James Axler (29 page)

J.B. and Mildred walked a few steps ahead of Krysty, discussing their surroundings in low, urgent tones.

Mildred’s backpack disguised her a little, and she was hardly the statuesque beauty that Krysty was. When the train stopped, the four of them had agreed to look outside and, once they confirmed that they were in a vast, roofed stopover, they had decided to take their chances outside among the mass of train people and other men and women who strolled through the huge, cavernous space.

The cavern was man-made, its flat sides curving inward toward the top as though domed. The ceiling was about three stories above the ground, and lighting was attached to catwalks and metal struts. The ceiling lamps were dim, their weak glow unable to penetrate the gloom of the huge room, and they were supplemented by portable lighting rigs dotted around the room, powered by chugging generators like the one they had seen used on occasion to light the work at the scaffold towers. As they walked past one, Doc glanced over it and noticed the olive-green paint and the large, white-stenciled lettering along the side. It was clearly military, a period piece from predark. The whole, vast room had an indefinable military essence about it, Doc thought; parts of the walls were patched together from old mil matériel. Chickens and a few dogs ran through the crowds, fresh meals when the crew needed them, he guessed.

The area was large enough to hold the obscene length of the train, sixty cars stretching along one side of the room. The remainder was given over to a large, flat space, a meeting room sufficient for a vast crowd in the hundreds or even thousands, with a few doors leading off the sides here and there, presumably into separate, smaller rooms. Doc estimated there were perhaps three hundred men and women here, milling around, the majority of them armed. A raised dais was located in the center of the huge room where a hooded, cloaked figure silently watched the proceedings as the three whitecoats and the commanding officer of the train trailed up the steps to the platform. A bank of lights surrounded the dais, their glow soft like the embers of a fire, a bubbling liquid visible within through the transparent windows. The crowd—made up of hard-faced men and women, sec men, mercies and gaudies like the ones the companions had seen aboard the train—made their way toward the raised dais.

There was a party atmosphere here; people were laughing and dancing, loud. Echoing music tried and failed to fill the cavernous room. It reminded Mildred of rock concerts from the late twentieth century, except that everyone seemed to be armed and proud to show it. Barrel fires burned here and there as food was cooked and distributed to the returning crew.

J.B. turned to face the others, walking slowly backward as he spoke, his voice low. “Me and Mildred are going to do a recce on the train, see if we can find Ryan and Jak.”

“I’d like to look, too,” Krysty started, but J.B. held up a hand for silence.

“Stick with Doc,” he told her. “You’re our backup, and we might just need some friends hidden in the crowd before too long.”

Just then there was a harsh, whistling sound from the central platform of the room. J.B. glanced over his shoulder, watching as the glowing lights around the dais grew in intensity then faded again. He saw two further figures had joined the others on the dais, and a chill went down his spine: the bruja, accompanied by a sec man. The frail old woman sat in a wheelchair, a skeletal-looking device with large wheels to each side.

She sat silently, wrapped in a shawl, her arthritic hands shaking incessantly, as a brawny sec man pushed her to join the others on the raised platform.

“Gonna get that plas ex,” J.B. whispered, turning to Mildred and leading the way back the train.

He pointed subtly toward the front of the train. “I want you to find Jak and Ryan if they’re still aboard.

Most likely near the front of the train—that’s where the cages are, and that’s where we found Jak the first time out. Both of them may need medical attention.”

Mildred hefted her backpack. “What about you, J.B.?”

“I’ll join you as soon as I can,” the Armorer told her, “but I’ve got a few things I want to do first.”

“And what if I bump into sec men guarding these cages?” Mildred asked.

“I reckon most of them got off to stretch their legs and enjoy a taste of home cooking.” J.B. smiled.

“Probably won’t be more than a half dozen onboard now.”

Mildred flipped the catch on the holster that held her ZKR 551 target revolver. “Great,” she muttered, looking over the vast beast of chrome and steel that stood on the silver rails.

A man brandishing a heavy longblaster appeared in one of the cars near the front of the train, and J.B. and Mildred quickly moved on, heading ever nearer the mighty engine that pulled the colossus. Mildred heard a familiar voice behind her and glanced back for a fraction of a second. Jak was being led out of the car along with a handful of children, heads bowed and chains wrapped around their wrists, marching forward like a chain gang. The man with the longblaster led the group in the direction of the central dais, while a second man brandishing a crossbow took up the rear, urging the party onward.

As they walked, J.B. and Mildred saw a similar group of chained children being forced from the car next to Jak’s. Mildred nudged J.B. softly in the side and caught his eye, raising one eyebrow. J.B. shrugged in response and continued marching toward the front of the train.

The sec men led the two groups of children through the crowd toward the center of the vast room. As they watched them depart, Mildred and J.B. hastily reevaluated their objectives. It would be difficult to free Jak now without bringing down the wrath of the whole room.

“I’m going to create a disturbance,” J.B. told Mildred, “but it’ll take some doing.” He gestured toward the middle of the train. “I need you to cover my back while I go get something.”

Eyes alert, Mildred walked beside J.B. until they reached the eighteenth car from the engine. The Armorer had memorized the important units of the train, and he knew precisely what he was looking for. This was the car where he and Ryan had found stocks of construction equipment, including that enticing stash of explosives.

There was no side door on this unit, so he stepped between the cars and pulled himself up on the lip beneath the foremost door while Mildred tried to look casual as she checked for anyone watching. There were sec men milling around, and suddenly one of the men on the dais shouted something and a group of sec men moved into position to surround a lone figure. Mildred wondered what was going on there, and realized, with a start, who the figure was.

“DO WE HAVE SUCCESS?” the hooded figure on the dais asked, his voice a painful rasp. He was addressing the lead whitecoat, the older man of the three-strong team.

Adam stood beside the hooded man, and the bruja sat in her wheelchair with a sec man waiting behind her should she require to be moved.

The eldest whitecoat stepped forward and dipped his head toward the hooded man in supplication. “We’ve tested the network as much as we can without going fully live,” he explained. “It’s been on stand-by condition for one week, as you know, idling until we set the final phase in motion. I foresee absolute success, Baron Burgess.”

The hooded figure, his face in shadow, nodded slowly, considering the whitecoat’s words. “Absolute,” he muttered, his voice strained.

“We have seen definite vagal nerve stimulation in the subthalamic nucleui of test subjects,” the dark-haired female whitecoat explained, consulting her notes. “The tests have been brief, of necessity, but the results have proved entirely satisfactory.”

The head beneath the heavy hood turned, and the baron addressed the bruja. “Well, mutie witch?” he asked, contempt in his tone. “What do you say?”

The trace of a smile crossed the woman’s cracked lips and the creases deepened around her wise, ancient eyes.

“He who controls the network will be puppet master. I can feel its power pulsing throughout the system now.”

“Good,” Burgess stated simply, turning back to look over the crowd.

But the bruja spoke again, after a moment. “I am not the only one who feels this,” she said quietly.

Burgess, Adam and the three whitecoats all turned to look at her, stunned by her statement. Adam was the first to speak the question on their minds. “What? Who are you talking about?”

“There,” the bruja whispered, and her claw like right hand moved toward the crowd around them. Her index finger slowly stretched out and she pointed at a figure in the audience. “The woman.”

Adam looked in the direction that the bruja pointed and scanned the crowd. After a moment he saw her—a tall woman that he hadn’t seen before. She wore a dirty, brown blanket over her shoulders to disguise her form and a battered fedora on her head.

THE SCARRED MAN on the platform called out to the sec men who were near her and suddenly Krysty was surrounded by hostile forms. A man grabbed her from behind, yanking her arm painfully high up her back, and she snarled.

“Get off me,” she growled, looking at the five armed men who stood in front of her.

“Adam says you’re needed up there, sweetmeat,”

said a blond-haired man with a white scar running through his hairline, a patch over his right eye. “Don’t make it awkward for yourself.”

Krysty bent forward, flipping the man who had grabbed her arm so that he flew over her head and into the man with the eye patch. The pair stumbled and they both fell to the floor along with J.B.’s hat, which had disguised her vivid red hair.

To Krysty’s right she saw Doc whip the hidden sword from its sheath inside his ebony cane, but more sec men had turned at the incident, and he was suddenly lost to her in the shifting crowd.

She needed to get out of there, to get away from these people, but as she looked left and right she realized that there was nowhere to run. She ducked her head and steamed into the nearest sec man, knocking him flat on his back and charging forward.

DOC WATCHED Krysty fight her way through the sec men until they finally overwhelmed her. Even in her weakened state, sick and feverish, she fought like a hellcat. One punch dislocated a man’s jaw, another pulled away from a man’s face with a fistful of teeth. She kicked and she slapped, she clawed and she punched, but the sheer weight of numbers brought Krysty down and there was nothing Doc could do about it.

The older man stood there, his sword still in his hand, considering what a few well-placed shots from his LeMat might gain him.

As he watched the sec men drag Krysty to the dais, Doc formed a swift plan in his mind. He had spied a group of chained children being marched across the room a few moments before, and he had recognized the unique figure of his albino companion, Jak, among them. Doc stood no chance fighting alone against this crowd, but with Jak’s assistance and whatever J.B. had hidden up his sleeve he might just be able to free Krysty.

He resheathed his sword and made his way through the crowd toward the chained children.

FROM HER SPOT beside the train, Mildred watched as the blur of red hair appeared in the middle of the skirmish.

Krysty had been discovered.

She looked back to the car door, inwardly cursing J.B. for how long he was taking. “Come on, J.B.,” she muttered, “time’s a-wasting.”

She turned back to look at the proceedings in the crowd and saw Krysty being dragged up the steps onto the dais. The figure in the hood was leaning forward, examining Krysty the way a jeweler would evaluate a precious gem or a butcher a piece of meat. This situation was getting further and further out of their control, Mildred realized.

A noise from her right made Mildred turn, and she saw a large man swinging a heavy mace toward her.

Mildred ducked as the mace rushed toward her face, and the spiked ball slammed into the wall of the car, denting the metal side. The man growled at her, aiming a blaster in her direction with his free hand. “You’re one of them, ain’t ya?” the man blurted. “I slept with every whore on this train, and I ain’t never seen you. You come here to rescue your lover boy?”

Ryan. The man was talking about Ryan, Mildred realized as she sprinted along the side of the train and weaved in between two cars. She heard the heavy footsteps behind her as the sec man followed. Just another minute and she and J.B. would have been away scot-free, unnoticed among the throng. It was bad timing that this guy realized that she didn’t belong. It had all been going so well.

Mildred clambered over the coupling that linked the two cars, then leaped out the other side and ran along the starboard edge of the train toward the engine. She looked back, seeing the man pulling himself through the tight gap between the cars, blaster at the ready. As soon as he was clear, he fired a shot at her retreating form, and Mildred dived to the floor, the bullet whizzing overhead.

As she slid along the rough floor, her momentum driving her forward, she fired a single shot from her Czech-made ZKR 551 revolver, clipping the sec man across the left arm. He brushed at the wound as a line of blood began to form, but the bullet had passed him, just scuffing his bicep. He looked up again, aiming his heavy blaster at the woman now lying prone on the floor. She rolled underneath the train as he blasted off another shot.

Target revolver in hand, Mildred crawled beneath the train, pulling herself along with her elbows and driving forward with her knees and feet as she tried to put distance between herself and the sec man. Hanging spikes of metal plucked at the pack on her back, slowing her, but she kept going, urging herself forward.

She turned and saw the man’s feet as he ran alongside the train. A second man was running toward him from the front of the train, and she could hear shouting—a reinforcement being given instructions.

Mildred turned, rolling on her side, and aimed her revolver at the first man’s feet. She pulled the trigger, the explosion loud in her ears in the enclosed space beneath the train. The bullet ripped through the man’s left foot, and she heard him screech in pain as blood sprayed from a rip in his boot.

She turned, targeting the second man and reeled off a further two shots into the guy’s feet. There was no time to be subtle. She needed to quieten the pair of them before more men were alerted, and she trusted that the noise of the blaster would be lost to the loud thrum of the crowd.