H-Ks; I’ll hold on to the SIG 228 and we’ll keep the Glock for emergencies.” He stuffed the smaller of the two SIG pistols—the 228—into his waistband, dropping four spare magazines for the pistol into his front pants pockets.
“Time to give Mr. Roosevelt a crash course in use of the SIG and a suppressor-fitted submachine gun.” Jack stood up and glanced behind them. “Can’t see the two cars we uncoupled.” As he spoke, the air around Ellen seemed to pulse, and there was a roar so loud she could barely hear Jack exclaiming “Holy shit!”
Ellen rested the locomotive engineer’s head on the carpetbag as she sprang to her feet so rapidly that her heel snagged in the hem of her dress. Jack caught her, and she was in his arms when she looked back along the tracks. “It’s not nuclear, is it, Jack?” Ellen heard the desperation in her own voice as the mushroom-shaped fireball lit the night almost as brightly as a premature sunrise would have.
“No, kid. No. Just conventional. Probably semtex or an even more powerful kind of plastic explosive. But they sure used enough of it. Probably trashed the whole track under the train cars. We’ll need to find the first place we can where we can wire news of the wreck before the next train trashes itself with no track under it and wreckage in front of it.”
Ellen turned her head and looked at Teddy Roosevelt. The explosive fireball was reflected in his glasses, his face red-tinged, as was Jack’s, where the coal dust had fallen away.
Ellen wondered if Roosevelt thought that he was having a vision of Hell, and Hell was the future.
As a little girl, if Ellen had ever pictured herself as a locomotive engineer, it was not under circumstances similar to those in which she found herself now. Her husband was showing Roosevelt all about how to use a submachine gun and an automatic pistol. It was half past five in the morning. The wind around the locomotive was very cold and numbed her. The feeble light positioned between the locomotive’s smokestack and cowcatcher—a headlight—provided so little illumination that the train was clearly outrunning it; by the time she might spot something on the rails ahead, there would be no time to stop the train before smashing into whatever that object was.
Nor had she envisioned herself driving a locomotive after the real engineer had died in her arms fewer than five minutes earlier.
And, to make matters just peachy, she saw a bright light to the south—a light slowly but steadily increasing in size. “Jack! We’ve either got a UFO coming toward us or it’s a helicopter. You hear me, Jack?”
“I hear you,” Jack told her, suddenly beside her. “And, I almost hope it’s a UFO.”
“What do the letters U-F-O stand for, Mrs. Naile?” Teddy Roosevelt inquired of her.
Ellen looked at Jack, seeing his eyes in the lamplight. She couldn’t read them, but he said, “May as well tell him. The phenomenon was reported in various ways down through the centuries.”
“Mysterious lights in the sky,” Ellen amplified, “flying objects which move in strange ways, aerial phenomena that are unidentified. They came/will come to be known as unidentified flying objects in about fifty years from now. Some people call them flying saucers.”
“Is that light emanating from one of these flying saucers, then?”
“No, sir,” Jack volunteered. “You’re doubtless familiar with the scientific musings of Da Vinci. Do you recall his design for an aircraft or flying machine with rotating wings above its approximate center?”
“As a matter of fact, I do, Jack. Quite fanciful, but there was no power source by means of which it could be made to fly, even if such had been possible.”
“You’ve identified the crux of the problem, Mr. Roosevelt,” Jack agreed. “Until two bicycle mechanics will achieve the first powered flight in a little over three years from now.”
“Americans, these bicycle mechanics?”
“Of course, sir,” Ellen informed Teddy Roosevelt.
“Bully, Mrs. Naile! So, Jack, the power problem was solved—or will be—and the origin of that light—electrical, certainly—is from a flying machine similar to that posited by the great Leonardo.”
“Yes, sir. When and where we come from,” Jack told him, “they are called helicopters. Sometimes they are heavily armed for warfare. This might be such a gunship, but probably isn’t. More likely there will be one, possibly two armed men aboard, along with the pilot.”
“If we are attacked, as it appears may soon prove out, then I would assume the object in returning fire is