Free Lighthouse Island by Paulette Jiles Page B

gems.

 
    Chapter 8
    S he placed her straw hat with the bow back on her head as pipes and wiring flashed past on either side. She ate one of the Quench candies. She wondered how much time had passed but there was no way to know.
    She sat thinking about the incomparable feeling of the dream and stared down the long line of illuminated cars. Her eyes focused. She saw a man sitting in one of the seats perhaps three or four cars down. Just one man. She had not seen him before. She wondered if the train had stopped somewhere when she was asleep.
    Nadia watched as he shifted one hand from the stanchion and took hold of it with the other. He was dressed in a sloppy dark shirt and pants. She leaned back, as if to hide. But she couldn’t hide.
    He turned to look at her and she could see the round white circle of his face and two black dots for eyes. He was staring at her.
    Nadia opened her tote and took out her notebook as if she had something important to read. She glanced up. He was now walking forward through the blue-white fluorescent light. His eyes were fixed on her. He turned a handle and passed forward from his car to the next one and sat down again. He never stopped looking at her. His abnormally large mouth made him look like a lizard. He sidled a knife or an ice pick out of his clothing.
    From under the crushed brim of her hat she watched and the dark tunnel rocketed past.
    She got to her feet. The car lurched; she took firm hold of a stanchion, and the steel was slippery in her hand. The train began to slow and then it stopped. Three cars in front the empty spaces began to fill up with a yellow smoke or mist. In the dim light she saw nozzles on both sides of the tunnel pouring out a fine spray in expanding rooster tails onto the outside of the train and also into the inside as the doors opened. The sharp, chemical odor struck her in the face and tears started from her eyes. She felt an instantaneous urge to throw up.
    Then the doors of her car opened and the automated voice declared, We are cleaning the northbound make sure all personnel are absent remove all personnel the northbound is now going through the cleaning and disinfecting process remove . . .
    She leaped for the platform and landed awkwardly, turned her ankle, and got up and ran limping down the platform. She swallowed repeatedly. An ochre mist ballooned up and drifted while music from the loudspeakers blasted out “Not Dead Yet” by a group she hated.
    The gelatinous mist lagged behind her like an assailant. She was in a high-ceilinged tunnel lit by a few electrical bulbs in a long diminishing procession and far down the tunnel were great open spaces carved in the earth full of pallets of boxes and bags. The famous food storages. She heard footsteps, stopping, starting, running for a few yards. Stopping. Nadia wept and wiped at her nose and mouth; all her bodily fluids seemed to be leaking from her eyes and nose. Don’t let me throw up . She ran on.
    She ran limping but thought of turning around and grappling with him. Fighting with him. She could throw herself at him, take off one of her heels, and smash his face. She dropped to a slow jog and turned a corner and came to a hub where tunnels led off in different directions. Set in a rough cast-concrete wall was a bank of elevators facing her with scarred metal doors. Lights flashed over the doors: numbers.
    She pushed the up and down buttons on every one and then darted down a tunnel. Flattened herself against the damp, rough wall. She took the shoe from her painful right foot.
    In the silence the elevator doors wheezed open and then shut again. She waited with her shoe in her hand but when she no longer heard footsteps she knew that he had got on one of the elevators. Nadia put her shoe on again and continued on down the left-hand tunnel, limping and stinking of chemical.
    S ometime later she found herself in an enormous cafeteria.
    People in coveralls ate from metal dishes and