James Axler (27 page)

After Jak’s vicious interrogation, all the children had been returned to the cattle truck that held their cage. Jak had been stripped of the throwing knife he had hidden in one sleeve and other secret places, as well as the one he’d had held in his hand when he had been captured by Adam. The sec men had patted him down, but they had failed to check his boots and so had missed the two additional leaf-bladed knives he had hidden there. The other children had been stripped of their weapons, the blasters they had acquired as well as the knifelike stakes that Jak had hewn from the wooden wall of their prison. They sat around quietly, dejected and resenting Jak for the flash of hope he had shown them that had amounted to nothing.

But mostly, he knew, the children were in shock at what had happened to one of their own, Francis-Frankie. Every last one of them knew that that was Jak’s fault, too.

The door had been replaced, and the screws in the hinges hastily welded in place by a sec man with an acetylene welding torch.

“The first day I was here,” Maddie said, turning to look at Jak for a second before turning back to gaze off at nothing, “I thought, sooner or later, Daddy will come aboard and rescue me and I can go back home and everything will be the same again.” She shrugged. “Then they took Hugo. An old grandpa and a pretty lady with a notebook came and they opened the cage door and they took Hugo. She said he had a really important job to do for them.”

“Hugo?” Jak asked, having never heard the name before. In his mind he still thought of Francis-Frankie, his shuddering body lying in the dirt, not yet ready to die. The sec men had left him there, in the massing puddle of his own blood.

“He’s nine years old, Jak,” Maddie said. “I don’t think he was even scared. He just went with them and I heard him tell the lady how pretty her hair was. And that was the last time we saw him. He didn’t come back.” Maddie’s expression had hardened, a sort of determination in her dark eyes. “Three days ago, if you want to know. That’s when Hugo left.”

“Say where?” Jak asked.

“No.” Maddie shook her head. “Just for the really important job. Don’t know what.” She looked at him, then her eyes swept the room, taking in the other prisoners.

“Back on the farm, my mom would give me really important jobs, too, like picking the sweet cherries from the tree and taking Rufus, he’s our dog, out to play so he wasn’t ‘cluttering up the house,’ that’s what Mom would say. Did you ever eat cherries, Jak?”

TWO MEN WERE assigned to search each batch of ten cars, checking for possible interlopers aboard Adam’s train. In the last ten cars, the sec men assigned were Barry Jackson and Horse McGintey, who figured they had an easy job. Most of the cars were dedicated to supplies, so they had only four cars of people to worry about. “Sure, could be that an interloper would hide himself in the storage car but, really, how hard is that neg-wit gonna be to spot?” Horse had asked. To Barry, it seemed kind of ironic him saying that.

By the time they had worked their way through to car fifty-four, they had gotten the thing down to a routine. Check each compartment, poke their heads in, ask if everyone was okay and who they were meant to be, then move on. Jackson had heard the freaky boy explain it had been him and his pa alone, and he was inclined to believe him. The boy looked wiry, but not much against the full brunt of Adam’s anger.

This car was split into four cabins along the port-side wall, with a corridor stretching along the starboard side toward the door that opened onto the first of the storage units. The sliding door to the first cabin was open, rattling in its frame as the train trundled along the tracks.

The compartment was empty, an unmade bed to the right and a tiny desk with the remains of a meal on it to the left. The cabin stank of rotgut, and insects had gathered in a sticky patch on the wood floor.

The next door was closed, and Horse knocked firmly on the glass panel before sliding it aside. “Whoa, boy!”

Horse said at the sight as he pulled back the door.

There was a sec man lying in the bed, a tough guy by the name of Blake whom Horse knew from a spate of rustling for the baron a while back. Blake’s hands were tied together and secured to a wooden pole built into the wall above him, and, as far as Horse could tell, he was naked, a sheet granting him little modesty down below. Next to him a dark-skinned gaudy slut wearing an olive-green bra was snuggled up to him, a hand on Blake’s hairy chest, smiling with a dazed expression on her stupe face. On the other side of Blake was another gaudy, this one a pale-looking redhead with curves in all the right places, naked as the day she was born, the sheet tossed indifferently over her legs. The redhead was asleep, her face beside Blake’s chest. The room smelled fiercely of body odor.

“’Scuse us, ma’am,” Horse grumbled, tipping a finger to his brow as he stepped out of the room.

Barry held the door a moment as Horse tried to slide it closed. “It’s okay,” Horse told him, “that’s Blake, I know him from a ways back.”

Barry snickered, looking at the gaudies dozing in the tiny bunk. “It ain’t Blake I were looking at,” he said. “Greedy SOB!” and he slammed the door back in its frame.

THE SECOND the door closed, Krysty lifted her head out of the sedated sec man’s armpit and drew a desperate breath of air. “This is disgusting,” she muttered in a harsh whisper.

Mildred looked across at her, her eyes wide open now. “I’ve sedated him three times in the past twelve hours. I think he’s become a little sweaty.”

“Whose idea was this again?” Krysty asked, swinging from the bunk and putting her arms back in her jumpsuit before zipping up the front. She had kept the legs on beneath the sheet, along with her beautifully tooled boots.

“They bought it, didn’t they?” J.B. asked as he dropped down from the overhead rack where the dead body of the piggy-eyed sec man still lay. “At least you didn’t have to turn tricks with corpse-boy up there.”

“How is he?” Mildred asked, pulling her dark vest top over her head and tucking it into her combat pants as she stood. She winced as the light material scraped against the cuts she had sustained on her back from her brief excursion beneath the train.

“Decomposing,” J.B. admitted with a sour look.

“You should have got rid of him while I was gone.”

“It’s on my to-do list,” Mildred grumbled, “right after distracting the guards with my tits.”

J.B. smiled, shaking his head as though vindicated.

“I knew they’d fall for it.”

IN THE NEXT CABIN, Barry and Horse found an old, white-haired man neither of them recognized. The old man lay asleep in the bed, snoring loudly.

“You know this old duffer?” Barry asked quietly.

Horse shook his head. “He one of the whitecoats?”

“Nah, don’t think so.”

“Reckon we’ll show him to Adam then?” Horse whispered.

“Old guy like this?” Barry pondered. “I dunno, how did he get aboard otherwise?”

“Mebbe he is with the whitecoats then,” Horse considered.

Lying in the bed listening to their hushed conversation, Doc decided it was time to “wake up.” He ceased snoring, his bright eyes popped open and he shrieked a single word. “Eureka!”

The two sec men were standing in the open doorway to the cabin, and both jumped back in astonishment.

Still fully clothed, Doc swung his long legs over the side of the bunk and reached across for his ebony, lion’s-head cane. “May I help you, gentlemen?” he asked, smiling as he looked at the visitors.

“We were just discussing whether you belong here or not, old man,” the younger of the sec men explained, a nasty leer on his face.

“Whether I belong here?” Doc asked, incredulity in his tone. “And who, might I ask, are you?”

“Barry Jackson,” the younger man said, “and this here is Horse.”

“Yes,” Doc said patronizingly, “I know Horse already. I asked who you were, young man.”

Horse was confused. He looked the old man up and down, then a smile crossed his lips. “We work together somewhere? I can’t think.”

Doc’s mind flashed back to the map on the classroom wall and he tried to remember the name of one of the large North Dakota towns. “Moorhead, I do believe it was,” he said, offering the man a bright smile.

Horse nodded, though he looked a little unsure.

“Yeah,” he muttered, “that must have been it.”

Barry pointed at his partner and went cross-eyed.

“Since his accident, Horse don’t remember so good sometimes. Sorry, fella.”

Doc nodded, understanding on his face. “Now, if you’ll both excuse me, I do have important work to be getting on with.”

“Sure,” Barry said, “sure thing.”

As the sec men pulled the sliding door closed, Doc twisted the handle of his swordstick back into place.

That had been close. He thought for a moment he had been caught out, but once more it seemed that fortune favored the brave. A little bluff work went a long way, he knew, it was all in the delivery. He sat on the bunk and waited for J.B. and the others to reappear so that they could plan their next move.

THE REPORTS CAME IN, one by one, as though his men were paying him tribute, until Adam had heard from all the teams. There was no one else on the train, no one who shouldn’t be there.

He sat in his Spartan cabin near the front of the train and pondered that. Why had they come out with this monstrous train again? When they started the operation, years before, it had made sense to carry all the equipment, the materials to build the towers and sometimes the very tracks that they traveled on. As Baron Burgess had refined the system, they had had to lay more track, and still the hulking workshops of the train had been required. But now? The supplies were barely required anymore, the men had become lazy and inefficient.

They hadn’t trimmed the train down to a more manageable length because of Adam’s paranoia that they might need something from the old storage units.

Traveling across the dead terrain of North Dakota, the fear had always gripped him. What if they stalled?

What if a rail broke, a point snapped or become stuck?

What if? What if? What if? And so he had insisted, despite what Burgess and his whitecoats had said, that they were to travel with everything, with all the supplies. A ville in miniature, traveling on oiled wheels.

For the first time ever, someone had come aboard his train and instigated a massacre. Men had been chilled, good men, men he trusted and, moreover, he liked.

But there was no one else aboard now. Just himself, his sec force, the three whitecoats and a smattering of imprisoned children who were essential to the Grand Project. And the bruja.

Yes, the bruja. The more distance he could put between himself and that creepy old woman the happier Adam was. Maybe, subconsciously, that was why he had kept the train at this impractical length. There was a buffer zone between them of more than forty cars, and even then he felt her sometimes, picking through his dreams while he slept, her dry, brittle hands and talon-like nails sifting through his thoughts.

He sat there, in the darkness of his cabin, the curtains drawn against the rich afternoon sunlight, and he picked at his teeth. This would be the last go-round, this was the last mission before the project went to the final phase. Once that happened, they wouldn’t need protection to travel the rails. No one would be left to challenge Baron Burgess and his loyal followers. They would be masters of all that they surveyed.

“You have to eat,” Maddie said.

Jak’s head moved lethargically as he looked up at her across the cage.

“You have to eat,” she said again, “or you’ll get weak.”

He nodded, almost imperceptibly, the movement so slight. A sec man had come by sometime earlier and passed the children several platefuls of some unrecognizable meat. The children in the cell had devoured it eagerly, but Jak hadn’t moved. He just sat there, his knees pulled close to his chest, his arms wrapped around them, staring off into space. Maddie had watched him, concerned at what he had to be thinking, at what his mind was dwelling on.

Jak could see the boy’s face—Francis-Frankie—in those hunks of meat. The boy, lying there in the poisonous soil, half his face gone and his life oozing away into the toxin-spoiled dirt. If he had just said something, just spoken up quicker, worked out his lie more swiftly…

Jak could hear the tinkling laughter of the boy even now, could hear that whiny quality of voice when he wanted something, when he didn’t understand. Jak had spent perhaps twenty hours in the boy’s company, half of those asleep thanks to the tranq dart he had taken to the chest. He had barely said five words to the boy, barely even acknowledged him except as a soldier in his failed little uprising. And now the boy was dead, thanks to Jak.

“Come on, Jak,” Maddie said. She knelt beside him and proffered the scraps on the grease-streaked plate.

“It’s good. It tastes good.”

He looked at the hunk of bloody red meat in her hand, a steak carved from the flank of a longhorn or maybe a mule, cooked and seasoned but still red beneath its dusting of charcoal. Red like Francis-Frankie’s face at the end.

Maddie held the steak to his hand, pried his limp fingers away from his knees, forcing him to clutch the sparse meal. “I want you to eat,” she told him firmly, her hand over his, holding it closed around the meat.

Jak looked at her again, but in his mind’s eye he saw the explosion of sound and light as the child’s jaw disappeared, and then he saw Maddie jawless. He blinked hard, scrunching his eyes closed as if to block out the images, then he looked at her again.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Maddie told him.

“Chilled plenty,” Jak muttered. “Never this way.”

Maddie shook her head firmly. “That man did it, the man with the scars,” she said. Jak was surprised that there was no pleading to her voice, no question. She was telling him the facts as she saw them. “They had you tied up, and there was nothing you could have done. I loved Francis-Frankie, we all did, but there was nothing you could have done, Jak.”

He saw the boy lying there, shaking as the blood streamed from his broken face. “Shoulda,” he said.