Читать книгу Alpha Wave - James Axler - Страница 12

“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 hoofbeats.

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.

R YAN, 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 hoofbeats 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.”

T HE 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.

Cars followed. The first was a flatbed, open to the elements with a large cannon affixed to its surface. If necessary, Jak guessed, this would be the first line of defense should any unwelcomes approach the steel behemoth.

After that, a series of boxes on wheels, glass windowpanes catching the moonlight. Jak guessed that these held equipment since one of these cars was where the spotlight trolley had appeared from.

The next two cars looked similar to each other, like large wooden crates with narrow horizontal slits where the planks met, and a set of steps at each end leading up to an open doorway. Inside the first doorway, Jak saw a sec man watching the group that passed with the prisoner. The man held a large-bore shotgun in his hands and trained it on Jak as he passed.

Jak stumbled up the steps as he was pushed roughly into the second car, though he felt grim satisfaction when he heard his assailant’s wail as he cut himself on his deadly jacket.

Inside, the interior was intensely dark, and Jak blinked his eyes several times in an effort to adjust. Out in the open had been dark enough, but the inside was pitch black.

Then a man behind him lit an oil lamp and followed Jak up the steps. “Come on,” he growled, “git in there.”

Jak looked around the narrow car. Floor-to-ceiling grillwork stood immediately in front of him with a bolted gate in its center. The grille acted as a cage, closing off four-fifths of the car. Through the grille, Jak could see eyes staring at him—scared, timid eyes, wet with tears.

As his guard jostled him forward, the oil lamp picked up more of the room and Jak saw that the eyes belonged to about eight or nine children, dressed in dirty rags and cowering as far from the mesh gate as they could. The room stank of their own feces and urine, and Jak could see cockroaches and other small creatures moving around the stained floor of the cage. As he watched, one of the filthy children reached out, trapping a roach in his fingers before devouring its squirming body.

“Welcome to your new home, sonny.” The guard with the oil lamp laughed behind him, his breath rancid as it spewed over Jak’s shoulder.

Another sec man had joined them, and he unbolted the gate, brandishing a remade Beretta blaster at the children in the cage. “These here are your new friends,” he told Jak, pulling back his hand to push the albino inside. He looked at Jak’s coat with its decoration of sharp edges and obviously thought better of it, choosing to wave the blaster in Jak’s face instead. “You get inside.” he told Jak.

Jak looked at the blaster’s muzzle, then up at the sec man’s eyes, and a snarl crossed his lips. The sec man backhanded him across the face, and Jak stumbled backward into the caged room, twirling around before slumping down hard on his rear. The guard pointed the Beretta at him, arm outstretched, aiming it at Jak’s forehead.

The albino teen sat still, watching the man’s eyes, waiting for that flash of determination that meant he was going to pull the trigger. Nothing. Just a bluff. A wicked smile crept across Jak’s face and the man growled, lowering the blaster.

And then Jak saw the twitch in the eyes, the defining moment, and the man pulled the trigger after all, burying a slug deep in his chest.