James Axler (7 page)

“Don’t move, Whitey.” It was a man’s voice, impatient, anger barely held in check.

Jak spun, flipping onto his back and unleashing a blast from his Colt Python without even stopping to think about it. One of the sec men was standing there, right behind him, surprise on what remained of his face as the large-bore bullet drilled through his head. The boom of Jak’s blaster echoed across the plain, and he dropped all pretence of stealth, leaping up and running toward the gates of Fairburn.

The sec men from the train reacted swiftly, a half dozen of them chasing the fleeing teenager across the sand, shouting to one another as they zeroed in on him.

Jak looked over his shoulder, dodging as a well-muscled man in a torn T-shirt made a grab for him from over his right shoulder. The man missed, his hand clutching at Jak’s leather jacket. He pulled his hand back with a shriek, blood pouring from the lacerations where his fingers had gripped around the razor blades and sharp edges of glass and metal that Jak had meticulously sewn into the fabric.

The wounded man reached for the blaster in his hip holster, but the foreman was beside him now, barking instructions. “Keep him alive,” he called loudly, so that all of his crew could hear. “One like that, be a lot of use to us.”

Jak tossed his arms back, the Magnum blaster still in his right hand, keeping his balance as he skirted down the slope that led to the walled ville in front of him. Two more of the train sec men appeared from the shadows to his left, and one of them tossed something in Jak’s direction. Roughly the length of a man’s forearm, the thing looked like some kind of nightstick in the light cast over the wall. Jak ducked his head, swerving to avoid it as it hurtled at him. The nightstick clattered to the ground, missing him by inches, and Jak continued to run.

The gates were closed. There wouldn’t be time to negotiate with the sentries now, so Jak would have to use his speed to clamber up them, the same way he’d negotiated the wall to get out here in the first place. He was scanning the gates, looking for potential handholds, when something hit him in the left shoulder. The other sec man had to have had a nightstick, too.

Jak staggered back, raising the blaster and targeting the two men who charged him. His first shot slapped the lead man off his feet, creating a vast hole in his chest as he fell to the sand. But by then the second was on him, and the handblaster was useless. Jak swung his left fist at the sec man, the man’s stubbled face leering at him as he lunged at the teen with a dagger. The fist connected, caving in the man’s nose. The sec man staggered backward, clutching at his bloody nose, but Jak could feel a nasty throbbing in his left arm. The hit with the nightstick had caught his shoulder, and the surge of adrenaline was already passing, leaving numbness in its wake.

More guards were arriving, appearing from the shadows all around, eight of them, then ten, with blasters and knives.

Jak stepped backward, Fairburn’s gates looming over him, his hands at his sides. He dropped his Colt Python to the sand, then raised his right hand, open and empty.

His left arm sagged, unmoving.

“My sweet Lord,” Mildred murmured as she watched from the window. She stood immobile as the train pulled away and watched it slowly ease along the tracks, away from Fairburn.

Finally she turned and looked at Krysty, who was hunched on the bed, her knees pulled up to her chest in fetal position, her hands over her ears. “Come on, Krysty, time to go,” Mildred said firmly.

Krysty sleepily opened one eye, mumbled something incoherent.

Mildred crouched at the side of the bed, running her hand over Krysty’s fevered brow. “I’m sorry, Krysty, but we have to go. I have to find Ryan and I think it’s best if you stay with me. You understand that, don’t you?”

Krysty slurred her answer, still struggling to shake off her sleep. “O’ course,” she said around her thick tongue. After a moment she opened both eyes and pulled herself up, swinging her legs and feet over the side of the bed. “What happened?” she asked as Mildred passed the woman her cowboy boots.

“They took Jak,” Mildred stated bluntly.

“SO,” DOC ASKED THE OTHERS as the three of them walked back toward Jemmy’s bar and hostelry, “what did you two find out?”

J.B. shrugged. “Nothing we didn’t already know.”

As they crossed the street—now empty but for a lone, hopeful street vendor, still roasting nuts over an open barrel—they saw Mildred burst from Jemmy’s, followed by a tired Krysty. J.B. ran the last few steps to meet them, and Ryan and Doc increased their pace behind him.

“What’s going on?” J.B. asked Mildred.

“Jak’s gone,” she told her audience. “He jumped the wall, to get a closer look at that monstrous thing that—”

Doc interrupted her. “What ‘monstrous thing’?” he asked.

“The train,” Mildred said breathlessly. “Didn’t you see it? Didn’t you hear it, at least? It shook the ground, Doc.”

“We were in the arena, the dog fight,” Doc explained.

“’Twas mighty noisy in there, the crowd all excited and the hounds going at each other hammer and tongs. Quite the experience.”

“Which way did he go, Mildred?” he asked, all business again.

Mildred hefted the backpack on her shoulder, pointing in the direction of the tower. “The train stopped beside the tower, and I think they did something to it, I’m not sure what. It was all very quick, like they had done this before. The whole operation took no more than four minutes. Jak was out there the whole time, he’d sneaked up really close so he could observe and report back, figured it was something worth knowing about.” She stopped, calming her breath. “But they took him, Ryan. They took him and then they left.” She pointed in the direction that the rails led.

 “Fireblast!” Ryan cursed, taking brisk strides toward the gate.

J.B. called after him. “What are you planning on doing? Chasing after him on foot?”

Ryan stopped, turning back to J.B. and the others.

“Well, what would you suggest?”

J.B. smiled as he indicated the corral behind him with his outstretched thumb. “I would suggest that we travel in style.”

Ryan was already sprinting down the street, heading for the corral at the far end, and J.B. kept pace with him.

Mildred looked torn, her head flicking to watch Ryan.

“Go,” Doc told her quietly. “I shall take care of Krysty.” She looked at him, an unspoken question on her lips, and he shook his head. “Now that she is on her feet again, I think we can just about take on the world between us. She will probably be carrying my weary bones by the time we catch up to you.”

“Thank you,” Mildred called as she sprinted down the street after Ryan and J.B.

While their companions raced to the corral, Doc led Krysty in the opposite direction, telling her that they needed to reach the gates. She rushed along in his wake, struggling to keep up.

At the gates, Doc studied the cantilevered system for a few moments. One of the sentries atop the gates—a strong-looking farmhand, twenty-one and toughened up by a life of manual labor—noticed him and made his way down the wood stairs, calling to the old man. “Hey, hey, what do you think you’re doing? Do I even know you?” he asked.

In a single movement, Doc snapped his cane open, revealing the sword blade hidden within, and had it pointed at the young man’s throat. “I will be requiring these gates to be opened instantly,” he explained.

His mouth agog, the young sentry glanced at the blade that was poised at his neck, then collapsed in a dead faint.

From the other end of the street Doc could hear the fast beating hooves of horses. As if to clarify what he already knew, Krysty alerted him. “Here comes Ryan.”

Doc squinted at the lock, trying to fathom how the system of pulleys that opened the heavy gate worked, then he shook his head and pulled his shining Le Mat revolver from its holster. “Rope A, fulcrum, point B…”

He shrugged and blasted a hole through the middle of the rope with a single load from the weapon’s shotgun barrel.

There was a second sentry, an old man dozing atop the sill beside the top of the gates. He was startled awake by the thunderous sound of Doc’s percussion weapon, and the first thing he saw was the gate swinging toward him, the taut rope that held it in place gone slack. The sentry backed up, forgetting where he was, and fell from the top of the wall, the full nine feet to the hard ground. He landed with a thump, rolling on the ground in pain. And then three horses galloped past him, their hooves bare inches from his skull, as the riders left the ville.

The gate open, Doc was rushing back down the street with Krysty at his heels. “We need to get transport of our own, Krysty,” he called to her as he led the way to the corral that Ryan and the others had just raided.

The surge of action seemed to be doing Krysty good.

Her cheeks were flushed, and she seemed more alive now than she had in the past nine hours.

“Do you feel up to riding a horse?” he asked her.

“I feel as if I am flying,” she replied, “floating on a vast lake. It’s all so unreal.”

At the gates to the corral, Doc looked around at the tied horses. “I would be inclined to take that as a ‘no,’ my dear,” he decided, “but please feel at ease to disabuse me of that notion if you so wish.”

She screwed her eyes closed, trying to feel whatever it was that was inside her. “I can still hear the sounds, Doc,” Krysty said. “The screaming.”

Doc spied a pony and trap in one corner of the corral and began to walk toward it. “In which case we shall be a little more sedate in our pursuit,” he told Krysty, untying the pony’s reins. He looked around the corral, wondering if he had missed anything. Slumped on the ground by a sack of feed was the stable boy, a large jug resting on his stomach. The boy was perhaps thirteen years old, and he stank of pear cider.

“Hyah! Hyah!” Doc shouted as he whipped at the pony. He and Krysty were on their way, speeding down the street and through the gates.

Doc gave one last look over his shoulder as they rushed out of Fairburn. He had liked the ville, as it had something of his home-town values about it. Sadly, they probably looked down on horse thieves, he reasoned as he urged the pony and trap past the gates and up the incline in the direction of the tracks.

As they bumped up the incline, Krysty called loudly for him to stop and Doc turned to her. He was hesitant to call a halt to their chase so soon, but he also worried about the young woman’s health. She looked okay, tired but otherwise well, but Krysty called again for him to stop, shouting to be heard over the racing hoof beats.

Doc pulled back on the reins, until the pony staggered to a stop. “What is it, Krysty? Are you…?” Doc began, but the woman was already out of her seat, running back toward the ville. Doc admired Krysty as she ran; there was something of her lithe grace returning to her muscles, though she seemed a little unsteady as she wended toward the open gates of Fairburn. She was twelve feet behind him when Doc saw her bend and take something large and shiny from the ground. Then she turned, ran back, and Doc saw that she clutched Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python blaster.

“Jak would never forgive us,” Krysty told Doc as she climbed into the seat beside him. She didn’t need to finish the sentence; Doc agreed one hundred percent.

He urged the pony toward the horizon. The train was nowhere in sight and neither were their companions.

They had a long ride ahead.

RYAN, J.B. AND Mildred rode side by side, urging the stolen horses beneath them with kicks and slaps. To their left, the train tracks continued in a slight curve across the sandy landscape, barely visible in the moonlight.

J.B. was trying to get the facts in order in his head.

“You say they took Jak with them?” he asked Mildred, raising his voice to be heard over the loud hoof beats on the packed ground.

She turned to him, her beaded plaits whipping across her face. “Definitely. I saw a half dozen of the crew lead him back to one of the cars, then push him inside.”

“And he was still alive? They hadn’t chilled him?”

“They took him alive,” she assured J.B., “but I don’t know how long they’ll keep him that way.”

Ryan continued to look to the horizon as he chipped in on the conversation. “Why would they want him, Mildred?”

“I wasn’t close enough to hear what they said,”

Mildred reminded him. “I could barely make out what was going on once they flicked the spotlights off. All I know is that Jak ran to the gates and a group of men followed him. I heard two shots and then the men reappeared, marching Jak to the train.”

“J.B.?” Ryan called for the Armorer’s opinion.

“Who knows why anyone would want Jak,” J.B. answered.

“If he’s still alive,” Ryan stated, “we’ll find him.

And if he’s dead, then we are going to chill every last sec man on that train.”

THE SEC MEN HAD MARCHED Jak beyond the locomotive engine and the first ten, wheeled units that it pulled before one of them opened a door and shoved him into a car. Jak had kept his head low, hands weaved behind his neck, left arm burning with pain, and tried to keep track of everything he saw.

The engine had been painted a matte black so as not to pick up reflections. It shrugged off the moonlight, a shadow looming large against the indigo sky. Holes had been molded into its casing through which burning coals glowed reddish-orange. It was almost forty feet, tip to tail, and the majority of that space was dedicated to burning the fuel that powered it. An open plate at the end showed where the engineer worked the controls.

Above the engine, near the strange figurehead that jutted from the front, a wide chimney belched puffs of steam while the vehicle stood at rest. Once it got moving again, that smokestack would blast a dense fog into the air around the train, just as Jak had seen on its approach, creating a misty cloud through which it seemed to battle to its destination.

Behind the engine stood a chrome container unit and Jak guessed that this held the fuel that powered the beast. It was a long unit, almost as long as the engine itself, and Jak could see putrid yellow symbols indicating radioactive material within as well as the coal.