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Last Train from Deadwall PART ONE of Two

by André Geleynse

 

The first time Knucklebone tried to kill himself, he’d already been dead for one hundred and thirteen years. He’d died in a workplace accident, which meant it was within their legal rights for the Cogsmith Railroad Company to bind his soul to his reanimated skeleton and hand him the invoice. Ten thousand chits for the soft tissue removal alone, plus a hundred thousand more for the brass gears, pneumatic muscles, aether core, and an impressively shitty diesel-powered engine to pilot his skeleton.

Knucklebone made about six chits a day. His family had written him off entirely after his death, so outside help was right out. After the first two decades of undead servitude, he’d learned about compounding interest and realized paying off his debt simply wasn’t possible this side of eternity. He’d have to find another way out.

In the dead of night, while on a job building a new bridge in the desolate mountains north of Clock City, he’d slipped out to the deserted work site. He’d picked up a screwdriver, some pliers, and a pipe wrench. He’d pried open his ribcage. Not actually that difficult. As a fleshless skeleton, his bones were tied together by pneumatics and wire rather than muscle and sinew. He’d found his aether core and clumsily tried to pry it open, dump out every last drop of the damned stuff. Aether was the spiritual glue that kept his soul tethered to this mortal plane like a ball and chain. Without it he would be properly dead, and free to roam the Mothlord’s Halls in peace.

It couldn’t really be considered suicide. He was just setting things back the way they should be.

Except the core wouldn’t open. He couldn’t even dent it.

He’d given up on emptying the core. Instead, he ripped it from its housing; sliced through the rubber tubing and tore off every wire that connected it to his body. It hadn’t hurt, exactly; although he did have some version of nerves, none were installed on his insides. But ripping out your own heart is never a pleasant experience. Even if you can’t feel it.

For a few seconds the world had sharpened into perfect clarity. He’d held up the core, about the size and shape of a pocket watch, with shorn tubing and wires splayed and drooping from it like a deflated squid. Its casing was hammered titanium, not even scratched from his attempts to break it. In the centre was a single glowing keyhole.

Then Knucklebone had collapsed to the floor in a clatter of loose bones and metal. Nothing more than a well-preserved skeleton and some overpriced machinery.

What he did not do was die.

His fragile soul, freed from the physical protection of his bones, was shredded against the unyielding reality of the material realm. Darkness consumed him like a beast with a thousand teeth. Needles pierced his corneas. Hunger tore his intestines to shreds. He screamed until his throat spat blood while every muscle contracted and continued to contract; breaking his bones, crushing him down and down and down. He had no organs, bones, or body, but his mind had no other way to conceptualize the torment inflicted on his naked soul. It invented a body to torture.

And still it continued, like a dream of falling but never waking up. Existence was a silent, bloody scream.

When he woke, they told him he’d been disconnected for eleven months. That was how long it took for the repair paperwork to go through and for his core to be reconnected to his body; all the necessary wiring and pneumatics patched or replaced. What he’d experienced, they said, was something called the Void. It was what death felt like to a soul unable to leave the mortal realm.

He wasn’t the first mechanical revenant to try and re-kill himself. Unless you destroyed the core itself — drained every drop of aether from it, letting it dissolve into the earth, taking your soul along with i t— your soul could not escape. Unable to leave the mortal realm, unable to shelter in the safety of a body. Common knowledge, they said with a shrug.

They’d added thirty thousand chits to his debt for the repair.

---

Ninety-one years later, and nineteen miles from Deadwall, Knucklebone’s train growled to a halt. It wasn’t supposed to. Brand new, top-of-the-line necromantic engine powered by an aether core more expensive than most cities and eight-hundred and eighty-five dinosaur bones; a colossal behemoth of iron and bone dead on its tracks in the middle of an endless plain of ice.

They called on Knucklebone to fix it.

He stood packed like cargo into a three-storey tall box car with a thousand other mechanical revenants. Three storeys of reanimated skeletons, strapped to support racks to avoid damage during transport, each wearing the reflective orange vest emblematic of the Cogsmith Company. If Knucklebone had had lungs, he would have asphyxiated on the diesel fumes of their thousand sputtering engines.

Their reflective vests marked them as part of a construction crew sent to complete the brand new Saint Tock Station. They were supposed to be very excited about it. Knucklebone had worked on over seventy new stations in his time, and he didn’t expect this one to be any different.

“For fuck’s sake,” Knucklebone said when the overseer arrived to unbuckle his travel restraints. “Why can’t they do their own damn job?”

“I told them you’ve got a way with trains,” said the overseer. This was true, though Knucklebone wasn’t sure he appreciated being perceived like that. Once in the Maze Rail of Jun’esh, when an unfortunately timed acid fall had melted the comms array, Knucklebone had guided the train safely out. Another time, he’d woken a slumbering engine that wasn’t scheduled to move for another week, just in time for the construction crew to escape an oncoming enemy horde.

The overseer, whose name was Brick, was part troll. They loomed over Knucklebone like a small mountain, and their skin scraped like rock when they moved. They were the closest thing Knucklebone had to a friend, which was to say they’d crossed paths often enough that he remembered their name. They wore a gas mask to survive the engine fumes, so Knucklebone couldn’t see the expression on their face, but he suspected it was apologetic. Brick hated making anyone do things they didn’t want to do. How they’d ended up with their current job was a mystery.

“Not like I’ve got a choice,” he muttered. Or tried to. The wiring in his speakers was degrading, so his voice buzzed static when he spoke too quietly.

He followed Brick from the car. A few of the grinning skulls of his cohorts turned to watch him leave, but most ignored him. He and Brick travelled down the main central catwalk; through several vast, empty, echoing cars toward the locomotive. The train was large enough to house a small city, though it currently carried only a handful of souls, relatively speaking. Its true purpose was not to carry people or even mechanical revenants, but the Clockwork Empire’s titanic war machines: bone mechs.

Currently, none were on board. Aside from the construction crew of mechanical revenants, the engineers, and a handful of overseers like Brick, the train was empty. Vast echoing halls of cars waited empty to carry those deathly titans of war from their factories in Deadwall to the ever-expanding battle lines at the outer edges of the Clockwork Empire.

“Right,” Brick said, coming to an exit hatch. “Good luck.” They shoved Knucklebone outside.

“You’re not coming?”

“I don’t like cold,” Brick said, and shut the hatch.

Knucklebone found himself close to forty feet above the ground, on a catwalk running the whole length of the giant locomotive. Ice fields spread to the horizon, reflecting the sunlight in a brilliant white glare. The train hissed and steamed in the glacial temperatures; a towering behemoth of clockwork and necromancy, intruder into an otherwise pristine expanse. Knucklebone navigated himself, engine rumbling and sputtering in the cold, along the catwalk until he reached the front of the train.

At the front, a massive skull loomed like a ship’s figurehead. Knucklebone wasn’t sure whether it was dinosaur or dragon, but whatever it had been millennia ago, it was now a train.

And the train was scared.

Knucklebone could feel its fear thrumming through his bones. It was deeply unpleasant; a sourceless anxiety like worms in his pneumatics. He’d always shared a connection with other aether-bound souls, though with his usual cohorts it was faint. More an unconscious awareness of their presence than anything else. With a beast this size, though, it was strong as diesel fumes in the sun.

Knucklebone did have a way with trains. It wasn’t because of anything special about him — at least, not that he was aware of. The difference was that while most others looked at a train and saw a machine, Knucklebone never forgot they were creatures too. Ancient, dead creatures but still creatures. Knucklebone and the train, they were the same.

Knucklebone pulled off his left glove and placed one fleshless hand on the front of the train’s skull. “Therapy time.”

The aether connection strengthened; less like worms niggling through his bones and more like a snake wrapping itself around the two of them. The train couldn’t speak — no one had ever bothered to give a train a mouth — but Knucklebone could sense the weight of its attention slowly turning to him. It would understand what he said now, or at least his general intent. Reanimated skeletons like the train or Knucklebone could only ever be as clever as they had been in life, and Knucklebone was reasonably certain whatever dinosaur or behemoth this skull had once belonged to hadn’t yet evolved the capacity for language.

“You’re spooked,” Knucklebone said. “I get it. So am I.”

He had no idea why the train was spooked. He just knew it was terrified to move any closer to Deadwall. And it wasn’t as if the train could explain; it just felt. Knucklebone tried to sound calming, but the cold was turning his voice staticky and monotone. The intent was enough. He just needed to calm this thing down and convince it that everything would be okay.

“It’s not a bad place,” he lied. “It’s where you were built. It’s where I was built. So it’s kind of like we’re going home, right? They say home is good. Where the heart is. Though I think our hearts must have decomposed a long time ago.”

He paused and leaned his forehead on a sharp ridge above the train’s top jaw. Bone to bone. He was rambling, but it was listening.

Knucklebone had often wondered what it would feel like to be a train. Souls could only ever be bound to pieces of the body they’d belonged to in life, but there was no natural law governing what configuration those bones had to be in. Unlike him, whose bones had been put back together in the same order they’d been in while alive, the train’s bones were mixed and matched, reconfigured into a whole new body. Whatever this creature had been, Knucklebone could only imagine the confusion of being yanked back to this world in a body completely unlike what it had had in life.

“I have a plan, you know. An escape plan.” He felt almost nervous to confess to this thing, to tell it this secret he’d never shared with anyone. But maybe it would feel the hope in his words, and that would be enough to bolster its courage.

“You hear stories, out on the lines. Most are bullshit, but over the centuries you learn to smell the truth buried in there. Or you just get desperate, but at this point what choice do I fucking have? They say there’s those who’ve paid off their debt. And when they did, the Company gave them the key to their core. Actual ownership of their own body. Which means there’s a key out there. And if it exists, I can steal it. Best I can figure, the only place it can be is Deadwall’s archives. I’ve been trying to get back here for almost twenty years. And now it’s finally happening. I’ll finally be free.”

Frost was forming around the metal bindings of his bones, snow drifting up around his boots. The train creaked as metal earlier warmed by engines now cooled and contracted. It didn’t move.

“Fuck,” Knucklebone said. He could still feel the fear roiling within the great beast. Fear of . . . what? What would cause a behemoth like this to cower?

Knucklebone dug deeper, recklessly forcing his way across the connection. This train knew something he didn’t. It felt something coming, something it couldn’t bear to face. Something like . . . like . . .

For one awful moment, his mind and the train’s became one. The gut-scraping dread of the Void ripped at him, and Knucklebone fell back as though hit in the face with a sledgehammer. Beneath him, the train shook and rumbled. Its wheels began turning — the wrong direction. Taking them back up the tracks, away from Deadwall.

“No no no,” Knucklebone said, panicking. “No, listen. I’ll get you out, alright? Remember how I have a plan? I’ll help you. If you just take me to Deadwall, I promise. I’ll free us both. You don’t have to be scared anymore. It’ll be okay.”

Somehow, impossibly, the train listened. Its fear dimmed. The brakes hissed, and the wheels’ slow reverse halted. Whatever nameless terror had stopped it morphed slowly into something like excitement.

Even as the first screech of spinning wheels shot up from below, and the catwalk beneath his feet shook as the train chugged back into motion, Knucklebone felt terrible. He’d lied. He had no intention of freeing this creature; no idea where he would even start. He had only the thinnest thread of hope for his own escape. The train would have to be left behind.

But there was no other option. He gave the train a quick parting pat before the negative thoughts reversed his progress, bone clacking on bone, and hurried back inside to once again stand in his corner of the cargo car. Alone, among a thousand other skeleton machines.

---

Once, if the collated myths of one hundred and six subjugated nations were to be believed, brave heroes and sly tricksters had slipped in and out of the Mothlord’s halls whenever they pleased. Sometimes they succeeded in their quest, and their beloved perished so-and-so would be returned to life. Mostly they failed, and they paid for their hubris with their own death and unending retribution. Eaten alive for all eternity was one of the Mothlord’s favourite punishments.

Since the ascension of the Clockwork Empire under the ticking hand of its Clockmaker god, those tales had become a relic of the past. No hero had breached the path to the Mothlord’s halls in three hundred years. This was because the Clockmaker, in a fit of familial rage, erected the city of Deadwall to sever all connection between her and her brother. And Deadwall suffered no living thing to pass.

Knucklebone was not actually interested in reaching this chasm. Not exactly. For one, he was pretty sure he stood no more chance of reaching it than a gas can did of surviving the surface of the sun. First he would have to cross a half mile of open ice, barricaded by sixteen lines of electrified razor wire and eighty-eight machine guns ordered to pulverize anyone who stepped foot past the first fence. Then, if he made it that far, he’d have to cross a hundred-foot minefield before reaching the Deadwall itself. Ninety-eight feet high, fifteen feet thick, built of basalt concrete columns reinforced with rebar and coated in a titanium alloy. It was said to be smooth as polished ice, and it was sloped outwards so as to be impossible to climb.

Even if Knucklebone was somehow invulnerable to electricity, razor wire, machine guns, mines, and could punch through fifteen feet of reinforced stone and titanium, there were at least six bone mechs on patrol at all times. And no one survived a bone mech.

If he could have been sure that being torn to shreds by machine gun fire or pulverized by a bone mech’s fist would truly end his unlife, perhaps he would have tried. But what kept Knucklebone bound to this world was not his body or his diesel engine. It was the six ounces of aether kept locked in his impenetrable titanium core. Until he could drain that core, he was trapped in this unlife forever.

He would have to find a subtler route.

---

The train reached Deadwall only fifteen minutes behind schedule. Knucklebone thought he deserved some praise for that — maybe even a raise — but was unsurprised when he was shuffled off with the rest of the mechanical revenants and told to sign in at the company offices before his shift started the next day. He nodded along dutifully, but when his cohorts tromped off to the offices, he slipped off unnoticed.

He found an icy alleyway full of garbage and old oil cans someone had been hiding for fire pits. Tucking himself behind a dumpster, he waited for night to fall. Outside the alleyway, the murmur of voices and crunch of feet on snow alerted him every time someone passed, but no one ever entered. It was peaceful here.

Long after he was sure everyone else had signed in, only half an hour before closing time, he rose. Brushing crusted snow off his reflective orange vest, he headed off to the company office, alone.

The creature behind the desk loomed menacingly over Knucklebone. The shape of its body lay hidden beneath thick folds of black fabric, but the ever-shifting topography of the cloak indicated that whatever was underneath had too many limbs in too many places. Its face, if it had one, was hidden behind a metal helmet reminiscent of an octopus with goggles.

“Name?” it asked, in a voice like a rat who’d ingested helium.

“Knucklebone,” said Knucklebone.

“Purpose?”

“Here to work on the construction of Saint Tock Station. Recently pulled off the Kaardish line, reassigned to the Seven-Seventy-Eighth Division of Labourers. Arrived this morning.”

The clerk under the cloak clacked away at a dingy typewriter, slowly updating files. As he’d hoped, Knucklebone was alone with it, high in the Cogsmith Company offices. It was a dingy little room, with outdated announcements clinging to the peeling wall paint and six waiting chairs padded with rat nests. An oil heater rumbled in the corner, belching fumes through an exhaust pipe fed lazily out the room’s only window. The surrounding wall bore several greasy scorch marks. The only sounds were the clicking of the clerk’s keys and the ever-present rattle-chug of Knucklebone’s internal engine.

“You’re here late. Rest of the Seven-Seventy-Eighth signed in hours ago.”

“Sorry,” Knucklebone said. It hadn’t occurred to him to think of an excuse, so he didn’t offer one. The clerk stared at him for a long minute through its octopus goggles, then turned back to its typing.

He had no weapon, but he was pretty sure he wouldn’t need one. The pneumatics in his arms were tuned for hammering railroad spikes and heaving crossties. Even if the thing hiding under that cloak were a rock troll like Brick, a solid punch from Knucklebone’s knucklebones should be enough to at least knock it unconscious.

He made a fist. He raised his arm.

And the ghost klaxons wailed.

The first howl was so distant Knucklebone wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. It could have been the arctic wind, whistling eerily down the lamplit street. Except the clerk paused its muttering and typing to look up, octopus helmet bobbing over the folds of its cloak.

“That’s probably normal, right?” Knucklebone asked, a moment before every klaxon in the city erupted.

“The dead rise,” whispered the clerk.

“Maybe it’s a system malfunction?”

He knew it wasn’t. Of course something was happening. The train had sensed it, somehow, on the way here. It had tried to stop. Only it hadn’t had a voice with which to warn them, and Knucklebone had told it to keep going.

Knucklebone pressed his skull up against the window, beside the exhaust pipe for the heater, which was definitely going to explode at any second, and tried to see outside.

The ghost klaxons, from what Knucklebone understood, were a warning system. The Deadwall hadn’t only been built to keep the living out. The road to the Mothlord’s Halls worked both ways.

It was dark. The road outside was lit by dull orange street lamps, and for several seconds all Knucklebone could make out was driving snow, like static filling the air.

Then he saw it.

A scatter-flash of distant fire lit up the night in eerie, irregular snapshots. Between one flash and the next, Knucklebone became suddenly aware of a roiling mass of movement in the centre of the city. A dark tsunami pouring in over the Deadwall to raze the city under a flood of death.

Somewhere behind him, a door slammed. Knucklebone spun to find himself alone. The clerk had abandoned him — no doubt to join the growing mass of terrified people clogging up the streets below.

“Hey!” Knucklebone yelled after it, annoyed. Then his mind caught up with him and he realized this had just made his job a lot easier. He took one last look out the window then darted behind the clerk’s desk, to slip through the door at the back of the room into the depths of the Cogsmith Company’s archives to find the key that would unlock his core.

---

Outside, war raged through the city. Knucklebone heard the distant explosions, and the dancing lights of cannonfire and burning towers played out across the punched tin ceiling, but he didn’t look up.

He’d found his file. Behind him, he’d left drawers strewn across the floor from where he’d let them fall in his search. If it hadn’t been for the attack on the city, there was no way he’d have made it this far. Guards would have found and stopped him. But it seemed the entire building was abandoned. Things had actually worked out well, for once.

It had taken him longer to find his file than it should have because he’d started looking in the wrong place. He’d gone to K, for Knucklebone, but that file didn’t exist. After several puzzled minutes, he remembered he’d had a different name when he was alive. He moved to a different section of the alphabet.

Confusingly, he hadn’t been under T, either. Then he’d remembered about last names, and there he was under R. Relaric, Theresa.

The files of his employment were there. Almost two hundred years’ worth, with the neat little rows of numbers showing the interest on his debt accumulating faster than he could possibly pay it off. It also had a thick packet that crinkled when he picked it up.

Hopeful and terrified to hope, Knucklebone opened the packet. Out spilled dozens of envelopes, ancient and yellowed, never opened. Correspondence from his forgotten family that had never reached him. Kept here, either by malice or bureaucratic incompetence.

He thought they’d forgotten him, after he died. He’d accepted it was easier that way.

One of the envelopes caught his eye. Unlike the others, this one was still white; almost brand new, where the others were ancient. It had a name he didn’t recognize: Ronia Relaric. It was addressed to “Great-great-great-great-grandmama Theresa,” in the handwriting of someone who had taken great care to ensure their Es were facing the right direction.

Knucklebone stared down at the pile of unopened envelopes in silence while outside a series of bombs cracked open the sky and screams floated through the air.

“No fucking way,” he whispered, speakers static-crackling. Strange emotions tugged at him, which was just fucking unfair — surely with no real hormones or neurotransmitters, he should at least be granted freedom from all these fucking feelings. His kids had had kids? He had a family? Not just a family — they must be a fucking clan at this point. What was it — six generations? He wasn’t going to do the math, but that must mean a metric fuckload of grandchildren.

“I don’t have time to deal with this,” Knucklebone said.

He did not open the letter. He shoved the envelopes back into their packet and then the whole packet into a pocket inside his ribcage. He didn’t know why, exactly — he didn’t intend to survive long enough to read them. But at least they could die with him, and they wouldn’t be left in the hands of the company.

He reached back into the drawer and found it empty. No key.

His engine chugged arrhythmically in panic. How could it not be here? He desperately checked the corners, checked the floor in case he’d dropped it. Nothing.

In despair, he looked back at his employment files — maybe it was stored on a different floor? — and something caught his eye. At the bottom of the first page, along with biographical information, date of employment, and date of death, was a serial number. FAC-0097677. It didn’t match anything he’d seen in here.

“Fuck,” he said. “Knucklebone, you brainless oaf.”

FAC stood for Factory. Of course the key wouldn’t be here; nothing but paper was kept here. The factory was where every mechanical revenant was built. It was where he’d been revivified two centuries ago. And it was where his key was. It had to be.

He shoved the paper into his ribcage pocket along with the letters and headed out into the blustering snow to find the Cogsmith Company Factory.

 

To be continued…

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Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was but the first part of our story, with the conclusion to follow next week, episode 941. I am sure, therefore, I will see you there, in the usual manner of speaking—yes? Yes. We’ll chat about it all after that: see you then.