James Axler (18 page)

These might also be used to lever the boards apart, he realized, but he would need an extended period without the possibility of a sec man stumbling upon him. He would need to pick his time carefully for that, as opening a hole in the side of the car while the train was moving would be very dangerous for the children.

While Jak’s number-one priority was to save himself from this situation, he would help the children if he could.

Jak also checked the flooring of the boxcar, but he did so only briefly, unable to think of a safe way to exit in that direction, even if the train was stationary. He noted that the floor was alive with lice and tiny, wriggling silverfish, thriving on the damp wood.

Finally, with Maddie ushering the children away, Jak took a close look at the lock and hinges on the cage door. He instructed both Marc and the inquisitive girl, Humblebee, to watch both entrances to the car—he did not want to be seen tampering with the lock.

Silently, Maddie stood behind Jak as he examined the bolt mechanism that held the gate closed. There was a corridor running along the front and one side of the cage, the same one he’d been brought in by; it was very narrow, someone of Ryan’s build would have to shuffle sideways along it, he realized.

The mesh wall looked flimsy but the construction was solid and the material had an awkward malleability that meant it bent without snapping away from its attachments at floor and ceiling. Jak stopped putting pressure on it, looking again at the lock and hinges of the door. It would be hard to break the lock from inside, hard to get a good angle on it or a solid enough run up to add significant force.

The door’s hinges were attached by flathead screws, however, and Jak placed his thumbnail into the groove of one and tried adding pressure there. The screw didn’t move. It was wound absolutely tight, embedded in the metal. But with one of his throwing blades he might be able to twist the screws free, one by one.

He looked back at the children, all of them sitting quietly, watching the doors with his appointed sentries except for Maddie. The girl was watching him, her head tilted like a dog’s with the effort of comprehension.

“What do you see?” she asked him, a tight smile on her lips.

“Couple good escapes, but—” Jak gestured to the children “—plenty responsibilities, too.”

Maddie couldn’t disguise her happiness, her smile widening and her eyes creasing as she replied. “So, you would take us with you?”

Jak nodded, firmly and slowly. “Kids not belong,” he said simply.

“Krysty’s health is flip-flopping like a beached fish,”

Mildred griped to Doc in a taut whisper. “I’m not comfortable leaving her alone for too long.”

She and Doc were lying on their bellies beneath their train car, peeking out between the oily wheels. Up close, the track was almost as haphazard as the train itself. By necessity the gauge was precise, but there seemed to be a hodgepotch of material in use to bring it into being.

Between the metal rails were struts of wood, though none of the struts matched in color. Some of them had licks of splintering paint across them, where they had served a previous life as a door, windowsill or shelf.

Shingle was tossed between the tracks, its rough points pressing into their torsos as they rested their weight on the ground.

Mildred was to Doc’s left, clutching Ryan’s Steyr in front of her as she hunkered in the shadows beneath the train, hidden from view. Doc leaned forward, adjusting J.B.’s minisextant where he had placed it upright on the shingle in front of him. Satisfied, he leaned down and looked though the spy hole once more, the device’s tiny telescope aimed toward the front port side of the train.

“Ah,” Doc said, beaming, “there you are, my beauty.”

Mildred glared fiercely at the old man, but her look was wasted—he was absorbed in his work with the minisextant. “Do you ever hear a word I say, Doc?” she growled.

“I heard,” he replied, still looking through the telescopic attachment. “Our Krysty is in rude health right now, Doctor, and she will be fine, I am sure.”

“You’re sure,” she scoffed, a harsh edge in her whispered voice.

“We have other, pressing matters to attend,” Doc told her, twisting the focusing knob on the little device. “A mystery which may, in turn, be the root cause of Krysty’s health problems, as you have already acknowledged.”

“Yes, but I said that while I was still sitting where I could keep an eye on her,” Mildred grumbled.

“Pish posh,” Doc said, dismissing her. After a moment he added, “They are coming out now, take a look.”

They had already observed a group of twelve, armed sec men trek away from the train, through the trees and off into nearby fields of cereal crops. Other sec men warily patrolled the terrain, blasters ready in their hands. Their position beneath the train was dangerous, but they both agreed that they needed to see what was happening with the towers, even if Mildred was starting to have second thoughts about leaving Krysty alone in the car above them.

Mildred tilted the Steyr to look through the scope, panning hurriedly across the field of vision until she found the point where Doc was looking.

“See them?” he asked quietly.

“Mmm-hmm,” Mildred acknowledged. “What are they doing?” She was looking at two technician types who appeared to be in deep discussion with a muscular man in a dark vest. She adjusted the scope, bringing the figures into tight focus—Vest Top had several white scar lines down his arm and across his face, while the technician types were the two thirty-somethings that Ryan had told her about.

“To the left,” Doc whispered, “a little way out from the tracks.”

Mildred shifted the weapon slightly and the view through the scope shuddered for a moment until she located the tower. It was a twin to the one they had found on the outskirts of Fairburn, a scaffold structure built into a thin pyramidal shape like an obelisk. From this distance, with no sense of scale, it reminded her a little of the old Washington Monument, towering proudly into the blue sky, oblivious to all that went on in its shadow.

As she watched, another technician or whitecoat came into view, older with wispy white hair, his round spectacles catching the sunlight. He patted the side of the tower with one hand, perhaps to assure himself of its structural integrity but just as likely to keep his own bent frame balanced on the rough terrain.

“This is it, huh?” Mildred whispered. “The whole magilla.”

Doc watched silently through the telescope attachment of the minisextant. He had seen this process once before, during the long night while his companions were sleeping, but he wanted Mildred’s opinion before they came to any conclusions. His theory about their being a switch felt viable, but they needed evidence to go further in acting on it.

They both watched as the man in the dark vest walked over to the tower, followed by the younger whitecoats, and spoke to the elderly man. Then, entering their tight viewpoints from the right of frame, from somewhere on the train, Mildred realized, two men carried a large, cylindrical canister to the tower’s base. They walked slowly, legs spread wide to hold the weight of the object. The canister was about four feet in height, painted the deep orange color of paprika, a yellow hazmat label affixed to its side.

“What is that?” Mildred muttered, all thought of the sharp stones beneath her now forgotten, dismissed from her mind.

The man with the scarred arm ducked down, dropping himself inside the base of the tower between the skeletal legs. Once there he worked his fingers into the ground, grasping something that was buried there.

Mildred thought back to the tower at Fairburn, remembering the metallic disk that was sunken in the sand at its base. With visible effort, the man began to twist something, his arms spread wide as though he was turning the steering wheel of an eighteen-wheeler truck.

The older whitecoat leaned in, pointing at something on the ground there.

“What are they doing?” Mildred asked quietly.

“That is what we are here to find out,” Doc whispered back. Though he had witnessed this operation once before, he hadn’t known what to look for then, and it had been at night. This time, in the bright, midmorning light, he was ready and had instructed Mildred on where to look.

A large steel cap, like a trash can lid or a manhole cover, was lifted from the ground by the man in the dark vest. He balanced it on its rim before rolling it along the ground, away from the tower’s base.

The female whitecoat stepped over, a measuring stick in her hands, and knelt in the grass beside the tower. Leaning down, she popped her measuring stick into the ground—presumably into whatever the metal disk had been covering—and reached forward so that her arm disappeared beneath the surface up to the elbow. When her hand reappeared, the dipstick was glistening with some sort of liquid. Mildred tightened the focus on the scope but she was not quick enough to see what mark the liquid had left.

“Do you see it?” Doc whispered.

“Yes,” Mildred breathed. “Liquid. Couldn’t see what.”

“Do not worry,” Doc told her, “there’s more.”

Mildred watched as the three whitecoats discussed the dipstick at some length before settling on a decision.

It took almost three minutes until there was any further activity, and Mildred began to wonder what spectacular feat Doc was expecting her to witness. Then they reached a consensus, and the man in the dark vest who had removed the metal cover stepped over to address the two men with the heavy cylinder, explaining some operation with hurried hand movements as well as words.

Slowly the canister bearers “walked” it to an area beneath the tower, half stepping, half turning the heavy item in the grass until it was in place. Then they unscrewed a small black plug near the top of the orange cylinder, revealing a round opening a little off center.

Together, following the shouted orders of Dark Vest, they tipped the canister very gradually until a thin drool of liquid began pouring from the hole.

Mildred adjusted the focus on the rifle scope again, trying to get as close a view as possible. Doc may have said “This is it” right then, but she wasn’t really listening anymore.

As she looked, a dark shape blotted her view, like a lunar eclipse across the crosshairs of the scope, as one of the patrolling sec men wandered across her field of vision. She cursed inside her mind, her lips moving but no sound coming out. Get out of the damn way, she thought, as though thoughts might have an effect. Then, just as abruptly, her field of vision was clear again and she watched as gray drool was poured into the space beneath the legs of the tower, disappearing into whatever the removed lid had revealed.

The gray liquid poured slowly over the lipped opening in the orange cylinder, its passage uneven where it contained small, solid lumps. Whatever it was, it was viscous, like mucus, the consistency reminding her of the old fruit smoothies she used to drink at college in her days before cryo sleep. Could it be organic? Refined liquids didn’t pour like that. This was more a paste than a liquid. It could be animal, more likely, really, but Mildred was a doctor not a vet—when she thought organic she extrapolated from her knowledge of the human body. She watched, thinking of the gunk that man produced: blood, saliva, urine, sweat, feces, semen, mucus, breast milk, perilymph… There were others, she knew, things hidden in the flesh, sebaceous glands and their ilk.

She felt Doc shift beside her, and suddenly the old man was moving with urgency. She took her eye from the scope, looked to her right and saw him rapidly crawling backward out of the hidey hole beneath the car using his elbows, off to the starboard side of the train—the opposite side to all the activity at the tower.

 “What is it?” Mildred asked, her voice low.

Doc’s head poked beneath the train to look at her.

“Stay put,” he instructed her, and then he was gone. She watched his feet stride along beside the car, heading toward the rear of the train.

There was no time for this, Mildred realized. Doc could take care of himself and whatever urgent business he had. She placed her right eye against the scope once more, watching the activity at the scaffold tower. The female whitecoat was back now, extending her dipstick into the hole in the ground while the two men with the canister held it upright in the same spot, no longer pouring liquid from its innards.

Suddenly a shot rang out just behind her and Mildred flinched. Doc? She wondered.

SITTING A LITTLE WAY back from the cool surface of the window glass, Krysty looked out at the area around the train. Propped in the chair by the tiny desk, she focused on some movements she had noticed in a flank of trees about seven hundred yards from the stationary train.

She watched eight men stalking through the shadow of the trees. Dressed in dark clothes with wool caps pulled over their hair, the men drew heavy blasters as they approached the train. One of them held a pair of binocs to his eyes, his head turning as he panned the monstrous length of the train, his expression grim. He lowered the binoculars, turned to his comrades and flashed a hand signal at them that Krysty didn’t recognize.

A moment later two men from the rear of the group stepped forward. The first had what looked like a long pipe slung over his shoulders, like an old-fashioned milk maid, his head bent forward, his hands holding the weight in place. The diameter of the pipe was roughly that of a man’s leg. As Krysty watched, the man swung the pipe from his shoulders and, after further discussion with the leader holding the binocs, knelt and rested the pipe over one shoulder. His partner rooted through a leather satchel and produced three identical items: three-feet-long tubes with pointed ends. Rockets.

Krysty unconsciously flinched as she saw the satchel bearer load the first rocket into the homemade launcher and light the fuse.

RYAN AND J.B. stepped warily into the new car, looking left and right, automatically scanning their surroundings for possible attack. But the area appeared to be empty of personnel.

The room was quite dark; the only lighting came from the walkway that ran down its center, indirectly splaying from the edges of the raised, metal grating.