherever it was they belonged.

Henry looked down. The tracks were glowing beneath his feet, glowing, not white, yellow, blue, green or any of the other colors associated with luminescence, but black, the gray steel rails radiating a jet darker than obsidian and somehow sharper than any hue was meant to be. He wondered if, from above, the tracks formed some sort of pattern. He looked up.

And saw a face.

It was a terrible visage that looked down upon the scene below it with a mixture of approval and disgust.

The spirit of the land, he thought instantly, but it was such a stupid cliche that he pushed it out of his mind.

His shoe felt hot, as though the section of railroad tie touching it were made of lava, and he jumped aside, finding sandy ground, trying not to touch any of the tracks. Other men were hotfooting it, too, some of them crying out in pain.

The tracks disappeared the same way they'd come in, sinking back into the ground; only this time, Henry noticed, they seemed to disintegrate as they submerged, not going under the dirt but becoming part of it, as though they had been conjured forth from native elements and were reverting to their natural state.

Henry looked up again at the face in the sky and saw that it was more than just a face. There was a body as well, although its components were parts of the surrounding landscape, which made it difficult to see. It was a creature of some sort. A monster, he wanted to say, but that was not right. This was something to which he felt connected, and he found himself thinking of all of those spirits and desert gods the old tribes had worshipped and to whom they had often appealed for assistance. He'd always assumed such stories were the way a primitive people would explain natural phenomena they did not understand, but for the first time he found himself wondering if there were not more things under heaven and earth . . .

Wes clapped him on the shoulder, grinned at him. "It's over, man. I think that's it."

"I think so, too," Henry said. He pointed up at the sky, intending to show Wes the creature towering above them, to ask whether he knew what it was, whether it was some sort of native deity or earth spirit that had been conjured by their chanting. He had the feeling that it was something else entirely, that they had not conjured it but rather that it had brought them to this place. "What do you think-?" he began. But the figure was gone.

By the time Rossiter arrived, it was ending. He saw only the thing in the sky and the black tracks sinking into the ground and those nearly made him turn tail and run like a pussy. He was thankful to have missed the action this time, and he could tell from the body language of the agents surrounding him that they felt the same. They stood on the hillock next to their cars, and tried to make sense of the chaos in front of them. No one said a word, and Rossiter realized that the other men were afraid to do so. They were silent out of deference. He was the expert here, he was the boss, and the knowledge made him stand taller.

He looked out at the tremendous gathering, doing his level best not to glance upward and see that moonlit monster face. It was impossible to judge the size of the crowd in the darkness, but there was a sea of bodies out there. It looked like one of those marches on Washington. Many of the men seemed to have been holding hands, and that seemed odd. Was there some sort of religious element here?

He didn't know, but he'd find out soon enough.

Rossiter breathed deeply, thought he smelled smoke beneath the dust. And mildew.

What the hell was Saldana doing? he wondered. The other agent hadn't checked in at the appointed time, and that had already been-Rossiter consulted his watch-a half hour ago. He wanted to believe that it was because the man had forgotten, a lapse for which Rossiter would happily chew out his ass, but until that point, Saldana had been as regular as clockwork.

Something had happened in Bear Flats.

Maybe it had and maybe it hadn't. He didn't want to think about that right now. All he knew at this moment was that out here at Promontory Point it was finished. And it looked like the good guys had won.

His mind was already concocting cover stories, bland explanations that would mollify the press and satisfy the public. A train crash, he was thinking. An accident involving two locomotives. Once he and his men conducted a few queries, took some photos and video and got a handle on what had happened, he would report back to Horn and the president.

He smiled to himself.

This time he wouldn't be pushed back into the closet.

This time he would get his promotion.

Epilogue

Canyonlands National Park, Utah

The seasons changed, the crowds returned, and it was easy to forget sometimes that any of it had ever happened.

Henry gave ranger talks, guided visitors to some of the more popular sites, narrated occasional evening slide shows in the campground, caught up on paperwork in the back office of the visitors' center. In short, he went back to his normal life.

For the most part.

But the nights were long, and on cold late evenings he sometimes found himself glancing nervously around his cabin, unnerved by the number of shadows gathered in the corners of the primitive space, half expecting one of them to move. And whenever he looked west, past Ray's cabin, and remembered the train they had seen there, it was as if it had happened just yesterday. The feelings returned full force, and he was engulfed by a fear so profound that he could not stop shaking.

Raul and Stuart were gone. Raul had transferred to Bandolier, while Stuart had quit the park service entirely. Healey had taken an early retirement, and while Henry couldn't say he was sad to see the supervisor go, he had to admit that he missed the freedom | he'd had under the man. The new guy was far more efficient and much better qualified, but he was also a stickler for procedure and kept a far tighter rein on the rangers than they were used to. Healey had always acted like a hard-ass, but he was so incompetent that his orders could be safely ignored. Not so with the new guy. But maybe time would change that.

If he'd expected to become more spiritual after what he'd experienced-or even more Indian-well, that hadn't happened. He was too old and set in his ways, Henry supposed. He was what he was, and events that no doubt would have been life altering had he been twenty or thirty years younger now left him battered and bruised but essentially unchanged.

Life went on.

In February, before the start of the spring rush, when one could travel for days through the park without encountering another soul even on the most popular roads and trails, Henry found himself alone in a secluded canyon while patrolling the northeast quadrant. A box canyon. It bore no resemblance really to the canyon with the petroglyphs where he'd encountered the twins, but he stopped his Jeep nevertheless and got out, searching the rock walls and the narrowing expanse of

sand before him. It was late afternoon, the sky hidden behind shifting layers of dark overlapping clouds, small traces of sunlight penetrating periodically from the west. He hadn't expected to find anything, but on the cliff face to the side of the Jeep, he saw what looked like the shadow of a voluptuous woman. It was a random confluende of shapes that together happened to resemble a persons and he could even spot the individual sources that contributed to the head, the breasts, the legs, but he pulled his pants down anyway and tried to masturbate.

He stroked slow, then fast, but it wasn't happening. He couldn't get even the slightest bit hard, and after a minute or two, he began to feel ridiculous.

He pulled his pants back up.

It really was over.

After work, he headed into Moab, to the Boy Howdy. Ector was supposed to meet him at the bar, but his friend hadn't shown up yet, so Henry ordered a beer and staked out a small table along the east wall. At the end of the counter next to him, two men, one overweight, one underweight, both wearing painter's overalls, were talking loudly enough to be heard over the television.

"I was at that Indian powwow a few months back," the fat guy said. "You know the one up at Promontory Point that was all over the news?"

"Really? Did you see the accident?"

"Front-row seats," the man bragged. "Those trains came at each other like two bulls out for blood. People were tryin' to get out of the way, but it was a mob scene. Reporters were gettin' trampled. Indians were runnin' in all directions, tryin' to get away from the tracks. ..."

Ector arrived, squinting into the dimness.

Henry waved him over.

"Yeah," the man said, "it was like those engineers had it in for each other. They just kept acceleratin' until-bam!-the trains hit. Shit was flyin' every which way. ..."

Henry couldn't help smiling to himself.

Ector walked up, slapped a hand on the table. "Hey."

"Hey, yourself," Henry replied.

"... and those two trains were ..."

He was still smiling. "Have a seat," he said. "Have a beer."

Seal Beach, California

Dennis stood at the end of the pier, looking not out at the ocean but back toward the shore and the solid row of contiguous houses that faced the beach. Within the past week, dump trucks, bulldozers and a cadre of uniformed men from the Army Corps of Engineers had built a sand berm in front of the houses in order to protect them from the waves of winter storms, but today's weather was nice, and mothers with their preschool children were walking, running and playing atop the giant hill of sand. Inland a few blocks, his mother and sister were, against his wishes, cleaning his apartment. They were out here only for a short vacation, in order to see for themselves where and how he was living, but Cathy had already told him she wanted to move out West, and he knew that with both of her children living here, his mother would follow.

As he had every day since his arrival, Dennis marveled at California's amazing weather. In Pennsylvania right now, the temperature was well below freezing and dirty snowdrifts were piled high along the roads like walls. Here it might as well be summer. On both sides of the pier, young men in wet suits were waiting on surfboards for waves to catch, and on the beach several couples as well as one very hot teenage girl were lying on blankets, catching some rays, while a tourist family ate lunch out of a picnic basket. Two small children ran up and down the shoreline, chasing seagulls and screaming.

It was a world away from Pennsylvania and a universe away from what he now thought of as his road trip through hell.

Unlike the other people at Promontory Point, he and his fellow passengers had been stranded by the destruction of the trains, left on that plain in Utah with no transportation and no way to return to their starting locations. His own car was way back in Milner, Wyoming, and if it hadn't been for a Sioux man with an old Pacer heading back home to Montana who offered him a ride, he had no idea what he would have done.

They hadn't spoken on the return trip, he and the Sioux man. There might have been a couple of exchanged sentences along the lines of "Let's get something to eat" or "I'll drive if you're getting tired," but for the most part there were hours and hours of silence as they drove north through plains and past mountains. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence, but it wasn't exactly comfortable either, and to Dennis the trip seemed very, very long.

He arrived in Milner midmorning, after a long nap, and he was grateful for that. He didn't want to see Carl Fong or his buddies, wanted only to escape cleanly and quietly, and he settled his bill at the motel, packed his stuff, got in his car and drove away, heading toward the coast.

He had a lot of time to think on the road.

But he avoided that.

Dennis turned, looked out at the ocean. A lone sailboat was heading toward Long Beach, and beyond that, silhouetted by a thin layer of white smog, he could see the blocky shape of a cargo ship waiting to dock at the port. A few days ago, there'd been a story on the news about illegal Chinese immigrants who'd been smuggled in the hold of one of these cargo ships but captured upon inspection. Although there wasn't as much resentment toward Asian illegals as there seemed to be toward those from Mexico-who weren't even granted the status of human but were referred to as aliens-darker races still seemed to provoke the ire of white America. There never seemed to be much of an outcry against immigrants from Caucasian countries.

He thought of that professor from Denver and the housewife from Oregon who had believed so strongly that retribution was necessary, violence justified, against the descendants of those who had persecuted their people. It was an insane and untenable position, the type of attitude that had led to wars and instances of ethnic strife throughout the world.

And yet ...

And yet he could see their point.

He thought of the looting and lawlessness that inevitably followed large-scale disasters. The veneer of civilization was thin. Anger and violence were always near the surface, even in seemingly peaceful rational individuals.

He recalled that giant... thing ... he'd seen towering over the plain.

Sometimes it was only outside intervention that saved people from themselves.

'"Scuse me." A dark squat man carrying a fishing pole, a tackle box and a bucket pushed past him to stake out a spot by the pier's railing.

Dennis started walking slowly back toward shore, enjoying the feel of the offshore breeze against his face. He looked up at the clock tower on top of the police substation. It was getting close to lunch. Already he could smell Mexican food from Taco Surf, and as he drew closer the scent of baked goods came to him from the bakery.

Maybe he'd take his mother and sister out to lunch. His mom moaned and complained if they ate anything other than Chinese food, but this was his chance to try and broaden her horizons.

From somewhere far off came the sound of a train whistle, and Dennis stopped in his tracks, heart pounding, the hairs bristling on the back of his neck. For a moment, he was frozen, his breath caught in his throat, his eyes wide with fear. But then he forced himself to exhale, forced his eyes to blink, forced his feet to walk forward, and within a few seconds he was back to normal. Glancing up at the slightly smog-tinged sky, he took a deep breath. Once again, he thought of the-spirit-that he'd seen looming over Promontory Point. What had really happened there? What exactly had they prevented? Was it all over for good?

Or were the professor and the housewife, along with other Chinese Americans throughout the country, resuming their blood rituals in hopes of once again raising the dead?

He didn't want to think about it.

And he wouldn't.

Dennis reached into his pocket, pulled out his cell phone and dialed the number of his apartment. After three rings, his sister answered, and he told her to stop whatever she was doing, grab their mother and meet him at Taco Surf in ten minutes.

"Is that Mexican food? You know Mom won't-"

"Hey, this is California."

He could almost hear his sister's smile over the phone. "And if we're both going to be living here, she'd better get used to it."

"Exactly." He gave her directions on how to reach the restaurant from his apartment.

"We'll be there," Cathy said.

Feeling happy, feeling good, Dennis closed the phone, put it in his pocket and strode off the pier onto the sidewalk. Instead of walking up the left side of Main Street to the restaurant, he started up the right side toward the liquor store.

He wanted to get a lottery ticket and a newspaper before his mother and sister arrived.

Bear Flats, California

It was not where she'd expected to be, not even where she was sure she wanted to be, but Jolene found herself working for the Bear Flats Police Department as an adjunct officer, a position created for her until she could find the time to undergo training, pass the test and become official. With her background, a career in law enforcement might have seemed a natural, but the truth was that she'd never considered such a move until Ned brought it up to her a week after the charred ruins of the Williams house had been razed. The police chief hired her, she supposed, because he knew that she could function well under extreme pressure. And because he needed her. There'd been one death and two defections, and the loss of even one person in a department this small had major repercussions. It was no more than the usual turnover, Ned tried to reassure everyone, but they all knew that wasn't the case.

The Williams place might have burned to the ground, but its influence lingered.

She needed the money and was happy to be employed. Leslie had offered to find her something to do at the restaurant, but that would have been a make-work pity position, and she would have accepted it only as a last resort. Her mother had said she and Skylar could remain at her place indefinitely-and the three of them had been getting along extremely well, particularly with the moratorium on drinking-but the quarters were still too close, the situation too stressful, and she needed to assert her independence and try to start a new life.

It was Ned's wife who'd found a place for her and Skylar to live. Lottie Tanner was in real estate, and though Jolene hadn't said anything to her, Ned must have, and she located a cabin for rent just down the road from Leslie's place. There was only one bedroom, but the cabin was furnished and the sofa in the living room folded out into a bed. Rent was cheap. It was not someplace where they could live permanently, but in the interim, while she decided what came next, they had a roof over their heads.

Even more important than her finding a place of their own, the divorce had become finalized.

It should have been messy, should have been complicated-she and Frank had a son together, after all-but Frank had been neither as intransigent nor as vindictive as she'd expected him to be, and they'd been able to do it all through lawyers, without meeting face-to-face. He'd even agreed to pay child support and waive all visitation rights, although this was not something she'd shared with Skylar. Jolene suspected he had someone else on the line already, and in a way she was glad. It took his focus off them, left them free to move on.

The truth was, Jolene hadn't discussed much of anything with Skylar since ... since everything had happened. Her son had always been somewhat close-mouthed and reserved, keeping his emotions to himself, but she'd prided herself on the way she shared everything with him, kept him in the loop, maintained a close relationship despite the circumstances of their lives and his natural disposition. In the wake of their experience at the Williams house, however, she'd found it easier to avoid certain subjects, to not talk about what they really should talk about. She felt guilty about that, but she still couldn't bring herself to break the pattern.

Three o'clock rolled around. Jolene got off work, picked up Skylar at school, and the two of them stopped by her mother's for a moment to say hi and pick up some hamburger casserole for dinner before heading home. Inside, the cabin was quiet, too quiet, and Jolene quickly turned on the

television so they'd have some background noise.

Skylar shut it off.

She looked at him in surprise.

"Mom ..." He started to say something, then changed his mind, looked down at the floor.

"What is it?" she prodded gently.

"It's ... I just ..." He shook his head.

Jolene walked over, put a hand on his shoulder. "Tell me."

Skylar looked up at her. "Are we going to stay here?" he asked. "Are we going to live here for good?"

Jolene had not made a decision about that, although she realized almost instantly that the decision should not be hers alone. These were important years for Skylar, and after all that he'd endured, he deserved to know what they were going to do, where they were going to live. He needed some stability in his life. "Do you ... ?" she began, but in his eyes she already saw the answer to the question she was about to ask. She thought about her mother and Leslie and her job and Skylar's school, where he'd already made a little friend. "Yes," she told him, meeting his gaze. "We are."

He hugged her tight, and she could tell from the way he hung on, pressing his face into her side, that he was crying. "Good," he said, and beneath the tears she heard gratitude. "Good."

Flagstaff, Arizona

What surprised Angela most was that she didn't go back home.

Despite everything that had happened, despite all that she'd gone through, all the horror she'd seen, she didn't go running back to Mommy and Daddy, didn't retreat into the safety of the familiar and the bosom of her family. She stayed and toughed it out.

Like an adult.

Although she'd decided to remain and finish out the semester, after that, anything was possible. She could stay; she could return home; she could transfer somewhere else. For now, though, the discipline and stability were necessary for her to work through all that she'd experienced.

Angela sat in the quad, watching students pass by. She and Derek both had a free period right now, but neither of them had made an effort to meet up with each other. It was an anniversary of sorts, two months since the night at Promontory Point, but it was not something that either of them felt like celebrating or even talking about.

She was surprised that the two of them hadn't become an item. In movies and books, males and females thrown together under traumatic circumstances invariably became lovers, although it was impossible to say how long those liaisons lasted after the credits rolled or the book covers closed. In the back of her mind, she'd half expected that to happen to them. Conditioning, she supposed. But instead the opposite seemed to have occurred. After it was all over and done, the intimacy they'd shared seemed to pull them apart rather than draw them together. They were awkward with each other now, both seemingly embarrassed by the sides of themselves they'd exposed, and while neither of them had dropped Dr. Welkes' class, they made no effort to sit together.

Derek definitely bore the brunt of the fallout. Dealing with what had happened was tough on her, but he'd lost his mother and his brother. She'd endured nothing compared with that. He was relying more on his old friends than her for support, Angela knew, and as guilty as it made her feel, she was grateful for that. She wasn't ready to be sucked into that emotional hurricane right now, and she didn't think she was strong enough herself to be someone else's rock.

Who knew, though? In time ...

For now she was content to attend classes, study and continue on with the responsibilities of being a full-time student.

Not that there weren't scars.

Occasionally, she found herself glancing around at the other young men and women in her classes, in the library, in the student union, at the pub, wondering if they had been in the crowd cheering the lynching of Edna Wong. She tried to tell herself that even if they had, it was the mold that had made them do that, that had affected their behavior. But the ethos of personal responsibility was too strong within her, and it was impossible for her to completely absolve those who had murdered Edna.

Which was one reason why she thought she might transfer to another college next semester.

Maybe somewhere in New Mexico.

She liked the Southwest.

Her cell phone rang, and Angela answered it. "Hello?"

It was her mother. She was grateful to hear her mom's voice, and it felt relaxing and comforting to speak Spanish, despite the looks of disapproval it engendered on the faces of some of the passersby. They talked for a while, about nothing really; then her mom said she had to make lunch, and hung up.

Angela put the phone back in her purse and looked up. The campus seemed to be getting foggy. Buildings on the opposite end of the quad were light and getting lighter, bulky outlines behind a sheer wall of white.

It wasn't fog. It was snow.

She still was not used to seeing snow fall-in Southern California, snow was something that happened up in the mountains, not on the ground-and as the flakes became larger and more obvious, as the under-dressed students around her began hurrying toward their indoor destinations, she stood there smiling up at the sky, the snow hitting her face and melting against the warmth of her skin.

She opened her mouth, ate a few snowflakes, then walked slowly toward her next class, looking around her at the pale silhouettes of the hulking NAU buildings, marveling at their beauty.

Maybe she wouldn't transfer to another school.

Maybe, she thought, she would stay.

THE END