James Axler (9 page)

Mildred sat cross-legged on the metal plate floor four feet in front of the door and held her ZKR 551 loosely in her hand, her eyes focused on the door handle. “Got it,” she said. “You boys look around, see if there are any toys to play with.”

Ryan and J.B. checked the small room rapidly as the glow stick continued to fizz out its greenish hue. The walls held strong steel shelves at the tail end, and the shelves were piled with train parts in various states of deterioration. Some even looked shiny new. There were heavy wheels for the rolling stock, jars and other containers filled with rivets, nails and screws; large sheets of metal lay atop one another in a huge stack, and J.B. found another group standing in one corner, wedged in the gap where two shelving units met. They located three acetylene torches for welding, and J.B. shook one to see if it had any fuel in it. Hooks and chains were attached to ceiling racks, and they rattled with each movement of the car.

“Storeroom,” Ryan announced.

“Repair shop,” J.B. agreed. “These people are well prepped for life on the move. Smart place for it, too, all this heavy metal at the back of the train—it would do double-duty as armor if someone tried a rear assault.

They’ve thought this through.” He looked around the cramped room, calculating how much material was held here. “Probably not the only one though, train this size.”

“Any medical supplies?” Mildred piped up, never looking away from the door she guarded.

“Nothing seen,” Ryan confirmed.

“We’ve got everything we need to barricade both doors,” J.B. said, “but I don’t know if there’s any real reason to do so.”

“Safety?” Ryan suggested.

“How safe would it be if someone blasts the car and unhooks the couplings?” J.B. asked in reply. “Find ourselves in a hot coffin with both exits well fortified to stop us getting out in a hurry.”

“Point taken.” Ryan nodded.

“So,” Mildred asked, “what do we do? Take it one car at a time?”

“No,” Ryan said firmly. “We’ll just look around for now. Make some decisions once we get the lay of the land.”

J.B. was opening the containers, seeing if anything else was stored in them besides screws and rivets. “Do you remember which car they took Jak into?” he said, addressing Mildred while both of them continued on their designated tasks.

“It was relatively close to the front section, about the tenth or twelfth car from the engine,” she told them. “I didn’t really get a sense of how long this thing was until we were above it.”

“Yeah,” Ryan grunted. “We need a way to get to the right car. Any ideas?”

“Along the roof?” Mildred proposed.

“Lot of sec men up there,” Ryan said, shaking his head. “Can’t rely on all of them sleeping on the job like my pal back there.”

“If we knew what was in the car…” J.B. trailed off, turning the idea over in his mind.

“Reckon we’re going to have to find out,” Ryan stated after a moment.

“Reckon we are at that,” the Armorer agreed.

They were about ten miles out from Fairburn, traveling in a southeasterly direction. “Mostly southerly,” J.B. decided, consulting his tiny compass by the eerie light of the glow stick, “but I saw some curvature to the tracks that suggests we’ll loop to the east.” The three of them were pondering their next move in the cramped storage car.

“Ultimately, we are going to have to get much closer to the front if we’re to locate Jak. That means working through the car somehow. Any idea what we can expect to find there?” he asked Mildred. “You’re the only one of us that saw the folk who work this thing.”

“Quite a few sec men came off the train when it stopped…” Mildred began.

“How many is ‘quite a few’?” J.B. interrupted.

“More than a dozen, but I didn’t count them on or off,” she admitted. “I was trying to keep one eye on Krysty.”

The hard look left Ryan’s face for a moment. “We understand, Mildred. Go on.”

“I saw maybe fifteen men, some of them were giving out orders, I think,” she said. “Our window really was quite a long way from the action, Ryan. The whole plan was that Jak would do the scouting and report back.”

“Pretty thin plan,” J.B. concluded in a growl. He was leaning against one of the walls, flattening out a dent in the brim of his fedora.

“Well,” Ryan decided, “I guess we are going to have to take us a look-see outside, see how far we can get.”

“Pretty soon someone is going to notice that the rearguard’s gone,” J.B. stated, pointing to the roof. “It’s pretty dark out there but they will notice if they don’t see a body sitting up top.”

“What are you saying?” Ryan asked.

“One of us should get up there, keep their head down and hope they don’t get challenged, least till Doc gets here,” he stated evenly. “Anyone want to play ringer?”

Mildred piped up. “I’d like to keep an eye out for Doc, make sure Krysty is all right.”

J.B. considered that for a moment. “Ryan?”

“Your build is closer to their lost comrade, J.B.,” he told his friend.

J.B. stepped across to the roof hatch and reached up to unseal it. “Good point,” he acknowledged before climbing out of the hole.

Ryan offered his hand to help Mildred off the floor.

“Ready, Mildred?”

THE TRAP JOSTLED over the rough ground as Doc urged the pony on in pursuit of the train. “How does it feel now?” he asked Krysty as he struggled with the reins.

“It’s a lot better,” she told him, pulling her jacket around her to stave off the cold wind that had whipped up around them. “My head feels much clearer now, like the pressure’s going away.”

“Any thoughts about what was causing it?” he asked her.

“The closer we got to that ville, the worse it became.”

 “And now that we have departed the area…” Doc continued, seeing the logic.

“Mebbe there was something there affecting me,”

Krysty suggested, pushing her hair away as it blew into her face. “Never felt that before.”

“It is certainly most peculiar,” he acknowledged.

“And yet Fairburn seemed—almost impossibly—normal. Friendly place, a real sense of community.”

Krysty barked out a laugh. “Perhaps I’ve been on the trail so long that I cannot bear to be near normality.”

“It was not just hallucinations, Krysty,” Doc reminded her, steering the pony around a large ditch in the terrain. “At one point when we were nearing the ville in question you were beset with a sudden, inexplicable nosebleed. That is more than a simple adverse reaction.”

Krysty shook her head, mystified. “I don’t even remember. Did that really happen?”

Doc nodded. “Something in that ville was working its way deep inside you,” he told her, “and removing you from there has proved itself a most fortunate decision.”

“What about the train of screams?” Krysty asked thoughtfully after a moment. “Could that have done something to the wiring in my head?”

Doc looked across to her. “I have considered that possibility, but it does not ring true. You were affected long before the train came to Fairburn. In fact, you were at your worst long before the engine appeared. If anything, its appearance coincided with an overall improvement in your health.”

“Apart from the imaginings of my ears,” she reminded him.

Doc encouraged more haste from the pony, snapping the reins and shouting encouragement to the creature before turning back to Krysty. “Do you still hear it now?”

“A little,” she told him, “if I listen for it. But it’s real quiet and far off now. What’s gotten into me, Doc?”

Doc shook his head. He had no answer.

THE WIND BLEW in Mildred’s face as she stood in the open doorway to the lattermost car on the train. When she looked down she could see the ground rushing beneath the cars, the metal tracks two parallel streaks caught in the periphery of the green light cast by J.B.’s ebbing glow stick.

Two feet ahead of her, close enough to reach, stood another open door, mirroring the one she stood in, the entryway to the next car in the monstrous train. Ryan had just stepped through it and disappeared into the dark shadows within.

Mildred crossed the gap and stepped through the open door, her target revolver held upright in a two-handed grip. She took an immediate side step to the left the second she was through the door, flattening her back against the metal wall of the new car.

The car seemed to be about the same width as the one she had just exited, and she could just about make out trace lines of bluish light trailing along the sides. Other than that, the room seemed to be in utter darkness.

Ryan’s voice came from the shadows ahead of her:

“Clear.” Mildred would place him at maybe fifteen feet ahead. “Keep going, watch the crates.”

Crates? Mildred held her eyes closed for several seconds. When she opened them she could see more clearly in the dark, narrow room. Shadowy shapes stood in the darkness, large square blocks lining the walls, some spilling across the central area of the room.

Enshrouded in darkness at the far end of the car, Ryan was almost invisible, the only hint of his existence coming from the indigo sky reflected on his belt buckle when he turned to call her. “Come on, Mildred. Let’s go.”

Mildred pushed the door behind her silently closed, then walked the length of the car to join Ryan at the next door.

THEY CHECKED FIVE CARS, each subsequent car increasing the tension in Mildred’s mind. The whole while, Ryan remained calm, treating the opening of those doors as routine.

The cars had been stuffed with various supplies, all of them ephemera one might associate with the construction of steam engines and train tracks. There was a lot of unpainted metal, sheet steel and solid pig iron, cut into various shapes and sizes for ease of storage or for specific uses. Ryan proposed that the majority of it was probably intended for what would basically amount to patching the engine and cars as required, and Mildred had voiced her wonder that the train was built so shoddy as to need a constant repair kit to hand.

“What’s the weather like in the state of North Dakota, Doctor?” Ryan had asked her.

“I don’t know,” she replied without really thinking.

“Me neither,” Ryan said. “But I’ve seen toxic clouds full of pollution and radiation right across , and I don’t imagine that Dakota is somehow different. Wind blows the wrong way, you could probably see whole hunks of this train burned through by an acid storm.”

Mildred nodded, looking around the car they were in, seeing the supplies in a different light. “Pays to be prepared,” she agreed, with new understanding.

Three of the cars had had at least one window, one of them had one whole side devoted to reinforced glass.

When Mildred had taken a closer look she had recognized a sticker still adhering to one of the panes—this was windshield glass designed for automobiles before nuclear eschaton had changed the world. Never used for their original purpose, the windshields had been placed upright and secured by welded spots to form the joins.

Mildred and Ryan had stopped and looked through the safety glass for a half minute. He was watching the curve of the train, looking for nearby roof guards ahead of them against the moonlit sky. She watched the countryside whiz past in the darkness, noticing the outline of trees against the horizon. The terrain was changing; they were moving out of the bland desert that had covered the earth from the Minot gateway to Fairburn.

When they reached the sixth door, Ryan paused. He was standing on a minuscule sill below the far car’s door, no more than a lip of metal where the door and floor failed to meet correctly, the ground between the tracks hurtling by four feet below him. He turned back, stretching one leg across the gap between the two cars and wedged his foot there, propping himself over the open gap.

“I don’t like it,” he told Mildred quietly.

“Should we go back?”

Ryan hung between the doors a moment, considering options. Finally he stepped back into the car with Mildred, closing the door behind him. “We’ve been lucky so far,” he told her quietly. “No sec men, nobody.

I saw a light under that door, so it’s likely there’s someone in there. Mebbe a whole mess of someones.”

Mildred nodded glumly. “We’ll have to face them sooner or later. We could wait for Doc and Krysty, have J.B. with us, too, and go in guns blazing.”

“Or we could do it quiet,” Ryan said, clearly thinking out loud. “Stealth, just the two of us.”

“And maybe not need to do it at all.”

“What?” Ryan demanded.

“I was just thinking about the problem being two doors,” Mildred told him, and then realized what she had said. “Back in medical school one of my lecturers told me an anecdote about trying to find an obstruction in a patient’s large intestine. He was using a tiny camera that fed through a thin wire inserted in the patient’s mouth, but he and his team just couldn’t find whatever it was that was causing the patient so much trouble.

‘And then,’ the lecturer had told us, ‘I remembered something quite fundamental about the human body.’ and he pointed to his anus.”

Ryan smiled. “So the doctor put the camera…”

Mildred nodded. “The lesson that he taught the class that day was to always remember that the body is three dimensional. If you can’t get in one side, alter the tangent of entry.” Mildred pointed to the door at the far end of the car, the one through which they had entered.

“Every car we’ve been in after the first has had two doors besides the sliding side panels, Ryan.”

“Some of them have had three, one in the roof or one in the side,” Ryan reminded her.

“You enter that car through the back door here, where it’s all unmanned storage lockers on wheels,”

Mildred said, “Whoever is in there is likely going to wonder where your gateway is, am I right? But if you enter via the front door…” She held her hands open, as though the whole strategy was obvious.

Ryan’s single eye burned into her. “Up, over, down, through the door. Then we introduce ourselves to the local players.”

“Without arousing so much suspicion,” Mildred finished.

“The real question is,” Ryan decided, “whether we can go up and over.” He went back to the door between the cars and gestured for Mildred to keep well back. She stepped backward to the center of the car, still clutching her target revolver, and tried to remain alert as Ryan disappeared out the door.