James Axler (10 page)

Ryan had lifted himself so that his head was above the rooftops of the cars both fore and aft. He checked the one behind first, saw no one there, then his head whipped around and looked at the rooftop of the car he intended to cross. Empty.

He dropped back to the rear car and encouraged Mildred to follow him. Then he was back out the door, lifting himself up the fore car by the strength of his arms alone, letting his legs swing below him until he could kick them over onto its roof. Mildred watched the feat of strength, realizing that Ryan had done it to avoid kicking at the car and alerting its passenger or passengers.

She looked behind her and reached up for the top of the open door frame of the car they were leaving. She pulled herself up on the swinging door, using the handle as a footrest, and got her knee up on its thin top ledge.

From there she could reach the opposite roof with ease, and she pulled herself onto it, crossing the gap quietly.

Ryan waited there, crouched and looking back and forth, up and down the moving train as the wind caught at his dark hair. “Sec man two cars behind us,” Ryan whispered, “another at twelve o’clock, three lengths ahead.”

Mildred squinted, trying to make out the dark figures against the night sky, noticing the light cast from the windows of the car below them on the ground beneath.

“Got them,” she told him quietly.

“Don’t think either of them will give us trouble, as long as we move quick,” he suggested. “It’s dark and it’s noisy out here, and they’re probably posted to look over the edge for attacking locals or muties.”

“Not checking tickets—got it.”

Together, the pair prowled across the curved rooftop in quick, quiet steps. Halfway across they dropped to the roof and lay flat. Ryan held Mildred’s hips as she dropped her head over the side of the train and looked in a lighted window—just a fraction of a second to assess the scene before she reappeared on the roof.

“Compartments,” she whispered to him, then they got up and made their way stealthily to the far end of the car.

At the other side, Ryan dropped like a stone, there one second, gone the next. Mildred dropped flat on the roof surface again, bracing her legs and swinging down.

She hung upside down between the jostling cars in front of the door, blaster ready. Ryan pulled the door open and entered, with Mildred hanging there, covering his back.

Ryan clutched his blaster as he stepped into the car.

The walkway stretched along the left wall, which had three large windows evenly spaced along it. To the right were compartments, just as Mildred had advised: glass partitions in wooden frames, their contents hidden by heavy, moth-eaten curtains. There were four compartments in total, and each had a glass-and-wood door in its center. This was, Ryan realized, a genuine train car, salvage scrap put back on the tracks, probably two hundred years after it had originally seen use.

Noises came from the compartment closest to him, and he silently walked the length of the corridor, stopping and listening at each of the doors to confirm whether they appeared to be occupied.

After he had checked them all, listening at the doors and peeking through gaps in the curtains, Ryan silently indicated for Mildred to join him. Swinging on the door frame, hands clutching the top, she dropped to the floor of the car very quietly, closed the door behind her and unholstered her revolver once more. The corridor shook from side to side with the movement of the train as Mildred sneaked silently along, and she held her arms out to keep her balance without raising the alarm.

Ryan stood outside the third compartment, his back to the glass wall, blaster held shoulder high. Mildred stood opposite the door to the compartment, her own revolver ready, and nodded firmly at Ryan. It was clear that he intended to enter, and that Mildred was his backup; he didn’t need to state it out loud for her. He put his left hand on the door handle and shoved the sliding door aside with a noisy clatter on its tracks, raising the SIG-Sauer and entering the room in a series of swift, fluid movements.

The small compartment was dimly lit by an ornate oil lamp hanging low on the ceiling. A bunk stood to the right, a curtain pulled across it, and to the left a chair sat in front of a small shelving unit with a mirror and a large washbowl. A large, curtain less window—almost the whole width of the compartment—looked out across the passing countryside, dabs of green speckled between the sandy-yellow soil. There was movement in the bunk behind the curtain, and a hand appeared, hairy knuckles reaching to pull back the curtain.

A gruff voice came from behind the curtain as it swept back. “Who the…?” But the man didn’t get to finish his sentence. Ryan had shouldered the bunk’s curtain aside and leaned one knee on the man’s chest, thrusting the blaster into the occupant’s face. An ugly face glared back at Ryan from the wrong end of the barrel, piggy eyes narrowed in reams of pallid flesh, unshaven jowls hanging heavily beneath.

The man’s eyes were full of questions, all of them murderous, but he remained silent as he looked at the one-eyed man bare inches above him. Behind his attacker he watched a curvaceous, dark-skinned woman pad into the room, sliding the door back into place and adjusting the curtain to ensure no one could peek in.

J.B. KEPT LOOKOUT AT THE BACK of the train, unconsciously checking the hilt of the Tekna knife he had hidden in one sleeve. The wind whirled all around him, making sound an unreliable indicator. Behind his round spectacles, his eyes flicked back and forth, and he spent equal times watching ahead and behind him as the train thundered across the ragged landscape. He was doing a commendably more vigilant job than the sec man that Ryan had dispatched, and the irony of that didn’t escape him.

On the horizon, where the deep blue of the sky met the solid black shadow of the earth, J.B. spotted a movement. The train was going downhill, a subtle incline, and it meant that he was looking upward. The moving shape looked like a box, and J.B. narrowed his eyes to try to bring it into focus. The box was being pulled with some speed across the bumpy plain, and J.B. concluded that a single horse was at the front of it.

He watched for almost two minutes before he decided that the pony and trap was following them. Because of the curvature of the railroad tracks, their pursuers could cut out vast chunks of the journey, straight-lining where they circled, and this was being used to help the vehicle catch up to them, slowly but surely. The jackass way of doing things like that had all the hallmarks of Doc, J.B. realized. Still, if it worked…

J.B. looked behind him, thinking about the car below and whether there was anything he could use in there to help Doc and Krysty get on board—rope, mebbe, or some kind of wire he could turn into a lasso. As he looked behind he saw a man approaching—one roof ahead and closing the distance carefully, keeping his balance low with a crouching shuffle of movement. As he watched the man approach, J.B. eased his index finger beneath the trigger guard of his Uzi, felt for the reassuring weight of the Tekna knife in his sleeve.

“Nate?” the man’s voice carried to him on the rushing wind. “That you, Nate?”

Whoever was approaching him, it wasn’t Ryan Cawdor.

J.B. sized the man up in his mind watching him jump across the gap between the car and land at the end of the one J.B. waited atop—about six feet tall, maybe 240 pounds, all of it solid muscle. He moved like a big cat, instinctively balancing on the moving rooftop. He wore a revolver under his arm, holstered in a shoulder rig, and the barrel to a larger blaster could be seen over his shoulder where it hung on his back by a thick leather strap. As the man closed the gap between them, J.B. could see pitted scarring on his cheeks, awkwardly catching moonlight.

“Nate?” the man asked again, deliberately keeping his voice low. He was just a few paces from J.B. now, trying to make him out in the darkness. “Hey, you ain’t Nate,” the man finally said.

With the butt of the Uzi resting on the car roof, J.B. had the man perfectly in his sights. But he waited, not pulling the trigger. The man had realized that he wasn’t

“Nate,” but he hadn’t made any move for his own weapon.

“What happened to Nate?” the man asked, his dirty blond hair blowing around his face.

In his mind’s eye J.B. saw the sec man falling from the train after Ryan had knifed him in the gut, a bloody splash oozing over his shirt. “Stomach problem,” he stated.

 “Little wonder.” The man laughed, clearly at ease with the stranger. “All I see him eat is crap.” He crouched and held an empty hand out to J.B. “Givin. Sean Givin.”

J.B. rested the Uzi on the rooftop and shook the man’s hand. “John Dix,” he told him. “You my relief?”

“Yeah, man, and— did you say your name was Dix?

You’re not Tish’s old man, are you?”

“Cousin,” J.B. said. He had no idea who Tish was, but it seemed that Sean Givin was happy to fill in the details and provide far more trust and alibi than J.B. could have asked for.

Sean shook his head, relieved. “Phew, thought I’d just walked into an ambush for a minute there.” He looked around. “I didn’t walk into an ambush, did I?”

J.B. reached across, giving the sec man a friendly punch on the shoulder. “Hey, what my cousin does is up to her. None of my business,” he confirmed.

A line of bright teeth appeared in the moonlight as Givin smiled. “I’m real sorry I’m so late, man,” he told J.B. “You go get yourself some sleep. I got this covered now.” He pointed out across the land behind the train, not really looking.

J.B. got to his feet. He was rapidly considering what to do next. Doc and Krysty were on their way, and the last thing they needed was a firefight with this stupe. At the same time, if the Armorer chilled him now he’d only up the possibilities of raising suspicion. The ante had been raised high enough with their boarding the train, and the trusting sec man’s naiveté had granted him a lucky break.

He made his way to the far end of the car roof, looking back at Sean Givin sitting there, the wind catching his long blond hair. Doc or Krysty could handle this dope, and neither of them would be stupe enough to approach the train without checking for guards. For now, J.B. was going to have to retreat and see if he could locate Mildred and Ryan.

“WHERE ARE WE GOING?” Ryan barked at the man in the bunk, pushing the barrel of the blaster further into his forehead so that the man sunk down in the pillow.

“What is this train’s destination?”

The man in the bed stuttered, fear overcoming his ability to speak. “I—I—I…”

“Where?” Ryan barked again, but the man failed to provide a coherent reply. “Listen, you little worm. That thing you feel pressing against your forehead is the end of my blaster. I’ll shoot what little brains you have right out the back of your head and no one will hear a damn thing over the racket of the engine, no one will come running. So you answer my questions now or you’re going to have yourself one bastard headache. You understand?”

The man gave a slight nod, the pressure of the blaster causing more pain as he moved his head. His whole face had turned very red with the pressure placed on him, the blood rushing to his head.

“So,” Ryan asked again, “where?”

Ryan watched the man blink rapidly, his tongue struggling around his mouth. “Forks, man,” he said, his voice trembling. “The Forks.”

“And where the rad blazes is that?” Ryan asked, and he looked across to Mildred who stood at the mirror, ignoring the man in the bunk.

“North? South?” Mildred shrugged, filling a disposable hypodermic syringe she had taken from her med kit. “I really don’t know. I can’t think of any Forks.

Maybe it’s a nickname.”

Ryan breathed a sigh through gritted teeth before turning his attention back to his captive. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. He was taken on this train against his will.”

The man in the bunk just looked at Ryan with those wide, scared eyes.

Ryan continued, gouging the barrel of his blaster into the man’s forehead once more. “What are you? Sec man? Is that it?”

“Yeah,” the man breathed, clearly terrified.

“You take prisoners? You do that?”

“Sometimes,” the man croaked. “Just kids though.”

“Just kids?” Ryan repeated, scowling.

The man struggled to breathe. “Mebbe sluts sometimes, I’m not…not sure.”

“Be sure,” Ryan warned him.

“Yeah. Gaudy sluts. Good lookin’ girls who should be gaudies. You know, guy?” the terrified man pleaded.

“No,” Ryan shook his head. “My friend is young-looking, very distinctive. He’s an albino. You know what that is?”

The man tried to shake his head but Ryan’s blaster point held him firm. “No.”

“Means he’s white,” Ryan told him. “Pure white, like snow. You get snow here? You’ve seen snow?”

“I see snow,” the man agreed. “Wintertime.”

“My friend’s skin and hair are colored like snow. You wouldn’t miss him.”

“I don’t…” The man in the bunk tried, but couldn’t seem to finish the sentence. His eyes fluttered.

 “You don’t remember, you haven’t seen him? What?”

“I ain’t seen no one, man,” the man croaked. “Please don’t chill me,” he added, his voice high and squeaky.

Ryan took the blaster away from the man’s head but continued to point it at his face. “You are going to have to remain very quiet for me if I’m to let you live.” The man nodded, his lips clamped shut, and so Ryan continued. “And you are going to have to prove irreplaceable in your helpfulness to me and my people.

Think you can do that?”

The man’s eyes flicked across to his right, looking above his head for a fraction of a second, then he looked back at Ryan. “Anything,” he said. “Anything at all.”

Ryan stepped back slowly, his SIG-Sauer still trained on the man’s face.

“I can sedate him, if you want,” Mildred told Ryan.

She had found some ancient sedatives during their rummaging in the remains of military hospitals and the like, although she wouldn’t want to vouch for the reliability of these medicines these days. Sedatives, like everything else in the , inevitably expired.

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Ryan told her.