Chapter 12 - Steel and Shadow
The steel monster groaned as its massive steel wheels ground against the slick iron tracks. Hannah waited until an empty flatbed car rumbled past, then braced herself alongside an open boxcar door.
The train was moving at roughly fifteen miles an hour—slow enough for an athlete, but nearly impossible for an exhausted, injured woman holding an infant.
She matched the train’s speed with frantic, staggering steps on the gravel shoulder. “Hold on, Leo,” she gasped through chattering teeth.
With one desperate leap, she hurled Leo onto the wooden floor of the boxcar, ensuring he landed safely on a pile of discarded burlap sacks. In the same motion, she reached up, her bloody, bandaged fingers clamping around the rusted iron door handle.
Her feet slipped from the gravel, dangling into empty air. The momentum jerked her shoulders violently, threatening to rip her arms from their sockets. She screamed in agony, her bandaged wrists bursting with fresh blood as the friction tore the wounds open once more.
Behind her, Dennis emerged from the tree line, firing his pistol blindly into the rain. A bullet sparked off the iron ladder just inches from Hannah’s hip.
Gritting her teeth until they felt ready to shatter, Hannah found a steel rung with the tip of her bare toe. Using the sheer instinct of a mother protecting her young, she hauled her body upward and tumbled over the sill into the cavernous, shadowy interior of the boxcar.
She hit the wooden floor hard, rolling onto her back. Panting, gasping for air, she dragged herself across the planks to where Leo lay crying. She pulled him against her chest, curling her entire body around him like a fortress.
The freight train picked up speed, its rhythmic clatter drowning out the storm outside. The lights of the mountainside faded into the distance.
Hannah lay in the pitch darkness of the rolling boxcar, shivering uncontrollably from hypothermia and shock. Leo’s tiny hands patted against her neck, seeking comfort.
“We made it,” she whispered, her vision darkening as exhaustion threatened to swallow her whole. “We made it, my sweet boy.”
Just as her eyes drifted shut, a soft scraping sound echoed from the dark corner of the boxcar.
May you like
Hannah snapped awake, her breath freezing in her lungs.
A match flared in the corner, illuminating a rugged, bearded face wearing a faded woolen cap.
