James Axler (21 page)

“And what are they transmitting?” Doc asked, clearly dubious. “Classic show tunes? Or perhaps they are sending telegrams to each other?”

“Except,” Mildred stated slowly, “I don’t think it’s a radio. That liquid they were using to fuel the cells, that was something organic, I’d swear it was. It had the sort of consistency you don’t get in refined material.”

“What does the fuel matter?” Krysty wanted to know.

“I think it’s the fuel that’s making you ill,” Mildred said confidently.

The three of them sat quietly, considering what Mildred had just said, wondering at its implications.

Krysty moistened her rag again and sat behind Mildred to work on the cuts across her back and shoulders.

“If that is true,” Doc wondered out loud, “then why doesn’t being aboard the train seem to have any direct effect on Krysty? The fuel is stored here, after all. I saw them remove it from one of the forward cabins.”

“Proximity,” Mildred said, enunciating the words slowly, “and pulse.”

“Meaning?” Krysty asked.

“Predark we had mobile phones,” Mildred stated.

“A cell phone signal is not one continuous stream. It broadcasts in waves. If you put a cell phone beside a radio, you can hear the pulse affecting the reception, crackle-crackle, clear signal, crackle-crackle, clear signal again.” Mildred’s words were coming quicker now, saying them out loud was helping to form the theory she had been slowly working on in the back of her mind. “Now, like anything automated, that pulse would work to a set rhythm. What if our towers out there are doing the same, working to a set rhythm?”

“But if this signal is what is affecting Krysty’s fluctuating health, would not we have noticed the pattern of the broadcasts?” Doc asked.

“Proximity,” Mildred stated again, and Doc nodded, suddenly understanding her theory.

“We have been traveling all over North Dakota,” he answered, “at varying distances from the towers. If they are broadcasting in waves, in pulses, and we have varied our distance from them, then the pattern would be almost impossible to recognize without studying all of the factors and amassing a significant amount of empirical data. Perhaps with study and a map of the towers’ locations…” He was nodding to himself now, seeing the point that Mildred had begun to explain.

“Am I right?” he asked her.

“Am I right?” she echoed. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

HUMBLEBEE WAS LAUGHING as she and several of the other children tried to copy the trick that the ghost boy, Jak, had shown them. He had produced a pocketknife, its blade gleaming in the indifferent light from the open door, and let the children carefully handle it, proving that it was as solid and real as they were. Then, with a flurry of his hands, the white-skinned youth had somehow made the knife disappear, apparently into thin air.

The children had applauded and several of them had squealed in delight, insisting he show them again. Jak had talked them through the trick, repeating the mantra

“Eye slow, hand quicker” at several points as he whipped his arm around and tucked the leaf-shaped blade into his sleeve.

Then Jak used the pocketknife to carve away two small, rigid strips from the wooden walls of the car and passed them to the children, under Maddie’s silent sufferance. The wood strips were roughly the size and shape of his knife, and were, according to Jak, “good practice not getting hurt.” Maddie had pointed out that the wood was splintering and its ends were sharp, but Jak had just shrugged. “Splinter never chilled,” he assured her.

The knife trick had been more than entertainment.

Jak had wanted to get the children used to carrying shivs, working them in their hands. He wanted them armed, however crudely, for when he broke them free from the cage.

As the children practiced with the wooden spikes, Jak went back to his own task, working away at the tight screws that held the hinges to the cage door. The screws were embedded deeply into the metal, but Jak had worked the thin point of a knife into the circular holding and slowly twisted. The knife had slipped numerous times, unable to hold in place against the tight screw, but he had silently endured, replaying the process until he finally got the right angle to use a torque action to loosen the fastener. He gradually rotated the knife by the leather-bound handle, careful not to lose the grip he’d found on the screw, and, slowly, the head of the screw pulled away from its grounding.

The light was poor for this work, streaming through the far door open to the moving countryside beyond and dazzling Jak while putting the hinges in shadow. But Jak worked carefully, feeling as much as seeing, shielding his eyes now and again to check on his progress. He wanted the screw just free of the lip of its hole, enough that he could work it free easily, in a matter of seconds, when the moment came, but not so much that the door would fall off if a sec man knocked into it.

Satisfied with his progress, Jak left the screw in place and began the process on the second screw in the hinge. There were four screws in each hinge, eight in total, and he intended to loosen them all. He had nothing but time.

As he sat cross-legged, working his knife at the second screw, Jak became aware of the grumbling in his stomach. It had been hours since he had eaten, the spiced ribs in Fairburn were almost eighteen hours in the past now. He would survive for a while, but without food he would become weak for the final assault.

“When eat?” he asked, turning to look at Maddie who was, once again, sitting close to him, watching his busy hands at work.

Maddie shrugged, a resigned smile on her face.

“When they remember to feed us, I think,” she told him.

Jak bent, looking closely at the screw he was loosening. It was coming away from its slot nicely. “Often?” he asked.

“Can be,” she replied. “Other times it will be almost a day. But sometimes we get two or three dishes, good food even, if it’s a nice man.”

Jak’s head turned and his scarlet glare pierced her, frightening Maddie. “None nice,” he told her. “Remember and stay alive.”

Maddie tugged at her bottom lip with her teeth and nodded. “I’m sorry, Jak. I’ll remember.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he stated, his voice softening again.

“Be alive. Best type Maddie ever is.”

She nodded again, but Jak had turned his face back to his task. Maddie looked at his busy hands, fascinating in their whiteness as though dipped in paint, the long fingers with their protruding knuckles so delicate, despite the traces of old scars that covered the pale skin.

She looked at his face in profile, the concentration absolute in his expression, taking shallow breaths through his barely opened mouth. His face was all angles, the high scarred cheeks planed like a statue, and his alabaster skin only added to that impression. His long, straight hair was white like the rest of him. She thought back, remembering the warmth that his skin gave off as she had touched his face as she had moved his head onto the blanket-pillow.

“Maddie, Maddie, look!” That was Humblebee, excited as she called across the tiny cage. Maddie looked up, seeing that Marc had one of the wooden shards. “Look what Marc did!” Humblebee cried, her face glowing with excitement. Maddie watched, her face impassive, as Marc palmed the wooden shank just as Jak had shown them.

“Good,” Jak told him. He had glanced up without Maddie realizing. “Show others.”

Marc smiled. “If I can remember.”

RYAN AND J.B. continued to make their hurried way through the train. The cars were busier now, as they got ever closer to the engine that drove the beast. There were more sec men, the small construction team they had seen at the towers, and at one point they passed the three whitecoats in the tight corridor of another bunk room, heading in the opposite direction. They passed through another double mess hall, busy with hungry sec men who watched the gyrations of a dancing, jolt-high slut as they ate.

There were two more rooms of food similar to the one where J.B. had found the pineapple chunks, though the side of the foremost one had been damaged. The right-hand wall was peppered with holes like buckshot, and J.B. and Ryan took a closer look. The Armorer poked his index finger through a hole, feeling the rush of air outside with the train’s rapid passage across the Dakotan fields.

“Took a hit from a home-made shotgun,” Ryan suggested.

“No,” J.B. said. “Look at the way the wounds wept.”

He pointed to the melted metal remains that ran beneath the holes like tears. “This is acid. Probably from a toxic rainstorm.”

“Avoided most of the shelling but I guess this part of the state couldn’t escape everything,” Ryan commented.

His words were borne out shortly after when the train thundered through the rad lands of the far south.

They had walked through another pair of acid-damaged cars, both filled with repair supplies like those at the rear of the train, and one of them showed some evidence of attempts to patch up the holes in its side since, when J.B. nudged a steel plate aside, they saw the holes were larger on this unit. A third car full of stock equipment was undamaged, however, and it wasn’t until they reached a car full of bunks that they could look through windows into the outside world again. What they saw was depressing.

Since they had left the redoubt in Minot, North Dakota had proved to be a changeable mishmash of territory. The bland desert around Fairburn had given way rapidly to greener areas and so to farmland that produced the richness of foods that had been sold in the walled ville. Fairburn had seemed isolated, but it was perhaps fifteen miles from farmland. But that patch of rich, fertile land had proved brief, and as they had crossed the lake they had seen evidence of poisoned terrain, destroyed by toxins in the air. Here, far to the south of the old territory, they saw the rank devastation of radiation. The land that the train traveled over was bare and pitted; no plants or greenery of any sort existed, not even moss or lichen. The soil was burned a dark shade of brown, almost black, in fact, looking more like charcoal than earth. Large cracks crisscrossed the land, digging deep into the lifeless soil like scars on a man’s flesh.

The air stank, an awful, putrid smell like rotting meat. Carrion birds flew across the sky, their vast wing-spans mutated to grotesque proportions. They swooped through the air, flying parallel to the train until Ryan and J.B. heard shots from above as the rooftop gunners took aim. One of the sec men was unlucky, and they watched as he was dragged away in the colossal claws of one of the vulture like birds, screaming as blood spurted from where the talons had pierced him. The booming report of a heavy cannon cut through the air over the shuddering racket of the train, and J.B. watched in fascination as a heavy shell blasted through the air from the front of the train. The shell failed to hit any of the fast-moving, enormous birds, but it served to scatter them and they swooped away toward the horizon.

The ground here was sloped, evidence of earth flow, and the train traveled at a lurched angle, its port side noticeably lower than starboard for almost three miles.

The tracks followed a perfectly straight line for the duration of the slope, any curves would have likely derailed the train.

As the ground began to level out once again, the squeal of brakes being applied rang through the train, and Ryan spotted another scaffold tower in the distance from the window of the third crew bunk car in succession. They were forty-one cars from the back of the train, closing on Jak’s position fast.

WITH NO WARNING, Krysty fell to the floor, stretching her hands out before her to cushion her fall.

Doc leaped up from the lone chair in the tiny compartment and Mildred jumped from her seated position on the bed, crouching beside their companion. “Are you all right? Krysty? Krysty?”

Krysty worked her swollen tongue in her mouth, swallowed against a suddenly dry throat and mumbled the words “I’m fine,” even though she wasn’t. The pain had started again, appearing from nowhere, an ax wound to her skull. Her muscles ached with cramp, her arms and legs heavy, and her heart was pounding in her chest as though thumping at her ribs to break free.

Mildred and Doc helped lift her from the floor, pulling her across to the bunk and stretching her out there. Mildred placed her hand gently on Krysty’s forehead, feeling for a moment in silence. “She’s burning up,” she told Doc.

“This is madness,” he replied, “sheer madness. She was fine, absolutely fine, not ten seconds ago. It is impossible.”

“It’s happening,” Mildred confirmed, “so it can’t be impossible. Whatever it is, it’s happening again—” she looked at the beautiful redheaded woman on the bed, watched in horror as blood began streaming from her nose and around her gum line “—only worse.”

Doc walked to the window, looking out across the bleak landscape. “We are coming up on a tower,” he stated, a strange sense of satisfaction in his voice.

“You think the theory stands?” Mildred asked.

“Though hardly the proof we wanted,” he decided,

“I would say that this is, at the very least, a good signifier of our perceived correlation, would not you?”

Mildred nodded. “Hell, yeah.”

ADAM HAD HOPPED BACK onto the train at the rearmost mess hall car when they had pulled away from the Hazel tower. He had sat alone, consuming a late breakfast as the train trudged on to its next, inevitable stop. He knew the route so well now, having traveled with the train on every one of its bimonthly journeys, and he had grown to hate this section of the route—the burned grounds south of Jamestown, where the fallout from the nukes had stretched its withering hand. It was a hot zone, the air itself still poisonous even after a century of supposed recovery, and he could feel the poisons burying themselves into the scars that crossed his arms, his face, eating into the muscles and tendons. Thus, he chose to eat on this section of the loop on every go-round, so that he never need see the awful, barren landscape.

Adam had been with the train crew from the very start, when Baron Burgess had assembled his team and proposed the project. Just another sec man in Burgess’s army, Adam had climbed the ranks in the subsequent four years, and now held the position of commanding officer, Burgess’s trusted right-hand man. The baron couldn’t travel with the train any longer, though he had been with it in the early days as the monstrosity had shuddered along the tracks, placing towers and creating new rail routes where they required, the old whitecoat at his side. These days, Baron Burgess couldn’t leave his citadel. Like many of his men, Burgess had had to make sacrifices for the Grand Project, and the worst of them had been his own mobility.