James Axler (26 page)

Jak saw Ryan fall in the poorly lit room before him and he made to turn, ushering the children back. As he turned, he found himself facing the end of a .44 Magnum blaster, similar to his own missing weapon. Adam, the commanding officer on the train, smiled as he cocked the hammer. “Your move, White Skin,” he growled.

The first thing that Ryan felt when he awoke was the rushing wind slapping into his face and the burning pain in his limbs. It felt for all the world like he was falling, plummeting toward the ground in the way you will in a dream, that sick feeling in your stomach as you drop with nowhere to land. But he had woken up now, and he was still falling, still plummeting without end.

Warily, Ryan opened his good eye. Two parallel steel lines stretched off into the distance, and to either side he saw the forbidding landscape of the scarred and poisoned earth. Above, the sky was dark with fierce, toxin-heavy clouds, and Ryan could see the land rushing past him.

He had been bow-spritted, tied to the carved figurehead of the mutie bitch with the bare breasts and the snake’s tail that stretched out in front of the massive engine of the train. Beneath him, the steel tracks glinted in the afternoon sunlight, just two feet below his hanging body.

The pressure on his arms was almost intolerable.

Ropes had been tied around his wrists and ankles, securing him to the figurehead at a forty-five-degree angle, his head thrust forward and the full weight of his body dangling from those ties. The coarse fibers of the ropes chafed at him, but already his limbs were falling into a blessed numbness, all sensation leaving them.

And so he hung there, buffeted by the wind as the mighty engine dragged the train across the cancerous terrain, dust and bugs peppering his naked face as they were caught up in the draft created by the train’s passing.

JAK HAD BEEN FORCED to watch as Adam’s men hoisted Ryan’s body up and tied it to the figurehead at the very front of the train.

Jak’s own hands had been bound using a leather belt and there were fifteen sec men, including Adam, standing nearby, each of them armed and wary of the lethal albino.

“One-Eye here’ll be hung there till he dies of thirst or starvation,” Adam explained, “a warning to anyone who disobeys the baron’s will.” Jak looked at the scarred face of the CO, identifying the grim satisfaction he took from his cruel work. “What you think of that, Whitey?”

Jak sniffed, wondering if he was next. Behind him, he could hear several of the children crying, and one of the sec men walked passed him shouting abuse at them to shut up.

“What? Cat got your tongue?” Adam asked Jak, yanking him by his mane of white hair and forcing him to look at the tied figure of Ryan. “You ain’t a mute, I know that, boy.”

That was it. That was the key, Jak realized suddenly.

“Boy.” The horrifically scarred commanding officer of the train had called him “boy.” Like the trick with the knife that he had shown the children, Jak knew that people would believe what they thought they saw. And Adam saw him as a boy, a child. As such, Adam would underestimate him, and therein lay his chance. Tied like this, unable to free his hands, cunning was the only weapon he had left.

“Stop!” Jak cried out. “Not hurt Pa.”

Adam looked at him, a wicked smile crossing his lips. “This man’s your pa, that right?”

“Not hurt Pa,” Jak replied.

Adam turned his head to one side and spit a thick gob of phlegm to the bare ground before addressing Jak again. “You and your pa caused a lot of trouble back there, Whitey, chilled a lot of my men.” He sighed, shaking his head. “How old are you, boy?”

Jak kept his mouth shut, his scarlet eyes looking fiercely at Adam. He knew that everything he told them now would be a lie, but he didn’t want it to be easy. He wanted them to be convinced. If he convinced them that Ryan had come alone, a doting father come to save his wayward son, they might not look for the others. It was a long shot, but he would play it for what it was worth.

Adam backhanded Jak across the face, and the albino teen staggered two steps before tumbling to the hard-packed soil. Unable to put his hands out to cushion the fall, Jak hit hard and Adam sneered as he looked down at him.

“You start answering me, boy, or I’ll put a bullet in your tongue,” Adam growled at him. Then he checked himself, looking across to the blood-streaked children that his men had rounded up, Jak’s cell mates and fellow rebels. “Better yet,” Adam began, striding over to the sniveling children and pulling his blaster free. From his place on the ground, Jak watched as the hulking foreman eyed the children, his breath coming hard.

Finally, Adam reached out for the unruly mop of blond curls atop Francis-Frankie’s head. The boy howled in pain as he was pulled off the ground by his hair. The .44 Magnum blaster was in Adam’s hand now, and Jak knew what would happen next.

“Wait,” Jak called.

Holding the child in the air in his left hand, the blaster in his right, Adam turned to look at Jak. He wore a thin smile on his lips and his eyes shone with challenge. Francis-Frankie was crying, and not for the first time, as he struggled to reach the powerfully corded arm of the man who held him.

“Don’t,” Jak insisted, unable to take his eyes off the hanging boy.

There was a sudden explosion and Francis-Frankie no longer had a jaw. Instead, there was just red.

It seemed almost casual, the way that Adam tossed the child’s body aside. Jak watched, distantly aware of the sounds of crying coming from the other children, unable to take his eyes off Francis-Frankie as he fell to the soil. His tiny body jerked and spasmed, his arms reaching about him, reaching for his face. He was alive, at least.

Then Adam stepped up to Jak and nudged him in the chest with his booted foot. “So?” he growled.

“Thirteen,” Jak mumbled, looking at the ground.

“What’s that?” Adam bellowed at him. “What d’you say?”

Jak looked at him, warily eyeing the blaster in his hand. “Thirteen. Am thirteen.”

“And what’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with your skin?” Jak didn’t answer immediately and Adam punctuated his question after a moment with a sharp kick to his ribs. “You see what I done to your daddy up there and you saw what I did to your playmate. You better start answering or I’ll be doing a damn sight worse to you. Now, what is it? You a mutie?”

“Not mutie,” Jak said, shaking his head. “Just no sun in me. Won’t stick.”

One of the other sec men stepped over, pointing to his wrist chron. “Pa’s up, we should get going. The schedule—”

“Let me worry about the schedule,” Adam barked.

Jak looked up at Ryan, hanging at the front of the chrome-and-steel monstrosity. They had even left his SIG-Sauer in its hip holster, such was the contempt they had for the one-eyed warrior now. Jak could understand that. Ryan posed no threat to them any longer. Of course, they didn’t know Ryan Cawdor like he did. Jak had learned, time and again, never to underestimate the man’s abilities or the depth of his single-minded determination.

“So,” Adam asked, turning his attention once more to Jak’s fallen figure, “what you doing on my train? We picked you up spying on us, that right?”

Jak nodded. “Black gold,” he said firmly, “on train.”

The capacity to drill for oil in the had been almost forgotten, the technology simply no longer existed, having long since been bombed out of existence with the first volleys in the war a hundred years before.

But the legacy of a society built around the use of oil as fuel remained, and anyone with access to it could command almost any price…if he could defend it.

“Oil?” Adam looked incredulous. “You think we got oil on this here beastie? Where you hear that?”

“Man tol’ Pa,” Jak said.

Adam laughed at that. “Man told him wrong then. The only oil we got is in the lamps, and that’s from vegetables.” Adam laughed again. “You was suckered here, boy.”

Jak bared his teeth as he watched the man laugh. It had been a series of quick lies, and the fool had filled in all the gaps for him. Oil poachers sounded plausible, and it pleased the arrogant man to think that the whole thing had been a trick, a misunderstanding.

“So,” Adam said finally, “how come he chilled so many?”

“How many I chill?” Jak asked.

Adam considered that a moment, realization dawning. “A family of assassins, that it?”

Jak nodded. “Whatever work,” he grunted.

“So my men manage to pick up some hit man’s son and stick him in a cage.” Adam laughed bitterly. “No wonder your daddy came aboard mad and gunning.” He shook his head, cursing under his breath as he looked at the unconscious figure of Ryan that now hung from the front of the engine. “You got a name? Your pa?”

“Thursby,” Jak replied from his position in the dirt.

“Floyd.” He nodded toward Ryan’s hanging body.

“Junior,” and he smiled, indicating himself.

“Well, I’m Adam,” the scarred man told him, “and I’m gonna be the person who chills you, Junior Thursby.”

Adam stepped back, making as if to walk away from the albino, then he took a short run and kicked Jak hard in the ribs. Jak groaned, expelling his breath in a painful rush. “You alone, Junior?” Adam shouted at him as Jak struggled to get his breath back. “You alone or I got to hunt every car of my train to find Mamma Thursby and the Thursby brothers?”

Jak blinked hard, stifling the cough he knew wanted to come. He looked across the dirt again at Francis-Frankie. The boy had stopped moving, the mess of red where half his face had been oozed blood over the ground. No one had gone to look at him, to check on him. “Alone,” Jak whispered, “Just us, Pa and me.”

Adam leaned down and pulled Jak’s head off the ground by his hair. “You better be telling the truth, Junior,” he snarled. Then he pulled back his fist and punched the tied teenager in the face before standing up.

Jak’s head reeled and his vision swam; he flirted in and out of consciousness for a few seconds, unable to get his bearings. He heard Adam saying something, an instruction to his men. Search every car, every compartment. Jak’s deception to hide the companions had failed. And somehow, without even realizing it, he’d gotten a five-year-old child chilled.

“THEY’RE GOING TO BE coming for us,” J.B. assured the companions in the tiny compartment, standing with his back to the curtained door, “and they won’t be sparing any bullets now, not after the show me and Ryan put on for them.”

Doc was standing with his back to the window.

Mildred sat in the chair, her backpack propped open on the tiny desk. Krysty lay on the bloodied sheets on the bunk, her breathing slow but regular, her eyes open.

“I seem to recall an agreement that stealth was to be the order of the day,” Doc reminded J.B.

“We were put in a situation where stealth wasn’t going to cut it,” J.B. told him bitterly. “But we might still save our asses with it now, if we act smart.”

 “What are you thinking?” Mildred asked, her dark eyes wide with concern.

“No train tracks go on forever,” J.B. said. “Sooner or later this thing has to stop, get refueled. We’ll hang out, heads down, till then. Might be a better opportunity to free Jak, too.”

“And what about Ryan?” Krysty asked, concern making her voice louder than it needed to be in the small room.

“Burns me up to leave him,” J.B. admitted, “but I don’t know where he is or if he’s still alive or even on the train anymore. Sorry to say it, but the odds aren’t good.” Despite the bluntness of his words, J.B. was concerned. Deep down, the years of traveling together had made all of the companions close, and Ryan and J.B. were closest of all. They had been together since the days of Trader and War Wag One, a whole lifetime of trying to eke out a survival in the pitiable remains of the world. They had become brothers, bonded by experience.

“He’s not dead,” Krysty said firmly, sitting up on the bed. “I’d know if he’d been chilled.”

Doc let out a sigh, part despair and part contempt, and Mildred left her chair and sat beside Krysty, wrapping an arm around the red-haired woman. “Let’s be practical,” Mildred said quietly. “We all need to keep our feet firmly on the ground right now, Krysty.”

Krysty’s green eyes pierced Mildred, and her lips tightened before she spoke. “They have cages, don’t they? Ryan could be in one of those.”

“Those are just for kids,” J.B. told her. “I didn’t see any caged adults. I’m just being honest now,” he added after a moment.

“Screw honesty,” Krysty shouted. “He’s alive, I know it.”

Doc rushed across from the window and stood in front of Krysty, reminding her to keep her voice low.

“Let us not go throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, Krysty, my dear. Mayhap Ryan is alive, no one said he’s not. But shouting up a storm and getting us detected would be an indubitable way of losing any opportunity of finding him, would it not?”

Krysty’s expression softened and she looked from Doc to J.B. to Mildred in turn. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice level once more. “I just… I’d know, okay? I’d know.”

J.B. swept the comment aside, focused on the main objective. “Unless anyone’s got a better plan, I say we go into hiding until the train stops.”

Doc agreed. “I hardly think we can take on a whole train of reprobates as we are.”

“I’ll take on the whole lot of them if it saves Ryan,”

Krysty told them quietly.

“We all would,” Mildred told her, “but we have to play things smart.”

“I USED TO THINK my daddy would come to save me,”

Maddie admitted to Jak as they sat together in the cage once more. She was sitting beside him, her knees tucked close to her chest, gazing off into the distance at nothing in particular.

Jak sat cross-legged, holding a piece of rag to the cut that had opened up just above his eye when Adam had punched him. His ribs ached where he had been kicked, and the throbbing was back in his left arm where he had strained the wound there during the brief rebellion. In his mind’s eye, all he could see was the struggling body of Francis-Frankie as the bullet took half his face away.

Tight-lipped, Maddie looked at him, her eyes wide and scared.