Author's Note: No, I'm not going to try to shoehorn Penance's story into the Dark Tower series. I've got at least nineteen different reasons to avoid that can of worms, say thankee-sai.

Besides, the idea of sneaking a dangerous character onto a train without alerting other dangerous people has more in common with a different story, altogether...

watch?v=nkXDLNRVMxY

Well, they are both Westerns. Kinda.

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"A Lonely Train"

Morrisville – 1984

Penance wasn't really a big fan of Stephen King.

The guy could write decently, he guessed, and who was Penance to judge? But it was the little things that put Penance off his writing.

One was King's fixation on the 'sensitive poet' type: the all-righteous guy or gal who was often bullied by people who were cartoonish caricatures of 'bullies'. In King's world— more often than not— a 'bully' was merely a demonic bastard hellspawn, simplistically evil to the core. They seemingly came out of the womb as monsters who would knife an old lady for her grocery money, then laugh about it. They didn't have a backstory to their behavior, or any other defining characteristics, other than being pure evil and wanting to fuck with the 'sensitive poet' characters that King so cherishes.

Something told Penance that the guy might've had his milk money stolen on the playground a few times in his youth.

Penance, on the other hand, had a certain affinity— or at least a sympathy— for monstrous characters. He'd take Mary Shelley over Stephen King any day of the week. Frankenstein's creation and Carrie are both monsters that were made by those around them, sure, but of the two Penance personally found the former's case far more interesting. The cruelty that made him, Penance reasoned, was far more profound.

But there was an exception to the rule. There was one particular story of King's that caught Penance's eye. It interested him enough that he actually re-read the thing, even, and Penance could count all the books he'd ever re-read on his hands and toes. It was a little book (by King's doorstopper standards) called 'The Gunslinger'.

And there wasn't a 'sensitive poet' type to be seen, there.

The protagonist of that story was a bastard, and he was chasing a bastard, trying to find some kind of magic tower.

Pretty gripping story overall, and it ended on a cliffhanger where the aforementioned bastard protagonist caught up to his bastard rival, who then died, and then the bastard protagonist continued his quest to find his magic tower.

The bastard.

Again, a good story, but it probably wouldn't be getting a sequel, Penance thought. For one thing the protagonist of that story certainly didn't deserve to ever find his precious magic tower, given the awful things he did over the course of the book. Truthfully, one of the reasons Penance re-read the story was just to get a bit of perverse satisfaction at seeing the protagonist have to start his urgent journey all over again from scratch.

No, there'd be no sequel to something like that. God only knows how you could possibly end it, after all.

Penance remembered that story now for one specific reason: it might not exactly be Nobel Prize material, all things considered, and Penance might not be the kind of literary scholar to judge its merits anyway, but he was still confident in his belief that it had absolutely the greatest opening line in the history of literature:

'The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.'

Seriously: that was just perfect.

And when Penance woke from his food-coma in the dead of the night in Medici's apartment— huddled back-to-back with Whip against the kitchen wall— that line came to him like a bolt from the blue.

What if, he thought, the gunslinger didn't have to follow the man in black? What if he managed to get ahead of him? That wasn't an option for King's protagonist, but it just might be an option for Penance.

Whip had picked up a little map at a bus terminal before heading out of Philadelphia in search of Penance, and now the pair poured over it under moonlight from the windows. It didn't take long for him to find what he was looking for: a train station lay to their southeast, not a few blocks from the river, and its tracks crossed the Delaware in basically the same place as US 1 and the Lower Trenton Bridge.

"We take the train north," Penance explained, "and we get out ahead of them."

"'Ahead'?" Whip asked.

"They need to go north," he explained. "Black Hat and Carlin Gay. Or at least they will, soon. And that way they'll be coming to us, instead of us coming to them. We choose the battleground; we make them come into our den. We don't fight 'em on open ground."

They elected to leave the apartment in the still of the night. It couldn't have been earlier than 2:00 AM when they crept out onto the sleepy streets of Morrisville. At that hour a passing police cruiser would be almost as dangerous as these mysterious 'men in black' Whip had seen, but at least they could skulk across the town on their own cautious terms.

By a mix of luck and skill they reached the Amtrack station undetected. There was a touch more life here than in the rest of town, though it wasn't a particularly large place. The terminal was a simple narrow building stretched out along the tracks; no cover was provided over the arriving trains. It was really little more than a glorified version of the classic Old West water stop, with the station more an afterthought than necessity. He guessed the bigger stations lay to the south and to the north: in Philly and in Trenton.

They wouldn't risk bellying up to the counter to have a look at the schedule, or heaven forbid purchase any tickets at such an ungodly hour. Their ability to get tickets during the bustle of the day was questionable, but in the dead of night it was impossible; the two of them were the definition of 'suspicious', after all.

Instead they circled around to the back of the station, where the ground sloped a bit near gated pens holding rusting drums and other decrepit miscellany. They found a secluded nook that butted up under a section of the wood floorboards of the station walkway. Here the discarded trash from careless patrons fought for dominance with the acrid scent of chemicals from the gated pens, and it was a pitched battle. Penance took his mind off the war of odors by staring up at those holey wooden floorboards.

He almost expected to hear the sharp jangle of spur-bearing boots above his head at any moment. Instead all he heard was the odd bit of idle chatter, and when a train did roll through the station it wasn't chugging with spurts of steam through its engine, crank churning back and forth over the wheels, whistle howling with an old-timey screech, but instead a sleek diesel number that worked silently, the only noise being the wheels thudding over the track's boards. It was a streamlined, efficient and practical device.

"No 'character' to it at all," Penance grumbled.

When Whip gave him a questioning look he merely shook his head.

"Never mind," he said.

X

X

X

Penance's plan was a good one, if he didn't say so himself. Unfortunately Black Hat and Carlin Gay must've felt the same way. After the sun came up Whip dared to explore the station and she instantly started running into conspicuous men dressed in identical black suits. They were crawling all over the station, and hardly seemed to even try blending in.

"Subtle they ain't," Whip said after she returned to their little nook under the floorboards.

When Penance didn't answer right away— instead toying with the aglet of one of his shoelaces, a pensive frown on his face— Whip gave him a little punch in the arm.

"Hey: at least they're easy to spot, aren't they? If they're gonna be that obvious then we shouldn't have too hard a time sneakin' by, right? Even if we can't get a train. These yahoos might as well be wearing sandwich boards around their shoulders!"

Whip left again to reconnoiter the area around the station and maybe eavesdrop on a few of the goons. Normally Penance would resist that plan, warning her of the danger or at least admonishing her to be careful, but he let her go with hardly a word. His own mental engine was hard at work, and it wasn't nearly as streamlined and efficient as a diesel.

Eventually he braved moving out into the sunlight a bit, sitting cross-legged on the ground, stacking a group of small stones he'd gathered. He managed a respectable little edifice when footsteps sounded in the dirt in front of him; a pair of black and white saddle shoes stopped within inches of his stone tower.

"You're in my light," the boy complained.

"Who're you, Diogenes?"

Penance's troubled frown broke for the briefest of moments; a small smirk came through like a tiny beam of sunshine.

The girl knelt on the other side of his stacked stones. Her curly red hair hung in fiery tendrils, trailing around her porcelain skin. Her fair face, with ghostly hints of freckles, was a stereotypical match for her hair. Her deep, radiant blue eyes, however, were not. If Penance's eyes were like the seawater's surface mixed with the corrupting sands of a beach and turned into a slushy copper murkiness, hers were like the virgin ocean waters a hundred miles from shore: clear and undefiled blue.

"I can't believe you're actually stacking stones just to pass the time," she said.

"I'm thinking." Penance did not once look up at the girl's face. "And right now that's kinda hard."

"How so?"

For the first time he looked up at her. He arched one eyebrow.

"Interruptions," he grumbled.

The girl held her hands to either side, a playful smirk on her lips.

"Didn't mean to intrude—"

"I think you do," Penance disagreed.

He went back to his stone stacking, ignoring the girl. She eventually got to her feet. She smoothed out the creases in her green cotton romper as best she could, but then it wasn't a particularly flattering garment. Wasn't ever supposed to be, really.

But she always wore it well enough, he thought.

"We could sit back-to-back," She suggested. "Relaxing. Helps you think—"

"I don't think so—"

"I remember feeling your heartbeat when we did that; it would get slow, and more even. You'd get calm..."

His attempt to cap the stone tower ended in failure; the whole thing tumbled apart with a simple tremor in his hand. Penance dropped the capping stone and took a slow breath.

"You did, too," he said. "Or at least I thought you did; I don't really know..."

He looked up at the 12-year-old girl towering over him, hands on her hips, clad in her vintage 40's shoes and modest PE romper uniform.

"Why are you here, Clara?"

The girl didn't miss a beat, she motioned up at the station with her head, red hair bobbing about like a roiling flame.

"What? I just came in on the train."

He mulled the joke, and eventually his sallow frown gave way to an appreciative scoff. He started collecting up the stones once again, singing a mournful tune as he did so.

"'There's a legend and there's a rumor: when you take the 3:10 to Yuma you can see the ghosts of outlaws go ridin' by.'"

Clara tilted her head. Penance waved one hand at her.

"That's from after your time," he said. "Maybe a decade or so since... well, you know..."

The girl put one slender finger to the outside of her neck, over her carotid artery. Penance could see the finger throb with her pumping blood. She drew that finger along her throat, 'cutting' to the opposite artery. She nodded, her face lacking any strong emotion.

"So I'm an 'outlaw', then?" She whispered.

"I never knew what you were, Clara." Penance shrugged. "Wasting my time trying to find out was bad for both of us, I guess."

"And seeing me, again?" The girl asked. "That bad? Or good?"

"It just means I'm more insane than I thought. I've been seeing ghosts lately, so it was only a matter of time before I started talking with them."

This brought a faint smile to Clara's face. She turned, looking out beyond the pens of rusting drums and equipment.

"You're only about 70 miles away. Did you know that? From Manhattan, I mean."

"You came here to talk about Manhattan?" He looked up at her, a mixture of curiosity and indignation on his face.

"Well, you've got a reason to go there. And there might be a soul that you know there, but..."

Clara shook her head. That faint smile turned to a melancholy frown. She got to her knees across from him, palms resting on the dirt.

"Penance," she said, "if I told you that sitting back-to-back with you was resting— calming— for me, too, and that I loved it as much as you did, what would you say?"

The boy stopped halfway through placing another stone on his tower. After a long pause he shrugged.

"I'd say you might be telling the truth, I guess."

Clara leaned a little closer to him; her voice a quavering whisper.

"Penance: do you hate me?"

His answer was reflexive.

"If I still gave you any thought I might, but I don't, so..."

His words were hollow even in his own heart; when he looked up at the girl he didn't find her wounded or annoyed or even affected in the slightest. She merely stared at him, her royal blue eyes not showing the slightest judgment.

Penance licked his lips, looking back down at his stone tower. He spoke in a whisper to match hers.

"No," he said. "I don't hate you. I guess the worst I could ever do is 'resent' you. But even that, anymore..." he shrugged. "There's no point in it, now. There's no point in repeating the past forever. That's just purgatory, really."

Clara's sad little smile returned. She moved off her knees, resting her bottom on the ground, hands draped over crossed legs.

"No. There's no point, I guess. But still—"

"But nothing." Penance set one of his stones down with a heavy clack.

The girl nodded, gripping her kneecaps with her hands. She motioned to his stack of rocks with her chin.

"You did that with her, didn't you? What was her name, Marisol?"

Penance nodded.

"Yeah," he mumbled. "She was always better at it. She had a steadier hand, you know? I was always a nervous kid; she wasn't. Her hands never shook. Mine always shook..."

"Why are you nervous now, Penance?" Clara tilted her head, and again those radiant red bangs bobbed about like torch fire.

Penance carefully set one more rock on his stack. He looked up from the pile with difficulty, meeting Clara's stunning blue eyes.

"Because I think something is very wrong..."

Clara smirked.

"You're talking to a girl whose been dead for almost 40 years and you think something might be wrong? That's a brilliant deduction."

His sour frown brought a bright smile to the girl's face; for all his current distress that smile was infectious, and he had to fight from joining her.

"Those 'men in black'," Clara guessed.

Penance nodded.

"This isn't hunting," he reasoned. "They're being too obvious; too out in the open."

"Your little birdie did say they were trying to flush you out. You know: make you feel pressure—"

"Pressure like this makes me want to hunker down and wait for it all to blow over, and Black Hat would know that. That's the opposite of what they want, based on what Whip overheard. And their leader— this 'banshee', this Carlin Gay—"

His voice trailed off. He went so far as to grip the sides of his head in frustration.

"I'm missing it, Clara. I'm missing something, here, and it's right in front of me."

Clara slowly stood up, crossing her arms.

"If I were right in front of you, Penance— if I were here, now— would you have trusted me to help you?"

The boy removed his hands from his head. He looked up at Clara with a serious expression, eventually shaking his head.

"No. I'll never forget you, Clara. Not ever. But I'd never have trusted you again, either. Not ever."

The girl nodded. Her crestfallen frown quickly disappeared, replaced by a little smile.

"I'm glad you have your little birdie. I'm glad you have someone you can trust."

Penance returned the smile this time.

"I, uh... 'trust' might not be the right word," he whispered.

"Isn't it? Well, don't you get her killed," Clara dropped her smile. "And don't let her get you killed."

"Or else I'll be taking the same train as you?" Penance didn't lose his smile.

Clara shrugged, taking a step back into the sunlight.

"There's more than enough passengers on it to keep you company, at least. We just couldn't listen to each other's heartbeats anymore so... don't be so eager to climb aboard..."

The girl took another step back into the sunlight, and as she did so she collided with Whip, who was moving towards Penance's spot on the ground. Clara's body rippled like heat waves in the desert and faded to nothingness before Whip could take the final step to reach Penance.

"You alright?" Whip asked.

"Super-duper," Penance mumbled.

"'cause you look like you've just seen—"

"A cliché?" The boy's sad little smile turned to a larger, genuine smirk. "I'm fine, Whip."

"Good, 'cause you should know that some of our black-suited friends up around the station are packing some impressive bulges in their fancy suit jackets."

"Guns?"

The girl shook her head.

"Walkie-talkies, I think. Just ruins the fine lines of their figures, too."

"They are coordinating, then..." He stared down at his half-finished rock tower. "But for what?"

"Does seem like overkill. All this to take down one little boy. No offense."

Penance got to his feet and moved back under the floorboards of the station. He looked up through the slats, standing in silence until a black dress shoe tromped overhead. The man it belonged to had shoulders like an ox, and his tailored black suit looked as out of place on his body as it might on a silverback gorilla. He watched the man step off down to the other end of the station, moving as methodically as a metronome.

Penance looked back at Whip and whispered, a frustrated hiss in his voice.

"There's more going on here than we know. More than I know. Unless God himself sends down some deliverance then we don't move until we can figure out what it is!"

"Ah! Thassa smart move, sonnie-baby!"

Both Whip and Penance jumped nearly high enough to bang their heads on the wood above them. They darted back from under the floorboards, eyes fixed on a certain pile of trash from which a manic and sunny voice sounded. The garbage stirred, and then a head peeked out from it. The wrinkly-faced hobo grinned at the pair with horribly stained but straight teeth. His nose and forehead were blotted with some kind of scabby skin infection, or the like, and looked almost ready to peel apart altogether. He lumbered from the trash pile, careful to bring along a tied garbage bag half-filled with his worldly possessions. The flesh around his black eyes was little better than the rest of his face— puffy and sore— and it looked like he had to struggle and squint to even see the pair clearly.

"When in doubt, sit it out! Am I right, sonny-babe?"

Penance, hand cemented to the back of his shorts, fingers gripped over the handle of his knife, slowly released his breath. He didn't take his hand off the blade, but he did relax his stance a bit.

The man finished extricating himself from the garbage pile, appearing little more than a large smear of garbage come to life. He took one ungainly, lumbering step forward and waved a grimy hand.

"Eh, sorry to scare ya li'l folk. Me? Harmless as a hedge. Or e'en a hedgehog!"

He chortled at his own joke; Penance and Whip didn't join in. They were both still waiting to see if their hearts would give out on them or not.

But Penance, at least, got an idea in his head as he waited to calm down.

"We're almost that harmless, too," the boy said. "How'd you like to make a few bucks?" He motioned for Whip to give him the wallet. "We could use a little 'commotion' up at the station, right when the next train's ready to leave, if you could manage that. Worth 40 to you?"

The grimy codger beamed with his greasy teeth, scabby skin twisting unnaturally as he smiled.

"That's jus' enough for jus' enough 40's, too, innit! F' that much I'd belly dance in the buff!"

"Whatever works for you, as long as you get everyone to pay attention to you, and not the train." Penance smirked, his hand still stretched out to receive the wallet. When Whip didn't give it to him he looked at her, noticing the troubled look on her face.

"What is it?" He whispered.

Whip eyed the hobo skeptically. Eventually she tossed a five dollar bill on the ground between them, motioning up to the station.

"We got folks lookin' for us we don't want tracking us down. Anyone asks you about us— about people that look like us— you tell them you saw us headin' north on a train. You got that?"

"What're you doing?" Penance demanded.

"You got that?" Whip repeated.

The codger eyed the bill on the ground, then Whip. He nodded.

The girl moved off around the pens of locked-up tanks and drums, dragging Penance by the back of his shirt collar like a mother cat carrying her kitten. The boy only protested once they were out of sight of the hobo.

"What the hell was that?" He demanded. "North is where we're trying to go! And how in the hell can we do that, now, Whip?"

"I don't know," she shook her head.

"Then why did you—"

"I don't know. But... that guy... I don't know. Something is wrong, here. Something is... just not right."

Her words gave him pause. That vagueness was maddening and he almost wanted to throttle her for it, but it was familiar, too. She must've known how odd she sounded, because she gripped the boy's shoulder's tight, staring down into his eyes.

"Pen: do you trust me? You trust me to help you, or not?"

He started to roll his eyes, but Whip's grip on his shoulders tightened and she gently shook him. She forced him to meet her gaze, and when he did he nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "I do trust you, Whip."

"Then you can't get on a train, here. Neither of us can. And I don't think we can hunker down around here, either." She looked out beyond the edges of the station property; there was greenery out beyond, and it stretched a decent ways. Most of the way to the river, at least.

"We go that way," she declared. "When no one's watching. When he's not watching. I don't want fuckin' God himself watchin', if it can be helped."

"Blasphemy," Penance grumbled.

"Nice, right?" Whip's wary frown changed to a self-deprecating smile.

"We can't hunker down forever, Whip."

"No," she agreed. "But long enough to recombobulate, right?"

Penance shared the little smirk.

"Just that long, I guess. Figure I can get my head on straight, too."

"So long as you don't..."

Whip's words cut out; it was obvious what she was going to say, and he finished the line in his own head. She must've found it horribly inappropriate, though, because she let out an awkward cough and looked away from the boy.

Penance rested one of his hands up on his shoulder, over hers. He squeezed it gently. When she looked back at him she'd regained her composure.

"It's gonna be alright, Whip," he said.

"Promise?" She asked.

He smiled in response, squeezing her hand tighter.

He did not, however, give her an actual answer.

X

X

X

They circled to the north side of the station, remaining under cover of either the building or the surrounding greenery, and after another hour they disappeared entirely in the foliage leading down to the river. They were unseen by almost all of creation.

Almost.

The grimy hobo observed their exodus from his place under the station floorboards, sequestered in another garbage patch, blended in like an octopus amongst coral-covered rocks. When the children were gone he waited a good five minutes, then abruptly stepped out of the foul-smelling pit, rising up like a phoenix from a bed of ashes.

He immediately circled the station and went for a nearby payphone. He deposited his coins and waited as the tinny device rang in his ear. He scratched at his nose, bristling with irritation, and eventually he'd had enough and ripped the thing from his face entirely. With it he pulled his forehead and his chin; the gummy prosthetics came off his face like chewing gum pulled from a desk, leaving stringy tendrils dangling from his face.

It was a far more youthful face— and far more physically appealing— than the prosthetics would've had one believe.

Eventually the ringing ceased, replaced by the sound of a receiver picking up and slow, steady breathing on the other end.

The 'hobo' spoke without waiting for an answer.

"It's Diùlt. She was right, of course. The 'Silver Arrow' contingency is a no-go; he won't be trying for the trains. You're all clear to begin the main operation at your leisure."

Diùlt looked over to the dense greenery in which Penance and his friend had disappeared. He smirked as he wiped the remaining gunky wax from his face.

"Please don't wait too terribly long, either," he said. "The prey is desperately waiting for direction..."