The sec man shouted to Ryan again, arrogance in his tone. “You put down your weapon,” he called, “and we’ll let you live.”

Ryan was standing now, his back flush to the metal panel that offered scant protection from the sec men. He held his blaster at shoulder height, listening carefully to the sec man’s voice, pinpointing his location in his mind.

“You hear me, boy?” the man called. “We let you live. You chilled a coupla my guys here. I can’t offer better than that.”

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Ryan swung out from his hiding place and fired six shots in a continuous stream at the voice. Two went wild, but four of the bullets drilled into the sec man, cutting through his left-hand side. The man staggered, splashes of blood bursting from the exit wounds. Next to him, the sec man with the shotgun brought it to bear on Ryan and pulled at the trigger. At the same second, the door behind the sec man slid open and Ryan saw Jak’s pure white arm reach through in a swift flip as though pitching a baseball.

The man with the shotgun collapsed to the floor, never managing to get the shot off. Ryan looked at the body. Jak’s leaf-bladed throwing knife protruded from high on the man’s back, just below the neck, severing his spinal column.

Jak dashed into the car, looking left and right to check for further enemies but finding none. He was followed by the group of filthy-looking children that he had been caged with.

“Thanks, Jak,” Ryan told him. “That’s one I owe you.”

Jak shrugged. “You came rescue. We ’bout even.”

The two men gripped hands firmly for a long moment, their unspoken bond being ratified once more.

Ryan saw that the children were armed now. Two of them held blasters while the adolescent boy had a wicked-looking scimitar in his hand, streaks of brown rust along its length. Two of the younger children held wooden stakes.

Jak crouched by the shotgun-wielding sec man’s corpse and plucked his blade from the man’s back.

“Where now?” he asked, looking up at Ryan as he hid the knife back in the sheath in his sleeve.

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“Back to Krysty and the others,” Ryan stated. “Get everyone together and see if we can find J.B.”

“Missed what?” Jak asked.

“J.B. avoided getting his brains splattered all over one of the cars by falling through a hole in the wall,”

Ryan told the albino. “Kept him alive, but not the choicest option.”

“Alive’s alive,” Jak stated firmly.

Ryan nodded, a wry smile on his lips. “There is that, and I suspect J.B. would agree with you.”

They turned toward the rear door, leading the way into the next car with the children behind them. Ryan had taken two steps into the food store when he felt the cold metal of a gun barrel crack into the back of his skull.

Jak saw Ryan fall in the poorly lit room before him and he made to turn, ushering the children back. As he turned, he found himself facing the end of a

.44 Magnum blaster, similar to his own missing weapon. Adam, the commanding officer on the train, smiled as he cocked the hammer. “Your move, White Skin,” he growled.

Chapter Nineteen

The first thing that Ryan felt when he awoke was the rushing wind slapping into his face and the burning pain in his limbs. It felt for all the world like he was falling, plummeting toward the ground in the way you will in a dream, that sick feeling in your stomach as you drop with nowhere to land. But he had woken up now, and he was still falling, still plummeting without end.

Warily, Ryan opened his good eye. Two parallel steel lines stretched off into the distance, and to either side he saw the forbidding landscape of the scarred and poisoned earth. Above, the sky was dark with fierce, toxin-heavy clouds, and Ryan could see the land rushing past him.

He had been bow-spritted, tied to the carved figurehead of the mutie bitch with the bare breasts and the snake’s tail that stretched out in front of the massive engine of the train. Beneath him, the steel tracks glinted in the afternoon sunlight, just two feet below his hanging body.

The pressure on his arms was almost intolerable.

Ropes had been tied around his wrists and ankles, securing him to the figurehead at a forty-five-degree angle, his head thrust forward and the full weight of his body dangling from those ties. The coarse fibers of the ropes chafed at him, but already his limbs were falling into a blessed numbness, all sensation leaving them.

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And so he hung there, buffeted by the wind as the mighty engine dragged the train across the cancerous terrain, dust and bugs peppering his naked face as they were caught up in the draft created by the train’s passing.

JAK HAD BEEN FORCED to watch as Adam’s men hoisted Ryan’s body up and tied it to the figurehead at the very front of the train.

Jak’s own hands had been bound using a leather belt and there were fifteen sec men, including Adam, standing nearby, each of them armed and wary of the lethal albino.

“One-Eye here’ll be hung there till he dies of thirst or starvation,” Adam explained, “a warning to anyone who disobeys the baron’s will.” Jak looked at the scarred face of the CO, identifying the grim satisfaction he took from his cruel work. “What you think of that, Whitey?”

Jak sniffed, wondering if he was next. Behind him, he could hear several of the children crying, and one of the sec men walked passed him shouting abuse at them to shut up.

“What? Cat got your tongue?” Adam asked Jak, yanking him by his mane of white hair and forcing him to look at the tied figure of Ryan. “You ain’t a mute, I know that, boy.”

That was it. That was the key, Jak realized suddenly.

“Boy.” The horrifically scarred commanding officer of the train had called him “boy.” Like the trick with the knife that he had shown the children, Jak knew that people would believe what they thought they saw. And Adam saw him as a boy, a child. As such, Adam would 240

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underestimate him, and therein lay his chance. Tied like this, unable to free his hands, cunning was the only weapon he had left.

“Stop!” Jak cried out. “Not hurt Pa.”

Adam looked at him, a wicked smile crossing his lips. “This man’s your pa, that right?”

“Not hurt Pa,” Jak replied.

Adam turned his head to one side and spit a thick gob of phlegm to the bare ground before addressing Jak again. “You and your pa caused a lot of trouble back there, Whitey, chilled a lot of my men.” He sighed, shaking his head. “How old are you, boy?”

Jak kept his mouth shut, his scarlet eyes looking fiercely at Adam. He knew that everything he told them now would be a lie, but he didn’t want it to be easy. He wanted them to be convinced. If he convinced them that Ryan had come alone, a doting father come to save his wayward son, they might not look for the others. It was a long shot, but he would play it for what it was worth.

Adam backhanded Jak across the face, and the albino teen staggered two steps before tumbling to the hard-packed soil. Unable to put his hands out to cushion the fall, Jak hit hard and Adam sneered as he looked down at him.

“You start answering me, boy, or I’ll put a bullet in your tongue,” Adam growled at him. Then he checked himself, looking across to the blood-streaked children that his men had rounded up, Jak’s cell mates and fellow rebels. “Better yet,” Adam began, striding over to the sniveling children and pulling his blaster free. From his place on the ground, Jak watched as the hulking foreman eyed the children, his breath coming hard.

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Finally, Adam reached out for the unruly mop of blond curls atop Francis-Frankie’s head. The boy howled in pain as he was pulled off the ground by his hair. The

.44 Magnum blaster was in Adam’s hand now, and Jak knew what would happen next.

“Wait,” Jak called.

Holding the child in the air in his left hand, the blaster in his right, Adam turned to look at Jak. He wore a thin smile on his lips and his eyes shone with challenge. Francis-Frankie was crying, and not for the first time, as he struggled to reach the powerfully corded arm of the man who held him.

“Don’t,” Jak insisted, unable to take his eyes off the hanging boy.

There was a sudden explosion and Francis-Frankie no longer had a jaw. Instead, there was just red.

It seemed almost casual, the way that Adam tossed the child’s body aside. Jak watched, distantly aware of the sounds of crying coming from the other children, unable to take his eyes off Francis-Frankie as he fell to the soil. His tiny body jerked and spasmed, his arms reaching about him, reaching for his face. He was alive, at least.

Then Adam stepped up to Jak and nudged him in the chest with his booted foot. “So?” he growled.

“Thirteen,” Jak mumbled, looking at the ground.

“What’s that?” Adam bellowed at him. “What d’you say?”

Jak looked at him, warily eyeing the blaster in his hand. “Thirteen. Am thirteen.”

“And what’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with your skin?” Jak didn’t answer immediately and Adam punctuated his question after a moment with a sharp 242

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kick to his ribs. “You see what I done to your daddy up there and you saw what I did to your playmate. You better start answering or I’ll be doing a damn sight worse to you. Now, what is it? You a mutie?”

“Not mutie,” Jak said, shaking his head. “Just no sun in me. Won’t stick.”

One of the other sec men stepped over, pointing to his wrist chron. “Pa’s up, we should get going. The schedule—”

“Let me worry about the schedule,” Adam barked.

Jak looked up at Ryan, hanging at the front of the chrome-and-steel monstrosity. They had even left his SIG-Sauer in its hip holster, such was the contempt they had for the one-eyed warrior now. Jak could understand that. Ryan posed no threat to them any longer. Of course, they didn’t know Ryan Cawdor like he did. Jak had learned, time and again, never to underestimate the man’s abilities or the depth of his single-minded determination.

“So,” Adam asked, turning his attention once more to Jak’s fallen figure, “what you doing on my train? We picked you up spying on us, that right?”

Jak nodded. “Black gold,” he said firmly, “on train.”

The capacity to drill for oil in the Deathlands had been almost forgotten, the technology simply no longer existed, having long since been bombed out of existence with the first volleys in the war a hundred years before.

But the legacy of a society built around the use of oil as fuel remained, and anyone with access to it could command almost any price…if he could defend it.

“Oil?” Adam looked incredulous. “You think we got oil on this here beastie? Where you hear that?”

“Man tol’ Pa,” Jak said.

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Adam laughed at that. “Man told him wrong then. The only oil we got is in the lamps, and that’s from vegetables.” Adam laughed again. “You was suckered here, boy.”

Jak bared his teeth as he watched the man laugh. It had been a series of quick lies, and the fool had filled in all the gaps for him. Oil poachers sounded plausible, and it pleased the arrogant man to think that the whole thing had been a trick, a misunderstanding.

“So,” Adam said finally, “how come he chilled so many?”

“How many I chill?” Jak asked.

Adam considered that a moment, realization dawn-ing. “A family of assassins, that it?”

Jak nodded. “Whatever work,” he grunted.

“So my men manage to pick up some hit man’s son and stick him in a cage.” Adam laughed bitterly. “No wonder your daddy came aboard mad and gunning.” He shook his head, cursing under his breath as he looked at the unconscious figure of Ryan that now hung from the front of the engine. “You got a name? Your pa?”

“Thursby,” Jak replied from his position in the dirt.

“Floyd.” He nodded toward Ryan’s hanging body.

“Junior,” and he smiled, indicating himself.

“Well, I’m Adam,” the scarred man told him, “and I’m gonna be the person who chills you, Junior Thursby.”

Adam stepped back, making as if to walk away from the albino, then he took a short run and kicked Jak hard in the ribs. Jak groaned, expelling his breath in a painful rush. “You alone, Junior?” Adam shouted at him as Jak struggled to get his breath back. “You alone or I got to hunt every car of my train to find Mamma Thursby and the Thursby brothers?”

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Jak blinked hard, stifling the cough he knew wanted to come. He looked across the dirt again at Francis-Frankie. The boy had stopped moving, the mess of red where half his face had been oozed blood over the ground. No one had gone to look at him, to check on him. “Alone,” Jak whispered, “Just us, Pa and me.”

Adam leaned down and pulled Jak’s head off the ground by his hair. “You better be telling the truth, Junior,” he snarled. Then he pulled back his fist and punched the tied teenager in the face before standing up.

Jak’s head reeled and his vision swam; he flirted in and out of consciousness for a few seconds, unable to get his bearings. He heard Adam saying something, an instruction to his men. Search every car, every compartment. Jak’s deception to hide the companions had failed. And somehow, without even realizing it, he’d gotten a five-year-old child chilled.

“THEY’RE GOING TO BE coming for us,” J.B. assured the companions in the tiny compartment, standing with his back to the curtained door, “and they won’t be sparing any bullets now, not after the show me and Ryan put on for them.”

Doc was standing with his back to the window.

Mildred sat in the chair, her backpack propped open on the tiny desk. Krysty lay on the bloodied sheets on the bunk, her breathing slow but regular, her eyes open.

“I seem to recall an agreement that stealth was to be the order of the day,” Doc reminded J.B.

“We were put in a situation where stealth wasn’t going to cut it,” J.B. told him bitterly. “But we might still save our asses with it now, if we act smart.”

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“What are you thinking?” Mildred asked, her dark eyes wide with concern.

“No train tracks go on forever,” J.B. said. “Sooner or later this thing has to stop, get refueled. We’ll hang out, heads down, till then. Might be a better opportunity to free Jak, too.”

“And what about Ryan?” Krysty asked, concern making her voice louder than it needed to be in the small room.

“Burns me up to leave him,” J.B. admitted, “but I don’t know where he is or if he’s still alive or even on the train anymore. Sorry to say it, but the odds aren’t good.” Despite the bluntness of his words, J.B. was concerned. Deep down, the years of traveling together had made all of the companions close, and Ryan and J.B.

were closest of all. They had been together since the days of Trader and War Wag One, a whole lifetime of trying to eke out a survival in the pitiable remains of the world. They had become brothers, bonded by experience.

“He’s not dead,” Krysty said firmly, sitting up on the bed. “I’d know if he’d been chilled.”

Doc let out a sigh, part despair and part contempt, and Mildred left her chair and sat beside Krysty, wrapping an arm around the red-haired woman. “Let’s be practical,” Mildred said quietly. “We all need to keep our feet firmly on the ground right now, Krysty.”

Krysty’s green eyes pierced Mildred, and her lips tightened before she spoke. “They have cages, don’t they? Ryan could be in one of those.”

“Those are just for kids,” J.B. told her. “I didn’t see any caged adults. I’m just being honest now,” he added after a moment.

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“Screw honesty,” Krysty shouted. “He’s alive, I know it.”

Doc rushed across from the window and stood in front of Krysty, reminding her to keep her voice low.

“Let us not go throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, Krysty, my dear. Mayhap Ryan is alive, no one said he’s not. But shouting up a storm and getting us detected would be an indubitable way of losing any opportunity of finding him, would it not?”

Krysty’s expression softened and she looked from Doc to J.B. to Mildred in turn. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice level once more. “I just… I’d know, okay? I’d know.”

J.B. swept the comment aside, focused on the main objective. “Unless anyone’s got a better plan, I say we go into hiding until the train stops.”

Doc agreed. “I hardly think we can take on a whole train of reprobates as we are.”

“I’ll take on the whole lot of them if it saves Ryan,”

Krysty told them quietly.

“We all would,” Mildred told her, “but we have to play things smart.”

“I USED TO THINK my daddy would come to save me,”

Maddie admitted to Jak as they sat together in the cage once more. She was sitting beside him, her knees tucked close to her chest, gazing off into the distance at nothing in particular.

Jak sat cross-legged, holding a piece of rag to the cut that had opened up just above his eye when Adam had punched him. His ribs ached where he had been kicked, and the throbbing was back in his left arm where he had strained the wound there during the brief rebellion. In Alpha Wave

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his mind’s eye, all he could see was the struggling body of Francis-Frankie as the bullet took half his face away.

Tight-lipped, Maddie looked at him, her eyes wide and scared.

After Jak’s vicious interrogation, all the children had been returned to the cattle truck that held their cage. Jak had been stripped of the throwing knife he had hidden in one sleeve and other secret places, as well as the one he’d had held in his hand when he had been captured by Adam. The sec men had patted him down, but they had failed to check his boots and so had missed the two additional leaf-bladed knives he had hidden there. The other children had been stripped of their weapons, the blasters they had acquired as well as the knifelike stakes that Jak had hewn from the wooden wall of their prison. They sat around quietly, dejected and resenting Jak for the flash of hope he had shown them that had amounted to nothing.

But mostly, he knew, the children were in shock at what had happened to one of their own, Francis-Frankie. Every last one of them knew that that was Jak’s fault, too.

The door had been replaced, and the screws in the hinges hastily welded in place by a sec man with an acetylene welding torch.

“The first day I was here,” Maddie said, turning to look at Jak for a second before turning back to gaze off at nothing, “I thought, sooner or later, Daddy will come aboard and rescue me and I can go back home and everything will be the same again.” She shrugged. “Then they took Hugo. An old grandpa and a pretty lady with a notebook came and they opened the cage door and they took Hugo. She said he had a really important job to do for them.”

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before. In his mind he still thought of Francis-Frankie, his shuddering body lying in the dirt, not yet ready to die. The sec men had left him there, in the massing puddle of his own blood.

“He’s nine years old, Jak,” Maddie said. “I don’t think he was even scared. He just went with them and I heard him tell the lady how pretty her hair was. And that was the last time we saw him. He didn’t come back.” Maddie’s expression had hardened, a sort of determination in her dark eyes. “Three days ago, if you want to know. That’s when Hugo left.”

“Say where?” Jak asked.

“No.” Maddie shook her head. “Just for the really important job. Don’t know what.” She looked at him, then her eyes swept the room, taking in the other prisoners.

“Back on the farm, my mom would give me really important jobs, too, like picking the sweet cherries from the tree and taking Rufus, he’s our dog, out to play so he wasn’t ‘cluttering up the house,’ that’s what Mom would say. Did you ever eat cherries, Jak?”

TWO MEN WERE assigned to search each batch of ten cars, checking for possible interlopers aboard Adam’s train. In the last ten cars, the sec men assigned were Barry Jackson and Horse McGintey, who figured they had an easy job. Most of the cars were dedicated to supplies, so they had only four cars of people to worry about. “Sure, could be that an interloper would hide himself in the storage car but, really, how hard is that neg-wit gonna be to spot?” Horse had asked. To Barry, it seemed kind of ironic him saying that.

By the time they had worked their way through to car fifty-four, they had gotten the thing down to a Alpha Wave

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routine. Check each compartment, poke their heads in, ask if everyone was okay and who they were meant to be, then move on. Jackson had heard the freaky boy explain it had been him and his pa alone, and he was inclined to believe him. The boy looked wiry, but not much against the full brunt of Adam’s anger.

This car was split into four cabins along the port-side wall, with a corridor stretching along the starboard side toward the door that opened onto the first of the storage units. The sliding door to the first cabin was open, rattling in its frame as the train trundled along the tracks.

The compartment was empty, an unmade bed to the right and a tiny desk with the remains of a meal on it to the left. The cabin stank of rotgut, and insects had gathered in a sticky patch on the wood floor.

The next door was closed, and Horse knocked firmly on the glass panel before sliding it aside. “Whoa, boy!”

Horse said at the sight as he pulled back the door.

There was a sec man lying in the bed, a tough guy by the name of Blake whom Horse knew from a spate of rustling for the baron a while back. Blake’s hands were tied together and secured to a wooden pole built into the wall above him, and, as far as Horse could tell, he was naked, a sheet granting him little modesty down below. Next to him a dark-skinned gaudy slut wearing an olive-green bra was snuggled up to him, a hand on Blake’s hairy chest, smiling with a dazed expression on her stupe face. On the other side of Blake was another gaudy, this one a pale-looking redhead with curves in all the right places, naked as the day she was born, the sheet tossed indifferently over her legs. The redhead was asleep, her face beside Blake’s chest. The room smelled fiercely of body odor.

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“’Scuse us, ma’am,” Horse grumbled, tipping a finger to his brow as he stepped out of the room.

Barry held the door a moment as Horse tried to slide it closed. “It’s okay,” Horse told him, “that’s Blake, I know him from a ways back.”

Barry snickered, looking at the gaudies dozing in the tiny bunk. “It ain’t Blake I were looking at,” he said. “Greedy SOB!” and he slammed the door back in its frame.

THE SECOND the door closed, Krysty lifted her head out of the sedated sec man’s armpit and drew a desperate breath of air. “This is disgusting,” she muttered in a harsh whisper.

Mildred looked across at her, her eyes wide open now. “I’ve sedated him three times in the past twelve hours. I think he’s become a little sweaty.”

“Whose idea was this again?” Krysty asked, swinging from the bunk and putting her arms back in her jumpsuit before zipping up the front. She had kept the legs on beneath the sheet, along with her beautifully tooled boots.

“They bought it, didn’t they?” J.B. asked as he dropped down from the overhead rack where the dead body of the piggy-eyed sec man still lay. “At least you didn’t have to turn tricks with corpse-boy up there.”

“How is he?” Mildred asked, pulling her dark vest top over her head and tucking it into her combat pants as she stood. She winced as the light material scraped against the cuts she had sustained on her back from her brief excursion beneath the train.

“Decomposing,” J.B. admitted with a sour look.

“You should have got rid of him while I was gone.”

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“It’s on my to-do list,” Mildred grumbled, “right after distracting the guards with my tits.”

J.B. smiled, shaking his head as though vindicated.

“I knew they’d fall for it.”

IN THE NEXT CABIN, Barry and Horse found an old, white-haired man neither of them recognized. The old man lay asleep in the bed, snoring loudly.

“You know this old duffer?” Barry asked quietly.

Horse shook his head. “He one of the whitecoats?”

“Nah, don’t think so.”

“Reckon we’ll show him to Adam then?” Horse whispered.

“Old guy like this?” Barry pondered. “I dunno, how did he get aboard otherwise?”

“Mebbe he is with the whitecoats then,” Horse considered.

Lying in the bed listening to their hushed conversation, Doc decided it was time to “wake up.” He ceased snoring, his bright eyes popped open and he shrieked a single word. “Eureka!”

The two sec men were standing in the open doorway to the cabin, and both jumped back in astonishment.

Still fully clothed, Doc swung his long legs over the side of the bunk and reached across for his ebony, lion’s-head cane. “May I help you, gentlemen?” he asked, smiling as he looked at the visitors.

“We were just discussing whether you belong here or not, old man,” the younger of the sec men explained, a nasty leer on his face.

“Whether I belong here?” Doc asked, incredulity in his tone. “And who, might I ask, are you?”

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“Barry Jackson,” the younger man said, “and this here is Horse.”

“Yes,” Doc said patronizingly, “I know Horse already. I asked who you were, young man.”

Horse was confused. He looked the old man up and down, then a smile crossed his lips. “We work together somewhere? I can’t think.”

Doc’s mind flashed back to the map on the classroom wall and he tried to remember the name of one of the large North Dakota towns. “Moorhead, I do believe it was,” he said, offering the man a bright smile.

Horse nodded, though he looked a little unsure.

“Yeah,” he muttered, “that must have been it.”

Barry pointed at his partner and went cross-eyed.

“Since his accident, Horse don’t remember so good sometimes. Sorry, fella.”

Doc nodded, understanding on his face. “Now, if you’ll both excuse me, I do have important work to be getting on with.”

“Sure,” Barry said, “sure thing.”

As the sec men pulled the sliding door closed, Doc twisted the handle of his swordstick back into place.

That had been close. He thought for a moment he had been caught out, but once more it seemed that fortune favored the brave. A little bluff work went a long way, he knew, it was all in the delivery. He sat on the bunk and waited for J.B. and the others to reappear so that they could plan their next move.

THE REPORTS CAME IN, one by one, as though his men were paying him tribute, until Adam had heard from all the teams. There was no one else on the train, no one who shouldn’t be there.

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He sat in his Spartan cabin near the front of the train and pondered that. Why had they come out with this monstrous train again? When they started the operation, years before, it had made sense to carry all the equipment, the materials to build the towers and sometimes the very tracks that they traveled on. As Baron Burgess had refined the system, they had had to lay more track, and still the hulking workshops of the train had been required. But now? The supplies were barely required anymore, the men had become lazy and inefficient.

They hadn’t trimmed the train down to a more man-ageable length because of Adam’s paranoia that they might need something from the old storage units.

Traveling across the dead terrain of North Dakota, the fear had always gripped him. What if they stalled?

What if a rail broke, a point snapped or become stuck?

What if? What if? What if? And so he had insisted, despite what Burgess and his whitecoats had said, that they were to travel with everything, with all the supplies. A ville in miniature, traveling on oiled wheels.

For the first time ever, someone had come aboard his train and instigated a massacre. Men had been chilled, good men, men he trusted and, moreover, he liked.

But there was no one else aboard now. Just himself, his sec force, the three whitecoats and a smattering of imprisoned children who were essential to the Grand Project. And the bruja.

Yes, the bruja. The more distance he could put between himself and that creepy old woman the happier Adam was. Maybe, subconsciously, that was why he had kept the train at this impractical length. There was a buffer zone between them of more than forty cars, and even then he felt her sometimes, picking through his 254

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dreams while he slept, her dry, brittle hands and talon-like nails sifting through his thoughts.

He sat there, in the darkness of his cabin, the curtains drawn against the rich afternoon sunlight, and he picked at his teeth. This would be the last go-round, this was the last mission before the project went to the final phase. Once that happened, they wouldn’t need protection to travel the rails. No one would be left to challenge Baron Burgess and his loyal followers. They would be masters of all that they surveyed.

Chapter Twenty

“You have to eat,” Maddie said.

Jak’s head moved lethargically as he looked up at her across the cage.

“You have to eat,” she said again, “or you’ll get weak.”

He nodded, almost imperceptibly, the movement so slight. A sec man had come by sometime earlier and passed the children several platefuls of some unrecog-nizable meat. The children in the cell had devoured it eagerly, but Jak hadn’t moved. He just sat there, his knees pulled close to his chest, his arms wrapped around them, staring off into space. Maddie had watched him, concerned at what he had to be thinking, at what his mind was dwelling on.

Jak could see the boy’s face—Francis-Frankie—in those hunks of meat. The boy, lying there in the poisonous soil, half his face gone and his life oozing away into the toxin-spoiled dirt. If he had just said something, just spoken up quicker, worked out his lie more swiftly…

Jak could hear the tinkling laughter of the boy even now, could hear that whiny quality of voice when he wanted something, when he didn’t understand. Jak had spent perhaps twenty hours in the boy’s company, half of those asleep thanks to the tranq dart he had taken to the chest. He had barely said five words to the boy, 256

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barely even acknowledged him except as a soldier in his failed little uprising. And now the boy was dead, thanks to Jak.

“Come on, Jak,” Maddie said. She knelt beside him and proffered the scraps on the grease-streaked plate.

“It’s good. It tastes good.”

He looked at the hunk of bloody red meat in her hand, a steak carved from the flank of a longhorn or maybe a mule, cooked and seasoned but still red beneath its dusting of charcoal. Red like Francis-Frankie’s face at the end.

Maddie held the steak to his hand, pried his limp fingers away from his knees, forcing him to clutch the sparse meal. “I want you to eat,” she told him firmly, her hand over his, holding it closed around the meat.

Jak looked at her again, but in his mind’s eye he saw the explosion of sound and light as the child’s jaw disappeared, and then he saw Maddie jawless. He blinked hard, scrunching his eyes closed as if to block out the images, then he looked at her again.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Maddie told him.

“Chilled plenty,” Jak muttered. “Never this way.”

Maddie shook her head firmly. “That man did it, the man with the scars,” she said. Jak was surprised that there was no pleading to her voice, no question. She was telling him the facts as she saw them. “They had you tied up, and there was nothing you could have done. I loved Francis-Frankie, we all did, but there was nothing you could have done, Jak.”

He saw the boy lying there, shaking as the blood streamed from his broken face. “Shoulda,” he said.

“Shoulda stopped.”

“No, Jak,” Maddie said. “Do you know why everyone’s Alpha Wave

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so quiet now, why we’re all sitting scared and sad and no one’s really talking?”

“’Cause of me,” he muttered. “Shoulda…”

“No,” Maddie said firmly. “Everyone is sad because there was nothing we could do, either.” Maddie’s grip on his hand tightened then, ensuring he wouldn’t drop the precious food.

Slowly, Jak’s gaze swept the cage, looking at the inhabitants who sat or lay on the hard floor. They all looked drained, as though none of them had slept.

Finally he looked at Maddie once more, her open face, the tentative, serious smile on her lips, and he nodded.

Next time they had a chance for freedom, Jak would make sure none of them got so much as a scratch. It wasn’t over yet.

ONCE THE SEARCH TEAM had departed, J.B., Krysty, Mildred and Doc regrouped in the tiny compartment they had used as their base for the duration of the train’s passage.

“I want us out of here,” J.B. told them. “If Ryan’s still among the living, we’ll find him and free him, that’s for certain. But I don’t want anyone going off half-cocked, thinking they can take on the whole train.”

Krysty shifted uncomfortably on the bunk where she sat with Mildred, but she said nothing.

“And when are we to help Ryan?” Doc asked. “Come to that, when are we to help Jak, as well?”

“We’ll work on the assumption that they’re still onboard,” J.B. told them. “When the opportunity arises, we’ll know.”

“So,” Mildred stated, “basically do nothing.”

“No train tracks go on forever,” J.B. repeated firmly, 258

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as though that put an end to the discussion. He stretched his muscles from his cramped position by the sliding door, stood and began gathering his maps and the minisextant from the tiny desk beside Doc.

Mildred shook her head, clearly deciding whether to challenge J.B. on this point. Krysty, whose health had continued to improve, reached across and placed her hand on Mildred’s arm, locking eyes with her. The silent instruction was clear: J.B. is the leader now, his decision stands or we’ll all get chilled.

Having packed away his materials, J.B. stood by the compartment’s door. “We’re going to bed down in the storage units,” he told them. “Less chance of being disturbed, more chance to defend ourselves if someone comes knocking.” He looked querulously at Krysty.

“You up to this?”

The Titian-haired beauty nodded, a tight smile on her face. “I feel much better, thank you.”

“Any problems,” J.B. said to her, “you call.

Anything—headaches, cramps—anything at all. You’re our number-one priority till we can get to Ryan and Jak.

Anything else?”

Doc spoke up, pressing a hand to his forehead. “I do believe I am suffering a little from a headache myself,”

he told J.B.

“Yeah,” Mildred chipped in. “Stress is getting to us all. Let’s wrap this one up quick and get off this ghost train.”

Together, the four of them made their way through the cars until they reached a unit full of metal sheets and jars of rivets. Despite Mildred’s plea, they would be on the monstrous train for a further three days before they reached their ultimate destination.

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THE TRAIN STOPPED at regular intervals and the crew would examine the strange towers that had been constructed close to the tracks. Sometimes, Mildred, Doc or J.B. would sneak out and watch, and once, when she was feeling well, Krysty took up a post by the roof hatch of their car and watched the operation at the front of the train under the waning moon of the night sky.

The operation never varied. The whitecoats would examine the odd towers, compare their readings and decide whether the balance of grayish liquid feeding the structures from beneath needed to be altered. Doc and Mildred proposed various possibilities to explain what that liquid was, and J.B. used his own field of expertise to run through possible mechanical oils, pastes and unguents, but the actual nature of the liquid remained frustratingly elusive. J.B. told the others about his en-counter with the canisters up close, and how the naked boy had been kept in a cage near to them. “The two may not be related,” he stated before they ran away on a flight of fancy about why a child was needed in this process, but it left everyone feeling even more unsettled about the operation they were witnessing.

In the storage car, just one from the back, J.B. constructed a shelter within the masses of metal plating that was stored there. With the help of the others, he shifted sheet steel so that they had a small burrow to retreat to, and a place where Krysty could remain during the frequent periods when her health seemed to dip. The structure looked to be part of the storage system, a casual arrangement of the stocks held onboard the train. J.B. spent several hours viewing it from various angles to ensure it looked camouflaged, hidden as it was in plain sight.

On several occasions the companions had heard the 260

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door in the preceding car being yanked aside, and they had scrambled to hide in the tiny shelter while sec men stomped through. One time, several men had stopped and had an extended conversation about the value of a particular type of rivet over another, and the companions spent an awkward forty-five minutes waiting for the men to leave. The whole time, J.B. had his M-4000

shotgun trained on the conversing men through a hidden gap in the shelter. Eventually, the men had left, and the companions had felt relief. However, it was a stark reminder that they were far from safe even here, sheltering in the darkness of the unmanned car.

Krysty had argued repeatedly for forming a search party to locate Ryan, telling them that every second they left him was a second he could be being chilled or worse.

“There’s just four of us now,” J.B. reminded her.

“We need to pick our moment.”

Tears glistened in Krysty’s eyes, the frustration of the situation coupling with the pain she continued to suffer at frequent intervals. “When will that be?” she insisted.

“Soon, I promise,” J.B. assured her.

In his own mind, the Armorer became increasingly unhappy with the situation he had led them into. Their food supplies were dwindling, and he had insisted they not raid the food stores—which were ten cars away—

unless they absolutely needed to. It wouldn’t do to put themselves in any unnecessary danger this late in the game. Still, by hiding the companions in the shadows it felt like he was failing to take charge. During their quieter moments, Mildred reassured him that he would know when it was time to act; she could sense his turmoil as much as any of them.

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“We’re two men down,” she reminded him while Doc and Krysty slept, “and Krysty isn’t in a reliable condition to help us. You’re doing the right thing.”

“It feels wrong,” he replied quietly as the darkened car hurtled along the tracks.

“Sometimes deciding to do nothing can be the hardest choice of all,” Mildred told him.

As time went on, and their third day on the locomotive turned into a fourth, J.B. admitted he had lost track of their passage. He tossed his map aside in disgust, and plowed a clenched fist into the hard metallic casing of the car with a resounding crash. Being cooped up in the windowless car for so long had not agreed well with J.B.’s temperament. Doc bent to pick up the map, while Mildred and Krysty watched them in the faint glow that seeped beneath the side door panels of the car.

“How far?” Doc asked, placing a hand on J.B.’s shoulder.

“I don’t know,” J.B. snapped, frustration in his voice.

“Yes, you do,” Doc told him genially. “You started making the calculations as soon as you stepped onboard, I know you did. And you have checked and triple-checked them ever since.”

J.B. sighed wearily as he looked at the old man. “Six hundred and forty miles,” he told him. “That’s how far we’ve traveled, assuming an average speed of twelve miles an hour, which roughly takes into account the stops.”

“And we know we shall be heading to Grand Forks,”

Doc reminded him, his voice calm, “sooner or later, do we not?”

J.B. nodded.

“Well?” Doc said.

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“If we continue to follow the loop I plotted out,”

J.B. said, “we’ll get there in about a half day.”

Doc smiled. “You have never yet given me reason to doubt your calculation abilities, J.B.,” he said. “A half day it shall be. I will stake my cane on it.”

The flash of a smile crossed J.B.’s face for just a split second, then it was gone. “Thanks, Doc,” he whispered.

THE WAY JAK saw it, he couldn’t free Ryan. He had spent two sleepless days mulling over the problem, approaching it from every angle. How do you untie a man from the front of a moving train without getting him chilled? Jak didn’t even consider his own safety in these scenarios, he just worked out the possible ways in which to free Ryan and promised to worry about himself once a viable solution came to him.

The reality was this: as far as he knew, Ryan had been hanging there for more than two days, buffeted by the winds and assaulted by the elements. His arms and legs had to feel like jelly, no sensation left in them. If he was untied he would simply drop, no strength left to save himself. And, from where he was hung, any drop would result in him falling under the wheels of the massive engine.

Jak would require some kind of winch or hoist to free Ryan, so that he could both untie him and hold the man in place. But then where would he take Ryan, assuming he could construct some kind of makeshift hoist?

This all ignored the very real problem of getting there in the first place. Following the failed bust-out, a sec man had been charged with checking on the children every hour, leaving Jak with little time to work at an Alpha Wave

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escape. The bravado he had shown J.B. when the Armorer had found him in the cage had long since evaporated. There was simply no easy way out of the jail he had been placed in, and any escape would likely result in the execution of another child by way of punishment, something that Jak had promised he would not let happen again.

Maddie continued to force him to eat, though not because Jak was in the thrall of depression as he had been when they were recaged. Now, Jak’s mind was frantically working solutions, working through every scenario in meticulous detail before discarding it. His father had taught him the importance of planning, and ultimately it hadn’t saved the man from the depreda-tions of the cruel baron who ruled over them. But planning, Jak knew, took time. Which made it all the more frustrating when, after two days, he had no solution to the myriad problems he was faced with.

IT WAS LATE into the night when the train ushered around the curving tracks and lumbered the last few miles to the Forks. Adam had joined the driver at the rattling front engine as they came to the end of their journey.

The driver was a stout man called Rhett who never slept and was permanently wired up to some liquid form of jolt stim that pumped straight into his veins. His cabin was painted completely black, and only the lights of his equipment, the dials and gauges that allowed him to monitor the locomotive’s progress, provided any illu-mination. Adam considered Rhett the single most reliable member of his squad.

It never ceased to amaze him, that long approach to the Forks base. Years before, way back before the 264

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megacall, the unit had been a U.S. Air Force base. Like most of the military facilities, the base had been destroyed, and whole sections were reduced to rubble.

But Burgess, in the days when he was just a gang master himself, before he’d assumed the title of “baron,” had seen value in sifting through the ruins and uncovering the old base’s secrets.

Baron Burgess had built his ville on the ruins of the military base, utilizing the underground facilities that had survived the attacks as an infrastructure to his grand design. They called it a ville, but really, beside several single-story outbuildings, it was one vast building, segmented to ensure it could stand, but stretching a half mile across the tortured landscape. It lurked on the horizon, a flat, low building so huge that it was unavoidable, even in the semidark of the waning moon. Lights glowed in its windows, the flickering of fires, gleaming like stars trapped in the vast structure.

Towers and posts and minarets jutted from the low roof, bristling into the indigo sky as though jabbing at a heaven that looked down and mocked the man within.

The death train powered toward it, the brakes squealing as Rhett applied them, pulling at the three levers that applied the scattered friction brakes throughout the colossal beast. It would have been impossible to try to stop the train from just the engine alone. Other brakes were linked to its controls, slowing the wheels in unison when they were applied.

As they got closer, Adam spotted the sec men who patrolled around Forks ville, striding through the fouled earth or eyeing the approaching train from their posts along the roof of the massive building.

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THE TRAIN HAD SLOWED to four miles per hour, little more than walking speed, and it followed the tracks into the open tunnel that ran the building’s length. Inside, the vast cavern was lit by flickering oil lamps strung along the ceiling. As the train trundled inside, sec men watched it enter, blasters at the ready. A few of them saluted in the direction of the towing engine, presum-ing Adam would be in there even though it was impossible to see within.

Adam reached across, flicking the switch that sounded the bell along the whole of the train, letting everyone know that they had arrived at their final destination.

“Welcome home,” he murmured.

Chapter Twenty-One

Doc shoved Jak’s Colt Python into his waistband and smoothed his frock coat back in place to hide the weapon before joining the growing throng outside the train. He watched Krysty walking ahead of him, seeing her weave a little as she stepped into the vast, low-ceilinged cavern that housed the train. Krysty was still battling with ill health, more than four days after they had left the redoubt in Minot, and the pattern was still hard to predict. Before the companions had left the train, Krysty had assured them that she felt fine, but it was clear that she was struggling, that the sickness had left her weak.

Krysty wore her hair up, tucked beneath the battered brown fedora that J.B. had loaned her for the infiltra-tion of the train pirate camp, and had the hessian blanket that she had retrieved when they left the sleeping cabin tossed over her shoulders. It would be difficult to disguise Krysty’s curvaceous, female form, but wearing the shapeless blanket and hiding her vibrant hair helped draw attention away from her.

J.B. and Mildred walked a few steps ahead of Krysty, discussing their surroundings in low, urgent tones.

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outside and, once they confirmed that they were in a vast, roofed stopover, they had decided to take their chances outside among the mass of train people and other men and women who strolled through the huge, cavernous space.

The cavern was man-made, its flat sides curving inward toward the top as though domed. The ceiling was about three stories above the ground, and lighting was attached to catwalks and metal struts. The ceiling lamps were dim, their weak glow unable to penetrate the gloom of the huge room, and they were supple-mented by portable lighting rigs dotted around the room, powered by chugging generators like the one they had seen used on occasion to light the work at the scaffold towers. As they walked past one, Doc glanced over it and noticed the olive-green paint and the large, white-stenciled lettering along the side. It was clearly military, a period piece from predark. The whole, vast room had an indefinable military essence about it, Doc thought; parts of the walls were patched together from old mil matériel. Chickens and a few dogs ran through the crowds, fresh meals when the crew needed them, he guessed.

The area was large enough to hold the obscene length of the train, sixty cars stretching along one side of the room. The remainder was given over to a large, flat space, a meeting room sufficient for a vast crowd in the hundreds or even thousands, with a few doors leading off the sides here and there, presumably into separate, smaller rooms. Doc estimated there were perhaps three hundred men and women here, milling around, the majority of them armed. A raised dais was located in the center of the huge room where a hooded, cloaked 268

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figure silently watched the proceedings as the three whitecoats and the commanding officer of the train trailed up the steps to the platform. A bank of lights surrounded the dais, their glow soft like the embers of a fire, a bubbling liquid visible within through the transparent windows. The crowd—made up of hard-faced men and women, sec men, mercies and gaudies like the ones the companions had seen aboard the train—made their way toward the raised dais.

There was a party atmosphere here; people were laughing and dancing, loud. Echoing music tried and failed to fill the cavernous room. It reminded Mildred of rock concerts from the late twentieth century, except that everyone seemed to be armed and proud to show it. Barrel fires burned here and there as food was cooked and distributed to the returning crew.

J.B. turned to face the others, walking slowly backward as he spoke, his voice low. “Me and Mildred are going to do a recce on the train, see if we can find Ryan and Jak.”

“I’d like to look, too,” Krysty started, but J.B. held up a hand for silence.

“Stick with Doc,” he told her. “You’re our backup, and we might just need some friends hidden in the crowd before too long.”

Just then there was a harsh, whistling sound from the central platform of the room. J.B. glanced over his shoulder, watching as the glowing lights around the dais grew in intensity then faded again. He saw two further figures had joined the others on the dais, and a chill went down his spine: the bruja, accompanied by a sec man. The frail old woman sat in a wheelchair, a skeletal-looking device with large wheels to each side.

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She sat silently, wrapped in a shawl, her arthritic hands shaking incessantly, as a brawny sec man pushed her to join the others on the raised platform.

“Gonna get that plas ex,” J.B. whispered, turning to Mildred and leading the way back the train.

He pointed subtly toward the front of the train. “I want you to find Jak and Ryan if they’re still aboard.

Most likely near the front of the train—that’s where the cages are, and that’s where we found Jak the first time out. Both of them may need medical attention.”

Mildred hefted her backpack. “What about you, J.B.?”

“I’ll join you as soon as I can,” the Armorer told her,

“but I’ve got a few things I want to do first.”

“And what if I bump into sec men guarding these cages?” Mildred asked.

“I reckon most of them got off to stretch their legs and enjoy a taste of home cooking.” J.B. smiled.

“Probably won’t be more than a half dozen onboard now.”

Mildred flipped the catch on the holster that held her ZKR 551 target revolver. “Great,” she muttered, looking over the vast beast of chrome and steel that stood on the silver rails.

A man brandishing a heavy longblaster appeared in one of the cars near the front of the train, and J.B. and Mildred quickly moved on, heading ever nearer the mighty engine that pulled the colossus. Mildred heard a familiar voice behind her and glanced back for a fraction of a second. Jak was being led out of the car along with a handful of children, heads bowed and chains wrapped around their wrists, marching forward like a chain gang. The man with the longblaster led the 270

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group in the direction of the central dais, while a second man brandishing a crossbow took up the rear, urging the party onward.

As they walked, J.B. and Mildred saw a similar group of chained children being forced from the car next to Jak’s. Mildred nudged J.B. softly in the side and caught his eye, raising one eyebrow. J.B. shrugged in response and continued marching toward the front of the train.

The sec men led the two groups of children through the crowd toward the center of the vast room. As they watched them depart, Mildred and J.B. hastily reevalu-ated their objectives. It would be difficult to free Jak now without bringing down the wrath of the whole room.

“I’m going to create a disturbance,” J.B. told Mildred, “but it’ll take some doing.” He gestured toward the middle of the train. “I need you to cover my back while I go get something.”

Eyes alert, Mildred walked beside J.B. until they reached the eighteenth car from the engine. The Armorer had memorized the important units of the train, and he knew precisely what he was looking for. This was the car where he and Ryan had found stocks of construction equipment, including that enticing stash of explosives.

There was no side door on this unit, so he stepped between the cars and pulled himself up on the lip beneath the foremost door while Mildred tried to look casual as she checked for anyone watching. There were sec men milling around, and suddenly one of the men on the dais shouted something and a group of sec men moved into position to surround a lone figure. Mildred wondered what was going on there, and realized, with a start, who the figure was.

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“DO WE HAVE SUCCESS?” the hooded figure on the dais asked, his voice a painful rasp. He was addressing the lead whitecoat, the older man of the three-strong team.

Adam stood beside the hooded man, and the bruja sat in her wheelchair with a sec man waiting behind her should she require to be moved.

The eldest whitecoat stepped forward and dipped his head toward the hooded man in supplication. “We’ve tested the network as much as we can without going fully live,” he explained. “It’s been on stand-by condition for one week, as you know, idling until we set the final phase in motion. I foresee absolute success, Baron Burgess.”

The hooded figure, his face in shadow, nodded slowly, considering the whitecoat’s words. “Absolute,”

he muttered, his voice strained.

“We have seen definite vagal nerve stimulation in the subthalamic nucleui of test subjects,” the dark-haired female whitecoat explained, consulting her notes. “The tests have been brief, of necessity, but the results have proved entirely satisfactory.”

The head beneath the heavy hood turned, and the baron addressed the bruja. “Well, mutie witch?” he asked, contempt in his tone. “What do you say?”

The trace of a smile crossed the woman’s cracked lips and the creases deepened around her wise, ancient eyes.

“He who controls the network will be puppet master. I can feel its power pulsing throughout the system now.”

“Good,” Burgess stated simply, turning back to look over the crowd.

But the bruja spoke again, after a moment. “I am not the only one who feels this,” she said quietly.

Burgess, Adam and the three whitecoats all turned to look at her, stunned by her statement. Adam was the 272

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first to speak the question on their minds. “What? Who are you talking about?”

“There,” the bruja whispered, and her clawlike right hand moved toward the crowd around them. Her index finger slowly stretched out and she pointed at a figure in the audience. “The woman.”

Adam looked in the direction that the bruja pointed and scanned the crowd. After a moment he saw her—a tall woman that he hadn’t seen before. She wore a dirty, brown blanket over her shoulders to disguise her form and a battered fedora on her head.

THE SCARRED MAN on the platform called out to the sec men who were near her and suddenly Krysty was surrounded by hostile forms. A man grabbed her from behind, yanking her arm painfully high up her back, and she snarled.

“Get off me,” she growled, looking at the five armed men who stood in front of her.

“Adam says you’re needed up there, sweetmeat,”

said a blond-haired man with a white scar running through his hairline, a patch over his right eye. “Don’t make it awkward for yourself.”

Krysty bent forward, flipping the man who had grabbed her arm so that he flew over her head and into the man with the eye patch. The pair stumbled and they both fell to the floor along with J.B.’s hat, which had disguised her vivid red hair.

To Krysty’s right she saw Doc whip the hidden sword from its sheath inside his ebony cane, but more sec men had turned at the incident, and he was suddenly lost to her in the shifting crowd.

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these people, but as she looked left and right she realized that there was nowhere to run. She ducked her head and steamed into the nearest sec man, knocking him flat on his back and charging forward.

DOC WATCHED Krysty fight her way through the sec men until they finally overwhelmed her. Even in her weakened state, sick and feverish, she fought like a hellcat. One punch dislocated a man’s jaw, another pulled away from a man’s face with a fistful of teeth. She kicked and she slapped, she clawed and she punched, but the sheer weight of numbers brought Krysty down and there was nothing Doc could do about it.

The older man stood there, his sword still in his hand, considering what a few well-placed shots from his LeMat might gain him.

As he watched the sec men drag Krysty to the dais, Doc formed a swift plan in his mind. He had spied a group of chained children being marched across the room a few moments before, and he had recognized the unique figure of his albino companion, Jak, among them. Doc stood no chance fighting alone against this crowd, but with Jak’s assistance and whatever J.B. had hidden up his sleeve he might just be able to free Krysty.

He resheathed his sword and made his way through the crowd toward the chained children.

FROM HER SPOT beside the train, Mildred watched as the blur of red hair appeared in the middle of the skirmish.

Krysty had been discovered.

She looked back to the car door, inwardly cursing J.B. for how long he was taking. “Come on, J.B.,” she muttered, “time’s a-wasting.”

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She turned back to look at the proceedings in the crowd and saw Krysty being dragged up the steps onto the dais. The figure in the hood was leaning forward, examining Krysty the way a jeweler would evaluate a precious gem or a butcher a piece of meat. This situation was getting further and further out of their control, Mildred realized.

A noise from her right made Mildred turn, and she saw a large man swinging a heavy mace toward her.

Mildred ducked as the mace rushed toward her face, and the spiked ball slammed into the wall of the car, denting the metal side. The man growled at her, aiming a blaster in her direction with his free hand. “You’re one of them, ain’t ya?” the man blurted. “I slept with every whore on this train, and I ain’t never seen you. You come here to rescue your lover boy?”

Ryan. The man was talking about Ryan, Mildred realized as she sprinted along the side of the train and weaved in between two cars. She heard the heavy footsteps behind her as the sec man followed. Just another minute and she and J.B. would have been away scot-free, unnoticed among the throng. It was bad timing that this guy realized that she didn’t belong. It had all been going so well.

Mildred clambered over the coupling that linked the two cars, then leaped out the other side and ran along the starboard edge of the train toward the engine. She looked back, seeing the man pulling himself through the tight gap between the cars, blaster at the ready. As soon as he was clear, he fired a shot at her retreating form, and Mildred dived to the floor, the bullet whizzing overhead.

As she slid along the rough floor, her momentum driving her forward, she fired a single shot from her Alpha Wave

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Czech-made ZKR 551 revolver, clipping the sec man across the left arm. He brushed at the wound as a line of blood began to form, but the bullet had passed him, just scuffing his bicep. He looked up again, aiming his heavy blaster at the woman now lying prone on the floor. She rolled underneath the train as he blasted off another shot.

Target revolver in hand, Mildred crawled beneath the train, pulling herself along with her elbows and driving forward with her knees and feet as she tried to put distance between herself and the sec man. Hanging spikes of metal plucked at the pack on her back, slowing her, but she kept going, urging herself forward.

She turned and saw the man’s feet as he ran alongside the train. A second man was running toward him from the front of the train, and she could hear shouting—a reinforcement being given instructions.

Mildred turned, rolling on her side, and aimed her revolver at the first man’s feet. She pulled the trigger, the explosion loud in her ears in the enclosed space beneath the train. The bullet ripped through the man’s left foot, and she heard him screech in pain as blood sprayed from a rip in his boot.

She turned, targeting the second man and reeled off a further two shots into the guy’s feet. There was no time to be subtle. She needed to quieten the pair of them before more men were alerted, and she trusted that the noise of the blaster would be lost to the loud thrum of the crowd.

The closer man fell to the floor, blood gushing from his feet, and his face lined up with Mildred’s for a moment. He howled in pain and raised his own weapon toward her. Calmly, keeping her breath steady, she 276

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snapped off another bullet into the man’s face, demol-ishing his pained expression in a burst of crimson.

IN CAR EIGHTEEN, J.B. stuffed as much plas ex into his pockets as he could and grabbed a handful of the sticks of dynamite. Looking at it closely, he realized that this was all predark military issue.

From discussions with Mildred and studying his ancient maps, J.B. had located an old Air Force base in the area now known as the Forks. All this stuff—the train, its contents, the crazy “station” that they now found themselves in—all of it had echoes of predark military equipment. From this evidence, he concluded that the baron and his crew had built their wealth and their plans on the Air Force remnants, which accounted for a lot of the impressive technology, such as the gosling gennys, that he had seen them using.

In J.B.’s experience there was a lot of trouble associated with old military equipment in the wrong hands.

BARON BURGESS WATCHED as the impressive, Titian-haired woman was forced up the steps to join him and his advisers. He closed his eyes, a long blink, and felt her there in his mind, burning like fire. Opening his eyes again, he fixed her with his stare. “What manner of woman are you?” he asked in his pained, rasping voice.

Krysty shook her head, her lips tight, trying to pull away from the baron’s stare. But she found, somehow, that she couldn’t do it, couldn’t look away. The low hood left his face in shadow, but his eyes—their whites tainted to a sick yellow, their irises a vivid emerald—

burned into her from its depths.

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“Answer your baron,” the man with the horrific scarring on his arms and face stated, looking angrily at Krysty.

“I…” Krysty began, her breath coming in gasps,

“I’m just…just a norm.”

“It is pointless to lie to me,” the baron snarled. “I can feel a lie as you speak it, and I can unpick your thoughts at will.”

Krysty tried to look away, turning her head from the hooded figure in front of her. She couldn’t seem to look away. It was like she was trapped by the hypnotic stare of a cobra. “I don’t…” she started, but it was becoming harder to string complete sentences together. Her head was pounding, her brain felt as though it was swelling, pushing against the sides of her cranium.

The robed baron clapped his hands together. “A demonstration,” he said. “A demonstration for…Krysty Wroth.”

Krysty gasped. He knew her name. This baron, a man she had never seen before, knew her name. And she had felt him—he took it, plucked it from her mind, wrenched it from her thoughts like a tiny thing, a splinter pulled from under a fingernail, a little pop of pain. What manner of man was this baron?

HIS WRISTS CHAINED, Jak shuffled behind Humblebee and Marc in the line of his cell mates as they were guided toward the raised platform in the center of the vast room. Maddie’s voice whispered behind him.

“What’s happening, Jak?”

Jak turned back, glancing over his shoulder at the girl. “Not know,” he stated.

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shot forward and slapped Jak across the face with the back of his hand. “No talking, Whitey,” he shouted.

Jak stumbled but retained his balance, recognizing the familiar metallic taste of blood in his mouth.

“You,” a voice boomed from the dais in front of them. It was Adam, the scarred commanding officer from the train, the one who had chilled Francis-Frankie.

“We got the resources this far, let’s not ruin ’em now.”

He was talking to the sec man who had slapped Jak, chastising the man.

A hooded, robed figure leaned across, standing beside Adam on the raised platform. He muttered something, and Adam nodded before instructing the sec man to step forward.

As the man walked toward the platform, Jak scanned its occupants. A sec man stood behind a wheelchair-bound old woman at the right of the platform. Beside them, the three whitecoats that he had seen tending to the tower back in Fairburn were waiting patiently, riffling through notebooks and talking quietly among themselves. Adam and the hooded man were standing near to the front of the dais, watching as the sec man stood in front of them. At the far left, with an armed man on either side, stood Krysty Wroth, her figure hunched over as though she was having trouble standing straight, and her arms wrapped around her chest as though to keep warm.

The man’s head twisted beneath the hood and he brayed at Krysty. “Your demonstration, Krysty Wroth.”

Jak watched in growing concern as the sec man who had slapped him moments ago pulled his sidearm from its holster and calmly positioned it beneath his own chin.

Jak turned back to Maddie. “Look ’way,” he told her and the other children.

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It was over in an instant. The man pulled the trigger to his blaster, casually, as though sleepwalking, and his head wrenched back as the bullet drilled through his jaw, behind his nose and into his brain before bursting from the back of his head in an explosion of bone, blood and gray matter. The sec man’s form keeled over as his legs buckled and he fell to the floor.

KRYSTY TOOK A STEP back from the hooded figure of Baron Burgess and bumped into one of the sec men behind her. She looked up at expressionless faces. These men had been full of life a moment before, yet now they were completely impassive at the horrific fate that had just befallen their colleague, their comrade-in-arms.

She wanted to scream because of the blacksmith’s anvil pounding in her head, wanted to pull her hair out by the roots, wanted to collapse and curl up and die for the pain that lashed through her body. The whole atmosphere was charged, something she could almost taste now, something so very wrong about everything around her.

Baron Burgess turned to look at her with those piercing, emerald eyes once more and she felt herself shrink under his stare.

“You’ve gone pale,” he rasped. “But I see that you are beginning to understand. You see, they are all my puppets. Everyone in this room, everyone in the state, and—soon—everyone in the whole of the Deathlands.”

The driving pain in Krysty’s head reached a cres-cendo, and all that she could see was the baron’s eyes through a pinprick in the darkness of her failing vision.

Then nothing.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Mildred scurried beneath the train, pulling herself away from the sec man as his blood-drenched boot trod toward her with an audible squelch. She was at the end of the car now, and she would have to break cover to crawl beneath the next one. She looked ahead, mentally preparing herself before diving out between the cars.

“Ah-ah.” The sec man laughed, swinging his heavy blaster at her the very second she appeared. “Now, I got—”

His sentence was abruptly cut short as a burst of bullets split the air. From the ground, Mildred watched as red spots appeared on the sec man’s shirt. He staggered forward before slumping against the car at her rear. J.B. stood behind him, holding his Uzi low to his body with a steadying hand beneath the barrel. “Come on, Mildred,” he told her, “let’s keep moving.”

Mildred rolled out from under the train and put a re-straining hand on J.B.’s shoulder as he started to jog in the direction of the rear of the train. “Wait, I think we have another complication.”

J.B. looked back at her, urging her to go on.

“They’ve got Krysty,” she told him.

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of going even farther south.” He looked up and down the length of train. “Eight minutes. Find Ryan and get him off the train.”

“Eight minutes. Check,” Mildred said, looking at her wrist chron as she leaped into the nearest car and started making her way forward through the cages. J.B.

stopped her long enough to hand her a pack of thermals and an instruction to “Distribute them every few cars.”

KRYSTY FELT SOMETHING plucking at her head, something inside her skull. Slowly, warily, she opened her eyes to narrow slits and surveyed her surroundings in a long-established survival tactic.

“That’s it, Krysty,” a voice rasped, “wake up now.”

She tasted a rich, thick flavor in her mouth and realized that she had vomited. She could feel it sticking to the side of her face and she spat out a thick string of gunk as she sat up.

The strange witch woman and the hooded baron were looking at her closely, along with a man that she recognized as the psychopathic leader of the train crew who had ordered the burning of the people that had attacked his train.

“What happened?” she groaned, her tongue feeling thick in her mouth.

Baron Burgess turned to Adam, his second in command, and laughed. “I’ve never known someone to be affected so completely,” he said. “It’s exquisite.”

Adam looked piteously at Krysty’s fallen form.

“Why does it affect her, do you think?”

The bruja never took her eyes from the red-haired woman sitting on the floor in front of them. “Because she’s like me,” she said quietly. “An earth witch.”

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“Is that right?” the hooded baron asked in his painful, cracking voice. “Are you a witch, Krysty Wroth?”

Krysty shook her head heavily. She was still wiping the remnants of her stomach lining from her face.

“She doesn’t know it,” the bruja said with convic-tion, “perhaps, but she is one of mine. The power of nature flows through her, I felt it back on the train.”

“What’s going on?” Krysty asked. She had started to cry, some strange involuntary side effect of the power that was affecting her.

“Can you feel it?” Burgess asked. “In the air, all around you. That is my power.”

Krysty looked fearfully at the eyes that burned within the shadowy hood. “I’ve felt it for so long,” she admitted, “here in my head, kicking like a mule.”

Burgess nodded, his hood swaying. “It hurts now,”

he rasped, “but it is a good hurt, I promise you. It is the power of good. Something so rare in this accursed land.”

“Good?” Krysty breathed the word, a question.

“Once upon a time,” Burgess began, “there was a fantastical nation called the United States of America.

A nation so fantastic that they actually called it ‘the land of the free.’ But the land of the free had enemies, and so it protected itself until the nukes came and it could protect itself nevermore. One of the ways that this great nation protected itself was by exerting control, Krysty Wroth. Control of hearts and minds.”

Krysty was trying to comprehend the fairy story that Burgess was presenting to her. He was belittling her, she knew, patronizing her with his prepared, satirical speech.

But it was so hard for her to think straight, so hard to think at all. Hearts and minds. What did that mean?

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“There were many programs,” Burgess continued,

“MK-ULTRA, MKDELTA, CHATTER, Osterley, AR-TICHOKE, Paperclip. Hundreds of these systems were tested, each experimenting with ways to control the one great unfettered—the human mind. Do you see it yet, Krysty? I think that you do.”

Krysty pushed the tears from her eyes, trying to hold all her thoughts in one place.

“The theories were all here, locked in the vast underground vaults of this base,” Burgess told her. “I just needed a way to make them work.”

“Why?” Krysty asked, her voice quiet and fearful.

“To save the world,” Burgess told her, not a trace of irony in his rasping voice. “The land of the free—the freelands—became what you see around you, the Deathlands. In one hundred years mankind has reverted to a semisavage state, preying on one another, creating nothing but pain and violence. But I shall change all of that, once my Grand Project is engaged.”

“I don’t see how…” Krysty began, struggling to frame her thoughts through the fog in her brain.

“Discipline of the mind,” Burgess shot back.

“Everyone working for one true purpose, cleansed of their impure desires to steal and to hurt and to kill.

Under my control those thoughts will be purged.”

Mind control, Krysty realized. She saw it all in a brilliant flash of comprehension. This man, Baron Burgess, had a noble dream to unite all the deathlanders into a society, into a true civilization once more. Except…

except something was not right, that was obvious.

Somehow, his noble dream had corrupted. The death and violence that went with the train wherever it appeared was proof of that.

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And then the thought was gone, coherence lost, the pain returned in her mind. In the distance she heard a child shouting, crying not to be hurt and she tried to turn, to open her eyes to see what was happening. Her head was so heavy now, the pain so intense.

MILDRED HAD CHECKED every one of the cage-bearing cars as instructed by J.B. There was no one aboard, no sec men, no children and certainly no sign of Ryan.

She had sprinted through all the empty cages, through a store car that showed clear signs of a firefight, two crew quarters, a laboratory car coupled to a car full of equipment. After that was a bland room with heavy drapes over the windows, another car filled with techie stuff including spotlights on a rig with a portable generator painted in a familiar military green, and finally out onto a flatbed with a heavy cannon on it.

She checked her wrist chron. She had less than four minutes left. Standing on the flatbed she looked ahead.

There was the vast unit that presumably held the fuel for the loco wag, and then there was the engine. “Sorry, Ryan,” she muttered to herself, shaking her head. He just wasn’t onboard.

She stepped off the flatbed unit on the starboard side, away from the congregation in the vast chamber.

RELUCTANTLY, MADDIE stepped forward. Despite her reluctance, she held her head high, looking challengingly at the people on the dais above. A sec man behind her slammed the butt of his longblaster into her back to hurry her along as she marched toward the dais. She turned back for a moment, and her eyes locked with Jak’s. “Goodbye,” she whispered. Jak saw that this Alpha Wave

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brave thirteen-year-old girl had accepted her fate with utter, faultless courage.

J.B. weaved through the crowd and joined Doc.

“What’s going on, Doc?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” the old man replied, “but it seems that this may be our last chance to free both Krysty and young Jak.”

“I’ve set charges throughout the loco wag,” J.B.

whispered. “We got about two minutes before they blow and then this whole place will turn into chaos.”

Doc smiled grimly as he looked at the Armorer. “And what of Ryan?” he asked.

“Mildred’s on it,” J.B. said.

“She’s going to have to be quick,” Doc concluded.

They watched as the girl in the white nightdress was made to stand in front of the raised dais. “I don’t like the look of this,” Doc told J.B.

“You and me both, Doc,” J.B. agreed. He looked across to the other chained children, instantly identifying Jak standing among them. “Reckon you can get the blaster to Jak?”

“I intend to do my level best,” Doc replied, reaching a hand beneath the tails of his frock coat and feeling for the butt of Jak’s Colt Python.

“IT WORKS BEST with the young,” Baron Burgess told Krysty as he focused his stare on the Asian girl standing in front of him. A pained expression showed on the girl’s face now, and she screwed up her eyes and brought her chained hands up to rub at the sides of her head. “Their brains are still forming,” Burgess rasped.

“They still have the capacity to accept me.”

Krysty shook her head as she watched the girl, 286

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feeling a tightness in her chest. The girl’s mouth was wide open now and she was screaming, screaming for her father. “I don’t think… No, she’s not accepting you.

That girl is not accepting you,” Krysty muttered.

Krysty turned away as the girl dropped to the floor and began punching and kicking at it with all her strength.

JAK LOOKED FRANTICALLY around, trying to find a way to break the chains on his wrists, to get a blaster in his hands. Maddie was beating at the floor; her knuckles were bloody where the skin had ripped away with her beating. “Maddie,” he said quietly. “Don’t, Maddie.”

Maddie looked at him and Jak saw the tears streaming down her face. She was still shouting for her father, but her voice was so overused it had gone hoarse. Jak watched as she wrenched at her hair, pulling it away from her scalp in great clumps.

All around, the sec men watched the display, casually indifferent as though they had seen this many times before. Probably they had, Jak realized.

“Please stop,” Krysty called from the dais, but the hooded figure continued to stare at Maddie as she squirmed on the floor.

Then Maddie pulled herself upright, kneeling as she looked up at the baron. Suddenly, violently, she pushed forward, bending at the waist, and slammed her forehead into the solid concrete floor, headbutting the unforgiv-ing surface again and again. Each time her head hit, her cries for her father became higher, as if she were hiccup-ping.

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her nose and down her cheeks. But she wouldn’t stop.

She just kept slamming her head into the floor, screaming for her father to come help her, over and over.

On the podium, Adam stepped forward and said something quietly to the hooded figure before walking across to the steps, accompanied by the sec men who had brought Krysty to the dais. They made their way down the brief staircase to the floor, and Adam gave an instruction to a nearby sec man who carried an ax next to the blaster on his belt. The man handed over the ax, and Adam tested its weight in his hands. Then he walked over to Maddie where she continued hitting the floor in a strange mockery of genuflecting.

Whatever happens, Jak told himself, this one dies.

Adam grabbed Maddie’s long hair, patchy though it now was after her own assault. He held her upright as she tried to yank herself away and pulled back the ax.

With a mighty sweep, he brought the ax down into the back of the girl’s neck, cutting through it like a tree truck, beheading her in a single stroke, and abruptly halting her pleas for her father’s help.

The girl’s headless body knelt in place as Adam carried his bloody trophy back to the hooded figure on the dais.

IT WAS ONLY BY CHANCE that Mildred had decided to walk around the front of the train. She had seen the exterior once, by night, from the window of the rented room in Fairburn, and she had been half-convinced it was something come alive from a nightmare. The jutting spikes and flaming holes along the matte-black sides still gave her that impression, even up close, and she suppressed a shiver as she admired the metallic beast.

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Then, quite unexpectedly, she saw Ryan, tied to the front of the train, hanging just above the floor by his wrists and ankles. His face was caked in dirt and his head hung low, no strength left to hold it up.

Mildred looked behind her, making sure no one else was sneaking up, before she stepped over to him and used her pocketknife to saw through the ropes. “Ryan?”

she said with quiet urgency. “Ryan, can you hear me?”

The one-eyed man’s only answer was a groan. His head lolled on his shoulders. He was clearly well out of it.

Mildred untied the final strap binding Ryan’s wrist and eased him gently down. “Ryan, wake up.” He was breathing and didn’t seem to have any obvious wounds.

He was just exhausted. She slung the backpack from her shoulders and rummaged through it until she found the half-full canteen of water. She unscrewed the cap and put the canteen to Ryan’s lips, letting a slow stream trickle into his mouth. “Come on, Ryan, we have to get out of here right now.” She checked her wrist chron again. They had one minute before J.B.’s surprise kicked into action.

Ryan’s right eye flickered in and out of focus and he spluttered out the water, choking on it. Mildred pulled the canteen away, told him to take it easy.

“What happened?” Ryan asked. “Mildred, ’zat you?”

“Large as life,” she told him, smiling broadly. “But not for much longer unless we get away from this train.”

Ryan tried to stand, but he slumped back on the ground. “Can’t feel my legs,” he told her, his voice slurring, “or my arms. What the hell happened?”

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around to see if any sec men might have noticed them.

“I’ll help you get out of here, come on.”

On hands and knees, Mildred shuffled along next to Ryan, half dragging him as he crawled slowly away from the train. She guided them over to a glass-walled control room that she had spotted across from the train, set against the wall.

“One second,” she promised Ryan, standing and stepping to the door of the control room. Inside, the room was full of tracking and monitoring equipment, and Mildred recognized some of it as being the workings of an old signal box. There was a single operator sitting at the control board, smoking a rolled-up cigarette, the cloying stench of maryjane in the foggy air. He turned when he saw her step into the room. “Hi,”

she said as she raised the blaster in her hand and fired off a shot straight through his forehead. “’Bye.” The signal controller slumped to his console, a neat circular hole between his eyes, the cigarette still clinging to his bottom lip.

Mildred dragged Ryan into the room and they sat together beneath one of the control desks. She glanced at her wrist chron once again as she started strapping up Ryan’s torn wrists with bandages from her med kit.

He had suffered some nasty wounds while hanging from the ropes. They had cut into the flesh of his wrists and Mildred could see signs of infection there.

“What have I missed?” Ryan asked, his voice hoarse as he sipped a little more of the water from the canteen.

“All of the sec men have gathered in the big reception room outside, Jak and a load of kids are chained up ready for the slaughter, and some insane baron has decided to make Krysty his pet,” Mildred summarized.

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“Nothing important, then,” Ryan said, and Mildred stopped strapping his wounds and looked at him. There was a sly smile on his lips, and she knew he was already assessing the best way to deal with their current problems.

Just then, a loud explosion rocked the room outside immediately followed by two further booms, and the glass in the control room’s windows shattered and crashed inward, showering over the desktops and floor all around them.

“Oh, almost forgot,” Mildred added. “J.B. has a plan.”

Ryan nodded, rubbing his hands together as he tried to get the feeling back into them. “So I hear.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

J.B. had rushed through the train, placing explosive charges in every fourth car until he reached the storage cars at the rear of the vehicle. He had not concerned himself with finesse, just tossed the bombs on shelves, under seats, sometimes simply placed them on the floor and then continued on. He had counted out the cars as he worked through them, units fifteen through to sixty, trusting Mildred to pepper the foremost cars with explosives, as well. When he reached car thirty, he had placed a huge wad of plas ex with a timer, setting it to seven minutes, giving him and Mildred more than enough time to complete their designated tasks. He had hoped she would find Ryan, but he had chosen not to delay the operation just because of that, well aware that Ryan might have been thrown overboard after discovery. Holding up the whole plan on the basis of a man who was possibly no longer aboard would be foolhardy behavior based purely on sentimentality, and sentimentality had no place in the Deathlands.

When he had joined Doc in the midst of the mob, the Armorer had resisted the urge to check his wrist chron.

Some sixth sense worked for him in these situations. He would know when the charges were going to blow. He remained calm as he watched the horrifying mental assault on the young girl in front of the dais. While not 292

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the most demonstrably emotional of men, J.B. had not enjoyed witnessing the awful fate of the girl, feeling it a relief when she was finally decapitated and put out of her misery. But rash heroics would do more harm than good now, so he continued to let the timer tick down—

when the train went up it would be big and it would hopefully provide the diversion they needed.

The younger male whitecoat had been handed the dead girl’s head by the scarred CO and had taken a powered bonesaw to it. He swiftly cut into the forehead, splitting the skull and flipping the top of the head back.

Inside, the brain sat snugly in the cranium, gray and glistening with moisture. Beside J.B., Doc had gasped, as though hit by a sudden realization.

Rubber gloves over his hands, the whitecoat had removed the brain and squeezed it in his hands, watching the trickle of liquid drip from it. The brain was placed in a container where, J.B. saw, it swam in similarly colored, mushy gray liquid.

Doc turned to J.B. and started to say something, but it was cut suddenly short as a series of almighty explosions came from the far right of the vast room. The timer had reached count zero. The first explosion flowered into existence, fire and fury wiping out the thirtieth car and the spreading flames engulfing the cars to either side. It took several seconds, the heat of the flames spreading from the middle car, before the next explosions kicked in, the thermals taking up the symphony of noise and heat.

“Get to Jak,” J.B. shouted over the ensuing chaos, turning away from the bright flames. “We need him now.”

Doc shoved his way through the crowd, most of Alpha Wave

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whom were transfixed by the burning wreckage that had been the center of the train just moments before.

Finding himself beside the children, Doc yanked the Colt Python from its hiding place at the small of his back. Jak stood in front of him, his back to Doc as he watched the reactions of the strange group of figures on the dais, his hands straining at the chains that bound him.

“Might I be of some assistance, Mr. Lauren?” Doc called, raising his voice above the turmoil and explosions that filled the air.

Jak turned, his eyes narrowed in anger. Then he saw Doc and relief flashed across his sharp features for a fraction of a second. “Thought not see you ’gain.”

Doc shook his head, showing Jak the blaster. “I am like the proverbial bad penny, Jak, you should know that by now.”

Jak’s eyes flashed over Doc’s shoulder as the older man spoke, and he powered forward, his hands held high with the small length of chain links pulled taut.

Doc weaved aside as the albino swung both fists frac-tionally to the old man’s left. Doc turned in time to see a bearded sec man stagger back with Jak struggling to right himself for a further attack. The man spit a phlegmy glob of blood to the ground before raising his right arm. Clutched in his hand, Doc saw, the bearded man held a well-maintained 9 mm Browning Llama blaster. In a second the sec man had the blaster pointed at Jak as the young man used his powerful leg muscles to push himself at his enemy.

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once more, the pain in her head abating; still there, but abating. Being near this Baron Burgess was like holding her head in a clamp. She had to get away.

She turned, scanning the crowd of, what had been a moment before, revelers. They had all turned to look at the flames that engulfed the center of the monstrous train at the far side of the room. As she watched, two further explosions ripped through the train in rapid succession, and she felt the heat of the flames throbbing on her chest and face.

She glanced back, looking at the people on the raised platform. They, too, were entranced, watching the growing inferno that had engulfed their train, all except the strange old woman with the blood-colored tears painted on her cheek. She just sat in her wheelchair, a serene expression on her lips, almost as though she was unaware of anything amiss, instructing the man behind her with a fluttering of hand gestures. Krysty could see the hooded figure of Baron Burgess shaking, gripped with shock, his shoulders shuddering almost as though he was crying.

This isn’t about a train, she reminded herself. It’s more than that, and to walk away now would be nothing but weakness, weakness Mother Sonja had warned her all her life to avoid. Krysty took a determined step forward.

“My train!” the baron screamed. “What has happened to my glorious train?”

Adam shook his head and turned to look at his master. His eyes widened when he saw the red-haired woman standing beside the baron, pulling back her fist.

“Baron Burgess, look—” he began.

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watched his fiery green eyes turn on her and she launched an upper cut the length of her torso before connecting with his jaw in a solid blow.

“What?” Burgess howled as the punch slammed hard into his chin and his teeth clashed together with a clap.

His head snapped backward on his neck and the voluminous folds of his hood dropped to his shoulders.

Krysty stood staring, her follow-up punch forgotten as she looked into the revealed face of Baron Burgess.

He was entirely bald, and his exposed skin looked old and haggard. His bright eyes were a fierce green within the bloodshot yellows where the whites should have been. Wiring sprung from the top and back of his head, linked through open wounds straight onto the pulsing mass of brain that could be seen through a Swiss cheese sequence of drilled holes. The man had been repeatedly trepanned, and she could see that the attached wires disappeared into the back of the robe and, most likely, through it and into the floor below. The baron, she realized, had never moved more than a few feet in all the time she had seen him.

Burgess tilted his head, recognition in his eyes as he looked at Krysty’s shocked expression. He smiled and she saw the rotten teeth that lined his mouth, the gums that they sat in an angry shade of violet. “You look horrified, Krysty Wroth,” he told her solicitously, as though to a child when his cruel prank has finally been revealed. To her right another explosion rocked the room as more cars burst into flame.

“What…?” Krysty began, unsure how to even voice the question that was forming in her mind. “Are you some kind of ’bot?”

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voice sounding as pained as ever. “To achieve perfec-tion one has to be willing to make sacrifices,” he told her. “This was the only way to truly ensure that the system would respond to my commands. So I willingly became a part of it.”

Krysty looked at the bald man, the wires jutting from his skull, and she felt a twinge of sadness.

Perhaps, somewhere in the distant past, Baron Burgess had been an idealist. Perhaps he had had not a plan but a dream, a vision. But somewhere on his quest to fulfill his ideal to create a working, ordered civilization from the wreckage that was the Deathlands, he had given himself over to the system of its implementation and he had given up a little piece of humanity in the process. She saw it all then—the harvesting of children’s malleable brains that acted as the transmitters in the towers. “What kind of monster does this to himself?” Krysty asked, thrusting her left fist toward the cloaked man.

But Krysty’s punch failed to connect. The strength in her muscles ebbed away, like water through netting, and she just sank, straight down, as though collapsing in on herself. Her legs folded beneath her, then she slumped back and to the side, dropping to the floor of the dais. Burgess stood over her, his fierce stare burning through her, sapping her will.

“We don’t need my glorious train anymore, girl,” he bragged. Krysty felt icy claws plucking at her memories, a burning sensation behind her eyes as though her optic nerves were aflame. Baron Burgess was there, inside her head, pulling and wrenching at everything that made her Krysty Wroth, pulling at her very self.

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DOC RAPPED the bearded sec man across the knuckles with his lion’s-head walking cane and the man dropped his blaster with a yelp.

Jak sprang forward, garroting the man with the small length of chain that bound his wrists. The man fell backward, slumping to the hard ground with the albino youth’s weight atop him. The sec man clenched his hands around Jak’s forearms, trying to pull away the pressure on his throat. As he did so he saw the older, white-haired man lean forward and point a blaster at his throat.

“Watch your hands,” Doc told Jak as he pulled the trigger on the Colt Python. There was a loud report and the bullet drove through the chain links between Jak’s wrists, splitting the chain before drilling into the sec man’s throat, killing him instantly.

The crowd of people around them were starting to react now, and Doc handed Jak his blaster and pulled his trusty LeMat from its holster. Jak swung the six-inch barrel of his weapon toward the dais and fired off a quick shot at the sec man who stood at the foot of the small staircase.

“Shooter still good,” the albino teen stated, a wide grin splitting his face as he headed toward the stairs.

“J.B. oiled it for you,” Doc called back as he knelt in a defensive position beside the group of frightened children.

Jak scrambled up the abbreviated flight of steps and onto the dais. He could see Krysty flailing as she dropped to the floor, and a bald-headed man poised over her, grinning maliciously. Beside the bald man was the scarred man who had killed his friends, Francis-Frankie and Maddie, his face away from Jak as he watched the burning wreckage of the train.

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Jak saw a movement across the room, at the other end of the dais behind the retreating woman in the wheelchair, but he dismissed it, keeping his mind on his primary objective. He raised the Colt Python and reeled off two shots at the figures in front of him. The bald baron swayed as the first shot glanced past him, missing him by barely an inch. Adam wasn’t as lucky—the bullet punctured his left leg and he danced on the spot as he struggled to maintain his balance.

Adam’s huge frame turned to face his attacker and he saw the wiry young albino sprinting toward him, a sliver of smoke emanating from the raised blaster in his hand. Adam still held the ax, and he tossed it in a rotating arc toward Jak in a flinch reaction.

Jak weaved below the onrushing ax and fired another shot at Adam’s legs, the large-bore bullet shattering his left hip in a burst of bone fragments and blood. Adam howled as the bullet destroyed his leg, and his hand reached down to the Magnum blaster he had holstered in his belt.

“Not escaping,” Jak said solemnly as he ran at the scarred man, toppling him as their bodies slammed together.

Adam had his blaster free now, but Jak was on top of him, too close to shoot. He used the blaster like a club, slamming the butt into Jak’s back and the lowest part of his neck. The albino teen continued his savage attack, arms swinging as he clawed at Adam’s face, his legs pumping to drive the pair of them on across the dais. Adam could feel the hot flood of blood pouring down his left leg, and he couldn’t seem to use the leg properly to anchor himself. Suddenly there was no floor to step on and Adam found himself walking backward Alpha Wave

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into thin air before falling at an angle toward the ground a few feet below, Jak still driving at him in an unre-strained rush of rage. With a slam, Adam’s body met the ground below, shoulders and the back of his head first, knocking the wind out of him. His blaster went flying, spinning across the floor before halting barely two feet away from the frantic pair of combatants.

Adam rolled to his left, tossing his attacker aside. As Jak wheeled away, Adam howled, unspeakable pain assaulting his shattered hip. He watched the strange, albino youth across the floor from him as he grabbed for the blaster he had dropped. Jak rolled across the floor before coming up in a crouch. He pointed his blaster at Adam’s face, and his red eyes narrowed in determination.

“Bullet for tongue,” Jak said through gritted teeth, pulling the trigger.

With a burst of crimson, the lower half of Adam’s face disappeared in the same way Francis-Frankie had been wounded back at the tower. His hand twitched and he ceased reaching for the blaster he had dropped moments before.

J.B. SPRAYED the crowd with bullets from his Uzi, forcing them away from the captive children and the dais as more explosions gripped the broken train.

Flames were racing up the wall now, and he could feel the heat of the fire here, halfway across the vast room.

He kept his blaster aimed away from Doc, Jak and the child prisoners.

The explosions had shaken up the crowd, and sec men were only now reacting, almost a minute after the first explosion, to the enemies in their midst. As far as 300

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J.B. was concerned, it was a turkey shoot. Everybody in his line of fire was an enemy and every last body, dead or alive, provided more cover for him. All he had to do was keep moving.

THREE DAYS Ryan had hung there, with no food to eat and only the little rainwater that hit his face to drink.

And all it had done was make him meaner, more focused than ever.

Mildred watched in admiration as the one-eyed man pushed himself up from the floor and rolled his shoulders to ease the tension in his muscles. Blood seeped into the bandages that Mildred had wrapped around his worn wrists as he flexed and tensed his hands, painfully driving away any lasting numbness. Standing amid the shattered glass, Ryan stretched his right hand to his hip and pulled the 9 mm SIG-Sauer from the worn leather holster. “Come on, Mildred,” he said through cracked lips, “time to end this thing.” With that, he strode determinedly to the door as another explosion rocked the room outside. Hefting her backpack on her shoulders, Mildred followed, the ZKR-551 target revolver ready.

Outside the control room it was turmoil. People were running in all directions as fire engulfed the monstrous train. Flames leaped up the wall next to the burning train, and Mildred realized they were lucky to depart their cover when they had. In a few moments those flames would spread and cover the doorway. Ahead of her, Ryan walked heavily, his muscles still aching. He led her around the front of the train, not so much as wasting a single glance on the area where he had hung for the past three days, no curiosity while there was a job to do. Flames lapped at the wheels and rear of the Alpha Wave

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engine and the matte paint blistered as heat engulfed it.

Ryan just continued on, surveying the scene until he spotted Krysty’s bright hair on the dais at the room’s center.

Head down, he marched toward the dais, with Mildred jogging along beside him, making their way through the startled mob.

J.B. WAS NEXT TO Doc now, firing short bursts from the Uzi into the air, keeping the crowd at bay. A number of the crowd had organized themselves, rushing around with buckets of water to try to douse the flames that stretched the length of the room along the train tracks by the right-hand wall. They were no longer concerned with guarding the children.

“How are we, Doc?” J.B. asked as he stood by Doc’s side.

Doc glanced at the Armorer, amused to see that during all the chaos the man had still managed to retrieve his hat from wherever it had fallen after Krysty’s disguise had been blown, along with Ryan’s longblaster. “I’ve done a quick recce, but I can’t see any keys for the handcuffs,” he said, indicating the children huddled behind him. “We’re going to have to break the chains manually, I think.”

J.B. shrugged. “As long as they’re alive. Any sign of Mildred?”

“None,” Doc told him, blasting off a swift shot with his LeMat as someone in the crowd leveled a shotgun in their direction. The man fell to the floor, a bloody wound dead center in his chest.

J.B.’s head flicked back and he scanned the dais. Jak had disappeared but Krysty was still up there, scram-302

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bling along the floor, trying to get away from the baron.

For the first time he noticed the transparent panels along the side of the raised platform and saw the gray liquid that swirled within, lighted in a strangely pulsing manner. Having witnessed the awful death of the girl, he knew now what that liquid was: brain matter.

Whatever this insane baron was doing, it involved the transference of thoughts, and the ideal medium for thought transference was brain—the horrifying logic was inescapable.

J.B. saw something else, too—two familiar figures jogging up the steps of the dais from the direction of the train. “Looks like she found Ryan,” he told Doc as he turned his attention back to the frantic crowd that surrounded them.

LYING SUPINE on the floor of the dais, Krysty kicked with her heels and pushed herself backward, away from the leering baron. The baron’s intense grip on her mind had wavered when Jak’s bullet glanced by his shoulder, and Krysty felt the fog in her head lifting once more. She reached into the pocket of her jumpsuit and gripped the handle of the .38 Smith & Wesson she had hidden there.

Looming above her, the robed baron smiled a fierce, horrible grin. “Come to me, Krysty Wroth,” he spoke softly, “don’t try to resist.”

“Resist this, Burgess!” she shouted, revealing the

.38 in her hand and blasting a shot at his face. The bullet missed him by a fraction of an inch, leaving a bloody gash on his cheek. The baron flinched, slapping his hand against the wound.

From the far end of the dais, Krysty heard a strained Alpha Wave

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voice call her name. Her eyes darted across for a moment and she saw Ryan and Mildred rushing up the steps and onto the stage. Mildred fired shots at the whitecoats, hobbling them to ensure they didn’t escape. In the turmoil, the old woman and her wheelchair had disappeared, Krysty realized. When had that happened?

Ryan had his blaster raised, and he bellowed something at the baron as he ran across the stage. “You shouldn’t piss off Krysty,” he yelled, and the baron turned, piercing him with his stare. Krysty knew the power of that gaze now. It had caused the sec man to kill himself, made the pretty, young Asian girl harm herself in the most savage, brutal manner, and it had locked Krysty’s mind to the point of complete seizure.

She raised the barrel of her blaster and targeted the back of the baron’s head. At the same time, Ryan pulled the trigger on his SIG-Sauer.

The noise of the twin shots was lost in the general hubbub of the panicked room. From opposite directions, two bullets raced through the air toward the same target: the trepanned skull of Baron Burgess.

Perhaps they hit at the same instant, no one would ever be sure, but the bald man’s skull cracked as the bullets drove through it, and a mass of gray jelly and wiring splattered into the air as the now-headless body fell to the floor.

Ryan continued to advance, a determined expression on his face as he struggled to make his tired leg muscles work. He dashed past Burgess’s sagging corpse and went to his knees as he reached Krysty, lying in front of him on the floor, the .38 still poised in her hand. Ryan pulled her close, wrapping his arms around 304

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her, the scarred fingers of his hands entwining her hair.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “It’s all over now.”

But it wasn’t, and Krysty was the first to feel it.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Krysty’s head was throbbing. Her headache had been getting disarmingly more urgent in the last three seconds, ever since Baron Burgess had taken two bullets to the head. Right now it felt as if a blacksmith was molding molten-hot horseshoes into shape with his hammer, the anvil located across the space between her eyes. She blinked back the pain, but it redoubled its efforts and she could hear the sound of her blood rushing through her ears.

“He’s not dead, Ryan,” she said to the one-eyed man who clung to her. Her voice sounded so loud in her ears, she wondered if she was shouting.

Holding on to her, Ryan felt something dancing on his head, as if the hair was being plucked out by its roots. Krysty had whispered something but it was mumbled, lost to the noise coming from all around the station. “What did you say?” he asked her, pulling her close as they sat together on the floor. His words seemed strange, jagged things, like knives in his own ears.

A few paces behind him he heard the crash of a body falling to the ground, and he heard Mildred curse. What was going on here?

Krysty began to speak again, and Ryan held her face between his hands, watching her lips move so that he could make her out over the sounds of chaos all 306

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around them. “He’s not dead,” she told him. “The baron is not dead.”

Ryan turned, aware of the heavy weight of his own skull atop his neck. It was like deep-sea diving, moving through the pressured water, trying to get the momentum going. The robed figure of the baron lay there, a puddle of blood and brain matter spilled from the top of his head. Ryan watched, inwardly preparing himself, but the man did not move. What was Krysty talking about? The man was clearly dead.

Beside the corpse, Mildred had fallen to the floor, her eyes clenched tight in agony. Ryan saw her slowly raise a heavy head, open her eyes and look at him. The whites of her eyes had turned pink as capillaries burst within them. She grimaced and pulled herself upright, confusion on her face. “What’s happening?” she asked him after a moment, biting off the words as though speaking had become difficult.

Ryan felt punch-drunk as the pressure in his skull mounted. Beside him, Krysty was speaking once more, and Ryan tried to make sense of her words. “He’s in my head.”

Ryan looked at her, shocked by the statement she had just made, trying to make sense of the phrase. But by then it was too late, and the baron was speaking to them all, everyone in the cavernous room, inside their very minds.

He began with laughter. A strange, happy sound, somehow wrong and out of context here as the people in the room sank to their knees or simply dropped to the floor. The baron laughed inside all their heads, enjoying his newfound freedom. “Of course,” he stated, “so simple.” The voice was loud, astonishingly loud, it Alpha Wave

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seemed to obliterate all other noise in the room but it wasn’t there at all. It wasn’t carried by sound waves, it was carried by thoughts, a virus running through the minds of every person in the room.

It went farther than the room. It went beyond the spectators here, wending through the skeletal transmitters that sat in the earth beside the railroad tracks, rocketing across the whole state and staggering farmers working in the predawn fields, the villes, the broken wreckage of the shattered cities. Everyone, awake or asleep, felt that voice in their head. Some heard it softly, a whisper in the back of their thoughts like the voice of their conscience. Others, especially the young and those nearest the scaffold towers powered by brain matter, heard it loud and strong, like the instructive voice of a teacher at the front of the classroom.

In Fairburn, the late drinkers in Jemmy’s bar stopped their conversations in unison and the room fell silent.

The players held their fans of cards in front of them but their eyes glazed over. The domino players dropped their tiles to the tables and clutched at their aching skulls.

Similar scenes were occurring throughout Fairburn, where the emanations of the nearby tower were strong, at the dogfight arena and the stables and the little, single-story wooden shacks that the villagers lived in.

Similar scenes erupted all across the old state of North Dakota, wherever the ring of transmitters touched, broadcasting its shrieking message to the minds of the inhabitants.

Baron Burgess’s disembodied voice spoke to everyone, though he really only spoke to himself. “I never even thought,” he said, “freed of the body I have utter control of the mind.”

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All around the station, people were dropping to the floor as though swatted by a hurricane, blood streaming from their nostrils, ears and mouths. The voice was strong here, loud and all-consuming, a wrathful god pronouncing sentence on his subjects.

Mildred could feel the blood welling in her mouth as her gums split. A trickle of blood was pouring from her left ear and both nostrils, and she tongued the blood away as it swam into her mouth. Raising her hand carefully, driving herself on despite the confusion in her mind, she aimed her ZKR-551 revolver at the baron’s limp form and fired, again and again until the clip was empty and the hammer caught on nothing but an empty chamber. The robed body jumped in place, shuddering with each impact, but the driving pain in her mind continued, pulling at her very identity as it violently overwhelmed her.

Still clutching Krysty where they sat on the other side of the baron’s corpse, Ryan watched Mildred blast holes in the fallen body. The whole thing seemed to take a second or an hour, Ryan couldn’t seem to make sense which. His perceptions were breaking down under the mounting pressure in his brain, and he struggled to hold on to his awareness.

When he saw the corpse move as Mildred’s bullets drilled into it, Ryan noticed the wiring that ran from the body into the floor—the same type of wiring that could be seen spouting from the skull. Beneath the baron, on the floor of the platform, there were holes and circuits, the whole dais formed some kind of machine. The mad bastard had wired himself into the machine itself, his whole life stuck to this spot, attached by an umbilical cord of wiring.

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“This is the ultimate,” Baron Burgess howled in the minds of everyone within transmission range. “The Grand Project works better than I could possibly have dreamed.”

Behind the dais, Jak was sleeping beside the faceless corpse of Adam. The pressure within Jak’s mind was colossal, and he had willed himself to sleep as a defense mechanism. In his dreams, the insane baron was laughing, his words flowing like living things from his mouth of rotten teeth.

Doc was slumped on the floor by the fallen children.

He couldn’t move his head, the pressure there felt so tight, but he lay with his sky blue eyes wide open, looking at the faces of the children as blood poured in rivers from their ears, nostrils and mouths, from the split where their eyes met the skin. The children were dying; their brains could not endure the unholy pressure that was building within them. Doc knew that within minutes the children would die, their personalities wiped out, their bodies empty shells. If only he could do something. If only he could move.

Beside him, J.B. had dropped under the mental on-slaught along with everyone else in the room. He remained focused, pushing the victorious words of the baron from his head, concentrating on keeping his own thoughts intact. His right hand still clutched the Uzi and he forced the muscles in his arm to move, to point the weapon at the dais. He had noticed the swirling brain goop within the floor of the platform and, freely admitting that he had no comprehension of how such a device worked, realized that the baron had amplified his own psionic abilities through some kind of alignment of brain matter in series.

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J.B. squeezed the trigger and the Uzi spit a long stream of bullets at the base of the platform, shattering the transparent glass and spilling organic liquid, gray matter, all over the floor.

But still the voice continued, still the pressure pounded at everyone’s mind.

“The system responds to my commands better than I ever hoped,” Baron Burgess bellowed. “I just needed the absolute freedom to embrace it. I am control!”

J.B. saw Mildred lying atop the dais, the blood pooling beside her face, and he wished there was some way to help her. “Mildred,” he called, forcing his own thoughts past the euphoric feeling that the baron was transmitting.

Mildred looked at him from the edge of the dais, her head moving slowly, her eyes cast a wicked, bloodshot red.

“How do you clean out a brain?” J.B. shouted, and he willed her to understand.

Mildred looked at him, struggling to comprehend as the weight pressed on her mind. She saw J.B. gesture toward the floor below her with the barrel of the Uzi, and she started to realize what he meant. She rolled, pushing herself away from the floor and shrugged out of the armholes on her backpack. In her mind, placed centrally in her thoughts, the baron was laughing once more, a delighted child with a new toy.

Mildred dug into the backpack. From the scrounged medical supplies in her backpack she pulled out a hypodermic syringe, her hands shaking as she held it up to her eyes, trying to see if it contained anything.

Liquid. It held liquid, crystal-clear with a trace of foam at the top of the container. She felt relief flow Alpha Wave

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through her like a wave, and her pained, bleeding mouth smiled.

“Put him to sleep,” she answered, her slurring voice low and strained. Still clutching the hypodermic, Mildred slumped to the floor, her thoughts trickling away like raindrops.

Ryan had heard her, had watched her rooting through the bag. He saw the syringe in her hand and he ignored everything else. His vision was almost gone, a narrow circle surrounded by thick, inky blackness was all that remained. The view flickered in and out, light and shadow, and he urged himself forward, letting go of his lover as he drove himself on.

Without Ryan to hold her up, Krysty slumped to the floor, blacked out from the pressure within her head.

Flames billowed up the walls, lighting the room, making her red hair shimmer in a halo of light.

Ryan crawled across the dais on hands and knees, his eye focused on the syringe in Mildred’s hand. He had dropped his blaster somewhere, but he didn’t remember where, his thoughts were so muddled, so fuzzy. Suddenly, like moving at high speed, he was there, his hand falling over Mildred’s, clasping the little plastic cylinder of the syringe. “How much?” he asked her, but she didn’t answer. Mildred had blacked out.

The baron’s voice was screaming maniacally now, the puppet master examining his creations. He laughed and howled, his thoughts weapons against his detractors.

Atop the dais, Ryan stood, his knees buckling a little at the stress, his frame unsteady, swaying as though a tree in the breeze. His right hand held the hypodermic syringe filled with sedative, the thin, metal needle twinkling in the flames of the destroyed train.

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He looked down at the baron’s corpse, looking for the strange wiring he had noticed that connected the baron’s body to the machinery below. There were gaps there, small tunnels through the floor that held the wiring in place. Ryan staggered two steps forward until he was upon the baron’s robed figure. Then he lunged, collapsing to the floor, his right arm extended above him.

There.

He ripped at the wiring, yanking a strand of it free, opening the hole into the base of the platform. The aperture was so slim, a tiny breach in the vast unit. Ryan imagined he might see the liquefied brain matter rushing beneath but it was just a hole, thin and characterless. He brought his fist down and drove the thin needle of the hypodermic syringe into the little gap in the surface of the floor. Then he pushed the stopper, his hands shaking with the stress of following his commands, until he had released all of the liquid into the thought amplification unit.

Once he was done, Ryan slumped to the floor as all the thoughts in his mind burned away.

BLACKNESS.

Nothingness.

The end of the all.

RYAN ABRUPTLY REGAINED consciousness as a hand pressed against his chest and rocked him awake. He opened his eye and looked up into Krysty’s smiling face.

“Wake up, lover,” she said. “We have to get out of here.”

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Something preyed on Ryan’s thoughts, a strange sense of loss, a dream only half-remembered.

“What happened?” Ryan murmured, his jaw aching, his mouth heavy and dry.

“He’s gone,” Krysty told him. “But the whole base is going up in smoke. We need to get moving.”

Ryan sat up, his muscles protesting, and saw the thick black smoke that was filling the hall beneath the high ceiling. All around the dais were the fallen bodies of the baron’s men, many of them struggling to rouse themselves as though from a hard night’s drinking.

There was blood splattered across the room, and many of the people wore streaks of crimson across their faces.

Ryan scanned the area and saw J.B. crouched beside a group of a dozen children, shaking them awake. To his side, Doc was nodding his muzzy head as he tried to shake off the effects of the mental invasion. In the distance, the train was nothing more than a burning streak of tortured wood and metal, and the wall beside it and floor beneath were burning furiously. Whatever ammunition had been stored on the train had cooked off during the initial fires, adding to the chaos.

Mildred stood beside the steps of the dais, her familiar backpack strapped across her shoulders, and she looked all around until she saw something behind the platform. She dashed off, hurling a single word back to Ryan and Krysty. “Jak.”

In the nightmarish past three days, Ryan had almost forgotten about their teenage companion, and he chastised himself for the oversight. If Jak needed anything, he assured himself, Mildred would be able to provide it. With Krysty’s help, Ryan pulled himself up to a 314

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standing position, his frame crooked as he tried to urge it to movement.

“Come on, lover,” Krysty said gently. “It’s time I saved you.”

The companions regrouped and, with the frightened child prisoners, made their way through the crowd and out of the burning station.

Outside, the sun was just tripping over the horizon in the east, a new dawn breaking.

Ryan leaned heavily against Krysty, but she took the burden with ease and good grace. Her strength had finally returned. “What happened there, in the end?”

Ryan asked, his memory of the final moments a clouded, impenetrable morass.

“The baron’s psyche was transferred into his machinery on death, I think,” Krysty told him, “and the whole process boosted his psionic abilities to a terrifying level.

Don’t ask me how—the guy was wired into his brain transmitter, and I’m damned if I can figure the whole logic of the thing.”

“The heck of it is,” Doc chipped in, “the confounded system actually worked, at the end.”

“For a while,” J.B. added as he herded the children out into the crisp, dawn air. They still wore chains at their wrists, but that was a problem to deal with once they were clear of the baron’s base.

Bringing up the rear, Mildred and a very tired-looking Jak made sure there were no stragglers among the child escapees. Jak had his Colt Python poised, keeping an eye out for anyone who was stupe enough to follow the companions. No one did. They were too busy saving their own skins from the burning building to worry about six outlanders and a handful of children.

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“You think that was Burgess’s plan?” Ryan asked.

Krysty shook her head. “He gave up so much to achieve his dream, it was kind of touching when he told me, but he would never have given up his body like that.”

“So where is he now?” Ryan wanted to know.

Krysty took a deep breath, luxuriating in the fresh air as the sun rose in the distance. “He’s gone,” she said with finality. “The sedative was transmitted through the system, just like his alpha waves. When you put him to the final sleep, well, I can’t feel their agony anymore.

They’re all sleeping now.”

There were more than a dozen children with the companions, and many of them were sniffling quietly, tears running down their cheeks and mixing with the dried blood on their faces where they had suffered from the baron’s devastating mental attack. Humblebee, the eight-year-old girl with the lopsided bunches in her hair, tugged at Jak’s sleeve and asked him a question.

Her face looked sad and frightened, but she wasn’t crying, at least. “Will we see Maddie again?” the girl wondered.

Jak shook his head. “Asleep with others,” he told her, trying to sound reassuring. “Won’t come back.”

Humblebee thought about that, her mouth turned down sadly, and then she nodded. “I miss her,” she told him, a confident smile on her lips as she turned back to her ex-cell mates.

“Me, too,” Jak solemnly agreed, scanning the horizon. Loping along, the albino youth parted from the group and pointed to a small shack on the outskirts of the old military compound. “Stables,” he told them.

He was right. As Ryan and the others looked, they 316

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saw several riders mount up and head toward the mountain paths to the north.

J.B. spoke up as the companions and the children made their way across the scarred landscape toward the low buildings. “Reckon they take orphans at Fairburn?”

He indicated the children.

Doc smiled, thrusting his walking stick forward to keep his balance over the uneven terrain. “It seemed like a nice enough ville, so I should think that they will,” he suggested. “Perhaps even help some of these lost souls find their rightful families.”

“But not Maddie,” Jak growled, thinking of the poor girl who had shown such courage throughout the ordeal.

Ryan turned back to address his companions. “Then let’s head back to the redoubt in Minot, swing by Fairburn and make us a few apologies while we’re there, see if they have people who will take these kids in.”

Together, the companions each secured a steed and, with the children sharing two or three to a horse, made their way across the plain and away from the wrecked military base at Grand Forks. North Dakota, they agreed, was a hell of a place to visit.

ISBN: 978-1-4268-3 4

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Copyright © 2009 by Worldwide Library.

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