James Axler (12 page)

Everyone in the cage had shed some tears after they had been snatched from their home villes or their arduous lives on the Dakota farms. But it was hard to see in the vague light that peeked in through the open door of the car with the racing wind of movement, and no one had wanted to approach the strange youth with the face of alabaster.

Humblebee, nine years old and a passenger on the train for three long days, finally plucked up the courage to ask the question that had been troubling her. Her voice came out quiet, as though she was afraid of breaking something with it. “Is he…a ghost?”

One of the younger children—Francis-Frankie—started to wail when he heard her say that, and Marc, who was almost fourteen and was used to taking care of whining younger siblings, scooted over to Francis-Frankie and told him not to cry because it was a stupe thing to do. Francis-Frankie sniffled back his crying, but it made him cry more, so Marc punched him on the nerve below the shoulder, giving him a dead arm. That shut Francis-Frankie up.

Humblebee didn’t want to say it again. She had this idea that if she said it, it might just come true anyway, even if it hadn’t been true before. She looked at the ghost boy slumped there, unmoving, and closed her eyes tight, trying to picture the car before he came, how it would look if he wasn’t lying there now. It was like the monsters under her bed back home in Brocketville; if she thought about it hard enough, if she really believed, then they stopped being there after all and she could go to sleep.

But when she opened her eyes again, he was still lying there. She screwed her eyes up tight and whispered, “Go away,” but he was still there when she looked again. So she had to ask the question again.

“Maddie?” she asked, frightened to take her eyes off the stationary white figure on the other side of the car.

Maddie was Humblebee’s best friend on the train.

Maddie was as old as Marc, but she was clever and funny. She had made up stories to help Humblebee sleep on her first night on the train, after she’d been snatched by the train pirates. “What is it?” Maddie asked after a few seconds.

Humblebee could tell that Maddie was watching the white-skinned boy, too, that she didn’t dare avert her gaze from the stranger. She was behind Humblebee somewhere, and Humblebee wished she could hold hands with her now, when she asked the scary question again. “Is that boy a ghost?”

“I don’t think so,” Maddie decided.

“Why is he so white?” Humblebee whispered. “He looks like a ghost.”

Marc’s funny, high voice broke the stillness after a moment. “I think he might be dead,” he announced.

“He’s not dead,” Maddie stated firmly. “Don’t say that, it’s a horrible thing to say.”

Humblebee looked at the ghost boy, trying to see if he was breathing, but she couldn’t see any movement.

“That man shotted him,” she told them.

Marc sniggered nervously. “If he wasn’t a ghost when he got on he prob’ly is now. Chilled.”

Maddie shushed them. “Stop it.”

Francis-Frankie was sniffling when he spoke up, his voice, as ever, an irritating whine. “Why would they give us a ghost?” he asked. It struck Humblebee as a very intelligent question. Why would anyone give you a ghost?

“For eatin’,” Marc decided, and he padded toward the white figure in the corner of the cage.

Francis-Frankie started wailing again when he heard that.

J.B. HELPED RYAN WRAP a blanket around the corpse of the pig-eyed sec man he had shot and shove it into the overhead luggage rack. They used the soiled sheet from the bed to wipe blasted brains from the wall. Then Mildred helped Krysty into the bunk.

The companions had moved in silence through the cars, alert to possible discovery.

Once they reached the perceived safety of the compartment, a hushed conversation brought everyone up to speed.

Mildred sat with Krysty, speaking soothing words as she took the woman’s temperature. The compartment was cramped now, with five living people and one blanket-wrapped corpse vying for space. Ryan stood with his back to the door, his weight against it and his heel dug against the sliding edge so that no one could force his or her way in. Doc and J.B. stood together by the window, watching Mildred work on their other companion.

“Why has the train stopped again?” Doc asked.

“There’s a tower up front,” Ryan told him.

“Another one?” Doc asked, his incredulity raising his voice. He had been the first to hear that there were probably more towers, but it still seemed unexpected somehow. He came from a different time, the 1800s, and it was hard to discard his instinctive assumption that trains stopped at stations. “I did not see it,” he concluded.

“Long way to the front,” Ryan explained.

“How far?” Doc wanted to know.

“Over a quarter mile,” J.B. chipped in. “Hard to tell with a dark, moving object, no landmarks.”

“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc muttered under his breath.

They felt the train begin to thrum. The engines were warming up, and the powerful shuddering was followed by gradual movement as the mighty engine began to pull its burden, very slowly, forward.

J.B. gestured to the dead sec man in the overhead luggage rack. “Might be easiest to toss the body overboard once we pick up speed. Cloud cover may hide it, but if not, anyone who sees it will probably think he’s slipped. Don’t reckon they’d stop the train to check on one man.”

“Have you located Jak?” Doc asked.

“Not yet,” Ryan replied. “Mildred thinks he’s close to the front, mebbe ten or twelve railcars from the engine.”

“How far away is that?” Doc asked, looking from Ryan to J.B. to Mildred.

J.B. answered. “Reckon the train’s about sixty cars in total, front to back. So far all we’ve seen is storage, but as we get nearer the front we can expect to see more people. The bunks here won’t be the only ones,” he said. “There’s a sec here, but they’re badly briefed. I passed myself off as one of them with the rearguard, didn’t even raise an eyebrow. Figure if we keep our heads down, no one will question me or Ryan.”

 “We’ll work through the cars,” Ryan added, “try to find Jak. We’ll plan it from there.”

Doc was shaking his head, clearly deep in thought.

“What is it?” Ryan asked him.

“The lad is plenty resourceful,” Doc told them. “He may well have found his escape route and be off the train already.”

“In that case he’ll find us,” Ryan said firmly. “Or we’ll go back to Fairburn, make our apologies, and wait for him to appear. Last rendezvous protocol, Jak’ll follow that.”

“Assuming he is on the train, however,” Doc mused, “how long do we have to find him?”

“Sooner the better,” Ryan said, as though it was the most obvious thing.

“You have missed my point, Ryan,” Doc told him.

“This train has to go somewhere, even if it is just to refuel. The next stop may very well put us in a situation we are ill-prepared to handle. There could be a thousand armed sec men waiting at the end of the tracks for all we know.”

“And my point stands,” Ryan stated. “The sooner the better.”

J.B. took a long breath, thinking it through. “Doc’s right, Ryan,” he said, “We may not be able to just rush Jak off. Might be a shed load more to it than opening a door.”

Mildred had been listening throughout as she tended to Krysty in the bunk. “The previous occupant of this bunk told us they were heading to the Forks,” she said.

Ryan nodded. “Mean anything to you, Doc?”

In his previous life, Doc was a well-traveled man, as well as a well-educated one. He stood by the window now, the dark countryside speeding past as the train rocked from side to side, trying to place the name. Many things had changed with the nuclear devastation of the United States of America; place names had been corrupted or simply vanished to the mists of time, and new settlements had popped up, named for their barons or the local geography or a dozen other reasons. Doc tried to picture the map of the Dakotas, North and South.

There had been a glorious map on the wall of one of the lecture halls of Harvard, and he had spent brief moments studying it when he had been waiting for class to start.

“Grand Forks,” he told them with certainty in his voice. “Up here—” he gestured in the air, still seeing the map in his mind’s eye “—in the northeast of the state.”

“We’re traveling south,” J.B. pointed out, producing a folded booklet from his inside breast pocket, “but there’s a curve to the tracks, could be taking us easterly, hard to say yet.”

“The redoubt that we exited said Minot on the wall,”

Ryan added. “Whereabouts is that?”

J.B. placed the washbowl on the floor and laid a map on the small desk it had sat on, flattening the paper with a sweep of his hands. Doc looked over J.B.’s shoulder and Ryan took a single, small step away from the door to join them.

“Here’s Minot,” J.B. said, pointing. “Northwest. And Grand Forks…here, a hundred and fifty miles as the scud flies. But if we’re looping around—” he drew a rough circle with his fingernail, following the state boundary “—who knows. Could take a week or more, especially if we’re stopping.”

Ryan addressed Doc, stepping aside as Mildred joined the group at the little desk to see the map for herself.

“Know anything about this Grand Forks place, Doc?”

Doc shook his head. “I am afraid I’ve never been there, or if I have I do not remember doing so. It is still hard to remember much of what I’ve done,” he continued, “some of it is so vivid, my times with Emily and the children, but other things…” His voice trailed off and Ryan nodded his understanding to the older man.

Doc’s memory had fractured somehow, due to the time jumps that had been thrust upon him. It seemed a cruel kind of senility to force upon the intelligent old man, and Ryan knew that it caused Doc much frustration, even if he didn’t voice it often.

Ryan spoke then, addressing everyone, his firm voice steady. “We get Jak, we do it quiet and we get off. If we don’t go looking for a ruckus, we can hopefully avoid getting ourselves into one. Low profile, all the way.” He looked across to where Krysty lay in the bunk. She seemed to be sleeping, but her fists were clenched tight, nails digging hard into her palms. “Mildred, you’re going to have to do what you can for Krysty until we get off this thing. J.B. and I’ll scout the train. Doc, I don’t think you’ll pass for a sec man, sorry to say. So that puts you on watch for Krysty and Mildred.”

“And two more delightful companions no man on Earth could ask for,” Doc announced, bringing a smile to Mildred’s face in spite of herself.

“Same rules as ever,” Ryan reminded them.

“Everyone’s backup. We’re three people down, with both Jak and Krysty out of action, and someone watching her at all times. So we don’t draw any attention we don’t need.”

 “Do you think this cabin is safe?” Mildred queried.

“Storage cars behind might be safer,” Ryan admitted, “but we have to think of Krysty’s comfort. Plus, at least we’re out of sight unless someone actually comes through that door.” He gestured to the single door of the tiny compartment. “We’ll live with it unless something more secure presents itself.

“How’s Krysty?” he asked Mildred.

“Her health’s declining again, Ryan,” Mildred admitted. “I can’t see what the pattern is, but she’s almost as low now as she was when we reached Fairburn.”

“I have hypothesized,” Doc explained, “that it may be something to do with the towers, but since we do not know where they are nor what they are doing, it is hard to come to a definite conclusion.”

“It’s a sound theory,” Ryan stated, “but why would it affect her and not us?”

Mildred looked at Krysty, then back at Ryan and the others. “It’s hard to say, Ryan. Anything I tell you now would have to be pure guesswork.”

“No point,” J.B. confirmed, and they all agreed to let the matter rest.

In the bunk, Krysty clawed at the remaining blanket, her hands scrabbling at the material, a soft groan coming from her mouth as her breathing became more rapid.

“Keep her comfortable,” Ryan told Mildred, his own frustration boiling into his abrupt tone for just a second.

“I’ll try,” Mildred assured him, resuming her vigil at the side of the bunk. She could almost feel the cold breath of the Grim Reaper blowing softly over her shoulder, standing just beyond the edge of her vision, waiting to claim Krysty for his own.

After a short discussion, the companions had decided to sleep in shifts, making room where they could on the floor of the cramped cabin. Ryan had been keen to continue the search for Jak, but eventually recognized his need for sleep after some persuasion. Inside, all he wanted was to get out there, find Jak and get off this awful train, but as soon as he sat on the floor beside Krysty’s bunk he felt his muscles locking, his head getting heavier as tiredness caught up with him.

Sleep was welcomed by all of them. The trek across the wasteland outside Minot had been exhausting, and none of them had had time to stop for very long except for Jak back in the Fairburn lodging room. J.B. and Mildred took the first watch.

The train stopped three more times during the night, and each time whichever of the companions was on watch had sneaked outside to see what was happening.

The train people were working on more towers, though Mildred noticed they passed several others without halting.

Doc was awake for one of the stops, and had taken Ryan’s blaster scope to observe the action at the front of the train, much as Ryan had earlier. The land was becoming greener, and they had passed occasional tributaries of clear water, shining in the moon glow, sometimes even crossing them over rickety bridges.

The tower stood near one of these tributaries, set back twenty feet from the rail tracks. When Doc looked at the magnified image, he realized that this tower was still under construction, its skeletal frame ending roughly, not reaching to the high zenith of the others. The foreman of the sec team spoke to a man whom Doc realized had already been on-site, and the three intellectual types had joined in with a flourish of maps and notations passing between them. A small construction crew sat waiting to go back to work—just three men, including the one who spoke with the train people.