“I’m Maddie.”

Jak took her hand and shook it once before looking around at the surroundings. He was in a cage in a wooden train car. There were small gaps in the walls where the planks didn’t meet and where there were knots in the wood. Water seeped though the holes. Jak 152

DEATHLANDS

looked closer, poking his eye to one of the knotholes.

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

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

“Just like you,” Marc told him.

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

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

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

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

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

Humblebee laughed, a nervous twitter of a noise.

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

she agreed.

Chapter Fourteen

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

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

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

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

Twenty feet away, at the far end of the car, a woman’s head appeared, popping out for just a fraction of a second from a shelving unit full of ammo, twitching like an inquisitive bird. Then the head disappeared behind 154

DEATHLANDS

the shelves. It didn’t matter. Ryan had her height now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alpha Wave

155

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

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

“What happened to stealth?”

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

“But I threw it quietly,” J.B. grumbled as he followed Ryan to the door at the far end. The Armorer scanned the shelves as he passed, grabbing a few clips of ammo that he knew would fit one or other of the companions’

blasters. He passed twin clips of 9 mm bullets for the SIG-Sauer to Ryan as he reached the door. “Thought this was going to get easier,” he asked.

“We’re a hairsbreadth away the whole time,” Ryan replied, shaking his head. “All we got is luck on our side and, damnation, but we don’t often get much share of that. You want to do something with the bodies?”

J.B. nudged the woman’s corpse under a low shelf with his foot. It was out of immediate sight, but if anyone looked down they would see her tattooed arm catching the overhead lamplight. Behind him, the huge sec man’s corpse lay in its own blood behind the counter.

“Nah, let’s just keep moving,” he said after a moment.

Warily, the pair made its way through the adjoining doors into the next car. This one was the same as its pre-decessor, an ordnance car stocked with more weaponry, though the emphasis was more on explosives—bundles of dynamite, some plas ex that could be molded by the user to suit the person’s needs. Like the one before it, this ordnance car had two sec men on permanent duty, one at each end. The man nearer to the back door raised 156

DEATHLANDS

an eyebrow when J.B. and Ryan entered, then went back to the pack of cards he was dealing out in some interpretation of solitaire. He probably assumed that the strangers had been vetted in the previous car.

“Just passing through,” Ryan said as he and J.B.

walked past. The sec man turned over a black seven and placed it on the eight of diamonds that was showing in one of the stacks in front of him, making no acknowledgement whatsoever.

The sec man at the far end, dark-skinned with a han-dlebar mustache and a weeping, blind eye, nodded to the companions as they walked through the car. “You looking for anything, gentlemen?”

J.B.’s eyes drifted to the plas ex on one of the high shelves. “We’re with construction,” he said. “Might be needing some explosives soon.”

The weeping man laughed. “Adam send you? You got orders?”

“We were ordered, ” Ryan said, stretching the last word, concerned that they were about to start another blasterfight that they could ill afford, “but he didn’t give us anything to show you.”

“We’re both new to the crew,” J.B. added hastily.

“Got on three stops back.”

The half-blind man shook his head, tutting. “You need to show me the coin, Adam will give you one.

Didn’t anyone explain this when you came aboard?”

Ryan sighed, clenching his hand into a fist. “Ah,” he said, “you don’t want to know.”

The sec man laughed at that. “Yeah, sometimes it gets busy, everyone rushing around. You see the scalies?

Heard that was some serious crazy right there.”

J.B.’s glance flicked to the high shelf once again, Alpha Wave

157

thinking. “We’ll come back. Have everything in order.

There’s no rush.”

The sec man smiled at them. “No problem,” he said,

“I’ll see you when you’re all sorted.” He winked his good eye.

J.B. felt something instinctive then, he didn’t know why, and he turned back to assess the card-playing guard at the other end of the car. The card player was oblivious to them. J.B. looked back to the one-eyed sec man, offering his hand. “John Dix,” he said, “and my pal, Ryan.”

The mustached man took the hand in a firm, two-handed grip. “Good to meetya, John.”

Once the introductions were complete, the pair departed, heading onward through the train.

The next car was unmanned and seemed to be a storeroom for the oil lamps that they had seen lighting cabins and corridors. Ryan stopped as soon as they were through the door, closing it behind him and glaring at J.B. “What the hell was that?”

“Making friends,” J.B. explained. “Might be handy later on, Ryan. We agreed to do this by stealth, remember. Sometimes stealth is just fitting in.”

Angrily, Ryan shook his head. “One minute we’re chilling people, the next we’re playing baron’s banquet.”

“You seek out your own kind at the baron’s banquet,”

J.B. reminded him, “so you have someone who’ll step in front of the bullet when your enemy shoots.”

Despite himself, Ryan felt a smile cross his lips.

“You never cease to amaze me, J.B.” They continued down the corridor between the shelves and pulled the sliding door at the far end aside.

As Ryan was about to step through, J.B. grabbed him 158

DEATHLANDS

by the shoulder, and he turned back to look at the Armorer. “I would sure as hell like to get my hands on that plas ex, I can tell you,” J.B. said seriously.

“You got ideas for it,” Ryan asked, “or just feeling greedy?”

“I think we’re all agreed,” J.B. stated, “that whatever is going on here—the train, the scaffolds—it isn’t going to benefit places like Fairburn.”

“Does that matter?” Ryan asked. “To us, I mean.”

“Putting a dent in an operation like this,” J.B. said thoughtfully, “strikes me as mighty wise. Even if it’s a temporary setback, I think we’d do well to halt proceedings if we can.”

Ryan held the door open, looking at the windowless metal door of the next car. “Let’s find Jak first, maybe he’ll have some insights we could use.”

J.B. followed his friend through into the next car, another crew quarters with triple bunks along the long walls.

The sound of loud snoring filled the room from a high bunk to the left. On one of the lower bunks, two men sat beside each other, one with his shirt off to display a web of blue ink down the right-hand side of his chest. Next to him, a sec man was holding a small knife blade in the flame of an open oil lamp that he had set beside the bunk, watching as the blade glowed from red to dazzling white at its tip. Suddenly he turned to the bare-chested man and carved further line work on the man’s chest with the searing blade. The man clenched his eyes, expelling a slight gasp between gritted teeth as the hot knife touched his flesh. Ryan watched as the blade began to cool, its length turning an orange-red throughout. The man with the knife was Alpha Wave

159

adding ink to the new wounds, slowly drawing another tattoo on the chest of his companion.

As Ryan reached for the door to the next car, the train lurched, and he realized that the brakes were being applied once again. He entered the car, J.B. at his side, and they both looked around in wonder.

“WE’RE STOPPING AGAIN,” Mildred said, looking across the claustrophobic compartment to Doc from her vigil over Krysty at the bunk.

Krysty had become more lucid in the past half hour or so.

Doc grunted a reply, like a man being woken from a dream, and looked at her with a befuddled expression.

Mildred knew that sometimes Doc would drift off into his precious memories, enjoying the happier times with his wife and children before Operation Chronos had uprooted him from the time stream. Of all the companions, Mildred could sympathize with this trait the most, as she, too, had been uprooted from her place in chronology, albeit in a less abrupt manner. But she had become used to the phi-losophy of the Deathlands, that you lived in the present or you got chilled. She tried to restrict her moments of reverie to the quietest, safest times, when the companions had found safe harbor to sleep in, watch posted. Doc had been active here longer than Mildred, walking the grim paths of the postapocalypse, yet he still clung to those strong attachments of his previous life. He had been promised, not so long ago, that sticking with the one-eyed chiller would offer him the magical route back home, and he spoke of this in their quiet moments, the words of the old shaman’s prediction still enticingly loud in his ears.

For a moment Mildred wondered if the white-haired 160

DEATHLANDS

man had heard her, but he finally answered her with his infectious smile. “Indeed we are, Doctor.”

“Krysty seems to be okay,” Mildred said, looking at her companion who was sitting beside her on the bed, smiling to herself as she looked out the window.

“How are you feeling?” Doc asked Krysty. To him it seemed a remarkable change, but her health had been a back-and-forth pendulum since they had all stepped out of the Minot redoubt.

Krysty looked up at Doc and smiled, her green eyes bright and alive. “I feel okay. I feel kind of…normal.”

The surprise was clear in her tone.

“Her temperature’s back to normal,” Mildred confirmed after asking Krysty to hold a pocket thermometer in her mouth for a half minute. “It had skyrocketed when we got her to Fairburn, and it’s been high ever since. But it’s normal now.”

“This is most peculiar,” Doc stated. “Perhaps it really was the gateway jump, an adverse reaction to the matter transfer.”

Mildred sealed the thermometer back in its covering plastic tube and replaced it in her backpack on the floor of the cabin. “Scuppers your theory about the towers,”

she said, but there was the trace of query in her voice.

“But you think, perhaps, that that hypothesis still holds some merit?” Doc asked.

Mildred reached a hand up to her brow, pushing hard against the points where her eyes met her nose as she thought. “It just doesn’t ring true,” she said. “There’s something here, but every time we think we’ve got a handle on it, the rules change. First it was the bad gateway jump, but her health deteriorated so swiftly that we started to wonder if it was something else. Then we Alpha Wave

161

wondered if it was the ville, the tower outside, the train.

And meanwhile, Krysty has been yo-yoing between off-color and near-catatonia. There’s just no pattern.”

The three companions looked out the window as the train pulled to a halt. Outside they could see rolling hills of green, beautifully tranquil. Suddenly, Doc piped up, struck by inspiration. “Eureka!” he exclaimed.

“What is it, Doc?” Krysty and Mildred blurted almost in unison.

The older man stood from the side desk in the cramped cabin, pacing a moment in the tiny area of floor. “A switch,” he told them, raising his index finger upright from a clenched fist. Then he folded the finger back into the fist. “Turned on and off. Simplicity itself.”

“A switch?” Mildred asked, the disappointment clear in her tone.

“Consider the prospect,” Doc said, “if what is affecting Krysty is on some kind of switch mechanism, be it by timer or other factor, then until we know the pattern of the switch we will not recognize the pattern of its effect.”

“A switch,” Mildred said again, but this time there was more acceptance in her voice. “Something on the train, you think?”

Doc shook his head. “No, not the train. Forget the train. It’s irrelevant. This is something—” he gestured sweepingly to the window “—out there.”

“But what?” Krysty asked eagerly, swept up in Doc’s wild theory now.

“The towers, of course,” he told them both, “it has to be the towers. Whatever they are doing, they do not do it all the time. There is an off switch, just like on a lamp.”

162

DEATHLANDS

Mildred was dubious. “We didn’t find an off switch at the one Ryan looked over at Fairburn.”

“And we have no idea what they do,” Doc agreed, “so how could we identify an off lever when we had not the slightest comprehension of what we were admiring?”

“He has a point.” Krysty nodded.

Mildred peered through the window, looking up and down the tracks as far as she was able. “Then we need to find out what the towers are about.”

“Of course,” Krysty said gleefully. Doc’s idea seemed to have lifted a weight from her mind.

But Mildred knew she had to dampen that elation.

“Not you, Krysty,” she said. “Too dangerous. You’re the one who’s reacting, I don’t want you to go near these things, just in case.” Though she saw the logic, Krysty still looked disappointed. “Doctor’s orders,” Mildred added firmly.

Doc spoke again, reaching for something on the tiny desk that J.B. had left along with his map of the territory: his minisextant. “Why do you think we have stopped?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s because of a tower,”

Mildred said, agreeing with Doc’s unvoiced conclusion.

Doc held up J.B.’s minisextant, and took a single, long stride to the door. “Bring the rifle,” he called back to Mildred as he stepped into the corridor.

Mildred did so, following Doc down the corridor once she had confirmed that Krysty would be all right on her own for the duration.

THE TRAIN had stopped moving, he knew.

Keeping their voices low, Jak quizzed Maddie and Alpha Wave

163

the other children about the sec patrols. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to them, he learned—the sec men simply came by when they felt like it, irregularly providing the prisoners with food. For the most part, however, the children in the cage were left on their own, to do as they wished. It was assumed, reasonably enough, Jak thought, that they would not be able to escape, so having a sec man watching them was a waste of personnel. More so, Jak realized, thinking back to his parade alongside the train to this car, when you took into account that there was more than one cage.

“Sometimes, when the train stops,” Marc told him,

“they put someone at the doors to make sure we don’t try anything.”

“Which is stupe,” Maddie whispered, “because there’s nothing we can do anyway.”

Jak disagreed, but he chose to say nothing. He didn’t want to raise the hopes of this ragtag group of children.

He was older than them, and they were beginning to adopt an attitude of subservience and obedience to him as they would to any adult. Before Jak had arrived, they had decided that Maddie and Marc were co-leaders by virtue of their age and, hence, seniority. Children, it seemed, followed the same patterns in pretty much any situation, and Jak realized just how easy it was to prey upon the innocent because of this.

At five foot five, he was taller than anyone else in the car, the Asian girl Maddie’s head just reaching to his breastbone. Standing upright, he could stretch and touch the wooden ceiling, but he needed something to stand on if he was to put any pressure on the boards in the hope that one of them might give. There was nothing immediately at hand, but the children might be per-164

DEATHLANDS

suaded to form a human ladder if required. For now, however, he dismissed the idea and considered other avenues of opportunity.

The side walls were wooden boards, with gaps between that were wide enough to fit his thumb through. He tried shoving the hard part at the base of his hand against a few of the planks to see how much give the joins had in them. There was some, and he might break one of the boards away with a solid punch or kick. Though he had lost his Colt Python, the sec men hadn’t bothered to check his jacket sleeves or his pockets, and he still had his sharp throwing knives secreted on his person and sheathed inside his boots.

These might also be used to lever the boards apart, he realized, but he would need an extended period without the possibility of a sec man stumbling upon him. He would need to pick his time carefully for that, as opening a hole in the side of the car while the train was moving would be very dangerous for the children.

While Jak’s number-one priority was to save himself from this situation, he would help the children if he could.

Jak also checked the flooring of the boxcar, but he did so only briefly, unable to think of a safe way to exit in that direction, even if the train was stationary. He noted that the floor was alive with lice and tiny, wrig-gling silverfish, thriving on the damp wood.

Finally, with Maddie ushering the children away, Jak took a close look at the lock and hinges on the cage door. He instructed both Marc and the inquisitive girl, Humblebee, to watch both entrances to the car—he did not want to be seen tampering with the lock.

Silently, Maddie stood behind Jak as he examined Alpha Wave

165

the bolt mechanism that held the gate closed. There was a corridor running along the front and one side of the cage, the same one he’d been brought in by; it was very narrow, someone of Ryan’s build would have to shuffle sideways along it, he realized.

The mesh wall looked flimsy but the construction was solid and the material had an awkward malleabil-ity that meant it bent without snapping away from its attachments at floor and ceiling. Jak stopped putting pressure on it, looking again at the lock and hinges of the door. It would be hard to break the lock from inside, hard to get a good angle on it or a solid enough run up to add significant force.

The door’s hinges were attached by flathead screws, however, and Jak placed his thumbnail into the groove of one and tried adding pressure there. The screw didn’t move. It was wound absolutely tight, embedded in the metal. But with one of his throwing blades he might be able to twist the screws free, one by one.

He looked back at the children, all of them sitting quietly, watching the doors with his appointed sentries except for Maddie. The girl was watching him, her head tilted like a dog’s with the effort of comprehension.

“What do you see?” she asked him, a tight smile on her lips.

“Couple good escapes, but—” Jak gestured to the children “—plenty responsibilities, too.”

Maddie couldn’t disguise her happiness, her smile widening and her eyes creasing as she replied. “So, you would take us with you?”

Jak nodded, firmly and slowly. “Kids not belong,” he said simply.

Chapter Fifteen

“Krysty’s health is flip-flopping like a beached fish,”

Mildred griped to Doc in a taut whisper. “I’m not comfortable leaving her alone for too long.”

She and Doc were lying on their bellies beneath their train car, peeking out between the oily wheels. Up close, the track was almost as haphazard as the train itself. By necessity the gauge was precise, but there seemed to be a hodgepotch of material in use to bring it into being.

Between the metal rails were struts of wood, though none of the struts matched in color. Some of them had licks of splintering paint across them, where they had served a previous life as a door, windowsill or shelf.

Shingle was tossed between the tracks, its rough points pressing into their torsos as they rested their weight on the ground.

Mildred was to Doc’s left, clutching Ryan’s Steyr in front of her as she hunkered in the shadows beneath the train, hidden from view. Doc leaned forward, adjusting J.B.’s minisextant where he had placed it upright on the shingle in front of him. Satisfied, he leaned down and looked though the spy hole once more, the device’s tiny telescope aimed toward the front port side of the train.

“Ah,” Doc said, beaming, “there you are, my beauty.”

Mildred glared fiercely at the old man, but her look was wasted—he was absorbed in his work with the Alpha Wave

167

minisextant. “Do you ever hear a word I say, Doc?” she growled.

“I heard,” he replied, still looking through the tele-scopic attachment. “Our Krysty is in rude health right now, Doctor, and she will be fine, I am sure.”

“You’re sure,” she scoffed, a harsh edge in her whispered voice.

“We have other, pressing matters to attend,” Doc told her, twisting the focusing knob on the little device. “A mystery which may, in turn, be the root cause of Krysty’s health problems, as you have already acknowledged.”

“Yes, but I said that while I was still sitting where I could keep an eye on her,” Mildred grumbled.

“Pish posh,” Doc said, dismissing her. After a moment he added, “They are coming out now, take a look.”

They had already observed a group of twelve, armed sec men trek away from the train, through the trees and off into nearby fields of cereal crops. Other sec men warily patrolled the terrain, blasters ready in their hands. Their position beneath the train was dangerous, but they both agreed that they needed to see what was happening with the towers, even if Mildred was starting to have second thoughts about leaving Krysty alone in the car above them.

Mildred tilted the Steyr to look through the scope, panning hurriedly across the field of vision until she found the point where Doc was looking.

“See them?” he asked quietly.

“Mmm-hmm,” Mildred acknowledged. “What are they doing?” She was looking at two technician types who appeared to be in deep discussion with a muscular 168

DEATHLANDS

man in a dark vest. She adjusted the scope, bringing the figures into tight focus—Vest Top had several white scar lines down his arm and across his face, while the technician types were the two thirty-somethings that Ryan had told her about.

“To the left,” Doc whispered, “a little way out from the tracks.”

Mildred shifted the weapon slightly and the view through the scope shuddered for a moment until she located the tower. It was a twin to the one they had found on the outskirts of Fairburn, a scaffold structure built into a thin pyramidal shape like an obelisk. From this distance, with no sense of scale, it reminded her a little of the old Washington Monument, towering proudly into the blue sky, oblivious to all that went on in its shadow.

As she watched, another technician or whitecoat came into view, older with wispy white hair, his round spectacles catching the sunlight. He patted the side of the tower with one hand, perhaps to assure himself of its structural integrity but just as likely to keep his own bent frame balanced on the rough terrain.

“This is it, huh?” Mildred whispered. “The whole magilla.”

Doc watched silently through the telescope attachment of the minisextant. He had seen this process once before, during the long night while his companions were sleeping, but he wanted Mildred’s opinion before they came to any conclusions. His theory about their being a switch felt viable, but they needed evidence to go further in acting on it.

They both watched as the man in the dark vest walked over to the tower, followed by the younger Alpha Wave

169

whitecoats, and spoke to the elderly man. Then, entering their tight viewpoints from the right of frame, from somewhere on the train, Mildred realized, two men carried a large, cylindrical canister to the tower’s base. They walked slowly, legs spread wide to hold the weight of the object. The canister was about four feet in height, painted the deep orange color of paprika, a yellow hazmat label affixed to its side.

“What is that?” Mildred muttered, all thought of the sharp stones beneath her now forgotten, dismissed from her mind.

The man with the scarred arm ducked down, dropping himself inside the base of the tower between the skeletal legs. Once there he worked his fingers into the ground, grasping something that was buried there.

Mildred thought back to the tower at Fairburn, remembering the metallic disk that was sunken in the sand at its base. With visible effort, the man began to twist something, his arms spread wide as though he was turning the steering wheel of an eighteen-wheeler truck.

The older whitecoat leaned in, pointing at something on the ground there.

“What are they doing?” Mildred asked quietly.

“That is what we are here to find out,” Doc whispered back. Though he had witnessed this operation once before, he hadn’t known what to look for then, and it had been at night. This time, in the bright, midmorn-ing light, he was ready and had instructed Mildred on where to look.

A large steel cap, like a trash can lid or a manhole cover, was lifted from the ground by the man in the dark vest. He balanced it on its rim before rolling it along the ground, away from the tower’s base.

170

DEATHLANDS

The female whitecoat stepped over, a measuring stick in her hands, and knelt in the grass beside the tower. Leaning down, she popped her measuring stick into the ground—presumably into whatever the metal disk had been covering—and reached forward so that her arm disappeared beneath the surface up to the elbow. When her hand reappeared, the dipstick was glistening with some sort of liquid. Mildred tightened the focus on the scope but she was not quick enough to see what mark the liquid had left.

“Do you see it?” Doc whispered.

“Yes,” Mildred breathed. “Liquid. Couldn’t see what.”

“Do not worry,” Doc told her, “there’s more.”

Mildred watched as the three whitecoats discussed the dipstick at some length before settling on a decision.

It took almost three minutes until there was any further activity, and Mildred began to wonder what spectacu-lar feat Doc was expecting her to witness. Then they reached a consensus, and the man in the dark vest who had removed the metal cover stepped over to address the two men with the heavy cylinder, explaining some operation with hurried hand movements as well as words.

Slowly the canister bearers “walked” it to an area beneath the tower, half stepping, half turning the heavy item in the grass until it was in place. Then they unscrewed a small black plug near the top of the orange cylinder, revealing a round opening a little off center.

Together, following the shouted orders of Dark Vest, they tipped the canister very gradually until a thin drool of liquid began pouring from the hole.

Mildred adjusted the focus on the rifle scope again, Alpha Wave

171

trying to get as close a view as possible. Doc may have said “This is it” right then, but she wasn’t really listening anymore.

As she looked, a dark shape blotted her view, like a lunar eclipse across the crosshairs of the scope, as one of the patrolling sec men wandered across her field of vision. She cursed inside her mind, her lips moving but no sound coming out. Get out of the damn way, she thought, as though thoughts might have an effect. Then, just as abruptly, her field of vision was clear again and she watched as gray drool was poured into the space beneath the legs of the tower, disappearing into whatever the removed lid had revealed.

The gray liquid poured slowly over the lipped opening in the orange cylinder, its passage uneven where it contained small, solid lumps. Whatever it was, it was viscous, like mucus, the consistency reminding her of the old fruit smoothies she used to drink at college in her days before cryo sleep. Could it be organic? Refined liquids didn’t pour like that. This was more a paste than a liquid. It could be animal, more likely, really, but Mildred was a doctor not a vet—when she thought organic she extrapo-lated from her knowledge of the human body. She watched, thinking of the gunk that man produced: blood, saliva, urine, sweat, feces, semen, mucus, breast milk, perilymph… There were others, she knew, things hidden in the flesh, sebaceous glands and their ilk.

She felt Doc shift beside her, and suddenly the old man was moving with urgency. She took her eye from the scope, looked to her right and saw him rapidly crawling backward out of the hidey hole beneath the car using his elbows, off to the starboard side of the train—

the opposite side to all the activity at the tower.

172

DEATHLANDS

“What is it?” Mildred asked, her voice low.

Doc’s head poked beneath the train to look at her.

“Stay put,” he instructed her, and then he was gone. She watched his feet stride along beside the car, heading toward the rear of the train.

There was no time for this, Mildred realized. Doc could take care of himself and whatever urgent business he had. She placed her right eye against the scope once more, watching the activity at the scaffold tower. The female whitecoat was back now, extending her dipstick into the hole in the ground while the two men with the canister held it upright in the same spot, no longer pouring liquid from its innards.

Suddenly a shot rang out just behind her and Mildred flinched. Doc? she wondered.

SITTING A LITTLE WAY back from the cool surface of the window glass, Krysty looked out at the area around the train. Propped in the chair by the tiny desk, she focused on some movements she had noticed in a flank of trees about seven hundred yards from the stationary train.

She watched eight men stalking through the shadow of the trees. Dressed in dark clothes with wool caps pulled over their hair, the men drew heavy blasters as they approached the train. One of them held a pair of binocs to his eyes, his head turning as he panned the monstrous length of the train, his expression grim. He lowered the binoculars, turned to his comrades and flashed a hand signal at them that Krysty didn’t recognize.

A moment later two men from the rear of the group stepped forward. The first had what looked like a long pipe slung over his shoulders, like an old-fashioned Alpha Wave

173

milk maid, his head bent forward, his hands holding the weight in place. The diameter of the pipe was roughly that of a man’s leg. As Krysty watched, the man swung the pipe from his shoulders and, after further discussion with the leader holding the binocs, knelt and rested the pipe over one shoulder. His partner rooted through a leather satchel and produced three identical items: three-feet-long tubes with pointed ends. Rockets.

Krysty unconsciously flinched as she saw the satchel bearer load the first rocket into the homemade launcher and light the fuse.

RYAN AND J.B. stepped warily into the new car, looking left and right, automatically scanning their surroundings for possible attack. But the area appeared to be empty of personnel.

The room was quite dark; the only lighting came from the walkway that ran down its center, indirectly splaying from the edges of the raised, metal grating.

One wall was lined with pressurized canisters standing upright in the confines of a metal unit, and these were painted the burnt-orange color of paprika and displayed the familiar hazmat symbol on their sides. The holding unit clunked and hummed to itself, its groans echoing through the chamber. To the right side of the car was a jumble of intricate pipework, running over and under a long desk that ran almost the car’s full length. It reminded Ryan of the moonshine stills he’d seen from time to time in villes throughout the Deathlands.

The car featured large, rounded sides, bloating outward beyond the standard width of the train. This was one of the three fatter cars they had seen during their walk along its side beside Lake Sakakawea.

174

DEATHLANDS

There was a definite clinical feel to the setup, and, as they walked slowly through the car, J.B. pointed out the pivoting spotlights that were arrayed above the desk on a long rail. A thick cable attached to the far end of the rail ran to a worn-looking gasoline generator, and a chimney hose ran from the genny to the ceiling, disgorging waste products as required. Currently the genny and the spotlights were switched off.

Automatically, J.B. checked the rad counter on his lapel. “Radiation’s at normal levels,” he told Ryan.

“Any idea what all this stuff is?” Ryan asked, peering around the unmanned car.

J.B. reached across and warily placed the back of his knuckles against one of the canisters lining the wall.

“Cold,” he stated.

Up close they could see that a sheen of water droplets had formed on the shelved canisters like morning dew, and the humming unit they sat within exuded cold air.

Ryan walked to the far end of the car and found a second generator hidden from view by the bulky cooling unit. The gasoline genny was jumping up and down in place, chugging away as it powered the refrigeration unit. A hose system took the waste products out through the ceiling, in the same way as the one that powered the desk spotlights. The car didn’t smell of gasoline, though there was the faint whiff of alcohol, implying that the ancient gennys had been converted to run on the more plentiful fuel source.

Ryan strode across to the door at the far end of the car. It was wider than any they had stepped through up to now, and featured a level board of metal that ran directly into the next car, thus forming a flat walkway between the two. A small, square window with rein-Alpha Wave

175

forced glass, the familiar crisscross pattern of wirework within it, was in the center of the door, and Ryan peeked through. The next car was also empty, and featured a similar long desk with spotlights along one side of the room. The other side held five parked carts, and Ryan could see that the wall featured a large set of double doors that would open at the left-hand side of the train.

At the far end he could see light coming through another square window like the one he was looking through. A dark shape obscured the light in the far window for a moment as someone passed. “Next one’s empty,” Ryan called to J.B., “but I can see movement in the next but one.”

J.B. grunted in acknowledgment. He was busy checking the burnt-orange canisters, reading the details on the hazmat labels and examining the dark, coglike seals that were found near the top of each unit. The labels told him very little. They were standard instructions about storage and he couldn’t be certain that they even referred to the contents now in these canisters—

after all, so much of the material in the Deathlands had been acquired for new lives long after its original purpose was forgotten. A rough square of paint had been chipped away on each canister on the rounded top and an alphanumeric code had been written there in a clear, bold hand using a black marker. In earlier times this information might have been added using printed labels and barcodes, but such luxuries were rarely found in this new world. J.B. couldn’t attach any special significance to the numbers, but concluded that they were probably just a storage code rather than a clue to the contents.

He reached forward and carefully unscrewed one of 176

DEATHLANDS

the dark caps that sealed a canister, before propping his spectacles on his brow and putting his naked eye to the opening. He shifted his head this way and that as he tried to get some light on what he was looking at, but it was very difficult with only the underfloor lighting of the car.

“What do you see?” Ryan asked, keeping his voice low.

“There’s some kind of liquid in there,” J.B. replied,

“I can see the shimmer of reflections. Can’t tell what it is, though.” He sniffed at the contents, which gave off very little smell, just something faintly acidic. If J.B.

recognized the odor, he certainly couldn’t place it.

“What’d it smell like?” Ryan asked as J.B. resealed the canister.

J.B. sighed, trying to gather his thoughts and overcome an uncomfortable nagging he had in the back of his mind. “Death,” he answered after a moment, “and I can’t place why.”

As the pair walked toward the door into the next car there was a loud explosion and the whole train shook.

Ryan staggered, reaching his hand out to the wall to steady himself as J.B. stumbled backward into one of the generators.

“Fireblast!” Ryan growled, looking around the car.

“Something hit us!”

MILDRED HEARD THE FIZZING noise coming from ahead of her as it passed from left to right, but she continued to watch the process at the tower through the powerful rifle scope. A second later the car above her shook, and a shower of dust fell over her bare arms and shoulders as the noise of an explosion filled Alpha Wave

177

her ears. Doc had disappeared just five seconds before, and she had heard the report of a blaster just prior to the explosion. She realized what it meant—

the train was under attack. No wonder Doc had rushed off when he did. While she had been watching the work at the tower through her scope Doc had to have been scanning for hostiles in the area around them and spotted the attack a split second before the rocket was launched. He’d trusted Mildred would be safe beneath the train while he guarded her from attack.

Whatever had hit had done so farther along the train, somewhere much closer to the engine. Unless someone targeted her car, she should be safe for now; Doc would see to that.

She dragged Ryan’s longblaster across the ground, keeping her eye to the scope as she tried to locate their attackers. A squad of sec men charged from the train toward a clutch of trees on the horizon, and shots whizzed over their heads as the roof guards set up cover fire. The group at the tower had ducked, the dark, vested leader crouching in a classic protective stance as he reeled off a volley of shots from a heavy blaster into the nearby shrubbery. With naked eye, Mildred glanced back at the tower, leaving the scope focused on the action in the trees, and watched the three technicians hurry for the armored protection of the train.

Something crossed her field of vision as she watched, a thin object moving at high velocity, and there was a second explosion. A cloud of dust kicked up near the tower and the train rocked once more.

Mildred put her eye back to the scope on the SSG-70

and watched flashes of light in the trees as the sec men 178

DEATHLANDS

reeled off shot after shot from their blasters, trying to locate their hidden attackers.

SOME SIXTH SENSE had told Doc to look around the train a few seconds before the attack had begun. That was all he could attribute it to as he rushed along the starboard exterior of the vehicle, hugging the side and sticking to the shadows there. He had his LeMat blaster in his hand, loaded and ready, as he dashed toward the back of the train.

Above him, he could hear gunshots as the roof gunners took aim at their assailants. Beside him, the train shook as it took a rocket to its midsection, and Doc looked behind him and watched as the rocket exited on his side of the train, having blown a hole clean through one of the cars near the front of the long vehicle from port to starboard.

He looked to his left, his eyes roving the patchy forest for signs of more attackers, and suddenly he saw another rocket burn through the air out of the trees, heading straight toward him. Doc threw himself to the ground and the rocket zipped overhead before slamming into the train car just behind him.

The explosion rang in his ears, and he looked back to see the extent of the damage. A wide hole had been created in the side of the car to his right, barely ten feet behind him. The edges of the hole glowed hot, and flames could be seen bursting from the interior. Several dented sheets of metal tumbled through the hole where they had been freed from the shelves in the storage car.

He struggled back to his feet as multiple shots rang out.

The rooftop gunners had spotted the glint of metal in the trees and were peppering the area with a spray of bullets.

Alpha Wave

179

Doc stepped back into the shadows, dodging into the space between two storage cars near the rear of the monstrous train. He watched from his hiding place as sec men rushed past, calling to one another about the fire in the nearby car.

A series of shots rang out from the trees, chipping at the wet ground around the train as a team of sec men rushed into the woods, trying to get a bead on their attackers. Suddenly, Doc spotted the movement in the branches above them, and a skinny man in homemade camouflage clothing appeared with a blaster in each hand, firing at the train guards. Three sec men fell at his devastating attack, and Doc heard the whoosh of air as another rocket launched from somewhere in the same clutch of trees.

As the rocket blasted through the air, its tail aflame with propulsion, Doc swung the LeMat and reeled off a single, devastating shot. Three of the upper branches of the trees disintegrated as the large ball slammed into them, and the skinny man fell to the ground in a whirl of limbs. It was a curious position that he found himself in, Doc realized, defending the prison that held his colleague. But right now there was no other option if they were to have a chance of rescuing Jak.

Then the rocket hit, smashing into the sheet-metal wall of the last car, shaking the structure of the whole train. Doc blinked back the dust from his eyes, shook his head to try to clear the ringing noise that gripped his ears, and peeked out from his hiding place. The rocket had slapped into the wall of the final car, denting the side but not piercing the sturdy boxcar. As J.B. had surmised, the last unit of the train had been toughened to withstand attack, and its heavy contents added to its shielding.

180

DEATHLANDS

Doc glanced around, realizing that no further noise was coming from the trees to his left. Four sec men were trudging back to the train, weariness replacing the adrenaline that had motivated them just moments before. Two of them carried one of their colleagues, bearing his weight on their shoulders. The man they held stumbled, hopping on one foot, afraid to put weight on the other leg. Blood poured from a wound in his left leg, glistening in the morning sun.

Men from the train rushed all around, sliding back the large side panels of several of the storage cars at the back of the vehicle and removing sheets of steel, rivets and welding equipment. They organized themselves quickly to make swift repairs where the train had been holed. Doc dropped farther back into the shadows between the cars, wondering what to do next.

JAK HAD BEEN examining the lock on the cage door when the train shook with the explosion. He spun automatically, looking toward the rear of the train as though he could peer through the wall and see where the explosion had come from.

The train rocked in place for a few seconds before settling once again. Some of the younger children began to wail then, and everyone voiced the same question: what was that?

“’Splosion,” Jak told them, urging everyone to be quiet as he walked across the small cage and put his ear against the back wall. He could hear lots of shouting and the crackling sound of flames. And there was screaming—the high voices of children, scared and hurt.

“Everybody on floor,” Jak instructed firmly, pointing to the wooden boards of the floor. “Lie down.”

Alpha Wave

181

The children looked at him quizzically, several of the younger ones like Francis-Frankie shrieking in terror, their faces red. Maddie reached out, gently touching the shoulders of several of the children as she repeated Jak’s instruction. “We all need to lie down, like we’re going to sleep. Come on, quietly, lie down.”

It took a few moments, and Maddie had to pull one of the younger children—a dark-haired five-year-old called Allison—gently to the floor, but eventually the children were lying down, leaving only Jak standing.

He heard the tinkling of a bell, two urgent rings, echoing along the train cars—some kind of alarm system, he guessed. He stepped away from the back wall, imagining he could feel the heat of flames but also certain that it had to be his imagination. The dull ache was still playing at his left arm, and he rubbed it through his jacket as he stepped across the car, looking all around.

With no warning, there was the sound of a second explosion, coming from the port side of the train, and Jak looked across at the wooden wall past the wire mesh of the cage wall. He heard something hit the side of the car there, a shower of rocks and dirt, he guessed.

The shells were getting closer.

His eyes swept around the little box of the room, his brain working urgently to try to find a way out. On the floor, some of the children had taken fetal positions, curling in on themselves as the car shook all around them. Others hugged each other, glistening tears streaming down their cheeks. Marc looked scared, his own cheeks damp with tears, but he held tight to two of the smaller children, promising them they would be safe.

Jak was conscious that three sets of eyes were watching 182

DEATHLANDS

him, including Maddie. When she caught his eyes she mouthed a question. “Are we going to be okay?”

Jak shrugged, his gaze sweeping across the roof, this way and that, as he heard the gunshots all around. Then he looked down at Maddie on the floor once more and he realized what he had to do. He crouched in front of her, knees bent, balancing on the toes of his worn boots.

“We be fine,” he told her firmly, locking his eyes on hers.

There was another explosion, far back in the train but still enough to shake their car, and Jak leaned down, resting his body beside Maddie and the other children.

He gazed at the wooden slats of the roof, listening to the stuttering song of automatic weapons from all sides.

THE SEC MEN HAD EXITED from the third of the bloated cars as soon as the explosions began, and Ryan and J.B.

rushed into it the second they were sure it was empty.

They had discussed going outside, finding out what was causing all the damage, but the urgency to find Jak had become paramount now as the situation on the train became more perilous.

They were stopped in their tracks by what they saw in the third car, though it affected Ryan more deeply than J.B. Like the previous two, this car featured what looked to be distillation equipment along one wall, coupled with a bloodied bone saw, and half of the opposing wall was taken up with another refrigerated unit full of the tall, burnt-orange cylinders. But the remainder of that wall, beside a grumbling gasoline genny, featured four little, square cages stacked two atop two. Three of the cages were empty, but the final one featured the body of a naked boy, lying in the tight Alpha Wave

183

space, curled up on himself. The child’s skin was dirty, and there was evidence of dried blood around his face and neck. His skin was lusterless, and bony ribs stuck out from his chest. The boy was about eight years old and he appeared to be sleeping.

J.B. had noticed Ryan’s discomfort. “You okay?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

Ryan shook his head, his single eye still looking at the child in the cage. “Just made me think for a moment,” he stated. There were things in Ryan’s past, a child of his own now lost somewhere in the Deathlands, his own childhood so abruptly cut short by his murderous brother… Ryan didn’t dwell, but, all the same, there were old wounds that would never heal, not completely. “The sec man back in the car, the one I iced, he said something about children—about how they would take, would steal children.”

“He explain why?” J.B. asked.

Ryan shook his head. “We didn’t talk extensively.

I’m thinking of Jak, wiry little runt that he is. It was pretty badly lit where they picked him up. Reckon they thought he was a kid?”

J.B. laughed in spite of himself. “That’s rich.” He smiled. “Jak would just love that.”

Ryan reached for the bolt mechanism on the exterior of the cage, but J.B. put a hand out to stop him. “Not our problem, Ryan,” the Armorer stated firmly. “But you open that cage, he’ll become our problem. One we can’t afford.”

Muttering a curse, Ryan withdrew his hand and the two of them headed to the door and into the next car.

IT TOOK ALMOST twenty minutes, but finally the sec men rounded up the few remaining stragglers of the rebel 184

DEATHLANDS

party that had attacked them. There were three survivors in all. The party of sec men that had been dispatched into the fields as soon as the train stopped had eventually attacked them from the rear, culling them in swift order. The three remaining attackers, still dressed in their dark clothes and wool caps, were made to kneel in the dirt close to the tower, and their hands were tied behind their backs.

Adam, the commanding officer of the train crew, wearing his dark vest to better show the ghastly scarifi-cation running down his arms to match his misshapen, abused face, pulled the .44 Magnum blaster from his hip holster once more and held it at the head of the first of the three living attackers.

“Why did you attack the train?” he asked.

“Screw you, outlander.” The man spit, looking firmly at the ground.

“Look at me,” Adam growled, “not the ground. Look at me, brave man, and say that again.”

The man grunted and slowly raised his head. In less than a second the top of his head disappeared in a cloud of blood as Adam’s blaster fired a shell through his skull.

“The next one won’t be so lucky,” he explained. “The next one, I shoot in the gut and leave for the burrowers.”

The two kneeling men looked at Adam as he swung the blaster toward them. “Now,” he told them, “I want to know why you attacked my train.”

The man to the left spoke through clenched teeth, venom in his voice. “You came here nine months ago,”

he told Adam. “You came in the night and you stole our crops and you took my only son. And not just him—

Alpha Wave

185

other children from the ville. For eight months we asked the same question. Why? Why did they take our sons and our daughters? Why?”

Adam grinned maliciously as he looked at the man.

“Nine months is long enough to produce another son,” he told him. “Think of the boy as your tribute to the baron.”

Anger welled in the man’s expression and he lunged at Adam, launching himself from his knees, head down, toward the larger man. Adam sidestepped, and the man fell facefirst into the mud behind him. Slowly, almost casually, Adam aimed his blaster at the man’s torso and blasted a hole below his rib cage. The man howled in agony, crumpling on himself where he lay.

The third man, still kneeling in front of Adam and the tower, found his voice at last. “We answer to no one here—Hazel has always been a free ville.”

Adam walked away from the kneeling man, instructing his men to follow him back to the train. The engine was warming up now, snuffling like an animal woken from hibernation, as it got ready to continue its journey along the metal tracks. The sec men who patrolled the grounds fell in line, making their way back to the train, as well. The fires had been extinguished and temporary plates had been added to the sides of the train where the rockets had hit; it was ramshackle, but it would do for now, until they could find a safer stopover point.

Adam barked out a single laugh. “A free ville,” he shouted. “You hear that, men? A free ville is what Hazel is.” And he laughed again, a humorless, mocking bray.

FROM HER WINDOW, Krysty felt her stomach drop as she watched the two sec men approach the kneeling man where he struggled by the skeletal tower. These sec 186

DEATHLANDS

men wore large, sturdy backpacks that glinted with the sheen of metal, and they each held a long pipe in their hands. The pipes were attached to their backpacks with a short length of hose.

The sec men stood eight feet from their kneeling victim, three or four paces between them, and leveled the pipe nozzles. Krysty turned away but she could see the man’s fate in her mind’s eye as he began to burn under the ghastly power of the flamethrowers.

THE BURNING MAN’S agonized scream was cut short almost as soon as it started as the flames engulfed his mouth and tongue.

Watching from her position under the train, Mildred heard the familiar hum as the engine warmed up, felt the car above her begin to vibrate as thrumming power began to pull at the heavy burden.

Ahead and above her she could hear the call going down the tracks as each sentry repeated the instruction.

“All aboard!” When it reached the sec man who was standing three feet in front of her, she hoped he might jump onto the train, but he just stood there, his dirt-streaked boots directly in front of her.

She felt the thrum of movement on the tracks where she rested as the train began to pull slowly away, and watched as the wheels began to gradually roll. Mildred pulled herself tighter under the train between the tracks, watching the wheels pass her. The length of the car above her was eighteen feet, she had that long to come up with a way to roll out from under its moving body, kill the sec man and get back onto the train—not necessarily in that order.

She hugged Ryan’s blaster closer to her body as the train chugged along the tracks, gathering speed.

Chapter Sixteen

A wall of moving wheels blocked her exit and the sec man was still there. Why hadn’t he boarded? Mildred reminded herself that the speed of the train was negligible just now, barely three or four miles per hour.

Outside, standing by the tracks, the guard could probably stroll beside the train and grab the rung of a passing ladder without a second thought while it traveled at this pace. Meanwhile, she was stuck below the moving behemoth as the space beneath became tighter and tighter.

From underneath, Mildred looked toward the rear of the train as it began to pick up speed. The clearance above her was about fifteen inches, and she could see that at least one of the ramshackle units rested lower to the ground than that. She pushed her chest and the side of her face to the shingle between the tracks, clutching the weapon to her side as the train trudged over her, clattering loudly on the tracks.

She shifted her head uncomfortably to the left, watching as a thin, sunny gap between the cars approached. The next car would follow, the storage unit with the windshield walls that she had walked through less than twelve hours before. Its bed fell lower and there were thin, spiky shafts hanging below where the pipework of the structure had been rudely finished. The 188

DEATHLANDS

struts were pencil-thin and various lengths, one almost reaching to the ground, and each was marked with the grime it had picked up on the journey.

As the sliver of light between the cars passed overhead, Mildred took a deep breath and closed her eyes, pressing her nose down into the pebbly surface between the rungs of the tracks. She felt the spikes drag across her back and shoulders, snagging runs of her skin and wrenching them painfully away. Farther down her body, she felt a tug at the seat of her combat pants and she pressed herself harder into the ground, willing the ordeal to be over. The sound of the train was almost deafening against the tracks beside her, the loud rumbling of its passage like an underground waterfall.

She felt something tangle in her hair and the skin of her scalp burned as something pulled at it until, with a painful snap, a braid of her plaited hair was yanked from her head.

Over the racket of the moving cars she heard a sudden crash right in front of her, out of sync with the rhythm of the train. She rolled her head carefully, the shingle biting into her left cheek, and looked out from under the train.

The dark, oil-smeared wheels passed just two inches from her face, and then came the gap between them and Mildred saw the dark shape of the sec man lying there, his mouth wide open, his eyes blank in death. A bloody line was drawn across the bottom of his shirt, and his guts sprawled across the muddy ground where a blade had slashed a horizontal streak across his torso.

“Come on, my dear doctor,” the familiar voice of Doc called. “You have a patient to treat.” She looked farther to her left where the voice had called from. She Alpha Wave

189

could see Doc’s swordstick hanging in the space between the cars and she ducked down beneath it as it passed overhead.

She timed the movement of the passing wheels on the next car, saw the gap between the large sets of wheels, and scrambled out from beneath the train, still holding Ryan’s Steyr. From the gap between the car ahead of her, Mildred saw Doc’s smiling face poking out, and he beckoned her with his hand as he stood on the lip of the door. “Quickly now,” he encouraged, and she darted forward and grabbed his outstretched arm, using it to pull herself up between the cars beside him.

“Thanks, Doc,” Mildred said breathlessly, relief in her eyes. She was covered in mud and beige dust from the shingle, and there were tiny traces of cuts all over her face and bare arms.

Doc opened the door to the next car and pushed her, somewhat less than gently, inside before following her.

Once inside, Mildred dropped the blaster to one side and folded over, placing her hands behind her calves as she gathered her breath.

“Close,” Doc’s voice said behind her as she sucked in deep breaths. “You almost missed your train and the good Lord alone knows when the next one’s due.”

Despite herself, Mildred smiled.

MILDRED AND DOC WERE back in the compartment with Krysty, though now it was Mildred who sat in the bed while Krysty tended to her wounds, dabbing them with a piece of rag doused in the antiseptic mouthwash that Mildred had picked up for her med kit somewhere on her travels. It wasn’t the antiseptic she would have chosen, and it stung like hell when Krysty applied it to 190

DEATHLANDS

the abrasions on her face, but Mildred knew she needed to clean the wounds and the small alcoholic content of the mouthwash would do that just as well as anything marketed for the job.

“I’ve been trying to place where I’ve seen those towers before,” Mildred told the others while Krysty dabbed at her cheek, “it was there all along, in the back of my mind.” She looked at Doc as she addressed him.

“Doc, you spent some time in the twentieth century, didn’t you?”

Sitting at the desk, the blade of his sword now hidden once more in the sheath of the ebony walking cane, Doc nodded. “Some, but, alack-a-day, it is sometimes a very blurred period in my memory.”

“Did you ever see one of those old RKO movies?”

Mildred asked. Then she put on the deep, clipped voice of the typical 1930s newsreel announcer. “‘An RKO

Radio Picture.’ Do you remember that?”

Doc shook his head slowly, a weary apology on his face.

“There was a tower,” Mildred continued, unfazed,

“just like the ones we’ve seen out there. A radio broadcast tower that spanned half the globe.” She gestured with her hands, drawing it in the air for them both. “An illustration, showing how the RKO company was able to send their information through the airwaves.”

“Perhaps I saw something of its ilk,” Doc said hesitantly. “It strikes a vague chord with me, to be sure.”

“This tower stood proud over the world,” Mildred explained, “and little bolts of lightning or something, the signal I guess, zapped off its highest point like so…”

She snapped her hands open and closed a few times, as though she were playing a set of invisible maracas.

Alpha Wave

191

Krysty watched Mildred’s pumping hands and smiled. “This ‘Arko’ used to flash lightning bolts over the world, in the days before the megacall?”

“No,” Mildred told her patiently, “it was an illustration. An animated way of bringing the idea of broadcast to life.”

“Like a radio,” Krysty concluded as understanding dawned.

“I think that those towers out there are radio transmitters,” Mildred stated, looking from Krysty to Doc.

“But there is no wiring,” Doc said, shaking his head,

“nothing visible at least.”

“The wires are underground,” Mildred told him.

“That thing we saw, that big metal plate—that opens into the lower part, beneath the broadcast tower. That’s where the workings are.”

“And what are they transmitting?” Doc asked, clearly dubious. “Classic show tunes? Or perhaps they are sending telegrams to each other?”

“Except,” Mildred stated slowly, “I don’t think it’s a radio. That liquid they were using to fuel the cells, that was something organic, I’d swear it was. It had the sort of consistency you don’t get in refined material.”

“What does the fuel matter?” Krysty wanted to know.

“I think it’s the fuel that’s making you ill,” Mildred said confidently.

The three of them sat quietly, considering what Mildred had just said, wondering at its implications.

Krysty moistened her rag again and sat behind Mildred to work on the cuts across her back and shoulders.

“If that is true,” Doc wondered out loud, “then why doesn’t being aboard the train seem to have any direct 192

DEATHLANDS

effect on Krysty? The fuel is stored here, after all. I saw them remove it from one of the forward cabins.”

“Proximity,” Mildred said, enunciating the words slowly, “and pulse.”

“Meaning?” Krysty asked.

“Predark we had mobile phones,” Mildred stated.

“A cell phone signal is not one continuous stream. It broadcasts in waves. If you put a cell phone beside a radio, you can hear the pulse affecting the reception, crackle-crackle, clear signal, crackle-crackle, clear signal again.” Mildred’s words were coming quicker now, saying them out loud was helping to form the theory she had been slowly working on in the back of her mind. “Now, like anything automated, that pulse would work to a set rhythm. What if our towers out there are doing the same, working to a set rhythm?”

“But if this signal is what is affecting Krysty’s fluc-tuating health, would not we have noticed the pattern of the broadcasts?” Doc asked.

“Proximity,” Mildred stated again, and Doc nodded, suddenly understanding her theory.

“We have been traveling all over North Dakota,” he answered, “at varying distances from the towers. If they are broadcasting in waves, in pulses, and we have varied our distance from them, then the pattern would be almost impossible to recognize without studying all of the factors and amassing a significant amount of em-pirical data. Perhaps with study and a map of the towers’ locations…” He was nodding to himself now, seeing the point that Mildred had begun to explain.

“Am I right?” he asked her.

“Am I right?” she echoed. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

Alpha Wave

193

HUMBLEBEE WAS LAUGHING as she and several of the other children tried to copy the trick that the ghost boy, Jak, had shown them. He had produced a pocketknife, its blade gleaming in the indifferent light from the open door, and let the children carefully handle it, proving that it was as solid and real as they were. Then, with a flurry of his hands, the white-skinned youth had somehow made the knife disappear, apparently into thin air.

The children had applauded and several of them had squealed in delight, insisting he show them again. Jak had talked them through the trick, repeating the mantra

“Eye slow, hand quicker” at several points as he whipped his arm around and tucked the leaf-shaped blade into his sleeve.

Then Jak used the pocketknife to carve away two small, rigid strips from the wooden walls of the car and passed them to the children, under Maddie’s silent sufferance. The wood strips were roughly the size and shape of his knife, and were, according to Jak, “good practice not getting hurt.” Maddie had pointed out that the wood was splintering and its ends were sharp, but Jak had just shrugged. “Splinter never chilled,” he assured her.

The knife trick had been more than entertainment.

Jak had wanted to get the children used to carrying shivs, working them in their hands. He wanted them armed, however crudely, for when he broke them free from the cage.

As the children practiced with the wooden spikes, Jak went back to his own task, working away at the tight screws that held the hinges to the cage door. The screws were embedded deeply into the metal, but Jak had 194

DEATHLANDS

worked the thin point of a knife into the circular holding and slowly twisted. The knife had slipped numerous times, unable to hold in place against the tight screw, but he had silently endured, replaying the process until he finally got the right angle to use a torque action to loosen the fastener. He gradually rotated the knife by the leather-bound handle, careful not to lose the grip he’d found on the screw, and, slowly, the head of the screw pulled away from its grounding.

The light was poor for this work, streaming through the far door open to the moving countryside beyond and dazzling Jak while putting the hinges in shadow. But Jak worked carefully, feeling as much as seeing, shielding his eyes now and again to check on his progress. He wanted the screw just free of the lip of its hole, enough that he could work it free easily, in a matter of seconds, when the moment came, but not so much that the door would fall off if a sec man knocked into it.

Satisfied with his progress, Jak left the screw in place and began the process on the second screw in the hinge. There were four screws in each hinge, eight in total, and he intended to loosen them all. He had nothing but time.

As he sat cross-legged, working his knife at the second screw, Jak became aware of the grumbling in his stomach. It had been hours since he had eaten, the spiced ribs in Fairburn were almost eighteen hours in the past now. He would survive for a while, but without food he would become weak for the final assault.

“When eat?” he asked, turning to look at Maddie who was, once again, sitting close to him, watching his busy hands at work.

Alpha Wave

195

Maddie shrugged, a resigned smile on her face.

“When they remember to feed us, I think,” she told him.

Jak bent, looking closely at the screw he was loosen-ing. It was coming away from its slot nicely. “Often?”

he asked.

“Can be,” she replied. “Other times it will be almost a day. But sometimes we get two or three dishes, good food even, if it’s a nice man.”

Jak’s head turned and his scarlet glare pierced her, frightening Maddie. “None nice,” he told her. “Remember and stay alive.”

Maddie tugged at her bottom lip with her teeth and nodded. “I’m sorry, Jak. I’ll remember.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he stated, his voice softening again.

“Be alive. Best type Maddie ever is.”

She nodded again, but Jak had turned his face back to his task. Maddie looked at his busy hands, fascinat-ing in their whiteness as though dipped in paint, the long fingers with their protruding knuckles so delicate, despite the traces of old scars that covered the pale skin.

She looked at his face in profile, the concentration absolute in his expression, taking shallow breaths through his barely opened mouth. His face was all angles, the high scarred cheeks planed like a statue, and his alabaster skin only added to that impression. His long, straight hair was white like the rest of him. She thought back, remembering the warmth that his skin gave off as she had touched his face as she had moved his head onto the blanket-pillow.

“Maddie, Maddie, look!” That was Humblebee, excited as she called across the tiny cage. Maddie looked up, seeing that Marc had one of the wooden shards. “Look what Marc did!” Humblebee cried, her 196

DEATHLANDS

face glowing with excitement. Maddie watched, her face impassive, as Marc palmed the wooden shank just as Jak had shown them.

“Good,” Jak told him. He had glanced up without Maddie realizing. “Show others.”

Marc smiled. “If I can remember.”

RYAN AND J.B. continued to make their hurried way through the train. The cars were busier now, as they got ever closer to the engine that drove the beast. There were more sec men, the small construction team they had seen at the towers, and at one point they passed the three whitecoats in the tight corridor of another bunk room, heading in the opposite direction. They passed through another double mess hall, busy with hungry sec men who watched the gyrations of a dancing, jolt-high slut as they ate.

There were two more rooms of food similar to the one where J.B. had found the pineapple chunks, though the side of the foremost one had been damaged. The right-hand wall was peppered with holes like buckshot, and J.B. and Ryan took a closer look. The Armorer poked his index finger through a hole, feeling the rush of air outside with the train’s rapid passage across the Dakotan fields.

“Took a hit from a home-made shotgun,” Ryan suggested.

“No,” J.B. said. “Look at the way the wounds wept.”

He pointed to the melted metal remains that ran beneath the holes like tears. “This is acid. Probably from a toxic rainstorm.”

“Avoided most of the shelling but I guess this part of the state couldn’t escape everything,” Ryan commented.

Alpha Wave

197

His words were borne out shortly after when the train thundered through the rad lands of the far south.

They had walked through another pair of acid-damaged cars, both filled with repair supplies like those at the rear of the train, and one of them showed some evidence of attempts to patch up the holes in its side since, when J.B.

nudged a steel plate aside, they saw the holes were larger on this unit. A third car full of stock equipment was undamaged, however, and it wasn’t until they reached a car full of bunks that they could look through windows into the outside world again. What they saw was depressing.

Since they had left the redoubt in Minot, North Dakota had proved to be a changeable mishmash of territory. The bland desert around Fairburn had given way rapidly to greener areas and so to farmland that produced the richness of foods that had been sold in the walled ville. Fairburn had seemed isolated, but it was perhaps fifteen miles from farmland. But that patch of rich, fertile land had proved brief, and as they had crossed the lake they had seen evidence of poisoned terrain, destroyed by toxins in the air. Here, far to the south of the old territory, they saw the rank devastation of radiation. The land that the train traveled over was bare and pitted; no plants or greenery of any sort existed, not even moss or lichen. The soil was burned a dark shade of brown, almost black, in fact, looking more like charcoal than earth. Large cracks crisscrossed the land, digging deep into the lifeless soil like scars on a man’s flesh.

The air stank, an awful, putrid smell like rotting meat. Carrion birds flew across the sky, their vast wing-spans mutated to grotesque proportions. They swooped 198

DEATHLANDS

through the air, flying parallel to the train until Ryan and J.B. heard shots from above as the rooftop gunners took aim. One of the sec men was unlucky, and they watched as he was dragged away in the colossal claws of one of the vulturelike birds, screaming as blood spurted from where the talons had pierced him. The booming report of a heavy cannon cut through the air over the shuddering racket of the train, and J.B. watched in fascination as a heavy shell blasted through the air from the front of the train. The shell failed to hit any of the fast-moving, enormous birds, but it served to scatter them and they swooped away toward the horizon.

The ground here was sloped, evidence of earthflow, and the train traveled at a lurched angle, its port side no-ticeably lower than starboard for almost three miles.

The tracks followed a perfectly straight line for the duration of the slope, any curves would have likely derailed the train.

As the ground began to level out once again, the squeal of brakes being applied rang through the train, and Ryan spotted another scaffold tower in the distance from the window of the third crew bunk car in succession. They were forty-one cars from the back of the train, closing on Jak’s position fast.

WITH NO WARNING, Krysty fell to the floor, stretching her hands out before her to cushion her fall.

Doc leaped up from the lone chair in the tiny compartment and Mildred jumped from her seated position on the bed, crouching beside their companion. “Are you all right? Krysty? Krysty?”

Krysty worked her swollen tongue in her mouth, swallowed against a suddenly dry throat and mumbled Alpha Wave

199

the words “I’m fine,” even though she wasn’t. The pain had started again, appearing from nowhere, an ax wound to her skull. Her muscles ached with cramp, her arms and legs heavy, and her heart was pounding in her chest as though thumping at her ribs to break free.

Mildred and Doc helped lift her from the floor, pulling her across to the bunk and stretching her out there. Mildred placed her hand gently on Krysty’s forehead, feeling for a moment in silence. “She’s burning up,” she told Doc.

“This is madness,” he replied, “sheer madness. She was fine, absolutely fine, not ten seconds ago. It is impossible.”

“It’s happening,” Mildred confirmed, “so it can’t be impossible. Whatever it is, it’s happening again—” she looked at the beautiful redheaded woman on the bed, watched in horror as blood began streaming from her nose and around her gum line “—only worse.”

Doc walked to the window, looking out across the bleak landscape. “We are coming up on a tower,” he stated, a strange sense of satisfaction in his voice.

“You think the theory stands?” Mildred asked.

“Though hardly the proof we wanted,” he decided,

“I would say that this is, at the very least, a good signifier of our perceived correlation, would not you?”

Mildred nodded. “Hell, yeah.”

ADAM HAD HOPPED BACK onto the train at the rearmost mess hall car when they had pulled away from the Hazel tower. He had sat alone, consuming a late breakfast as the train trudged on to its next, inevitable stop. He knew the route so well now, having traveled with the train on every one of its bimonthly journeys, and he had grown 200

DEATHLANDS

to hate this section of the route—the burned grounds south of Jamestown, where the fallout from the nukes had stretched its withering hand. It was a hot zone, the air itself still poisonous even after a century of supposed recovery, and he could feel the poisons burying themselves into the scars that crossed his arms, his face, eating into the muscles and tendons. Thus, he chose to eat on this section of the loop on every go-round, so that he never need see the awful, barren landscape.

Adam had been with the train crew from the very start, when Baron Burgess had assembled his team and proposed the project. Just another sec man in Burgess’s army, Adam had climbed the ranks in the subsequent four years, and now held the position of commanding officer, Burgess’s trusted right-hand man. The baron couldn’t travel with the train any longer, though he had been with it in the early days as the monstrosity had shuddered along the tracks, placing towers and creating new rail routes where they required, the old whitecoat at his side. These days, Baron Burgess couldn’t leave his citadel. Like many of his men, Burgess had had to make sacrifices for the Grand Project, and the worst of them had been his own mobility.

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

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

Messing up things was not an option any longer. The project was at final stage, they could no longer afford mistakes. He had asked both the whitecoats and the Alpha Wave

201

baron himself how the project fared, and they had all made agreeable noises: the tests, it transpired, had proved very encouraging.

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

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

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

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

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

202

DEATHLANDS

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

Where were the guards?

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

Adam looked at the blood on his fingertip, looked at the corpse, then stood once more. “You got aced, you lazy simp,” he muttered as he stalked down the car, flicking the catch on his hip holster and drawing his .44

Magnum blaster. Jen worked here, too, always the shift with Phil. He had drawn up that rota; the two always asked to work together.

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

You hid, girl? You hid yourself?”

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

Alpha Wave

203

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

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

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

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

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

They had intruders.

Chapter Seventeen

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

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

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

Jak remained cross-legged by the cage door and watched the sec man from the corner of his eye. The sec man had a curly mop of dark hair, long sideburns and the signs of several days’ beard darkening his chin. He carried a large longblaster held on a strap that rested on his left shoulder crosswise over his body, hanging below the level of his groin. The longlaster looked homemade, spliced together from old parts, but it took a standard ammo clip of 9 mm slugs in an awkward-looking top-loader. The man was dressed in muted greens and browns, a passing effort at camouflage Alpha Wave

205

should he find himself in the woods. As he stepped in front of Jak, the albino flicked his wrist as though swatting away one of the flies that hung around the little mound of feces in the corner of the cage. The movement pushed his leaf-bladed knife from its hiding place in his hand down his sleeve, the sec man none the wiser.

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

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

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

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

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

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

R.H.—were carved in the black metal of the butt.

206

DEATHLANDS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.B. HAD SPECULATED that the triple burst of bells was some kind of warning system, and Ryan agreed, feeling Alpha Wave

207

deep in his gut that they had been discovered. The companions continued along the train, keeping their heads low as they walked through two more cars stocked with repair equipment and demolition explosives. J.B.

paused at the demolition material, picking up a few items and judging their weight and flexibility. Old-fashioned dynamite stood there in sticks like thick candles, but there were also some combustible liquids, some accelerant and a small slab of plas ex. Unlike the weapons store, this area remained unguarded, though the explosives were of the same type and caliber. It was interesting how the context changed the security protocols; while the train pirates didn’t concern themselves with guarding this storeroom, J.B. saw it as a wealth of armament opportunities.

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

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

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

208

DEATHLANDS

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

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

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

“What’s going on?” Ryan asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Think I could make things right.”

The sec man in the rear, the one who had initially failed to recognize them, spoke up again, his Heckler

& Koch still targeted at Ryan’s head. “You fellas knew Alpha Wave

209

Phil?” he asked warily. “I don’t remember you. You got names?”

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

Jumped on last night, just outside Fairburn.”

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

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

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

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

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

The man at the overhead rail blaster peeked down the ladder, a silver-plated .38 shining in his hand. Ryan 210

DEATHLANDS

reeled off a shot in his direction and the man ducked back into his cubbyhole.

There was a pause then, the car falling silent. Ryan swiftly reloaded the SIG-Sauer, the spent cartridges clattering to the floor while J.B. covered him.

A stream of bullets came at Ryan and J.B. from behind the ladder as the surviving sec man fired blindly in their direction. The blasts from the ugly, flared snout of the blaster dug chunks of wood from the wall behind them, and Ryan and J.B. scurried to the right, out of their attacker’s potential arc of fire. Ryan watched him through the rungs of the ladder while J.B. trained his Uzi at the top of the ladder, ready for the overhead gunner.

Suddenly the train lurched around a sharp bend in the track and all three of the men on the ground level staggered, losing their positions. The sec man behind the ladder recovered, aiming his blaster at J.B.’s chest, firing three rapid shots. Two of them missed, whizzing past J.B. as his finger gently squeezed the trigger on his Uzi, unleashing a stream of bullets at the man, spraying him over the upper legs, chest and face as he fell backward with their impact. J.B. staggered as the sec man’s third bullet took him low in the torso, and his breath blurted out of him with the bullet’s impact.

Ryan looked at the Armorer, seeing the flash of pain that crossed his face, and his single eye moved down to J.B.’s gut where the bullet had hit. A dark stain was forming on his shirt. The Armorer looked down as he regained his composure, pulled back one side of his jacket, reached into an interior pocket and pulled out the can of pineapple chunks. There was a dent in the can and syrupy liquid was trickling from the far side, Alpha Wave

211

creating the stain. The can had deflected the bullet, just enough for it to miss the Armorer, glancing off into one of the walls somewhere. J.B. looked at it, a grim smile crossing his lips, and tossed the leaking tin to one side of the boxcar with a clatter.

An eerie silence had descended on the car once J.B.

stopped firing and the fallen sec man stopped moving.

The companions waited, their breathing hard as the adrenaline pumped through them, waiting for the upside gunner to reappear. There was a sudden report from his blaster, and they watched as a bullet embedded in the floor beneath the ladder. Then a second and third followed, hitting different points in the floor, but none of them hit near Ryan or J.B.

The two companions walked carefully forward, edging around the area beneath the circular hole in the roof, watching more bullets pump into the floor from above. It was clear that the sec man wasn’t aiming, just hoping a stray shot might catch the intruders.

Across the other side of the ladder, J.B. gestured to Ryan, miming the pumping of a shotgun barrel and making a querulous face. J.B. was right—the man could have a whole stack of weapons up there besides the .38

blaster. It wouldn’t do to just rush up there while he appeared to be reloading.

J.B. took careful aim with the Uzi and blasted off several rounds up the ladder and into the cavity above.

They heard the man curse violently as the bullets whizzed around him in the enclosed space, and he reeled off four more shots in reply, the bullets embedding themselves in the scratched wooden boards at the foot of the ladder.

Ryan edged closer to the ladder, silently instruct-212

DEATHLANDS

ing J.B. to fire again. The Armorer did so, and they heard the man scream in pain. One of the bullets had hit him, maybe off a ricochet. A stream of profanity accompanied bullets from the .38 as the man blasted shots down the ladder, several of them close to where Ryan stood.

Ryan reached up, the SIG-Sauer handblaster steady in his grip, and pushed the nose of the blaster against the car’s wooden roof. He pulled the trigger, and reeled off three shots through the rotting wood and into the space above. With the second shot they heard the man scream once more, then heard him slump to the roof above with a heavy thud accompanied by the sound of a blaster shot but no sign of the bullet. Ryan continued to hold the SIG-Sauer to the ceiling, shifting it slightly to where he thought the thud had come from and firing off three more shots. He pulled the blaster away as three thin streams of red began to drip through the bullet holes in the ceiling.

Without looking back, Ryan and J.B. reloaded their weapons and continued onward.

MILDRED HAD HELD Krysty’s head, pulling her hair back while the woman spluttered blood into the washbowl that Doc had passed her. After a while, Krysty had turned to spluttering pink drools of saliva, dry heaving but producing nothing else from her stomach. Her whole body shook, and she had cried pitifully with the explosive force of her vomiting, but it had finally passed and she now lay back on the bunk, her eyes closed as Mildred and Doc watched over her. The vomiting spell had lasted almost fifteen minutes, pretty much the whole time that the train Alpha Wave

213

remained stationary at the tower in the wastelands.

Doc had kept one eye on the comings and goings outside the window, but remained disinclined to in-vestigate further, genuinely fearing for Krysty’s life now. Again he had had to remind himself of how wrong this all was, that Krysty’s destiny was not to die by the hand of some rogue, unseen infection, whatever the cause.

“Curse those blasted towers,” he suddenly exhorted, pumping a fist into his open palm with a loud slap.

“Doc,” Mildred said, trying to calm him, “There’s nothing we can do but keep her safe.” She looked at the old man, seeing the anger that had finally broken through his calm exterior, and held her gaze on him as he wrestled with the situation in his mind.

“I hate to see her hurting like this,” Doc said, his voice still tense.

“It hurts us all, Doc,” Mildred insisted, keeping her voice level.

Doc sat quietly for a few seconds, looking at the shapely redheaded woman on the bed, at the dried blood smeared across her chin and throat. “Ryan should be here now,” Doc said firmly but quietly.

Mildred looked at the floor, shaking her head slowly.

“This whole situation has been impossible since the second we got here,” she said quietly, almost as though she spoke only to herself. “We’re stretched thin, vulnerable and Krysty’s…” She stopped herself, looking at the still body of the woman lying on the bed, hands folded across her chest as though lying in state.

“Krysty’s what?” Doc encouraged, not from spite but from a need to hear the truth.

“Krysty’s in a lot of trouble,” was all Mildred would 214

DEATHLANDS

tell him with any certainty. She didn’t want to say the other thing, the word that was looming at the forefront of both their minds.

RYAN AND J.B. FOUND themselves in an unlit, cold car that stank of human waste. To their right was a cage and inside were six children along with the corpse of a seventh. The children huddled together under a sack that had been split to make a blanket, remaining as far from the rotting corpse as they were able in the tight confines of the cage. Ryan and J.B. were both relieved and disappointed to find that Jak was not among them.

The cage was an add-on, the unit they were in looked like some kind of cattle truck or maybe a horse box with a gaping hole along the wall of the corridor, opposite the cage itself. The cage had been constructed using some kind of sturdy mesh, and Ryan pushed his hand against the grille wall with some force before conclud-ing it was solidly built. The mesh bent under pressure, but seemed to have enough give in it to simply bounce back when he let go.

J.B. stood with his Uzi ready, watching through the open slit of the car as the tortured landscape hurtled past. The children ignored both men, clearly used to armed adults intruding on their tiny world, assuming them to be part of the force of their captors.

“We should free them,” Ryan said to J.B., keeping his voice low.

J.B. agreed, nodding a definite yes as he thought through the angles of such an operation. “Need to have somewhere to put them, a way off the train, way to keep the crew off our backs and theirs.” He pointed to Alpha Wave

215

the horizontal slit that ran the length of the car, gesturing to the dead landscape outside the train. “It’s rad hot out there, no place to take children.”

Automatically, Ryan checked his lapel pin rad counter, saw the tiny display had turned orange: a hot zone, but not immediately lethal. Run around in it for three or four days on the trot and you’d start to see sores on your body that wouldn’t heal, though, and the immune system of malnourished kids like this, well, it would be game over.

“Hey,” Ryan said, offering the children a friendly smile as he approached the door to the cage. “I need you to help me.” None of the children reacted. They just watched Ryan blankly, their eyes wide in fear. “I’m looking for a friend of mine, a man with white skin, anyone seen him?”

The children continued to look at Ryan, remaining absolutely still and silent.

J.B. reached across, skimming Ryan’s arm with his knuckles. “They’re scared, Ryan. They’re terrified.”

“I know,” Ryan said quietly, his jaw set as he looked at the children in the cage. He crouched on his haunches, looking at the group of children for a moment. “We’re friends,” Ryan told them. “We’ll get you out. We’ll come back and we’ll get you out. I promise.” Then he and J.B. departed, stepping through the door into the next car.

RYAN AND J.B. STEPPED through the remains of a cage, parts of the grille work still dangling from the holed roof. There was blood and body parts all over the car, and a gaping hole in the exterior walls on either side bore witness to where the rocket had passed straight 216

DEATHLANDS

through. The body parts were small, the little legs and arms of children. One of the bodies was almost intact, just missing a hand, but it was charred, black where the flesh had burned in the ensuing fire after the rocket had hit.

Maybe some had escaped during the confusion.

Ryan clung to that thought as he walked across the blood-smeared wooden boards of the car, his SIG-Sauer still in his hand. J.B. disturbed his thoughts then, stooping and prodding at some body parts with the muzzle of his Uzi. “Find something?” Ryan asked.

“No one I recognize,” J.B. stated, his face set, fury burning behind his eyes.

Ryan looked at the body parts, thinking about how these children had died, their last days spent in terror, captives to the psychopaths running this hellish train until one of them was taken off, stripped naked and used in whatever foul experiments they had stumbled on in the bloated cars farther down the train.

J.B. rose from his sifting on the floor, his expression equal parts weariness, anger and determination. “Jak’s a survivor,” the Armorer reminded his friend. “He’ll be right as rain.”

They walked through the ashes that covered the floor and opened the door into the next car.

“MEN COMING,” Humblebee and Marc called across the cage to Jak from their vigil watching the rear door of the car. Jak palmed the knife in his hand and rolled back from the cage door. Marc was holding one of the makeshift daggers that Jak had carved from the wall, and he copied the albino’s move as best he could, palming the weapon in a half second.

Alpha Wave

217

The rear door opened and two men walked in, blasters in their hands. The one in the lead had to crab-walk through the narrow corridor alongside the cage, just as Jak had imagined.

“Ryan,” he said, beaming when he saw his old friend.

“And J.B.” He stood and walked with them as they both rounded the cage to stand in the larger gap in front of the bolted door.

“Dark night, it’s good to see you!” J.B. exclaimed, looking through the mesh at his imprisoned friend.

“How they been treating you?” Ryan asked, looking past Jak to the children that filled the cage.

Jak pulled open the top few buttons of his dark shirt, showing Ryan the purple bruise that had been generated when he had been hit with the tranq dart. “Dart gun,”

he explained. “See again, chill shooter.”

Ryan laughed. It was a relief to see his friend in such high spirits after all that had happened in the last, terribly long half day.

“Krysty?” Jak asked, not sure how he should broach the subject. “Better yet?”

Ryan looked wistful, his mouth a thin line. “Hard to say, Jak. She’s been out of it half the time. Mildred was none the wiser when we left them. They’re both on the train with us, along with Doc, keeping a low profile in a secure cabin.”

J.B. spoke up then, his tone faintly amused. “Surprised to see you in here. Thought you’d have come up with six escape routes by the time we caught up with you.”

Jak held him in a steady gaze. “Got seven, deciding when for.”

“That’s my boy.” Ryan laughed.

218

DEATHLANDS

Jak felt a presence at his side and turned to see that Maddie was standing there, holding Humblebee’s little hand in her own, with Marc and Allison just behind.

They were all looking at Ryan and J.B.

“Introduce friends,” Jak told Maddie and the others,

“Ryan and J.B. Hundred percent loyal.” He gestured to the children, went through them, telling Ryan and J.B.

their names.

It was uncomfortable, making small talk with children when they all knew they were on a tight schedule, but Ryan spoke to the children, doing his best to put them at their ease while J.B. kept close watch on the closed doors at either end of the car.

Francis-Frankie pointed to Ryan’s face. “What happened to your eye?” he asked, not a trace of malice in his voice.

Ryan put a hand to the patch, running his fingers around the edge where it met his scarred flesh. “I had a fight with my brother, a long time ago, and it ended up that he took my eye out.”

Several of the children gasped, imagining how it had to have happened. Marc stepped forward, speaking quickly. “Didja chill ’im?”

Ryan nodded. “Had to in the end.”

Just then, the door at the front of the car opened and the curly haired sec man burst in. “I’m ready for your little dance, sweetheart,” he said with a laugh as he stepped into the car, blaster in hand. He stopped in mid-stride, looking at the two armed strangers in shock.

Chapter Eighteen

Adam had called together his troops when the train had halted at the tower in the poisonous wastelands, telling them of his discovery in the weapons car and advising them to pass the information along. He wouldn’t entertain the idea that this might have been a domestic dispute of some kind, either between Phil Billion and his lady Jen or perhaps with another crewman. He ran a tight team here, ragtag mercs but ones good at obeying orders. A lot of the crew had been with the project right from the start, and many of them had a vested interest in seeing Baron Burgess’s plans come to fruition after such a long investment of their time. Internal squabbles, while not unheard of, had never escalated into chilling like this.

When he explained the situation to the dozen men who had joined him during the tower repairs, one of them had piped up with an interesting point. The man’s name was Boran, a sour-tempered individual with a hook in place of his left hand, but still a dead aim with his right. “Anyone seen anything o’ Sean Givin?” he asked. “He was rearguard and I was meant to relieve him this morning, but when I got there there weren’t no sign of him.”

“Givin,” Adam muttered out loud, trying to place the name. He knew every man’s shift, the patterns 220

DEATHLANDS

etched into his brain after so many journeys. “Why didn’t you bring this to me earlier?” he asked.

Boran shrugged. “I di’n’t think it meant anything.

Mebbe he just slipped and fell off, what do I know?”

“Yeah,” Adam agreed, “could have been. We’ve lost men before, I’ll accept that. You weren’t to know better.”

“So what do we do now?” another sec man asked, tossing a scimitar idly in one hand like some perverse circus act.

“Get the word out,” Adam told them, “we got us some intruders aboard. Mebbe one, mebbe more. You see anyone you don’t recognize and you challenge ’em, bring ’em to me if you think it’s necessary. We’re a big crew, I know, and there’s mebbe people on side you don’t know. Use your brains, stay alert. Don’t chill one o’ our own.”

“This is mayhem,” one of the sec men called,

“anarchy. We go around challenging everybody? What about the project, man. What about that?”

Adam looked at the tower, where work repairing one of the struts had just finished. “I’ll make sure the project stays on target. You just let me worry about that.”

As the train pulled away, the men went about distributing the alert. Adam paced the length of the train as it trudged slowly past him to his left. When the forty-seventh car had reached him, the red B sloppily painted on its side, he leaped aboard, a dark kerchief pulled over his mouth and nose. It was time to consult the bruja.

RAY HAD KNOWN the second he entered the prison car, before he had even seen the two men who stood there.

Alpha Wave

221

It was the change in atmosphere; the heavy taint of fear wasn’t there any longer.

There was a man standing at the door to the cage. He was tall and powerfully built, with the sure stance of an arena fighter. His unruly dark hair was long and curly, and he wore a holster at his hip. The man held a blaster.

“I’m ready for your little dance, sweetheart.” Ray had laughed as he entered the car, tormenting the little Asian girl with his words as a prelude to what he planned to do with her slim little body. But when he opened the door, the tall man had turned his head to look over his right shoulder, the fiery blue of his eye cutting through Ray as he stood there, door handle still gripped in his hand. There was a black line across the man’s forehead where a leather patch was strung to cover his left eye.

Ray heard a noise off to his right, and he looked across to see the second stranger. Ray couldn’t claim to know every person on the train, as he’d only been with the operation for two months. This was only his second go-round the loop. But he was sure he had never seen these two before. The second man stood, covering the room while the man with the eye patch spoke to the prisoners. This one was shorter, his eyes watching behind steel-rimmed spectacles, a battered fedora on his head and a heavy jacket wrapped around his wiry frame. The coat was bulky in places, stained and scuffed with spatters of ash and oil. The shorter man was holding a compact Uzi machine blaster, the long handle cutting the barrel to create a T shape. Ray watched the man raise the Uzi in his direction; the expression on the shorter man’s face was the familiar look of a seasoned chiller.

222

DEATHLANDS

It was automatic, an ingrained survival instinct. Ray pulled the door back toward him, leaping backward and slamming it as a spray of bullets thudded into it. His footing slipped as he rushed through the next car, another cage unit full of stinking, filthy brats, a narrow walkway along the left side. Recovering his footing as he heard the door open again behind him, Ray dashed ahead, reaching for the wooden door at the front of the car, the sounds of children’s screams filling the rocking room. He dived through the door and into the next car as a burst of gunfire spurted from the Uzi.

“DAMN!” J.B. GRUNTED as he followed the curly haired sec man into the next car. The man had stumbled as he ran down the narrow corridor beside the cage, but by the time J.B. was clear of the door, the man had recovered and managed to reach the far door, placing the cage of children between himself and the Armorer.

J.B. rushed forward, sweeping the Uzi in a tight arc as he blasted shots at the receding figure of the sec man. To his right, the caged children began screaming.

“We got a live one, Ryan,” J.B. shouted, hearing his heavy footsteps as Ryan bounced into the car behind him.

Together, Ryan and J.B. dashed through the car and reached for the exit door into the next unit.

J.B. went through the door first, keeping his head low as a volley of shots from the sec man’s blaster split the air above him, thudding into the wall to his left.

Ryan dived through the door behind him and they found themselves in another storage unit, half-empty but stocked with food. The dark-haired sec man was scrambling through the tight corridor between the Alpha Wave

223

wooden shelves, blasting off shots behind him without taking aim. In this enclosed space and with the rate of fire his blaster achieved, the sec man had concluded that aiming didn’t much matter.

Ryan and J.B. weaved between the half-empty shelves, using them as cover. A bullet plowed into the shelf just by Ryan’s face, splintering the wood as he turned from the scattering debris. J.B. pumped off two short bursts from the Uzi, the shots splitting food packages on the shelves, tossing frost-blackened vegetables and clouds of powdered egg into the air. At the far end of the car, the sec man had reached the next door.

He turned, firing a stream of bullets behind him before jumping across the gap between moving cars and into the next unit. Ryan’s back slapped into the wall, making as small a target as he could as the bullets streaked past.

He looked across the car, seeing J.B. doing the exact same thing. The bullets raced into the far wall, bursting several more food parcels as they went.

“We do not need this,” J.B. growled.

“Agreed,” Ryan said, rushing through the car toward the door in the front. “Let’s shut the runner up and get back to Jak.”

They ran between the shelves, and Ryan took the lead as they prepared to enter the next car. A continuous tolling bell echoed through the train.

With J.B. standing across from him, Ryan’s hand reached out to turn the handle of the door when the air was split with the noise of a shotgun. A volley of buckshot thudded into the metal door, chunks of lead burst through and shook it in its frame.

Ryan dived backward, spinning as he dropped to the floor. J.B. leaped back as well, slamming himself into 224

DEATHLANDS

the wall behind him. A second round slammed into the door, and it teetered in its frame again, hunks of the metal plating disintegrating and clattering to the floor.

Ryan brought up the SIG-Sauer to cover the door as it caved inward under the force of a mighty kick. He reeled off a succession of shots at the open doorway.

There was a cry as one of his bullets met a target, and urgent voices called for calm.

“How many of them?” Ryan asked as he scrambled back to his feet.

J.B. was skirting along the side wall, skipping backward on light feet as he moved away from the open door. “Not sure, but it’s more than just the runner.”

“Fireblast!” Ryan spit.

“WHAT IS IT, OLD WITCH?” Adam asked, as the bruja drew back from noisy pain that was calling behind her.

He stood in front of her in the incense-thick car, a dark kerchief over the lower half of his face, his breath steady.

The bruja’ s head rose heavily, her dim eyes ineffec-tually piercing the gloomy car to see the commanding officer standing there, three paces from her table. He was so close that she might reach out and grab him, she realized, and a thin smile crossed her lips.

“Speak,” Adam urged her forcefully. He was a man of little patience, and it was clear that being around the old witch made him nervous. “Is it the project?”

The bruja inhaled deeply, taking in the incense-filled atmosphere of her car prison, feeling its dulling effect blur her senses, making the pain something different and far away. “The project, yes,” she said, her voice a screech, a whisper.

Alpha Wave

225

“But there’s more,” Adam said in realization, taking a step closer. He wore a large blaster in the holster at his hip, and he deluded himself that it equated to power.

But, like many things in the world of man, this was but a fleeting power, easily dismissed. The bruja’ s wander-ing gaze stroked at the weapon before moving up his body, watching his mouth form the words. “Speak, old witch. I won’t ask you over and over.”

Suddenly a continuous ringing split the air, and Adam looked at the ceiling where the noise came from before biting off a muffled curse beneath the kerchief.

The bruja considered the space between them, insignificant now, close enough that she could grab him, rend his throat with sharp teeth and nails. And he, distracted, was more concerned with the tolling bell than the dangerous prisoner in front of him.

“Later,” he blurted, turning from the crone and striding back toward the doorway at the front of the car.

“Another,” she replied, her voice a whisper. But Adam had left and was jogging along the train’s length.

The bruja closed her ancient, rheumy eyes and concentrated on the pain that was emanating from the other, the woman who, like her, could feel the stab of the broadcast.

RYAN AND J.B. WEAVED through the food storage car as a rain of bullets split the air. Behind them, three sec men had rushed through the door from the far car, including the curly haired man with the homemade longblaster.

J.B. ducked down behind a wooden shelving unit and peppered the car with a burst from his Uzi. The sec men took cover as the bullets rent the air.

Through the smoking hole of the open doorway, J.B.

226

DEATHLANDS

saw more figures approaching, bursts of light as they fired rounds into the car.

Ryan had the near door open and turned back to put up some covering fire. He blasted several shots in quick order and felt a grim satisfaction when he saw one of the sec men’s shoulders explode in a cloud of blood and bone.

“Come on,” Ryan ordered, waiting for J.B. to cross the threshold into the next car.

J.B. leaped through the open door and sped down the narrow corridor by the side of the cage full of children with Ryan at his heels. “The doors are the weak spots,”

the Armorer observed. “We could pick them off, one by one.”

Ryan started to respond, but his reply was cut short as a burst of buckshot exploded through the air. To their left, Ryan and J.B. watched helplessly as two of the caged children were struck with the deadly burst, dropping to the floor with blood streaming over their small bodies.

“Not here,” Ryan stated. This was no place for a showdown. They needed to get clear of the sequence of cages that ran through the train, get to somewhere where they didn’t have to worry about the children getting hurt or chilled.

JAK WATCHED as the door burst open and Ryan and J.B.

came hurtling through.

“We’ve got a wagload of trouble following us,” Ryan told him urgently. “Keep the kids down or they’re liable to get shot.”

“Need help?” Jak asked.

Ryan nodded. “Whatever you can do.”

Alpha Wave

227

“Door come off if pushed,” Jak told him. “Been offing screws.”

“Good work,” Ryan said as he and J.B. rushed down the narrow corridor by the cage. “Choose your moment wisely. We probably won’t get a second chance now.”

With that, he and J.B. disappeared into the next car.

Moments later, eight sec men filed through the car, and Jak instructed the children to stay low as the armed men passed. One of the rearmost sec men was the curly haired one who had taunted Maddie, and Jak slipped his knife from his sleeve as the man followed his colleagues along the narrow corridor and into the next car.

A moment later a ninth sec man, a straggler with blood on his shirt by his left shoulder, staggered into the car accompanied by a tenth man holding a Smith & Wesson revolver low to his body. Jak stood near the back of the cage, watching these men enter, and he hunkered low into himself, the knife hidden in his hand.

As the man with the wounded shoulder stepped in front of the cage, Jak ran at the door. He jumped off the floor, slamming high into the hinged side with shoulder and hip simultaneously. The hinges popped from their sockets, the loosened screws flying in all directions as Jak crashed into the door. The mesh gate fell forward, spinning on the bolt. The cage door toppled into the wounded sec man, the top of the door hitting his forehead with a loud crack. The sec man’s legs gave way as the door and Jak’s weight barreled into him.

As the wounded sec man stumbled backward, falling to the floor, Jak was already using his momentum to push him into the second man, the one brandishing the revolver. The albino youth’s boots raced across the falling gate as he propelled himself at the other man, 228

DEATHLANDS

and he plunged the knife in his right hand into the man’s body just beneath his sternum.

Smith & Wesson Man was pushed upward with the blow, his feet leaving the floor as the full force of Jak’s attack slammed into him. The man toppled over on the pivot of the knife, and Jak spun aside, yanking the blade free as he went. The man crashed to the ground, knocking the breath out of him as he hit the wood floor, his weapon trapped beneath him. He lurched, trying to free his blaster as Jak leaped at him again, the blooded knife in his outstretched hand.

The blade’s sharp point penetrated the man’s back, cutting through his shirt and his skin and deeply into his body, puncturing his lung from behind. Jak’s weight rested on the man’s body, holding him down as he pulled his blade free and yanked the man’s head backward by the hair. He drew the bloody blade across the man’s exposed throat, slicing deep into the flesh and ending the unfortunate sec man’s life in a horrifying second of fury.

The other sec man, the one with the wounded shoulder, was struggling to free himself of the collapsed gate, but Marc and Francis-Frankie were standing on top of it, holding the man down. Marc held one of the wooden shivs that Jak had carved, watching the man below his feet.

Jak had taken the Smith & Wesson from the dead man, and he turned it on the man beneath the cage door before loosing a single bullet into the man’s skull. “We go,” he told the terrified children in the cage, pointing to the rear door at the end of the narrow corridor.

In Maddie’s mind, a mixture of revulsion and admiration warred for attention as she watched the albino youth lead the way to freedom.

Alpha Wave

229

THEY WERE IN the shattered car that had been rent open by the rocket attack. Ryan was already at the far end, pulling open the sliding door. J.B. ran through the ash and charred bodies of the dead children, ducking the broken remains of the cage.

Sec men charged through the door, the shotgun blasting yet again.

J.B. crouched low as he ran, the burst of buckshot whizzing over his head. Ahead of him, Ryan was firing 9 mm slugs from the SIG-Sauer, weaving his body as the smoke cleared and the sec men took aim.

As he ran, J.B.’s heel slipped in the ash on the floor, and suddenly he felt himself skidding forward, overbal-anced and falling to his left. A rush of air slammed into his face as he stumbled through the gaping hole that had been left in the rocket’s wake, and suddenly the Armorer was falling through space with nothing beneath his feet.

Ryan watched in horror as J.B. slid and disappeared from view. There was no time to do anything to save his friend. The primary mission now was to keep himself alive and he knew it.

As the sec men filled the air with bullets, Ryan dived through the open door behind him and rolled across the floor of the next car. He reached back and slammed the door shut as bullets whizzed through the open gap. The noise of the blasts continued as the shots slammed against the wooden door.

Breathing heavily, Ryan looked up into the faces of six startled and very frightened children.

Seven sec men ran through the car that Ryan had just exited. The eighth member of the crew had caught a face full of lead from Ryan’s SIG-Sauer and was lying in a pool of his own blood, struggling to remain conscious 230

DEATHLANDS

as his heart slowed. The felled sec man bleated in pain as someone stepped on his torso, rushing in from the preceding car unit. Looking up from the floor he saw the white-skinned specter and was certain that this was Father Death come to take him. He closed his eyes, his lips fluttering as he mumbled a prayer.

Jak launched himself into the room, stepping on the wounded man and blasting five swift shots at the retreating sec men before they even realized he was there. Two of the men fell to the floor under his hail of bullets and a cloud of blood sprayed from the torso of a third man who staggered into the wall beside the door. The other sec men were already gone, but Jak had wounded three in less than five seconds and a fourth had stopped and spun to face him.

The Smith & Wesson in his hand was empty. Jak pulled the trigger twice more as the unhurt sec man turned, then he tossed the blaster at the man’s forehead.

The man ducked and Jak saw that it was the arrogant, dark-haired man who had taunted Maddie earlier. The sadistic sec man’s face broke into a vicious smile when he saw the albino and the children who followed him.

He raised his homemade blaster, laughing at his would-be attackers.

“You brung them kids out to chill me, Whitey?” the sec man asked as he leveled the gun at Jak.

“No,” Jak responded, “pleasure to do myself.”

Jak’s arms whipped out and the sec man saw the glint of metal as something raced through the air toward him. He felt the pain immediately, like a kick to the crotch, and he spluttered his breath out in an urgent gasp. He looked down, burning fire racking over the top of his legs, and saw the handle of the leaf-shaped Alpha Wave

231

throwing knife where it had embedded in his groin to the hilt.

The sec man remembered the blaster in his hand, and looked up to target the freak who had thrown the knife, only to find that—in the scant second he had taken to acknowledge the knife protruding from his body—the albino had crossed half the length of the car and was leaping at him, another blade already in his hand. As the sec man pulled the trigger on his blaster, Jak’s flying fist connected with his left temple, and the knife ripped the skin there.

The curly haired sec man fell backward with the force of the attack, Jak’s weight pushing him down.

Shots rang out from his longblaster, but the albino youth was well within the circle of fire, the blasts going wildly around the shuddering car.

Jak saw the other man by the door pull a bloody hand away from the wound in his side and turn around to face the unexpected attack. He held a scimitar, rust dappled along its lethal-looking blade, and he gritted his teeth fiercely against the pain as he took a step toward the entangled bodies of Jak and the curly haired sec man.

The albino teen flicked his hand, tossing the knife he held in a flat, spinning arc at the wounded man, then turned back to the curly haired guard and started to pound at his face with his fists. The knife spun through the air before hitting the man with the torso wound between his lowest ribs. The blade failed to stick, falling to the wood floorboards with a clatter, but the man staggered backward with the force of the impact. As he regained his senses, he turned and saw the wooden shank stabbing toward his left eye, held point down by 232

DEATHLANDS

one of the children from the cage. Then his vision went red and he felt a tremendous, unspeakable pain as the spike was driven through his eye and into the brain behind.

As Marc face-stabbed the wounded sec man, Jak drove the knuckles of his powerful fist into the throat of his curly haired compatriot. When he pulled his fist back, he could see the unnatural dent in the man’s throat that hadn’t been there a second before, and he slammed his fist into it again and again, making sure the man stayed down. Finally, Jak stepped back from the felled sec man, stretching the taut muscles in his hand as he clenched and unclenched his aching fist. The curly haired lech was chilled.

Jak looked behind him, seeing the children who were watching him in awe, and nodded his approval to Marc as the lad pulled the rusty scimitar from the hand of the sec man he had chilled. Jak gathered his throwing blades, dismissing the homemade longblaster as an unreliable burden for himself but instructing all of the children to take the weapons and arm themselves.

Maddie, he noticed, chose not to take anything, even pushing the proffered wooden knife aside when Marc tried to hand it to her.

The train continued to hurtle along the tracks as Jak led the way into the next car.

J.B. TUMBLED ACROSS the cracked, poisoned soil of the irradiated terrain beside the rushing behemoth of chrome and steel, rolling bodily along the ground until he came finally to a halt. He shook his head as he raised himself from the soil, resting on all fours as he struggled to get back into a standing position. He Alpha Wave

233

removed his spectacles for a moment and wiped the debris of muddy soil from the lenses before replacing them on his nose. He looked across to his right, his head held low, and watched as the train rushed along beside him.

He pulled himself up and looked back down the tracks, considering how long he might have until the train was gone completely. There was a chance he could get back on, just grab one of the side ladders the same way he and Ryan and Mildred had originally boarded this monstrosity, but that window was finite and he would need to move swiftly. He looked around the cracked terrain at his feet until he spotted his compact Uzi, caked with filth, and next to it his battered fedora.

Still unsteady on his feet, J.B. stepped across to them and plucked the weapon and hat from the ground before turning back to face the train.

The bloated cars had passed, and he had perhaps fifteen more cars until the last unit went by. He looked up, spotting three rooftop gunners. Raising the Uzi, he took aim at the nearest gunner and squeezed the trigger.

The roof guard staggered, his ankles buckling as the bullets cut through them, and he fell from the train with an agonized cry.

J.B. swept the Uzi in an arc, cutting through the next two roof guards in quick succession, his attack so swift that the complacent sec men had no chance to retaliate.

He left them hurt but mostly alive, and he felt the pang of conscience at having to wound them. But the bottom line was that he had no time to deal with a blasterfight as the rear end of the train thundered along the railroad tracks toward him. There was still a roof man on the final car, but J.B. sprinted into the shadow cast by the 234

DEATHLANDS

train—he running in one direction as the train journeyed in the other—and trusted it was cover enough.

J.B. had spotted the metal rungs of a side ladder four cars from the back, just past the car with the windshield windows, and he steadied himself as he prepared to grab for it. He swapped the Uzi to his left hand as he waited for the ladder rungs to come to him, unwilling to be weaponless for even a second. This whole operation had been a disaster right from the get-go and it felt to J.B.—hardly a superstitious man at the best of times—that it was tempting fate to pocket the weapon even for a second.

The ladder sped toward him, and J.B. grabbed it as it passed, his feet scrabbling up the side of the train the second he had hold of it. His right arm burned in its socket but his grip held. He hung there, calming his racing thoughts as the spoiled terrain raced past.

His slip had left Ryan alone at the front of the train, facing more than a half dozen armed sec men who were all out for blood. And there wasn’t a damn thing J.B.

could do about it.

IT TOOK RYAN a moment to realize that he wasn’t alone in this firefight. Only three men had followed him through the door into the car with the second level where he and J.B. had slaughtered the guards. He had rushed through the last car with the children in it, determined not to let them get hurt any more than they already had been. But he knew that at least six men had been chasing him when he had entered the last cage car, and yet there were only three now.

Buckshot peppered the car, tinkling as it hit the thick, metal bars of the ladder that stretched up to the second-Alpha Wave

235

story rail blaster. Ryan found a sheltered cranny by one of the arrow slits, and used his blaster to keep his attackers at bay. From where he was he couldn’t get a clear shot but neither could they. Trouble was, the second he tried to escape the car they would have him.

And they knew it.

Ryan’s head flitted out from cover for a split second as he sized up the enemy. Three sec men, one armed with a shotgun, the others with automatic weapons. A hail of bullets greeted the appearance of his head, drilling into the metal plate that sheltered Ryan’s face.

Once the shots had ceased, one of the men at the far end of the car shouted, “Nowhere left to run, son. You gotta know that.”

Ryan’s head appeared again, low now where he had adopted a crouch, and he unleashed two 9 mm slugs into a sec man who was creeping toward him along the right-hand wall. The sec man fell with an anguished cry, hurt but still breathing.

“Who says I’m going to run?” Ryan called back.

Silence followed, and he swiftly reloaded his SIG-Sauer once more with one of the magazines that J.B. had handed him in the storage car.