James Axler (15 page)

In the center of the ugly, purple bruise, a wicked color against his pallid flesh, was the end of a dart.

Maddie told Marc and two of the smaller children to hold the chalk-white boy down, and she carefully pulled at the dart until she had plucked it from his flesh with a little, tearing sound.

A tiny spot of blood formed around the hole where the dart’s nib had rested, and everyone was fascinated that it was red, just like their own. Humblebee had actually laughed, for about the first time since she had been snatched and put in this filthy cage. “See,” she said, giggling, “no way is he a ghost now.” Maddie had given her a stern look to silence her, then bent to take a closer look at the wound in the youth’s chest.

The dart had clearly hit him hard, and the range was almost point-blank. He had taken the full impact between the lowest ribs on his left side. The skin had broken around the dart’s sharp tip, but the hole it had made was negligible. It was whatever had been in the dart that had knocked the youth out.

Maddie looked at the youth’s face, easing the mane of hair—just as white as his frighteningly alien body—from where it had stuck to his cheek. His face was angular, young and yet old-looking. He seemed somehow serene in sleep. And, yes, it was sleep. Now that she was closer she could discern the faint breathing coming from his nostrils in the dawn light that filtered in from the door and the cracks in the wood-plank walls. She wondered how old he was. At first glance he could pass for fifteen, but she noticed the start of white stubble on his cheeks, the long curls in his sideburns that only came about when a boy had turned into a man.

Francis-Frankie reached forward and tried to grab at a shiny object that seemed to be caught in the boy’s coat.

His hand snapped back, whip fast, and he looked at his finger. It was bleeding, runnels of red rushing down its length and making tracks across his little hand as he watched.

“Hand up—” Maddie demonstrated “—hold the wound.”

Francis-Frankie did as he was told, tears silently streaming from his eyes as he sat there. “The ghost boy’s coat bit me,” he told them.

Maddie inspected the light camou jacket, keeping her hands clear of the shining objects that poked through its surface here and there. Razor blades, hunks of pointed metal and sharp shards of broken glass had been sewn into the fabric. Holding the chalk boy had to be like trying to hug a porcupine, she reasoned.

On Maddie’s request, Humblebee passed her one of the three hessian sacks that the imprisoned children used as blankets. She brushed it with her hand, knocking off tiny, writhing bodies that had affixed themselves to the open weave. Then she rolled the sack-cloth in on itself, turning it over and over in her hands.

Gently, Maddie raised the ghost boy’s head, feeling the warmth of his skin through the ice-white hair. She placed the rolled-up cloth beneath his head, pushing the hair once more from his face and eyes.

Maddie turned to face the others. All of them were watching her with interest. She “walked” toward them on her knees, shooing them back with wide gestures of her hands. If the chalk boy had to sleep, he would at least be comfortable, she told herself.

“He’s one of us now,” she told the others firmly.

The vicious hailstorm continued its relentless assault on the ground as the train finally started moving again.

Where the hailstones hit they left tiny smouldering craters in the soil, and the wisps of smoke formed a misty, froglike blanket over the first couple of inches of the surface after a while. The rainwater helped damp the blanket of toxic fumes down, but the air still took on the acrid stink of petroleum and made it unpleasant to breathe.

Despite the horrendous weather, the construction crew had continued to work at the front of the train. The bridge that spanned the eight-mile expanse of Lake Sakakawea beside the old Garrison Dam had been blocked off at both ends using the corpses of dead automobiles. The cars had long since lost their engines and been stripped of their contents. In place of the interiors, the vehicles had been filled with concrete or rocks, significantly adding to their weight. It took equipment and organization to shift the vehicles, and acted as a solid deterrent to any parties that may think of interfering with the train operation across the bridge.

A similar, fenced-off bay at the far side of the bridge acted as another stopping point, so that the blockades could be erected again. It was a laborious operation, even using a portable crane that was stored in one of the cars, but it served to dissuade interference. Should another group get it into their minds to damage the bridge, it would have put a significant dent in the usability of the train. Slow and sure were the watchwords for the whole crew here, the bridge identified as a weak point on the trail.

The construction crew bent to its task slowly.

Ryan and J.B. had found what they described as a mess hall, just a few cars down from their unit. To get there they had walked through three cars devoted to bunks for the crew. Two of the cars were similar in design to the one they had left Krysty and the others in, old stock brought back into service with minimal repair work and a little brute force, although the farthest one included a compact, foul-smelling restroom at one end.

Between these cars was a windowless truck, with double-stacked bunks lining both of the side walls.

Some of the bunks were curtained off, but Ryan and J.B. had seen several sec men sleeping, one sitting on the top bunk field stripping a remade AK-47, and several empty beds. The man who worked at the AK-47 didn’t bat an eyelid as the companions passed—bedroom or walkway, he couldn’t care less.

The mess hall served boiled vegetables and meats of unknown species, their true tastes barely masked by the liberal use of strong spices. Hungry, the pair sat quietly at one of the makeshift tables, some kind of wooden bench. For a while they ate in silence, watching the other inhabitants of the car. There were more sec men here, looking exhausted from their night trip. Ryan realized that these men may well have been involved in the showdown with the scalies. If that was the case, it was little wonder that there was a general feeling of malaise about them. Night fighting muties took a lot out of a man.

Outside, the rain continued to pound against the windows, creating a shushing noise in the mess hall as it rattled through the countryside. One of the sec men had commented on it to Ryan, who sat resting his head on his left hand, elbow propped on the table and hand obscuring the distinctive, black eye patch he wore. Ryan had nodded, mumbling a vague agreement, not wishing to get involved in any conversation that might reveal him to the crew.

J.B.’s busy hands worked with scraps of the food, parceling it up and slipping it inside his pockets so that he could take it to Mildred, Doc and Krysty. Their instinct about leaving the other three in the compartment had been good—the crew was almost entirely male, with no one over forty. The women and Doc would have stood out and encouraged too many questions, where Ryan and J.B. managed to bluff their way through. Mildred possibly might have been able to pass for crew, but the female complement was so small that it seemed very risky.

“We’re tempting fate here,” J.B. whispered across the table, his eyes watching the far door of the mess hall as three construction workers entered. “We need to get Jak and get off.”

Ryan chewed at a stringy piece of meat. “And what about Krysty?” Ryan whispered back, his eye never leaving the other entry door to the car.

“Use a gateway to leave the area.” J.B. stated, “Mebbe it’ll go.”

“And what if it doesn’t?” Ryan asked.

“Then we’re off the train of horrors, at least.”

Ryan sucked at a hollow tooth. “Let’s find Jak.”

 “DID YOU NOTICE ANYTHING odd about those sec men back at the bridge stop?” Mildred asked, breaking the relative silence of the cabin.

Doc looked up from the map of the Dakotas that J.B. had left laid out on the tiny desk. “What’s that, my dear?”

Mildred seemed deep in thought when she spoke again. “The sec men at the bridge stop, patrolling the fence. They seemed—” she clenched her eyes for a moment, her whole body tensing as she tried to find just the right word “—wrong,” she concluded.

Doc thought back to the stopover at the fenced-in area. There had been a handful of armed men shuffling around the edges of the area, keeping a slow, steady patrol. He tried to picture them, but they all blurred in his mind, none of the features really affixed in his memory. “I’m not sure, my dear doctor,” he stated, glancing across to the window as though for inspiration.

He sat there, watching the green-tinted hail as it pelted the glass with a rattling tattoo. “The hail!” Doc exclaimed suddenly. “They didn’t come in out of the hail, did they?”

“They didn’t,” Mildred agreed.

And that was odd. The hail out there could seriously hurt a man.

“Of course,” Doc said, thinking out loud, “we do not know what their orders were. If they were told to stay outside then I would guess—”

“No,” Mildred butted in. “Everyone came in when the rain started. J.B. said they shouted the instruction down the line, to make sure everyone knew.”

“But the sentries remained,” Doc muttered, his voice barely more than a whisper.

 “Zombies,” Mildred said, biting off the word through clenched teeth. “I think they’re zombies.”

Doc shook his head. “My knowledge of such subject matter is, I freely admit, somewhat limited, but—”

Mildred held up a hand to silence him. “I don’t mean, like, undead, movie zombies. I mean they were, I don’t know, mindless.”

Doc nodded as he thought back. “I watched while our comrades joined in the salutation to the dawn baloney. I was watching as the construction hands peeled away from the others, going about their business.

I was a long way away, but what I saw…well, it would seem to reinforce your viewpoint.”

Wordlessly, Mildred encouraged the white-haired man to continue. “They were trudging in their movements, no life to them. They clearly followed the sec officer’s orders, I can assure you of that, but they didn’t seem to be thinking for themselves. They followed him in a line, Mildred. A line, do you see?”

Mildred glanced at the window, seeing the reflection of the oil lamp swinging to and fro above their heads.

“They weren’t soldiers, Doc, they weren’t marching,” she half asked, half stated the point.

“No,” Doc assured her. “And yet they walked in a perfectly straight line.”

Mildred and Doc looked at each other across the width of the tiny cabin, the ramifications of their realization only just beginning to sink in, its implications blossoming like the petals of a flower before them. And yet they walked in a perfectly straight line.

RYAN AND J.B. headed forward from the double mess hall.

The next car was another storeroom, this one containing a few dismantled weapons along with the usual sheets of steel, tins, jars and bottles of rivets, and strings of chain stretched across the ceiling. There were two small windows at the front of the car, one on either side of the unit. Ryan and J.B. checked the view through the windows simultaneously, J.B. taking the one to the right. It was the same on both sides—the train was speeding through fields of green plants and brown earth, the sand of the desert long since left behind.

Both of them had mentally calculated the journey to this point of the train, but they were reassured to see a large letter B painted across the door that led into the next car. B for bruja.

Ryan pulled a sweat-stained neckerchief from his pocket and tied it firmly around his throat. Beside him, J.B. was doing likewise with a piece of cloth he took from one of his pockets.

Ryan opened the door and they stepped through together, pushing open the second door and into the bruja’ s darkened compartment.

There was a popping sound, and the train suddenly leaped, wheels clipping a badly soldered segment of the track. Tensed, Ryan felt his heart jump with the train, and for a moment he had a vision of the whole unit being derailed, tossing them across the fields. Then the train rolled on, wheels meeting track with the reassuring thrumming they had become used to.

A black curtain made of heavy velvet had been drawn across the doorway to the bruja’s car, and Ryan pushed his hand into its voluminous folds. The thing seemed to wrap around his arm like liquid.

As Ryan stood there, his left hand lost in the folds of black velvet, J.B. breathed his name through his cloth mask and pointed to the right. Ryan saw it, too—a thin walkway had been curtained off using the drapes of the room. The staff of the train could walk down this corridor without disturbing the witch. They hadn’t noticed it when they had been in the compartment the first time, automatically assuming that the curtains covered the walls.

They walked swiftly down the curtained-off corridor, until it curved back inward at the far end, presenting the front door of the bruja’s car. As they walked, Ryan heard a soft laughter coming from the other side of the curtains. It was slow and somehow painful. He opened the far door and stepped across the gap into the next car, closing the door behind J.B.

The one-eyed man stood with his back against the door, pulling the neckerchief from his face but leaving it tied in place. He felt the relief pour through him like the heat of whiskey, and took a deep breath to steady himself.

“What is it about her?” Ryan asked.

In answer, J.B. simply shook his head. “Once bitten, twice shy, I guess,” he concluded with a grim smile.

They were alone in a metal car filled, floor to ceiling, with tins of food. Old-fashioned, mil-prepped cans, a fortune in prenukecaust foodstuffs. J.B. picked up a can at random and looked at the illustration on the label.

“Pineapple.” He grunted before secreting the can in a voluminous pocket of his jacket.

They continued, making swift progress through two more cars of food stock until they reached a car guarded by a sec man. They were eighteen cars from the rear of the train and at least forty from the front.

“Gonna need to see your orders,” the sec man shouted, even though Ryan and J.B. were no more than four feet in from of him.