The Gray Machine

Purpose, Shore

The body wore only ragged strips of what might have been pants, woven of some strange dark tattered material. All seven feet of him was hairless. The bloated face was wide, strong, and oddly regal despite its pallor. And yet, smooth, almost childlike. He was coated in gashes, caked with sandy black blood. And the way he lay still, no breath detectable... chilled Summer to her core.

Dimple and Wednesday knelt, one on each side of him.

"Poor fella's mighty et up." Dimple's face was pallid, jaw clenched. Wednesday touched the not-man's chest, searching for a breath or a pulse.

Summer noticed an implant on the side of his neck, a small, metal disc like a silver dollar. She could not read the writing on it, but there as a symbol.

"What kinda place inserts a metal disc in someone's neck? Could he be some kind of prisoner, or soldier?"

"Is it a pyramid?" Dimple wondered. "Some sort of freemason bullshit?"

"It's not a pyramid," John said. The others turned to see his eyes blazing, his teeth grinding under light stubble. His tone was kerosene poured on smoldering terror. "It's a road, disappearing on the horizon. The arc in the center means death. The last ride we all take. We have to get the fuck out of here."

To Summer's surprise, Wednesday countered with austere ice. "The. Hell. We. Do. Are you out of your damn mind? We can't just leave him!"

John finally snapped. "Damnit, just why in the hell not?"

"Baby, we're putting this man to rest like civilized people. And then you're gonna tell me what that symbol means and what in heaven is going on."

After a moment, John knelt, wiped his brow, and grabbed a leg as thick as his own torso. It took all five of them to lift it. The skin was slippery, rubbery, the blood that still oozed slimy. Summer got the sensation that she was trying to lift a pile of dead snakes.

"Bad goddamn idea..." John grunted at the darkening sky, as they heaved the bulk across the sand.

They managed to half-carry-half-drag him above the high tide line. They laid him spread-eagle a ways down from their dying fire, amidst dehydrated seaweed and overeager black flies.

The sun had begun to set. There was still no one else within sight, and for some reason that was getting to her. Summer was caught between crying for help and a strange need to... to what? To honor the dead? Hide the evidence?

Summer's eyes kept moving to the gashes. She'd seen plenty of things riding the rails – a man's leg crushed under the wheels of a shotgunned black snake freighter, protesters gunned down in Blackhawk. She'd run from her share of bone polishers and psychos, ridden with plenty of blinkies, wingies, and limpies – hobos who'd surrendered eyes, arms, and legs to the rails. But there was something inhuman about this one. Not just the deadman's face, but also his weight, his wounds, his ammonia smell, and his dark blood—even the drunken way the flies reeled away after they'd had a sip.

"What's it mean, John?" Wednesday's voice was thick.

"Means the past don't ever leave you alone."

✧

John's pale blue eyes scanned distant memories.

Rachel.

Skinny Rachel, shaking under dirty night rain, underlit yellow by the 110th Street subway entrance. Screaming at him.

John wouldn't let her down this time. He'd find her before they did, make up for everything.

"It means they're back, and they'll be coming for her..."

"For who, goddamnit, John. Who!?" Wednesday demanded.

"Damnit, someone I care about!" John felt wretched at the shock on Wednesday's face. The four looked at him in the fading light like he was the stranger that had just washed up, and it cut him coldly. John fought back a loathing for himself older and scalier than time.

"My daughter, Rachel," he said at last. "We have to find her before they do. She got caught with folks who ride under this same symbol years back. Los Hombres de la Sombra. Though some call them the Gray Machine. I thought that chapter was long over, dead as this poor miserable fuck. But this..."

John couldn't look at Wednesday.

"John –" the woman who'd loved him so well said in a whisper. "Fifteen years. Fifteen years I've been by your side, and you never told me you had a child."

"I'll tell you it all. But not now. Wednesday, I'm... sorry." His voice broke as he pled with these good people who'd been fools enough to think they'd known him. "But please. We gotta head north."

"What will they do to your daughter?" Summer asked.

"Please don't make me tell you."

The five hobos had come to this beach via the black widow's web of trains that locals called El tren de la muerte. Others called it El tren de los desconocidos, or simply, la bestia—the beast. These were the not-so-secret corridors for the ones fleeing north, to scale walls or cut fences our traverse canals to reach the promised land, and to die by tens of thousands for their trouble.

John considered their options, grim as the route they must follow. He'd find her up north, at the bitter end of those tracks. As long as he lived, John himself had no desire to return to that northern necropolis of false idols and falser hopes, where the reaper wrapped its bony ass in Old Glory and Bible paper.

But what choice did he have?

✧

"Voló a través de un parabrisas..." Rolando said, eyes fixed, face pale, making them all jump. It was rare to get more than three words from him.

Wednesday translated. "He says it looks like he was thrown through a windshield." They considered, all somber eyes on the boy. "But in the ocean?" Wednesday asked, squinting. "Off a boat?"

Rolando paused, still expressionless, looking nowhere.

"Creo que no. Los recortos..."

Rolan snapped to life as if someone had hit a light switch. His eyes locked with each of theirs in rapid succession, voice in fast forward. He gesticulated, kneeling to prod at the swollen head with one hand, whilst mining a vessel zooming downward with the other.

"El ángulo de las heridas..."

The deadman's craft, Rolan told them, must have been headed at a steep downward angle, judging from the wounds, no doubt made by the breaking windshield glass. It must have been going faster than any normal boat, but the lack of road burn and the minor degree of concussive injury told him the man had been tossed from craft into water, and not dry land.

"Also, he says the glass from a boat or plane windshield wouldn't break that way, into those nasty chunks." She grimaced as she said it.

Summer's jaw slipped open. If she didn't know better, she'd have thought Rolan was Egoing it at breakneck speed, zipping down a rabbit-hole of outlinked articles faster than a coke fiend in a debate team competition, but no. The boy was like her: never embedded. Egoless.

The boy wasn't putting on airs or making wild conjecture. He knew these things to be true. She tried to fathom the rate and amount of information he must be processing to make it all come together in a clear picture, and couldn't.

John was regarding Rolan with all the solemnity of a villager with a pitchfork. "If not a boat then what?"

A long pause.

"Lo no sé. Tal vez un ONVI."

"A spaceship," Wednesday said quietly.

"Bullshit," John spat. "... Well? Don't tell me you're buying any of this! Los Hombres are some twisted occult motherfuckers but—"

With a jolt, the gray deadman, who was evidently neither dead nor man, woke up.