James Axler (30 page)

The closer man fell to the floor, blood gushing from his feet, and his face lined up with Mildred’s for a moment. He howled in pain and raised his own weapon toward her. Calmly, keeping her breath steady, she snapped off another bullet into the man’s face, demolishing his pained expression in a burst of crimson.

IN CAR EIGHTEEN, J.B. stuffed as much plas ex into his pockets as he could and grabbed a handful of the sticks of dynamite. Looking at it closely, he realized that this was all predark military issue.

From discussions with Mildred and studying his ancient maps, J.B. had located an old Air Force base in the area now known as the Forks. All this stuff—the train, its contents, the crazy “station” that they now found themselves in—all of it had echoes of predark military equipment. From this evidence, he concluded that the baron and his crew had built their wealth and their plans on the Air Force remnants, which accounted for a lot of the impressive technology, such as the gosling gennys, that he had seen them using.

In J.B.’s experience there was a lot of trouble associated with old military equipment in the wrong hands.

BARON BURGESS WATCHED as the impressive, Titian-haired woman was forced up the steps to join him and his advisers. He closed his eyes, a long blink, and felt her there in his mind, burning like fire. Opening his eyes again, he fixed her with his stare. “What manner of woman are you?” he asked in his pained, rasping voice.

Krysty shook her head, her lips tight, trying to pull away from the baron’s stare. But she found, somehow, that she couldn’t do it, couldn’t look away. The low hood left his face in shadow, but his eyes—their whites tainted to a sick yellow, their irises a vivid emerald—burned into her from its depths.

 “Answer your baron,” the man with the horrific scarring on his arms and face stated, looking angrily at Krysty.

“I…” Krysty began, her breath coming in gasps,

“I’m just…just a norm.”

“It is pointless to lie to me,” the baron snarled. “I can feel a lie as you speak it, and I can unpick your thoughts at will.”

Krysty tried to look away, turning her head from the hooded figure in front of her. She couldn’t seem to look away. It was like she was trapped by the hypnotic stare of a cobra. “I don’t…” she started, but it was becoming harder to string complete sentences together. Her head was pounding, her brain felt as though it was swelling, pushing against the sides of her cranium.

The robed baron clapped his hands together. “A demonstration,” he said. “A demonstration for…Krysty Wroth.”

Krysty gasped. He knew her name. This baron, a man she had never seen before, knew her name. And she had felt him—he took it, plucked it from her mind, wrenched it from her thoughts like a tiny thing, a splinter pulled from under a fingernail, a little pop of pain. What manner of man was this baron?

HIS WRISTS CHAINED, Jak shuffled behind Humblebee and Marc in the line of his cell mates as they were guided toward the raised platform in the center of the vast room. Maddie’s voice whispered behind him.

“What’s happening, Jak?”

Jak turned back, glancing over his shoulder at the girl. “Not know,” he stated.

One of the sec men that was marching beside them shot forward and slapped Jak across the face with the back of his hand. “No talking, Whitey,” he shouted.

Jak stumbled but retained his balance, recognizing the familiar metallic taste of blood in his mouth.

“You,” a voice boomed from the dais in front of them. It was Adam, the scarred commanding officer from the train, the one who had chilled Francis-Frankie.

“We got the resources this far, let’s not ruin ’em now.”

He was talking to the sec man who had slapped Jak, chastising the man.

A hooded, robed figure leaned across, standing beside Adam on the raised platform. He muttered something, and Adam nodded before instructing the sec man to step forward.

As the man walked toward the platform, Jak scanned its occupants. A sec man stood behind a wheelchair-bound old woman at the right of the platform. Beside them, the three whitecoats that he had seen tending to the tower back in Fairburn were waiting patiently, riffling through notebooks and talking quietly among themselves. Adam and the hooded man were standing near to the front of the dais, watching as the sec man stood in front of them. At the far left, with an armed man on either side, stood Krysty Wroth, her figure hunched over as though she was having trouble standing straight, and her arms wrapped around her chest as though to keep warm.

The man’s head twisted beneath the hood and he brayed at Krysty. “Your demonstration, Krysty Wroth.”

Jak watched in growing concern as the sec man who had slapped him moments ago pulled his sidearm from its holster and calmly positioned it beneath his own chin.

Jak turned back to Maddie. “Look ’way,” he told her and the other children.

It was over in an instant. The man pulled the trigger to his blaster, casually, as though sleepwalking, and his head wrenched back as the bullet drilled through his jaw, behind his nose and into his brain before bursting from the back of his head in an explosion of bone, blood and gray matter. The sec man’s form keeled over as his legs buckled and he fell to the floor.

KRYSTY TOOK A STEP back from the hooded figure of Baron Burgess and bumped into one of the sec men behind her. She looked up at expressionless faces. These men had been full of life a moment before, yet now they were completely impassive at the horrific fate that had just befallen their colleague, their comrade-in-arms.

She wanted to scream because of the blacksmith’s anvil pounding in her head, wanted to pull her hair out by the roots, wanted to collapse and curl up and die for the pain that lashed through her body. The whole atmosphere was charged, something she could almost taste now, something so very wrong about everything around her.

Baron Burgess turned to look at her with those piercing, emerald eyes once more and she felt herself shrink under his stare.

“You’ve gone pale,” he rasped. “But I see that you are beginning to understand. You see, they are all my puppets. Everyone in this room, everyone in the state, and—soon—everyone in the whole of the.”

The driving pain in Krysty’s head reached a crescendo, and all that she could see was the baron’s eyes through a pinprick in the darkness of her failing vision.

Then nothing.

Mildred scurried beneath the train, pulling herself away from the sec man as his blood-drenched boot trod toward her with an audible squelch. She was at the end of the car now, and she would have to break cover to crawl beneath the next one. She looked ahead, mentally preparing herself before diving out between the cars.

“Ah-ah.” The sec man laughed, swinging his heavy blaster at her the very second she appeared. “Now, I got—”

His sentence was abruptly cut short as a burst of bullets split the air. From the ground, Mildred watched as red spots appeared on the sec man’s shirt. He staggered forward before slumping against the car at her rear. J.B. stood behind him, holding his Uzi low to his body with a steadying hand beneath the barrel. “Come on, Mildred,” he told her, “let’s keep moving.”

Mildred rolled out from under the train and put a re-straining hand on J.B.’s shoulder as he started to jog in the direction of the rear of the train. “Wait, I think we have another complication.”

J.B. looked back at her, urging her to go on.

“They’ve got Krysty,” she told him.

The frustration was visible on the Armorer’s face and he growled through his clenched teeth. “Just when you think it’s as bad as it can be, the whole deal finds a way of going even farther south.” He looked up and down the length of train. “Eight minutes. Find Ryan and get him off the train.”

“Eight minutes. Check,” Mildred said, looking at her wrist chron as she leaped into the nearest car and started making her way forward through the cages. J.B. stopped her long enough to hand her a pack of thermals and an instruction to “Distribute them every few cars.”

KRYSTY FELT SOMETHING plucking at her head, something inside her skull. Slowly, warily, she opened her eyes to narrow slits and surveyed her surroundings in a long-established survival tactic.

“That’s it, Krysty,” a voice rasped, “wake up now.”

She tasted a rich, thick flavor in her mouth and realized that she had vomited. She could feel it sticking to the side of her face and she spat out a thick string of gunk as she sat up.

The strange witch woman and the hooded baron were looking at her closely, along with a man that she recognized as the psychopathic leader of the train crew who had ordered the burning of the people that had attacked his train.

“What happened?” she groaned, her tongue feeling thick in her mouth.

Baron Burgess turned to Adam, his second in command, and laughed. “I’ve never known someone to be affected so completely,” he said. “It’s exquisite.”

Adam looked piteously at Krysty’s fallen form.

“Why does it affect her, do you think?”

The bruja never took her eyes from the red-haired woman sitting on the floor in front of them. “Because she’s like me,” she said quietly. “An earth witch.”

“Is that right?” the hooded baron asked in his painful, cracking voice. “Are you a witch, Krysty Wroth?”

Krysty shook her head heavily. She was still wiping the remnants of her stomach lining from her face.

“She doesn’t know it,” the bruja said with conviction, “perhaps, but she is one of mine. The power of nature flows through her, I felt it back on the train.”

“What’s going on?” Krysty asked. She had started to cry, some strange involuntary side effect of the power that was affecting her.

“Can you feel it?” Burgess asked. “In the air, all around you. That is my power.”

Krysty looked fearfully at the eyes that burned within the shadowy hood. “I’ve felt it for so long,” she admitted, “here in my head, kicking like a mule.”

Burgess nodded, his hood swaying. “It hurts now,” he rasped, “but it is a good hurt, I promise you. It is the power of good. Something so rare in this accursed land.”

“Good?” Krysty breathed the word, a question.

“Once upon a time,” Burgess began, “there was a fantastical nation called the United States of America.

A nation so fantastic that they actually called it ‘the land of the free.’ But the land of the free had enemies, and so it protected itself until the nukes came and it could protect itself nevermore. One of the ways that this great nation protected itself was by exerting control, Krysty Wroth. Control of hearts and minds.”

Krysty was trying to comprehend the fairy story that Burgess was presenting to her. He was belittling her, she knew, patronizing her with his prepared, satirical speech.

But it was so hard for her to think straight, so hard to think at all. Hearts and minds. What did that mean?

“There were many programs,” Burgess continued,

“MK-ULTRA, MK-DELTA, CHATTER, Osterley, ARTICHOKE, Paperclip. Hundreds of these systems were tested, each experimenting with ways to control the one great unfettered—the human mind. Do you see it yet, Krysty? I think that you do.”

Krysty pushed the tears from her eyes, trying to hold all her thoughts in one place.

“The theories were all here, locked in the vast underground vaults of this base,” Burgess told her. “I just needed a way to make them work.”

“Why?” Krysty asked, her voice quiet and fearful.

“To save the world,” Burgess told her, not a trace of irony in his rasping voice. “The land of the free—the freelands—became what you see around you, the . In one hundred years mankind has reverted to a semi savage state, preying on one another, creating nothing but pain and violence. But I shall change all of that, once my Grand Project is engaged.”

“I don’t see how…” Krysty began, struggling to frame her thoughts through the fog in her brain.

“Discipline of the mind,” Burgess shot back.

“Everyone working for one true purpose, cleansed of their impure desires to steal and to hurt and to kill.

Under my control those thoughts will be purged.”

Mind control, Krysty realized. She saw it all in a brilliant flash of comprehension. This man, Baron Burgess, had a noble dream to unite all the deathlanders into a society, into a true civilization once more. Except…except something was not right, that was obvious.

Somehow, his noble dream had corrupted. The death and violence that went with the train wherever it appeared was proof of that.

And then the thought was gone, coherence lost, the pain returned in her mind. In the distance she heard a child shouting, crying not to be hurt and she tried to turn, to open her eyes to see what was happening. Her head was so heavy now, the pain so intense.

MILDRED HAD CHECKED every one of the cage-bearing cars as instructed by J.B. There was no one aboard, no sec men, no children and certainly no sign of Ryan.

She had sprinted through all the empty cages, through a store car that showed clear signs of a firefight, two crew quarters, a laboratory car coupled to a car full of equipment. After that was a bland room with heavy drapes over the windows, another car filled with techie stuff including spotlights on a rig with a portable generator painted in a familiar military green, and finally out onto a flatbed with a heavy cannon on it.

She checked her wrist chron. She had less than four minutes left. Standing on the flatbed she looked ahead.

There was the vast unit that presumably held the fuel for the loco wag, and then there was the engine. “Sorry, Ryan,” she muttered to herself, shaking her head. He just wasn’t onboard.

She stepped off the flatbed unit on the starboard side, away from the congregation in the vast chamber.

RELUCTANTLY, MADDIE stepped forward. Despite her reluctance, she held her head high, looking challengingly at the people on the dais above. A sec man behind her slammed the butt of his longblaster into her back to hurry her along as she marched toward the dais. She turned back for a moment, and her eyes locked with Jak’s. “Goodbye,” she whispered. Jak saw that this brave thirteen-year-old girl had accepted her fate with utter, faultless courage.