TRAVEL BY RAIL
Chapter 3
"AAAAAAAAAUGH!"
The cry of pain dashed Adam's hopes of an accident-free day.
"Promontory!" A second voice rang out. Running on the ground beside the train, Adam almost made it to the front when he remembered there was a first-aid kit in the cab of the first locomotive. Climbing onto the running board at the back of the locomotive, Adam ran the rest of the way to the cab and flung open the door. Scrambling around the conductor's desk, he looked for a cabinet or something that would hold the large railroad-approved first-aid kit.
Where the hell did they put the first aid kit when they made this thing?
Adam turned around and looked at the back wall of the cab. Franticly searching for the first-aid kit, his eyes darted over a regulations poster and a fire extinguisher before finally finding the kit. Grabbing the kit, Adam lunged down the stairwell, opened the door to the outside, and jumped down to the side of the locomotive. Adam looked around anxiously for the injured people, but he wasn't prepared when he found them.
Three miniature horses with red bandannas and striped engineer hats were huddling around a fourth one, who Adam presumed to be the injured one.
"Everything is going to be OK," the white one said to the injured one. The concept of talking miniature horses dressed up like engineers was much too foreign for Adam, especially the talking part. As Adam stood there slack-jawed, he decided he couldn't take any more of it, and muttered a single phrase:
"What the hell?"
The decision to vocalize his confusion may not have been the best his sanity, as it caused the three uninjured miniature horses to look up at him. The white one's eyes widened when he saw what Adam had in his hands, the first-aid kit. Adam was shocked when the white one ran right up to him and grabbed the first aid kit out of his hands, then lugged it over to the injured one and started giving orders.
"Evening Star, you go get some sticks to splint Promontory's legs with. Caboose, help me with this latch," The white one said, and the brown one with the curly hair, whom Adam guessed was Evening Star, ran off, presumably to get some sticks. The other one, Caboose, went over to help the white one with the clasps. Adam still stood there with his mouth open.
"John Bull, I don't know how these latches work," Caboose said confusedly to the white one, which Adam guessed was John Bull. Deciding now was a good time to take action, Adam ran over, grabbed the first-aid kit from the two who were trying to flick the latches open with their hooves, and quickly undid the clasps. Throwing open the lid of the kit, Adam silently gawked at the amount of stuff they packed into the metal box. Snapping back into the real world, Adam grabbed a knife from the box, took off his shirt, and started to cut off strips of it in order to tie the splint. The two animals present looked like they were shocked at Adam's way of lifesaving.
By now, the one with the curly orange hair had come back with several nice-sized sticks. Adam briefly pondered where one would find such sticks in the desert before snatching them up and out the animal’s mouth to prepare the splint. The act made Evening Star jump in surprise. As Adam straightened out the injured one's leg, the miniature horse gave a whimper of pain.
"Promontory it's going to be alright, we have help," the John Bull one said, even though he was clearly shocked and weirded out by the whole scene.
Adam finished tying up the first splint and moved on to the second. By now, the three uninjured ones were watching Adam work as he started the second splint. When Adam finished tying the second splint, he tried to pick up the miniature horse in order to move him into the cab. As it turns out, miniature horses are not very light, and Adam struggled to keep the injured one, Promontory, in his arms.
"Help me get him into the cab," Adam said as he strained to get the now-unconscious miniature horse off the ground. The three uninjured ones fell over themselves in aiding Adam maneuver the injured one onto the front of the locomotive. After climbing up onto the front deck, Adam swung the door open and pulled the animal up the stairs and into the cab, the three others obediently following. Spinning the conductors chair with his foot, he laid the unconscious animal into it, and plopped into his own chair.
"Where's the nearest hospital?" Adam called out to the silent cab.
A few seconds passed as Adam started to release the brakes in order to leave, "well?"
"Ponyville, behind you," was the answer he got from Caboose. Adam finished adjusting the controls,
"Wait, we need to keep our train running," Evening star commented.
While he waited for the train line to fill with air, Adam dashed out of the cab. Looking at the scene, he saw the ropes and harnesses that the miniature horses wore. Adam was awed knowing that those four creatures were actually pulling the entire train. Seeing nothing else that he could do to at least rescue their schedule, he grabbed the harnesses and wrapped them tightly around his locomotive's coupler.
Running back into the cab, he threw himself into the chair, turned on the sand, put the train into reverse, and slowly moved the combined power handle into notch 8. The locomotives were surprisingly responsive for hauling two trains at the same time.
Like a landslide, all the anxiety of the day came crashing down on Adam. Everything from the train with the hot bogey to the collision to the knowledge that he severely injured an animal, even if it was a talking one that pulled trains, stormed through Adams head. Adam's head fell into his hands as he muttered quietly, "what has my life come to?"
As Caboose was helping the dragon or whatever it was take Promontory into the larger thing, he couldn't help but feel like this was taken out of one of those bad sci-fi books that Northern Wind, a pony working for the freight train, gushed over all the time. 'You have the ponies that get abducted by the alien and then get experimented on by the aliens.' It was something he heard many times before, enough that Caboose didn't believe there was bad sci-fi without it.
This isn’t bad sci-fi though, it’s real. Caboose thought.
The dragon opened up a door on the front of the thing, and pulled Promontory through it. Caboose followed, not willing to drop his friend and leave him up to the will of the dragon. The inside was not as large as Caboose had expected it, but it was surprisingly much quieter inside than it was outside. Now fully inside and in the main room, Caboose could see everything. There were two chairs, one had a desk with a few papers on it, and the other had a large box-like thing obscuring it from view from where Caboose was standing. The dragon used its rear leg to turn the chair in front of the emptier desk, and gently placed Promontory in it. The dragon then sat down in the chair on the opposite side of the small room and spoke.
"Where's the nearest hospital?" the creature asked. A few seconds passed as it started adjusting some of the levers on the box.
"Well?" It asked again.
Caboose, startled, said, "Ponyville, behind you," he said, and the dragon started working on the things, moving their positions until Evening Star spoke up.
"Wait, we need to keep our train running," Evening Star said. Caboose did not expect Evening Star to say anything at all; Evening star was a pretty timid pony. After the prompt, the creature jumped up, ran down the stairs, swung the door open, and disappeared outside.
The three of them, Caboose, Evening Star, and John Bull didn't move, but they did look at each other, scared that some creature the dragon kept as a pet would eat them if they moved.
A minute later, the dragon appeared and ran up the stairs, sat back in the chair, then started adjusting the levers on the large box again. A small lurch and the whatever-it-was started to move. As it picked up the pace, Caboose was amazed at its speed; he didn't think anything ground-based could ever move so fast.
None of the four ponies moved, and neither did the dragon.
A few minutes passed by without any noise but the rumbling of the dragon’s lair.
A buzzing sound started sounding through the lair and the dragon’s head shot up. The three ponies jumped in surprise and tried to quickly brace themselves for an attack. No harm came to them though, as one of the dragon’s claws came down on a button on the large box and the noise stopped. The dragon didn’t look down again after the strange buzzer; instead it looked at a mirror that was strangely outside of the lair that Caboose hadn’t noticed earlier.
While Caboose had only heard of dragons and their habits, he could see some things that he didn’t think were very dragon-like. For one, the dragon hadn’t really made any attempt to eat them; in fact, it had helped Promontory quite a bit. Second, the dragon didn’t appear to have anything of obvious value, in fact, the only thing Caboose could see that might possibly be of any value to a dragon was anything inside of a bag made of a material he had never seen before. Third, Caboose thought that dragons liked much larger lairs than this, and he certainly never heard of a dragon lair that moved.
The tense air between the three ponies could be cut with a knife. Promontory on the other hoof just sat there.
Going for the kill, Caboose felt the need to interject into the silence, "so, just what kind of dragon are you?"
What other questions are worth a million bits?