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He bent at the waist, cramping; but the train rounded a bend and blasted light up the hill.
It would have to slow, he thought.
But it didn't.
It hit the hill like the hill was nothing. Three engines and a wall of metal, it blew past as if it could strip the air from his lungs. But more cars came onto the hill every second, and Gideon had a sense of it in the dark, of fifty cars and then another hundred, their weight dragging at the engines until he realized the train had slowed so much he could almost keep up. And that's what he tried to do, running fast as the wheels sparked yellow and built a vacuum that sucked at the bones of his legs. He scrabbled at one car and then another, but the rungs were high and slick.
He risked a glance and saw the last cars racing up behind him, twenty maybe, and then less. If he missed the train, he missed the prison. His fingers stretched, but he fell and smeared skin from his face, then ran and reached and felt a rung in his hand as agony burst in his shoulder and his feet thumped across wooden ties before the car, at last, was a shell around him.
He'd made it. He was on the train that would carry him off to kill a man, and the truth of that pressed down in the dark. It wasn't talk anymore, or waiting or planning.
The sun would rise in four hours.
The bullets would be real bullets.
But so what?
He sat in the blackness, determined as hilltops rose and fell and houses between them looked like stars. He thought of sleepless nights and hunger; and when the river glinted beneath him, he looked for the prison, seeing a bright light miles out across the valley floor. It raced closer, so he leaned out when the ground seemed flattest and least rocky. He looked for the strength to jump, but was still on the train as dirt flicked past and the prison sank like a ship in the dark. He was going to miss it, so he thought of his mother's face instead, then stepped out and fell and hit the ground like a sack of rocks.
When he woke, it was still dark, and though the stars looked dimmer, he had enough light to limp along the tracks until he found a road that led to a cluster of brown buildings he'd seen once from the back of a moving car. He stepped beneath a black-lettered sign that said CONVICTS WELCOME and studied the two-windowed, cinder-block bar on the other side of it. His face was a blur in the glass. There were no people or traffic, and when he turned to look south, he saw how the prison rose up in the distance. He looked at it for long minutes before slipping into the alley beside the bar and putting his back against a Dumpster that smelled like chicken wings and cigarettes and piss. He wanted to feel pleased for making it this far, but the gun looked wrong in his lap. He tried watching the road, but there was nothing to watch, so he closed his eyes and thought of a picnic they'd had when he was very young. The picture taken that day was in a frame on his bedside table at home. He'd worn yellow pants with big buttons and thought he might remember how his father held him high and spun him in a circle. He held on to the idea of that childhood, then imagined what it would feel like to kill the man who took it away.
Hammer back.
Arm straight and steady.
He practiced in his head so he could do it right in person; but even in his mind, the gun shook and was silent. Gideon had imagined the same thing a thousand times on a thousand nights.
His father was not man enough.
He would not be man enough.
Pressing the barrel against his forehead, he prayed for strength, then walked through it again.
Hammer back.
Arm straight.
For an hour more he tried to steel himself, then threw up in the dark and hugged his ribs as if all heat in the world had been stolen, too.
Excerpted from Redemption Road by John Hart. Copyright © 2016 by John Hart. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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