Dating : Kansas City Death Train: 10

Part 9 is here.

Joe left Two Sugars unconscious behind a stack of pallets and walked to the perimeter of a bee-hive of mutant hoboes carrying out preparations for a Kansas-City-wide dynamite party featuring a giant carnivorous insect as its guest of honor. And he wasn’t even getting paid for it.

He considered going to the police, but he knew what happened when hoboes went looking for help from the fuzz. They just wound up nursing nightstick fractures while bailiffs sang unsweet serenades in their ears. He wasn’t willing to risk the fate of ol’ KC by putting his trust in the kindness of elephant ears when such kindness was unpredictable at best.

There were too many hoboes for Joe to take on his own, though. Dozens of them. Maybe even hundreds. They crawled all over the yard preparing the Death Train for its run. They were halfway to inhuman, too, as Two Sugars had been, with antennae sprouting out of their heads and mandibles in their mouths. All kinds of other freakish appearances. Not even Rolling Joe Stone could take them all, though he was tempted to try it.

Luckily, Joe had been hopping train cars for a long time. He knew the lines and switches just as well as Greta Garbo knew how to pout and Kid Chocolate knew how to sit boxers down on their backsides. As such, he knew precisely where the train would have to switch lines to make its way west towards its doomed destination. If he could get to the spot ahead of the death train he could hop a ride without any of the hoboes even noticing. From there he wasn’t sure what he’d do, but thinking on his feet was Joe’s specialty.

Joe was backing away from the hobo-hive when a shout interrupted him.

“Interloper!”

Joe turned to see a beanstalk of a kid in a bowler’s cap pointing him out.

“Interloper!” the kid yelled again.

“Interloper?” Joe drew his shotgun out from under his coat. “They give out complementary thesauruses when you join this bunch? I ain’t never a hobo say goddamn ‘interloper’ one time in all my life.”

That was it, though. The whole swarm of hobos was coming at him. Somewhere near the back one of the crowd one of them was yapping, “Start the train! Start the train! Get this thing going to Kansas City!”

The other hoboes let out a big cheer. Some boarded the train. Some worked the tracks. Most of them headed dead-center for Joe.