Читать книгу Alpha Wave - James Axler - Страница 11

Jak lay perfectly still, the Colt Python resting in his right hand, watching the hideous train pull to a halt beside the skeletal tower. A dozen men had leaped from the first two cars as the train slowed, all of them armed and several brandishing their blasters in readiness, as though they expected an attack. The men spread out across the area, checking, Jak realized, for people who might be hiding, checking for people like him. He hunkered down lower, wishing for better cover in the open plains. For the moment, the armed men remained close to the tower, which was two whole car lengths away from Jak’s current position. Despite leaving it open to the elements and to attack through the day, they had arrived to protect it now—and Jak’s curiosity was piqued.

The train lurched to a halt and a huge cloud of steam burst from the funnel atop its insectlike engine. For a moment Jak watched it through the cloud, like trying to make out faces in the fog, until the steam disbursed, filling the atmosphere all around with a malodorous mist that irritated his nose and throat. Burning—the train smelled of burning.

Instructions were being shouted now, and more people were stepping from the train. The first group had been fighters, sec-men types, well-armed and well-muscled, men of action. But the second group was made up of more general body types.

Two shirtless men were struggling with a cylinder less than three feet in length. Jak guessed that it wouldn’t reach to his waist if it was stood on its end. But seemed to be heavy—the men struggled with it, walking in irregular spurts as they carried it to the tower, quick discussions preceding each movement. A sec man followed them, casually holding a short-handled club, shouting instructions.

Three others followed, two men and a woman, looking nervously around as they left the security of the train. One of the men looked quite a bit older than the others, wispy gray hair blowing around on his balding head, glasses perched on his nose. The other two were younger, midthirties perhaps—about Ryan’s age. All three looked uncomfortable as they walked warily to the tower, taking care not to slip on the dry, sandy ground.

While they made their way to the structure, Jak turned to examine the train. It stretched off down the tracks for a seemingly impossible length. Its details lost to darkness, Jak could see faint lights burning in the cars as it waited down the length of railroad. He held a thumb up to his eye, trying to estimate the length of this beast of chrome and steel, but there were no landmarks to adequately judge it by. A quarter mile, perhaps a little less—that would be his guess. Helluva train.

None of it matched. Though too dark to make out the detail, even with Jak’s unearthly vision, he could clearly see that the cars were constructed ad hoc, random pieces of junk transformed into containers to travel the metal tracks. Some were straight conversions, old train cars pulled out of the enforced retirement of the Long Winter. Others looked like they had been constructed by a blind man dancing a jig in a junkyard, choosing pieces wherever he tripped, bulbous or holed or both, only their wheels fitting the gauge of the tracks.

Noise came from some of the lighted cars, laughing and shrieking, people having fun, their voices and the sound of clinking glasses carrying to Jak over the empty plain now that the shuddering train had ceased generating its arthritic cacophony of movement.

The three people had reached the tower beside the nose end of the train, and they called out and pointed at the ground around the base of the tower. The younger man was setting up a small tripod, unfolding a large sheet of paper that he held out to the width of his arm span and consulted diligently—a map, Jak realized. The woman joined him, jabbing at the map, then pointing at the sky above them, and the man nodded his agreement. Then he crouched slightly, and put his eye to a small metallic box that rested atop the tripod. His right hand fiddled with a knob sticking from the side of the box, and Jak realized that this was some kind of seeing device that he was lining up to check on his whereabouts or the whereabouts of something important to the man and his team.

Meanwhile, two burly thugs worked at the oil drum canister that rested at the base of the scaffold tower. At first Jak thought they were trying to move the half-buried can, but then he saw them remove the large metal plate that formed its lid.

One of the men at the tower put his fingers to his lips and loudly whistled. The cry went out. “More light!”

There was movement to Jak’s left, farther down the train, and two men wheeled a cart from the fourth car down an unfolding ramp and across the dirt. As they passed Jak, barely eight feet in front of his hiding position, he could clearly see the cart. Set on a rig on top of it were three, heavy, round spotlights of the type found in theaters, and a petroleum generator rested on the cart’s base. When they reached the site of the tower, the genny was switched on and it began to chug loudly, spluttering as it started converting fuel to power, filling the air with the rotting fruit stench of petroleum. The spotlights came on in a blaze, dimming a moment, then reaching full intensity. The cart was positioned so that the spots pointed at the open canister at the tower’s base. People milled around, blocking Jak’s line of sight.

The albino teen looked around, conscious of the guards patrolling the surrounding area. They seemed fairly lax, as if they weren’t really expecting trouble, and Jak reasoned that they had had trouble in the past and had dealt with it in a definite manner, the way that scared interested spectators away from future excursions. Whatever, he needed to get closer to the tower, to see for himself exactly what these train people were doing here. If he could see what they were up to, he might have the answer to what the tower actually was, its purpose.

With a swift check over his shoulder, Jak pushed himself off the ground and scrambled across the plain toward the tower, keeping clear of the glowing red lights cast by the holes in the train’s carapace.

He was just forty paces from the tower, then thirty, twenty, and suddenly he had almost run slap-bang into one of the huge sec man dressed in muted colors and holding an a longblaster. Jak dropped silently to the ground, and was reassured that the sec man showed no reaction. Swiftly, Jak clambered away on elbows and knees, the noise of his movement masked by the vibrating gasoline generator.

Jak watched as the three nervous types instructed the others. The woman dipped a thin line of metal into the buried canister, and when she pulled it out it glistened with liquid. She looked at the dipstick for a moment, and the older man with the wispy gray hair spoke to her, writing the reading into a book he had produced from his jacket pocket. He showed her the page and the pair consulted for a half minute. Then the older man pointed to the two shirtless men who had hefted the heavy, three-foot-high cylinder over and instructed them to bring it to him.

Their companion continued to check through his tripod’s eyepiece, occasionally pulling away and using his fingers to count off some calculation, his lips moving.

The two shirtless men had brought the cylinder to the area beneath the tower, and wedged it into the dirt as they stood waiting for further instructions. The older man leaned down, clutching at a muscle in his back and wincing before he adjusted the glasses on his nose to read off something from the side of the cylindrical tank. Satisfied, he nodded and consulted with the woman and the tripod man. There was a hasty discussion, with a lot of arm waving, but Jak couldn’t hear what they were saying over the noise of the genny running the spotlights.

After a while, one of the burly sec men stepped over, his face angry, and jabbed at the older man with a meaty paw. The older man checked his wrist chron and nodded in supplication.

Jak watched as the shirtless men tipped the cylinder toward the open barrel in the ground. The younger man who had set up the tripod shouted a single word, loud enough that it carried to Jak’s ears. “Careful!” Jak shook his head, brushing his white hair from his face unconsciously as he tried to discern what it was that the group was doing. They had unscrewed a cap at the top of the smaller cylinder and were carefully tipping it until a thick drool of liquid poured from it into the barrel beneath the tower. The liquid didn’t pour easily—it had lumps in it and it trickled from the cylinder spout in fits and starts. The gunk was a grayish color, glistening in the harsh spotlights.

Suddenly the operation was called to a halt, the older man, the younger man and the woman all calling for a stop at the same time, shouting over one another. The shirtless men stopped pouring the liquid from the cylinder, tipping it backward until it rested upright again on its base, denting into the sand. One of the shirtless men leaned down, screwing the black cap back on, while the woman tried her dipstick in the liquid of the barrel once again. Satisfied with her findings, she nodded and gave a thumbs-up.

The older man and the woman turned, walking slowly back to the train, deep in conversation. The other man was busy folding the legs of his tripod back together and inserting it into a plastic carry case. An instruction was given by the thug who had pressured the group—a foreman of some kind, Jak reasoned—and the genny was shut down. The lights dimmed and went out, and the generator shuddered a few times before finally sitting still on the cart.

The whole mysterious group was making its way back to the train and it was time for Jak to make his way back, too, to tell Ryan and the others all that he had witnessed. He couldn’t begin to fathom what it all meant, but he trusted that Ryan and the others would make sense of it given enough information and time. The barrel of liquid seemed vital to the operation—was that somehow connected to the tower, beneath the sands, where they couldn’t see?

Jak eased himself backward, crab-walking, his belly touching the ground as he pulled away from the train and the tower, back toward the ville wall. The crew was getting on the train, and he could hear the engine being stoked with coal, building up a head of steam to get it moving once more along the metal tracks. And then he heard another sound: the familiar click as a blaster was cocked behind his ear.

“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.