The Gray Machine

6 Night, Shadow

Wednesday had seen countless families part ways beside the trains, children and parents perhaps never to see each other again. Human sacrifices to la bestia and all her pretty pyrite promises. Seventy years ago, before New York and before life on trains, Wednesday had grown up with next to nothing in the wreckage of Ocean City, New Jersey, in the wake of the storm of Ash Wednesday, when the ocean rose up and smashed the East with forty-foot waves, and seen everyone she'd called family die one by one before fifteen. And now she'd seen a deadman come back to life. If it really was a man. And maybe Wednesday's life hadn't been so strange, after all.

Beyond the fence, if you knew what to look for, you could snoop out a train that would skirt the hungry backsprawl of Mexico City largely ignored, and then cut through the wild heart of the country, jungle, mountain, desert, and finally el fronterizo. The band all knew that the most dangerous part of the journey besides border crossings was 'catching out' on a moving train, as it picked up speed out of the switchyard, but none of them dared be caught sitting pretty on a still train when the bulls came sniffing.

"How are we gonna get the big guy up without waking the town?" Dimple asked, his usual nonchalance overridden by a quiet, brooding nervousness. "He looks pretty blind."

"Go me shelter," the huge deadman repeated robotically.

Summer approached the man, hands out, shaking. "Easy there, buddy. We got you. Do you understand me?"

The deadman kept his eyes closed, but lifted himself to a half-squat. His head swiveled towards the sound of her voice. "Understand...you. Buddy."

Summer grabbed his hand and gave him a tug. She looked like a small girl compared to him. Wednesday was certain he'd rip her arm off. But after a terrible pause, he stepped in the direction she tugged, wincing with each step.

"There ya go, big guy. Can you walk a quarter mile?"

"Walk...think me."

Summer took that as a yes, and the party began to make their way away from the darkening flat maw of the ocean, towards the concrete boardwalk, beyond which Puerto Mexico cargo ships lay in dark repose, hunched stone dragons older than time.

Yes, Wednesday thought again, as they started off. Seventy years of living, and things had only just begun to get interesting.

✧

"This is the craziest damn thing I ever done," John grumbled as they guided the oozing, bleeding thing through the dusk. And that's saying something. Once upon a time in New York, before Wednesday, rail yards, and Uncle John Philip Starzec found his freedom, he'd been a comedian.

He'd gone by the regrettable name of Jonny Starz, working his way up through the ranks of a thousand weeknight improv hacks, under hot spotlights in brick-walled basements, where the flop-sweat was thick in the air as rotten fish. Jonny would pace the stage, sweating like a fiend under his cheap turquoise polyester blazer and James Dean haircut. He'd do his fifteen agonizing minutes, hang a lantern, and head home to electrocuted rats lodged in the back of the stove, and nightmares about his estranged teenage daughter.

Worst of all, there had been that freezing, rain-soaked night when skinny, sick, junky Rachel reappeared for six terrible hours – and later that week something truly horrible happened. Off someone's joke pitch, John had got picked up for network TV.

It had been half a season of variety sketches, a recent shitstorm in Mutumba or Madison, police scandals in New York, or pharmaceutical fascism, painted in saccharine globs of white-picket-fence satire. The schmuck bait was that Uncle Sam had everyone's best intentions at heart. And the big blow, the button, the real message was, well, exactly the opposite. Uncle Sam was only there to gather your bones and use them as kindling for his engine of death, churning ever onward towards manifest destiny.