“Let’s go,” he finished.
They jogged over to the engine, grateful when its clean smell of hot iron, oil and soot overcame the slaughterhouse stink of the abandoned dying. John lifted Pia up with both hands on her waist, then her friend. Three of the Marines scrambled up onto the heap of broken coal that filled the fuel car; the rest of the party jammed themselves into the cab.
“Going to be a bit crowded,” Sinders said, tapping at gauges and studying the swing of dials and the level of fluid in segmented glass tubes. “She’s hot, though—plenty of steam. Could use a little coal . . . not that way, ye daft pennyworth!”
One of the marines jerked his hand back from the handle of the firebox set into the forward arch of the cab’s surface.
“Use the shovel!” Sinders said. “Lay me down some, and I’ll get this bitch movin’—beggin’ your pardon, ma’am,” he said to Pia.
John took the worn, long-handled tool down from the rack, sliding through the press of men and women. The ashwood was silky-smooth under his hands; he flicked the handle of the firedoor up and to the side, swinging the tray-sized oblong of cast iron open until it caught on the hook opposite. Hot dry air blasted back into the cab of the locomotive, with a smell of sulfur and scorched metal.
“Wilton, you get back with the others on the fuel car, I’m going to need some room here. Darling, could you and—”
“Lola. Lola Chiavri,” the other woman said.
“Miss Chiavri get on those benches.” Short iron seats were bolted under the angled windows at the rear sides of the cab, so that an off-duty fireman or stoker could sit and watch the track ahead.
John spat on his hands and dug the shovel into the coal that puddled out of the transfer chute at the very rear of the cab.
“Spread it around, like, sir,” Sinders said, turning valve wheels and laying a hand on one of the long levers. “Not too much. Kind of bounce it off that-there arch of firebrick at the front of the furnace, you know?”
John grunted in reply. The second and third shovelfuls showed him the trick of it, a flicking turn of the wrists. Have to get someone to spell me, he thought. He was amply strong and fit for the task, but his hands didn’t have the inch-thick crust of callus that anyone who did this for a living would develop.
WHUFF. WHUFF. Steam billowed out from the driving cylinders at the front of the locomotive.
“Keep it comin’, sir. She’s about ready.” Sinders braced a foot and hauled back on another of the levers. “Damn, they shoulda greased this fresh days ago. Goddam wop maintenance.”
There was a tooth-grating squeal of metal on metal as the driving wheels spun once against the rails, the smell of ozone, a quick shower of sparks. Then the engine lurched forward, slowed, lurched again and gathered speed with a regular chuff. . . chuff . . . of escaping steam. Pia grinned at John as he turned for another shovelful of coal; he found himself grinning back.
“Did it, by God,” he said, then rapped his knuckles against the haft of the shovel in propitiation.
Sunlight fell bright across them as they pulled out of the train station; he flipped the firedoor shut and slapped Sinders on the shoulder.
“Halt just before that signal tower and let me down for a moment,” he half-shouted over the noise into the Marines ear. “I’ll switch us onto the mainline.”
The trooper looked dubiously at the complex web of rail. “Sure you . . . yessir.”
John leaped down with the prybar in hand. The gravel crunched under his feet, pungent with tar and ash. A film of it settled across the filthy surface of what had once been dress shoes; he found himself smiling wryly at that. He looked up for an instant and met Pia’s eyes. She was smiling too, and he knew it was at the same jape.
That’s some woman, he told himself, as he turned and let Center’s glowing map settle over his vision. She recovered fast.