February Fever by Jess Lourey Page B

happily slept through the night, and thought I had until I was awoken suddenly.
    â€œHunh?”
    Darkness. Random flashes of light outside. The digital clock read 2:34 AM.
    I blinked, shapes coming into focus. I’m in a train car.
    Once I had myself placed, I backtracked to figure out what woke me. I sat up, the top of my head grazing Mrs. Berns’s bunk. She was snoring softly. Everything else was quiet except for the rumble rumble click, rumble rumble click of the train sliding through the night.
    But there it came again, making me jump. A noise like a door being slammed, but not quite that. It was both tighter and more hollow. The sound turned my blood icy.
    A gunshot?
    It still was February, after all, even if we were on a train.
    I was past due to uncover a corpse.

Sixteen
    My heartbeat was so loud that it sounded like someone was pounding on my head. I tried to steady my breathing so I could hear everywhere at once. My eyes went to the door of our cabin. Had we locked it?
    When the next hollow sound rang out, I rolled out of bed and laid flat on the floor, my heart galloping. We were under attack from all sides, and I couldn’t catch my breath. How could I get Mrs. Berns to safety without drawing attention to us? How close were the gunshots? Were they coming nearer?
    The noise repeated four more times, mimicking the backfiring of a car, before I realized it must be some function of the train—some normal sound that I hadn’t noticed when I was falling asleep, or maybe some maintenance that was only performed at night. I forced my breathing to calm, feeling like a fool.
    Stumbling across a corpse a month every month for nearly a year makes a person jump at shadows, it turns out. I crawled back onto my bed and reached for the curtain, pausing as I thought of that Twilight Zone episode where William Shatner spots an apey creature outside his airplane window. I pushed through the fear and slid open the curtain, observing nothing but the snow-dusted Dakotas slipping past under the brightness of a million stars. Or maybe we were on the moon, so vast was the sense of an empty wide world. In either case, the train was on its tracks. We were not in danger. I forcibly calmed myself, concentrating on slowing my heartbeat.
    My emotions finally under control, I realized I needed to use the bathroom, and urgently. Maybe that’s what had woken me? The lemon dill cod, tapping Morse code signals on the inside of my stomach? You shouldn’t have eaten me. Stop. I’m crawling back up your throat to discuss exactly why not. Stop. I don’t think you’re going to like this conversation. Stop.
    I was almost relieved. My corpse-finding affliction hadn’t awoken me. Eating train fish had, and I had just stretched my neurosis across that. It was a fine point, but when you don’t have a lot, you tend to cling.
    Out of respect to Mrs. Berns and our small space, I chose to use the Car 11 public bathroom rather than our private one. My jammies were decent, and who cared what my hair looked like? I glided the door open and almost ran into Reed.
    â€œSorry!” I said. Dang social conditioning.
    He stepped aside, ducking his face so I couldn’t read his expression. “You’re up late.”
    A sound down the hall and to the right pulled my attention. Was that a person stepping into the shadows? I hesitated, but my curiosity got the better of me, and I started to walk in that direction before Reed gently grabbed my wrist. “Can I help you with something?”
    My head was full of cobwebs. I’d gone from an imaginary threatening situation to one that felt genuinely uncomfortable. “Were you standing outside my door this whole time?”
    He finally looked me head on. His face appeared tense and tired, and then, like water running out of a cracked jar, the tension melted away and he relaxed. “Naw, I’m happy to report that I have better things to do, though not much.