James Axler (17 page)

“We’re a hairsbreadth away the whole time,” Ryan replied, shaking his head. “All we got is luck on our side and, damnation, but we don’t often get much share of that. You want to do something with the bodies?”

J.B. nudged the woman’s corpse under a low shelf with his foot. It was out of immediate sight, but if anyone looked down they would see her tattooed arm catching the overhead lamplight. Behind him, the huge sec man’s corpse lay in its own blood behind the counter.

“Nah, let’s just keep moving,” he said after a moment.

Warily, the pair made its way through the adjoining doors into the next car. This one was the same as its predecessor, an ordnance car stocked with more weaponry, though the emphasis was more on explosives—bundles of dynamite, some plas ex that could be molded by the user to suit the person’s needs. Like the one before it, this ordnance car had two sec men on permanent duty, one at each end. The man nearer to the back door raised an eyebrow when J.B. and Ryan entered, then went back to the pack of cards he was dealing out in some interpretation of solitaire. He probably assumed that the strangers had been vetted in the previous car.

“Just passing through,” Ryan said as he and J.B. walked past. The sec man turned over a black seven and placed it on the eight of diamonds that was showing in one of the stacks in front of him, making no acknowledgement whatsoever.

The sec man at the far end, dark-skinned with a handlebar mustache and a weeping, blind eye, nodded to the companions as they walked through the car. “You looking for anything, gentlemen?”

J.B.’s eyes drifted to the plas ex on one of the high shelves. “We’re with construction,” he said. “Might be needing some explosives soon.”

The weeping man laughed. “Adam send you? You got orders?”

“We were ordered, ” Ryan said, stretching the last word, concerned that they were about to start another blasterfight that they could ill afford, “but he didn’t give us anything to show you.”

“We’re both new to the crew,” J.B. added hastily.

“Got on three stops back.”

The half-blind man shook his head, tutting. “You need to show me the coin, Adam will give you one.

Didn’t anyone explain this when you came aboard?”

Ryan sighed, clenching his hand into a fist. “Ah,” he said, “you don’t want to know.”

The sec man laughed at that. “Yeah, sometimes it gets busy, everyone rushing around. You see the scalies?

Heard that was some serious crazy right there.”

J.B.’s glance flicked to the high shelf once again, thinking. “We’ll come back. Have everything in order.

There’s no rush.”

The sec man smiled at them. “No problem,” he said,

“I’ll see you when you’re all sorted.” He winked his good eye.

J.B. felt something instinctive then, he didn’t know why, and he turned back to assess the card-playing guard at the other end of the car. The card player was oblivious to them. J.B. looked back to the one-eyed sec man, offering his hand. “John Dix,” he said, “and my pal, Ryan.”

The mustached man took the hand in a firm, two-handed grip. “Good to meetya, John.”

Once the introductions were complete, the pair departed, heading onward through the train.

The next car was unmanned and seemed to be a storeroom for the oil lamps that they had seen lighting cabins and corridors. Ryan stopped as soon as they were through the door, closing it behind him and glaring at J.B. “What the hell was that?”

“Making friends,” J.B. explained. “Might be handy later on, Ryan. We agreed to do this by stealth, remember. Sometimes stealth is just fitting in.”

Angrily, Ryan shook his head. “One minute we’re chilling people, the next we’re playing baron’s banquet.”

“You seek out your own kind at the baron’s banquet,”

J.B. reminded him, “So you have someone who’ll step in front of the bullet when your enemy shoots.”

Despite himself, Ryan felt a smile cross his lips.

“You never cease to amaze me, J.B.” They continued down the corridor between the shelves and pulled the sliding door at the far end aside.

As Ryan was about to step through, J.B. grabbed him by the shoulder, and he turned back to look at the Armorer. “I would sure as hell like to get my hands on that plas ex, I can tell you,” J.B. said seriously.

“You got ideas for it,” Ryan asked, “or just feeling greedy?”

“I think we’re all agreed,” J.B. stated, “that whatever is going on here—the train, the scaffolds—it isn’t going to benefit places like Fairburn.”

“Does that matter?” Ryan asked. “To us, I mean.”

“Putting a dent in an operation like this,” J.B. said thoughtfully, “strikes me as mighty wise. Even if it’s a temporary setback, I think we’d do well to halt proceedings if we can.”

Ryan held the door open, looking at the windowless metal door of the next car. “Let’s find Jak first, maybe he’ll have some insights we could use.”

J.B. followed his friend through into the next car, another crew quarters with triple bunks along the long walls.

The sound of loud snoring filled the room from a high bunk to the left. On one of the lower bunks, two men sat beside each other, one with his shirt off to display a web of blue ink down the right-hand side of his chest. Next to him, a sec man was holding a small knife blade in the flame of an open oil lamp that he had set beside the bunk, watching as the blade glowed from red to dazzling white at its tip. Suddenly he turned to the bare-chested man and carved further line work on the man’s chest with the searing blade. The man clenched his eyes, expelling a slight gasp between gritted teeth as the hot knife touched his flesh. Ryan watched as the blade began to cool, its length turning an orange-red throughout. The man with the knife was adding ink to the new wounds, slowly drawing another tattoo on the chest of his companion.

As Ryan reached for the door to the next car, the train lurched, and he realized that the brakes were being applied once again. He entered the car, J.B. at his side, and they both looked around in wonder.

“WE’RE STOPPING AGAIN,” Mildred said, looking across the claustrophobic compartment to Doc from her vigil over Krysty at the bunk.

Krysty had become more lucid in the past half hour or so.

Doc grunted a reply, like a man being woken from a dream, and looked at her with a befuddled expression.

Mildred knew that sometimes Doc would drift off into his precious memories, enjoying the happier times with his wife and children before Operation Chronos had uprooted him from the time stream. Of all the companions, Mildred could sympathize with this trait the most, as she, too, had been uprooted from her place in chronology, albeit in a less abrupt manner. But she had become used to the philosophy of the , that you lived in the present or you got chilled. She tried to restrict her moments of reverie to the quietest, safest times, when the companions had found safe harbor to sleep in, watch posted. Doc had been active here longer than Mildred, walking the grim paths of the post apocalypse, yet he still clung to those strong attachments of his previous life. He had been promised, not so long ago, that sticking with the one-eyed chiller would offer him the magical route back home, and he spoke of this in their quiet moments, the words of the old shaman’s prediction still enticingly loud in his ears.

For a moment Mildred wondered if the white-haired man had heard her, but he finally answered her with his infectious smile. “Indeed we are, Doctor.”

“Krysty seems to be okay,” Mildred said, looking at her companion who was sitting beside her on the bed, smiling to herself as she looked out the window.

“How are you feeling?” Doc asked Krysty. To him it seemed a remarkable change, but her health had been a back-and-forth pendulum since they had all stepped out of the Minot redoubt.

Krysty looked up at Doc and smiled, her green eyes bright and alive. “I feel okay. I feel kind of…normal.”

The surprise was clear in her tone.

“Her temperature’s back to normal,” Mildred confirmed after asking Krysty to hold a pocket thermometer in her mouth for a half minute. “It had skyrocketed when we got her to Fairburn, and it’s been high ever since. But it’s normal now.”

“This is most peculiar,” Doc stated. “Perhaps it really was the gateway jump, an adverse reaction to the matter transfer.”

Mildred sealed the thermometer back in its covering plastic tube and replaced it in her backpack on the floor of the cabin. “Scuppers your theory about the towers,” she said, but there was the trace of query in her voice.

“But you think, perhaps, that that hypothesis still holds some merit?” Doc asked.

Mildred reached a hand up to her brow, pushing hard against the points where her eyes met her nose as she thought. “It just doesn’t ring true,” she said. “There’s something here, but every time we think we’ve got a handle on it, the rules change. First it was the bad gateway jump, but her health deteriorated so swiftly that we started to wonder if it was something else. Then we wondered if it was the ville, the tower outside, the train.

And meanwhile, Krysty has been yo-yoing between off-color and near-catatonia. There’s just no pattern.”

The three companions looked out the window as the train pulled to a halt. Outside they could see rolling hills of green, beautifully tranquil. Suddenly, Doc piped up, struck by inspiration. “Eureka!” he exclaimed.

“What is it, Doc?” Krysty and Mildred blurted almost in unison.

The older man stood from the side desk in the cramped cabin, pacing a moment in the tiny area of floor. “A switch,” he told them, raising his index finger upright from a clenched fist. Then he folded the finger back into the fist. “Turned on and off. Simplicity itself.”

“A switch?” Mildred asked, the disappointment clear in her tone.

“Consider the prospect,” Doc said, “if what is affecting Krysty is on some kind of switch mechanism, be it by timer or other factor, then until we know the pattern of the switch we will not recognize the pattern of its effect.”

“A switch,” Mildred said again, but this time there was more acceptance in her voice. “Something on the train, you think?”

Doc shook his head. “No, not the train. Forget the train. It’s irrelevant. This is something—” he gestured sweepingly to the window “—out there.”

“But what?” Krysty asked eagerly, swept up in Doc’s wild theory now.

“The towers, of course,” he told them both, “it has to be the towers. Whatever they are doing, they do not do it all the time. There is an off switch, just like on a lamp.”

Mildred was dubious. “We didn’t find an off switch at the one Ryan looked over at Fairburn.”

“And we have no idea what they do,” Doc agreed, “so how could we identify an off lever when we had not the slightest comprehension of what we were admiring?”

“He has a point.” Krysty nodded.

Mildred peered through the window, looking up and down the tracks as far as she was able. “Then we need to find out what the towers are about.”

“Of course,” Krysty said gleefully. Doc’s idea seemed to have lifted a weight from her mind.

But Mildred knew she had to dampen that elation.

“Not you, Krysty,” she said. “Too dangerous. You’re the one who’s reacting, I don’t want you to go near these things, just in case.” Though she saw the logic, Krysty still looked disappointed. “Doctor’s orders,” Mildred added firmly.

Doc spoke again, reaching for something on the tiny desk that J.B. had left along with his map of the territory: his minisextant. “Why do you think we have stopped?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s because of a tower,”

Mildred said, agreeing with Doc’s unvoiced conclusion.

Doc held up J.B.’s minisextant, and took a single, long stride to the door. “Bring the rifle,” he called back to Mildred as he stepped into the corridor.

Mildred did so, following Doc down the corridor once she had confirmed that Krysty would be all right on her own for the duration.

THE TRAIN had stopped moving, he knew.

Keeping their voices low, Jak quizzed Maddie and the other children about the sec patrols. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to them, he learned—the sec men simply came by when they felt like it, irregularly providing the prisoners with food. For the most part, however, the children in the cage were left on their own, to do as they wished. It was assumed, reasonably enough, Jak thought, that they would not be able to escape, so having a sec man watching them was a waste of personnel. More so, Jak realized, thinking back to his parade alongside the train to this car, when you took into account that there was more than one cage.

“Sometimes, when the train stops,” Marc told him, “they put someone at the doors to make sure we don’t try anything.”

“Which is stupe,” Maddie whispered, “because there’s nothing we can do anyway?”

Jak disagreed, but he chose to say nothing. He didn’t want to raise the hopes of this ragtag group of children.

He was older than them, and they were beginning to adopt an attitude of subservience and obedience to him as they would to any adult. Before Jak had arrived, they had decided that Maddie and Marc were co-leaders by virtue of their age and, hence, seniority. Children, it seemed, followed the same patterns in pretty much any situation, and Jak realized just how easy it was to prey upon the innocent because of this.

At five foot five, he was taller than anyone else in the car, the Asian girl Maddie’s head just reaching to his breastbone. Standing upright, he could stretch and touch the wooden ceiling, but he needed something to stand on if he was to put any pressure on the boards in the hope that one of them might give. There was nothing immediately at hand, but the children might be persuaded to form a human ladder if required. For now, however, he dismissed the idea and considered other avenues of opportunity.

The side walls were wooden boards, with gaps between that were wide enough to fit his thumb through. He tried shoving the hard part at the base of his hand against a few of the planks to see how much give the joins had in them. There was some, and he might break one of the boards away with a solid punch or kick. Though he had lost his Colt Python, the sec men hadn’t bothered to check his jacket sleeves or his pockets, and he still had his sharp throwing knives secreted on his person and sheathed inside his boots.