Chapter Nine

By Chris Fulmer

"Come on, Susan, pick up!" Neal said as he listened to the phone inside the Mecklenburg train station. On the other end, the phone was still ringing. Neal was surprised he wasn't getting a response; Susan was almost always home by this time. But for some reason, all he was able to get was the dial tone, followed by the familiar sound of his answering machine: "Hi, you've reached the home of Neal and Susan Page. We're not home right now; please leave a message at the beep."

Neal sighed. "Susan, it's me," he told the machine. "I guess by now you've heard the plane I was on went down. I want you to know Del and I got off it just in time, and right now we're in Ohio. We'll be coming home on a train; expect us to arrive in Chicago by about eleven tonight at the latest. Love to the kids, and I will be home soon, don't worry."

He hung up. It had been a half hour since he and Del had arrived in Mecklenburg to find with great delight that the town did in fact have a train station that had trains going to Chicago. Del had gone off to buy the tickets while Neal had tried to call home. This had been his fourth unsuccessful attempt, and he was beginning to get a bit worried. The last thing he wanted to do was let his family spend any more time worrying he was dead, not after what they'd gone through last time.

Del came sauntering over. "Any luck, Neal?" he asked.

"No," Neal said, disappointed. "I don't get it; Susan's always home by this hour."

"Well, maybe she's stuck in rush hour traffic," Del said, trying to be helpful. "You know how bad it is around the Chicago area at this time of day."

"I don't think so, Del," Neal told him. "She leaves work at four, so she's got plenty of time to get back to the house even if traffic is horrible."

"Well don't worry about it, Neal; everything's probably okay," Del said positively.

"Isn't there anyone else you can call? How about your pal Jake Briggs, I'm sure he'd be willing to help."

"He probably would be, Del, but he's out in Tucson for the holidays," Neal told him.

"Okay then, what about Chet Ripley? He's..."

"...in Canada, and there isn't a phone where he is," Neal finished the sentence for him.

"How about, uh, what's his name, um...?"

"Vermont, and I don't know his cell number."

"Clark Griswold?"

"Don't even get me started with him," Neal said, rolling his eyes. "He said he'd be taking his family on a special Christmas excursion, so knowing him, he's probably stuck somewhere up in the Yukon trying to get to the North Pole."

"That sounds like him all right," Del agreed. "Oh well, I was just trying to see if there was any other way we could get through to Susan." He changed the subject quickly. "Anyway, I've got the tickets. The train leaves from Track 3 in twenty minutes, and will be arriving in Chicago tomorrow morning at nine."

"Nine!?" Neal thought he hadn't heard the time right. "That's a sixteen hour train ride! Are we stopping at every little town along the way or what?"

"Uh, yeah, that's the problem, Neal," Del admitted. "You see, I couldn't get a nonstop train, or one that goes directly to Chicago. We're going to make about twenty-three stops along the way. Oh, and the route'll take us down through Kentucky, so we'll be coming into Illinois from the south rather than the north."

"Eleven stops!? South through Kentucky!?" Neal was all but beside himself with rage and frustration. It was happening all over again: bad travel luck. "Who the hell came up with this route?"

"Beats me," Del shrugged. "I don't like it either, Neal, but it's all I could get."

"All right, if that's all there is, I guess we'll take it," Neal sighed in resignation. "Let's just get to the platform so we can't get left behind or anything."

"This way then," Del said, pointing toward the far end of the station. "My trunk's already there, so we won't have to worry about that."

"Good," Neal said, relieved that he wouldn't have to be seen lugging the trunk, which he always felt a little embarrassed carrying. "When does it leave again?"

"Tenty minutes," Del told him. "Hungry for anything now?"

"Not yet," Neal said. Let's just go to the track."

"I'd like to make a call first, though," Del said. Squeezing past Neal, he dropped a quarter into the phone and dialed his own number. "John, it's me," he said after a moment's pause. "Our plane got shot down, and we'll be coming home by train. I should be back sometime tomorrow morning. Try not to get into any trouble while I'm out. Have a nice evening."

"Was he there?" Neal asked Del after the shower curtain ring salesman had hung up.

"Nope," Del told him. "John usually isn't back until at least six on weekdays."

"Of course. He has a specific number of people he's got to beat up and extort every day before he can run back to the shelter of your roof," Neal said sarcastically. He had no strong feelings for Bender, the bully having threatened his daughter at one point last year before Neal had called the authorities on him.

"Now come on, Neal; you can't say that if you don't know for sure that's what he does after school," Del argued.

"He does it so often that it's reasonable enough to assume that's the case more often than not," Neal stated. "Frankly, I think you should just give him over to the cops and start over with a little kid, one who can grow and bond with you."

"I think John is starting to bond a little with me, Neal," Del told him.

"Oh? And what makes you say that?"

"Well, last week when I came in to wish him good night, he turned the radio down for me. To be sure, he told me to go join a walrus colony afterwards, but at least it's an improvement."

"And how is that an improvment, may I ask?"

"Normally he turns the volume up whenever I come in," Del explained. Neal didn't consider this to really constitute an improvement betwen Del and his ward, but he didn't feel like arguing the point any further at the moment.

"Why don't we just let him go for the moment and find the platform?" he suggested.

"Fine with me," Del led his friend toward their track. As they passed the front door, Lieutenant Maltin and several of his troops came in. "All right men, the cop at the corner said he saw those two guys come in here about a half hour ago," he announced in a low voice so as not to attract attention. "Let's start at that end and search the station for them."

"Sir?" came the voice of Corporal Maslin. Maltin ignored him. "Now there's going to be a bit on guard after what we did to their plane, so try to take care in detaining them," he continued. "Remember not to do anything to damage the general's breifcase; he wants those codes intact."

"Sir..."

"Not now, corporal!" Maltin yelled at him. "Once we've got the codes, we'll take them into the nearest bathroom, shoot them, then throw them on the tracks to make it look like a train ran them over."

"Sir..."

"All right, corporal, what is it?"

"There's right over there," Corporal Maslin pointed to Neal and Del walking toward there track. Lieutenant Maltin looked surprised; he'd expected finding the two men to be more difficult than this. "Well why didn't you just say so, corporal?" he said.

"All right, change of plans, then. Private Siskel, Private Ebert, follow them and shoot them the first chance you get."

"Yes sir," the two privates said in unison and set off after Neal and Del. Lieutenant Maltin smiled to himself. This wasn't going to be so hard an assignment after all.

At that moment, a security guard came up to him. "Excuse me, do you have official business here, soldier?" he asked the lieutenant. "This is a civilian building, after all."

"Uh,..." Lieutenant Maltin thought as fast as he could, "we're...we're on an official wargame maneuver, very top secret, so top secret in fact that we don't have connections to headquarters, um, and in fact this never happened."

The guard was staring at him, apparently having not understood a word Lieutenant Maltin had said. "Well then, can I see some ID, just to verify you're really a soldier?" he asked.

"Just a minute..." Lieutenant Maltin dug through his pockets. Nothing was there. He realized with a sinking heart that he'd left his ID back in New Jersey. "Uh, tell you what," he told the guard, "just wait here a minute, and I'll get you my superior officer for this mission. He can verify everything for me." He ran back through the door shouting, "Major!"

Meanwhile Privates Siskel and Ebert were still in hot pursuit of Neal and Del. They had followed the two men to Track 3, where they were now waiting in a crowd for the train to arrive. Unfortunately, they had lost them in the crowd. Both soldiers had gone to the far ends of the platform to try and find their targets through the mass of people, with little luck.

"Now what?" Private Siskel asked when they rejoined each other.

"I guess our last option is to detain them all and pick..." Private Ebert began, but Siskel cut him off. "Wait a minute, I see the fat guy now!" he exclaimed, pointing to a now visible Del in the middle of the crowd. He raised his gun to shoot the salesman, but Private Ebert shoved the barrel back down.

"Are you crazy?" he hissed. "You just can't shoot him here and now like this!"

"We have orders, Ebert; shoot to kill when we find them!" Private Siskel retorted.

"But not out in the open," Private Ebert argued. "We'll be caught and jailed doing it that way. I've got a better idea."

"Oh have you now?" Private Siskel said sarcastically, but his colleague wasn't listening. Ebert rushed off toward the train station's newsstand. Moments later he returned clutching a copy of Entertainment Weekly. "You see, we do it inconspicuously," he said. "This way we just shoot them and walk off as if nothing happened."

He opened the magazine and pretended to be reading it. "Now let them have it!" he whispered.

"All right, we'll try it your way," Private Siskel muttered. He quickly placed a silencer on his gun and took aim at Del through the magazine, but seconds before he fired, Del suddenly started jumping up and down, and the shot missed him.

"Del, what on earth are you doing?" Neal asked his friend.

"Keeping warm, Neal," Del told him. "Movement always keeps you warmer on a day like today."

He hopped faster and faster, moving all over the platform as he did so. Private Siskel continued firing, but as Del was very much a moving target, he kept missing. Before long, there was a very big hole in the magazine with nothing to show for it. Miraculously, no one else had been hit.

"Give me that!" Private Ebert shouted under his breath, grabbing the gun off his partner. He marched straight up to Del, intending to put a bullet directly into the salesman's back, but a few feet away from him, the soldier slipped on a patch of ice he failed to notice and fell flat on his back. The gun went off, its sound smothered by the whistle of the oncoming train, and the bullet hit a screw holding a drainpipe in place over the platform, destroying it and causing the pipe to collapse, dumping about six inches of snow over the private. No one noticed with the train, a classic steam engine, pulling into the station.

"Well, this is it," Del said, taking one end of his trunk. "Next stop, Oxford, Ohio."

"Please don't reference every town along the way," Neal said, taking the other end. "It'll make the trip to Chicago seem even longer."

"Don't you worry, Neal. This'll go by so fast you won't even notice all the stops," Del reassured him.

"I sure hope so."

The two men boarded the train. Both privates tried to get on board as well, but the conductor blocked their path. "Tickets please," he asked them.

"We are on an official army..." Private Ebert began, but the conductor cut him off.

"No tickets, no entry!" he barked and jerked his hand back toward the platform.

"Now what, Einstein?" Private Siskel asked his companion coolly as they walked reluctantly away from the train.

"I guess we get the tickets," Private Ebert said, shrugging.

The rest of the soldiers, Sherman Blum leading the way, met them at the entrance to the station. "So where are they?" the major asked the privates.

"They're on the steam train behind us, sir; we need to get tickets to get on board, though," Private Ebert told him. "Would you happen to have about, oh, I guess around eight hundred dollars to cover all of us?"

"We don't have time for tickets, private!" Sherman yelled at Ebert. "Just get on board and...!"

At that moment, the train's whistle blew, and it pulled out of the station. Sherman growled in frustration. "You two are on report for your failure!" he shouted at Siskel and Ebert. "However, I'll give you another chance. Get to your planes and stop the train by force, if that's possible!"

"Yes sir, we won't fail again!" Private Siskel said out loud, saluting. He and Private Ebert went back into the station. "Nice going, knucklehead!" he muttered to Ebert once they were out of Sherman's earshot.

"Oh looking who's talking, Mr. I-can't-hit-a-man-forty-feet-wide!" Private Ebert shot back.

"Don't yell at my shooting skills, moron!"

"Jerk!"

"Lamebrain!"

"Dumbo!"

"Suckup!"