-I barely got this out in time. I blame it on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, due to the fact that I went and saw it three damn times!!! But I loved every minute of it, so I say that in jest. Anyway, Z2Z is coming very close to reaching its climax here, meaning more than likely next chapter. There are only two or three chapters left, so I should hopefully have this done by the end of the summer. If I don’t, KILL ME! That’s about all for now, up here anyways. Read and enjoy.

Mystery Train

Maine rain in winter was usually not a blessing. It hampered things down, made them colder and harder to work with, made things difficult and confused. It dampened peoples’ feelings, made them more prone to anger and distress, or more likely to be depressed and hopeless.

So as Johnny Smith stood out in the pouring rain, his trench coat’s collar pulled up around his ears, he couldn’t help but feel those same emotions that most people did when it rained. But as the sky stood in an eerie twilight, the moonlight oozing through the clouds actually making them lighter, but not enough to outshine the encompassing darkness, he wondered if there was not good reason behind his fear.

He knew there was.

The forest around him hung in juxtaposed silence. The patter of the rain echoing like ghosts through the trees, making them seem alive and moving, crawling with their bare bones of branches towards where he stood alone in the darkness. The wind whispered below, hissing like leaking gas into his back and cutting through him, as if as much as he was there and existing, that he was really nothing.

The train tracks shone under their layer of water, as if the rain were already ice before it even hit the ground. Rusty and decrepit though they were during the day, hidden under the freezing liquid they looked new and clean, as if a dark night’s water could somehow wash away their age.

But no force on Earth could wash away time.

In the distance, Johnny could hear above the rain a strange sound. It was a chuffing, heaving kind of sound, something akin to what the old steam trains of old used to make. But it was hushed, hidden under a sound that he could only mentally describe as the sound particles made when they were rubbing together to form electricity. And much to the assistance of his description, his nostrils were bombarded with the tang of ozone as he stood amongst the dead trees and falling water.

As he searched for the lights of the train sure to be coming for him, he held his breath in some form of anticipation. As if he were holding his last breath, and upon the arrival of the train that led him unto what he did not know, he would breathe no more.

But he did, and the train arrived.

And it was nothing like he had ever seen.

The train was like a lance, narrowed down into a fearsomely carved point in the front, and spiked like the base of a spade on the back. Only one car in length, it had no source of outward light, save for the gleam of the moonlight off of its hull. There were no windows, and only one door. The door stood on the back, between the crown of thorns around the only marginally flat part of the train. A small ladder led up to it, but the rungs were small, and did not reach past the bottom of the train. In fact past the bottom of the train, where he assumed the floor would be on the inside, there was nothing at all.

The train was hovering, with no wheels or pistons to propel it forward.

As he stood before it he wondered if the noise he had heard had been his imagination. But as the two stared each other down, he heard it again. That heaving noise, and just preceding it vents on the top of the lance opened, letting out some manner of scalding steam into the waking night. It was like the train was breathing, for he also heard the strange machine suck in air, the whoosh so loud he had to hold his ears.

As soon as the machine had finished with its breath, the back door slid open. It did not angle outwards, or open as other doors did. It just seemed to disappear into the nonexistent floor, and as he strode towards the door, lights began to come on inside of the spear shaped vessel.

Taking the short ladder up to the hovering vessel, Johnny noticed with an odd interest that when his weight was added to the back, there was another hiss, and he felt hot air gather around his feet as it steamed out from under the train car. The vehicle then leveled out, as if his weight had never caused it a problem in the first place.

Taking the last step in, the door jumped up behind him, closing him off from the outside world. The interior was practically empty, save for two rows of seats on opposite sides of the compartment. He strode through the small space, sitting down and looking around. The compartment was lit only with deep red bulbs set far into the ceiling, only allotting the minimum amount of light to see.

And all throughout the compartment, he felt that same emptiness in his Dead Zone. It wasn’t consuming this time, like it had been. It was just the absence of anything at all. As if the air inside the train wasn’t really there, and that in the grand scheme of things, neither was he.

Inside the small compartment, a small chime sounded, and before he could even brace himself the train jerked into motion. He was lucky, he counted himself, for having held onto the armrest of his seat. For if he had not, he would surely have been sent tumbling to the floor with the tremendous jolt the machine had given.

He sighed, trying to settle himself within the locked confines of the machine, thinking in a meditative manner that perhaps by the end of the night this would all be over and resolved. He knew his chances were slim of that easy of an outcome, but no other though calmed him quite as much as that of finally having things settle into some semblance of peace.

If he thought otherwise, he wasn’t going to be able to do it.

---

Bailey sat on the leather seat of Reece’s bike, holding her arms close to her chest and shivering like a leaf beneath her raincoat. She thought that she was pretty damn special then, because she must have been the only leaf in the entire forest. But then, she thought, that was probably for the best, because no leaf in its right mind would be able to survive this much cold.

On that train of thought, she was discovering just how out of her right mind she really was. She’d been sitting in the cold for over an hour, watching the train tracks were Johnny was supposed to meet this “mystery train.” But, as of yet, her research was turning up a big fat goose egg for results. She sighed, folding over the handlebars and resting her head. What luck. The one time she tried to do something good and it only ended up giving her a one way ticket to the doctor’s office. Cold, sniffles, and a week out of school all included.

But as she sat, a strange hissing sound came to her ears. It was quiet for a moment, before rising to an almost ear-splitting level. She covered her ears, looking around and trying to find its proper source. She couldn’t see anything on the tracks, but over the trees she could see a strange cloud of what appeared to be steam rising up over the dark trees.

She waited for a few minutes, in which the steam faded and the forest went back into the throes of its eerie silence. But just as she was about to give up, she heard a different sound. It was a rush of air, and just before she blinked, a black form in the darkness came rushing past her in the darkness. A bolt of lightning lit up the world for a moment, and she got the only good look of what she could only describe as the most nightmarish train car she had ever seen in her life.

It shot past her like a bullet, and the wind displaced by it was so strong that she nearly fell off of her bike, albeit in a heap that would probably not have been all too flattering. As soon as it had gone, she maneuvered her bike into the tracks, standing up on the pedals as she pushed to keep on track with the looming figure quickly being lost in the distance. She knew that there was no way to catch up to it, but she also knew that this was Maine they were talking about. Nothing could be that far away.

For what seemed to be miles she thudded along the old rail tracks, the wooden supports sunken, and pushing the limit of Reece’s bike’s shock absorbers. She thanked God that Reece had a mountain bike for some twisted reason, and noted to herself to thank Reece later on as well.

But as she progressed, her energy and her patience began to wane. She was just about to give up and turn back, having paused to gather her steaming breath in the cold night, when she finally looked up. It frightened her at first, what she saw. But as the fear faded she realized that that color cast on the low hung clouds, the reds and yellows, flashing and dancing, must have been from the carnival that the politicians had shuttled Johnny to.

Deciding to weather the rest of the storm, she finally made her way to a clearing in the trees of the forest. A portal almost, through which she could see the strangely lit shapes of the long forgotten carnival rides. Many of them were moving, their lights flowing in patter, but were missing parts.

She stood in awe for a moment, staring at the great carnival as it towered beyond her line of sight. She maneuvered her bike off of the tracks, dismounting and rolling down into the bushes as she feared a closer look. She took a deep breath, letting it out slowly as she watched. From what she could see, there was no one there. From the time on her watch she could more than guess that Johnny had already gone inside, but with the web of movement and lights, it was hard to see anything all that clearly.

And when a hand touched her shoulder, she couldn’t help but scream like… well, a girl.

A small hand clapped over her mouth, and she opened her eyes, one at a time in a damningly dramatic fashion. She had to blink a few times, just to make sure that she was seeing what she was actually seeing.

Standing in front of her with a finger on his lips was what seemed to be a miniature clone of Johnny Smith himself. She sighed, remembering that Mrs. Bannerman had mentioned her son once. And seeing the resemblance, Bailey’s genius mind couldn’t help but see the connection between the two.

‘Sheriff’s son my foot,’ she thought to herself, but said nothing at the younger boy’s indication. She nodded, and he drew his hand away.

“I’m glad someone else is here,” he whispered, and she let the tension she had been harboring loosen a bit. He was shorter than her… but not by much. He would easily outgrow her in the future, if she was ever there to care. He wore a black winter coat, the hood thrown back on his shoulders despite the rain. “I was kind of afraid to go in…” he said, looking at her with a rather bashful look.

She chuckled nervously. “So am I,” she whispered back, looking over her shoulder at the Hell’s Carnival behind her. She then looked back at the younger man with a semblance of confusion on her soaked face. “Wait… I rode my bike, so then… how did you get here?” she asked, swearing upon the fact that she hadn’t seen anything in the politician’s plans on making Johnny’s son come along.

The young boy smiled at her again, saying after a moment, “As soon as my dad got on the train, I held onto the ladder on the back.” He rolled up his sleeve, revealing a very ladder-shaped bruise forming on his forearm. “I’m glad the ride was so short, if it had been any longer I probably would have lost my arm,” he said, his smile again a bit bashful.

Bailey smacked herself in the forehead. Really? Had it really been that simple? She sighed, slouching over a bit. Apparently not, considering the kid would be black and blue for at least a couple weeks. And in any case, if that had been her plan in the first place, it would have failed. Seeing as the train car was not all that large, she guessed that the ladder wasn’t either. And if this little boy had trouble holding on, it would only have been made worse by her presence.

“Well,” she said, facing the jungle of rides and buildings again, this time with a little more ease on her mind, “If we don’t go in there, neither of them are going to come out. Do you have any idea what’s going on… uh… what was your name again?” She knew that Sarah had told her the name of her son before, but for the life of her she could not remember it. So sue her, her mind was on other things, like a ring of illegal crimes being arranged by some of the world’s most powerful and influential men.

Yeah, those kinds of things could do that to a person’s brain.

“My name’s JJ,” he answered with a nod. “And yeah, I have some kind of idea what’s going on. Stillson came to my dad’s house and kidnapped my friend, Danny. Now he’s making my dad come and get him so that Stillson can get rid of them both. He…” the young man trailed off, “he doesn’t like my dad very much.”

‘Damn,’ Bailey thought, ‘if this kid knows that much, he must have some really good resources or some really, really good intuition. Kind of sad though, that he knows how much Stillson doesn’t like his dad… to the point that he would already know what the scumbag would want by drawing away his dad.’

Taking the first step of many into the carnival, Bailey looked back at her new companion with sympathy and something akin to respect. It took a lot of guts to come out in the middle of the night, on your own, to save someone. Even if it was your dad, and especially when you were a minor like he was.

He followed after her without another word, and they walked side by side into the main stretch of the carnival. They both looked around with wary eyes, keeping close to each other as they walked. After a few minutes of nothing but skeletons of rides and ominous shadows, their collective nerves were so on end that they both simultaneously began to jog. Not quickly, but with enough pace and silence that they were able to traverse the broken down grounds with hardly so much as a whisper to their names.

But all throughout, the one consistency they found was that no matter where they looked, or how much they tried to catch any glimpse of movement other than the rides still drawing patterns of light above them, they could see nothing. No man, no figure, no shadow of a doubt that there was any life locked within the carnival of horrors other than them.

And much to their unknowing minds, they were not the only ones thinking that being there, in the nightmarish maze that was about to blow sky high, was a horrible idea.

---

When Danny came back into consciousness, he groaned loudly. How many times was he going to get punched out in this place? Letting out a long breath, he lifted his head from where it had been resting. His neck ached from the movement, but he managed to get his eyes to open anyway. His vision was blurry for quite a while, and when his vision did swing into focus, he could have sworn that he was hallucinating.

But when the discovery came that he wasn’t, he found himself none too comforted.

All about him were copies of himself. Reflections, rather, surrounding him in a ring of himself that stretched for the optical illusion of miles upon miles. There seemed to be no end to him, as he sat tied in his chair and feeling like he had a good bout of vertigo going on. But he held himself together, taking a deep breath and trying to think his body’s reactions away.

After his little tiff with Stillson the previous day, the master schemer himself had come for a visit. The man in armor had reappeared to give him a little pep talk of his own. But as the pattern seemed to be forming, the man in the iron mask seemed to strike much more fear into him than the drunken Southerner did. And yet again, at the strange hands of this armored menace, he found himself unable to do anything in his defense.

But this time around, he found that he really didn’t need to.

As it seemed, yesterday or whenever it had been, the man in the armor had only come to talk at him. He hadn’t spoken back, knowing that the consequences would be beyond his ability to control, considering he was still drained by the damn armor his addresser was wearing. And the news he received was not at all something he was pleased to hear.

The plan was simple, the morals all but sound as was the usual trend with villains. Johnny would be coming to get him, wherever he was now. He could only guess he was in a house of mirrors, but knew not where the house itself was or how he had gotten there in the time in-between consciousness. And if Johnny could find him and get out of the maze of mirrors in one piece, they could both leave in peace. But if they didn’t, both of them would be leaving in pieces.

He sighed again, testing his mental connection with Obsidian one more time in a desperate attempt. This time, he found, his energy was enough to reach her. But, much to his dismay, her usually tumultuous mind was silent. He was beginning to worry then, that whatever this man in the mask was capable of, was also capable of blocking Obsidian, keeping her asleep while he toiled alone.

He could only imagine how angry she would be when she got up… if she got up.

He pulled against the tethers holding him to the chair again, finding that the energy connected to his ghost side was still not even ample enough to even phase a finger. He grumbled to himself, glaring out at the mirror images of himself. There didn’t seem to be any way into the circle of mirrors he was trapped in, and he wondered then how on Earth Johnny was supposed to get in.

‘But that’s just it,’ he thought then, facing his mirror image with a different air of understanding on his features, ‘Johnny’s not supposed to get it. They want him to fail… so they can get rid of him and me.’

Sitting upright a little bit more, Danny blinked a few times. He took a deep breath, looking around. There was nothing to see but himself. But the enclosed feeling he had, he wasn’t going to let it control him, wasn’t going to let it make him weak, too weak to do anything in his defense.

So, taking a deep breath, Danny started to yell. He yelled Johnny’s name for starters, hearing his voice echo in a space far larger than the one he was contained in. This comforted him a bit, and after a while he was yelling all sorts of things. Yelling creative insults at whoever had set this up and why, yelling as whoever might come and find him, and eventually yelling out campfire songs he was so bored.

But all the while as he sat there, making noise and trying to entertain himself as his energy slowly returned, he could feel the emptiness coming from Obsidian’s end of his mind. He sang to her after a while, talked to that quiet part of him and wondered why she wouldn’t respond. Why no one at this point would respond.

But as what seemed to be hours passed by, his patience seemed to grow. Waiting wasn’t so hard when you got used to it, and by the time something marginally important happened, he had grown very used to the wait.

But then the waiting was staved off by a visitor, one that he gladly could have lived his entire life without having seen again.

It was the man in armor, seemingly appeared out of nowhere behind his chair. He could see him well enough thanks to the profuse amount of mirrors surrounding them both. But he could not quantify how the armor clad assailant could have gotten there without him seeing his entrance.

“You have a rather nice voice, young man,” the armor said, its digitalized voice still a source of venomous irk to him. “A pity it’s not of any use here. I would suggest saving it for when you might actually need it. We’re not expecting Mr. Smith for another few hours, so I would advise you not waste what talent you have on an audience that isn’t there.”

Danny frowned. He didn’t believe that. If they really weren’t expecting Johnny for another long while, they wouldn’t bother telling him that. They’d want him clenched in suspense, left to his fears and his toils alone where he could worry himself to the point of disillusionment. Meaning Johnny was more than likely very close at hand.

“It would be wise of you, Danny,” the masked man said, and for a flash of a second Johnny could almost picture the bleached white skull painted on the metal mask speaking to him. His heart pounded for a moment as a spark of recognition ignited in him. He knew that voice. He knew that face, that bleached bone face, those hollow eyes. Panic flooded him as he all but stared Death’s parallel right in the face. “to heed me. I say this from the view of one who knows your trials. Who wishes all of us to be rid of certain… pests. Pests that even to the political machine are of no use other than that of distraction and nuisance. Vlad Masters is of no importance to me, so I give you all permission to smite anything of his that you see necessary. I, unlike most others who agreed to this scenario, am not intimidated by him.”

For a life-freezing moment Danny was struck entirely silent. Here was this man, whom he did not know in the slightest, who was offering him alliance… at least against the Masters regime. He stood in his cold suit of armor, and now Danny could specifically feel the power of this “Black King.” This King was higher even than Vlad, and even though he had agreed to this show, had been brave enough and brash enough to go against it at the very last minute. ‘Not intimidated indeed,’ the ghost then thought.

“Just because we share an enemy, doesn’t make us friends,” Danny said, despite the reeling that his mind was going through. He had to figure this out before something else went wrong. He had to see where all of the pieces were, and what suit they were, if he ever wanted to compete against this man who had the strength and sources to defy Vlad Masters.

A low chuckle emanated from the suit, and a cold, lead-like hand was placed on his shoulder. He didn’t want to look at his reflection anymore, knowing that the bony face of that demonized dog would be right beside him. He felt with a jolt that his energy was draining again, but decided not to push his luck by trying to jerk away.

“With friends like me, Danny, you’ll never need a better enemy,” the armor said, and just as his eye was drawn inexplicably up to that white skull, the man disappeared. Before his very eye, a prestidigitator in every sense and right, the towering armor that had stood behind him left no trace other than an empty, tired feeling in his chest.

“Low lights, trick mirrors, what more could a guy ask for,” Danny muttered to himself, feeling suddenly and very much alone.

He didn’t want to sing anymore.

---

-Oooh, ominous, ne? Well, in any case, this chapter turned out to be a bit tougher to write than I thought. Not much happened in it, because most of the action is in the next chapter. That one’s going to take me a long time at the rate I’m going. But I’m hoping, again, to have it up by at least the end of July. After that there are only a couple short chapters that are just closing up this part of my saga so I can make my way into Espionage by the first day of school. I’m also hoping to have In the Shadow of the Looking Glass done by the end of the summer, seeing as it too only has about three more chapters. I need to finish it up for the end of Z2Z and quite a bit of Espionage, so I’ll get to work on that. Thanks for being so patient, you guys, and I hope you enjoyed this short chapter.

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