James Axler (31 page)

J.B. weaved through the crowd and joined Doc.

“What’s going on, Doc?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” the old man replied, “but it seems that this may be our last chance to free both Krysty and young Jak.”

“I’ve set charges throughout the loco wag,” J.B. whispered. “We got about two minutes before they blow and then this whole place will turn into chaos.”

Doc smiled grimly as he looked at the Armorer. “And what of Ryan?” he asked.

“Mildred’s on it,” J.B. said.

“She’s going to have to be quick,” Doc concluded.

They watched as the girl in the white nightdress was made to stand in front of the raised dais. “I don’t like the look of this,” Doc told J.B.

“You and me both, Doc,” J.B. agreed. He looked across to the other chained children, instantly identifying Jak standing among them. “Reckon you can get the blaster to Jak?”

“I intend to do my level best,” Doc replied, reaching a hand beneath the tails of his frock coat and feeling for the butt of Jak’s Colt Python.

“IT WORKS BEST with the young,” Baron Burgess told Krysty as he focused his stare on the Asian girl standing in front of him. A pained expression showed on the girl’s face now, and she screwed up her eyes and brought her chained hands up to rub at the sides of her head. “Their brains are still forming,” Burgess rasped.

“They still have the capacity to accept me.”

Krysty shook her head as she watched the girl, feeling a tightness in her chest. The girl’s mouth was wide open now and she was screaming, screaming for her father. “I don’t think… No, she’s not accepting you.

That girl is not accepting you,” Krysty muttered.

Krysty turned away as the girl dropped to the floor and began punching and kicking at it with all her strength.

JAK LOOKED FRANTICALLY around, trying to find a way to break the chains on his wrists, to get a blaster in his hands. Maddie was beating at the floor; her knuckles were bloody where the skin had ripped away with her beating. “Maddie,” he said quietly. “Don’t, Maddie.”

Maddie looked at him and Jak saw the tears streaming down her face. She was still shouting for her father, but her voice was so overused it had gone hoarse. Jak watched as she wrenched at her hair, pulling it away from her scalp in great clumps.

All around, the sec men watched the display, casually indifferent as though they had seen this many times before. Probably they had, Jak realized.

“Please stop,” Krysty called from the dais, but the hooded figure continued to stare at Maddie as she squirmed on the floor.

Then Maddie pulled herself upright, kneeling as she looked up at the baron. Suddenly, violently, she pushed forward, bending at the waist, and slammed her forehead into the solid concrete floor, head butting the unforgiving surface again and again. Each time her head hit, her cries for her father became higher, as if she were hiccup-ping.

There was blood on Maddie’s face now, seeping through from her hairline, trickling into her eyes, over her nose and down her cheeks. But she wouldn’t stop.

She just kept slamming her head into the floor, screaming for her father to come help her, over and over.

On the podium, Adam stepped forward and said something quietly to the hooded figure before walking across to the steps, accompanied by the sec men who had brought Krysty to the dais. They made their way down the brief staircase to the floor, and Adam gave an instruction to a nearby sec man who carried an ax next to the blaster on his belt. The man handed over the ax, and Adam tested its weight in his hands. Then he walked over to Maddie where she continued hitting the floor in a strange mockery of genuflecting.

Whatever happens, Jak told himself, this one dies.

Adam grabbed Maddie’s long hair, patchy though it now was after her own assault. He held her upright as she tried to yank herself away and pulled back the ax.

With a mighty sweep, he brought the ax down into the back of the girl’s neck, cutting through it like a tree truck, beheading her in a single stroke, and abruptly halting her pleas for her father’s help.

The girl’s headless body knelt in place as Adam carried his bloody trophy back to the hooded figure on the dais.

IT WAS ONLY BY CHANCE that Mildred had decided to walk around the front of the train. She had seen the exterior once, by night, from the window of the rented room in Fairburn, and she had been half-convinced it was something come alive from a nightmare. The jutting spikes and flaming holes along the matte-black sides still gave her that impression, even up close, and she suppressed a shiver as she admired the metallic beast.

Then, quite unexpectedly, she saw Ryan, tied to the front of the train, hanging just above the floor by his wrists and ankles. His face was caked in dirt and his head hung low, no strength left to hold it up.

Mildred looked behind her, making sure no one else was sneaking up, before she stepped over to him and used her pocketknife to saw through the ropes. “Ryan?” she said with quiet urgency. “Ryan, can you hear me?”

The one-eyed man’s only answer was a groan. His head lolled on his shoulders. He was clearly well out of it.

Mildred untied the final strap binding Ryan’s wrist and eased him gently down. “Ryan, wake up.” He was breathing and didn’t seem to have any obvious wounds.

He was just exhausted. She slung the backpack from her shoulders and rummaged through it until she found the half-full canteen of water. She unscrewed the cap and put the canteen to Ryan’s lips, letting a slow stream trickle into his mouth. “Come on, Ryan, we have to get out of here right now.” She checked her wrist chron again. They had one minute before J.B.’s surprise kicked into action.

Ryan’s right eye flickered in and out of focus and he spluttered out the water, choking on it. Mildred pulled the canteen away, told him to take it easy.

“What happened?” Ryan asked. “Mildred, ’zat you?”

“Large as life,” she told him, smiling broadly. “But not for much longer unless we get away from this train.”

Ryan tried to stand, but he slumped back on the ground. “Can’t feel my legs,” he told her, his voice slurring, “or my arms. What the hell happened?”

“I’d guess you’ve been hanging from the front of the train for the past three days,” she told him, looking around to see if any sec men might have noticed them.

“I’ll help you get out of here, come on.”

On hands and knees, Mildred shuffled along next to Ryan, half dragging him as he crawled slowly away from the train. She guided them over to a glass-walled control room that she had spotted across from the train, set against the wall.

“One second,” she promised Ryan, standing and stepping to the door of the control room. Inside, the room was full of tracking and monitoring equipment, and Mildred recognized some of it as being the workings of an old signal box. There was a single operator sitting at the control board, smoking a rolled-up cigarette, the cloying stench of maryjane in the foggy air. He turned when he saw her step into the room. “Hi,” she said as she raised the blaster in her hand and fired off a shot straight through his forehead. “’Bye.” The signal controller slumped to his console, a neat circular hole between his eyes, the cigarette still clinging to his bottom lip.

Mildred dragged Ryan into the room and they sat together beneath one of the control desks. She glanced at her wrist chron once again as she started strapping up Ryan’s torn wrists with bandages from her med kit.

He had suffered some nasty wounds while hanging from the ropes. They had cut into the flesh of his wrists and Mildred could see signs of infection there.

“What have I missed?” Ryan asked, his voice hoarse as he sipped a little more of the water from the canteen.

“All of the sec men have gathered in the big reception room outside, Jak and a load of kids are chained up ready for the slaughter, and some insane baron has decided to make Krysty his pet,” Mildred summarized.

 “Nothing important, then,” Ryan said, and Mildred stopped strapping his wounds and looked at him. There was a sly smile on his lips, and she knew he was already assessing the best way to deal with their current problems.

Just then, a loud explosion rocked the room outside immediately followed by two further booms, and the glass in the control room’s windows shattered and crashed inward, showering over the desktops and floor all around them.

“Oh, almost forgot,” Mildred added. “J.B. has a plan.”

Ryan nodded, rubbing his hands together as he tried to get the feeling back into them. “So I hear.”

J.B. had rushed through the train, placing explosive charges in every fourth car until he reached the storage cars at the rear of the vehicle. He had not concerned himself with finesse, just tossed the bombs on shelves, under seats, sometimes simply placed them on the floor and then continued on. He had counted out the cars as he worked through them, units fifteen through to sixty, trusting Mildred to pepper the foremost cars with explosives, as well. When he reached car thirty, he had placed a huge wad of plas ex with a timer, setting it to seven minutes, giving him and Mildred more than enough time to complete their designated tasks. He had hoped she would find Ryan, but he had chosen not to delay the operation just because of that, well aware that Ryan might have been thrown overboard after discovery. Holding up the whole plan on the basis of a man who was possibly no longer aboard would be foolhardy behavior based purely on sentimentality, and sentimentality had no place in the .

When he had joined Doc in the midst of the mob, the Armorer had resisted the urge to check his wrist chron.

Some sixth sense worked for him in these situations. He would know when the charges were going to blow. He remained calm as he watched the horrifying mental assault on the young girl in front of the dais. While not the most demonstrably emotional of men, J.B. had not enjoyed witnessing the awful fate of the girl, feeling it a relief when she was finally decapitated and put out of her misery. But rash heroics would do more harm than good now, so he continued to let the timer tick down—when the train went up it would be big and it would hopefully provide the diversion they needed.

The younger male whitecoat had been handed the dead girl’s head by the scarred CO and had taken a powered bone saw to it. He swiftly cut into the forehead, splitting the skull and flipping the top of the head back.

Inside, the brain sat snugly in the cranium, gray and glistening with moisture. Beside J.B., Doc had gasped, as though hit by a sudden realization.

Rubber gloves over his hands, the whitecoat had removed the brain and squeezed it in his hands, watching the trickle of liquid drip from it. The brain was placed in a container where, J.B. saw, it swam in similarly colored, mushy gray liquid.

Doc turned to J.B. and started to say something, but it was cut suddenly short as a series of almighty explosions came from the far right of the vast room. The timer had reached count zero. The first explosion flowered into existence, fire and fury wiping out the thirtieth car and the spreading flames engulfing the cars to either side. It took several seconds, the heat of the flames spreading from the middle car, before the next explosions kicked in, the thermals taking up the symphony of noise and heat.

“Get to Jak,” J.B. shouted over the ensuing chaos, turning away from the bright flames. “We need him now.”

Doc shoved his way through the crowd, most of whom were transfixed by the burning wreckage that had been the center of the train just moments before.

Finding himself beside the children, Doc yanked the Colt Python from its hiding place at the small of his back. Jak stood in front of him, his back to Doc as he watched the reactions of the strange group of figures on the dais, his hands straining at the chains that bound him.

“Might I be of some assistance, Mr. Lauren?” Doc called, raising his voice above the turmoil and explosions that filled the air.

Jak turned, his eyes narrowed in anger. Then he saw Doc and relief flashed across his sharp features for a fraction of a second. “Thought not see you ’gain.”

Doc shook his head, showing Jak the blaster. “I am like the proverbial bad penny, Jak, you should know that by now.”

Jak’s eyes flashed over Doc’s shoulder as the older man spoke, and he powered forward, his hands held high with the small length of chain links pulled taut.

Doc weaved aside as the albino swung both fists fractionally to the old man’s left. Doc turned in time to see a bearded sec man stagger back with Jak struggling to right himself for a further attack. The man spit a phlegmy glob of blood to the ground before raising his right arm. Clutched in his hand, Doc saw, the bearded man held a well-maintained 9 mm Browning Llama blaster. In a second the sec man had the blaster pointed at Jak as the young man used his powerful leg muscles to push himself at his enemy.

AS SOON AS the first explosion rocked the cavernous room, Krysty felt her thoughts snap into clear focus once more, the pain in her head abating; still there, but abating. Being near this Baron Burgess was like holding her head in a clamp. She had to get away.

She turned, scanning the crowd of, what had been a moment before, revelers. They had all turned to look at the flames that engulfed the center of the monstrous train at the far side of the room. As she watched, two further explosions ripped through the train in rapid succession, and she felt the heat of the flames throbbing on her chest and face.

She glanced back, looking at the people on the raised platform. They, too, were entranced, watching the growing inferno that had engulfed their train, all except the strange old woman with the blood-colored tears painted on her cheek. She just sat in her wheelchair, a serene expression on her lips, almost as though she was unaware of anything amiss, instructing the man behind her with a fluttering of hand gestures. Krysty could see the hooded figure of Baron Burgess shaking, gripped with shock, his shoulders shuddering almost as though he was crying.

This isn’t about a train, she reminded herself. It’s more than that, and to walk away now would be nothing but weakness, weakness Mother Sonja had warned her all her life to avoid. Krysty took a determined step forward.