Even before the first jarring bump, she got the feeling that something was about to go terribly wrong.

Then the train seemed to bounce off the track and she clutched her seat for support.

"Enz--?"

She stopped herself. He was just staring at the watch, shaking his head dolefully, concerned with nothing but the watch. Looking like his best friend in the world had just had a fatal stroke right in front of him.

The train was shaking and rattling now, swinging wildly back and forth on the track, the air horn emitting deafening blasts. A few people were screaming, the little girls behind her starting to cry, asking the woman who was sitting with them what was happening.

Allysa's last coherent thought before the front of the car behind her smashed into the rear of the one she was sitting in, ramming it forward into the locomotive, crunching it between them like a wad of aluminum foil in an angry fist, was that those brats, those poor little helpless brats, were going to get hurt.

In the proverbial perfect world filled with perfect human beings, Julio Salles might have been able to reduce the loss of life that occurred that night. Though the fifty-five miles per hour that Salles was doing while still nearly two miles from the disabled "slow" signal fell within the limit of his authorized speed, it did so just barely, and slower would have been wiser on a downhill grade. Though he had been alert at his post and looking out for the signal, and had no reason to suspect anything might be wrong with the signal, it would have been an intelligent precaution to use geographic landmarks as he neared the place where the track looped around the hillside in the unlikely event that it did fail.

But there can be such a thing as overfamiliarity with a route, particularly in country where the terrain rolls along with a dulling sameness, one stretch of track bleeding into the next. Anybody who regularly drives to work in a rural area knows this; after taking the same roads day in and day out for several months or years, you begin to ignore the scenery and depend on a general sense of your bearings rather than its specific features, until coming to a sign or stoplight that marks a necessary turn. The building, brook, farmyard, radio tower, or cherry '63 Mustang in someone's driveway that once caught the eye on every trip will be passed unnoticed along the way. You feel free to straddle the speed limit, and perhaps even slightly exceed it without risking a traffic stop, knowing the police will in most instances tolerate a person going, say, sixty-eight or seventy in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour speed zone.