The Haunted Forest Tour

CHAPTER FOUR

Tommy Walker knew a fake smile when he saw one, even when it was gloomy and kind of hard to see. He liked Barbara, the lady talking to them in the front of the tram, though her voice hurt his ears a little, but he could tell that she was really upset. She walked toward the front of the tram as the things outside slithered and crawled over the exterior.

A few of the people around Tommy looked at the woman with wide, fearful eyes. For his part, he sat perfectly still and chewed on his bottom lip. Mommy and Daddy didn’t like it when he made a fuss. They weren’t here with him, because they were going through a d-i-v-o-r-c-e, but his Uncle Perry and Aunt Jean were still being pretty calm, so he hoped this meant that the monsters weren’t going to get him.

Without saying a word, Uncle Perry, who sat one row ahead, in front of Aunt Jean, reached into his pocket and took out his cell phone. They’d taken away most of the cell phones before the tour began, but Uncle Perry had shown that his didn’t have a camera on it.

Aunt Jean reached across the aisle and patted Tommy’s knee. “It’s okay, Big Tom. They’re just trying to add to the scares.” Aunt Jean was ten years younger than his mommy, and her hair was red instead of brown, but they looked enough alike that he found the contact comforting.

Tommy was the youngest person on the Haunted Forest Tour, and his eyes were wide as he stared out the window. Something was staring back at him. He couldn’t see it all that clearly with the lights off, but he could make out the hard, bony ridges around its burning green eyes and the long segmented body, held up by a series of skeletal arms that ended in hooked claws, as it scrambled over the outside and looked first at him and then at Aunt Jean.

Uncle Perry was punching numbers on his cell phone, mumbling to himself. Maybe Aunt Jean thought they were all adding scares to the tour—which he had to admit was already plenty scary—just for fun, but Uncle Perry was breathing like he’d been running for a long time and couldn’t get enough air.

In front of them, a fat man tugged at his tie, pulling it loose and staring out the window as something that looked like it was made of black smoke pressed against the glass and bared wickedly sharp teeth. His wide, flabby fingers grabbed at the edge of Barbara’s khakis as she walked past. “Are you sure those things can’t get inside here? Because I gotta tell ya, that thing looks hungry!”

Barbara looked first at the fat man and then back at Tommy. She was chewing on her bottom lip too, but she suddenly smiled when she looked at the fat man and nodded her head. “Absolutely. It’s not possible for anything to get inside one of the tram cars.” Her smile still didn’t look right. It looked like Mommy’s smile whenever she said everything was fine between her and Daddy. It looked more like a wish than the truth. “Now, just to be on the safe side, I’m going to talk to the driver and we’re going to try to get hold of the main office to see if they know what the delay is.” Barbara flashed another smile at Tommy and pushed forward.

The snakey-boney-bug thing had slithered off the window and moved on, but there were other things behind it. Something with very thick, powerfully built arms and what looked like three eyes moved past in the trees, but it didn’t come any closer. Tommy was glad, because the thing was taller than the tram.

“Son of a whore!” Uncle Perry closed his cell phone and muttered under his breath as several people looked his way.

“What is it?” Aunt Jean gave him a look that said there’s a little kid here, behave yourself—an expression that Tommy saw a lot whenever his parents were talking in whispers.

“I can’t get any reception on this thing.”

“Well, we’re in a thick forest, honey. I’d be surprised if you could.”

“The lady at the store said I should get reception anywhere.”

“Perry, it’s not a top-of-the-line phone. It doesn’t even have a camera.”

Behind Tommy, a brown-haired girl around twelve years old let out a piercing shriek as something came lumbering toward the tram car. It had gray skin that fell in thick folds from its neck and shoulders, and if it had a face at all, Tommy couldn’t see it. Where the face should have been there was just a warty lump of more gray skin with an upside down Y-shape. As he looked, the slit on the face opened up and revealed row after row of teeth and a purplish tongue that dripped thick, foamy spittle.

The open mouth clamped down on the tram and the window near the girl with a loud rude noise. The girl screamed again and jumped from her seat with both of her hands over her mouth to stop any more screams from getting out. The man across the aisle from her reached over and pulled her into his lap. “Calm down, Carrie. It’s fine. We’re going to be just fine.” He was a big man, beefy with short brown hair. His voice was deep and cheerful as he pulled his daughter closer. Tommy smiled at the sight of him, because he looked large enough to be Superman.

Neal Whistler looked out the window, and a snake woman looked back. She wasn’t really a woman, per se, but she had breasts and she had a nice upper body of a woman, if you looked past the scales. From the navel down her body got scalier and tapered off into a powerfully thick snake body that was coiled below her as she gazed at him.

She had black eyes, just like the garter snake he’d kept as a pet for three weeks before his mom found it and had a fit. That had been messy.

The snake girl leaned in closer and smiled at him with full, sensuous, and slightly green lips. He smiled back, a little nervously. At thirty-four years of age, Neal was still a virgin. He hadn’t even tried dating a girl since the one time he’d built up the courage to ask Shaileen Stillers to the prom and she’d laughed in his face in the middle of the cafeteria. He’d been telling himself for years that the problems were glandular, but that was a lie and he’d finally accepted the simple fact that he was fat. Not a little large, not pleasantly plump or big boned, but fat.

It was an ugly truth, but the fifty-four-inch waistline on his pants put an end to his arguments. He’d been forcing himself into pants with a forty-eight-inch waistline for a long time, because the weight around his waist was malleable, but after last week, when he’d blown out the backside of his slacks while trying to sit down at his office cubicle, he’d finally had to accept that some things are inevitable.

Getting new clothes always depressed him but not as much as the idea of dieting. As he was doing both next week, this was his little motivational trip. Today he ate, watched monsters and enjoyed himself. Monday bright and early, it was time to become a better man, even if it killed him.

The snake woman moved closer to the glass, a Mona Lisa smile on her face. She wasn’t human, no two ways about that, but she was exotic and he stared, fascinated by her.

Right up until the time she opened her mouth and bared the four-inch fangs that slid out from her upper and lower jaws. The fact that her mouth opened wide enough to swallow his head was a little unsettling, too.

Still, he thought, she’s cute.

“Stupid piece of shit.”

Perry gave up and shut off his phone. Back in the car, he had a top of the line, state-of-the-art satellite phone, set up to receive a signal anywhere in the world. He’d paid more than most of the people he knew growing up made in a fucking year. But he’d left it behind, because—oh no!—they didn’t dare have camera phones in their precious fucking forest. So instead he’d brought this crap phone, that the bitch clerk had promised him would work. The unemployed bitch clerk, after he returned home.

He didn’t even want to be here. He had things to do, but no, Jean had to watch her little nephew, because her stuck-up sister couldn’t keep her husband happy anymore. And who had to pay for it? Perry, of course. He had the money, it wasn’t a cost thing, it was a matter of the inconvenience.

Perry didn’t want kids, didn’t like kids, didn’t much care if there were kids anywhere around him. It was just the way he lived. Nothing personal against Tommy—who was a good kid as kids went—but he could have been back at the office or working on the publicity stills for the next movie. He couldn’t even enjoy himself on what was supposed to be the coolest tourist attraction ever because he needed to get a few more calls in before he could relax. Instead, they were stuck in the fucking woods.

Tommy looked over his way with wide eyes, and Perry made himself smile. The kid was okay. A pain in the ass, but as long as they had him around now and then, at least Jeanie was shutting up about having kids of their own someday. Having kids would have ruined all the sweet stuff he had going on the side, because you never, ever wanted to risk a family with kids in it. Cheating on Jean was kind of shitty, but cheating on her after they had kids? That was like being a Nazi or something.

Which reminded him, it was time for his monthly check-up. No need to take risks on getting herpes or something worse.

Movement from the corner of his eye caught his attention just in time to let him see a lizard man flick its tongue in his direction. Okay, a nine-foot-tall lizard man, with a dark blue tongue.

Perry opened his phone again and prayed for a signal.

Up at the front of the tram, Tommy watched Barbara as she spoke to the driver. The driver tried talking into a radio and waited for answers that didn’t come. He and Barbara whispered to each other, and neither of them would look back into the car behind them.

In the seat directly behind the driver’s, an old man dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt looked out the window and smiled, showing discolored teeth as he watched the things that kept creeping closer in. A baseball cap covered the top of his head. His skin was pasty white and his hands trembled, but he looked like he was happy while almost everyone else was nervous. Tommy kept staring at him, glad to see somebody smiling in the darkness.

Something wet and black oozed across the window near Aunt Jean’s head and caught his attention for a moment. Whatever it was, it left a dull red smear on the glass as it slipped past.

Eddie Turner looked at Barbara and sighed as he set down the radio. “Nothing. There’s got to be some major power failure in the tram. I can’t even get a signal on the radio. And the handheld is battery operated. I should be able to get through on that if nothing else.”

“Jesus, Eddie, what are we going to do if we can’t get contact?” She tried not to sound nervous. There had never been an incident of something getting inside the tram on one of her or anybody else’s watches, not even the ghosts. Though they’d suffered the occasional technical glitch, nothing like this had ever happened. The Haunted Forest Tour was one hundred percent safe.

Barbara loved her job. The benefits rocked her world and the pay was good enough to cover her college bills, but she had to admit that some of the things she’d seen along the way were disturbing enough to guarantee her nightmares from time to time. The first time she’d seen a giant spider—not an original name, but accurate enough, even if the thing did have ten legs and an unsettlingly human face—she’d almost peed her pants.

The idea of the tram being stuck without power was not at all comforting. “Wait, Eddie, please tell me there’s some power left on this thing.”

“I would, but I try not to lie to people I’m not dating.”

“No power at all?” Her heart sped up a bit inside of her chest.

“None.”

“So the electromagnet is fried, too?”

“As far as I know. I flipped the switch, so I guess in theory it could be working.” Eddie looked a little worried, but he was holding it in pretty well. “The only good thing is I haven’t seen anything big enough to be a real threat so far.”

“Listen, Eddie, we can’t sit out here until night, and if we do, we need to be armed.”

“I think it’s way too early to worry about that, sweetie.” Eddie chuckled and Barbara gritted her teeth. She hated being called “sweetie” by him. They were friends but sometimes she couldn’t decide if the older man was trying to flirt with her or adopt her. Either way, it was a little creepy and a lot annoying. Still, she held back from making any comments. “It’s gotta be just a freak power failure. We’ll be running again any second now.”

“Well, to be safe, we should look into opening the weapon chest.”

“Are you kidding me? Jeez, you’d think this was your virgin voyage. Relax, sweetie. If it comes down to that, we’ll open it, but I don’t think that’s anywhere close to necessary yet.” He looked at the people in the seats behind them. “The last thing we want to do is start these folks panicking, and if they do start panicking, the last thing we want is for them to be packing heat.”

“Yeah? The last thing I want is to end up as dinner for something with eight mouths.” She had to keep herself from yelling. Eddie was a nice enough guy, but sometimes he was condescending as all hell and right now she wasn’t much in the mood to be talked down to.

“Don’t worry your pretty head, Barbara. If it starts getting ugly, I’ll protect you. There’s lots of weird stuff out there, but they’re harmless. How many workers died clearing out trees and laying out those tracks? Zero. How many got injured? Three. How many of those were injured because of monsters? Zero. I know you’re paranoid about getting eaten, but people in this forest don’t get et. Just doesn’t happen. Go take a bong hit or something to calm yourself down, and let me do my job.”

“You don’t have a job right now. You can’t drive.”

“Go away, sweetie.”

Before she could tell him off, the tram rocked harshly and a few of the passengers let out gasps of surprise. Something big had just bumped into them, and big in this case meant hefty enough to rock the four-ton vehicle.

“Okay,” said Eddie. “Electromagnet definitely not working.”

Eddie let out a gasp as something covered the entire windshield. Whatever it was, it seemed intent on getting inside. Thick claws scraped across the windshield and the tram shook a second time.

The passengers were definitely starting to panic. Barbara looked back to where the people who trusted her to maintain order were all staring out of the windows and either recoiling or pointing.

A lot of creatures were moving in for a closer look.

Everyone around them talked in whispers, the same sort you expected in a church. Brad Landry barely noticed. He was too fascinated by the things outside of the tram. Monsters, demons, and God alone knew what else. Brad had his face inches from the glass and stared out at the things in the woods. Some of the things stared back.

A creature with four arms and warty skin looked right at Tina and licked its chops. Definitely an image she could do without. Still, it was almost worth the nightmares to see Brad so happy.

He worked so hard. Both of them did, but with Brad it was almost an obsession. He wanted them to have the American Dream, and he’d get it for them if it killed him. So it was especially nice to see him having a good time, even if that meant she had to deal with things like the ghost that was shifting and glowing as it moved past the window.

Oh yes, this was going on her long list of places to avoid in the future. Brad was the one that liked horror movies and comic books. He was still a big kid in a lot of ways, but only after he’d finished his duties as The Man Of The House. It wasn’t unusual for him to spend ten hours at work, come home and do the monthly bills, and then settle back on the sofa with her to watch one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. She was okay with those, because even with all the blood, the plots were thin enough to see through.

Brad looked back over his shoulder and pointed at something moving in the distance. She didn’t know what it was, but it pushed a tree hard enough to make it sway. Giving it a little thought, Tina decided she was perfectly fine never actually seeing whatever was large enough to knock around a seventy-foot oak tree.

“Did you see that, honey?” Brad’s voice quivered with excitement.

“Are we supposed to be waiting this long to move forward? What’s taking so long, Brad?”

Brad must have heard the worry in her voice. He smiled and leaned closer, his thickly muscled arm moving around both of her shoulders as he grinned. “Don’t worry. I’m betting you they set this up for the extra scares. Remember, this is the Halloween special, right?”

And just like that, some of the tension left her body. Her shoulders relaxed and her chest stopped feeling like it was going to collapse on itself.

“I never even thought about that.”

“Trust me.” He smiled and nodded knowingly. “If I was the one running this show, that’s exactly what I would be doing. Five minutes from now, we’re on the way and moving again.”

Tina snuggled in closer to her husband of five years and closed her eyes for the moment. Let him have his fun with the weird things lurking outside. She’d had enough. It was better just to think about being back home, where she would be safe and sound.

He heard the tour guide and the driver talking, of course. He was directly behind them and despite their best efforts to be quiet, Lee Burgundy had made it a point to be in the right place to hear the important conversations that people weren’t supposed to hear. He’d had a lot of practice at eavesdropping in his sixty-three years on this planet. It came with the territory and he doubted he could stop if he was suddenly struck deaf.

For the last thirty-five years he’d worked as a debunker, writing under the name Alexis Gander, and his list of fraudulent showmen was almost as large as his bank account. He’d proved hundreds of psychics as grandiose fakes over the years, and if he had a dollar for every “miracle” he’d shown to be nothing more than a clever hoax, he’d have eight hundred and seventy-nine dollars. Fortunately, he had a lot more than a dollar for each one.

For the first time in his life, Lee doubted he’d be able to disprove a claim. Either the Haunted Forest Tour was real, or the special effects being used far exceeded the best he’d seen come out of Hollywood. He’d been on the tour before, of course. First in line when it opened a year ago. It didn’t make him a believer. Obviously, the sudden existence of a five-mile forest in the middle of the desert was extremely bizarre, and the creatures didn’t immediately strike him as fake. But Lee followed a mindset of “total fabricated crap until proven otherwise,” and he hadn’t been entirely convinced that the Haunted Forest was not a mega-budget Disney-funded undertaking.

He didn’t write about it, though. Honestly, the Haunted Forest was a little too big of an endeavor for him at this stage of his life. Too much effort to debunk. He’d gone on the tour, been impressed but not convinced beyond any reasonable doubt of its authenticity, and moved on to more manageable targets.

Hearing the only two employees talking only proved that they believed this was all real. The thing with the cat eyes staring through his window was certainly convincing, but again, total fabricated crap until proven otherwise. The beast had a thick mane of fur around its feline face, and when it opened its mouth to yawn he got a chance to count the rows of teeth with decidedly sharp points. It moved closer, and he watched, quietly horrified and fascinated, as the monster’s six legs moved forward with unsettling symmetry.

There were more things behind it and the tour guide’s words echoed in the back of his head as he tried to comprehend everything he was seeing. I guarantee that you’ll see things you never imagined.

He had a good imagination, but damn, this was well beyond his wildest hopes.

Despite a long career of revealing the frauds for what they were, he’d longed to see something real. His grandmother had told him fairy tales when he was growing up, and he’d been searching for his entire adult life to find something that could come close to the thrills she’d given him as a child.

A shadowy figure moved closer to the window he was staring out as the six-legged cat-thing jumped onto the roof of the tram. A tattered brown cloak wrapped around the too-thin form and where the feet should have been, he saw what looked like a hundred snake tails writhing in unison to move it forward. A small constellation of glowing lights moved within the hood of the thing’s cloak, and after a second he realized the flecks of luminescence were the eyes of the nightmare looking back at him. It moved closer still and its breath cast a pall of frost across the shatterproof surface.

“What the hell kind of thing is that?” He spoke softly, to himself, and almost jumped when he had an answer from the tour guide.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered one of those before.” Her voice was forced into a cheerful tone that lacked all sincerity. Bless her heart; he could only imagine how she must feel being stuck in her position.

“How’d it get a cloak?” he asked.

“We’ve actually seen the occasional humanoid creature wearing articles of clothing,” said Barbara. “Never anything like a cloak before, but remember, the forest sprouted up on top of an existing town, so we think the creatures sometimes find items that were left behind.”

“That makes sense. So I get to name it, right?”

“Well, absolutely!” She smiled brightly, apparently happy to handle something that wasn’t part of the crisis. “Did you have a name in mind?”

As Lee watched, a small, humanoid creature with wings got too close to the hooded monster, and the head turned quickly. What looked like at least seven black tongues snapped out of the cowl and wrapped around the delicate-looking fairy. Each tongue latched on firmly and the poor thing was torn to shreds, then pulled back into the depths of the covering.

“Oh my.” He swallowed the dust that seemed to have built up in his throat and nodded his head. “Yes, let’s call that one a Proof Demon, shall we?”

“A Proof Demon?”

“Yes. I don’t believe in the supernatural, but this is as close to proof as I’ll ever get.”

Barbara chuckled. “Proof Demon it is.”

“Do you suppose it’s going to be much longer?”

“Before we get the power back? No, I’m sure it will be back any moment now. There’s another tram scheduled to show up soon and even if the power failure continues here, they’ll be able to radio back for assistance. This is going to be a busy day for the Haunted Forest Tour, and there are contingency plans for situations just like this.”

“Really?” He lowered his voice. “Like the weapons cache you have stored onboard?”

“Well, we can’t be too careful, can we?” She smiled nervously. “As a matter of fact, in a worst case scenario we’d distribute the weapons, but of course that would be a last resort.”

They both flinched as the tram rocked slightly again and something heavy walked across the roof above them. “Sooner might be better at this point,” said Lee. “It’s been a while, but when I was younger I was quite the marksman.”

“Right. I think I’m going to ask a few people as quietly as I can if they’d like to volunteer. If you’d like, I’ll introduce you to Eddie up front so he knows who to hand the weapons to. In a worst case scenario. Which of course we don’t anticipate.”

Lee nodded and slowly stood up. Outside of his window, the Proof Demon let out a wet, croaking noise that rose in octaves and was loud enough to shake the shatterproof glass. Barbara followed him and made the proper introductions.

“Do you think we’ll need them?” Lee asked Eddie, who was sweating profusely even though he was apparently trying to project a calm demeanor.

“I doubt it, but I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve never seen this many critters around the tram before. I mean, nothing even close. People on the tour don’t get ripped off, that’s for sure, but the forest things never, ever, ever gather around the tram like this, not at any of the stops. This is insane.”

“I have to tell you, I wasn’t expecting to see anything like this when I booked the tour.”

Eddie nodded solemnly. “Believe me, I completely understand you people being scared shitless.”

Lee appreciated the empathy but still wished they were willing to pass out the firearms instead of waiting.

Christopher was starting to wonder if he’d ever discover what fate awaited him Monday at work. He looked at his mom, who was still peering out the window with fascination. Either she was still having a good time or she was a better actress than anyone ever suspected. The girl a couple of seats behind him had recovered from her perfectly understandable panic attack and was now quietly clinging to her father.

Just past his mother, several sets of eyes stared back, watching every movement that she made; in front of him the little boy and his mom were quiet, both looking at the roof as something heavy paced repeatedly, scraping claws across the top of the tram. The tour guide was leaning over and whispering to a young man two seats ahead of him. Finally, Barbara pointed to the front of the tram and the man nodded his head before getting up and walking past her, shuffling his feet.

Christopher did everything he could to avoid looking out of his own window, because if he kept seeing these nightmarish creatures, even through the protective glass, he was probably going to freak out a little. He hadn’t expected to be squeamish, but something about having twelve perfectly round eyes looking at him from above a set of hairy mandibles big enough to eat his face was making him a little twitchy.

Barbara came over, a strained smile on her face, and leaned in close enough that he could smell the perfume she was wearing. It smelled like cotton candy. Nice. When she spoke, it was in a conspiratorial tone. “Hi, listen, we’re pretty sure that another tram car is due in a few minutes and that they’ll get everything taken care of.”

“That’s nice. Good to hear. I’m glad.”

She continued. “Just as a precaution, we’re scouting out a few people who would be willing to carry a firearm if it comes down to that, which it won’t, we’re certain. We only have a few, plus our driver has something more substantial if it’s needed, but I wanted to know if you would consider being ‘deputized’ until this is over with.”

Christopher looked at Barbara for several heartbeats before nodding. “Um, yeah, if you think it becomes necessary. Sure.”

“We don’t think it will. Have you ever fired a weapon before?”

“A few times.” He didn’t mention that the biggest thing he’d ever fired was a pellet gun, though he’d almost put out the neighborhood bully’s eye with it, so he knew how to do some damage. Besides, he was pretty sure he could figure out how to handle the firearm if the situation came up, and he wanted to be damned sure somebody on board was watching out for his mom.

Barbara smiled again. “Great, thanks. Again, we’re certain it won’t come down to that, but it’s best to be prepared, right?”

“Absolutely.” He had a hundred questions he wanted to ask—Did the weapons come with silver bullets? Was there any proof that some of the things out there were actually susceptible to firearms damage? Were there any cute and cuddly things hiding in the woods, because, damn, the ugly and menacing stuff sure seemed to be in the majority?—but instead he nodded as Barbara gave him instructions to see the driver and then took her leave, heading towards the drill sergeant-looking man who was holding on to his crying daughter.

Christopher looked over to his window when he heard the scraping noises. The spider-thing was trying to chew through the reinforced window, though, happily, it didn’t seem like it was getting anywhere.

Damn bug.

His mom leaned across the aisle and whispered to him. “So you’ve been deputized. Is that like a guarantee of getting a date with the cute tour guide, or what?”

“I think she’s a little distracted right now, Mom.” He looked back at Barbara. “Also, a little young.”

“Oh, please! Your dad was ten years older than me.”

The floor began to vibrate under his feet, and Christopher looked over his shoulder to the back of the vehicle. Through the window he could see a distant pinpoint of light through the murky forest and past the growing numbers of creatures waiting outside.

“I think we might be in luck. I think the next tram is coming.”

“Oh, good!” Mindy shifted in her seat and looked back toward the window with him. “This is fun and all, but after a while even staring at all-new monsters makes me edgy.”

As they watched, the light came closer and several of the things outside started stepping away as if the oncoming illumination hurt their eyes. That wasn’t surprising, since at least three of the things back there had eyes that seemed almost totally made of pupil.

As the things in the world outside of their safety bubble moved away, Christopher caught better glimpses of them in the light and almost wished he hadn’t. What the hell is something with wet tentacles doing on dry land? And why does it have wings? He wasn’t really sure he wanted to know.

The light at the front of the approaching vehicle grew quickly. After sitting in the gloom for a while and watching freakish things move up and over the tram, Christopher’s eyes ached as they tried to readjust.

“Say, honey, do you think that thing is coming sort of fast?” His mom frowned as she spoke.

“Maybe a little…” Okay, maybe a lot. They hadn’t been moving anywhere near the same speed when they’d been touring. It was impossible to see anything past the headlights, but was there something else on top of the tram car? He couldn’t tell.

“Seriously, they won’t be able to slow down in time.”

Christopher nodded and shouted to the other tourists without even thinking about it. “Everyone put on your seatbelts, now!” He quickly turned around and began to refasten his. His mom followed suit a second later.

Several other people were looking over their seats now, all of them watching the approaching vehicle. Most listened to his suggestion, but a few of them kept staring, some at the approaching car and others at the beasts around them.

The heavy-sounding beast on the roof suddenly jumped off amid a clatter of scrapes and a loud roar.

Christopher craned his neck around until he could look out the back window again. “You’re right, Mom. They’re not slowing down.” His throat felt hot and dry. His pulse raced at the thought of a four-ton one-car locomotive ramming into them. Oh, this was going to be so very bad…

“Just brace yourself and try to relax, honey. Think solid, immobile thoughts.”

Barbara rushed past them, heading for her own safety spot near the front of the tram. “Everyone please secure your seat belts immediately!” All pretense of calm was gone from her face.

The heavyset man a few rows in front of them stood up with a stunned expression on his face. Apparently he couldn’t believe there was a chance of danger from another group of tourists.

“What’s happening?” His voice quavered. “What’s wrong?”

Christopher shot him a hard look. “Buckle up and sit the hell down!”

The man got a sour I-just-swallowed-a-thousand-legged-bug expression and opened his mouth to make a comment. Behind him, through the window, Christopher could see the various shapes and nightmares outside the tram backing away. Some of them had faces too alien to read, but a few seemed to be grinning in anticipation.

The light from the car behind them filled the entire cabin of the tram, and the obese man held his hands before his face as if to hide from the light or the full understanding that they were about to get creamed. He let out a bellow of fear and looked away.

There was one loud blast of an air horn.

And then impact.