"What's strange?"
"This accident has happened before. Exactly this way." Smith swallowed. "And it was one of the worst in Amtrak history."
Chapter 21
Cora Lee Beall would never forget the sound as long as she lived.
That long scream of metal that preceded the dull crump of impact, followed by the booming cannonade of passenger coaches slamming into a suddenly stopped engine. Then an awful silence.
And after the silence, the horrible moans and screams of the injured rose up from the settling dust like fresh-made ghosts discovering their fates.
It had happened at her backyard right here in Essex, Maryland.
Cora Lee had been unloading her washing machine. The sound yanked her out of that household chore like a bluefin tuna pulled out of the Chesapeake Bay.
When she emerged from her house, she saw the coaches lying on their sides, piled and jammed together like foolish toys in her backyard. Big as they were, they reminded her of little toys.
One had skidded on its side, scalping the lawn and crushing her clothesline flat. The same clothesline she would have been standing at in another minute or two. Another coach lay open, as if an old-fashioned claw can opener had been taken to it, spilling its precious cargo.
It was a day and an experience Cora Lee would never forget and hoped never to witness again. The sound was what stayed with her. Not so much the blood and the torn of limb. After things got back to normal, in the first of the nights without sleep, Cora Lee heard those sounds again and again in her mind and ultimately came to the sorrowful conclusion they had cut her life exactly in half. After that first long, piercing scream of steel wheels on steel rail, her life was never again the same.
That was back in January 1987. Almost ten long years ago now. How the time had flown. Gradually the gouged earth softened, and the scars were healed over by the seasonal rains. New grass grew. Cora Lee got herself a brand-new washer-dryer stack, never again to air out her laundry in the backwash of the Colonial. She finally got to the point where she could look at the passing trains and not flinch.
True normalcy never did quite come back into her life, but the years took care of the worst of it.
So on a July day when Cora Lee was lounging on a redwood chair as the day's wash tumbled in the dryer, sipping a mint Julep and looking out over the rail bed, the last thing she expected on earth was to hear a long, familiar scream of steel under stress.
Cora Lee dropped her drink and sat frozen. Before, she had only heard the disaster. This time she saw it happen with her own eyes.
The Colonial came shrieking by, steel wheels spitting sparks. She knew what a hotbox was. When a moving wheel-set overheated, it would spark and begin to fly apart. This was no hotbox. Every wheel was in agony. The Colonial looked more like a groundskimming comet than a train. The wheels were locked, sliding not rolling. She knew enough about trains to know the air brakes had been applied. Hard and fast.
Her stricken gaze went to the engine, and her heart jumped and froze even as her body sat paralyzed.
Coming down the line on the same northbound track was a lone blue Conrail freight engine.
"This can't be happening," she said. Then she screamed it.
"This can't be happening. Oh, dear Lord!"
But it was. Exactly like 1987, when the Colonial slammed into a Conrail engine that shouldn't have been there, and sixteen had died.
The sounds that followed might have been played by the tape recorder of her memory and pumped out through a quadrophonic sound system.
The long scream of steel ended in a dull, ugly crump. Then like steel thunder the coaches slammed together and flung themselves about.
"Oh, Lord, this is the end of me," Cora Lee said just before the flying fragment of broken rail smashed her apart like a cotton sack filled with so much loose meat.
MELVIS CUPPER'S BEEPER went off within fifteen minutes of the derailment at Essex.
He was at the Omaha airport bar, knocking back frosty Coors, lamenting the wretched unfairness of life and improvising old railroad choruses as the spirit moved him.
Oh, her eyes were Conrail blue, She wore a Casey Jones cap. But she lusted after maglev speed. Which everyone knows is crap. So now I'm off my feeeeeed.
On that high note, the pager beeped.
"Oh, hell," Melvis said, shutting off his pager and seeking out a pay phone.
His supervisor was direct. "Got another one for you, Cupper."
Melvis groaned. "Where is it this time?"
"Essex, Maryland. Colonial slammed into a wrong-way Conrail diesel."
"Hell, Sam. You soused?"
"You're the one slurring his s's, Mel."
"I may be drunk as a boiled owl, but even I can remember through the haze that Essex, Maryland, was the site of that hellacious wreck back in '87. Colonial plowed into a Conrail humper then, too. Conrail hogger was on drugs."
"You always say that."
"That time it was true. He ran a signal he shouldn't, confessed and got his ass suspended for life."
"Damn. I remember it now. You're right. That's downright weird."
"Weird or not, I'm on my dang way," said Melvis, hanging up. It took him six tries. He kept missing the switch hook.
"Damn Jap phone," he muttered, handing the receiver to a bewildered child.
AN NTSB HELICOPTER was waiting for Melvis at the Baltimore-Washington international airport. He was on-site thirty minutes later.
"Don't tell me that's one of them new Genesis II engines," he moaned as the chopper was settling.
"What's that?" the pilot asked.
"Never dang mind," Melvis said, slapping on his Stetson and ducking out of the winding aircraft.
The on-site Amtrak director of operations shook his hand and said, "We're still processing bodies here."
Melvis said, "I aim to stay outta your way. Just want to get a preliminary gander at the point of impact."
The man pointed the way and rushed off.
Melvis walked down, picking his way carefully. He almost tripped over the bottom half of a leg that lay in his path. It was naked except for an argyle sock with a hole big enough to allow one cold toe to poke out.
"That boy shoulda listened to his mama about keeping up his socks," Melvis muttered, clapping his Stetson over his big chest out of respect for the dead and dismembered, which were plentiful.
The train cars had performed every acrobatic stunt from flying sideways to gouging their wheels into trackside ballast, Melvis saw as he passed the mangled mess.
The compacted engines were as bad as in Nebraska. The monocoque body of the Genesis had gotten the worst of the deal. There was a joke in the industry that the Genesis looked like the box the real locomotive had come in. Now it looked like the box thrown out after Christmas Day.
The Conrail freight engine was an SD50 diesel. By some freak it had bounced back from the point of impact.
Melvis decided he should check out the Conrail cab, in case he had another inconvenient headless engineer on his hands.
Climbing up the tangle of blue steel that had been the access ladder, he heard voices, paused and muttered, "Naw. Couldn't be."
A wrinkled ivory face peered out at him through the shattered glass of the gaping nose door. "You are too late," said Chiun.
"Hidy, old-timer," Melvis said with more enthusiasm than he actually felt. "Hell of a way to run a railroad, don't you think?"
Chiun withdrew so Melvis could step in. Remo was there with him, looking unhappy-which seemed to be his natural condition.
"You boys are sure tramplin' up my patch."
"We got here first," Remo remarked.
"You did, at that. What you find-anything?"
"No engineer. No blood."
"So I see," said Melvis. "Well, let me show you how we do things at the NTSB. Follow me down into the necessary."