Gun Train
Living steel. That was her home, and it always had been, unbeknownst to Anri till that very moment that it shuddered forward and sent her tumbling into its yawning maw from her perch on the roof of the engine car. The Surveyor had taken the accelerator, it’s wheels shaking off rust and curling weeds. Hook-clawed vixens clamored at the walls, trying to get the precious meat within, only to bounce against the sheet metal and be flung off by the sudden start.
“Put it back! Put it back!” she yelled desperately from where she’d landed. She felt around the grated floor of the driver’s cab until she grasped onto an automatic pistol with an oversized, bright green plastic rectangle of ammunition.
The Surveyor didn’t look back, and continued on pulling levers and flipping switches of the electrified behemoth. “Come on now, it’s nice to get out every once in a while. Can’t stay cooped up in this trash heap all your life.”
“Trash heap!”
“Or who knows, we might die in it yet!”
She couldn’t kill the Surveyor. Not that it wouldn’t have been easy if she set her mind to it. He had slow reflexes, and was easily distracted. No, it would have been excessively easy. The problem was the lack of a replacement.
Until he arrived, she was almost certain she was the last living human in the city. She had begun to forget the last time her sister’s caravan had swung through, or the last time any other random traveler had wandered into the wasted city and found her home in the concrete yard with crisscrossing steel tracks.
He had seemingly walked out of the same shadowy ether pouring from the cracks as the vixens, his clothes crisp and clean, his accent strange, and his eyes bright and unsuspecting. He carried a clipboard with him, and introduced himself by asking her to fill out a questionnaire. “how do you measure time”, ”what is the oldest story you can remember”, “how many people have you ever met”, “can you remember your parents”, “do you know where all these guns came from”, and “do you take part in worship, if so, what do you worship”. He recorded each answer with a certain concerned “hmm” and intrigued “ahh, I see.”
He stuck around for several days after that, sitting around on stacks of wooden logs, writing with bizarre symbols into a leather-bound notebook. He would disappear in the night, as if he had sunk into a hole he burrowed somewhere. When she would ask where he went, he’d simply say, “to survey the land,” except for today. Today, he had said he had gone to see home.
Today had arrived, it had sprung into the doorway and shouted “Move aside, I take large steps!” to the accumulated refuse and grime of what had always been. A 20 foot tall mantis woman settled on the train roof. The vixens congregated around her and viciously snarled as the Surveyor struck up a bargain with the magnificent magenta creature.
It was too late to stop now anyway; the momentum had become intoxicating. Even if she did pull the trigger and kill the strange madman who had set it in motion, she could not have brought herself to get up and stop the train. Paralyzed, Anri picked up speed, faster and faster beyond the power of any fleshy human, surpassing the swoop of a diving hawk and entering a realm beyond which evolution had no say.
The Surveyor appeared self-satisfied with what he had done, and stuck his head out the window of the cabin, his unnaturally fluffy hair in flight. To him, it seemed, this machine produced wind, and not velocity.
“We’re going to visit an old friend of mine,” he said. “I’m glad you decided to join us, I know you’ll love him!”
“Join you?! I live here!”
“What a remarkable coincidence.”
Flustered, she threw the entire gun at him, hitting him squarely on the shoulder. He winced, indignant.
“Is this how you treat your guests?” he asked.
“What friend?” she demanded to know.
“He used to run an ice cream parlor, back when things were shiny and brass. Do parlor tricks. He had been enthralled in ice cream when he first discovered it only a couple decades after it first came out. Very early investor. We used to chat about big band music and whatever books we had been reading when the business was slow.”
This was all lost on Anri’s ears. “Uh huh.”
“He’s one of the few I’m pretty sure stuck around. Very stubborn fellow, never liked to relocate. Always clings on.”
Anri slid up against the wall in resignation, having given up hope on making sense. “Nobody clings on forever.”
“No person, for sure. But some things are constant, infinite relative to our little spheres of life. Even time has its exceptions. But you’ll never be able to guess what they are until you actually find them.”
“You know, I’m sorry I said anything.”
“No, it’s important you understand.” He sat down, legs crisscrossed opposite her. “You will be the only witness besides our Madam Mantis.”
“Is that actually her name?” asked Anri in disbelief.
“Oh goodness no, it’s absolutely unpronounceable with a human throat and diaphragm,” he replied.
When Anri had returned from hunting earlier that day, she could see both of them atop the train, the towering insectoid form startling her. Everything had been going so well until that very moment, so normal.
She had set out that morning with a curved stock rifle, it’s barrel long and carved with depictions of proud lizards and crested birds, and a simple grey, double-action pistol.
The rifle only had one bullet, which limited its utility. But she had been waiting ever so long for an excuse to use it, to become a part of its beauty for the moment of ultimate and final expenditure in what she assumed had been a long, unknowable history.
She chose this morning when she noticed the Surveyor standing outside, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his gaze, glazed in contemplation, fixed on the rays of light filtering through the cracks and empty squares of the tallest building that overlooked the yard. It was rare for him to be there so early, it demanded her to make a show of things. That’s when she grabbed the rifle from where it laid under a bleached plastic seat, fixed her hair in the cracked mirror, and strode out into the brisk morning.
She slung the barrel over her shoulder, and pretended not to pose in front of the Surveyor.
“I’m going out hunting,” she announced.
The Surveyor nodded as if she said something profound. “I’m going home, I think.”
“You’re leaving already?” She tried to hide her disappointment.
“No, no, I already came back. I’m sorry. I sometimes forget which order things go in after a while.”
“Apology accepted.”
“Thank you.”
“Did you intend to stay for dinner tonight, if so I’ll need to bring back a bit more than usual,” she asked, letting the top of the rifle rest on stack of wooden logs behind her.
“Yes, I think I will. There’s lots still to be done.”
“Excellent!” she started off in the direction of the garden hole, marching along with new purpose.
“Don’t get into any trouble while I’m gone,” she called back, almost joking. Before then, the Surveyor didn’t seem to get into much of anything. He seemed to only exist to be a pair of eyes in this world to look upon what had previously only been hers, reminding her that eyes still existed in moments when she began to think even she had none.
The path to the garden hole was marked by the streets that had the most moss and lichens, and she would often make a game of trying to only step on the patches of green and blue, avoiding the cracked asphalt and scattered guns. On either side of her were little hills of sand and rubble, punctured by the occasional pillar. Even though they often obscured what lay beyond the road, she wasn’t much afraid of being ambushed. She was, after all, one of the apex predators of the city! Only the big cats could rival her, and they couldn’t use the thousands and thousands of firearms lying around the ground, except perhaps by accidentally stepping on them. No, they would only attack if they were especially desperate, and this was a year of plenty.
She skipped to the last clump of moss before deciding she was getting too close to continue on the road. The vixens were stupid, but not blind. She began to climb on the crumbled architecture, taking the long way to the precarious overhang above the garden. First she pushed the obtuse rifle over the ledge and then heaved herself up, crawling forward until she was safely overlooking her hunting grounds.
The garden hole lay in the depths of some grand edifice, surrounded by high gleaming stone walls. Broken slabs made it possible for animals to descend into its dense, defiantly lush thicket of greenery. Hidden within the wide leafed trees and beds of exotic flowers was the day-nursery of the hook-clawed vixens.
She wouldn’t stoop so low as to steal their young, of course, but the watchful matrons, they were fair game. Their red-brown coats stuck out from plants, and were easy to differentiate from the greyish ones of the children. All she had to do was wait for one to reveal themselves.
The patience she had now was different from the one she had during the hunts with her family. In the days when her sister and her father were mentoring her, and taking her on their hunts, it was to impress them that she didn’t squirm. She was able to stretch hours into hours without saying a word in their presence, watching for their prey as their bodies grew stiff, even as they trigger fingers remained sharp.
This patience was different. It was resigned, less disciplined. It was the patience of the water dripping from one plain of concrete to the next. Material, unfeeling.
Necessity.
Even the games she would play in her mind as she waited were born from that necessity. Counting by fours the number of cracks in the walls, over and over again, to keep herself aware.
The day the Surveyor appeared, she could barely contain her relief. As the days become reduced to necessity, absent the joys of conversation, of living as human rather than animal, she began to care less if they continued.
Her father had warned her, as a child, always to carry two guns with her. Never rely on there to be guns waiting for her when she needed them. Nor rely on a single one to protect herself. Guns were fickle things, after all. Arcane gifts from ancient gods. And all gods are tricksters at heart.
Up until today, she had been breaking that rule, eager for the consequences.
A flash of color. A click. A resounding bang.
The guardian vixen didn’t stand a chance.
She took a deep breath and slowly got to her feet. She let the rifle fall, discarded, into the small jungle beneath her. She jumped down after it, and slipped in the small pile of firearms and used ammunition at the foot of her hiding place, falling flat on her ass.
“Fucking bullshit,” she muttered to herself.
The vixen howled from where it had collapsed into a pile of its blood and torn flesh. Anri drew her pistol and quickly silenced the beast. It’s narrow claws, meant for snagging fish from creaks or mice from gulley’s, finally relaxed in the dark peat.
She began to stuff the fresh meat into her bag when the streaks of orange and grey fur began to emerge from the garden. The children paid her no heed. They walked straight past her, towards something that called to them with such strict discipline that their obedience defied the fear of predation.
Anri was unsure of what to do at first, her hesitancy broken only by a desire to continue to observe the spectacle. Quickly slinging the bag of meat over her shoulder, she followed them.
They led her directly back to the train yard, where several thousand of their kin had congregated before the giant Mantis on top of her home.
Her first instinct was to call, “Look out!” to the Surveyor on the roof, as if he had somehow not noticed the massive creature, and then find something big to shoot it with. But the fact that it’s mandibles were chittering away in a back and forth with the Surveyor’s nonchalant speech calmed her, it couldn’t be that dangerous if it hadn’t killed him yet, after all.
The vixens, however, seemed far less charitable. They could smell their dead kin in Anri’s pack and barred their fangs as she approached the carriage. She took the long way around, approaching from the caboose.
When she finally clamored atop the train, and confronted the mantis woman and the Surveyor, she could scarcely speak in the presence of such a being. It gazed down at her with such alien desire, and Anri was momentarily filled with terror before it’s monstrous chitin body and wavering antennas.
“Ah, Anri, you’re just in time,” said the Surveyor, then, already set on starting them on this path.
Now they were leaving the city, barreling through the undergrowth, smashing through debris, and escaping the ruins of sky scrapers. The only place Anri had ever known.
“Maybe we’ll find my sister,” she said, still overtaken by resignation. She found a small pocket pistol in the corner of the drivers cabin next to her. It was inlayed with ornate, tarnished silver. She began fumbling with it, taking it apart.
“She was always trying to get me to change my mind, and to leave with her and the rest of my family. She and the others went off to find a lake they had heard about, a lake that had an island at its center which held the last living city on earth.”
The Surveyor nodded. “Maybe. Maybe we’ll find the city too.”
“I doubt it.”
“Is that why you stayed behind? You didn’t think another city was waiting for you?”
She pulled the barrel off and extracted the spring from the gun, only to forcefully coil and uncoil it in her hand. “No, I liked it there.”
“Really?”
Anri fell silent. She realized she couldn’t put the gun back together again.
“I felt the same way, as you and my old friend in the ice cream parlor, about staying put. That is, until a great annunciation. The parlor used to hail to me, called me by name and placed me as its customer. It was with great pride that I could keep up a conversation with my dear host, as ancient and eternal as he was. But, one day, quite on accident, I stumbled upon a horrible, horrible place that called out ‘You! You there! I know your name,’ and suddenly I turned to the call, red handed. I soon discovered with great terror what was waiting for me, or rather, what was not.”
“What place?” asked Anri, pocketing the flat slab of silver with swirls and leaves etched into its side that came off the pocket pistol, a trinket for the journey.
“It was that city we just left.”
“Oh come on it’s not that bad!”
“It really sucks.”
Anri rolled her eyes. “Where are we going that’s so much better then, huh?”
“We don’t have a destination.”
“Excuse me.”
“Well if we did, I wouldn’t be able to say maybe we’ll find that city or your sister.”
“Then how do you know you’ll find your friend?”
“Well, I can’t know for sure. That’s the problem of not having a destination. Either, we’ll keep going on forever, or something will interrupt us midway through. For example, say you heard a man rambling in the streets about his love for his fellow man, he has no plan or structure to what he’s saying, he’s figuring it out as he goes along, piety mixed with everyday epiphany’s, intermixed with condemnations of evil, suspicion of the youth-”
“I get the idea,” said Anri abruptly. That was a lie.
She stood up and dusted off. “Tell me when we get there.”
As it turned out, their journey stretched from hours into days. They stopped some nights for Anri to hunt and bring back food. This was excessively easy thanks to Madam Mantis’s bizarre ability to attract animals towards her, animals that would otherwise devour each other, congregating in droves, mouths agape, eyes wide in perhaps hunger, perhaps devotion.
She would sit atop the train, grabbing whatever rifle she could find with decent sights, looking for the healthiest, the fattest and most juicy looking beasts to mow down. She never had such a pick before.
Madam Mantis would lay flat on her abdomen, watching her pick her target with her eyes bulging from her angular skull. There was something unnervingly feminine about the mantis. Perhaps it was the smoothness and sleekness of her body, that made her feminine to human eyes the same way they made feral cats so. It was a metaphysical intrusion Anri preferred not to think about.
After shooting two or three of the mid-sized beasts, Madam Mantis kindly hoisted them onto the train with her long, spindly mantis arms.
Anri busied herself for much of the day cleaning, preparing and cooking the animals, and the rest staring out the broken window. Every blurry passing landscape hypnotized her, ruined cities, towns, and homes infused with flush greenery. Sometimes, however, she couldn’t tell what was ruined, and what had always been endless grassland and old growth forest. Or perhaps, there were simply some places that were always ruined, and others that were always pristine. No, that couldn’t be right.
It was easier to deal with in the city. Her father had said the crumbling stone and metal was the creation of a great evil, an inhuman evil that lived in the shadows of every man, woman and child. It had possessed the souls of everything alive, and tricked them into creating ever more clever ways of devouring each other. Each building was said to be the home of a cannibal lord, who would send out servants to bring back pairs of brothers and sisters for the feast.
She never believed these stories, in part because the moral at the end was just what her parents had been berating her about before. Her sister had said the rocks just grew that way sometimes, when the sun was right. Anri didn’t like that explanation either, since even if rocks could grow, metal almost certainly could not.
Once, she considering asking the Surveyor for his opinion on the matter, but decided against it. She didn’t talk to the Surveyor too much, he only confused her. But she was happy to have the opportunity, the ability to talk to him. He was at least more understandable that the mantis, who’s motivations continued to evade her.
One day she asked the Surveyor where exactly their insectoid passenger had come from.
“Oh, the same place as all the guns.”
This took Anri aback. “You know where the guns came from?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then how can you say they came from the same place?”
He blinked. “She told me.”
“Then she knows where the guns came from?!”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Anri threw her hands up in frustration.
Things continued in this way for some time. That is, until the moment she was gazing dazed into the whirling panorama outside the broken window, and saw the inky curtain approaching.
“Holy shit!”
She jumped in alarm when it began to ebb into her vision. It took her a moment to convince herself it was truly there, that it didn’t vanish no matter which way she looked at it.
It was like an impending horizon, except made from all too tangible darkness. And they were headed straight for it.
She called out for the Surveyor as she got up from her seat and rushed to the front cabin, trying to raise the alarm of the impending collision. She almost tripped on a long-barrel revolver in her haste, dodging through car after car.
Eventually, she found him, sleeping in a booth, his notebook over his face. She roughly pushed him off, “Wake up, you need to stop the train!”
He stumbled out of his sleeping stupor onto the floor. “What?!”
She grabbed him by the collar and thrust his head through the window. “That!”
“Oh…” He staggered backwards and held onto the seat for support. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“We’re going to run right into it!”
“Seems like it,” he agreed, dusting himself off.
“What do you think will happen when we hit it?”
“We will either continue on this track, or we will be stopped.”
“And that second option doesn’t concern you?!” She began to regret ever allowing him to drag her and her home along on what must have been a roundabout suicide.
“Well, it’s necessary to find out if we will continue or not, isn’t it? What does it matter, anyway, if we stop here versus there?”
“It matters if stopping there kills us and stopping here doesn’t!” she retorted.
“The train must continue,” he said, “I have to know…”
She grabbed a sub-machine gun that was lying on the seat behind her and aimed it at the Surveyor’s chest. “Turn it around.”
He shook his head. “I can’t do that.”
“I will shoot you.”
He looked down the barrel of the gun and gulped. “Alright. But then you would just enter it without me.”
They had to be close to the threshold. Her finger fluttered on the trigger.
“You want to know too, don’t you?” he said, watching her closely. “You’ve been confused, doubting, all your life. You don’t have to accept that.”
“I don’t have to accept getting killed either!”
“Come on now, we both know it’s too late to worry about silly things like that.”
The train slammed into the vast dark wall, and it encompassed the metal beast and its prayer mantis guardian as if it was the horizon of the ocean swallowing up the land. Anri could feel it coming. She closed her eyes, and felt a chill pass over her as they passed into the thick ink.
When she opened them again, only the small lights from the train allowed her to see, not a single shred of light of color could be observed in the murky world beyond the window.
Now, the train slid to a stop. Not suddenly, from impact, but as if the train had applied the breaks itself, on its own volition.
The two of them stood in unease, enveloped as they were, for a moment.
“You know, you almost made me pissed enough to actually do it there for a second,” said Anri, lowering her aim.
A smokeless powder bang rattled the carriage.
“Ah!” the Surveyor recoiled. Blood spattered the wall behind him. “Someone shot me!”
Anri ducked, and braced herself against the control panel, beneath the windows. There was nothing beyond the empty frames. Just the deep.
Then a flash. A ting of metal against metal.
The Surveyor crawled into the corner, clutching his wound. “Please! Hold your fire. We mean you no harm!”
“Shut up!” Anri kicked him.
The deep came alive like firecrackers thrown to the wind. A dozen different cartridges exploding in a dozen steel barrels. Each of them sounded identical.
These were the brothers and sisters of Man and their arms. Anri had never hunted human prey before. But the principles of flesh remained the same.
She returned fire blindly, warding them off.
“How do we restart it?” she pulled on a random blue lever; the engine hissed.
The Surveyor moaned in pain, but slouched beside her against the control panel, and flipped one of the switches. The locomotive sounded equally wounded, it’s metal joints creaking, pushing against the weight of the inky darkness.
Figures appeared in the cone of the headlight. Green men in shiny masks, fire spewing forth. How fearsome it seemed until the moment Madam Mantis plucked one from the earth, and sank her mandibles into the rubber-wrapped body. It screamed.
“These soldiers…” the Surveyor muttered, “they must be the Baluster Contingency. Daryll can’t be far now, he’s the only one who could have kept them here.”
“Quiet, we need to stop your bleeding,” said Anri, tossing her gun aside as the sound of firing began to drift farther away. She tended to the blood-wet place.
“Don’t worry, I won’t die here,” he told her, “it hasn’t been approved yet.”
“Very funny.”
She couldn’t lose him, not yet. Not just because she didn’t know how to get back to the city. How cruel it would be for him to strand her here with only the mantis, herself, for company.
“They must have been desperate.”
“Who?” asked Anri, applying pressure to the wound as the machine vibrated them together.
“My people. They must have created this darkness as a means to preserve themselves. I thought it was only hypothetical. A…second chance…”
He sighed, putting his hand over Anri’s. He closed his eyes and subsided into a breathing slumber.
The train continued.
Anri did not sleep in the endless night, she lay beside Madam Mantis on the roof, peering through a scope into the swirling darkness. Shapes emerged. A tentacle curled. A hydraulic piston contracted. Periodically, she pulled a trigger. The shapes would dissipate. The Surveyor slept in her stead, bandaged, splayed out across a seat in the carriage beneath her.
There was a night, much like this one, when Anri was just a girl. A mighty storm had upturned her city. The tunnels were flushed. Archaic growths floated to the surface.
She and her sister thought they had hidden someplace safe, in the heart of the most intact concrete fortress. But the bottom floors began to flood, one by one. They huddled in the corner of the 3rd floor, in a nest of blankets and wooden boards. Her sister had one arm around Anri, the other cradled a pump-action shotgun.
They didn’t hear the reptile sloshing towards them over the sound of the wind, nor did they see it until it lunged through the walls of their fragile nest, biting into her sister’s leg.
Her ears ringing, it was left to Anri to pry the half-eviscerated skull from her sister, and pick the lead shrapnel out of the wound before binding it. She couldn’t hear her sister’s screams and panting breaths though she could feel them. The precarity of life was never lost on her after that, she’d never felt fear quite like that before or again. Not an adrenaline fear, but an existential fear, of falling off the cliff of meaning which had so sheltered her since leaving the cradle.
She hadn’t felt such fear for a long time, not the whole time she had been alone.
When she returned to the Surveyor, he was feverish. She dabbed a wet cloth on his forehead and fed him the dried herbs that her father had taught her to use for such circumstances.
When the train slid to a stop a second time, the inky depths now denser than ever, he was barely conscious.
“We’re here…we have to be,” he spoke hoarsely.
The world outside murmured and groaned from horrible things moving closer. Anri peered through the nearest window, they were in some kind of structure, dirty tiles covering the wall she could barely make out through the darkness.
“Take me to him,” he said.
“No you’re not in any shape to move,” she told him.
“I’m sorry Anri…” he whispered with all the strength in him, “I’ve caused so much trouble for you.”
For some absurd reason, this made her laugh.
“Yes…yes you have.”
He shifted, his hand reaching out to her. She took it into hers.
“Please,” he begged. “I have nothing left, but to know.”
“You’re a selfish brute,” said Anri. But she could not refuse him. She hooked her arms underneath his armpits, and did her best to help him to his feet, shaky as he was.
Together, they limped onward, onto the platform that was waiting for them. Madam Mantis followed them, as if she somehow could comprehend the gravity of the situation, as if she knew this was her path to follow as well.
Whatever this place had once been, the floor above them had mostly collapsed, leaving a bowl shaped cavity ahead of them, accessible through a large gap in the debris. The gun density was high, among the highest Anri had ever seen. They were stepping over revolvers and expended ammunition as they shambled forward, then carefully shifting between larger and larger ones, machine guns giving way to rifles the size of men, and then giving way to toppled over canons. There were machinations here which Anri could scarcely identify as guns at all, but they were all pointed inward, towards the end of the collapsed room. Towards their target.
The noise of metal against metal against wood and stone echoed with each step, and the body of the thing named Daryll became more and more revealed.
The wall was the first thing that could be made out. The concrete looked like a concave moon without light, pocked and blasted with a thousand rounds. Then there was the figure in the shape of a man, his clothes in tatters, his bones broken at odd angles. Still, though, he breathed. Still, his eyes moved, perceiving Anri, perceiving the Surveyor, perceiving the mantis.
No sound escaped his chapped, bloody lips. Parts of his arms and legs were separated into discrete chunks of flesh, with threads of sinews and muscles barely holding them together – as if he had been torn apart and was slowly being knit back together.
The Surveyor kneeled down beside him. He looked up and down the desecrated body of his old friend, incomprehension settling in.
“Daryll, what did you do?”
Daryll stared strangely back at him.
Madam Mantis approached the assemblage of flesh and began to eat. Like a dutiful gardener weeding her plot, she snipped the cords regrowing between the lumps. Then she dug her mandibles into what remained of the limbs, viscera and blood covering her mouth.
The Surveyor looked to her, mystified.
“This is what you wanted to show me?” he asked.
She turned away from her meal and chattered something back. This was the moment of understanding, dawning upon the Surveyors face. The final conclusion of all that ever meant anything in his world.
He did not speak again after that.
The train had another two months of operation in it, during which time the Surveyor recovered from his injuries and continued to maintain his silence. To Anri, not much had changed, except the absence of Madam Mantis whose purpose remained in that awful cave.
The Surveyor began to help her cook after she brought back her game in the evening, and though he asked no questions, he picked up her techniques quite easily. He acted in whatever way he could to make her life easier, perhaps to repay his endless debt to her. She returned the kindness by never asking him about the true horrors of the old world. Instead, she would tell him stories passed down through her family, or about the weird ruins or creatures she would find in her hunts. He seemed to enjoy them. He never went back home, after all.
This, she was content with.