He had once worked as a switch engine despite being built to be a mainline steamer. He had survived trials and tribulations. He had raced against newer trains and came out the victor, ushering in a new era of steam and restoring much of the damage left in the wake of dieselization.
Right then, however, Rusty thought one of his greatest accomplishments was to hold a flashlight.
In its beams, Wrench the repair truck and another mechanic worked, carefully fixing the dents on an unconscious vehicle. A rolling blackout had hit the yard during a thunderstorm. Trains, unable to read the electric semaphores, had collided, and the switch engines had rushed them to the powerless repair shop.
Although a mainline engine again, Rusty had grabbed his work helmet, which had a bright headlight, and inserted himself among the switchers, knowing how critical speed was in these moments. After all the dented vehicles were pulled out of the rain, he had stayed to offer assistance, and in the dark a familiar hand had grabbed his refurbished, crimson couplings.
"This way, Steamer," Wrench said, her authoritative, no-nonsense approach taking over in the emergency. Her flashlight had illuminated her blue umbrella, her flame-like hair, her painted face, and narrow, but muscular, frame.
Rusty was used to her abruptness. Wrench had first arrived in the yard as the concierge mechanic for an electric locomotive named Electra. After her engine had disappeared following the championship race, leaving her train stranded, Wrench had started her own practice. Rusty had been one of her first patients. Although Rusty had not much money at the time, Wrench had accepted him out of intellectual curiosity, wanting to learn about steamers firsthand in order to stay ahead of the wave of diesel-to-steam conversions in the area.
Over the course of his refurbishment, Rusty learned that behind her business-like persona, Wrench genuinely cared for repairing vehicles. In addition to her own practice, she chipped in at the local repair shop during emergencies, such as tonight.
"What do you need me to do, Doc?" he had asked quietly as he followed her along the exterior row of sliding doors.
"With the power out, I need you to be your bright self and help me see, Rusty," she had answered, "if you can handle it."
To back out was out of the question. Rusty had seen worse in the fuel dump, back when he used to haul waste as a switcher past homeless trains and orphaned vehicles. On the one wheel, it had desensitized him to graphic injuries; on the other, it had given him a desire to help others when it was in his power. Thus, he strode after his friend into one stall.
One of the local mechanics, a male truck named Hammer, was already inside, examining a steel caboose affectionately christened Rover the doghouse. Rusty winced with sympathy for the upright truck. He used to work with Rover in the freight yard, but ever since he had started pulling his own passenger train, the steamer had not seen that side of Control's property much.
"Hammer sedated him," Wrench explained, nodding to her colleague while handing Rusty the flashlight to use in addition to his headlight, "but we can't tie up our hands holding a light."
Rusty gave a thumbs up, happy to help.
Wrench set to work at once. She pulled off her stylish black gloves and set them aside to scrub her well-worn hands.
In the beam of the flashlight, Rusty studied the calluses dotting her pale synthetic skin. Each mark spoke of hours of welding and carpentry, restoring vehicles and comforting the injured, soothing burns and bringing derailed trains back from the brink of death.
For that reason, Rusty found her amazing.
When she had first rolled in with Electra, Rusty had figured she was as hardhearted and stuck up as her engine. In getting to know her, however, he had learned she had simply been loyal to the cause which Electra had represented, the return of electricity to the American railways, which had been dominated by diesels for decades. With Electra out of the picture, she had fallen back on her core values of helping vehicles with her skills. She was tough, but fair; strong, but gentle; professional, but approachable.
It hardly took Rusty any time to consider her an awesome train. When his refurbishment was completed, and he was no longer her patient, he enjoyed speaking with her in a casual setting, whether running into her at the coffee sheds or visiting the library car's shed together. She told him about the faraway east coast of the US, autumns in New England, Christmas in New York, races on electric lines and in dark subways. He told her about the age of steamers, riding on his old line with his parents, exploring the abandoned tracks of mine trains, braving snow at high altitudes which forced him to use up fuel before he could reach the nearest coal tower.
As he watched the two repair trucks now, Wrench's callused hands examined her patient, checking for damages which the trucks would not fully find until the power returned. Even so, she focused on what she could fix for the present.
"Can I get you to boil water with your firebox?" she asked, turning to Rusty.
"Whatever you need, Doc," he replied.
Fortunately, the plumbing had not been damaged in the storm. Wrench ran out with her umbrella for a few minutes and returned with a kettle, which she filled in the sink. She next opened his firebox and jury-rigged a bungee cord with hooks to hold the kettle close to his flame.
Rusty, who was only vaguely familiar with mechanics, thought she meant to sanitize the area or something, but Hammer retrieved a plunger, of all things, and held it at the ready. When the kettle bubbled and steamed, Wrench carefully removed it from Rusty's chest cavity and poured its contents gently over the dents on her patient's chest. Rusty winced; although he himself was comfortable with boiling water, he was glad for Rover's sake that the caboose had been sedated.
Working together, Wrench poured while Hammer, wearing rubber gloves, used the plunger to force out the dents that he could. They couldn't treat the deeper damages, but Rover soon looked a whole lot better.
When she could step away, Wrench left Rover to Hammer's primary care and turned to Rusty.
"Can you handle helping some of the others?"
Of course he could.
It was two hours before the power came back on. Rusty and Wrench took their kettle and plunger to other stalls, working with the mechanics who accepted their help. When the lights finally switched on, a collective sigh traveled through the repair shop, but it was another two hours before any of the mechanics could leave the ICU. Although he was no longer needed to boil water or hold flashlights, Rusty stayed nearby to run any errand the repair trucks required of him.
Throughout it all, Wrench's callused hands hardly rested. For an unpowered tool car, she kept a pace to rival a factory machine. Dents were restored. Damaged limbs were painlessly unattached for additional repairs. Synthetic skin was stitched up. If she was tired or aching from the constant standing, she gave no murmur of complaint. Only when she rolled out of the shop with Rusty did she let out a yawn.
"I need coffee," she said, stretching.
"You need sleep, Doc," Rusty advised.
"Not when I volunteered to be on call." She twisted side to side, punching the air as she did. "Just as well the clinic was closed tomorrow for Labor Day. Emergencies don't recognize holidays."
"You got more stamina than some engines," he observed with an exasperated, but admiring, look.
"Do or drop," Wrench answered practically.
Rusty gave her a lift to the shed where Matty, the vintage automatic-buffet car, operated a 24 hour collection of vending machines. Rusty bought Wrench her coffee and a bag of chips, while he purchased a cocoa and a package of cinnamon rolls. The two sat on benches under a pavilion lit by a string of lightbulbs. The storm had lightened to a calming patter that belied the earlier damaging force.
Wrench reached into a compartment on her leg and pulled out a cloth, which she passed to Rusty.
"Dry off," she advised. "We can't have you rusting up again."
"If I did, at least I'd have an awesome mechanic to look over me," he quipped, wiping his damp face.
"Who isn't cheap," Wrench replied in that subtle tone, which he recognized as her way of joking.
"I can pay you back in energy drinks."
She took his arm, patting his elbow. "You're turning into an excellent negotiator, my dear."
His flame leapt at her touch, but he smiled as though unaffected. Still linked to him, Wrench sipped her coffee, gazing out at the falling shower, reflective on the pavilion's lights. Rusty acted as casually as he could, wiping off his iron legs and chest, glad the rain masked the sound of the bubbling in his boiler.
When he had been her patient, Wrench had always interacted with him professionally. After she completed the refurbishments, however, a gradual change seemed to creep over their relationship. A brush of the hand here, a lingering hold on his couplings before she unhitched, a caress on his arm, a pat on his shoulder. Rusty could not say it bothered him, yet he often noticed the same casual use of PDA among the other trucks on her train. As such, he could not be completely sure as to whether Wrench regarded him as a close, but platonic, friend, or…
…Well, maybe it was better not to overthink it, Rusty told himself yet again. Wrench and the rest of Electra's trucks were thousands of miles away from their home on the electric tracks; Electra was still missing, and his manufacturers hadn't sent any funds to his employees to take them back East, only demanding they mail back the components of Electra's computer which they used to carry. If it made Wrench feel better to have a reliable friend in a strange yard while she and her coworkers made ends meet, then he was happy to be there for her.
Rusty started to talk to keep his mind off his dancing flame, catching her up on his work, how Poppa's new boiler was treating him, how Rocky 3 had started dating a freezer while Rocky 2 was seeing, to everyone's surprise, a 2nd-class sleeper named Secunda, who lived in the heritage yard.
"We've already come up with names for their future kids," Rusty joked. "A Rocky/freezer baby can be Rocky Road, while a little sleeper can be called Rockabye. Get it?"
"Mmm-hmm," Wrench replied, suppressing a yawn. "Secunda's the Brit who looks a bit like Volta, right?"
"No, that's her cousin, Tertia the third-class sleeper," he vouchsafed. "Secunda's the blonde who you said kinda looks like Joule."
"Right. Well, a number of facial features have been internationally popular with manufacturers for decades," Wrench mused, slowly withdrawing a potato chip. "When I was a truckling, almost every kid in my class had the same nose."
Rusty nodded. "Poppa says when he was the reigning champion, parents wanted their kids to look like him. We actually met two of his lookalikes at a museum a few years ago. It was like Poppa had a pair of younger mirrors."
Wrench smiled, peering up at his face. "Maybe your fans will start populating the railroads with little Rusty's."
"Those poor kids," he laughed, shaking his head. "I wouldn't wish my looks on Greaseball."
"Don't sell yourself short," she countered. "After your impeccable refurbishment, you're not half bad. Your mechanic must have been a genius."
"She was," he grinned.
"In which case," she added, "maybe parents will start commissioning me to build them all those replicas. I should start studying you more closely, don't you think?"
She slid a callused finger along the rivets on his russet jaw. Rusty's black eyes widened, but he did not pull away. Her hand traveled to his chin, then over his coal-black lips, along his thin nose, until she laid her palm against his inflamed cheek.
"I hope I can do you justice," she said simply, but the look in her eyes seemed to say more.
He opened his mouth, but no sound, sans a whisper of steam, escaped. Her hand remained against his skin, and her thumb slid over his once corroded cheekbone.
Her synthetic hand was nothing like the dainty paws of coaches, who hardly did anything more strenuous than grasping the holdings of the vehicle in front of them, but Rusty did not mind. His mother's hands had been roughed up like that, after his family became poor. Once his father had been replaced by a diesel engine, Mama had taken odd jobs to help them get by: she washed and mended clothes for coaches, scrubbed pots for kitchen and dining cars, mopped sheds and roundhouses. Over a single year, her soft hands began to resemble those of a work train, and her lacey gloves had been torn and recycled as rags. Even so, Rusty had admired those palms, knowing the love which had motivated her to provide for him. A similar love powered Wrench, such as when she had treated her patients during the blackout.
She really is something, Rusty thought, but he could not get even those words past his stunned lips.
A quick beeping broke through the rain-filled silence, causing him to jump. Wrench promptly reached into her leg compartment to pull out a small, rectangular device.
"My beeper," she explained. "Duty calls."
Wordlessly, he stood and offered his couplings, and they set off through the rain once more.
In moments, the repair shop was back in sight, lit windows piercing through the night. Compared to earlier, a relative calm had settled over the tracks out front.
"You can drop me off here, Rusty," Wrench said when they were nearly a stone's throw from the main entrance.
Rusty halted, and she unhitched. Stepping through the mud and grass between two tracks, Wrench maneuvered around, one hand out to balance herself — and Rusty caught it.
She turned, glancing at him curiously.
Rusty heated, realizing he could not think of an excuse to explain his rash action. He cleared his throat, but that did not alleviate his awkwardness.
Fortunately, Wrench formed a smile in the light of his work helmet. She gripped his hand.
"Want to meet up for a late lunch tomorrow?" she suggested. "I might be off by then."
"Sure," he managed to say.
Another squeeze, and her hand slipped from his. He stayed in the rain, watching her until she rolled into the repair shop.
THE END