Chapter 15 - The Runaway Engine
The wind outside was a deafening vortex of ice and flying ash.
Clara caught Nathaniel’s hand just as the private car cleared the depot limits, leaving behind the shouts of the miners and the dying flames of the station. Behind them on the platform, Agnes and her men were rounding up the surrendered guards, but the train was already barreling down the main trunk line, picking up terrifying speed.
"Bell isn't dead!" Clara shouted over the scream of the locomotive wheels. Through the smoke-filled corridor of the burning car, she saw a dark figure stumble forward through the vestibule toward the tender and the locomotive cabin.
"He's heading for the throttle!" Nathaniel grimaced, clutching his bleeding arm. The blizzard hit them with brutal force as they climbed onto the narrow exterior walkway between the cars. The iron beneath their boots was slick with black ice, vibrating violently as the engine surged past forty miles per hour on a downgrade slope.
"Nathaniel, look ahead!" Clara screamed, pointing past the coal tender.
Ahead, cutting across the sheer abyss of Black Canyon, lay the Dead Man’s Trestle—a five-hundred-foot wooden railway bridge. Two days ago, a rockslide had weakened the center supports; railway workers had marked it with red warning lanterns. Bell wasn't trying to escape Black Ridge. In his madness, he was going to jump before the gorge or derail the entire train to obliterate every scrap of evidence and take them with him.
"We have to cut the coupling!" Nathaniel shouted, swinging himself onto the iron ladder of the tender. "If we uncouple the passenger cars, the emergency handbrake might hold on the rear!"
"You can't climb that with your ribs broken!" Clara grabbed his collar, pulling him back against the iron railing. Her hair whipped around her face like black silk ribbons. "You drop the pin on the rear car! I’m going to the cab!"
"Clara, no! He has an armed crew in the locomotive!"
"He has my life's blood, Nathaniel!" she cried, her eyes ablaze with an unyielding fire that silenced him. "Trust me!"
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Without waiting for his answer, she slung her empty shotgun over her back, pulled Vance’s hunting knife from her boot, and scrambled up the freezing metal rungs of the coal tender.
***
