The Uninvited by Cat Winters Page A

into place, gave it a firm upward twist, and jumped into the driver’s seat with the engine rumbling awake. My pulse beat in my ears, and the locomotive roared my way, the whistle blaring, lights shining. I pushed the hand lever forward, released the clutch pedal, and, after a quick adjustment of the spark advance and the throttle, the truck careered off those tracks with a squeal of rubber. The train thundered behind me, its wheels churning, wind whipping across the open driving compartment, and the whistle hollered through the night with the ear-shattering wails of an Irish banshee.
    I brought the ambulance to a stop and, with a groan, collapsed across the steering wheel, in shock that I remained alive and in one piece.
    Beside me, a pair of hands gripped the dashboard. Erratic panting filled the truck while the train whistled farther and farther into the vast and distant void of the eastern farmlands.
    “Are you all right?” I asked whoever sat with me, but my voice—raw and deep—didn’t sound like my own. It hardly even sounded like a voice.
    The passenger didn’t answer. I lifted my head and, in the light of a streetlamp shining through the windshield, I saw a skinny black girl, no older than seventeen, wearing a white surgical mask over the bottom half of her face. She was dressed in a dark necktie and a Red Cross coat, skirt, and hat—all made of gray wool—and her arms and shoulders trembled. She stared at me in that hazy light, her brown eyes wide and damp.
    “What happened to Nela?” she asked with a squeak in her throat.
    “Who?”
    “Nela. The woman at the crank. Where is she? We’re supposed to be doing this together.”
    “I’ll go . . .” I peeled my fingers off the steering wheel, one by one, the muscles so stuck in a crooked position that my hands curled like claws. “I’ll make sure she’s all right.”
    I slid out of the driver’s seat and landed too hard on my feet, jarring my neck, and then I staggered over to the supine blond woman lying in the road near the tracks. She also wore the gray Red Cross uniform, and like the girl in the front seat, her mouth and nose hid beneath a gauze mask, the blue eyes above it wide and unblinking. Her chest rose and fell with shallow contractions that didn’t make a sound.
    I bent down beside her, my knees digging into the sharp gravel below my skirt, and I touched the wool-covered arm above her right elbow. “Are you all right? Can you hear me?”
    “They said . . .” She still didn’t blink, and her voice emerged from her larynx as a breathy murmur. “They said . . . we could help the Southside families at night.” Her accent—what I could hear of it—sounded Polish. Maybe Russian, or Czech. “But we had to drive ourselves. I do not know how to drive. She does not know how to drive.”
    “Neither of you—?” I furrowed my brow. “You mean to say that the Red Cross sent two non-drivers out to helm these vehicles at night? Don’t they know how dangerous these railroad tracks are—and how badly a person can break her arm if she doesn’t know how to turn the crank?”
    The woman finally blinked, her blond eyelashes fluttering. “One of our own volunteers, another Polish woman, is lying in the back of the ambulance with a fever. She was to be our driver. Liliana.”
    A pair of feet crunched across the crumbled flakes of asphalt in the road behind me. I peeked over my shoulder and found the young black volunteer walking toward us with her arms wrapped around her waist. “We have to deliver everyone in Southside,” she said, “the Poles, the Russians, the Romanians, the blacks— everyone —to Polish Hall.”
    My jaw dropped. “The hospital isn’t treating Southside residents?”
    Both women shook their heads.
    “It’s too full,” said the blonde. “No room.”
    “Here, can you sit up?” My hands hovered over the woman’s shoulders. I feared I’d fracture one of her bones if I touched her with even the gentlest of