Steven saw the Line for the first time at the age of six. What he remembered most was that it seemed to go on forever, like an oversize freight train extending into the distance as far as one could see. Walking from one end of the factory floor to the other only enhanced the impression of endless massive industrial might. The floor itself was more like a tunnel than a building, it was a dingy iron shell that somehow seemed dwarfed by the machine it sheltered.
That day, following shyly behind his father, sheltering from the eyes of the huge dirty machine operators as much as the violent mechanical motion of the machine itself, it had seemed unreal. Nothing, it seemed, could possibly be that big, that loud, that complicated.
The Line was much quieter now. Maybe it was his older ears, worn down by years of loud music and video games. The line still clanked and rumbled and emitted screaming whines, and the combined vibrations echoing down the long cavern of the factory floor were pitched to make speech nearly impossible in its presence. Men used to retire deaf from the Line, those who didn’t quit within a year or make some stupid mistake along the unforgiving half a mile of machine. Now they all wore the bright red ear earmuffs with little sound cancelling microphones and wireless antennae. The Line didn’t make men deaf now, but it could drive you mad, the vibration of it resonated in your chest and head until the silence at home felt terrifyingly empty.
John Barber must have been in his early twenties that day Steven followed his father into the long factory. John said he’d worked there since he was sixteen, but it was hard to tell with him sometimes, hard to tell if he was lying, and hard to tell from the rough lines of his face how old he might really be. In any case, he knew the Line like an old lover, and sometimes talked about it like one, too.
Today, they stood together at the lateral milling segment, watching the machine cut away shiny stainless steel in intricate, precise movements. Over the vague muddy hiss of the sound cancelation software, John’s voice spoke to him in curt sentences that even through the mud sounded wry.
“The motors just don’t have the power. We put them in about three years ago, over my objections I might add. Very efficient and lightweight, but they don’t have the oomph.”
Steven remembered seeing the paperwork on the upgrade in one of those long tedious meetings that seemed to constitute his entire first month as manager here. The motors had been very expensive.
“We can’t replace the motors, what are our options?” His voice sounded strange echoed on the radio headphones, but inaudible in the din outside of them.
“Slow the Line. This is a chokepoint, we slow this down and the whole Line slows down. The old motors weren’t as fancy, no computer control, not so efficient, but damn they had power.”
“Slow it down then, we need these pieces clean. Maybe there’s some maintenance we can usefuly do while the rest of the line waits for this.” They both watched the milling arms do their work, spinning bits digging into metal, cutting it away milimeter by milimeter. Where the bits were doing a full cut into the metal, not just taking material off of an edge, thier muffled whine changed pitch in Steven’s ears. Then the blade began to bog and vibrate, chattering its way across the surface leaving a ragged scar across the metal. John slammed a fist into the full stop button, the arms pulled away from their work and the noise died. All down the line, segment after segment halted work. There was a drawn-out stepwise reduction in sound as each unit stopped and removed its signature frequencies from the mix. Finally, nothing but the big vent fans were moving, and the sound was a low breathy hum that seemed infinitely quite.
Steven took his headphones off and looked at the scowling face of John Barber.
“Do what you have to do. We can’t afford to be down, but we can’t afford to ruin product either.”
He watched John get to work. The man was big and his hands were massive rough slabs of calous and little scars, but he worked with a frightening speed and precision. However long the man had been on the Line, it was long enough for him to have absorbed the qualities of the behemoth he cared for. He was prone to cussing, drank heavily but never came to work hung over, he had no tolerance for incompetence and he respected the physical above the intellectual. In short, to Steven, he was just the kind of man’s man that had always intimidated him, made him feel inadequate and a little embarrassed. John, however, added insult to injury by being nothing but decent to Steven. As a child, as a scrawny teenager doing grunt work on the Line, and as a man returned from college with an MBA and his father’s old office where he oversaw the aging factory and the crew of manly men who kept it moving.
When he was 16, his father got him a job on the Line. He had walked in the door and forced himself to walk through the wall of hideous sound. They gave him ear protection – no radio in his, but the men running the machines had them, and he spent the day sweeping up metal shavings and dodging out of the way of big dirty men who didn’t have the patience to put up with his incomprehension of their work. He watched, though, and John Barber kept an eye on him, pulled him out of harms way more than once.
Eventually, when he had pestered his father past the point of tolerance about how the Line operated, it was John Barber who walked him from segment to segment, explaining what each machine was doing to the metal that passed through its guts. There were more men then, and more of the segments were fully manual, really just stations where someone sat and pulled down a drill press or aligned something underneath a hudraulic punch. Steven understood it, at least in vague terms, from that first long walk-through. He saw the elegance of it, saw how the machines interoperated, and grasped immediately the process as a whole. Perhaps that was why John Barber respected him, treated him well even then.
For four yeas he tailed the big machinist, who alone among the men of the Line didn’t have a station with a hard stool and handles worn smooth by decades of constant contact with human hands. John walked the Line looking for problems to fix, for machines to improve, for someone not keeping up with the Line. He was not kind to those who made mistakes, and absolutely terrifying if someone’s mistake damaged a machine. He could yell well over the din of the machines and through the thick insulation of the earmuffs, inserting humiliation and fear directly into the minds of anyone foolish enough to drop a wrench into the conveyor or push a tool hard enough to break a bit.
Steven learned by touching. John made sure that he put his hands on every part of the machine, the shiny smooth-worn handles and the black grease-coated gears. He took apart tranmission assmblies and electric motors, packed bearings and calibrated tools. At the end of it, when he went off to college, the grease was a premanent black stain under his fingernails, and he dreamed of the silken motion of perfect machinery.
School had taken the black out of his hands, and to be honest the MBA hadn’t done as much for his understanding as John Barbur had in the first few weeks of putting heavy oily pieces of metal into his hands and telling him to figure out what was wrong. Now here he was, Father buried, the musty old machine-oil smelling office his, and John Barbur his subordinate.
The beast drew a ragged breath and began a slowly growing roar that followed Steven back to his office.
–
Malik was lost. This was not his town, and the men who had taken him had not even said the name of it before they dumped him out of their van onto the wet pavement in an alley stinking of urine. They hadn’t said much, in fact, and seemed to think that he couldn’t understand what they did say. He understood more than people thought, though the things he didn’t understand always seemed to overwhelm that comprehension. He had remained silent when they broke into his room and tied him up. He fought, of course, but they were strong, too strong, and there were four of them. Malik was not a fighter, though his wild animal instincts seemed to stymie the men for at least a little while. He had bitten one hard on the arm and tasted blood, but then they hit hit with something and he blacked out.
They took some of his maps. That was the worst thing. He didn’t care what they did to him, or to Nurse Delores, or to anyone else, but they had rifled through his map collection, creasing and tearing and smudging them, and they had taken one. When he woke up in the van, one of the men was trying to read it, but didn’t seem to like what he was seeing. The sight of some careless oaf touching it, not even wearing gloves, enraged him. So he had screamed, and they had dumped him here.
It was a cold wet day, not late, but the rain made it feel so. He wandered down unihabited streets, still fuming with rage, without any real direction. He wasn’t good at figuring things out, except for the maps. He didn’t know what to do, where to go, whether he should go into some store to get warm, or whether he should try to talk to someone. The idea of talking to someone was scary, but he knew he might have to. He wished Nurse Delores was here, he had gotten used to her, he could talk to her – but there was no one, just streets, a handfull of glum faces under umbrellas, and the cold.
He sat down on the sidewalk and tried to think. Someone walking by threw a quarter at him, and the bubbling rage made him grab it up and fling it back at them. He choked out a ragged sob as they fled, and sat back down.
He was not good at thinking. Nurse Delores had been around for as long as he could remember, and she took care of him. She gave him food and told him when to go to bed and when to get up and what to wear. Otherwise she left him alone with his maps and his books and occasional visits from Randy, who would bring him the maps he asked for, if Randy thought there was enough money. The maps were one thing he understood. Not just understood, but grasped with a complete comprehension. A few minutes looking at a map would be enough, though he loved them so much he woould stare for hours sometimes, following the little lines, peering at the details. Road maps were good, they had numbers which told you how long the lines were, and you could follow them along, counting miles or kilometers. Road maps were like a big comforter, they enveloped him in a warm comprehension, a network of dots and lines that he could understand totally, in a world where he understood virtually nothing else.
His butt became cold and sore, so he stood and began walking again. He wished he had a map. The rage had finally boiled off, replaced by a cold empty pain. He was lost.
The street he followed ended at a short concrete wall. He peered over and saw the black water of a river, there was a barge on the other shore, loaded with coal. He looked up and down the dark waterway, saw a bridge in one direction, nothing in the other. The bridge looked exactly like the drawing of a bridge on the cover of his 1989 edition Walton commerical map of Briggsville Pensylvania. He stared at it. What did that mean? The image of the bridge hung there in his vision, while his mind played over the details of the map. There were nineteen thousand miles of roads on that map, most of them in Briggsville itself. He hovered over them, watched the network of lines behind his eyes, but there was nothing else. It was a memory, not a paper map in his hands. He was still lost, still alone, still in a strange place. He supposed he would have to talk to someone.
–
“Don’t say anything, just hold your hands and back up. I’m a prfessional bad guy, you are just a girl minding her own business who doesn’t need this kind of trouble.” The barrel of the gun was the steadiest point in the room, everything seemed to pivot around it. The woman it was pointed at held up her arms and backed away. “Thank you. Now these nice men here are going to tie you up – nothing else, just tie you up, and I am going to take the money out of the cash register, take a look around the back room, and leave. Got that?” She did.
Carlos knew this dingy little convenience store wasn’t the right place, but they had to look. The girl didn’t look that bright, hopefully emptying out the register would leave her with a convincing story of an armed robbery and nothing else. The money wasn’t much, certainly not worth the trouble of actually stealing it, but it was a good idea to make sure what you were doing was less obvious than what people saw you doing.
The back room was practically a closet, packed tight with boxes of cigarettes and candy bars and beer. Not the place. He pulled out the yellowing old scrap of paper and stared hard at it. It was filled with lines, each one labeled with a street name, but the streets bore no relationship to the streets of this city, other than bearing their names. There was a big X in the very center of the map, drawn with speed and force, drawn hard enough to tear through the paper where the two black ink lines crossed. Going by the street names, the X marked this corner.
“All right boys, this is going to be more work than we hoped.” They filed out into a light drizzle, and he tried hard not to let it bother him. So much of his work was about image, about beeing seen to be implacable, unperturbed, rock steady. The rain tickled the back of his neck and he ignored it fiercely. They would need a place to hole up for a few hours and think about the damn map. He would have to call his client.
Something felt ever so slightly wrong a split second before the shot. Or perhaps he only thought it was before, perhaps the bullet had grazed his cheek and then his mind had rewritten history to cover up his failure to anticipate this possibility. Andy’s head, three steps in front of him, exploded.
Someone with a gun can fire it several times in rapid succession and still hit targets, especially if the targets stand there like posts, staring like idiots at the wash of blood and brain running down the windows of the van they were just about to enter. This thought seemed to hit him almost at the same time he comprehended what had happened. The second shot went through Dave’s chest, punching a fist-sized crater where it exited, the bullet continued on and put a neat hole in the side of the van. He and Alec hit the ground simultaneously and rolled in opposite directions.
First things first, get cover, get it fast. He ran away from the van, hit the asphalt hard and rolled behind a car parked several spaces down from the van. Alec went who knew where. Next, where the hell had that bullet come from? He could just see the corpses and the dripping bloody rear bumper of the van from where he lay. Andy had been almost directly in front of him, Alec off to the left. There was the conveneince store behind them, the girl was very well tied up inside it. Therefore, the shooter was in the alley. He hoped to god he was in the alley, and not in a window three stories up two blocks away. Time to move.
He hit the sidewalk and ran hard, hugging the buildings on his right. The shooter would have to come out of the alley and expose his back to the street to get a shot. Alec would take the cue and run down the sidewalk the other direction, with luck, they would be able to meet up somewhere behind the shooters present location. There were pedestrians on the sidewalk ahead, good. There was a chance their attacker was insane, willing to kill innocent bystanders, but the clean killing shots to his men would seem to indicate a more cool and professional man. Professional he could deal with, madmen were problematic. It had been a mad man who drew the damned map.
He turned down the next street and imediately stopped. There was no sound of pursuit. He pulled aout his cell and called Alec, who answered instantly, not even out of breath.
When they finally slipped into the other end of the alley, they found it as deserted as they had expected. They worked their way back to the van, and found it also empty, the back door opened wide. A police cruiser whipped around the corner, siren off but lights blazing. Sirens sounded from the opposite direction. Staning in an expanding pool of blood in which two very dead corpses lay was not the ideal position to speak to the authorities from.
There was no time for image now, nothing left to do but work. He ran for the cruiser, reached its hood at nearly the same time the car came to stop, ran up the sloping white plane and put three bullets through the windshield into the driver. Alec was right behind him, the officer in the passenger seat got a single bullet. They didn’t stop moving, were behind the cruiser and on the street less than a second after the unfortunate officer had hit the brakes. The sound of sirens blared from every direction, filling the neighborhood. They ran across the street and into another alley, removing their jackets as they ran, tucking guns into belts. They eventually emerged walking calmly five streets away, entered an apartment building, and dissappeared.
–
Malik was no longer lost. The realization had taken a while, sinking very slowly down into his brain, down to where the maps lived. On the bridge over the river, an elegant archway of steel that drew the eye across the water in one seamless leap, he looked back the way he came, and saw the line of the street receding into the distance. The street sign wasn’t visible, but he remembered walking past it on his was to the bridge, and now it hung in his vision over the perfect straight line of the street. Ankeny street. It was the major thoroughfare through downtown, it was five miles long from where it started at the Ambridge mansion to its end at the bridge. On the other side of the bridge it was Bridge street. The entire city was there, everything about the place that had ever been committed to a map was there in his memory. He owned fourteen maps that showed Briggsville in detail, and he had seen many others.
The map that the men had stolen from him was of Briggsville, though it was not like the other maps. It was a crazed scramble of the city, but he understood it, it was very clear if you just looked at it closely.
–
The motors were going to be a problem.
“In the old days, if the engineers said they needed ten horse for something, they’d build a big iron casing and put a big heavy motor in it, and the damn thing would put out ten horse. It’d weigh a hundred pounds, wouldn’t be efficient, but it would damn well put out ten horse. Now, it’s all lightweight and efficient, they figure since it’s so efficient they can maybe do it with eight horse instead, and they can use a little aluminum casing, and hook up a computer, and that’ll make up for those other two horse. And you see what happens.”
Steven looked down at the elaborate piece of ruined stainless steel, several hundred dollars worth in material alone.
“We can’t afford to replace them. Look, I hate to say this, but this might be the last contract we see for a while. The’re not much call for an operation like this anymore, we’re damn lucky my dad and grandad modernized as much as they did, or we’d have been dead a decade ago.” His grandfather had seen the writing on the wall almost as soon as he’d enherited the place from his estranged father William Ambridge. He’d been a genius, in his way, chasing the new technology, pulling in every newfangled process or tool he could onto the Line. Steven’s father had been fighting a losing battle, but computerization had kept the place alive this far.
John just looked down at him, face blank.
The job he had taken over was one he could do, he knew the Line and he knew as much of the business end as anyone ever would. He would do it this year, and if the contract survived until next year, he’d keep on doing it. It wouldn’t, though, he knew that. The Line was obsolete, expensive new motors or not. It was too easy and too cheap to have everything made in China, or more often a hundred different pieces made in a hundred different places, wherever today’s prices were lowest.
The Line was a historical curiosity to begin with, built, as legend had it, in one long continuous piece because William Ambridge had won the three mile long, two hundred foot wide stip of land in a poker game with Edward Harriman the railroad baron. Ambridge was audacious and ambitious, he swore he could make a factory that could construct a railway engine from raw iron to finished product in one continuous line, and he was famous for the Line he built to do it long after his original boast and it’s utter failure were forgotten. The Line was an engineering marvel of it’s day in any case. No general manufacturing line close to it’s size had ever been made, and there were good practical reasons for that. The thing had hung on, though, and the Ambridge family proved cunning in their use of it’s reputation and history in getting contracts.
“Look, slow the run, do whatever you can. We’ll run around the clock, can you handle that? You’ve got thirty-five men, put eighteen on tomorrow night, let them sleep tonight to get ready. I’ll supervise night shift, you take day.”
“Men and women.”
“What?”
“You have twelve women and twenty three men working for you.”
“Oh, right, of course. Use your best judgement, put good.. people on the night shift, we’ll make deadline somehow.” He was tired. Taking over the reigns of a slowly sinking anchor was bad enough, but he hadn’t slept well since the funeral, and he had the fates of thirty five men and women to consider. This contract would be the last, there was no maybe about it, they only had this one because the federal government still liked to have some things manufactured domestically. The line was an engineering marvel, but all the computers in the world couldn’t make a winning proposition out of half a mile of big iron. In two years time, the Line would be a museum.
That night, he found John Barbur at the lateral mill, motor innards scattered on a white canvas tarp on the floor. At first he thought the man had snapped and was destroying them, but the careful small movements were those of a craftsman. Steven didn’t feel the need to ask, he walked up and stood over the white canvas, admiring the copper entwined stators.
“Some of these things can handle well over spec current, the problem is you don’t know how much until they burn. They’ll burn out here-” he pointed with a screwdriver at one of a dozen identical wires, “they always do. So I popped one open to see what gauge that connection is, see if we can pump more juice through. Just for this run, I wouldn’t want to risk it long term.” A knowing silence hung in the air while John went back to his work.
“John, did you know my father well?”
“About as well as anyone, son. He was a good man, and his daddy was too. I even met your Uncle, now there was a piece of work, most evil man I ever met. Bastard tried to kill your dad once.”
“Seriously?” Steven was shocked, this was not a story he had heared before, though there were plenty of sotries about Uncle Joe. Steven’s half-brother, born out of wedlock to an Indian woman, back when that carried a lot of weight, especially in the monied circles Grandfather Ambridge had moved in. The monied circles had long since gone, but Uncle Joe never let go of how he was treated by the “decent” Ambridges.
“Came in here and tried to beat him with a wrench, your dad gave him what-for. Never seen anyone with eyes that crazy – your dad stood there trying to reason with him, and he just goes and swings a wrench. Not that we all didn’t occasionally want ot swing a wrench at your dadddy. These damn Japanese motors’d be exhibit A.”
–
The cleaned their guns in silence. The client wasn’t answering, and the map made no more sense than it had before. Gun clean, he stared at the nonsensical arrangement of streets and the furious X. He looked out the window, and that was depressing too. It was raining full on now, not hard, but cold tiny drops. They were going to have to go back out in that, try every identifiable point on the map until something looked promising. He stared through the grey and saw a lone figure slowly making it’s way up the street, the only person he had seen out there for a while. It was getting dark, the figured moved from one street-light to the next, almost dissapearing in between. When he realized who it was, he nearly choked.
“The kid!”
“So what? He’s retarded, or autistic or something, he doesn’t know anything.”
“Client said he was really into maps… who knows, maybe he knows something, maybe theres another piece, or whoever sold it to him said something. Worth a try, right?”
“Sure, why not.”
The kid was out of sight by the time they made their way down the stairs and into the rain. The walked up the street in the direction the kid had been walking. Half the streetlights seemed to be out, what few were working just provided glare that made it harder to see. This was an industrial area, the only lights other than the steetligths were the windows of one long factory building up ahead. He caught a hint of movement against one of those windows, and picked up his pace.
The building was strange, to say the least. It was unreasonably long, dissappearing into the rain and darkness as if it went on forever. Itwas painted white but streaked red with rust. They saw the kid against the pale side of it, then saw a warm light pour out of a doorway.
“Little bastard went inside!”
–
All you had to do was look at the map. There was the Ambridge Line, there was the skull, picked out in the meanings of the street names arranged on the page. The map said this was the place, and Malik could feel it in his gut.
–
Steven listened to John talk as he worked. Big nimble fingers arranged bearings and springs, lined up wires and made delicate but firm connections. Talking didn’t seem to distract him at all. The gun seemed to come out of nowhere. Steven was asking a question when he became aware of the barrel pointing at his temple, he started violently. When he realized it was a gun, saw the man holding it, he froze. John looked around and took in the scene, hardly seeming surprised.
The gun moved to cover John, but the man holding it stood so that he could swivel it towards either of them easily.
“No heroics. I’m a professional bad guy -” Steven hardly saw John move, but he had been holding a long wrench when the gun intruded on their conversation, and with a twist of his wrist it hit the gun and sent it flying, a second twist and it clipped the man’s temple with a decisive -thock- sound. The man slumped, then rolled on the floor, shaking his head.
“I’m no professional bad guy,” John said, a cold edge slipping into his voice, “me, I’m just an amateur sadistic bastard.” He reached for the fallen man, who swung his arm to knock away the approching hand. It might as well have struck an iron bar. John was fast, far faster than Steven would have suspected, even knowing the man’s power. The fallen gunman scrambled for the gun, but John grabbed an arm and jerked him fully upright in one fast movement. The arm went up behind the man’s back and Steven heard a pop as the shoulder join left its socket. The man whimpered. John tossed him casually against the side of the lateral mill, there was a sound of bones cracking. Before the man could collapse to the floor again, John grabbed him by the back of the neck and held him upright. He slammed the body again against the iron wall of the machine.
“Professional bad guy, eh? You little prick, come in here pointing a gun at me, what the hell is wrong with you?” This last was neary a shout, and on the work “you” he slammed the man again agains the mill. Steven felt as if he had been glued down. The sudden realization that John was going to pound the man to death released his feet, he grabbed ineffectually at the big machinist.
“John! Don’t kill him!”
“Bastard, first the motors, then the whole damn Line is going, and now some little prick thinks he can walk in and point guns around the the place?” Slam. The sound was a wet thump, the man wasn’t even grunting now.
–
Alec finally found the kid hiding under a section of the enormous line of machines that ran down the center of the building. No, not hiding, he was crawling along in the metal shavings and grease, like he looking for something. He heard banging noises, and then shouting, far down the line of machines. He reached under, found a leg, and pulled. The kid shreiked.
The scream almost gave Steven a heart attack. John dropped the limp body to the ground and looked around. The scream still reverberated, John looked to the north end and took off running, Steven found himself running hard to catch up, wondering all the while if this was a good idea.
Alec heard heavy footfalls, running men. On the other side of the frieght-train sized line of machinery. He tried to pull the kid up, but the little bastard had grabbed onto something and wouldn’t let go, and he was heavy to boot. Alec gave up and slipped down the line, if he could find his way around the end, he could get behind the runners.
–
Malik was relieved the the hand let go of his ankle. He was also delighted, he had found the X.
–
Steven stared under the machine, Malik peered back, a pale face in the shadows.
“Hello?” he called out, desperately hoping that whoever was hiding under there did not also have a gun. There was no answer, but the eyes blinked.
Alec saw one man bend down to look under the machinery, the other was doing something with the machine itself. There was no sign of Carlos. He took careful aim, a chest shot to the big guy should do it, there would be time for a second shot to the skinny one. The bullet tore through his chest cavity, collapsing his lungs and bursting his heart like a balloon.
Steven cringed when he heard the shot, and threw his hands over his head, knowing it was futile. The face under the conveyor hadn’t moved. John grabbed on of his arms and yanked him up, gave him a shove towards the wall away from the Line. There were tool cabinets there, he staggered into one, then sank to the floor behind it. John stood out on the floor, exposed, but didn’t seem to care. The cold rage Steven had seen in his eyes earlier seemed to radiate off of him now. Steven wondered if it had been there all along, through years of slow disintegration of the Line, just building up, waiting for this moment.
“There’s another one up on the north end, somebody else shot him. Stay there, I’m gonna go make somebody pay.”
Steven watched him walk away, and he wanted to stay there behind the massive metal cabinet. Desperately wanted to, but he found himself walking out after John. This was his factory, his inheritance. He was not going to hide behind a cabinet waiting for John Barbur to sort things out.
There were no more shots as they walked down the Line towards a body sprawled out in a pool of blood. No sounds but the hum of the flouescent lights overhead.
–
The assasin watched from atop a tool cabinet. He watched the two factory men walk up the line and stand over the body he had so recently dispatched. These men were not his concern, his employer was very particular about killing bystanders. Though the fourth man, Carlos, had been beaten badly, he was probably not dead, but he could wait, a bullet could be used later if blunt trauma didn’t take its toll. He was surprised to hear the exterior door open again, creaking loudy on unoild hinges. The man that walked through was also not on his list, but clearly wasn’t a factory employee, he worse an expensive grey suit, expensive shoes, an expensive wide-brimmed hat. The Assassin slowly swung his gun to trace the strangers steps. The factory men heard the door as well, they slipped closer to the big machine and watched the grey suited man enter. They did not see the Assissin’s emplyer, who hobbled quickly but not easily through the still open door.
–
The man in the grey suit stopped dead as soon as he recognised the dead body. Steven watched him, watched his face slip into an angry confusion and then just as quickly calm itself into an unsmiling, unemotional mask.
“Did you do this?” he asked, calmly, almost friendly.
“Who is he?” asked Steven in reply. He watched the man, and was certain for a moment that he was going to lie to them, but somewhere between the drawn breath and actual words, a decision was made.
“This man, and three others, I hired to find something. Simply find it. There was no call to kill them.”
“Oh yes there was! There was all the reason in the world!” a new voice shouted out, cracking with emotion. “You think you can walk into my grandfather’s factory and take his greatest treasure? You think I’d allow that? Even an outcast has some pride.”
“Uncle Joe?” Steven was stunned, but so was the man in grey, he turned to look and the stooped old man, reaching under his finely tailored jacket.
“I wouldn’t do that, Pierce, that thug of yours didn’t die by accident, you’ll die the same way if you pull out a piece on me,” the old man cackled.
Steven retraced the words back through his mind. There were men here willing to kill each other. For what?
“What greatest treasure, Uncle Joe?”
Joe looked at him with disgust. “Oh, you don’t know then? The right side of the family didn’t see fit to tell you either? To hell with you anyway, the family went to pot with your father, that selfish bastard probably took the secret to his grave.”
John Barbur took three steps forward, drew back his arm to punch the old man, and stopped shot at the deafening crack of a rifle firing in closed quarters. There was blood on the tip of his nose.
“Next shot will be through the head.”
The man in grey, still mainatining his calm unruffled look, broke in: “We don’t know what the treasure was. William Ambridge died in an asylum, he ranted constantly about his “perfect treasure”, even drew a map, but no one took him seriously at that point. Oh, a couple of people went looking, and there were always rumors of chests full of gold, but nothing ever turned up.”
“The treaure was real,” said Uncle Joe, “my father knew it, grandfather told him, well before the asylum. I’ve kept an eye on that map, kept an eye on bastards like Pierce here, and a dozen like him, who think they can rummage around in the old Line, or the Mansion, or the trust funds to get something for themselves.”
“A scholar studying the Ambridge family -” began Pierce, and Joe spat theatrically at the word ’scholar’ “- did some intensive research into the early Ambridge fortune, and concluded that there was indeed a substantial amount of hard currency unaccounted for.”
“That bastard tried to interview me,” interjected Joe, “but I wouldn’t sully the family name, wouldn’t give him the ammo to shoot even more holes in gandfather’s legacy. But I watched, oh yes, I have my resources. And I caught Pierce here red handed, stealing grandfather’s map away from a simpleton child, I wasn’t going to let that go!”
There was metalic rattling scrape behind them and everyone turned simultaneously. A large, pallid boy, in grease-smudged clothing and wild mussed hair stood next to the line, one arm holding the end of a chain that dissapeared into the darkness under the Line.
“They took my map, he said, “but I remembered. I found the big X.”
They stared at him, until finally John walked towards him, bent down, and held out his hand. “May I?” The boy slowly handed over the chain.
Whatever was on the other end was heavy, but moved easily once set in motion. This part of the Line had been built on a long continuous pedistal of concrete, Steven had always assumed it was solid – if not, the space beneath could have been hidden since the Line was built. Out of the darkness, the first thing visible was a small white skull, seemeing to hover alone in the shadows. Eventually the rest of the mystery revealed itself, a perfect small model of a steam engine, the skull an emblazon on its nose, a symbol William Ambridge had used on his short-lived railway line in Ohio. The chain was connected to a ring on the front, but every other detail was a perfect scale model of a working engine. It rolled out onto the floor, behind it trailed three cars piled with miniature coal. The whole train was only a foot high and some eight feet long.
Steven went to the boy, at a loss for what to do, but feeling he ought to try something. John Barbur went to his knees reverently to look at the little engine.
“What is the boy doing here?” asked Pierce, as Steven looked down into the pudgy, dirty face. The boy looked vacant, not exactly confused, but not exactly focussed on the here and now.
“Your thugs kidnapped him, Pierce, presumably for use as a hostage if there were complications. By the time I got people into place, he wasn’t with them anymore. Don’t bother, Steven, there’s not much you can do, unless you have a map in your pocket.”
Steven stopped himself from putting an arm around the kid, who was shrinking away from him. The boy perked up at the word ‘map’, but otherwise had shown no emotion since decalring his discovery.
“I think it would run, if you put a little charcoal and water in it.” John said from the floor, startling them all. “There’s a plate, says ‘From pig iron to steam engine on the famous Ambridge Line, 1902′”.
Realization sank into Steven. “His great treasure, that bet he made that he could produce a locomotive engine on the Line from raw materials. Looks like he did it. Pride of accomplishment probably meant more to him than the money, this is where your maps leads, this is your buried treasure.”
Pierce looked shocked, as did Joe, but the truth of it sank into both men simultaneously. There was no fortune hidden away, just an engineering masterpiece, perfect in every detail. John rolled it across the floor and they could all see the smooth motion of the pistons, the exquisite detail of the wheels and whistle and paint. Tiny rivits dotted the little black boiler, gold paint declared ‘The Ambridge Line’ in elaborate flowery text. How many men had died for this? Steven looked again at the dead body they had all managed to avoid thinking about.
“But… ” mumbled Pierce.
John Barbur stood, holding a piece of the miniature coal thoughtfully in his hand. Sirens rose in the distance.
–
When it was over, when the investigation closed with Uncle Joe, Pierce and the badly injured but living Carlos in jail, when Malik was returned to his caretaker and all the blood scrubbed up out of the porous concrete factory floor, the Line died.
Their last contract was cancelled, there were no more contracts to be had. A small trust fund ensured that the line would become a museum – not a well funded one, but at the very least William Ambridge’s Line would be there for historians to admire and children to climb on. Steven hired John Barbur to oversee converting the line back to it’s original equpment, as much as that was possible, and then made preparations to hand everything over to the conservators. He should stay on, he knew, but the cold quiet machinery felt wrong now, and the image of death and blood was too close.
On his last day, as the final box of papers was sealed up in the dingy little office, John Barbur walked in. The first thing he had done was clean and oil the little steam engine, and build a display platform for it. Steven could see the pure, unadulterated love the big machinist felt for the perfect miniature engine, he carried one of the little coal pieces with him now.
“Well, John, I suppose it could be worse. There’ll be plenty of work for you, at least, restoring the Line. It’s in good hands.”
John held out the little piece of coal, and let it drop to the desk in front of Steven. It made a small metallic clink. Steven picked it up and was startled at it’s weight, he looked closely at the little pebble. The paint on one corner had flaked off, revealing shiny yellow metal beneath.
“Yeah,” said John Barbur, “I’ll make due somehow.”
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The Line by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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