Railroad! Collection 1 (The Three Volume Omnibus)

by Tonia Brown

  “I’ll bite his face off,” Bottle said, though Dodger wondered how the man planned on doing that with such rotten choppers.

  “Thaddeus!” Dodger shouted, and rested his hands on his guns. “Control them, or I will.”

  “You threaten us?” Thad asked with a snarl. “In defense of him?”

  Dodger lifted his hands off the pistols, to prove his peaceful intentions. “No, but I won’t let you hurt him either. I said you could trust him, and I stand by that. Give him a chance to explain. Killing him won’t do you no good. Especially if he’s to blame.”

  “If he’s to blame, then killing him will be a greater pleasure than you can possibly imagine.”

  “That’s as it may be. You may be killing the only man who can change you back again. What good will that do?”

  The men fell into a brooding mumble, but at last they backed down from their threatening stances. Good. This was a start. Now, on to the hard part.

  Dodger went to the professor and laid his hand on the man’s shaking shoulder to steady him. To calm him. “Doc? I know we don’t really know one another from Adam’s housecat. But from what little I’ve seen of you in action, I feel I can say you’re not the kind of man who would do this to a living being. Am I right?”

  “Yes!” the professor squeaked. “I would never consciously allow such a thing to come to pass. Please. You must believe me.”

  Consciously.

  With that single word, Dodger started to get an idea of what was going on here. He tightened his grip on the professor’s shoulder, sending the squat man signals of reassurance while keeping the man from fleeing the scene in a panic. “Sir, I’m going to ask you a question now, and I got a feeling it’s going to be really hard for you to answer, and awful hard for these boys to listen to that answer without getting a might bit upset. But I’m gonna have to ask you the question anyway. And I know you’ll tell us the truth.”

  The professor nodded, the wattles of his bearded chin jiggling in the fervor of his agreement. “Of course I will. I’m not a very good liar, as you know.”

  “I know, sir.” Dodger flashed the doc a quick smile. He then turned a more serious look upon Thad. “Can you and your men control yourselves long enough to allow him to explain?”

  “If that is what you wish, Dodger,” Thad said.

  The others grunted in agreement.

  Dodger, though still unwilling to be their new leader, took the opening given him and rode the authority to its fullest. “You’re right. That is what I want. I want you fellows to calm down and hold all of your anger and fury and fussing until this man has a chance to explain himself. Can you do that?”

  Again, the men grunted in assent.

  Preparing himself for the worst, Dodger nodded to the professor. “Go ahead.”

  “It is true,” the professor said. He slumped into the seat of a tall stool parked before his work bench. “I am responsible for the technology that changed you into what you are now.” He paused as if expecting retaliation, but the men were true to their words and held their tongues. Given a window to explain, the professor continued. “I stumbled on the concept of cellular manipulation several years ago, but even then I never intended it for such a hideous application. You must believe that. I never meant it for use on live subjects.”

  “Then why make such a thing at all?” Clyde asked.

  “Clyde,” Thad warned. “Let him talk.”

  “No,” the professor said. “He has a right to ask. It’s a fair question with a surprisingly innocent answer. My original intention was to mix various components of different dietary sources to create a sounder source of nutrition.”

  Every eye blinked. Every brow wrinkled.

  The professor seemed to sense the confusion and elaborated. “Imagine a foodstuff that holds the high iron of beef liver mixed with all the protein of pork, the vitamin C of oranges, the potassium of spinach, and the beneficial oils of fresh fish. My machine, my original idea, that is, allows the user to blend these source components into manageable bite-sized cubes that are easier to ship and maintain than the combination of the original elements. The cubes never rot. Never dry out. Never go to waste. Of course, they aren’t very tasty either, but then again, it wasn’t so much about flavor as portability and nutrition.”

  Dodger had to hand it to the man, it did sound like a fine idea. “Then the question I suppose we should ask is who did you sell the original machine to?”

  The professor gave an impish little grin. “You must understand this was a few years before I moved to America. I think it was the winter of ‘64, but my memory isn’t what it used to be. Truth be told, I didn’t even know there was a war on. I simply conceived the notion for the device, created the blasted thing, then shipped it off to the highest bidder. I just assumed it would be employed for hospitals and the like.” He scratched his beard as his mind wandered again, taking his mouth with it. “You see, it has been my experience that the food in hospitals is, by some strange tradition, quite atrocious. My thought was that the food might as well pack as much nutrition as possible if it’s going to end up tasting like the bottom of a used emesis basin-”

  “Doc …” Dodger said.

  “Oh, back to the point, yes? Well, the point is I never imagined someone would employ the Poly-Organic Weaver for such a nefarious means. I can’t begin to fathom what changes they made to the thing. You see, it wasn’t designed to handle live specimens.”

  “So you’re saying whoever did this changed your design. It was meant for organic material but not living, breathing organic material. You didn’t make it for that. Right?”

  The professor winced with a hiss. “Yes, well … in the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit I did try my hand at a live subject or two, but never human beings. No, mercy me, no indeed. A few chickens and lab mice, but never a human. In fact, I didn’t think such a thing possible. Someone, whoever he was, didn’t just get his hands on my device and start cranking out dog-men. No, he altered my design. Tampered with it. Why, the whole idea infuriates me, that my device, bearing my hard work and my personal signature, would be used for such a terrible deed.”

  “You’re not at fault here,” Dodger reassured the man. “That much is clear.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Dodger, but I still feel responsible for what happened to these men. What I don’t understand is how the Pow device ended up at the prison to begin with.”

  “Pow device?” Dodger echoed, then groaned as he made the obvious connection. “Poly-Organic Weaver. Prisoner of War. P. O. W.”

  “What does that mean?” Thad asked.

  “It means a typical government screw-up. The professor here sold his machine to the Confederates, but instead of it turning out compact meals for the boys in gray, it ended up at Camp Sumter. A P.O.W. device shipped to a P.O.W. camp.”

  Thad stared at the professor, weighing the man’s words against the growling of his comrades. “But you swear you don’t know Commander Rex?”

  “Who?” The professor furrowed his brow for a moment of intense thought. His eyes shot wide and he said, “Oh, you mean that dreadful man who was in charge at your prison? No, I don’t know him personally. Only of him.”

  And Dodger really wished the man hadn’t said that last bit. Thad turned to Dodger with a look that demanded more.

  “Private Clemet told us a little of what happened,” Dodger explained. “Before he passed on, he mentioned the commander by name. It’s the only reason the doc knows of him. Isn’t that right, boss man?”

  “Yes!” the professor squeaked. “I never met the man. Honestly. I never handle sales personally. I have people for that. Well, I had people. Now I have Ched. Which is kind of like a person if you plug your nose and squint really hard.”

  “Does he always ramble like that?” Bottle asked in a whisper under the professor’s rambling.

  Dodger nodded. “You see? He is a good man at heart. His work, strange as it is, was well intended. Someone else warped it. The doc didn’t d
o this to you. Commander Rex did this to you. Rex perverted not just the laws of nature, but this man’s good intentions. Do you believe us now?”

  “Give us a moment, please,” Thad said. “This is a lot to swallow.”

  The dog-men formed a tight circle on one side of the lab to confer on the details. Dodger remained near the professor, just in case, but he was fairly sure the Doc’s explanations had tempered their anger. After a minute or so of discussion, the men broke apart and Thad nodded to Dodger, then gave the professor a curt nod as well. But all of them still wore worried looks and eyed the doc with suspicion. Dodger had a feeling that no matter how many ways you sliced it, they blamed Dittmeyer for their present state of being. And he reckoned he would feel the same had he been in the doghouse himself.

  “Then you believe me?” the professor asked.

  “We believe you meant no harm,” Thad said. “Yet we can’t help but remain mistrustful of you.”

  “But you have to trust me,” the professor said. “Because I am the only one who can help you.”

  “I’m not sure we want your brand of help.”

  “You don’t have to want it, but you do need my help, because you are much worse off than you think. You all are. I’m afraid to say, your entire Pack is damned, thanks to this mysterious Mr. Rex.”

  Thad cocked his head at Dodger. “What does he mean?”

  “Tell ‘em, Doc,” Dodger said.

  The professor clasped his hands together and interlaced his fingers, all save the forefingers, which he tapped against one another as he explained. “The reason I gave up on live subjects was simple: cellular instability. I could blend the physical bodies of a chicken and a mouse, but the end result—aside from being abhorrent, I mean who wants a teeny tiny furry chicken?—the wings were too small for flight, or food, and not to mention the … wait … where was I? Oh yes, the end result was highly unstable. The ensuing creature seemed in the best of health but would last no more than a few days, sometimes hours, before collapsing into a pool of goop.”

  The men exchanged glances at the familiar effect.

  “I eventually discovered,” the professor said, “that I could meld the flesh of these creatures with no difficulty or side effects.” The professor paused to clear his throat. “Well, not many side effects. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that as long as I used the flesh and not the living animals themselves, I could merge all day to my heart’s content. But put a live creature in it and I ended up with soup. And soup I can make without a cellular manipulator and without the burden of such a deed on my already aching conscience.”

  Four doggish faces turned to Dodger, seeking interpretation.

  “What happens to you when you suffer a mortal wound?” Dodger asked.

  “We … well … we sort of dissolve,” Tad said.

  “What the professor is trying to say is that it won’t be much longer before you and your fellow Pack members break down without the help of a wound. That soon you will just dissolve where you stand, without warning.”

  A collective gasp rose from the men as their eyes went wide with understanding.

  “How long do we have?” Bottle asked.

  “It’s impossible for me to tell without further testing,” the professor said. “A few days? A few hours? I’m surprised you’ve lasted as long as you have. Despite the unethical connotation of his work, having a subject last almost five years is an amazing feat-”

  “Sir,” Thad said over the professor. “We haven’t been this way for five years.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We’ve only been this way for a few months,” Stanley said.

  The professor slowly shook his head, confused by the man’s claim. “But … the prisoner-of-war camp … the commander … I don’t understand …”

  “We weren’t changed at Sumter,” Thad said. “We met at Sumter, we were imprisoned there together, but in the spring of ’65, Commander Rex and his elite guard moved about a hundred of us to another P.O.W. camp. And he brought that device with us.”

  “Another camp?” Dodger asked. “Where?”

  “Some series of caves off the coast; we aren’t really sure of the exact location. All I know is that we spent the next five years confined there. Half of us died in those caves, some from natural causes, others from Rex’s experiments. Most of us had given up on anyone finding us again.”

  “The war raged on,” Bottle said, “and we remained his prisoners.”

  “But the war ended that summer,” Dodger said.

  Thad snorted. “We didn’t know. We didn’t know anything. He kept us in the dark for years. None of us even knew the war was over until we escaped.”

  “Why that scoundrel,” the professor said. “I’ll wager that this so-called Commander Rex must have realized the war was going poorly for his side. He felt the winds of change and snuck off like a thief in the night with a full regiment of human test subjects and my blasted machine.” The doc slammed the work table with a clenched fist. “That makes me so angry! It’s one thing when a man agrees to be part of an experiment, but to cage a bunch of men—veterans no less—and subject them to such atrocities in the name of science … why … that just makes my blood boil. That isn’t science! That’s insanity!”

  If Dodger had any doubt that the professor was a good man, an honest man— granted, a strange man, but a noble one nonetheless—then this speech put those fears to rest. The doc shook with rage, his ire provoked by the thought of such injustice. It not only put Dodger’s faith in the man’s favor, it also left Dodger with the feeling that perhaps the whole world wasn’t the right bunch of bastards he’d thought they were for so long. Maybe there was truth and justice out there, somewhere, for there certainly seemed to be a heaping dose of it right here.

  “It might please you to know,” Thad said, “that he got his own in the end.”

  “His own?” the professor asked.

  “We put him in that damned machine of his,” Bottle said, then proceeded to cackle like a happy hen.

  “Tis true,” Thad said. “We closed him inside and cranked it as high as it would go. We had seem him operate it enough to know what to do.”

  “What became of him?” Dodger asked.

  “We don’t know. We took off while it was still changing him. For all we know the thing exploded taking him with it.”

  “Good riddance too,” the professor said.

  The metallic echo of Ched’s voice cut into the conversation. “Dodger. We have arrived.”

  “I’m on my way,” Dodger said and did his best to stand his ground as the train slowed to a halt.

  The inexperienced men swayed forward with the shift in momentum, but the professor never moved from his perched position upon the stool.

  “Are we settled here then?” Dodger asked. “Do you men trust my boss? Or should we just part ways now and you can take your chances as you see fit?”

  Thad and the others exchanged glances, unspoken words passing between the four men. Each nodded once, in turn, answering Dodger’s question without so much as a growl.

  Seemingly satisfied by this silent symposium, Thad said, “We believe you. And trust you. Both of you. Tell us what you want from us, and we shall try our best to comply.”

  “Excellent!” the professor shouted as he rubbed his hands together. “We should get started right away. I have an idea of what can be done to stabilize you, but I will need to run a few tests to be sure.” When someone—it was hard to tell just who—gave a puppy-dog whine at the idea of more tests, the professor explained, “Just blood work. Yes? Nothing too invasive to start off with. Though it might get a bit trickier as we go.”

  “We shall submit to your tests,” Thad said. “Granted it will make us whole again.”

  “I’m sure he will try his best,” Dodger said. “I’ll leave you in the professor’s capable hands.”

  “Where are you off to?” the professor asked as he followed Dodger into the joining section.

&nbs
p; “I need to help Ched jerk some water.”

  “Ahh, I see. Will you wake Torque on your way past the meeting car? I’ll need some extra hands.”

  “Yes, sir.” Dodger had pulled the door to the next car open when the professor called to him again.

  “Dodger?”

  Dodger turned in place and asked, “Yes?”

  “Thank you,” the professor said. “Thank you for … well … for everything. Had I known my research was responsible for such a terrible crime, I would have … just … thank you for giving me the chance to make amends to these poor men.”

  “Sir, don’t fault yourself for something you had no control over.”

  “I can’t help but feel guilty for what happened to them.”

  Words of wisdom sprang to Dodger’s mind and tongue. “A god implants in mortals guilt whenever he wants utterly to confound a house.” The words were out of his mouth before he knew it, and once again he betrayed his simpleton facade with a flash of intelligence.

  The professor smiled. “The Greek poet Aeschylus. Nicely quoted too. You are just full of surprises, aren’t you? I expect great things from you, Mr. Dodger. Yes. Great things indeed.” His conscience eased, the professor returned to the cab and left Dodger to his work.

  Dodger paused to mull over the idea of what great things the professor expected of him, but a soft click caught his attention. He looked down the hallway just in time to see the last door on the left slide shut.

  Lelanea’s quarters.

  For a brief moment, he was tempted to knock upon her door again, but decided against it when he remembered the sting of her backslap. Besides, if she wanted to talk to him, she would have stepped into the hallway and not retreated behind her door. Let her hide. He had other things to tend to.

  And a very different woman to face.

  End

  Volume Two

  ****

  back to top

  ****

  Volume Three

  The Trouble with Waxford

  Chapter One

  Down on the Farm

  In which Dodger visits an old friend.