James Axler (22 page)

And so, Adam had taken the position of train commander. While the train was traveling, Adam was a demi-baron and these people were his to command.

After he had eaten, he got up and made his way toward the engine. They would be stopping at the next tower shortly, and he knew from experience that without a supervisor the crew was likely to forget something.

Messing up things was not an option any longer. The project was at final stage, they could no longer afford mistakes. He had asked both the whitecoats and the baron himself how the project fared, and they had all made agreeable noises: the tests, it transpired, had proved very encouraging.

Adam had made his way through the cars, passing the store car and the curtained car of the bruja. Adam did not approve of carrying the witch aboard, but Baron Burgess had felt she provided a service they could not get in any other manner. Adam was uncomfortable around the bruja. He disliked the old woman, and he respected her mystical abilities the way one might respect a dog with sharp teeth. Fear and distrust.

After three more cars stocked full of foodstuffs, Adam felt the familiar thrum through the soles of his boots as the driver pumped the brakes. They would be stopping at the tower in a couple of minutes, he knew.

The drawn-out braking procedure of the train was etched into the back of Adam’s brain after all this time, as natural to him as blinking.

He stepped into the ordnance car and stopped, looking around him. The metal-sided car appeared empty. “Hey!” he called loudly, then repeated it five seconds later when no one had answered.

There was no one here, no guards. This was a weapons car, and he had posted guards. His men weren’t known for disobeying his orders; he was the baron as far as they were concerned. None of them had even expressed the slightest hint of mutiny. So there should be two sec men here, keeping watch, checking orders whenever anyone requisitioned a blaster. He had insisted, right from the start, that they keep tight tabs on the weapons. No good having a train if you couldn’t defend it. Every shot was accounted for, every blaster numbered and tracked.

He stepped farther into the car, looking back and forth, a growing sense of unease welling within him.

Where were the guards?

At the low counter he found the giant, Phil Billion, who appeared at first to be sleeping on the job. “Wake up, you worthless half-wit,” Adam shouted at the huge man, but Phil didn’t move. Adam bent closer, looking at the reclining body, spotting the dried stain on the metal floor beneath his face, his neck. Crouching, Adam prodded his ring finger into the dark stain, feeling the liquid that pooled there. The blood had congealed. It was almost dried now and had taken on the dirt brown color old blood. There was a wound in Phil’s neck, a small hole piercing the cartilage of his trachea, maybe an inch across.

Adam looked at the blood on his fingertip, looked at the corpse, then stood once more. “You got aced, you lazy simp,” he muttered as he stalked down the car, flicking the catch on his hip holster and drawing his .44 Magnum blaster. Jen worked here, too, always the shift with Phil. He had drawn up that rota; the two always asked to work together.

“Jen?” Adam asked tentatively, his voice barely audible over the squealing of the brakes. “Jen, you here?

You hid, girl? You hid yourself?”

Adam walked in a semi crouch, heading for the front of the car, checking carefully between the shelving units for Jen or intruders. When he reached the far end, he stood by the door to the next car, his breathing even and quiet. He turned, looking back down the length of the car he had just walked, seeing Phil’s corpse lying there in its own blood. He couldn’t see Jen, couldn’t see anyone else.

Holding the blaster in one hand, Adam lowered himself, bending at the knees to drop to the floor.

Someone could hide under one of these shelving units, some thin bastard come to chill his men. He lowered his head, stretching his body flat to the floor, the blaster close to his face, tracking the floor with eyes and blaster in unison. There was no one under there. The car was empty bar himself and the corpse.

Then, at the very last moment, he saw the hand hidden in the shadows beneath the shelving unit immediately beside him. There was a tiny tattoo of a rose, its petals proudly flowering in a burst of red within the jumble of greens and blues that covered the hand. Jen.

Adam pulled the woman’s corpse out by the arm, bringing her from beneath the shelving unit until he saw the puncture in her forehead where the bullet had gone straight through her brain. Reaching forward, he closed her shocked eyes. Then, he stood and made his way to the horizontal cord that ran high along the left-hand edge of every car. He reached for the cord and pulled at it once, twice, thrice.

A bell rang, a merry little tinkling, completely at odds with Adam’s mood. Three rings: alert.

They had intruders.

Jak had loosened five of the screws that held the gate’s hinges to the frame of the cage. He was working at the sixth when Humblebee rushed over to him and said,

“There’s a man coming.” She whispered it in that way that children will, awkward, loud and showy, making a performance of its being a whisper. Jak pulled his knife from the groove of the sixth screw and palmed the blade as a sec man trudged in from the rear of the car, shuffling sideways along the narrow route that ran by the side of the cage.

The train had stopped a few minutes before, and they had heard shouting from outside, the rumbling movements of heavy equipment over the rumble of the idling steam engine.

Jak remained cross-legged by the cage door and watched the sec man from the corner of his eye. The sec man had a curly mop of dark hair, long sideburns and the signs of several days’ beard darkening his chin. He carried a large longblaster held on a strap that rested on his left shoulder crosswise over his body, hanging below the level of his groin. The longlaster looked homemade, spliced together from old parts, but it took a standard ammo clip of 9 mm slugs in an awkward-looking top-loader. The man was dressed in muted greens and browns, a passing effort at camouflage should he find himself in the woods. As he stepped in front of Jak, the albino flicked his wrist as though swatting away one of the flies that hung around the little mound of feces in the corner of the cage. The movement pushed his leaf-bladed knife from its hiding place in his hand down his sleeve, the sec man none the wiser.

“What you doin’ there, Whitey?” Curly Hair demanded, the smell of rotgut on his breath as he leaned down to address Jak.

Jak’s ruby eyes flicked up, locking with the sec man’s, showing no fear. He remained silent, however, considering possibilities in his mind. There were five loose screws on the hinges, with a good kick or shoulder slam, the door would buckle and fall open, flattening the sec man in the process. While he was trapped beneath the cage door, Jak could use the shiv in his sleeve to cut the man’s throat, or he could do him without any need of a weapon if the man couldn’t get his blaster in place, snap the man’s neck with a twist of his ankles or the thrust of an outstretched hand.

“I asked you a question, boy,” the curly haired man growled. “You a simp as well as a snow-skin freak?”

Jak continued to look at the sec man, his glaring eyes locked.

Maddie’s voice broke the stalemate. “Did you bring us any food?” she asked.

The man looked up at her. The second he stopped looking at Jak, the albino youth began to examine his home-made longblaster, analyzing details, wondering about its rate of fire, what kind of recoil it would produce. The thing was scratched all over, and initials—R.H.—were carved in the black metal of the butt.

“Brats want to eat?” the man grumbled. “And what you gonna do for it? How you gonna earn your dinner?

What? You gonna sing for it? Put on a striptease, maybe, little piece like you?”

Maddie stood still, looking at the man, watching as his eyes played over her thin frame. She didn’t like the way he looked at her. She wanted to cower, to hide from his gaze, but she stood there and concentrated on her breathing, steady in, steady out. An amused sneer had formed on the man’s lips, sharp, yellow teeth showing between his curled lips. Seeing that sneer appear, Jak became suddenly conscious, more than ever, of the weight of the blade hidden in his sleeve.

“Leave her alone,” Marc piped up, stepping in front of Maddie, trying to hide her from the man’s gaze.

“She’s just hungry. We’re all hungry.”

There was a shout outside the car and the sec man turned, looking through the open doorway. Men were walking around outside, Jak could see them busying themselves as they patrolled the area around the stalled train, blasters ready. Curly Hair shouted something, just an acknowledging grunt really, and looked back at the children in the cage. His blue eyes pierced Maddie where she stood behind Marc, and he held her gaze for a moment.

“Be back for you, sweetmeat,” he promised, an ugly smile on his face. Then he spit on the floor of the car before turning and striding to the exit door. He walked down the steep steps and exited the car, Jak’s glowering eyes following every movement.

J.B. HAD SPECULATED that the triple burst of bells was some kind of warning system, and Ryan agreed, feeling deep in his gut that they had been discovered. The companions continued along the train, keeping their heads low as they walked through two more cars stocked with repair equipment and demolition explosives. J.B. paused at the demolition material, picking up a few items and judging their weight and flexibility. Old-fashioned dynamite stood there in sticks like thick candles, but there were also some combustible liquids, some accelerant and a small slab of plas ex. Unlike the weapons store, this area remained unguarded, though the explosives were of the same type and caliber. It was interesting how the context changed the security protocols; while the train pirates didn’t concern themselves with guarding this storeroom, J.B. saw it as a wealth of armament opportunities.

There were two more cars full of food stock, a few old mil rations sitting side by side with cured meats and preserves.

The train began moving again as they entered the next car. They had walked into a wooden box featuring a ladder that led up to a raised portion of ceiling in the middle of the room. Built into the roof, an ex-military rail blaster had been mounted on a swiveling pedestal, and a gunner sat there, scanning the landscape with a pair of binoculars. The sides of the car featured arrow slits, holes big enough to shoot a blaster from while still keeping the occupants well protected. There were five sec men in the car, including the upside gunner, and they were all on high alert. As Ryan and J.B. stepped through the door they found themselves facing a selection of blaster barrels.

“Easy, brother, easy,” Ryan said calmly, his hands raised to shoulder height, open and empty.

 “He one of them?” a bearded man in the rear of the car asked, training a Heckler & Koch longblaster on the strangers.

“Don’t recognize either of them,” one of the others replied, looking Ryan and J.B. up and down, a blaster with an ugly, sawed-off snout ready in his hand.

J.B. kept his hands held loosely at his sides as he stood behind Ryan, feeling the folds of his coat sway around him.

“What’s going on?” Ryan asked.

“You heard the alarm,” the sec man with the broken-snouted blaster replied. “Adam says there’s intruders on the train. Found two dead in the ordnance cars.”

“That’s too bad,” Ryan stated sincerely. “Who was it?” He tried to remember the name the woman had shouted. “Phil? They get Phil?”

“Yeah, I heard it was Phil and his missus,” the sec man stated, lowering his blaster slightly but still holding it trained on Ryan.

“Phil,” Ryan said, moving to look over his shoulder at the Armorer. “You hear that, J.B.? Didn’t he owe you some jack?”

“He had only two left to pay,” J.B. stated. “It ain’t right.” It was code and he hoped Ryan would pick up on it. J.B. could take the two on the left but he didn’t have a clear shot for the others; Ryan would need to deal with them.

“I got some. I can cover your debts,” Ryan answered, looking ahead once more to scan the men to his right.

“Think I could make things right.”

The sec man in the rear, the one who had initially failed to recognize them, spoke up again, his Heckler & Koch still targeted at Ryan’s head. “You fellas knew Phil?” he asked warily. “I don’t remember you. You got names?”

“Ryan and John,” Ryan said, slowly lowering his hands. “We were with one of the construction crews.

Jumped on last night, just outside Fairburn.”

The sec man in the rear pondered. “Is that—?”

He was cut off abruptly as bullets flew through the air. Ryan had shouted the word “Now!” as he skated across the wooden boards of the floor of the car, pulling his SIG-Sauer from its holster as he moved and firing off shots from the hip. J.B.’s hand was already beneath his coat, firing a burst from the Uzi he had stashed there out of sight, clipping holes in the wooden side of the train as he wasted the two sec men to his left.

Ryan fired five shots. The first took out the farther of the two men to the right, mashing into his bearded cheek and obliterating the bone on one side of his face.

The man stepped in place unsteadily, the force of the bullet drilling his head back, snapping his neck as he was whipped backward. He managed to get off a single shot from the Heckler & Koch, firing wildly into the ceiling as he fell to the floorboards, but two more bullets from the SIG-Sauer slammed into his chest, finishing him with certainty.

The second man leaped aside as Ryan reeled off shot after shot at him, tracking his movements as the man sprinted across the car from right to left, ducking behind the thick, metal rungs of the ladder. He watched as his two colleagues slumped to the floor under the barrage of bullets that J.B. had loosed from the Uzi, its sounds loud in the tightly enclosed space.

The man at the overhead rail blaster peeked down the ladder, a silver-plated .38 shining in his hand. Ryan reeled off a shot in his direction and the man ducked back into his cubbyhole.