surprised, I congratulated myself on a clean getaway.
All I had to do now was lay still and wait for the big
bang.
Let 'er rip, Andrew, Blow her straight to hell!
This was exciting stuff. I could hardly wait to see the
first fireball and I didn't want to miss any of the show so
I kept my eyes riveted on Andrew's tower. W h e n he
sparked the lighter, that room would be the first to go.
Ten minutes passed and n o t h i n g happened.
Even the guards were staying silent on the radio and
that was starting to worry me. W h a t if they'd discov¬
ered my plan and were quickly and quietly going around
shutting the gas valves and opening windows to air out
the rooms? Or what if t h e guards had rushed the tower
room and grabbed the lighter before Andrew could ig¬
nite the gas? Or Andrew had accidentally dropped the
lighter onto the floor, and being paralyzed, couldn't
move to pick it back up?
All of those scenarios were valid reasons for worry,
and with every passing minute, the tension in me was
cranked up a notch. Leaving Andrew alone might have
been a big mistake.
Dammit! Should I go hack?
Maybe.
Probably.
Yes.
Leaving my bed of leaves behind, I started back
across the grassy field, not having a clue what I in¬
tended to do once I made it back to the castle. I could
head for one of the basement windows and—
BOOM!
The tower room detonated, the sudden explosion
catching me unprepared, a mighty crack of thunder
smashing into my eardrums from what seemed like two
feet away. It was a good thing I still had most of the
field between the building and m e , or I'd be a goner.
Andrew's room was there one second, gone the next,
and then the sky darkened and started to rain chunks of
brick. Chunks of Andrew and a guard or two, as well,
I'd imagine, but I tried not to think about that. I hit the
deck, curling into a ball on the grass, protecting my
head with my arms.
Seconds later, there was a huge explosion on the
fourth floor, followed immediately by an overlapping
series of minidetonations throughout the building. W h e n
the basement blew, it appeared that the entire fourstory structure—foundation and all—lifted fifteen feet
into the air, the superheated gases expanding and push¬
ing upward in the same way volcanic eruptions occur.
There was no lava flow from the basement, but fires
raged and the thickest, blackest smoke I'd ever seen
came p o u r i n g out to obscure the final explosions that
tore N a t h a n Marshall's research facility apart at the
seams.
I never saw the castle come back down to earth, but I
sure heard it. There was a tremendous growl within the
swirling smoke, then a volley of j a r r i n g thuds that shook
the ground under me like an earthquake. I had my head
buried and my eyes tightly shut, praying none of the
thousands of pounds of concrete, brick, steel, plaster,
and glass being torn apart and thrown skyward would
land on m e , crushing me in my moment of triumph.
I kept my eyes closed for a long t i m e , feeling very
much like Chicken Little as the sky fell all around m e .
N o t h i n g touched me. N o t a thing. W h e n I opened my
eyes, the billowing smoke was so thick over where the
building had been, I couldn't tell how much damage I'd
actually done. Had I demolished the entire structure,
or did some of it still stand, untouched? As black and
acrid-smelling as the smoke was, it had to be the oil
furnace reservoirs that were burning. If that were the
case, the fire might rage for a while yet. I sat up with
my legs crossed at my ankles, and waited.
It gets awfully quiet after a large explosion. Too quiet.
Once the fires and smoke died down a little, I could see
that my hopes had been granted—there was n o t h i n g
left of the castle except a large hole in the ground. I
should have felt ecstatic, but in all honesty, what I felt
tred, fear, and anger into for so long, as now gone. Dr.
Marshall, Drake, the security team, whichever of the
cruel doctors, nurses, and orderlies unlucky enough to
have been on duty today—all gone in the destruction
that had just ended. I felt like the sole survivor of a ter—
rible plane crash, sitting here amid the debris scattered
over a three-hundred-foot blast radius. It was a creepy
feeling, alone among the charred pieces of the dead, so
I tried thinking about me and what I should do next to
get my mind focused on something different.
Bad idea.
My thoughts about the people who'd j u s t been blown
apart started me t h i n k i n g about my own new body and
how it was also made from pieces of the dead. From
there, my thoughts swirled darker and darker, wonder¬
ing where I was supposed to go from here. W h e r e could
a freak like me possibly fit in? And would I even be
given a choice? W h e n the authorities finally showed
u p , it wouldn't take long for them to realize I wasn't
exactly an innocent bystander. One look at my body by
a policeman or an ambulance attendant and the gig
was up. I'd soon find myself hurried off—for my own
protection, of course—to some hospital room, where
they'd poke and prod me until someone with more
power got wind of me and sent his own people to poke
and prod me more thoroughly.
I had a bleak vision of my life b e c o m i n g a never-ending
series of tests and medical examinations, every doctor,
scientist, and government official in the country vying
for the right to keep me as their own personal oversized
lab rat. It would happen, too, I wasn't just being para¬
noid this time. N a t h a n Marshall had been a brilliant
man and his success with me was a huge leap forward in
nerve regeneration and transplantation research. For
science, finding me would be the equivalent of the
Wright brothers getting their hands on a space shuttle.
They wouldn't stop testing, scanning, questioning, ex¬
amining, pushing, pulling and molesting every square
inch of me—body and mind—until they uncovered all
of Dr. Marshall's secrets. The same secrets, I'd vowed to
destroy along with the rest of this place.
Son of a bitch/
W h a t had I done? Here I thought I'd had the last
laugh on everyone, the bum who had defied the odds
to defeat the mad scientist and destroy his research
forever. Only now was I realizing I should have stayed
in the building and went up in smoke along with ev¬
eryone else.
Briefly, I considered taking off, disappearing before
anyone showed up to investigate the explosions. No one
knew I was here so all I had to do was slip away and
never say a word to anyone. People who saw me
would
cringe at my scars but with the crowd I h u n g out with it
wouldn't really matter much. Blue j would still be my
friend, regardless of how hideous I looked.
It was a nice dream but I knew it couldn't happen. For
one, someone would rat me out eventually and someone
would come to check out the mysterious reports of the
homeless Frankenstein monster. Even if that didn't
happen, and people j u s t left me alone, I was on several
antirejection medications to keep my body from attack¬
ing all the foreign parts. They were expensive drugs
that I'd have no way of getting my hands on. Without
them, my body's immune system would start waging
war in a hurry. If I went back to live with Blue J and
Puckman, within a few weeks I'd start getting sick and
I'd be dead before Christmas.
Stay here or take off? Either way I was screwed.
I had no idea what to do. No idea what I could do.
Then I heard a noise coming from a long way off in the
woods. It was a familiar sound that put a smile on my
face and erased the nagging questions in my mind. I rose
to my feet, instantly knowing what I had to do. Turning
away for the smoking chaos I'd created, I started hob¬
bling back toward the woods, hearing the sound again,
The lonely sound of an approaching train whistle.
PART FIVE
T H E E N D
C H A P T E R F O R T Y - T W O
Full circle.
For obvious reasons, those words were stuck in my
head and I couldn't shake them. The idea of things al¬
ways returning to where they'd begun was a total crock,
but there was no denying the notion appealed to me.
After all, if I was going to kill myself I had a perfectly
good gun that would do the trick with one pull of the
trigger. There was no reason for me to lug my battered,
aching body through the woods on a freezing cold day
j u s t to achieve the same goal on a railroad track I might
never find, much less find beibre the train passed me by.
But something inside of me wanted to try.
Swallowing Drake's gun would be quicker, easier,
and far less messy, but that was part of the reason I
didn't want to end my sad excuse of a life that way. The
bullet would ruin my head and send my soul packing—if
I still had a soul left—but it would leave the scientists
my body intact to slice, dice and dissect at will and I
wasn't going to let that happen. The train, although
harder to get to and a potentially agonizing death if it
didn't kill me on first impact, would at least leave noth¬
ing behind bigger than a bread box. I'd seen pictures of
train wreck victims and, man oh man, most had to be
scraped up off the tracks and put into little plastic freezer
baggies. Let the government scientists try do their r e
search on me that way. Good luck.
More importantly, when they identified my remains
on the railway track, my daughter Arlene would still get
her college fund from my life insurance policy. Good
old dental records. At least my teeth were still my own.
Arlene and Gloria would have no idea why I was out
wandering in the woods so far from Buffalo, but nei¬
ther would anyone else. No one knew I had ever been
here, which was good. The insurance people could
squawk but in the end they'd have to pay. That thought
put a smile on my face.
I couldn't remember crossing any train tracks when
Jackson had been marching me to my death along the
wooded trail, and I'd walked a fair distance along it. My
guess was Dr. Marshall and Drake had known where
the tracks were and made the trail out to their macabre
graveyard in the opposite direction. It wouldn't do to
have the railroad crews passing by j u s t as Drake was
dumping a fresh body into a shallow grave. People tend
to remember things like that. N o , the tracks would be
nowhere near the trail, so when the path veered to the
right, I cut into the trees and headed left.
I was fairly confident I'd find the tracks, but not at all
sure if I'd make it on time. Judging from its whistle, the
tram had seemed to be fairly close, but the way sound
travels in the open woods, there was a better chance it
might still be miles away.
I hurried as fast as I could manage, my knee throbbing
in time with each step across the uneven, leaf-shrouded
terrain. The trail far behind me now, my sense of direc¬
tion was getting all screwed up. There was n o t h i n g to
see but trees and bushes. No wonder people always got
l o s t in the woods. Every bloody thing looked the same.
For ten minutes I charged forward, one foot in front of
the other, hoping I was headed in a reasonably straight
line. Ahead of me, the land started to slope upward, and
when I crested the hill the trees fell away and I suddenly
found myself standing on large chunks of rock and
gravel instead of frozen dirt.
The tracks were twelve feet in front of me.
Bingo!
Had the train passed already? That was the question.
I walked out into the center of the tracks and looked
both ways. Nothing. The track was straight as an arrow
and clear for miles on my right. I was on a bit of a curve
heading to my left, but I could still see for a long dis¬
tance down the line. I considered going down on my
knees and putting my ear to the track like I'd seen train
robbers and Indians do countless times in the old West¬
ern movies, but my knee hurt too much to bend and I
didn't know what to do once I got down there. Were you
supposed to put your ear to the track and listen for the
chug-a-chug-a sound of the approaching train wheels,
or was the purpose to feel the silent vibrations along
the steel rail?
Either way, it wasn't necessary. One look at the top
of the rails told me everything I needed to know—the
train hadn't passed yet. There was rust on them, which
would have been scratched and buffed shiny had a cou¬
ple of hundred steel wheels jostled and rolled over them
recently.
As if to confirm my deduction, the train whistle
blared again, louder this t i m e , m a k i n g me j u m p and
twist my bad knee again. I fell to the ground between
the tracks and tried getting back up but it hurt like a
bugger and wasn't really worth the effort. I made it to a
sitting position, straddling the one rail, and decided to
stay there. I'd be less likely to be seen low to the ground
like this, and the engineer wouldn't slam on the brakes
to try stopping the train. I wanted him going -full bore
when we had our first kiss. It had to be less painful that
way, and the damage to my body would be much greater.
Especially the way I was sitting, one leg on either side of
the rail.
The whistle had sounded off to my left, and just now
I could see the fr
ont cowcatcher and the louvered steel
radiator grille of the big diesel engine rumble into view.
Despite the curve, I had a fairly unimpeded line of sight
in that direction but it was still hard to tell how far away
the train was, or how long I had until it was on top of
me. All I could do was wait it out.
Do you really want to do it this way?
Good question. I was nervous and scared. There was
no sense denying that. Far more scared than I'd been
on the Carver Street tracks back in Buffalo. There was
no reason why—I was more than ready to die, glad I
might finally be helping Arlene, and more than a little
excited about the possibility of seeing my wife and son
again—but deliberately sitting in the path of a speed¬
ing locomotive takes a lot of balls and makes even the
bravest of men rethink their plans.
Maybe I should just shoot myself now, let the train destroy
my body when I'm already dead and gone.
N o w that was tempting, but it might not work. I
wasn't a big guy and I was seriously worried I'd fall be¬
tween the tracks and the train would scoot right over
the top without touching me. It might clip a leg or a
foot off, but again, that would leave the scientists more
of me than was acceptable. N o , I'd come this far; I was
determined to see it through to the end.
As far back as I can remember, even as a y o u n g boy,
I'd always loved trains, and being run over by one wasn't
as bad of a way to die as you might think. The after¬
math is nasty, absolutely, but death would be instanta¬
neous and relatively painless. One quick SLAM, and
it's over. My body might be strewn over a mile of track,
but my suffering would only last a second. That's not so
bad. I could get through that.
The train was getting closer, smoking along the track,
maybe two hundred yards away. I closed my eyes and
tried to conjure up a picture of Jackie, thinking the sight
of my wife would be the perfect way to end things, but
I couldn't do it knowing the train was barreling down
on me the way it was. I couldn't keep my eyes closed,
some masochistic need forcing me to watch my death
approaching.
One hundred and twenty yards to go.
So far there'd been no whistles or the shrill screech
of brakes to indicate that anyone had spotted me. That
was good. At the speed they were traveling, even if some¬
one did see me sitting here, there wouldn't be enough