Page 47

Thirty-Seven

Anna looks around the galley, knowing there must be a first-aid kit somewhere.

She spots one on the wall and lunges for it.

The kit cracks open in her hands and its contents rain onto the floor.

She falls to her knees, sorting through tubes of burn ointment, a bottle of mercurochrome, and small tins of rattling pills until she finds what she needs.

Gauze pads. Adhesive tape. Scissors to cut them.

Before Anna can use them, she needs to check the wound.

She lifts Reggie’s shirt, noting but not dwelling on the two-inch slice in the fabric.

It’s the similarly sized gash in the bottom left side of his stomach that commands her attention.

While not particularly wide, it looks alarmingly deep.

Blood continues to gush through the puckered flesh.

She unwraps a gauze pad and presses it over the wound. Blood instantly soaks through it, bubbling out the other side. Anna covers it with more gauze and tapes everything into place.

A temporary fix.

Reggie clearly needs stitches. If Anna can’t find some way to close his wound, it’s likely he’ll bleed out in the next hour or two.

She stands and starts searching every drawer, tossing aside their contents, frantically looking for needle and thread.

There’s nothing. With time of the essence, Anna decides it’s more likely to find what she needs in a different part of the train.

But she can’t leave Reggie by himself. Not when Judd is possibly still nearby.

“Can you stand?” she says.

Reggie shoots her a wary look. “Do I have a choice?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Take this,” Reggie says, handing her the gun still gripped in his hand. Overwhelmed by the sight of the knife and the blood, Anna hadn’t noticed it. Now she’s takes it into her blood-slicked hands and shoves it into the pocket of Reggie’s borrowed jacket.

He exhales, nods, then tries to rise off the floor. Anna swoops in to support him, ducking so that his arm is across her shoulders, transferring much of his weight onto her. Together they move through the galley, every step prompting a pained hiss from Reggie.

“It happened so fast,” he says. “I turned my back for one second and the next he’s sticking a knife in me.”

“Judd?”

“Yeah.”

The knowledge that Judd might still be nearby—ready to strike again—makes Anna quicken their pace. They push into the dining car, where Lapsford and Sal are simultaneously entering from the other end.

“What the hell happened?” Lapsford says upon seeing Anna and Reggie hobbling across the room.

“Judd attacked him. Have you seen anyone?”

“No,” Sal says. “No one has come through here or the lounge.”

“But he came this way,” Anna insists. “Where did he go?”

A tense silence falls over the car as all four of them lift their eyes to the ceiling.

“The roof,” Reggie mutters. “He’s on the goddamn roof.”

“We need to go,” Anna says. “All of us. Right now.”

Moving in a pack, they make their way into the lounge, where Anna veers behind the bar just long enough to grab a bottle of vodka. She’s going to need something to clean the wound. After that, it’s into Car 11, where Anna and Reggie stop at the door to his room.

“Do you have a sewing kit?” she asks Sal. “I need to stitch him up.”

Sal nods. “I’ll be right back.”

Anna drags Reggie into his room. When she lowers him onto the bed, blood instantly starts to seep into the sheets.

By then, Sal is back, thrusting a tin sewing kit into her hands.

Anna opens it, seeing needles, scissors, and several spools of thread.

It’s not ideal—the needles aren’t sterilized, and the thread is a far cry from sutures—but it’ll have to do.

“Go back to your room,” she tells Sal. “Lock the door. Stay away from the windows.”

Anna follows the same protocol in Reggie’s room.

In the bathroom, she washes her hands, threads the needle, and pours vodka over its tip.

She then grabs a washcloth and returns to Reggie’s side.

Anna peels away the blood-soaked gauze, douses the washcloth with vodka, and starts cleaning the wound.

The first touch brings an agonized gasp from Reggie.

“Give me that,” he says, reaching for the bottle.

Anna hands it over, and he takes several long, sloppy gulps.

Properly fortified, he carefully shifts onto his uninjured side, giving her better access to the wound.

Anna stares at it, dumbfounded. Of all the ways she’d pictured the trip going—and the various scenarios she’d come up with were many—this wasn’t one of them.

Reggie takes another swig of vodka. “Have you ever stitched someone up before?”

“Oh, I do it all the time.”

Reggie drinks half a swallow more. “Then you already know that you start by pinching the skin together at one end and looping the thread through it at least twice before tying it off.”

“Of course,” Anna says, keeping up the ruse because it’s easier for both of them to ignore the truth that she has no idea what she’s doing.

Despite the vodka, Reggie’s body tenses when she pinches the bottom end of the cut as instructed and prepares to slide the needle through the skin.

He nods for Anna to keep going, so she does, piercing both edges of flesh and pulling them together with the thread.

Reggie winces, takes another drink. “Other than stitching up strangers, what else do you do for fun?”

“Fun?” Anna says.

“Yeah, you know. Hobbies. Amusing yourself.”

Anna, having looped the thread through the wound’s edge three times, ties it off. “I know what fun is.”

“Yet your answer tells me you don’t have any.”

“I go to the movies sometimes,” Anna says, now working her way upward, slowly sewing the wound like it’s a piece of mending. She tries to pretend that’s exactly what she’s doing. Mending a dress and not sewing up flesh, blood slick on her fingertips.

“That’s it?” Reggie says through gritted teeth, also pretending that this is just an ordinary conversation and not an emergency procedure that might possibly save his life. “An occasional movie? What about musicals?”

The question catches Anna so off guard that her hand almost slips. “Musicals?”

“Come on, you’ve heard of them. People onstage singing and dancing. They’re very popular.”

“I’m sure they are,” Anna says, now at the halfway point, the wound closing tighter with each subsequent pull of the thread. “I assume you’re a fan.”

“Love them,” Reggie says, his voice taking on a dreamy tone. Anna guesses it’s either from the vodka or blood loss. She prays it’s the former. “Give me an interesting plot and some hummable tunes, and I’m in heaven. Once this is all over, you should let me take you to one.”

Anna looks up from the half-stitched wound. “Are you asking me on a date as I’m giving you stitches?”

“Maybe,” Reggie says, hitting the bottle once more. “It doesn’t have to be a date. We could go as friends.”

“Friends?”

“I guess you don’t have much of those, either.”

“I’ve been busy,” Anna says quietly.

“Plotting vengeance.”

“Yes,” Anna says. “For the past year, every thought, every action, every damn minute has been spent preparing for this night. And now it’s all gone to hell.”

“It seems I’ve hit a nerve,” Reggie says.

Anna gives the needle an overzealous tug, making sure Reggie can feel the spiraled thread tightening through his flesh. “And I can hit several,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice distant and shrinking by the second. “It’s just such a sad way to go through life.”

“What else should I have done?”

“I told you that earlier—let the authorities handle it.”

“But these people destroyed my family,” Anna says. “Not yours.”

Reggie grows quiet. So much that Anna assumes he’s passed out, either from the pain or the vodka. It’s a surprise when, after a minute of silence, he speaks again, his voice a gruff whisper.

“My family was destroyed, too. When my father died.”

A sense of guilt settles over Anna. Of course everyone has their losses that are just as painful. “What happened to him?” she asks.

“He was murdered.”

Anna’s hand stills. “I’m so sorry. Did they catch who did it?”

“No,” Reggie says.

“Is that why you joined the FBI?”

Reggie turns his head to look at her through glazed eyes. “Yes. Because I don’t want anyone to experience what my family did.”

“You want justice,” Anna says, finally understanding why he’d been so annoyed with her earlier. By taking matters into her own hands tonight, she denied him—and the many men like him—the chance to right a terrible wrong.

“I do,” Reggie says, his voice so far away he might as well be in outer space.

Anna says nothing, focusing instead on finishing the stitch job with a triple loop at the opposite end of the gash. She ties it off and lets out a deep, shaky breath.

“All done,” she says, although Reggie can’t hear her, having fallen into a vodka-and-pain-induced slumber.

Anna knows that’s for the best. He needs rest. She only hopes he doesn’t toss around in his sleep and break her makeshift stitches.

To lessen the chances of that happening, she gently rolls him onto his back.

In the bathroom, she washes the blood from her hands, which tremble uncontrollably. A delayed reaction not just to all the stress of the past hour, but the hours preceding it, and the days preceding them, and the year preceding those.

All of it has taken a toll, as her appearance in the mirror above the sink can attest. Anna thinks she looks positively frightful.

There’s blood on her dress, her hair remains a windswept tangle, and stress and sleep deprivation have turned her face pale gray.

Her exhaustion is underscored by bruise-black circles under her eyes, which give her a spectral appearance. Simultaneously haunting and haunted.

Exhaustion clings to her as she shushes out of the room.

She knows she shouldn’t. It’s safer inside with Reggie.

But she also knows she’ll go mad if she doesn’t escape the chaos, just for a minute.

In the corridor, she drifts to the middle of the car and stares out the window.

The snow outside has slowed. Anna can again see the sky as it begins to fade from black to the hazy gray of dawn.

Just a few more hours, she tells herself. Then this will all be over.

If any of them live that long.

Every rattle of the train and every clatter of the wheels has her convinced Judd is right behind her, knife raised, ready to slash.

It doesn’t help that the lights have started to flicker again.

While Anna doesn’t know if it’s just this car or the entire train, she doesn’t like it.

The blinking lights seem to her like a portent of something bad—a feeling that gets worse when they give up the ghost and flash out entirely.

Plunged into darkness, Anna’s about to return to Reggie’s room when a man appears in the doorway at the back of the car. What little Anna can see of him is bathed in the tepid light coming through the window. The meager glow falls in a slant across his face.

As he gets closer, Anna can make out only individual features. A nose. An eye. Half of a mouth. Just enough for her to piece together the man’s identity. Shock vibrates through Anna like she’s a bell that’s just been struck.

“Tommy?” she says.

She’s proven right when her brother—her thought-to-be-dead brother—steps into a patch of predawn light. Anna doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry or scream, especially when Tommy says, “It’s really me, Annie. Gosh, I’ve missed you.”

He flashes that matinee-idol smile she had loved so much, opening his mouth wide to reveal two rows of rotting teeth and blood trickling between them. He lurches closer and Anna sees that his body isn’t a body at all. Just a mass of blood and bone and sinew.

When Tommy tries to hug her, Anna finally knows how to react.

She screams.