James Axler (28 page)

“Shoulda stopped.”

“No, Jak,” Maddie said. “Do you know why everyone’s so quiet now, why we’re all sitting scared and sad and no one’s really talking?”

“’Cause of me,” he muttered. “Shoulda…”

“No,” Maddie said firmly. “Everyone is sad because there was nothing we could do, either.” Maddie’s grip on his hand tightened then, ensuring he wouldn’t drop the precious food.

Slowly, Jak’s gaze swept the cage, looking at the inhabitants who sat or lay on the hard floor. They all looked drained, as though none of them had slept.

Finally he looked at Maddie once more, her open face, the tentative, serious smile on her lips, and he nodded.

Next time they had a chance for freedom, Jak would make sure none of them got so much as a scratch. It wasn’t over yet.

ONCE THE SEARCH TEAM had departed, J.B., Krysty, Mildred and Doc regrouped in the tiny compartment they had used as their base for the duration of the train’s passage.

“I want us out of here,” J.B. told them. “If Ryan’s still among the living, we’ll find him and free him, that’s for certain. But I don’t want anyone going off half-cocked, thinking they can take on the whole train.”

Krysty shifted uncomfortably on the bunk where she sat with Mildred, but she said nothing.

“And when are we to help Ryan?” Doc asked. “Come to that, when are we to help Jak, as well?”

“We’ll work on the assumption that they’re still onboard,” J.B. told them. “When the opportunity arises, we’ll know.”

“So,” Mildred stated, “basically do nothing.”

“No train tracks go on forever,” J.B. repeated firmly, as though that put an end to the discussion. He stretched his muscles from his cramped position by the sliding door, stood and began gathering his maps and the minisextant from the tiny desk beside Doc.

Mildred shook her head, clearly deciding whether to challenge J.B. on this point. Krysty, whose health had continued to improve, reached across and placed her hand on Mildred’s arm, locking eyes with her. The silent instruction was clear: J.B. is the leader now, his decision stands or we’ll all get chilled.

Having packed away his materials, J.B. stood by the compartment’s door. “We’re going to bed down in the storage units,” he told them. “Less chance of being disturbed, more chance to defend ourselves if someone comes knocking.” He looked querulously at Krysty.

“You up to this?”

The Titian-haired beauty nodded, a tight smile on her face. “I feel much better, thank you.”

“Any problems,” J.B. said to her, “you call.

Anything—headaches, cramps—anything at all. You’re our number-one priority till we can get to Ryan and Jak.

Anything else?”

Doc spoke up, pressing a hand to his forehead. “I do believe I am suffering a little from a headache myself,” he told J.B.

“Yeah,” Mildred chipped in. “Stress is getting to us all. Let’s wrap this one up quick and get off this ghost train.”

Together, the four of them made their way through the cars until they reached a unit full of metal sheets and jars of rivets. Despite Mildred’s plea, they would be on the monstrous train for a further three days before they reached their ultimate destination.

THE TRAIN STOPPED at regular intervals and the crew would examine the strange towers that had been constructed close to the tracks. Sometimes, Mildred, Doc or J.B. would sneak out and watch, and once, when she was feeling well, Krysty took up a post by the roof hatch of their car and watched the operation at the front of the train under the waning moon of the night sky.

The operation never varied. The whitecoats would examine the odd towers, compare their readings and decide whether the balance of grayish liquid feeding the structures from beneath needed to be altered. Doc and Mildred proposed various possibilities to explain what that liquid was, and J.B. used his own field of expertise to run through possible mechanical oils, pastes and unguents, but the actual nature of the liquid remained frustratingly elusive. J.B. told the others about his en-counter with the canisters up close, and how the naked boy had been kept in a cage near to them. “The two may not be related,” he stated before they ran away on a flight of fancy about why a child was needed in this process, but it left everyone feeling even more unsettled about the operation they were witnessing.

In the storage car, just one from the back, J.B. constructed a shelter within the masses of metal plating that was stored there. With the help of the others, he shifted sheet steel so that they had a small burrow to retreat to, and a place where Krysty could remain during the frequent periods when her health seemed to dip. The structure looked to be part of the storage system, a casual arrangement of the stocks held onboard the train. J.B. spent several hours viewing it from various angles to ensure it looked camouflaged, hidden as it was in plain sight.

On several occasions the companions had heard the door in the preceding car being yanked aside, and they had scrambled to hide in the tiny shelter while sec men stomped through. One time, several men had stopped and had an extended conversation about the value of a particular type of rivet over another, and the companions spent an awkward forty-five minutes waiting for the men to leave. The whole time, J.B. had his M-4000 shotgun trained on the conversing men through a hidden gap in the shelter. Eventually, the men had left, and the companions had felt relief. However, it was a stark reminder that they were far from safe even here, sheltering in the darkness of the unmanned car.

Krysty had argued repeatedly for forming a search party to locate Ryan, telling them that every second they left him was a second he could be being chilled or worse.

“There’s just four of us now,” J.B. reminded her.

“We need to pick our moment.”

Tears glistened in Krysty’s eyes, the frustration of the situation coupling with the pain she continued to suffer at frequent intervals. “When will that be?” she insisted.

“Soon, I promise,” J.B. assured her.

In his own mind, the Armorer became increasingly unhappy with the situation he had led them into. Their food supplies were dwindling, and he had insisted they not raid the food stores—which were ten cars away—unless they absolutely needed to. It wouldn’t do to put themselves in any unnecessary danger this late in the game. Still, by hiding the companions in the shadows it felt like he was failing to take charge. During their quieter moments, Mildred reassured him that he would know when it was time to act; she could sense his turmoil as much as any of them.

“We’re two men down,” she reminded him while Doc and Krysty slept, “and Krysty isn’t in a reliable condition to help us. You’re doing the right thing.”

“It feels wrong,” he replied quietly as the darkened car hurtled along the tracks.

“Sometimes deciding to do nothing can be the hardest choice of all,” Mildred told him.

As time went on, and their third day on the locomotive turned into a fourth, J.B. admitted he had lost track of their passage. He tossed his map aside in disgust, and plowed a clenched fist into the hard metallic casing of the car with a resounding crash. Being cooped up in the windowless car for so long had not agreed well with J.B.’s temperament. Doc bent to pick up the map, while Mildred and Krysty watched them in the faint glow that seeped beneath the side door panels of the car.

“How far?” Doc asked, placing a hand on J.B.’s shoulder.

“I don’t know,” J.B. snapped, frustration in his voice.

“Yes, you do,” Doc told him genially. “You started making the calculations as soon as you stepped onboard, I know you did. And you have checked and triple-checked them ever since.”

J.B. sighed wearily as he looked at the old man. “Six hundred and forty miles,” he told him. “That’s how far we’ve traveled, assuming an average speed of twelve miles an hour, which roughly takes into account the stops.”

“And we know we shall be heading to Grand Forks,”

Doc reminded him, his voice calm, “sooner or later, do we not?”

J.B. nodded.

“Well?” Doc said.

“If we continue to follow the loop I plotted out,”

J.B. said, “We’ll get there in about a half day.”

Doc smiled. “You have never yet given me reason to doubt your calculation abilities, J.B.,” he said. “A half day it shall be. I will stake my cane on it.”

The flash of a smile crossed J.B.’s face for just a split second, then it was gone. “Thanks, Doc,” he whispered.

THE WAY JAK saw it, he couldn’t free Ryan. He had spent two sleepless days mulling over the problem, approaching it from every angle. How do you untie a man from the front of a moving train without getting him chilled? Jak didn’t even consider his own safety in these scenarios, he just worked out the possible ways in which to free Ryan and promised to worry about himself once a viable solution came to him.

The reality was this: as far as he knew, Ryan had been hanging there for more than two days, buffeted by the winds and assaulted by the elements. His arms and legs had to feel like jelly, no sensation left in them. If he was untied he would simply drop, no strength left to save himself. And, from where he was hung, any drop would result in him falling under the wheels of the massive engine.

Jak would require some kind of winch or hoist to free Ryan, so that he could both untie him and hold the man in place. But then where would he take Ryan, assuming he could construct some kind of makeshift hoist?

This all ignored the very real problem of getting there in the first place. Following the failed bust-out, a sec man had been charged with checking on the children every hour, leaving Jak with little time to work at an escape. The bravado he had shown J.B. when the Armorer had found him in the cage had long since evaporated. There was simply no easy way out of the jail he had been placed in, and any escape would likely result in the execution of another child by way of punishment, something that Jak had promised he would not let happen again.

Maddie continued to force him to eat, though not because Jak was in the thrall of depression as he had been when they were recaged. Now, Jak’s mind was frantically working solutions, working through every scenario in meticulous detail before discarding it. His father had taught him the importance of planning, and ultimately it hadn’t saved the man from the depredations of the cruel baron who ruled over them. But planning, Jak knew, took time. Which made it all the more frustrating when, after two days, he had no solution to the myriad problems he was faced with.

IT WAS LATE into the night when the train ushered around the curving tracks and lumbered the last few miles to the Forks. Adam had joined the driver at the rattling front engine as they came to the end of their journey.

The driver was a stout man called Rhett who never slept and was permanently wired up to some liquid form of jolt stim that pumped straight into his veins. His cabin was painted completely black, and only the lights of his equipment, the dials and gauges that allowed him to monitor the locomotive’s progress, provided any illumination. Adam considered Rhett the single most reliable member of his squad.

It never ceased to amaze him, that long approach to the Forks base. Years before, way back before the megacall, the unit had been a U.S. Air Force base. Like most of the military facilities, the base had been destroyed, and whole sections were reduced to rubble.

But Burgess, in the days when he was just a gang master himself, before he’d assumed the title of “baron,” had seen value in sifting through the ruins and uncovering the old base’s secrets.

Baron Burgess had built his ville on the ruins of the military base, utilizing the underground facilities that had survived the attacks as an infrastructure to his grand design. They called it a ville, but really, beside several single-story outbuildings, it was one vast building, segmented to ensure it could stand, but stretching a half mile across the tortured landscape. It lurked on the horizon, a flat, low building so huge that it was unavoidable, even in the semi dark of the waning moon. Lights glowed in its windows, the flickering of fires, gleaming like stars trapped in the vast structure.

Towers and posts and minarets jutted from the low roof, bristling into the indigo sky as though jabbing at a heaven that looked down and mocked the man within.

The death train powered toward it, the brakes squealing as Rhett applied them, pulling at the three levers that applied the scattered friction brakes throughout the colossal beast. It would have been impossible to try to stop the train from just the engine alone. Other brakes were linked to its controls, slowing the wheels in unison when they were applied.

As they got closer, Adam spotted the sec men who patrolled around Forks ville, striding through the fouled earth or eyeing the approaching train from their posts along the roof of the massive building.

THE TRAIN HAD SLOWED to four miles per hour, little more than walking speed, and it followed the tracks into the open tunnel that ran the building’s length. Inside, the vast cavern was lit by flickering oil lamps strung along the ceiling. As the train trundled inside, sec men watched it enter, blasters at the ready. A few of them saluted in the direction of the towing engine, presuming Adam would be in there even though it was impossible to see within.

Adam reached across, flicking the switch that sounded the bell along the whole of the train, letting everyone know that they had arrived at their final destination.

“Welcome home,” he murmured.

Doc shoved Jak’s Colt Python into his waistband and smoothed his frock coat back in place to hide the weapon before joining the growing throng outside the train. He watched Krysty walking ahead of him, seeing her weave a little as she stepped into the vast, low-ceilinged cavern that housed the train. Krysty was still battling with ill health, more than four days after they had left the redoubt in Minot, and the pattern was still hard to predict. Before the companions had left the train, Krysty had assured them that she felt fine, but it was clear that she was struggling, that the sickness had left her weak.

Krysty wore her hair up, tucked beneath the battered brown fedora that J.B. had loaned her for the infiltration of the train pirate camp, and had the hessian blanket that she had retrieved when they left the sleeping cabin tossed over her shoulders. It would be difficult to disguise Krysty’s curvaceous, female form, but wearing the shapeless blanket and hiding her vibrant hair helped draw attention away from her.