Day Six began in earnest behind an ink-stained pine table forty feet beneath the central rail switching yards.
It began with its hero bound in two slats of a red cedar vegetable crate, four oiled steer-hide luggage straps, and eight crushing mattress stitches of black waxed flax. Len Vey couldn’t close his left hand. He couldn’t lift an eight-pound iron cleaver. He couldn’t run ten paces through a drainage under-road drain without his altered balance point threatening to pitch him face-first onto the stones.
Yet the clockwork pocket watch on the hearth-shelf clicked toward twelve-thirty. Then, a strange, quiet stillness settled into the marrow of his bones.
The underground back kitchen beneath Track Four was cold. It smelled of ancient river mud, boiled vinegar, roasted chicory roots. The damp lime mortar that bound the granite vaults overhead. Above them, twenty feet of ballast rock and railway ties absorbed the nonstop, dull rumbling of the central freight lines, transmitting low-hum tremors down through the stone piers into the legs of Len’s chair. Every shaking made the ink in the clay pot shiver in tiny nested rings.
For five days, he had lived in nonstop, choking terror of the midnight clock.
He had watched the hands crawl toward twenty-four hundred hours on Day One, Day Three, and Day Five. He knew that each stroke of the gear catch wheel brought the loss of another piece of his living self. He had watched Burdenless Step tear away beneath the iron toll canopy on…
