The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [150]
Easing up, he saw the massive twist of steel. What remained of a railroad car was lying on its side halfway down an embankment. It was then he realized he had been thrown from the train.
Farther up the embankment, he could see the other cars, some driven, accordion-like, into each other. Others were piled, almost piggyback, one on top of another. Bodies were everywhere. Some were moving; most were not. At the top of the hill, a group of young boys came into view, staring down at the wreckage and pointing.
Slowly Osborn began to understand what had happened. “McVey!” he heard himself say out loud.
“McVey!” he said again, struggling to his feet. Then he saw the first rescuers push past the boys and start down the hill.
The act of standing made him dizzy. Closing his eyes, he grabbed onto a tree for balance and took a deep breath. Reaching up, he felt the pulse at his neck. It was strong and regular. Then somebody, a fireman, he thought, spoke to him in French. “I’m all right,” he said in English, and the man moved on.
Shrieks and cries of victims cleared his mind further, and he saw that everything around him was chaos. Rescue workers poured down the hillside. Climbed into cars. Began lifting people out through smashed windows, easing them out from beneath the wreckage. Blankets were tossed, in a rush, over the dead. The entire area became a frantic hill of activity.
And settling over everything—the shouts, the screams, the distant sirens, the cries for help—was the pungent, overwhelming, odor of hot brake fluid as it leaked from sheared lines.
The smell of it made Osborn cover his nose as he pushed through the tragedy around him.
“McVey!” he cried out again. “McVey! McVey!”
“Sabotage,” he heard someone say in passing. Turning, he found himself looking into a rescue worker’s face.
“American,” he said. “An older man. Have you seen him?” The man stared back as if he didn’t understand. Then a fireman came up and they ran back up the hill.
Stepping over broken glass, climbing over torn and ravaged steel, Osborn moved from one victim to another. Watching the doctors work on the living, lifting the blankets to stare at the faces of the dead. McVey was nowhere among them.
Once, lifting the blanket to look at the face of a dead man, he saw the man’s eyes flicker once, then close again. Reaching, he felt for a heartbeat and found it. Looking up, he saw a paramedic.
“Help!” he shouted. “This man is alive!”
The paramedic came with a rush and Osborn moved back. As he did, he began to feel cold and lightheaded. Shock, he knew, was beginning to set in. His first thought was to ask the paramedic where he could get a blanket and he started to, but suddenly had enough presence of mind to realize that if the train had been sabotaged, the act could well have been meant for McVey and himself. If he asked for a blanket, they would know he’d been a passenger. They would demand his name and he would be reported alive.
“No,” he thought and backed away. “Best to get out of sight and stay there.”
Looking around, he saw a thick stand of trees near the top of the grade not far from where he stood. The paramedic had his back to him and the other rescue workers were farther down the hill. It became a major physical effort for him to climb the few yards to the trees, and he was afraid it was taking too long and he would be seen. Finally he reached them and turned back. Still, no one looked his way. Satisfied, he melted into the thick under-growth. And there, away from the hysteria, he lay down in the damp leaves and, using his arm for a pillow, closed his eyes. Almost immediately deep sleep overtook him.
76
* * *
WORD OF the Paris-Meaux train derailment reached Ian Noble less than an hour after it happened. First reports indicated sabotage. A second report confirmed that an explosive device had been set off directly under the engine.
That McVey and Osborn would be on the same route, at the same time, to rendezvous