James Axler (14 page)

On top of Mildred, the man struggled to get free, but something was holding him down, some weight pushing against him in the enclosed space of the cabin.

Mildred squirmed beneath him and he seemed to remember his first objective. He couldn’t seem to free his arms, but it didn’t stop him. Opening his jaws wide, he lunged at her, hoping either to head butt or bite her, she didn’t know which.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the man’s head lolled to the left and he slumped on top of her, his eyes flickering until the lids closed. The sedative in the hypo had finally kicked in.

Mildred looked up, the heavy weight pushing at her ribs. She saw that Krysty stood by the door, her body closed up on itself like a tortoise trying to revert into its shell. She had pulled the sliding door closed, containing the noise of the fight from prying ears.

Mildred saw now what had hit her assailant from behind—Krysty had to have rolled the corpse from the luggage rack overhead, letting it drop onto Mildred’s attacker.

Struggling to drag in a breath with the weight of two heavyset men atop her, Mildred called to Krysty. “A little help?”

Krysty pushed the bedraggled hair from her eyes and helped her friend push the two men away.

As they were wondering what to do with the dead man and the sleeper, Doc joined the women in the cabin, a secret knock confirming his identity. “By the Three Kennedys!” he exclaimed when he saw the two men lying on the floor caught up in the blanket that had fallen from the corpse. “What in the name of the Messiah did I miss?”

“We had a gentleman caller,” Mildred explained, and she set to work wrapping the corpse back in the blanket while Doc tied the wrists of the intruder.

“And what did you do to him?” Doc asked, alarm in his voice.

Mildred smiled, but her expression seemed firm and serious. “I gave him a little sedative, just to make him sleep for a while,” she said.

“Do you know how long it will be until that wears off?”

“I don’t know how much went into his system before he pulled the needle out, but I’d say six hours,” Mildred answered thoughtfully. “Call it five to be on the safe side, heavy bastard like this.”

“We must find somewhere to place the gentleman, then,” Doc stated, “unless you plan to chill the train personnel one by one.”

Mildred shrugged. “I hit him with the sedative the second he burst through the door. He should have trouble remembering what he saw. We could probably put him back in his compartment.”

“And what if he should awaken and decide to pay another visit to his late friend?” Doc asked.

 “We could tie him up, then. Gag him,” Mildred suggested.

From her position seated on the cot, Krysty spoke up in a quiet, strained voice. “Ryan would chill him,” she told them. “Loose end, otherwise.”

Doc and Mildred looked at each other in silence, knowing the truth behind Krysty’s statement.

RYAN AND J.B. crashed to their knees, slumping to the floor like rag dolls. There was something about the room or the woman at the table or both that was affecting them.

Ryan looked around, dizziness making his vision blur, the sickly sweet aroma of the heavy incense suffocating his nostrils, clogging his mouth. He reached forward and his right hand slapped against the hardwood floor of the train car, barely propping himself upright. The elderly woman was smiling, the scarlet tears poised on her cheeks as she watched them both.

J.B.’s voice penetrated Ryan’s thoughts like something hard and jagged thrust into his brain. “It’s the air, Ryan. There’s something in the air.” His voice sounded far away, the words tumbling together like echoes in a cave.

Ryan felt his strength ebb, could feel his body falling forward, but he had no energy left to stop it. His face smashed hard into the floor, hitting on his left side, jarring his skull with resounding force. J.B. was right.

The incense. There was something about the incense.

Kneeling beside Ryan, J.B. was struggling to stay upright. His body wavered and his clammy hands left watery trails of sweat as they slid on the polished floor.

He noticed something then, his eyes caught by the glint of metal the way a magpie will focus on a mirror. Low down, beneath the surface of the table, was a chain, its links solid and newly fashioned, gleaming with the stuttering light of the candle flame. One end of the chain was attached to a solid metal ring that was sunk into the floor. The other end was attached to a clasp that was locked tight around the elderly woman’s frail, bird-thin ankle.

As he swayed on the floor in front of the woman, J.B. heard the tramping feet as first one man and then a second and third entered the car through the same door he had used with Ryan a moment before. J.B. tried to turn his head, but it felt heavy and strangely unattached to the rest of him, as though it had gone numb like a slept-on limb. He felt himself falling and struggled to remain upright, but his sense of balance was gone and the demands of gravity too strong.

As he collapsed, he looked at the door through which he and Ryan had entered the strange car. The three sec men who had been following them stood there, sideways in his vision, kerchiefs pulled up over their mouths and noses. They were aiming heavy blasters at the Armorer and his companion.

J.B. focused his eyes on the chain around the woman’s ankle, trying to keep himself from sinking further into apathy. He breathed, shallow and fast.

“Who are you?” the muffled voice of one of the sec men called through the kerchief over his mouth. “Why haven’t I seen you before?”

Ryan piped up, not a trace of fear or worry in his voice. “Construction crew,” he answered. “Got on two stops back as per instructions.” He still lay on the floor, struggling to get up, but the knock on the head had done him a surprising amount of good. He felt woolly headed from the incense, but he also felt the pain at the front of his skull from the swelling bruise. And that pain felt good, a throbbing beacon to focus his thoughts on.

“Never seen you around before,” the lead sec man stated bluntly, pointing a well-maintained Smith & Wesson revolver at Ryan’s flailing body.

“Con…construction crew,” Ryan stuttered. He focused on the pain on the left of his skull, trying to keep his thoughts rock steady.

“Could be,” one of the other two sec men suggested.

“Hmm.” The lead man grunted, sounding doubtful.

“Then why you come to see the bruja without a mask.

You stupes, the both of you?”

“Forgot the rule,” he said, raising his head very carefully from the floor. He looked at the sec men, their image swimming in front of his good eye.

One of the sec men spoke to the others. He had the same voice as the one who had said “could be” a moment before on hearing Ryan’s lie. “Adam probably didn’t even warn them. You know how he likes his jokes.”

“I don’t like it,” the lead man replied. “This operation’s too close to completion now to let anyone infiltrate it. I’ve given four years of my life over to Baron Burgess and his plan. I signed on right at the start. Gave him my daughter, too.”

“Shut up about your daughter, for once.” The third man spit. “They’re construction guys. You’re as paranoid as a one-armed mutie in a beauty contest.” With that, the man stepped over and offered Ryan a hand.

His companion, the one who had mentioned Adam’s jokes, came over and handed a spare kerchief to J.B. where he was sprawled on the floor. As he did so he murmured something to the Armorer confidentially. “I don’t like having the bruja on here neither.”

They sat in the dirt outside the car for a while, catching their breath and regaining their senses, and the three sec men finally left them alone.

“What the hell was that?” Ryan asked J.B. once they were sure they were out of the hearing range of any of the crew.

“Potent airborne drug,” J.B. told him, still trying to shake off the feeling of drowsiness. “Crazy potent.”

“Yet it doesn’t seem to affect the woman in there,”

Ryan pointed out.

“The bruja, ” J.B. stated. He had heard the word through the muzziness of the assault on his senses.

 “Mean anything to you?” Ryan asked. “Bruja, I mean. It’s a new one on me.”

“Means witch,” J.B. said. “You see her ankle? She’s chained in there.”

“Breathing that crap all day?” Ryan said, incredulous. “Why would you need a witch on a train?”

“Why would you need a train?” J.B. grinned.

“C’mon, Ryan, we’re neck deep in mystery here, and we don’t have clue one to what’s going on.”

Ryan looked off into the middle distance, letting his thoughts wend their own patterns while the soft breeze blew on his skin. He noticed that some of the sec men patrolling the perimeter seemed almost mindless, zombie-like in their trudging patterns. It struck him as more than simple boredom that was affecting them, something deeper, as though they were puppets, no longer in control of their actions. Just then, the cry went out, repeated down the line of the train, called to the guards at the perimeter. It was a single word. “Storm!”

As the rain hit, accompanied by vicious little hailstones, Ryan and J.B. ran alongside the train to the compartment where they had left Krysty, Mildred and Doc.

J.B. SPREAD OUT HIS MAP of the Dakotas on the tiny, molded desk once again, and Ryan, Mildred and Doc crowded around him in the small compartment. Krysty lay on her back on the bunk, pleased to finally be rid of the corpse of the previous occupant. Mildred and Doc had decided not to chill the second man, even though they agreed with Krysty’s “loose end” argument.

Instead they had followed Doc’s suggestion, tying him to his bunk in the cabin next door by ankles and wrists, a gag in his mouth. They had tried to make it look like some fetishistic sex game, so that if anyone should stumble upon the man they might assume he had been left by his gaudy slut.

“We’re here, Lake Sakakawea.” J.B. pointed at the body of water labeled on the map. “Didn’t see the lake ourselves, but the CO spoke of a bridge to cross it, naming it as he did so. Not sure where we are exactly, but I’d estimate we’ve traveled about sixty-five miles.

That makes the towers about twenty, twenty-five miles apart.”

“Any idea what they are?” Mildred asked.

“Not a clue,” J.B. admitted.

Ryan sighed as he added, “They didn’t say much about them, but a whitecoat spoke of the operation being a great success, though a little behind schedule.”

“Did you see Jak?” Doc wondered.

Ryan shook his head. “No sign of him yet, but we didn’t get much exploring done. Met someone, though,”

Ryan told them, and the tone of his voice was a warning in itself. “They call her the bruja. J.B. tells me that means witch.”

“If she’s Mexican,” Doc stated, the amusement still clear in his voice, “then she’s certainly a long way from home.”

J.B. shot him a look. “So are you, Doc.”

“Touché.” Doc smiled, before falling silent.

“The bruja is on her own in a car, seven down from our location,” Ryan told them. “J.B. says she’s chained to the floor by an anklet, though I didn’t see it myself.

There’s something about the car or about her, it hits you— bang! ” He clapped his hands together. “Sec men followed us in wearing kerchiefs to breathe through, so we think it’s the incense she’s got pumping through the room. Thing is, it doesn’t seem to affect her.” Ryan looked at Mildred before adding, “You got any ideas on this?”

“Airborne hallucinogen, maybe?” she suggested. “If there’s an antidote or counteragent then she could be dosed up on that, the crap in the air wouldn’t affect her.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Ryan agreed. “Whatever, if you need to work through the train for any reason, be prepared. You walk in there without a filter over your nostrils and you won’t make it three paces.”

Doc was looking out the window, watching the violent rainstorm as it continued to pound into the ground, spotting the dirt with huge puddles like shallow lakes. “Why are they holding her?” he mused. “You said she was chained in place.”

Ryan sighed. “The more we see, the less we know just now, Doc. Just keep your eyes open.”

J.B. sat at the desk and studied his ancient map, trying to familiarize himself with the nearby territory so that he could recognize upcoming features.

Assuming, of course, that said features still existed in the post nuclear world.

“So,” Mildred asked, “what next?”

“CO says we’ll move inside two hours,” J.B. told her.

“Guessing that’s about 105 minutes now.”

“They have to do something to the bridge,” Ryan explained. “We didn’t have an opportunity to find out what.”

“Only bridge on the map would put us near Garrison,” J.B. stated, his finger tracing the length of Lake Sakakawea, “unless they built themselves one.”

“And how likely is that?” Doc asked.

Ryan pondered, his single eye watching the hail spatter against the car window, rapping on the glass.

“They seem very organized,” he said. “Lazy, mebbe, a little too trusting, bored of their routines. But this whole thing is heavily organized. It isn’t something someone’s whipped up on a whim.”

“One of the sec men that found us with the bruja mentioned four years of work,” J.B. added.

“But to do what?” Mildred asked, frustrated.

“Whatever it is,” Ryan told them, “it’s one big op.”

The companions remained in silence for a long while after that, each pondering the ramifications in his or her own way. And, on the bunk, Krysty Wroth slipped in and out of a restless sleep.

IN THE CAGE inside the twelfth car of the train, eight sets of eyes were staring at the chalk-white boy. The prisoners were braver now, after Marc had established that whatever the gangly youth was, he wasn’t a ghost. He had a solid body and his skin was warm to the touch.

Marc had expressed his disappointment at that because, as he told it, he had always dreamed of eating a real live ghost. It seemed kind of far-fetched, and Humblebee suspected that he had said that just for something to say, or mebbe trying to impress Maddie who had expressed precisely no interest in him.

It was Maddie who had rolled the boy over, with Marc’s help, and looked at the wound on his chest where the sec man had shot him. Luckily they didn’t touch the hidden razor blades in his jacket. His dark shirt was torn where the blast had penetrated, and an ugly bruise had formed on his skin. It didn’t seem to matter that much—the boy’s torso was covered in scars and bruises, old and new. He had to must be some kind of fighter, Maddie reasoned.