James Axler (16 page)

Ryan looked at J.B., the barest hint of confusion on his face, before turning back to the sec man. He was something approaching six foot eight in height, and he had the shoulders to match. Biceps strained through his stained shirt, and his legs looked solid as the trunks of oaks. He was either a very large man or a very small ogre. Ryan wasn’t one hundred percent certain which.

Behind the ogre like man was an armory, shelves and shelves of blasters, grenade launchers, knives and swords, all lit by a low-hanging oil lamp like the one in the cabin they had secured for Krysty.

J.B.’s eyes widened as he took everything in. They had found the mother lode.

“Orders!” the giant shouted again, his right hand reaching for the blaster secured in his belt.

INSIDE HER MIND it felt like the ocean, where the ocean meets the shore.

The bruja sat there, in the darkened compartment, the blurred vision of her cataract-obscured eyes seeing the flickering candle as a light show, flashing and popping in front of her with all the wonderful colors of the spectrum. The woman sat there and she felt the ocean, washing up again, slapping against the folds of her medulla oblongata, right there at the back of her skull.

A woman, perhaps?

The bruja wasn’t certain, not yet, but she thought it most probably a woman. In her heart, at least.

The bruja came from a whole family of women, of sisters young and old, sisters of different generations, each one schooled in the craft of the wise, each one a bruja like her. And so, quite naturally, she associated power with women, because that was as it had always been. Not blasters, not fists, not the ability to cause violence and pain. No, this was real power that she spoke of when she spoke at all.

And it was almost funny, she thought, that here she was, trapped and enslaved to a man, to Baron Burgess.

His power was artificial, a slight thing, minuscule and irrelevant. But he had caught her, had trapped her and employed her services. And in return she was fed, sometimes.

Years ago, when she had begun the long trek from Sâo Paulo, when she had still been a young woman, she would never have believed that she would be captured and held like this, traveling across the Northlands in a mechanical thing shaped by the hands of man. More so, she would never have believed how little the incarceration being against her will would actually matter to her in the end. But that was more than seventy years ago, when the was still being constructed from the ashes of the old United States, and she had been young and idealistic.

Now she sat there, her old eyes watching the flickering candle flame through a rheumy haze, and she felt for the mind that was like hers. It had joined the train not long past, already shrieking in its pain; in her pain.

It felt like something burning as it washed up once more, the foam of the ocean searing the bruja’s brain.

And then the burning ocean retreated once more, washing away and leaving trails from its smoldering foamy wash.

This one would hurt more, she knew, before the end.

THE FIRST THING that Jak saw when he slowly opened his eyes was a pretty girl, barely into her teens, with silky long black hair pouring like a waterfall over her neck and shoulders. The girl’s skin was golden and her thin eyes were pools of hazel brown.

A box full of children? Was that it?

The girl was a few feet from him, and he could see the wire mesh of a cage behind her, its crisscross metal-work just barely twinkling in the little light of the shaking room. He closed his eyes, not wanting to alert her that he was awake until he was ready, and concentrated on reaching out to his surroundings using his other senses.

He was lying down, his right cheek resting against a coarse fabric, solid and hard-packed, a hard floor beneath his body. There was movement here, the continuous rocking of a ship or…

A train. They had brought him to a train and then they had—

He was lying on the hard floor of a train. The floor was warm, holding his body heat. But the room was cold, air whistling all around as the train shuddered onward to its destination.

He could hear voices, too, the giddy shrieking of children. Not the girl. He didn’t think that she had moved from her vigil. But there were other children behind her, nearer his feet. Yes, that made sense. There had been children on the train. He had seen them.

And then someone had unholstered a blaster and they had pulled the trigger and…

He shifted his weight slightly, a minuscule movement, in time with the rocking of the boxcar. His arm twinged, pain running through it where he had taken a hit outside Fairburn. But there was more. His blaster was gone. His Colt Python. It should be there, resting at the small of his back, but its familiar weight was no longer there. Had he dropped it? He couldn’t remember.

He remembered a scuffle, brief and bloody, not really enough to it to call it an actual fight. The light had been bad, he was hurried, they had overwhelmed him, surrounded him.

And they had brought him to the train, and then they had shot him.

Jak’s eyes flashed open with the memory and he leaped from the floor, his hands reaching for throat of the dark-haired girl beside him. She pulled away, even as he was reaching, a startled scream starting in her mouth, but she was too slow. Jak struck like lightning, pushing the girl—by the throat—to the floor. Her scream cut off, turning into an abbreviated squawk.

Behind him, at least two children were shouting incoherently, and he could hear the scrabbling of feet as they tried to find somewhere to run to in the stinking, enclosed space. A child’s voice, could be boy or girl, Jak couldn’t tell without looking, shrieked a single word. “Maddie!”

“Where?” Jak asked the girl as he held her head to the floor. “What happenin’?”

The Asian girl’s eyes were wide; she was terrified.

Her mouth opened but no noise came out. Jak loosened his grip on her throat and the girl made a squeaking noise, working her mouth painfully.

“Where?” Jak repeated, his voice a low growl.

The girl breathed rapidly, looking in his eyes, fear receding. “I don’t know,” she told him. “Please.”

A boy’s voice, cracking as he spoke, came to Jak from over his left shoulder, where the kids were huddled. “Let her go, Ghost Face. You have to play nice.”

Ghost face?

Slowly, warily, Jak looked over his shoulder. Seven children stood there, encompassing a variety of ages.

The eldest was a boy, thin and wiry, like Jak had been as a lad, tousled dark hair on a dirt-streaked face. Jak guessed he was the same age as the girl, no older than fourteen. The boy stood in front of the younger children protectively, his arms stretched at his sides as though to stop anyone from passing. Jak admired him for that.

Slowly, making it clear just what he was doing, Jak pulled his hands from the girl’s throat and held them out from his shoulders, palms visible. “Okay,” he said, “mistake. Woke thinking chilled.” None of these children could hurt him, he realized, and it was a given that none of them had anything to do with his imprisonment. They weren’t a danger; they were cell mates.

Jak eased himself from the floor, leaving the girl where she lay as he faced the protector of the group. He heard her splutter, trying to clear the scratching sensation in her throat “Name Jak. You?” he asked.

“Marc,” the boy said warily.

Making no sudden movements, Jak offered an open palm to the teen. The boy looked reticent to take it, but eventually he opted to shake.

“See?” Jak told him. “Gentlemen now. Just misunderstanding before.”

Marc nodded. “You were almost chilled,” he told Jak, a nervous smile crossing his lips. He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist as though to hide the smile.

“Yeah,” said another child, this one younger and with wildly curling blond hair that could belong to a boy or a girl. “The big man shot you.” The child sounded enthusiastic about the shooting. His blue eyes were wide with excitement at the memory.

“That’s enough, Francis-Frankie,” the girl said from behind Jak. She had a commanding voice, a natural leader, and he noticed that she had recovered from his attack very quickly. She stood behind him, fists bunched against her hips, and showed no fear when Jak turned to her. She looked at him, openly studying his face for a moment, before asking, “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

“Eyes?” Jak replied, wondering what she meant. Had he been wounded? He reached up, but there was no dried blood, no cuts, no tears. Then he realized what she meant—his red eyes, the eyes of the albino. “Just that way,” he told her. “Momma birthed me as seen. Red ’n’ white, veins of blue, just like old flag.”

“Are you a mutie?” the girl asked. There was no judgment in her tone, it was clearly just curiosity, a need to get all the facts in order.

“Nope.” Jak shook his head. “No sun tanning.”

The girl stood still, looking Jak up and down for a long moment, considering all that he had told her.

Despite her small frame, her dirt-smeared, torn smock, she had a quiet dignity about her, Jak thought. Then she nodded. “Okay,” she said, holding her hand out to him.

“I’m Maddie.”

Jak took her hand and shook it once before looking around at the surroundings. He was in a cage in a wooden train car. There were small gaps in the walls where the planks didn’t meet and where there were knots in the wood. Water seeped though the holes. Jak looked closer, poking his eye to one of the knotholes.

It was daylight outside, daylight and raining. Heavy clouds sat across the sky, not interested in going any-where.

“All prisoners, then?” Jak asked, turning back to the children in the cage. He knew the answer, of course, but he needed to break the ice, to make friends quickly with these children. They may be a crucial resource in his forming escape plan, and it was a definite that just one of them crying foul because they weren’t on his side would scupper any chance he had of getting off without alerting the guards.

“Just like you,” Marc told him.

“Mister?” A small girl child with long blond hair tied in dirty, uneven pigtails stepped forward. Jak guessed she was about eight years of age. “Are you really a ghost?”

Maddie laughed uncomfortably, the reaction of an adult to an embarrassing question, not that of a child.

“Ignore Humblebee,” she told Jak, “she has some silly ideas sometimes.”

Jak bent, addressing the blond-haired girl at her own height. “Hi, Humblebee,” he said gently. “Jak not ghost.”

He held his hand out in front of the girl, palm spread, fingers stretched outward. Humblebee reached across, mirroring Jak’s movement, and placed her palm flush against his. “No ghost,” he told her, smiling. “See?”

Humblebee laughed, a nervous twitter of a noise.

And then she nodded, suddenly solemn. “Not a ghost,” she agreed.

J.B. flicked his wrist and the Tekna blade flew through the air, landing with a solid thud in the sec man’s throat, forcing him back.

Ryan had his SIG-Sauer in his hand now, leveling it over the man’s shoulder toward the far end of the car.

A noise from that end drew Ryan’s attention. A tanned arm appeared, homemade tattoos running down its length in a scribbling of blues and greens. The tattooed arm ended in a tattooed hand and the tattooed hand ended in a cut off shotgun.

The sec man who had abruptly taken J.B.’s knife in his throat took another unsteady step backward, his teeth turning red as his mouth filled with blood. A river of scarlet dripped down the pale skin of his throat, and J.B. and Ryan could only guess how much more was going down the inside, drowning the unfortunate bastard as he struggled to comprehend what had gone wrong. He reached forward, trying to raise his blaster, but it fell from his grip, clattering to the metallic floor beside the low counter where the man had been stationed.

Twenty feet away, at the far end of the car, a woman’s head appeared, popping out for just a fraction of a second from a shelving unit full of ammo, twitching like an inquisitive bird. Then the head disappeared behind the shelves. It didn’t matter. Ryan had her height now.

The rest was just waiting or flushing her out. She had to know that a stray shot in this car, filled floor-to-ceiling with ammunition, grenades, rockets and blasters, would be catastrophic. And Ryan could see the far door, she had to have realized that by now. If she made a move to escape he’d have her, so she had to stand and fight.

The huge sec officer finally dropped to his knees behind the counter, and then his heavy head fell forward. With a crash, the sec man slammed face-first into the metal flooring of the shuddering car.

“Phil?” the woman called. “Phil, you okay?”

Ryan stood still, his right arm raised, the SIG-Sauer steady, his left hand gripping between wrist and elbow to keep his aim absolutely firm.

“Phil?” the woman called again, and Ryan heard the familiar sound of the stock being pulled back and readied on a shotgun.

J.B. crouched, watching the far end of the car where Ryan had targeted. He reached forward, glancing down a fraction of a second to map the movements of his hand, and pulled the knife from the dying sec man’s throat. There was a quiet squelching pop as the blade was drawn from the bloody hole, and then a rapid rush of blood spurted from the man’s throat.

Ryan saw the gunmetal tip of the shotgun barrel appear between the shelving units, and suddenly the woman’s head popped out as she took aim at the strangers. Ryan’s single bullet hit her equidistant between her eyes before she had time to pull the trigger on her shotgun, and she fell backward, knocking into the shelves as she fell to the floor.

Ryan stood there a moment, listening to the sounds of the car until he was certain there were no more sec men to be taken care of. Then he turned to his companion.

J.B. was resheathing his knife in the wrist hideaway.

“What happened to stealth?”

“You threw the knife,” Ryan stated, walking away down the corridor between the metal shelves.

“But I threw it quietly,” J.B. grumbled as he followed Ryan to the door at the far end. The Armorer scanned the shelves as he passed, grabbing a few clips of ammo that he knew would fit one or other of the companions’ blasters. He passed twin clips of 9 mm bullets for the SIG-Sauer to Ryan as he reached the door. “Thought this was going to get easier,” he asked.