James Axler (20 page)

He gazed at the wooden slats of the roof, listening to the stuttering song of automatic weapons from all sides.

THE SEC MEN HAD EXITED from the third of the bloated cars as soon as the explosions began, and Ryan and J.B. rushed into it the second they were sure it was empty.

They had discussed going outside, finding out what was causing all the damage, but the urgency to find Jak had become paramount now as the situation on the train became more perilous.

They were stopped in their tracks by what they saw in the third car, though it affected Ryan more deeply than J.B. Like the previous two, this car featured what looked to be distillation equipment along one wall, coupled with a bloodied bone saw, and half of the opposing wall was taken up with another refrigerated unit full of the tall, burnt-orange cylinders. But the remainder of that wall, beside a grumbling gasoline genny, featured four little, square cages stacked two atop two. Three of the cages were empty, but the final one featured the body of a naked boy, lying in the tight space, curled up on himself. The child’s skin was dirty, and there was evidence of dried blood around his face and neck. His skin was lusterless, and bony ribs stuck out from his chest. The boy was about eight years old and he appeared to be sleeping.

J.B. had noticed Ryan’s discomfort. “You okay?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

Ryan shook his head, his single eye still looking at the child in the cage. “Just made me think for a moment,” he stated. There were things in Ryan’s past, a child of his own now lost somewhere in the , his own childhood so abruptly cut short by his murderous brother… Ryan didn’t dwell, but, all the same, there were old wounds that would never heal, not completely. “The sec man back in the car, the one I iced, he said something about children—about how they would take, would steal children.”

“He explain why?” J.B. asked.

Ryan shook his head. “We didn’t talk extensively.

I’m thinking of Jak, wiry little runt that he is. It was pretty badly lit where they picked him up. Reckon they thought he was a kid?”

J.B. laughed in spite of himself. “That’s rich.” He smiled. “Jak would just love that.”

Ryan reached for the bolt mechanism on the exterior of the cage, but J.B. put a hand out to stop him. “Not our problem, Ryan,” the Armorer stated firmly. “But you open that cage, he’ll become our problem. One we can’t afford.”

Muttering a curse, Ryan withdrew his hand and the two of them headed to the door and into the next car.

IT TOOK ALMOST twenty minutes, but finally the sec men rounded up the few remaining stragglers of the rebel party that had attacked them. There were three survivors in all. The party of sec men that had been dispatched into the fields as soon as the train stopped had eventually attacked them from the rear, culling them in swift order. The three remaining attackers, still dressed in their dark clothes and wool caps, were made to kneel in the dirt close to the tower, and their hands were tied behind their backs.

Adam, the commanding officer of the train crew, wearing his dark vest to better show the ghastly scarification running down his arms to match his misshapen, abused face, pulled the .44 Magnum blaster from his hip holster once more and held it at the head of the first of the three living attackers.

“Why did you attack the train?” he asked.

“Screw you, outlander.” The man spit, looking firmly at the ground.

“Look at me,” Adam growled, “not the ground. Look at me, brave man, and say that again.”

The man grunted and slowly raised his head. In less than a second the top of his head disappeared in a cloud of blood as Adam’s blaster fired a shell through his skull.

“The next one won’t be so lucky,” he explained. “The next one, I shoot in the gut and leave for the burrowers.”

The two kneeling men looked at Adam as he swung the blaster toward them. “Now,” he told them, “I want to know why you attacked my train.”

The man to the left spoke through clenched teeth, venom in his voice. “You came here nine months ago,” he told Adam. “You came in the night and you stole our crops and you took my only son. And not just him—other children from the ville. For eight months we asked the same question. Why? Why did they take our sons and our daughters? Why?”

Adam grinned maliciously as he looked at the man.

“Nine months is long enough to produce another son,” he told him. “Think of the boy as your tribute to the baron.”

Anger welled in the man’s expression and he lunged at Adam, launching himself from his knees, head down, toward the larger man. Adam sidestepped, and the man fell face first into the mud behind him. Slowly, almost casually, Adam aimed his blaster at the man’s torso and blasted a hole below his rib cage. The man howled in agony, crumpling on himself where he lay.

The third man, still kneeling in front of Adam and the tower, found his voice at last. “We answer to no one here—Hazel has always been a free ville.”

Adam walked away from the kneeling man, instructing his men to follow him back to the train. The engine was warming up now, snuffling like an animal woken from hibernation, as it got ready to continue its journey along the metal tracks. The sec men who patrolled the grounds fell in line, making their way back to the train, as well. The fires had been extinguished and temporary plates had been added to the sides of the train where the rockets had hit; it was ramshackle, but it would do for now, until they could find a safer stopover point.

Adam barked out a single laugh. “A free ville,” he shouted. “You hear that, men? A free ville is what Hazel is.” And he laughed again, a humorless, mocking bray.

FROM HER WINDOW, Krysty felt her stomach drop as she watched the two sec men approach the kneeling man where he struggled by the skeletal tower. These sec men wore large, sturdy backpacks that glinted with the sheen of metal, and they each held a long pipe in their hands. The pipes were attached to their backpacks with a short length of hose.

The sec men stood eight feet from their kneeling victim, three or four paces between them, and leveled the pipe nozzles. Krysty turned away but she could see the man’s fate in her mind’s eye as he began to burn under the ghastly power of the flamethrowers.

THE BURNING MAN’S agonized scream was cut short almost as soon as it started as the flames engulfed his mouth and tongue.

Watching from her position under the train, Mildred heard the familiar hum as the engine warmed up, felt the car above her begin to vibrate as thrumming power began to pull at the heavy burden.

Ahead and above her she could hear the call going down the tracks as each sentry repeated the instruction.

“All aboard!” When it reached the sec man who was standing three feet in front of her, she hoped he might jump onto the train, but he just stood there, his dirt-streaked boots directly in front of her.

She felt the thrum of movement on the tracks where she rested as the train began to pull slowly away, and watched as the wheels began to gradually roll. Mildred pulled herself tighter under the train between the tracks, watching the wheels pass her. The length of the car above her was eighteen feet, she had that long to come up with a way to roll out from under its moving body, kill the sec man and get back onto the train—not necessarily in that order.

She hugged Ryan’s blaster closer to her body as the train chugged along the tracks, gathering speed.

A wall of moving wheels blocked her exit and the sec man was still there. Why hadn’t he boarded? Mildred reminded herself that the speed of the train was negligible just now, barely three or four miles per hour.

Outside, standing by the tracks, the guard could probably stroll beside the train and grab the rung of a passing ladder without a second thought while it traveled at this pace. Meanwhile, she was stuck below the moving behemoth as the space beneath became tighter and tighter.

From underneath, Mildred looked toward the rear of the train as it began to pick up speed. The clearance above her was about fifteen inches, and she could see that at least one of the ramshackle units rested lower to the ground than that. She pushed her chest and the side of her face to the shingle between the tracks, clutching the weapon to her side as the train trudged over her, clattering loudly on the tracks.

She shifted her head uncomfortably to the left, watching as a thin, sunny gap between the cars approached. The next car would follow, the storage unit with the windshield walls that she had walked through less than twelve hours before. Its bed fell lower and there were thin, spiky shafts hanging below where the pipework of the structure had been rudely finished. The struts were pencil-thin and various lengths, one almost reaching to the ground, and each was marked with the grime it had picked up on the journey.

As the sliver of light between the cars passed overhead, Mildred took a deep breath and closed her eyes, pressing her nose down into the pebbly surface between the rungs of the tracks. She felt the spikes drag across her back and shoulders, snagging runs of her skin and wrenching them painfully away. Farther down her body, she felt a tug at the seat of her combat pants and she pressed herself harder into the ground, willing the ordeal to be over. The sound of the train was almost deafening against the tracks beside her, the loud rumbling of its passage like an underground waterfall.

She felt something tangle in her hair and the skin of her scalp burned as something pulled at it until, with a painful snap, a braid of her plaited hair was yanked from her head.

Over the racket of the moving cars she heard a sudden crash right in front of her, out of sync with the rhythm of the train. She rolled her head carefully, the shingle biting into her left cheek, and looked out from under the train.

The dark, oil-smeared wheels passed just two inches from her face, and then came the gap between them and Mildred saw the dark shape of the sec man lying there, his mouth wide open, his eyes blank in death. A bloody line was drawn across the bottom of his shirt, and his guts sprawled across the muddy ground where a blade had slashed a horizontal streak across his torso.

“Come on, my dear doctor,” the familiar voice of Doc called. “You have a patient to treat.” She looked farther to her left where the voice had called from. She could see Doc’s swordstick hanging in the space between the cars and she ducked down beneath it as it passed overhead.

She timed the movement of the passing wheels on the next car, saw the gap between the large sets of wheels, and scrambled out from beneath the train, still holding Ryan’s Steyr. From the gap between the car ahead of her, Mildred saw Doc’s smiling face poking out, and he beckoned her with his hand as he stood on the lip of the door. “Quickly now,” he encouraged, and she darted forward and grabbed his outstretched arm, using it to pull herself up between the cars beside him.

“Thanks, Doc,” Mildred said breathlessly, relief in her eyes. She was covered in mud and beige dust from the shingle, and there were tiny traces of cuts all over her face and bare arms.

Doc opened the door to the next car and pushed her, somewhat less than gently, inside before following her.

Once inside, Mildred dropped the blaster to one side and folded over, placing her hands behind her calves as she gathered her breath.

“Close,” Doc’s voice said behind her as she sucked in deep breaths. “You almost missed your train and the good Lord alone knows when the next one’s due.”

Despite herself, Mildred smiled.

MILDRED AND DOC WERE back in the compartment with Krysty, though now it was Mildred who sat in the bed while Krysty tended to her wounds, dabbing them with a piece of rag doused in the antiseptic mouthwash that Mildred had picked up for her med kit somewhere on her travels. It wasn’t the antiseptic she would have chosen, and it stung like hell when Krysty applied it to the abrasions on her face, but Mildred knew she needed to clean the wounds and the small alcoholic content of the mouthwash would do that just as well as anything marketed for the job.

“I’ve been trying to place where I’ve seen those towers before,” Mildred told the others while Krysty dabbed at her cheek, “it was there all along, in the back of my mind.” She looked at Doc as she addressed him.

“Doc, you spent some time in the twentieth century, didn’t you?”

Sitting at the desk, the blade of his sword now hidden once more in the sheath of the ebony walking cane, Doc nodded. “Some, but, alack-a-day, it is sometimes a very blurred period in my memory.”

“Did you ever see one of those old RKO movies?”

Mildred asked. Then she put on the deep, clipped voice of the typical 1930s newsreel announcer. “‘An RKO

Radio Picture.’ Do you remember that?”

Doc shook his head slowly, a weary apology on his face.

“There was a tower,” Mildred continued, unfazed, “just like the ones we’ve seen out there. A radio broadcast tower that spanned half the globe.” She gestured with her hands, drawing it in the air for them both. “An illustration, showing how the RKO company was able to send their information through the airwaves.”

“Perhaps I saw something of its ilk,” Doc said hesitantly. “It strikes a vague chord with me, to be sure.”

“This tower stood proud over the world,” Mildred explained, “and little bolts of lightning or something, the signal I guess, zapped off its highest point like so…”

She snapped her hands open and closed a few times, as though she were playing a set of invisible maracas.

Krysty watched Mildred’s pumping hands and smiled. “This ‘Arko’ used to flash lightning bolts over the world, in the days before the megacall?”

“No,” Mildred told her patiently, “it was an illustration. An animated way of bringing the idea of broadcast to life.”

“Like a radio,” Krysty concluded as understanding dawned.

“I think that those towers out there are radio transmitters,” Mildred stated, looking from Krysty to Doc.

“But there is no wiring,” Doc said, shaking his head, “nothing visible at least.”

“The wires are underground,” Mildred told him.

“That thing we saw, that big metal plate—that opens into the lower part, beneath the broadcast tower. That’s where the workings are.”