James Axler (11 page)

“Our friend here just wants to play along. Isn’t that right, friend?”

The man spun in the bunk, launching his right hand at a cubbyhole above his shoulder, obscured from view by the pillows of the bunk. “Screw you!” he croaked, pulling a snub-nosed .38 weapon from the cubbyhole and swinging it around to target the intruders.

Ryan’s bullet drilled through the man’s forehead in an instant, and the man’s blaster hand continued to swing around but his fingers never pulled the trigger.

The back of the man’s skull opened up as brains splattered across the bunk, the pillows and the Beachwood wall behind. Though loud in the contained area of the cabin, the noise of the blaster was negligible outside thanks to the racket of the train rocking along the tracks.

Mildred held her breath, looking at the scene for a moment as the man’s body twitched, its life departing.

“I thought we could sedate him,” she said quietly, “if he became rowdy.”

Ryan sighed. “Didn’t seem like the sedating type, Mildred,” he told her, his blaster still trained on the body in the bunk as a final muscle spasm jerked through it.

After a moment Ryan opened the door slightly, poked his head out and checked the corridor. No one was coming.

He stepped back into the compartment and holstered his weapon in his belt. “J.B. is probably getting concerned,” he told Mildred.

THE SWEAT WAS FOAMING on the pony’s coat as Doc urged more speed from its tired legs. They had been racing across the North Dakota plain for far too long, and the animal was near exhaustion. It couldn’t take much more of the grueling punishment. Its legs looked unstable as it ran, threatening to buckle as it dragged the trap behind it. However, they were definitely gaining on the train now. Doc could see its obscene length slithering along the tracks, a giant, black caterpillar crossing the land, smoky steam belching from its foremost segment.

“I think it may actually be slowing,” Doc said to Krysty, his eyes fixed ahead, watching the train in the distance.

When Krysty didn’t respond, he voiced his observation louder, above the loud tattoo that the pony’s hooves were banging out on the hard-packed earth. They had hit a few pockets of grass here and there, and the land was definitely getting greener, the soil more fertile. Doc turned to Krysty, then, and saw she was slumped in the seat beside him. “Krysty?” he asked, letting go of the reins with one hand and reaching across to shake her gently by the shoulder. “Krysty, dear? We’re almost there. Try to stay awake.”

Krysty’s head weaved atop her neck as she returned to consciousness. She looked at him, bleary-eyed.

“D-Doc?” she groaned. “Is that you?”

Doc glanced ahead—just level fields here—then took the opportunity to look more closely at his companion. “Krysty, are you feeling unwell?” Mentally he added the word again.

She shook her head, not in answer to his question, he realized, but to try to bring reality back into focus.

“The screaming is louder,” she told him, so quietly he had to strain to hear her over the drumming sound of hooves.

“We’re getting closer to the train,” he explained.

“Perhaps we were wrong in our earlier summation. It seems to be having some effect on your faculties, after all.”

Krysty looked ahead of them, eyes focusing on the train in the distance. “It’s that, but it’s not just that,” she said after a moment’s consideration.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s so hard to tell. My brain feels like it’s on fire,” she said hesitantly, struggling to find the right words of explanation. “But there’s something… I can’t tell if it’s just inside me now, alive and eating away at me.”

Doc reached his free hand across to Krysty, patting her lightly on the shoulder. “You poor child,” he said.

He watched, horrified as she winced at his touch. “My profuse apologies,” he told her, immediately withdrawing his hand.

Krysty closed her eyes a moment, and when she opened them Doc could make out the watery tears in the moonlight. “It hurts so much,” she said.

Silently, Doc agreed with her. It hurt him, too, deep inside, seeing his companion in so much pain.

“HEAR THAT?” Mildred asked.

Ryan cocked his head, trying to filter out the sounds of the train to divine something new. “What?”

“High-pitched squealing. That’s brakes,” Mildred told him. “We’re slowing down.”

Ryan moved across the tiny compartment and looked out the fly-specked window. “You’re right,” he said, examining the landscape as it passed. “Any ideas why?”

Mildred shrugged. “Pit stop, station.” She thought for a second, then added, “Food run?”

“Doc found out something earlier,” Ryan said, “and never had the chance to tell you. There are other towers.

That’s what he was told.”

Mildred felt a chill come over her, hugged her arms around her as she stood next to Ryan while he watched through the window. “It doesn’t surprise me,” she stated. “I didn’t give it a thought until you said it, but it doesn’t surprise me, not really.”

Ryan continued to stand at the window, looking this way and that, trying to make out details in the moonlight. As she watched him, Mildred realized just what it was he was really looking for. Krysty and Doc, who were still somewhere between here and Fairburn.

Maybe they never even left the walled ville. After Doc had opened the gates it was very possible that they had both wound up at the end of the hangman’s rope, vandal and accomplice. Mildred pushed the thought from her mind, and then her voice broke the silence. “You know, Ryan,” she said, “I shouldn’t have left Krysty.”

She watched Ryan standing there, looking out the window, his face away from her, the moisture in his breath steaming the cold glass. He gave not so much as a nod of acknowledgment to her statement as the sound of the brakes grew louder, their scream becoming increasingly shrill as the train pulled to a stop.

Mildred took two steps forward, unable to stop herself moving as the train stopped. Ryan, she noticed, didn’t move at all. His thick legs were planted, rock-solid, on the floor of the train, his uncanny sense of balance holding him firm.

Once the train had stopped, Ryan turned and went to the door. “Come on,” he told the doctor, and stepped from the compartment, SIG-Sauer blaster back in his hand.

Mildred followed him, and they jogged down the corridor toward the door through which they had entered the car. As they reached it, the door at the opposite end opened, and Mildred spun, dropping to one knee and targeting the newcomer with her revolver.

J.B. stood in the doorway, his own weapon—the compact Uzi—in ready position. When he saw Mildred and Ryan he lowered the blaster and gave a single, firm nod.

“We stopped,” Ryan told J.B. as they returned to the door at the front.

The Armorer nodded, tight-lipped.

 “We’re a long way from the front,” Ryan continued.

“Going by what Mildred said, I’d guess that’s where the action is. We were planning to go take a look-see, find out what’s what.” He opened the door, then reached up to the roof of the car. In a moment, Ryan was up and over. Once there, he lay down flat and looked up the length of the train. It was too dark to make out details.

He unslung the SSG-70 Steyr and rested it in front of him, then looked down the powerful scope, adjusting it until he could see to the front of the train.

A handful of people were walking around, most of them armed sec men. A few others rushed back and forth, receiving orders from a dark-haired foreman who held something shiny and metallic in his hands—probably a blaster, Ryan guessed. The one-eyed man panned the scope slowly across the area, tracking a group of three, serious-looking people, a dark-haired woman and two men, one of them older and sporting wispy, white hair. Lit by the glowing light of the train engine, Ryan watched as this group made its way to an area off to the side of the tracks. As they left the faint light of the engine, he lost them. Then a bright light suddenly broke the darkness in the scope’s image. The train people had a method to light the area. A little pool of light as bright as day had appeared where the group waited.

Ryan watched as the group had a quick discussion, gesturing to something to the right. He panned the scope slightly, and there it was. Spitted in the X of his crosshairs, gleaming in the brilliant light as it lunged into the sky, was another skeletal tower, just like the one outside Fairburn.

“Fireblast,” Ryan muttered.

While Mildred kept watch, J.B. joined Ryan on the roof of the car to discuss the situation. Ryan continued to watch the activities through the scope on his SSG-70

Steyr blaster as they talked, trying to fathom what the operators of this mechanical monstrosity were doing.

“So, why did you come find us, J.B.?” Ryan whispered.

“My position got relieved. Sec man came over, spoke to me. Saw nothing out of the ordinary in my being there. I told him I was filling in.”

There was frantic activity through the scope as Ryan watched. A group of the raggedly dressed sec men leaped from the train and ran toward a nearby copse.

The remainder of the group continued to work at the tower. “Something’s going down,” Ryan said. “They have a big sec force, easily infiltrated.”

“That’s my conclusion, too,” J.B. agreed. “None of them are uniformed. Walk tall, they won’t bother us, I’m thinking.”

“Sounds risky,” Ryan stated, “but we need to find Jak, and I don’t think we have a lot of options here.”

Ryan continued to watch the activity through the scope, never shifting his position.

J.B.’s gaze swept the rooftops of the train in the moonlight, pinpointing where the roof guards waited.

 “Any sign of Doc?” Ryan whispered.

“I think I saw him and Krysty,” J.B. said, checking the rear cars, trying to see beyond but finding only darkness below the moonlit break of the horizon.

“Looked like a pony and trap. Not much of a vehicle for the long haul, but should be enough to get them here.

’Specially if we’re stopped here for a while.”

“You think she’ll be all right?”

“Ask a Mildred,” J.B. told him. “I don’t know.”

DOC PULLED AT THE REINS, slowing the pony’s charge.

They were close to the train, barely two hundred yards away, and Doc knew that it was only the cover of darkness that granted them protection. Above them, the silver moon danced through the clouds, its light sporadically bright on the landscape.

Doc could see a man on top of the last car of the train, cast in silhouette against the indigo sky. The old man pulled the pony to a halt and spoke rapidly to Krysty.

“I need you to look for me, Krysty,” he told the sick woman, “locate the sec men.”

Krysty lay there, slumped in the seat beside him, her head lolling on her shoulders, her eyes scrunched tightly closed. Doc wondered what folly had made them think to move her from Fairburn, and to let Mildred leave her side. She had seemed better, he reminded himself. What had happened? What was going on with Krysty?

Doc snapped the reins and the weary pony trotted forward once more, approaching the train while thick clouds obscured the moonlight.

 “MUTIES.” RYAN BIT OUT the word, and J.B.’s head whipped to look in the direction that Ryan was watching through the powerful magnification of his scope.

“Where?” the Armorer asked, his vision unable to pierce the darkness around them.

“Trees, two o’clock,” Ryan stated. He watched through the scope as a group of sec men fought with the naked, humanoid figures. The muties numbered more than fifty, and they moved with grim determination.

The sec men’s bullets slowed them, but the few they felled would collapse for a moment only to struggle back up and continue the attack. Scalies, probably, thick leather skin protecting them against small blaster fire.

Suddenly, Ryan rolled over and shifted to a sitting position, looking at J.B. with his single, piercing blue eye. “Time to find Doc and Krysty,” he said.

They leaped from the roof, returning to Mildred where she waited in the car beneath them. “Back of the train, Mildred,” Ryan told her.

“What is it, Ryan?” Mildred asked as they turned to jog through the car.

“Mass chilling going on outside,” Ryan explained.

“We need to get Krysty and Doc onboard before someone chills them, too.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Mildred said, following them into the car with the car windshield wall.

“It was up front,” J.B. told her. “Mutie scuffle. We’re best keeping out of it.”

“But if they spot Doc…” Ryan stated, then left the inevitable conclusion unsaid.

When they reached the penultimate car, Ryan clambered up between the coaches and took to the rooftops again, with Mildred and J.B. following. The sec man, Sean Givin, was still atop the roof of the last car. “Hey, man,” Givin began as they approached, “what’s—?”

He never finished the question. A 9 mm bullet from Ryan’s SIG-Sauer blaster drilled through his left eye.

Ryan jumped across the gap between rooftops, scanning the horizon as the sec man dropped onto his back, crashing onto the metal roof with a loud thump, a mosaic of blood splattered across the left side of his face. “There,” Ryan called, pointing to the left of the train. J.B. and Mildred followed where he indicated, spotting the pony and trap bumbling toward the train from the shadows.

J.B. was down the side ladder in an abbreviated second, waving his arms above his head to show Doc it was safe to approach. Ryan looked up the length of the train, aware that the roof guards had to have heard the single shot, wondering how long they had before another guard became suspicious.

THE SEC MAN HAD LEFT the children in the twelfth car alone. The group had sat there, huddled together as far from the pure white youth as they could get. All of them watched the thin figure lay there, saw him jostled with the heavy movements of the train as it had hurtled down the tracks. They watched him roll away from them, toward the front of the train, when the brakes were applied, until he finally rolled over, slapping softly into the grille mesh when the train stopped.

His eyes were closed and he hadn’t reacted when his body had hit the ringing metal of the mesh wall, not even with a grunt of expelled air. Some of the younger children were crying quietly, but that wasn’t so unusual.