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Feet first, Ryan dropped through the opening, quietly landing in a crouch and steadying his blaster hand with his left, swiftly rotating on his heel to take in the confined space of the car. The room was dark, the only light coming from the night sky through the open hatch directly above him. He could sense objects all around him. A few glints of metal caught his eye, but he couldn’t see anyone else in the car. He held his breath and listened, blaster still in the ready position. Nothing.

He was alone.

He called to the others, his voice a low growl, confirming the all clear and instructing them to join him.

Mildred dropped down first, her target revolver still in hand, and J.B. followed, Uzi at the ready.

“Dark as a blacksmith’s rag in here,” J.B. muttered as he pulled the roof hatch back in place. He fiddled in one of his jacket pockets for a moment and produced a glow stick with an audible snap. The glow stick emanated a dull, green iridescence, filling the car with long shadows.

Ryan scurried to the front end of the car and stood next to the metal door that had appeared with the increase in light. He put a hand on the doorknob, slowly increased the pressure on it and felt the door give, opening a bare inch. He pulled the door closed again and examined it for a locking device of some kind, but couldn’t find any bolts or turnkeys. “Door’s unlocked,”

he told the others bleakly.

“One of us needs to watch that at all times,” J.B.

decided. “Can’t be entertaining uninvited company.”

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 80

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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 plasts the car and unhooks the couplings?” J.B. asked in reply. “Find our-Alpha Wave

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selves 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.

Chapter Eight

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 Alpha Wave

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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.”

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“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, inexpli-cable 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 Alpha Wave

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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 86

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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 Deathlands, 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.”

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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.

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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 Alpha Wave

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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.

Ryan had lifted himself so that his head was above the rooftops of the cars both fore and aft. He checked the one behind first, saw no one there, then his head whipped around and looked at the rooftop of the car he intended to cross. Empty.

He dropped back to the rear car and encouraged Mildred to follow him. Then he was back out the door, lifting himself up the fore car by the strength of his arms alone, letting his legs swing below him until he could kick them over onto its roof. Mildred watched the feat of strength, realizing that Ryan had done it to avoid kicking at the car and alerting its passenger or passengers.

She looked behind her and reached up for the top of the open door frame of the car they were leaving. She pulled herself up on the swinging door, using the handle as a footrest, and got her knee up on its thin top ledge.

From there she could reach the opposite roof with ease, and she pulled herself onto it, crossing the gap quietly.

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Ryan waited there, crouched and looking back and forth, up and down the moving train as the wind caught at his dark hair. “Sec man two cars behind us,” Ryan whispered, “another at twelve o’clock, three lengths ahead.”

Mildred squinted, trying to make out the dark figures against the night sky, noticing the light cast from the windows of the car below them on the ground beneath.

“Got them,” she told him quietly.

“Don’t think either of them will give us trouble, as long as we move quick,” he suggested. “It’s dark and it’s noisy out here, and they’re probably posted to look over the edge for attacking locals or muties.”

“Not checking tickets—got it.”

Together, the pair prowled across the curved rooftop in quick, quiet steps. Halfway across they dropped to the roof and lay flat. Ryan held Mildred’s hips as she dropped her head over the side of the train and looked in a lighted window—just a fraction of a second to assess the scene before she reappeared on the roof.

“Compartments,” she whispered to him, then they got up and made their way stealthily to the far end of the car.

At the other side, Ryan dropped like a stone, there one second, gone the next. Mildred dropped flat on the roof surface again, bracing her legs and swinging down.

She hung upside down between the jostling cars in front of the door, blaster ready. Ryan pulled the door open and entered, with Mildred hanging there, covering his back.

Ryan clutched his blaster as he stepped into the car.

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were compartments, just as Mildred had advised: glass partitions in wooden frames, their contents hidden by heavy, moth-eaten curtains. There were four compartments in total, and each had a glass-and-wood door in its center. This was, Ryan realized, a genuine train car, salvage scrap put back on the tracks, probably two hundred years after it had originally seen use.

Noises came from the compartment closest to him, and he silently walked the length of the corridor, stopping and listening at each of the doors to confirm whether they appeared to be occupied.

After he had checked them all, listening at the doors and peeking through gaps in the curtains, Ryan silently indicated for Mildred to join him. Swinging on the door frame, hands clutching the top, she dropped to the floor of the car very quietly, closed the door behind her and unholstered her revolver once more. The corridor shook from side to side with the movement of the train as Mildred sneaked silently along, and she held her arms out to keep her balance without raising the alarm.

Ryan stood outside the third compartment, his back to the glass wall, blaster held shoulder high. Mildred stood opposite the door to the compartment, her own revolver ready, and nodded firmly at Ryan. It was clear that he intended to enter, and that Mildred was his backup; he didn’t need to state it out loud for her. He put his left hand on the door handle and shoved the sliding door aside with a noisy clatter on its tracks, raising the SIG-Sauer and entering the room in a series of swift, fluid movements.

The small compartment was dimly lit by an ornate oil lamp hanging low on the ceiling. A bunk stood to the right, a curtain pulled across it, and to the left a chair 92

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sat in front of a small shelving unit with a mirror and a large washbowl. A large, curtainless window—almost the whole width of the compartment—looked out across the passing countryside, dabs of green speckled between the sandy-yellow soil. There was movement in the bunk behind the curtain, and a hand appeared, hairy knuckles reaching to pull back the curtain.

A gruff voice came from behind the curtain as it swept back. “Who the…?” But the man didn’t get to finish his sentence. Ryan had shouldered the bunk’s curtain aside and leaned one knee on the man’s chest, thrusting the blaster into the occupant’s face. An ugly face glared back at Ryan from the wrong end of the barrel, piggy eyes narrowed in reams of pallid flesh, unshaven jowls hanging heavily beneath.

The man’s eyes were full of questions, all of them murderous, but he remained silent as he looked at the one-eyed man bare inches above him. Behind his attacker he watched a curvaceous, dark-skinned woman pad into the room, sliding the door back into place and adjusting the curtain to ensure no one could peek in.

J.B. KEPT LOOKOUT AT THE BACK of the train, unconsciously checking the hilt of the Tekna knife he had hidden in one sleeve. The wind whirled all around him, making sound an unreliable indicator. Behind his round spectacles, his eyes flicked back and forth, and he spent equal times watching ahead and behind him as the train thundered across the ragged landscape. He was doing a commendably more vigilant job than the sec man that Ryan had dispatched, and the irony of that didn’t escape him.

On the horizon, where the deep blue of the sky met Alpha Wave

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the solid black shadow of the earth, J.B. spotted a movement. The train was going downhill, a subtle incline, and it meant that he was looking upward. The moving shape looked like a box, and J.B. narrowed his eyes to try to bring it into focus. The box was being pulled with some speed across the bumpy plain, and J.B. concluded that a single horse was at the front of it.

He watched for almost two minutes before he decided that the pony and trap was following them. Because of the curvature of the railroad tracks, their pursuers could cut out vast chunks of the journey, straight-lining where they circled, and this was being used to help the vehicle catch up to them, slowly but surely. The jackass way of doing things like that had all the hallmarks of Doc, J.B.

realized. Still, if it worked…

J.B. looked behind him, thinking about the car below and whether there was anything he could use in there to help Doc and Krysty get on board—rope, mebbe, or some kind of wire he could turn into a lasso. As he looked behind he saw a man approaching—one roof ahead and closing the distance carefully, keeping his balance low with a crouching shuffle of movement. As he watched the man approach, J.B. eased his index finger beneath the trigger guard of his Uzi, felt for the reassuring weight of the Tekna knife in his sleeve.

“Nate?” the man’s voice carried to him on the rushing wind. “That you, Nate?”

Whoever was approaching him, it wasn’t Ryan Cawdor.

Chapter Nine

J.B. sized the man up in his mind watching him jump across the gap between the car and land at the end of the one J.B. waited atop—about six feet tall, maybe 240

pounds, all of it solid muscle. He moved like a big cat, instinctively balancing on the moving rooftop. He wore a revolver under his arm, holstered in a shoulder rig, and the barrel to a larger blaster could be seen over his shoulder where it hung on his back by a thick leather strap. As the man closed the gap between them, J.B.

could see pitted scarring on his cheeks, awkwardly catching moonlight.

“Nate?” the man asked again, deliberately keeping his voice low. He was just a few paces from J.B. now, trying to make him out in the darkness. “Hey, you ain’t Nate,” the man finally said.

With the butt of the Uzi resting on the car roof, J.B.

had the man perfectly in his sights. But he waited, not pulling the trigger. The man had realized that he wasn’t

“Nate,” but he hadn’t made any move for his own weapon.

“What happened to Nate?” the man asked, his dirty blond hair blowing around his face.

In his mind’s eye J.B. saw the sec man falling from the train after Ryan had knifed him in the gut, a bloody splash oozing over his shirt. “Stomach problem,” he stated.

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“Little wonder.” The man laughed, clearly at ease with the stranger. “All I see him eat is crap.” He crouched and held an empty hand out to J.B. “Givin.

Sean Givin.”

J.B. rested the Uzi on the rooftop and shook the man’s hand. “John Dix,” he told him. “You my relief?”

“Yeah, man, and— Did you say your name was Dix?

You’re not Tish’s old man, are you?”

“Cousin,” J.B. said. He had no idea who Tish was, but it seemed that Sean Givin was happy to fill in the details and provide far more trust and alibi than J.B.

could have asked for.

Sean shook his head, relieved. “Phew, thought I’d just walked into an ambush for a minute there.” He looked around. “I didn’t walk into an ambush, did I?”

J.B. reached across, giving the sec man a friendly punch on the shoulder. “Hey, what my cousin does is up to her. None of my business,” he confirmed.

A line of bright teeth appeared in the moonlight as Givin smiled. “I’m real sorry I’m so late, man,” he told J.B. “You go get yourself some sleep. I got this covered now.” He pointed out across the land behind the train, not really looking.

J.B. got to his feet. He was rapidly considering what to do next. Doc and Krysty were on their way, and the last thing they needed was a firefight with this stupe. At the same time, if the Armorer chilled him now he’d only up the possibilities of raising suspicion. The ante had been raised high enough with their boarding the train, and the trusting sec man’s naivete had granted him a lucky break.

He made his way to the far end of the car roof, looking back at Sean Givin sitting there, the wind 96

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catching his long blond hair. Doc or Krysty could handle this dope, and neither of them would be stupe enough to approach the train without checking for guards. For now, J.B. was going to have to retreat and see if he could locate Mildred and Ryan.

“WHERE ARE WE GOING?” Ryan barked at the man in the bunk, pushing the barrel of the blaster further into his forehead so that the man sunk down in the pillow.

“What is this train’s destination?”

The man in the bed stuttered, fear overcoming his ability to speak. “I—I—I…”

“Where?” Ryan barked again, but the man failed to provide a coherent reply. “Listen, you little worm. That thing you feel pressing against your forehead is the end of my blaster. I’ll shoot what little brains you have right out the back of your head and no one will hear a damn thing over the racket of the engine, no one will come running. So you answer my questions now or you’re going to have yourself one bastard headache. You understand?”

The man gave a slight nod, the pressure of the blaster causing more pain as he moved his head. His whole face had turned very red with the pressure placed on him, the blood rushing to his head.

“So,” Ryan asked again, “where?”

Ryan watched the man blink rapidly, his tongue struggling around his mouth. “Forks, man,” he said, his voice trembling. “The Forks.”

“And where the rad blazes is that?” Ryan asked, and he looked across to Mildred who stood at the mirror, ignoring the man in the bunk.

“North? South?” Mildred shrugged, filling a dis-Alpha Wave

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posable hypodermic syringe she had taken from her med kit. “I really don’t know. I can’t think of any Forks.

Maybe it’s a nickname.”

Ryan breathed a sigh through gritted teeth before turning his attention back to his captive. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. He was taken on this train against his will.”

The man in the bunk just looked at Ryan with those wide, scared eyes.

Ryan continued, gouging the barrel of his blaster into the man’s forehead once more. “What are you? Sec man? Is that it?”

“Yeah,” the man breathed, clearly terrified.

“You take prisoners? You do that?”

“Sometimes,” the man croaked. “Just kids though.”

“Just kids?” Ryan repeated, scowling.

The man struggled to breathe. “Mebbe sluts sometimes, I’m not…not sure.”

“Be sure,” Ryan warned him.

“Yeah. Gaudy sluts. Good-lookin’ girls who should be gaudies. You know, guy?” the terrified man pleaded.

“No,” Ryan shook his head. “My friend is young-looking, very distinctive. He’s an albino. You know what that is?”

The man tried to shake his head but Ryan’s blaster point held him firm. “No.”

“Means he’s white,” Ryan told him. “Pure white, like snow. You get snow here? You’ve seen snow?”

“I see snow,” the man agreed. “Wintertime.”

“My friend’s skin and hair are colored like snow. You wouldn’t miss him.”

“I don’t…” The man in the bunk tried, but couldn’t seem to finish the sentence. His eyes fluttered.

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“You don’t remember, you haven’t seen him? What?”

“I ain’t seen no one, man,” the man croaked. “Please don’t chill me,” he added, his voice high and squeaky.

Ryan took the blaster away from the man’s head but continued to point it at his face. “You are going to have to remain very quiet for me if I’m to let you live.” The man nodded, his lips clamped shut, and so Ryan continued. “And you are going to have to prove irre-placeable in your helpfulness to me and my people.

Think you can do that?”

The man’s eyes flicked across to his right, looking above his head for a fraction of a second, then he looked back at Ryan. “Anything,” he said. “Anything at all.”

Ryan stepped back slowly, his SIG-Sauer still trained on the man’s face.

“I can sedate him, if you want,” Mildred told Ryan.

She had found some ancient sedatives during their rummaging in the remains of military hospitals and the like, although she wouldn’t want to vouch for the reliability of these medicines these days. Sedatives, like everything else in the Deathlands, inevitably expired.

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Ryan told her.

“Our friend here just wants to play along. Isn’t that right, friend?”

The man spun in the bunk, launching his right hand at a cubbyhole above his shoulder, obscured from view by the pillows of the bunk. “Screw you!” he croaked, pulling a snub-nosed .38 weapon from the cubbyhole and swinging it around to target the intruders.

Ryan’s bullet drilled through the man’s forehead in an instant, and the man’s blaster hand continued to swing around but his fingers never pulled the trigger.

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tered across the bunk, the pillows and the beechwood wall behind. Though loud in the contained area of the cabin, the noise of the blaster was negligible outside thanks to the racket of the train rocking along the tracks.

Mildred held her breath, looking at the scene for a moment as the man’s body twitched, its life departing.

“I thought we could sedate him,” she said quietly, “if he became rowdy.”

Ryan sighed. “Didn’t seem like the sedating type, Mildred,” he told her, his blaster still trained on the body in the bunk as a final muscle spasm jerked through it.

After a moment Ryan opened the door slightly, poked his head out and checked the corridor. No one was coming.

He stepped back into the compartment and holstered his weapon in his belt. “J.B. is probably getting concerned,” he told Mildred.

THE SWEAT WAS FOAMING on the pony’s coat as Doc urged more speed from its tired legs. They had been racing across the North Dakota plain for far too long, and the animal was near exhaustion. It couldn’t take much more of the grueling punishment. Its legs looked unstable as it ran, threatening to buckle as it dragged the trap behind it. However, they were definitely gaining on the train now. Doc could see its obscene length slither-ing along the tracks, a giant, black caterpillar crossing the land, smoky steam belching from its foremost segment.

“I think it may actually be slowing,” Doc said to Krysty, his eyes fixed ahead, watching the train in the distance.

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tion louder, above the loud tattoo that the pony’s hooves were banging out on the hard-packed earth. They had hit a few pockets of grass here and there, and the land was definitely getting greener, the soil more fertile. Doc turned to Krysty, then, and saw she was slumped in the seat beside him. “Krysty?” he asked, letting go of the reins with one hand and reaching across to shake her gently by the shoulder. “Krysty, dear? We’re almost there. Try to stay awake.”

Krysty’s head weaved atop her neck as she returned to consciousness. She looked at him, bleary-eyed.

“D-Doc?” she groaned. “Is that you?”

Doc glanced ahead—just level fields here—then took the opportunity to look more closely at his companion. “Krysty, are you feeling unwell?” Mentally he added the word again.

She shook her head, not in answer to his question, he realized, but to try to bring reality back into focus.

“The screaming is louder,” she told him, so quietly he had to strain to hear her over the drumming sound of hooves.

“We’re getting closer to the train,” he explained.

“Perhaps we were wrong in our earlier summation. It seems to be having some affect on your faculties, after all.”

Krysty looked ahead of them, eyes focusing on the train in the distance. “It’s that, but it’s not just that,” she said after a moment’s consideration.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s so hard to tell. My brain feels like it’s on fire,”

she said hesitantly, struggling to find the right words of explanation. “But there’s something… I can’t tell if it’s just inside me now, alive and eating away at me.”

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her lightly on the shoulder. “You poor child,” he said.

He watched, horrified as she winced at his touch. “My profuse apologies,” he told her, immediately withdraw-ing his hand.

Krysty closed her eyes a moment, and when she opened them Doc could make out the watery tears in the moonlight. “It hurts so much,” she said.

Silently, Doc agreed with her. It hurt him, too, deep inside, seeing his companion in so much pain.

“HEAR THAT?” Mildred asked.

Ryan cocked his head, trying to filter out the sounds of the train to divine something new. “What?”

“High-pitched squealing. That’s brakes,” Mildred told him. “We’re slowing down.”

Ryan moved across the tiny compartment and looked out the fly-specked window. “You’re right,” he said, examining the landscape as it passed. “Any ideas why?”

Mildred shrugged. “Pit stop, station.” She thought for a second, then added, “Food run?”

“Doc found out something earlier,” Ryan said, “and never had the chance to tell you. There are other towers.

That’s what he was told.”

Mildred felt a chill come over her, hugged her arms around her as she stood next to Ryan while he watched through the window. “It doesn’t surprise me,” she stated. “I didn’t give it a thought until you said it, but it doesn’t surprise me, not really.”

Ryan continued to stand at the window, looking this way and that, trying to make out details in the moonlight. As she watched him, Mildred realized just what it was he was really looking for. Krysty and Doc, who were still somewhere between here and Fairburn.

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Maybe they never even left the walled ville. After Doc had opened the gates it was very possible that they had both wound up at the end of the hangman’s rope, vandal and accomplice. Mildred pushed the thought from her mind, and then her voice broke the silence. “You know, Ryan,” she said, “I shouldn’t have left Krysty.”

She watched Ryan standing there, looking out the window, his face away from her, the moisture in his breath steaming the cold glass. He gave not so much as a nod of acknowledgment to her statement as the sound of the brakes grew louder, their scream becoming increasingly shrill as the train pulled to a stop.

Mildred took two steps forward, unable to stop herself moving as the train stopped. Ryan, she noticed, didn’t move at all. His thick legs were planted, rock-solid, on the floor of the train, his uncanny sense of balance holding him firm.

Once the train had stopped, Ryan turned and went to the door. “Come on,” he told the doctor, and stepped from the compartment, SIG-Sauer blaster back in his hand.

Mildred followed him, and they jogged down the corridor toward the door through which they had entered the car. As they reached it, the door at the opposite end opened, and Mildred spun, dropping to one knee and targeting the newcomer with her revolver.

J.B. stood in the doorway, his own weapon—the compact Uzi—in ready position. When he saw Mildred and Ryan he lowered the blaster and gave a single, firm nod.

“We stopped,” Ryan told J.B. as they returned to the door at the front.

The Armorer nodded, tight-lipped.

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“We’re a long way from the front,” Ryan continued.

“Going by what Mildred said, I’d guess that’s where the action is. We were planning to go take a look-see, find out what’s what.” He opened the door, then reached up to the roof of the car. In a moment, Ryan was up and over. Once there, he lay down flat and looked up the length of the train. It was too dark to make out details.

He unslung the SSG-70 Steyr and rested it in front of him, then looked down the powerful scope, adjusting it until he could see to the front of the train.

A handful of people were walking around, most of them armed sec men. A few others rushed back and forth, receiving orders from a dark-haired foreman who held something shiny and metallic in his hands—

probably a blaster, Ryan guessed. The one-eyed man panned the scope slowly across the area, tracking a group of three, serious-looking people, a dark-haired woman and two men, one of them older and sporting wispy, white hair. Lit by the glowing light of the train engine, Ryan watched as this group made its way to an area off to the side of the tracks. As they left the faint light of the engine, he lost them. Then a bright light suddenly broke the darkness in the scope’s image. The train people had a method to light the area. A little pool of light as bright as day had appeared where the group waited.

Ryan watched as the group had a quick discussion, gesturing to something to the right. He panned the scope slightly, and there it was. Spitted in the X of his crosshairs, gleaming in the brilliant light as it lunged into the sky, was another skeletal tower, just like the one outside Fairburn.

“Fireblast,” Ryan muttered.

Chapter Ten

While Mildred kept watch, J.B. joined Ryan on the roof of the car to discuss the situation. Ryan continued to watch the activities through the scope on his SSG-70

Steyr blaster as they talked, trying to fathom what the operators of this mechanical monstrosity were doing.

“So, why did you come find us, J.B.?” Ryan whispered.

“My position got relieved. Sec man came over, spoke to me. Saw nothing out of the ordinary in my being there. I told him I was filling in.”

There was frantic activity through the scope as Ryan watched. A group of the raggedly dressed sec men leaped from the train and ran toward a nearby copse.

The remainder of the group continued to work at the tower. “Something’s going down,” Ryan said. “They have a big sec force, easily infiltrated.”

“That’s my conclusion, too,” J.B. agreed. “None of them are uniformed. Walk tall, they won’t bother us, I’m thinking.”

“Sounds risky,” Ryan stated, “but we need to find Jak, and I don’t think we have a lot of options here.”

Ryan continued to watch the activity through the scope, never shifting his position.

J.B.’s gaze swept the rooftops of the train in the moonlight, pinpointing where the roof guards waited.

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“Any sign of Doc?” Ryan whispered.

“I think I saw him and Krysty,” J.B. said, checking the rear cars, trying to see beyond but finding only darkness below the moonlit break of the horizon.

“Looked like a pony and trap. Not much of a vehicle for the long haul, but should be enough to get them here.

’Specially if we’re stopped here for a while.”

“You think she’ll be all right?”

“Ask a Mildred,” J.B. told him. “I don’t know.”

DOC PULLED AT THE REINS, slowing the pony’s charge.

They were close to the train, barely two hundred yards away, and Doc knew that it was only the cover of darkness that granted them protection. Above them, the silver moon danced through the clouds, its light sporadically bright on the landscape.

Doc could see a man on top of the last car of the train, cast in silhouette against the indigo sky. The old man pulled the pony to a halt and spoke rapidly to Krysty.

“I need you to look for me, Krysty,” he told the sick woman, “locate the sec men.”

Krysty lay there, slumped in the seat beside him, her head lolling on her shoulders, her eyes scrunched tightly closed. Doc wondered what folly had made them think to move her from Fairburn, and to let Mildred leave her side. She had seemed better, he reminded himself. What had happened? What was going on with Krysty?

Doc snapped the reins and the weary pony trotted forward once more, approaching the train while thick clouds obscured the moonlight.

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“MUTIES.” RYAN BIT OUT the word, and J.B.’s head whipped to look in the direction that Ryan was watching through the powerful magnification of his scope.

“Where?” the Armorer asked, his vision unable to pierce the darkness around them.

“Trees, two o’clock,” Ryan stated. He watched through the scope as a group of sec men fought with the naked, humanoid figures. The muties numbered more than fifty, and they moved with grim determination.

The sec men’s bullets slowed them, but the few they felled would collapse for a moment only to struggle back up and continue the attack. Scalies, probably, thick leather skin protecting them against small blaster fire.

Suddenly, Ryan rolled over and shifted to a sitting position, looking at J.B. with his single, piercing blue eye. “Time to find Doc and Krysty,” he said.

They leaped from the roof, returning to Mildred where she waited in the car beneath them. “Back of the train, Mildred,” Ryan told her.

“What is it, Ryan?” Mildred asked as they turned to jog through the car.

“Mass chilling going on outside,” Ryan explained.

“We need to get Krysty and Doc onboard before someone chills them, too.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Mildred said, following them into the car with the car windshield wall.

“It was up front,” J.B. told her. “Mutie scuffle. We’re best keeping out of it.”

“But if they spot Doc…” Ryan stated, then left the inevitable conclusion unsaid.

When they reached the penultimate car, Ryan clambered up between the coaches and took to the rooftops again, with Mildred and J.B. following. The sec man, Alpha Wave

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Sean Givin, was still atop the roof of the last car. “Hey, man,” Givin began as they approached, “what’s—?”

He never finished the question. A 9 mm bullet from Ryan’s SIG-Sauer blaster drilled through his left eye.

Ryan jumped across the gap between rooftops, scanning the horizon as the sec man dropped onto his back, crashing onto the metal roof with a loud thump, a mosaic of blood splattered across the left side of his face. “There,” Ryan called, pointing to the left of the train. J.B. and Mildred followed where he indicated, spotting the pony and trap bumbling toward the train from the shadows.

J.B. was down the side ladder in an abbreviated second, waving his arms above his head to show Doc it was safe to approach. Ryan looked up the length of the train, aware that the roof guards had to have heard the single shot, wondering how long they had before another guard became suspicious.

THE SEC MAN HAD LEFT the children in the twelfth car alone. The group had sat there, huddled together as far from the pure white youth as they could get. All of them watched the thin figure lay there, saw him jostled with the heavy movements of the train as it had hurtled down the tracks. They watched him roll away from them, toward the front of the train, when the brakes were applied, until he finally rolled over, slapping softly into the grille mesh when the train stopped.

His eyes were closed and he hadn’t reacted when his body had hit the ringing metal of the mesh wall, not even with a grunt of expelled air. Some of the younger children were crying quietly, but that wasn’t so unusual.

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been snatched from their home villes or their arduous lives on the Dakota farms. But it was hard to see in the vague light that peeked in through the open door of the car with the racing wind of movement, and no one had wanted to approach the strange youth with the face of alabaster.

Humblebee, nine years old and a passenger on the train for three long days, finally plucked up the courage to ask the question that had been troubling her. Her voice came out quiet, as though she was afraid of breaking something with it. “Is he…a ghost?”

One of the younger children—Francis-Frankie—

started to wail when he heard her say that, and Marc, who was almost fourteen and was used to taking care of whining younger siblings, scooted over to Francis-Frankie and told him not to cry because it was a stupe thing to do. Francis-Frankie sniffled back his crying, but it made him cry more, so Marc punched him on the nerve below the shoulder, giving him a dead arm. That shut Francis-Frankie up.

Humblebee didn’t want to say it again. She had this idea that if she said it, it might just come true anyway, even if it hadn’t been true before. She looked at the ghost boy slumped there, unmoving, and closed her eyes tight, trying to picture the car before he came, how it would look if he wasn’t lying there now. It was like the monsters under her bed back home in Brocketville; if she thought about it hard enough, if she really believed, then they stopped being there after all and she could go to sleep.

But when she opened her eyes again, he was still lying there. She screwed her eyes up tight and whis-Alpha Wave

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pered, “Go away,” but he was still there when she looked again. So she had to ask the question again.

“Maddie?” she asked, frightened to take her eyes off the stationary white figure on the other side of the car.

Maddie was Humblebee’s best friend on the train.

Maddie was as old as Marc, but she was clever and funny. She had made up stories to help Humblebee sleep on her first night on the train, after she’d been snatched by the train pirates. “What is it?” Maddie asked after a few seconds.

Humblebee could tell that Maddie was watching the white-skinned boy, too, that she didn’t dare avert her gaze from the stranger. She was behind Humblebee somewhere, and Humblebee wished she could hold hands with her now, when she asked the scary question again. “Is that boy a ghost?”

“I don’t think so,” Maddie decided.

“Why is he so white?” Humblebee whispered. “He looks like a ghost.”

Marc’s funny, high voice broke the stillness after a moment. “I think he might be dead,” he announced.

“He’s not dead,” Maddie stated firmly. “Don’t say that, it’s a horrible thing to say.”

Humblebee looked at the ghost boy, trying to see if he was breathing, but she couldn’t see any movement.

“That man shotted him,” she told them.

Marc sniggered nervously. “If he wasn’t a ghost when he got on he prob’ly is now. Chilled.”

Maddie shushed them. “Stop it.”

Francis-Frankie was sniffling when he spoke up, his voice, as ever, an irritating whine. “Why would they give us a ghost?” he asked. It struck Humblebee as a 110

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very intelligent question. Why would anyone give you a ghost?

“For eatin’,” Marc decided, and he padded toward the white figure in the corner of the cage.

Francis-Frankie started wailing again when he heard that.

J.B. HELPED RYAN WRAP a blanket around the corpse of the pig-eyed sec man he had shot and shove it into the overhead luggage rack. They used the soiled sheet from the bed to wipe blasted brains from the wall. Then Mildred helped Krysty into the bunk.

The companions had moved in silence through the cars, alert to possible discovery.

Once they reached the perceived safety of the compartment, a hushed conversation brought everyone up to speed.

Mildred sat with Krysty, speaking soothing words as she took the woman’s temperature. The compartment was cramped now, with five living people and one blanket-wrapped corpse vying for space. Ryan stood with his back to the door, his weight against it and his heel dug against the sliding edge so that no one could force his or her way in. Doc and J.B. stood together by the window, watching Mildred work on their other companion.

“Why has the train stopped again?” Doc asked.

“There’s a tower up front,” Ryan told him.

“Another one?” Doc asked, his incredulity raising his voice. He had been the first to hear that there were probably more towers, but it still seemed unexpected somehow. He came from a different time, the 1800s, and it was hard to discard his instinctive assumption that Alpha Wave

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trains stopped at stations. “I did not see it,” he concluded.

“Long way to the front,” Ryan explained.

“How far?” Doc wanted to know.

“Over a quarter mile,” J.B. chipped in. “Hard to tell with a dark, moving object, no landmarks.”

“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc muttered under his breath.

They felt the train begin to thrum. The engines were warming up, and the powerful shuddering was followed by gradual movement as the mighty engine began to pull its burden, very slowly, forward.

J.B. gestured to the dead sec man in the overhead luggage rack. “Might be easiest to toss the body overboard once we pick up speed. Cloud cover may hide it, but if not, anyone who sees it will probably think he’s slipped. Don’t reckon they’d stop the train to check on one man.”

“Have you located Jak?” Doc asked.

“Not yet,” Ryan replied. “Mildred thinks he’s close to the front, mebbe ten or twelve railcars from the engine.”

“How far away is that?” Doc asked, looking from Ryan to J.B. to Mildred.

J.B. answered. “Reckon the train’s about sixty cars in total, front to back. So far all we’ve seen is storage, but as we get nearer the front we can expect to see more people. The bunks here won’t be the only ones,” he said. “There’s a sec here, but they’re badly briefed. I passed myself off as one of them with the rearguard, didn’t even raise an eyebrow. Figure if we keep our heads down, no one will question me or Ryan.”

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“We’ll work through the cars,” Ryan added, “try to find Jak. We’ll plan it from there.”

Doc was shaking his head, clearly deep in thought.

“What is it?” Ryan asked him.

“The lad is plenty resourceful,” Doc told them. “He may well have found his escape route and be off the train already.”

“In that case he’ll find us,” Ryan said firmly. “Or we’ll go back to Fairburn, make our apologies, and wait for him to appear. Last rendezvous protocol, Jak’ll follow that.”

“Assuming he is on the train, however,” Doc mused,

“how long do we have to find him?”

“Sooner the better,” Ryan said, as though it was the most obvious thing.

“You have missed my point, Ryan,” Doc told him.

“This train has to go somewhere, even if it is just to refuel. The next stop may very well put us in a situation we are ill-prepared to handle. There could be a thousand armed sec men waiting at the end of the tracks for all we know.”

“And my point stands,” Ryan stated. “The sooner the better.”

J.B. took a long breath, thinking it through. “Doc’s right, Ryan,” he said, “We may not be able to just rush Jak off. Might be a shedload more to it than opening a door.”

Mildred had been listening throughout as she tended to Krysty in the bunk. “The previous occupant of this bunk told us they were heading to the Forks,” she said.

Ryan nodded. “Mean anything to you, Doc?”

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now, the dark countryside speeding past as the train rocked from side to side, trying to place the name. Many things had changed with the nuclear devastation of the United States of America; place names had been corrupted or simply vanished to the mists of time, and new settlements had popped up, named for their barons or the local geography or a dozen other reasons. Doc tried to picture the map of the Dakotas, North and South.

There had been a glorious map on the wall of one of the lecture halls of Harvard, and he had spent brief moments studying it when he had been waiting for class to start.

“Grand Forks,” he told them with certainty in his voice. “Up here—” he gestured in the air, still seeing the map in his mind’s eye “—in the northeast of the state.”

“We’re traveling south,” J.B. pointed out, producing a folded booklet from his inside breast pocket, “but there’s a curve to the tracks, could be taking us easterly, hard to say yet.”

“The redoubt that we exited said Minot on the wall,”

Ryan added. “Whereabouts is that?”

J.B. placed the washbowl on the floor and laid a map on the small desk it had sat on, flattening the paper with a sweep of his hands. Doc looked over J.B.’s shoulder and Ryan took a single, small step away from the door to join them.

“Here’s Minot,” J.B. said, pointing. “Northwest. And Grand Forks…here, a hundred and fifty miles as the scud flies. But if we’re looping around—” he drew a rough circle with his fingernail, following the state boundary “—who knows. Could take a week or more, especially if we’re stopping.”

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Ryan addressed Doc, stepping aside as Mildred joined the group at the little desk to see the map for herself.

“Know anything about this Grand Forks place, Doc?”

Doc shook his head. “I am afraid I’ve never been there, or if I have I do not remember doing so. It is still hard to remember much of what I’ve done,” he continued, “some of it is so vivid, my times with Emily and the children, but other things…” His voice trailed off and Ryan nodded his understanding to the older man.

Doc’s memory had fractured somehow, due to the time jumps that had been thrust upon him. It seemed a cruel kind of senility to force upon the intelligent old man, and Ryan knew that it caused Doc much frustration, even if he didn’t voice it often.

Ryan spoke then, addressing everyone, his firm voice steady. “We get Jak, we do it quiet and we get off. If we don’t go looking for a ruckus, we can hopefully avoid getting ourselves into one. Low profile, all the way.” He looked across to where Krysty lay in the bunk. She seemed to be sleeping, but her fists were clenched tight, nails digging hard into her palms. “Mildred, you’re going to have to do what you can for Krysty until we get off this thing. J.B. and I’ll scout the train. Doc, I don’t think you’ll pass for a sec man, sorry to say. So that puts you on watch for Krysty and Mildred.”

“And two more delightful companions no man on Earth could ask for,” Doc announced, bringing a smile to Mildred’s face in spite of herself.

“Same rules as ever,” Ryan reminded them.

“Everyone’s backup. We’re three people down, with both Jak and Krysty out of action, and someone watching her at all times. So we don’t draw any attention we don’t need.”

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“Do you think this cabin is safe?” Mildred queried.

“Storage cars behind might be safer,” Ryan admitted,

“but we have to think of Krysty’s comfort. Plus, at least we’re out of sight unless someone actually comes through that door.” He gestured to the single door of the tiny compartment. “We’ll live with it unless something more secure presents itself.

“How’s Krysty?” he asked Mildred.

“Her health’s declining again, Ryan,” Mildred admitted. “I can’t see what the pattern is, but she’s almost as low now as she was when we reached Fairburn.”

“I have hypothesized,” Doc explained, “that it may be something to do with the towers, but since we do not know where they are nor what they are doing, it is hard to come to a definite conclusion.”

“It’s a sound theory,” Ryan stated, “but why would it affect her and not us?”

Mildred looked at Krysty, then back at Ryan and the others. “It’s hard to say, Ryan. Anything I tell you now would have to be pure guesswork.”

“No point,” J.B. confirmed, and they all agreed to let the matter rest.

In the bunk, Krysty clawed at the remaining blanket, her hands scrabbling at the material, a soft groan coming from her mouth as her breathing became more rapid.

“Keep her comfortable,” Ryan told Mildred, his own frustration boiling into his abrupt tone for just a second.

“I’ll try,” Mildred assured him, resuming her vigil at the side of the bunk. She could almost feel the cold breath of the Grim Reaper blowing softly over her shoulder, standing just beyond the edge of her vision, waiting to claim Krysty for his own.

Chapter Eleven

After a short discussion, the companions had decided to sleep in shifts, making room where they could on the floor of the cramped cabin. Ryan had been keen to continue the search for Jak, but eventually recognized his need for sleep after some persuasion. Inside, all he wanted was to get out there, find Jak and get off this awful train, but as soon as he sat on the floor beside Krysty’s bunk he felt his muscles locking, his head getting heavier as tiredness caught up with him.

Sleep was welcomed by all of them. The trek across the wasteland outside Minot had been exhausting, and none of them had had time to stop for very long except for Jak back in the Fairburn lodging room. J.B. and Mildred took the first watch.

The train stopped three more times during the night, and each time whichever of the companions was on watch had sneaked outside to see what was happening.

The train people were working on more towers, though Mildred noticed they passed several others without halting.

Doc was awake for one of the stops, and had taken Ryan’s blaster scope to observe the action at the front of the train, much as Ryan had earlier. The land was becoming greener, and they had passed occasional tributaries of clear water, shining in the moon glow, Alpha Wave

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sometimes even crossing them over rickety bridges.

The tower stood near one of these tributaries, set back twenty feet from the rail tracks. When Doc looked at the magnified image, he realized that this tower was still under construction, its skeletal frame ending roughly, not reaching to the high zenith of the others. The foreman of the sec team spoke to a man whom Doc realized had already been on-site, and the three intel-lectual types had joined in with a flourish of maps and notations passing between them. A small construction crew sat waiting to go back to work—just three men, including the one who spoke with the train people.

Doc recognized the rumbling sounds of the engine as it warmed up once more to leave, its brief stopover concluded. He jumped back on the train from his crouched position beneath, bringing the longblaster with him, and returned to the compartment. He stood at the window, a step back so that he wouldn’t be seen, and studied the tower as the train trundled past. The construction crew was already back at work, the bright blue jets of welding torches clear in the darkness. “Curiouser and curiouser.”

THE COMPANIONS WERE awake when the rays of dawn peeked over the horizon and began to shed light in the cramped cabin. The air in the enclosed space had become warm and stuffy, smelling of sweat and leather from their boots. Krysty sat up in the bunk, her knees pulled tight to her chest, gently rocking with the movement of the train. Mildred had asked if she wanted a sedative, as she had several different types in her bag, but Ryan had rejected the idea. “If trouble comes calling we’ll need her awake,” he told them, even though it 118

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meant leaving Krysty in pain. If they had to make a swift exit he didn’t want to have to carry Krysty if he didn’t absolutely have to.

Doc told them about the construction work he had seen during the night.

J.B. tried to marry the readings from his minisextant with the topographical information presented on his creased maps, but he couldn’t work out precisely where they were yet, let alone where the towers they had passed were located.

The train pulled to a halt just as Ryan and J.B. were checking their weapons in preparation for their search for Jak. Mildred stood at the window, looking up and down the tracks to try to see what was happening.

“Another tower?” J.B. asked.

Mildred shook her head. “Can’t see any.”

Ryan slung the SSG-70 Steyr, rolling his shoulders to accommodate the familiar weight, and indicated that Doc and J.B. join him as he entered the corridor beyond the cabin. The three of them paced swiftly down the corridor, and Ryan opened the door at the end and lowered himself down between the adjoining cars.

The one-eyed man pressed against the forward car, looking toward the front of the long vehicle. First J.B., then Doc peeked out to see what he was watching. All around the train, at a distance of roughly twenty yards from the tracks, stood a fence. Pieces of corrugated steel stood next to wire mesh and wood panels, and some of the fence was made up of tree trunks, branches removed but left rooted where they grew, the panels of the fence slotted around them. The fence never fell below seven feet in height—not an impossible climb, by any means, but certainly a deterrent. A few sec men Alpha Wave

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strolled slowly around the perimeter, blasters in their hands. A set of chain-link gates had been closed at the far end, behind the train. The compound made an effective stopping point, easily defended from local interference, but Ryan realized it might also double as a prison for him and his companions if they weren’t careful.

The air held that fresh smell that Ryan associated with the ocean shore.

Doc’s whispered words broke into Ryan’s thoughts.

“Some kind of stopover,” he said, incredulous.

“Saluting the dawn,” J.B. concluded, “like dirt-poor primitives.”

Ryan beckoned J.B. forward, and together they sneaked silently alongside the train toward the ceremony, leaving Doc to wait at the juncture of the cars. Doc stepped back into the shadows, removing the LeMat from its holster and resting it easily against his leg. Should anyone question the older man’s presence he wanted all of his options within easy reach.

Ryan and J.B. walked past eighteen cars, two of which had rounded sides, making them bloat outward like a well-fed boa constrictor, and both men silently committed the details of each one to memory. As they neared the dawn ceremony, Ryan turned back to his partner and whispered from the side of his mouth, “This is not a good idea.”

J.B. continued walking straight ahead, his gaze set on the participants of the ceremony as they laughed and spoke among themselves. “Too late now,” he said.

“Ho, brothers,” called a bald sec man when he spotted them. Ryan and J.B. felt a wave of relief when the man offered them no challenge, but Ryan could see the tremoring in the man’s stance that indicated jolt de-120

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pendency. High on an ultimately lethal drug, the man was probably not the most observant of the train crew.

“You’re not late, they ain’t ’peared yet.”

They noticed that other sec men were still stepping from the train, joining the pack that waited in the rising sunlight, and several musicians stepped from the bloated cars carrying simple instruments—fiddles and guitars—

with which they entertained the crowd as they walked through. Ryan counted around eighty sec types in all, as well as the gaudies and a handful of weaker-looking men who were mistreated—kicked at, spat on and berated—

as they trudged through the group. As he watched, a few more sec men joined the crowd, hopping down from the roofs of the train cars and bringing the grand total up to perhaps ninety, an effective little army. All of the guards were armed, but there was no uniformity to them. Their weapons and clothing were individual. Many of them carried blasters, though some had simpler weapons such as knives and swords, Ryan saw, a scimitar glinting with the rays of the sun, a machete stained with coppery rust.

The sky was a bright shade of red above them, the rising sun blazing over the horizon, casting long shadows of the group and the train. Rain-heavy thunder-heads blew through the sky, blotting the rays of the sun for brief moments as they drifted onward.

Ryan scanned the crowd but there was no sign of Jak.

“He’s not here,” J.B. confirmed as they took up a spot at the edge of the loose grouping.

A burly man wearing a dark-colored vest walked toward the crowd from a car near the front of the huge train and the haphazard, lively music ceased. Wide-shouldered, the man walked with a heavy, determined tread. He wore a blaster holstered low on his right hip, Alpha Wave

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a leather tie securing it just above the knee. As he got closer, Ryan could see that the man had several white streak scars across his face and down one arm.

Behind the scar-faced man came three people—a man and woman in their thirties accompanied by a much older man with wispy white hair and spectacles perched on his nose.

Ryan had seen all four of them before, when he had watched the activities at the second tower. Scarface seemed to be some kind of foreman, giving out orders to the sec crew. The other three had been working at the tower when the firefight with the scalies had broken out, and Ryan recognized their type—whitecoats or similar, definitely brainy types.

When he reached the front of the crowd, the burly foreman began speaking in a barked shout. “We’re at journey’s end for the night, brothers.” At this, a cheer came from the crowd before the man continued.

“Anyone who needs sleep or company can take it. The bridge comes alive in two hours, and we’ll cross Sakakawea then and be on our way. Until then, day shift in place, construction crew with me, everyone else use the time wisely. We’ve got a lot of track to cover and I don’t need anyone falling asleep.”

“We’re three stops behind schedule,” a young whitecoat said, raising his voice as several of the sec men guffawed and heckled him. The foreman chastised them with a single, shouted instruction, and they quieted.

“We’ve made up a little ground from the previous night, but we’ve still a way to go, and it is critical that we get the circuit operational on time.”

“Why?” someone called from the crowd, clearly meaning it as an insult.

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“Well,” the man told the crowd, “that’s really not down to me…”

“The preliminary tests have been encouraging.” The young woman butted in, taking the attention off her colleague. “If all goes to plan this should be the last go-round. Then the baron will be able to move on to phase four.”

Ryan and J.B. couldn’t help but notice the smiles and looks of relief on the faces of some of the sec crew at this news. J.B. also noticed several sec men pointing across in their direction and talking among themselves.

“Ryan,” he murmured, tapping his friend with the back of his hand. “Time to go.”

Ryan didn’t question his colleague. He simply took two steps backward, as though trying to get a better view over the crowd of the speakers. Then he and J.B.

turned and walked back toward the rear of the train.

Behind them, the conference continued.

“Interesting,” Ryan said to the Armorer, keeping his voice low as they walked briskly down the length of the train. “I don’t know what it is we’ve stumbled into, but I’m thinking it looks mighty big, J.B.”

“Agreed.” J.B. pointed to an open door ahead on the side of a car and Ryan took the lead, jumping up onto the raised step and ducking through it. J.B. followed, trotting up the step and out of the sunlight.

The interior smelled of incense, heavy and cloying, and thick drapes hung over the windows, blocking out the dawn light.

A single table stood in the middle of the expanse, oval and big enough to seat four, a fat candle burning in its center. A lone figure sat at the table, a woman wearing a hood. She looked up at their entry, lit by the Alpha Wave

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candle in front of her, and Ryan saw the deep lines of age crisscrossing her face. She was hunched in on herself, her hands hooked into claws through rheuma-tism, and there was something glistening on both of her cheeks.

“Come in, gentlemen,” the woman said in a whispery voice.

As they stepped closer to the elderly woman, Ryan saw what it was that sparkled on her cheeks: twin tears of blood. And then he felt the world drop from beneath his feet.

DOC WATCHED as his companions ducked into one of the cars a little way down the gleaming length of train. He watched momentarily as three armed men followed them, then ducked back into the cool shadows between cars, knowing it wouldn’t do to be caught out here. He holstered the LeMat, reached up to the metal bar at the side of the open car door and pulled himself up.

His head had barely eclipsed the sill of the step when he spotted the moving feet, padding along the corridor of the car away from him.

Damnation!

He ducked back, crouching beside the open door. If he stepped into the car now, the stranger would be immediately aware of him. And that wouldn’t do. No, that that wouldn’t do at all.

SITTING ON THE BUNK with Krysty, Mildred heard the sounds of movement in the adjacent cabin. Whoever was in there had woken up, and she heard a loud groan—a yawn—followed by the quiet, distinct sound of a belch.

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She had quite forgotten that there were likely other people in the compartments around them. Ryan had listened at all the doors when they had staked out this car, she recalled, and he had decided that this compartment was the least dangerous. Mildred shook her head.

Ryan and his instincts.

There were further sounds of movement, then she heard the door to the compartment ahead of them slide open, and the heavy tread as someone exited the room.

With the train stationary, the walker’s movements shook the car slightly, a light trembling that passed to Mildred’s feet through the wooden floorboards.

“You awake, Scott?” a man’s deep voice boomed from just outside the cabin. A moment later the man rapped three heavy blows on the sliding door, rattling its glass panels. As silent as a cat, Mildred stepped from the bunk and put a hand against the handle of the door, instinctively pulling her double action ZKR 551

revolver from the holster at her side.

“Come on, Scotty,” the man’s voice continued, “we gotta go. Day shift’s on.”

Mildred looked at the target revolver in her hand, thinking about the noise it would produce if she were forced to use it in this confined space. Krysty looked at her from the bunk, and Mildred pointed to her backpack. Krysty winced as she pulled herself from the bunk, clearly in a lot of pain, and quietly passed the backpack to Mildred, exchanging it for the ZKR 551 in her hand.

At the door, her face inches from the glass, Mildred could hear the man cursing his sleeping friend. It wouldn’t be long now, she realized, pulling a hypodermic syringe from her bag.

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The man called Scotty again and Mildred felt the pressure on the door handle as his hand pulled at it. “If you’ve left without me, ya fink, so help me I’ll skin ya alive!”

Mildred held the door handle with her left hand as she adjusted her grip on the syringe, deftly rolling it through rotating fingers.

“Nukin’ door’s stuck,” the man outside growled, then he pulled at it again and Mildred let go.

The door slid back with a dull rattling on its treads, and a bearded, muscular man burst into the room, looking startled by his own swift entrance. Mildred jabbed the syringe into the man’s neck the instant it cleared the door frame, and it stuck fast, translucent contents pouring into his thick, blue vein.

The man turned to look at her, his face red with anger. “What the hell? Who are you?” he bellowed.

“What the hell’d you just do to me? Stuck somethin’…”

He reached up, yanking the syringe from his neck and giving it a momentary look before tossing it aside. The syringe flew across the tiny cabin, droplets of translucent liquid splashing from its needle as it spun through the air before hitting the glass of the exterior window at the far side of the compartment.

He swung a punch at her, his heavy fist cleaving the air with an audible whoosh. Mildred ducked and the man’s fist slammed into the cabin wall above her head, shaking the glass and frame of the sliding door. She pushed forward, driving a knee into his gut, knocking the wind out of him. He stumbled back a half step, arms reaching as he regained his breath in a short gasp.

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words. His hand reached forward in a blur and suddenly he had a hold of Mildred’s plaits, painfully pulling her toward him by her hair.

Mildred punched at his chest, his sides, but she couldn’t get any purchase while he held her like that, couldn’t get any weight into the punches. And then a dark shadow whipped across the corner of her vision and something heavy slammed into the back of her attacker’s head, knocking both of them to the cabin floor, Mildred underneath. Mildred expelled her breath with a loud grunt as she hit the hard floor.

On top of Mildred, the man struggled to get free, but something was holding him down, some weight pushing against him in the enclosed space of the cabin.

Mildred squirmed beneath him and he seemed to remember his first objective. He couldn’t seem to free his arms, but it didn’t stop him. Opening his jaws wide, he lunged at her, hoping either to head butt or bite her, she didn’t know which.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the man’s head lolled to the left and he slumped on top of her, his eyes flickering until the lids closed. The sedative in the hypo had finally kicked in.

Mildred looked up, the heavy weight pushing at her ribs. She saw that Krysty stood by the door, her body closed up on itself like a tortoise trying to revert into its shell. She had pulled the sliding door closed, containing the noise of the fight from prying ears.

Mildred saw now what had hit her assailant from behind—Krysty had to have rolled the corpse from the luggage rack overhead, letting it drop onto Mildred’s attacker.

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heavyset men atop her, Mildred called to Krysty. “A little help?”

Krysty pushed the bedraggled hair from her eyes and helped her friend push the two men away.

As they were wondering what to do with the dead man and the sleeper, Doc joined the women in the cabin, a secret knock confirming his identity. “By the Three Kennedys!” he exclaimed when he saw the two men lying on the floor caught up in the blanket that had fallen from the corpse. “What in the name of the Messiah did I miss?”

“We had a gentleman caller,” Mildred explained, and she set to work wrapping the corpse back in the blanket while Doc tied the wrists of the intruder.

“And what did you do to him?” Doc asked, alarm in his voice.

Mildred smiled, but her expression seemed firm and serious. “I gave him a little sedative, just to make him sleep for a while,” she said.

“Do you know how long it will be until that wears off?”

“I don’t know how much went into his system before he pulled the needle out, but I’d say six hours,” Mildred answered thoughtfully. “Call it five to be on the safe side, heavy bastard like this.”

“We must find somewhere to place the gentleman, then,” Doc stated, “unless you plan to chill the train personnel one by one.”

Mildred shrugged. “I hit him with the sedative the second he burst through the door. He should have trouble remembering what he saw. We could probably put him back in his compartment.”

“And what if he should awaken and decide to pay another visit to his late friend?” Doc asked.

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“We could tie him up, then. Gag him,” Mildred suggested.

From her position seated on the cot, Krysty spoke up in a quiet, strained voice. “Ryan would chill him,” she told them. “Loose end, otherwise.”

Doc and Mildred looked at each other in silence, knowing the truth behind Krysty’s statement.

RYAN AND J.B. crashed to their knees, slumping to the floor like rag dolls. There was something about the room or the woman at the table or both that was affecting them.

Ryan looked around, dizziness making his vision blur, the sickly sweet aroma of the heavy incense suf-focating his nostrils, clogging his mouth. He reached forward and his right hand slapped against the hardwood floor of the train car, barely propping himself upright. The elderly woman was smiling, the scarlet tears poised on her cheeks as she watched them both.

J.B.’s voice penetrated Ryan’s thoughts like something hard and jagged thrust into his brain. “It’s the air, Ryan. There’s something in the air.” His voice sounded far away, the words tumbling together like echoes in a cave.

Ryan felt his strength ebb, could feel his body falling forward, but he had no energy left to stop it. His face smashed hard into the floor, hitting on his left side, jarring his skull with resounding force. J.B. was right.

The incense. There was something about the incense.

Kneeling beside Ryan, J.B. was struggling to stay upright. His body wavered and his clammy hands left watery trails of sweat as they slid on the polished floor.

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of metal the way a magpie will focus on a mirror. Low down, beneath the surface of the table, was a chain, its links solid and newly fashioned, gleaming with the stuttering light of the candle flame. One end of the chain was attached to a solid metal ring that was sunk into the floor. The other end was attached to a clasp that was locked tight around the elderly woman’s frail, bird-thin ankle.

As he swayed on the floor in front of the woman, J.B.

heard the tramping feet as first one man and then a second and third entered the car through the same door he had used with Ryan a moment before. J.B. tried to turn his head, but it felt heavy and strangely unattached to the rest of him, as though it had gone numb like a slept-on limb. He felt himself falling and struggled to remain upright, but his sense of balance was gone and the demands of gravity too strong.

As he collapsed, he looked at the door through which he and Ryan had entered the strange car. The three sec men who had been following them stood there, sideways in his vision, kerchiefs pulled up over their mouths and noses. They were aiming heavy blasters at the Armorer and his companion.

Chapter Twelve

J.B. focused his eyes on the chain around the woman’s ankle, trying to keep himself from sinking further into apathy. He breathed, shallow and fast.

“Who are you?” the muffled voice of one of the sec men called through the kerchief over his mouth. “Why haven’t I seen you before?”

Ryan piped up, not a trace of fear or worry in his voice. “Construction crew,” he answered. “Got on two stops back as per instructions.” He still lay on the floor, struggling to get up, but the knock on the head had done him a surprising amount of good. He felt woolly headed from the incense, but he also felt the pain at the front of his skull from the swelling bruise. And that pain felt good, a throbbing beacon to focus his thoughts on.

“Never seen you around before,” the lead sec man stated bluntly, pointing a well-maintained Smith & Wesson revolver at Ryan’s flailing body.

“Con…construction crew,” Ryan stuttered. He focused on the pain on the left of his skull, trying to keep his thoughts rock steady.

“Could be,” one of the other two sec men suggested.

“Hmm.” The lead man grunted, sounding doubtful.

“Then why you come to see the bruja without a mask.

You stupes, the both of you?”

“Forgot the rule,” he said, raising his head very care-Alpha Wave

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fully from the floor. He looked at the sec men, their image swimming in front of his good eye.

One of the sec men spoke to the others. He had the same voice as the one who had said “could be” a moment before on hearing Ryan’s lie. “Adam probably didn’t even warn them. You know how he likes his jokes.”

“I don’t like it,” the lead man replied. “This operation’s too close to completion now to let anyone infiltrate it. I’ve given four years of my life over to Baron Burgess and his plan. I signed on right at the start. Gave him my daughter, too.”

“Shut up about your daughter, for once.” The third man spit. “They’re construction guys.You’re as paranoid as a one-armed mutie in a beauty contest.” With that, the man stepped over and offered Ryan a hand.

His companion, the one who had mentioned Adam’s jokes, came over and handed a spare kerchief to J.B.

where he was sprawled on the floor. As he did so he murmured something to the Armorer confidentially. “I don’t like having the bruja on here neither.”

They sat in the dirt outside the car for a while, catching their breath and regaining their senses, and the three sec men finally left them alone.

“What the hell was that?” Ryan asked J.B. once they were sure they were out of the hearing range of any of the crew.

“Potent airborne drug,” J.B. told him, still trying to shake off the feeling of drowsiness. “Crazy potent.”

“Yet it doesn’t seem to affect the woman in there,”

Ryan pointed out.

“The bruja, ” J.B. stated. He had heard the word through the muzziness of the assault on his senses.

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“Mean anything to you?” Ryan asked. “Bruja, I mean. It’s a new one on me.”

“Means witch,” J.B. said. “You see her ankle? She’s chained in there.”

“Breathing that crap all day?” Ryan said, incredulous. “Why would you need a witch on a train?”

“Why would you need a train?” J.B. grinned.

“C’mon, Ryan, we’re neck deep in mystery here, and we don’t have clue one to what’s going on.”

Ryan looked off into the middle distance, letting his thoughts wend their own patterns while the soft breeze blew on his skin. He noticed that some of the sec men patrolling the perimeter seemed almost mindless, zombie-like in their trudging patterns. It struck him as more than simple boredom that was affecting them, something deeper, as though they were puppets, no longer in control of their actions. Just then, the cry went out, repeated down the line of the train, called to the guards at the perimeter. It was a single word. “Storm!”

As the rain hit, accompanied by vicious little hailstones, Ryan and J.B. ran alongside the train to the compartment where they had left Krysty, Mildred and Doc.

J.B. SPREAD OUT HIS MAP of the Dakotas on the tiny, molded desk once again, and Ryan, Mildred and Doc crowded around him in the small compartment. Krysty lay on her back on the bunk, pleased to finally be rid of the corpse of the previous occupant. Mildred and Doc had decided not to chill the second man, even though they agreed with Krysty’s “loose end” argument.

Instead they had followed Doc’s suggestion, tying him to his bunk in the cabin next door by ankles and wrists, Alpha Wave

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a gag in his mouth. They had tried to make it look like some fetishistic sex game, so that if anyone should stumble upon the man they might assume he had been left by his gaudy slut.

“We’re here, Lake Sakakawea.” J.B. pointed at the body of water labeled on the map. “Didn’t see the lake ourselves, but the CO spoke of a bridge to cross it, naming it as he did so. Not sure where we are exactly, but I’d estimate we’ve traveled about sixty-five miles.

That makes the towers about twenty, twenty-five miles apart.”

“Any idea what they are?” Mildred asked.

“Not a clue,” J.B. admitted.

Ryan sighed as he added, “They didn’t say much about them, but a whitecoat spoke of the operation being a great success, though a little behind schedule.”

“Did you see Jak?” Doc wondered.

Ryan shook his head. “No sign of him yet, but we didn’t get much exploring done. Met someone, though,”

Ryan told them, and the tone of his voice was a warning in itself. “They call her the bruja. J.B. tells me that means witch.”

“If she’s Mexican,” Doc stated, the amusement still clear in his voice, “then she’s certainly a long way from home.”

J.B. shot him a look. “So are you, Doc.”

“Touché.” Doc smiled, before falling silent.

“The bruja is on her own in a car, seven down from our location,” Ryan told them. “J.B. says she’s chained to the floor by an anklet, though I didn’t see it myself.

There’s something about the car or about her, it hits you— bang! ” He clapped his hands together. “Sec men followed us in wearing kerchiefs to breathe through, so 134

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we think it’s the incense she’s got pumping through the room. Thing is, it doesn’t seem to affect her.” Ryan looked at Mildred before adding, “You got any ideas on this?”

“Airborne hallucinogen, maybe?” she suggested. “If there’s an antidote or counteragent then she could be dosed up on that, the crap in the air wouldn’t affect her.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Ryan agreed. “Whatever, if you need to work through the train for any reason, be prepared. You walk in there without a filter over your nostrils and you won’t make it three paces.”

Doc was looking out the window, watching the violent rainstorm as it continued to pound into the ground, spotting the dirt with huge puddles like shallow lakes. “Why are they holding her?” he mused. “You said she was chained in place.”

Ryan sighed. “The more we see, the less we know just now, Doc. Just keep your eyes open.”

J.B. sat at the desk and studied his ancient map, trying to familiarize himself with the nearby territory so that he could recognize upcoming features.

Assuming, of course, that said features still existed in the postnuclear world.

“So,” Mildred asked, “what next?”

“CO says we’ll move inside two hours,” J.B. told her.

“Guessing that’s about 105 minutes now.”

“They have to do something to the bridge,” Ryan explained. “We didn’t have an opportunity to find out what.”

“Only bridge on the map would put us near Garrison,” J.B. stated, his finger tracing the length of Lake Sakakawea, “unless they built themselves one.”

“And how likely is that?” Doc asked.

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Ryan pondered, his single eye watching the hail spatter against the car window, rapping on the glass.

“They seem very organized,” he said. “Lazy, mebbe, a little too trusting, bored of their routines. But this whole thing is heavily organized. It isn’t something someone’s whipped up on a whim.”

“One of the sec men that found us with the bruja mentioned four years of work,” J.B. added.

“But to do what?” Mildred asked, frustrated.

“Whatever it is,” Ryan told them, “it’s one big op.”

The companions remained in silence for a long while after that, each pondering the ramifications in his or her own way. And, on the bunk, Krysty Wroth slipped in and out of a restless sleep.

IN THE CAGE inside the twelfth car of the train, eight sets of eyes were staring at the chalk-white boy. The prisoners were braver now, after Marc had established that whatever the gangly youth was, he wasn’t a ghost. He had a solid body and his skin was warm to the touch.

Marc had expressed his disappointment at that because, as he told it, he had always dreamed of eating a reallive ghost. It seemed kind of far-fetched, and Humblebee suspected that he had said that just for something to say, or mebbe trying to impress Maddie who had expressed precisely no interest in him.

It was Maddie who had rolled the boy over, with Marc’s help, and looked at the wound on his chest where the sec man had shot him. Luckily they didn’t touch the hidden razor blades in his jacket. His dark shirt was torn where the blast had penetrated, and an ugly bruise had formed on his skin. It didn’t seem to matter that much—the boy’s torso was covered in scars 136

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and bruises, old and new. He had to must be some kind of fighter, Maddie reasoned.

In the center of the ugly, purple bruise, a wicked color against his pallid flesh, was the end of a dart.

Maddie told Marc and two of the smaller children to hold the chalk-white boy down, and she carefully pulled at the dart until she had plucked it from his flesh with a little, tearing sound.

A tiny spot of blood formed around the hole where the dart’s nib had rested, and everyone was fascinated that it was red, just like their own. Humblebee had actually laughed, for about the first time since she had been snatched and put in this filthy cage. “See,” she said, giggling, “no way is he a ghost now.” Maddie had given her a stern look to silence her, then bent to take a closer look at the wound in the youth’s chest.

The dart had clearly hit him hard, and the range was almost point-blank. He had taken the full impact between the lowest ribs on his left side. The skin had broken around the dart’s sharp tip, but the hole it had made was negligible. It was whatever had been in the dart that had knocked the youth out.

Maddie looked at the youth’s face, easing the mane of hair—just as white as his frighteningly alien body—

from where it had stuck to his cheek. His face was angular, young and yet old-looking. He seemed somehow serene in sleep. And, yes, it was sleep. Now that she was closer she could discern the faint breathing coming from his nostrils in the dawn light that filtered in from the door and the cracks in the wood-plank walls. She wondered how old he was. At first glance he could pass for fifteen, but she noticed the start of white stubble on his cheeks, the long curls in his side-Alpha Wave

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burns that only came about when a boy had turned into a man.

Francis-Frankie reached forward and tried to grab at a shiny object that seemed to be caught in the boy’s coat.

His hand snapped back, whip fast, and he looked at his finger. It was bleeding, runnels of red rushing down its length and making tracks across his little hand as he watched.

“Hand up—” Maddie demonstrated “—hold the wound.”

Francis-Frankie did as he was told, tears silently streaming from his eyes as he sat there. “The ghost boy’s coat bit me,” he told them.

Maddie inspected the light camou jacket, keeping her hands clear of the shining objects that poked through its surface here and there. Razor blades, hunks of pointed metal and sharp shards of broken glass had been sewn into the fabric. Holding the chalk boy had to be like trying to hug a porcupine, she reasoned.

On Maddie’s request, Humblebee passed her one of the three hessian sacks that the imprisoned children used as blankets. She brushed it with her hand, knocking off tiny, writhing bodies that had affixed themselves to the open weave. Then she rolled the sack-cloth in on itself, turning it over and over in her hands.

Gently, Maddie raised the ghost boy’s head, feeling the warmth of his skin through the ice-white hair. She placed the rolled-up cloth beneath his head, pushing the hair once more from his face and eyes.

Maddie turned to face the others. All of them were watching her with interest. She “walked” toward them on her knees, shooing them back with wide gestures of 138

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her hands. If the chalk boy had to sleep, he would at least be comfortable, she told herself.

“He’s one of us now,” she told the others firmly.

Chapter Thirteen

The vicious hailstorm continued its relentless assault on the ground as the train finally started moving again.

Where the hailstones hit they left tiny smouldering craters in the soil, and the wisps of smoke formed a misty, foglike blanket over the first couple of inches of the surface after a while. The rainwater helped damp the blanket of toxic fumes down, but the air still took on the acrid stink of petroleum and made it unpleasant to breathe.

Despite the horrendous weather, the construction crew had continued to work at the front of the train. The bridge that spanned the eight-mile expanse of Lake Sakakawea beside the old Garrison Dam had been blocked off at both ends using the corpses of dead automobiles. The cars had long since lost their engines and been stripped of their contents. In place of the interiors, the vehicles had been filled with concrete or rocks, significantly adding to their weight. It took equipment and organization to shift the vehicles, and acted as a solid deterrent to any parties that may think of interfering with the train operation across the bridge.

A similar, fenced-off bay at the far side of the bridge acted as another stopping point, so that the blockades could be erected again. It was a laborious operation, even using a portable crane that was stored in one of the 140

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cars, but it served to dissuade interference. Should another group get it into their minds to damage the bridge, it would have put a significant dent in the us-ability of the train. Slow and sure were the watchwords for the whole crew here, the bridge identified as a weak point on the trail.

The construction crew bent to its task slowly.

Ryan and J.B. had found what they described as a mess hall, just a few cars down from their unit. To get there they had walked through three cars devoted to bunks for the crew. Two of the cars were similar in design to the one they had left Krysty and the others in, old stock brought back into service with minimal repair work and a little brute force, although the farthest one included a compact, foul-smelling restroom at one end.

Between these cars was a windowless truck, with double-stacked bunks lining both of the side walls.

Some of the bunks were curtained off, but Ryan and J.B.

had seen several sec men sleeping, one sitting on the top bunk field stripping a remade AK-47, and several empty beds. The man who worked at the AK-47 didn’t bat an eyelid as the companions passed—bedroom or walkway, he couldn’t care less.

The mess hall served boiled vegetables and meats of unknown species, their true tastes barely masked by the liberal use of strong spices. Hungry, the pair sat quietly at one of the makeshift tables, some kind of wooden bench. For a while they ate in silence, watching the other inhabitants of the car. There were more sec men here, looking exhausted from their night trip. Ryan realized that these men may well have been involved in the showdown with the scalies. If that was the case, it was little wonder that there was a general feeling of Alpha Wave

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malaise about them. Night fighting muties took a lot out of a man.

Outside, the rain continued to pound against the windows, creating a shushing noise in the mess hall as it rattled through the countryside. One of the sec men had commented on it to Ryan, who sat resting his head on his left hand, elbow propped on the table and hand obscuring the distinctive, black eye patch he wore. Ryan had nodded, mumbling a vague agreement, not wishing to get involved in any conversation that might reveal him to the crew.

J.B.’s busy hands worked with scraps of the food, parceling it up and slipping it inside his pockets so that he could take it to Mildred, Doc and Krysty. Their instinct about leaving the other three in the compartment had been good—the crew was almost entirely male, with no one over forty. The women and Doc would have stood out and encouraged too many questions, where Ryan and J.B.

managed to bluff their way through. Mildred possibly might have been able to pass for crew, but the female complement was so small that it seemed very risky.

“We’re tempting fate here,” J.B. whispered across the table, his eyes watching the far door of the mess hall as three construction workers entered. “We need to get Jak and get off.”

Ryan chewed at a stringy piece of meat. “And what about Krysty?” Ryan whispered back, his eye never leaving the other entry door to the car.

“Use a gateway to leave the area.” J.B. stated, “Mebbe it’ll go.”

“And what if it doesn’t?” Ryan asked.

“Then we’re off the train of horrors, at least.”

Ryan sucked at a hollow tooth. “Let’s find Jak.”

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“DID YOU NOTICE ANYTHING odd about those sec men back at the bridge stop?” Mildred asked, breaking the relative silence of the cabin.

Doc looked up from the map of the Dakotas that J.B.

had left laid out on the tiny desk. “What’s that, my dear?”

Mildred seemed deep in thought when she spoke again. “The sec men at the bridge stop, patrolling the fence. They seemed—” she clenched her eyes for a moment, her whole body tensing as she tried to find just the right word “—wrong,” she concluded.

Doc thought back to the stopover at the fenced-in area. There had been a handful of armed men shuffling around the edges of the area, keeping a slow, steady patrol. He tried to picture them, but they all blurred in his mind, none of the features really affixed in his memory. “I’m not sure, my dear doctor,” he stated, glancing across to the window as though for inspiration.

He sat there, watching the green-tinted hail as it pelted the glass with a rattling tattoo. “The hail!” Doc exclaimed suddenly. “They didn’t come in out of the hail, did they?”

“They didn’t,” Mildred agreed.

And that was odd. The hail out there could seriously hurt a man.

“Of course,” Doc said, thinking out loud, “we do not know what their orders were. If they were told to stay outside then I would guess—”

“No,” Mildred butted in. “Everyone came in when the rain started. J.B. said they shouted the instruction down the line, to make sure everyone knew.”

“But the sentries remained,” Doc muttered, his voice barely more than a whisper.

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“Zombies,” Mildred said, biting off the word through clenched teeth. “I think they’re zombies.”

Doc shook his head. “My knowledge of such subject matter is, I freely admit, somewhat limited, but—”

Mildred held up a hand to silence him. “I don’t mean, like, undead, movie zombies. I mean they were, I don’t know, mindless.”

Doc nodded as he thought back. “I watched while our comrades joined in the salutation to the dawn baloney. I was watching as the construction hands peeled away from the others, going about their business.

I was a long way away, but what I saw…well, it would seem to reinforce your viewpoint.”

Wordlessly, Mildred encouraged the white-haired man to continue. “They were trudging in their movements, no life to them. They clearly followed the sec officer’s orders, I can assure you of that, but they didn’t seem to be thinking for themselves. They followed him in a line, Mildred. A line, do you see?”

Mildred glanced at the window, seeing the reflection of the oil lamp swinging to and fro above their heads.

“They weren’t soldiers, Doc, they weren’t marching,”

she half asked, half stated the point.

“No,” Doc assured her. “And yet they walked in a perfectly straight line.”

Mildred and Doc looked at each other across the width of the tiny cabin, the ramifications of their realization only just beginning to sink in, its implications blossoming like the petals of a flower before them. And yet they walked in a perfectly straight line.

RYAN AND J.B. headed forward from the double mess hall.

The next car was another storeroom, this one con-144

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taining a few dismantled weapons along with the usual sheets of steel, tins, jars and bottles of rivets, and strings of chain stretched across the ceiling. There were two small windows at the front of the car, one on either side of the unit. Ryan and J.B. checked the view through the windows simultaneously, J.B. taking the one to the right. It was the same on both sides—the train was speeding through fields of green plants and brown earth, the sand of the desert long since left behind.

Both of them had mentally calculated the journey to this point of the train, but they were reassured to see a large letter B painted across the door that led into the next car. B for bruja.

Ryan pulled a sweat-stained neckerchief from his pocket and tied it firmly around his throat. Beside him, J.B. was doing likewise with a piece of cloth he took from one of his pockets.

Ryan opened the door and they stepped through together, pushing open the second door and into the bruja’ s darkened compartment.

There was a popping sound, and the train suddenly leaped, wheels clipping a badly soldered segment of the track. Tensed, Ryan felt his heart jump with the train, and for a moment he had a vision of the whole unit being derailed, tossing them across the fields. Then the train rolled on, wheels meeting track with the reassuring thrumming they had become used to.

A black curtain made of heavy velvet had been drawn across the doorway to the bruja’s car, and Ryan pushed his hand into its voluminous folds. The thing seemed to wrap around his arm like liquid.

As Ryan stood there, his left hand lost in the folds of black velvet, J.B. breathed his name through his cloth Alpha Wave

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mask and pointed to the right. Ryan saw it, too—a thin walkway had been curtained off using the drapes of the room. The staff of the train could walk down this corridor without disturbing the witch. They hadn’t noticed it when they had been in the compartment the first time, automatically assuming that the curtains covered the walls.

They walked swiftly down the curtained-off corridor, until it curved back inward at the far end, presenting the front door of the bruja’s car. As they walked, Ryan heard a soft laughter coming from the other side of the curtains. It was slow and somehow painful. He opened the far door and stepped across the gap into the next car, closing the door behind J.B.

The one-eyed man stood with his back against the door, pulling the neckerchief from his face but leaving it tied in place. He felt the relief pour through him like the heat of whiskey, and took a deep breath to steady himself.

“What is it about her?” Ryan asked.

In answer, J.B. simply shook his head. “Once bitten, twice shy, I guess,” he concluded with a grim smile.

They were alone in a metal car filled, floor to ceiling, with tins of food. Old-fashioned, mil-prepped cans, a fortune in prenukecaust foodstuffs. J.B. picked up a can at random and looked at the illustration on the label.

“Pineapple.” He grunted before secreting the can in a voluminous pocket of his jacket.

They continued, making swift progress through two more cars of food stock until they reached a car guarded by a sec man. They were eighteen car from the rear of the train and at least forty from the front.

“Gonna need to see your orders,” the sec man shouted, 146

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even though Ryan and J.B. were no more than four feet in from of him.

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 ogrelike 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, Alpha Wave

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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. Moreso, she would never have believed how little the incarcera-tion being against her will would actually matter to her in the end. But that was more than seventy years ago, when the Deathlands 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 smouldering foamy wash.

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

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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 Alpha Wave

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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 150

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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 imprison-ment. 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 Alpha Wave

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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 suntanning.”

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.