James Axler (25 page)

The other sec man, the one with the wounded shoulder, was struggling to free himself of the collapsed gate, but Marc and Francis-Frankie were standing on top of it, holding the man down. Marc held one of the wooden shivs that Jak had carved, watching the man below his feet.

Jak had taken the Smith & Wesson from the dead man, and he turned it on the man beneath the cage door before loosing a single bullet into the man’s skull. “We go,” he told the terrified children in the cage, pointing to the rear door at the end of the narrow corridor.

In Maddie’s mind, a mixture of revulsion and admiration warred for attention as she watched the albino youth lead the way to freedom.

THEY WERE IN the shattered car that had been rent open by the rocket attack. Ryan was already at the far end, pulling open the sliding door. J.B. ran through the ash and charred bodies of the dead children, ducking the broken remains of the cage.

Sec men charged through the door, the shotgun blasting yet again.

J.B. crouched low as he ran, the burst of buckshot whizzing over his head. Ahead of him, Ryan was firing 9 mm slugs from the SIG-Sauer, weaving his body as the smoke cleared and the sec men took aim.

As he ran, J.B.’s heel slipped in the ash on the floor, and suddenly he felt himself skidding forward, overbalanced and falling to his left. A rush of air slammed into his face as he stumbled through the gaping hole that had been left in the rocket’s wake, and suddenly the Armorer was falling through space with nothing beneath his feet.

Ryan watched in horror as J.B. slid and disappeared from view. There was no time to do anything to save his friend. The primary mission now was to keep himself alive and he knew it.

As the sec men filled the air with bullets, Ryan dived through the open door behind him and rolled across the floor of the next car. He reached back and slammed the door shut as bullets whizzed through the open gap. The noise of the blasts continued as the shots slammed against the wooden door.

Breathing heavily, Ryan looked up into the faces of six startled and very frightened children.

Seven sec men ran through the car that Ryan had just exited. The eighth member of the crew had caught a face full of lead from Ryan’s SIG-Sauer and was lying in a pool of his own blood, struggling to remain conscious as his heart slowed. The felled sec man bleated in pain as someone stepped on his torso, rushing in from the preceding car unit. Looking up from the floor he saw the white-skinned specter and was certain that this was Father Death come to take him. He closed his eyes, his lips fluttering as he mumbled a prayer.

Jak launched himself into the room, stepping on the wounded man and blasting five swift shots at the retreating sec men before they even realized he was there. Two of the men fell to the floor under his hail of bullets and a cloud of blood sprayed from the torso of a third man who staggered into the wall beside the door. The other sec men were already gone, but Jak had wounded three in less than five seconds and a fourth had stopped and spun to face him.

The Smith & Wesson in his hand was empty. Jak pulled the trigger twice more as the unhurt sec man turned, then he tossed the blaster at the man’s forehead.

The man ducked and Jak saw that it was the arrogant, dark-haired man who had taunted Maddie earlier. The sadistic sec man’s face broke into a vicious smile when he saw the albino and the children who followed him.

He raised his homemade blaster, laughing at his would-be attackers.

“You brung them kids out to chill me, Whitey?” the sec man asked as he leveled the gun at Jak.

“No,” Jak responded, “pleasure to do myself.”

Jak’s arms whipped out and the sec man saw the glint of metal as something raced through the air toward him. He felt the pain immediately, like a kick to the crotch, and he spluttered his breath out in an urgent gasp. He looked down, burning fire racking over the top of his legs, and saw the handle of the leaf-shaped throwing knife where it had embedded in his groin to the hilt.

The sec man remembered the blaster in his hand, and looked up to target the freak who had thrown the knife, only to find that—in the scant second he had taken to acknowledge the knife protruding from his body—the albino had crossed half the length of the car and was leaping at him, another blade already in his hand. As the sec man pulled the trigger on his blaster, Jak’s flying fist connected with his left temple, and the knife ripped the skin there.

The curly haired sec man fell backward with the force of the attack, Jak’s weight pushing him down.

Shots rang out from his longblaster, but the albino youth was well within the circle of fire, the blasts going wildly around the shuddering car.

Jak saw the other man by the door pull a bloody hand away from the wound in his side and turn around to face the unexpected attack. He held a scimitar, rust dappled along its lethal-looking blade, and he gritted his teeth fiercely against the pain as he took a step toward the entangled bodies of Jak and the curly haired sec man.

The albino teen flicked his hand, tossing the knife he held in a flat, spinning arc at the wounded man, then turned back to the curly haired guard and started to pound at his face with his fists. The knife spun through the air before hitting the man with the torso wound between his lowest ribs. The blade failed to stick, falling to the wood floorboards with a clatter, but the man staggered backward with the force of the impact. As he regained his senses, he turned and saw the wooden shank stabbing toward his left eye, held point down by one of the children from the cage. Then his vision went red and he felt a tremendous, unspeakable pain as the spike was driven through his eye and into the brain behind.

As Marc face-stabbed the wounded sec man, Jak drove the knuckles of his powerful fist into the throat of his curly haired compatriot. When he pulled his fist back, he could see the unnatural dent in the man’s throat that hadn’t been there a second before, and he slammed his fist into it again and again, making sure the man stayed down. Finally, Jak stepped back from the felled sec man, stretching the taut muscles in his hand as he clenched and unclenched his aching fist. The curly haired lech was chilled.

Jak looked behind him, seeing the children who were watching him in awe, and nodded his approval to Marc as the lad pulled the rusty scimitar from the hand of the sec man he had chilled. Jak gathered his throwing blades, dismissing the homemade longblaster as an unreliable burden for himself but instructing all of the children to take the weapons and arm themselves.

Maddie, he noticed, chose not to take anything, even pushing the proffered wooden knife aside when Marc tried to hand it to her.

The train continued to hurtle along the tracks as Jak led the way into the next car.

J.B. TUMBLED ACROSS the cracked, poisoned soil of the irradiated terrain beside the rushing behemoth of chrome and steel, rolling bodily along the ground until he came finally to a halt. He shook his head as he raised himself from the soil, resting on all fours as he struggled to get back into a standing position. He removed his spectacles for a moment and wiped the debris of muddy soil from the lenses before replacing them on his nose. He looked across to his right, his head held low, and watched as the train rushed along beside him.

He pulled himself up and looked back down the tracks, considering how long he might have until the train was gone completely. There was a chance he could get back on, just grab one of the side ladders the same way he and Ryan and Mildred had originally boarded this monstrosity, but that window was finite and he would need to move swiftly. He looked around the cracked terrain at his feet until he spotted his compact Uzi, caked with filth, and next to it his battered fedora.

Still unsteady on his feet, J.B. stepped across to them and plucked the weapon and hat from the ground before turning back to face the train.

The bloated cars had passed, and he had perhaps fifteen more cars until the last unit went by. He looked up, spotting three rooftop gunners. Raising the Uzi, he took aim at the nearest gunner and squeezed the trigger.

The roof guard staggered, his ankles buckling as the bullets cut through them, and he fell from the train with an agonized cry.

J.B. swept the Uzi in an arc, cutting through the next two roof guards in quick succession, his attack so swift that the complacent sec men had no chance to retaliate.

He left them hurt but mostly alive, and he felt the pang of conscience at having to wound them. But the bottom line was that he had no time to deal with a blasterfight as the rear end of the train thundered along the railroad tracks toward him. There was still a roof man on the final car, but J.B. sprinted into the shadow cast by the train—he running in one direction as the train journeyed in the other—and trusted it was cover enough.

J.B. had spotted the metal rungs of a side ladder four cars from the back, just past the car with the windshield windows, and he steadied himself as he prepared to grab for it. He swapped the Uzi to his left hand as he waited for the ladder rungs to come to him, unwilling to be weaponless for even a second. This whole operation had been a disaster right from the get-go and it felt to J.B.—hardly a superstitious man at the best of times—that it was tempting fate to pocket the weapon even for a second.

The ladder sped toward him, and J.B. grabbed it as it passed, his feet scrabbling up the side of the train the second he had hold of it. His right arm burned in its socket but his grip held. He hung there, calming his racing thoughts as the spoiled terrain raced past.

His slip had left Ryan alone at the front of the train, facing more than a half dozen armed sec men who were all out for blood. And there wasn’t a damn thing J.B. could do about it.

IT TOOK RYAN a moment to realize that he wasn’t alone in this firefight. Only three men had followed him through the door into the car with the second level where he and J.B. had slaughtered the guards. He had rushed through the last car with the children in it, determined not to let them get hurt any more than they already had been. But he knew that at least six men had been chasing him when he had entered the last cage car, and yet there were only three now.

Buckshot peppered the car, tinkling as it hit the thick, metal bars of the ladder that stretched up to the second-story rail blaster. Ryan found a sheltered cranny by one of the arrow slits, and used his blaster to keep his attackers at bay. From where he was he couldn’t get a clear shot but neither could they. Trouble was, the second he tried to escape the car they would have him.

And they knew it.

Ryan’s head flitted out from cover for a split second as he sized up the enemy. Three sec men, one armed with a shotgun, the others with automatic weapons. A hail of bullets greeted the appearance of his head, drilling into the metal plate that sheltered Ryan’s face.

Once the shots had ceased, one of the men at the far end of the car shouted, “Nowhere left to run, son. You gotta know that.”

Ryan’s head appeared again, low now where he had adopted a crouch, and he unleashed two 9 mm slugs into a sec man who was creeping toward him along the right-hand wall. The sec man fell with an anguished cry, hurt but still breathing.

“Who says I’m going to run?” Ryan called back.

Silence followed, and he swiftly reloaded his SIG-Sauer once more with one of the magazines that J.B. had handed him in the storage car.

The sec man shouted to Ryan again, arrogance in his tone. “You put down your weapon,” he called, “and we’ll let you live.”

Ryan was standing now, his back flush to the metal panel that offered scant protection from the sec men. He held his blaster at shoulder height, listening carefully to the sec man’s voice, pinpointing his location in his mind.

“You hear me, boy?” the man called. “We let you live. You chilled a coupla my guys here. I can’t offer better than that.”

Ryan swung out from his hiding place and fired six shots in a continuous stream at the voice. Two went wild, but four of the bullets drilled into the sec man, cutting through his left-hand side. The man staggered, splashes of blood bursting from the exit wounds. Next to him, the sec man with the shotgun brought it to bear on Ryan and pulled at the trigger. At the same second, the door behind the sec man slid open and Ryan saw Jak’s pure white arm reach through in a swift flip as though pitching a baseball.

The man with the shotgun collapsed to the floor, never managing to get the shot off. Ryan looked at the body. Jak’s leaf-bladed throwing knife protruded from high on the man’s back, just below the neck, severing his spinal column.

Jak dashed into the car, looking left and right to check for further enemies but finding none. He was followed by the group of filthy-looking children that he had been caged with.

“Thanks, Jak,” Ryan told him. “That’s one I owe you.”

Jak shrugged. “You came rescue. We ’bout even.”

The two men gripped hands firmly for a long moment, their unspoken bond being ratified once more.

Ryan saw that the children were armed now. Two of them held blasters while the adolescent boy had a wicked-looking scimitar in his hand, streaks of brown rust along its length. Two of the younger children held wooden stakes.

Jak crouched by the shotgun-wielding sec man’s corpse and plucked his blade from the man’s back.

“Where now?” he asked, looking up at Ryan as he hid the knife back in the sheath in his sleeve.

“Back to Krysty and the others,” Ryan stated. “Get everyone together and see if we can find J.B.”

“Missed what?” Jak asked.

“J.B. avoided getting his brains splattered all over one of the cars by falling through a hole in the wall,”

Ryan told the albino. “Kept him alive, but not the choicest option.”

“Alive’s alive,” Jak stated firmly.

Ryan nodded, a wry smile on his lips. “There is that, and I suspect J.B. would agree with you.”

They turned toward the rear door, leading the way into the next car with the children behind them. Ryan had taken two steps into the food store when he felt the cold metal of a gun barrel crack into the back of his skull.