Blood Binds the Pack

by Alex Wells

  She edged their direction to intercept and flicked her headlight on. If they were armed, well, she was probably better armed. Once this was dealt with, she could check the direction with the Bone Collector again. For his part, he didn’t seem to mind the diversion.

  The headlight trick worked: the person stopped, standing at the top of the dune, a dark cut-out against one of the moons. They had their hands spread, so at least she knew they weren’t getting ready for a fight. There was something disturbingly familiar about them she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Hob took them halfway up the low windward face of that dune and then stopped, left side facing the person. Made her profile thin, and if things got dicey, she could drop behind the motorcycle. It also hid her drawing her pistol with her right hand.

  “You’re a long way from home,” she said, her voice booming through the helmet speakers.

  Before the person could react, the Bone Collector got off her motorcycle and walked toward them, right through her line of fire.

  Cussing, Hob threw down the kickstand as the Bone Collector drew even with the person, his tall form, not so thin when he was filled out by wearing his duster, hiding theirs. Still holding her pistol, Hob moved up the dune toward them. Hers were the only footprints left in the sand, and she liked that least of all.

  Then the Bone Collector stepped aside, and she recognized Coyote, without a goddamn stitch of clothing on. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “What the fuck,” Hob said, fervently, the closest she ever got to praying.

  “Fancy meeting you here, boss,” Coyote said, voice slightly breathy.

  Mag opened the kitchen door to Odalia’s house, feeling strangely divorced from her own hand as it twisted and pushed the knob. Listening to the story Coyote, now thankfully wearing Clarence’s spare pants, had to tell while Hob sat grim-faced beside him in Clarence’s kitchen had filled Mag first with horror, then with anger, then with some emotion that transcended both into a cold, killing distance. It was plain as day that the always-so-eager Omar had betrayed Coyote to the greenbellies. He was the one who’d gotten Coyote alone, got him walking to a different end of town where the ambush waited. She’d always known that there could be company plants or spies or sympathizers in with the miners, but she hadn’t wanted to give in to paranoia about it.

  Which meant she had to stop this now, she thought coldly. She had to warn Odalia and Clarence how badly compromised they were. And she had to find out who else was in league with him. No shying away from it.

  There were three people in the kitchen, not the two she expected: Clarence and Odalia both standing over Omar, his face crossed with strings of tacky blood. Both his eyes were swollen almost shut with angry red bruises.

  “What the hell is this?” Mag demanded. The three in front of her started and looked at her in alarm. Her gaze went to Clarence’s knuckles, but his hands were clean. This didn’t look like the two crew leaders had beaten her to the punch.

  “Mariposa men jumped Omar,” Odalia said tightly. “Beat him to hell, just for the fun of it.”

  It wasn’t unheard of, especially with things on a razor edge like they were these days. But it felt damned convenient considering the part of the story she knew. She didn’t trust this one bit. “Was that before or after Coyote met up with him?” She knew the answer, of course, but the point was to see what bullshit story Omar had spun.

  “I was waiting for him,” Omar mumbled through his swollen lips. “Just waitin’. We were gonna play cards.”

  “You were just waitin’,” Mag repeated.

  “At the corner, ’cause I thought maybe he got lost on the way to Luis’s place. Then they come out of the alley and asked me what I was doin’ outside. I said wasn’t my shift so I could do as I pleased. The sergeant in the group said I was stirrin’ trouble, an’ too many of us were out when we shouldn’t be. I said there weren’t no law, and they said damn right, they were the law.” Omar tried to cover his face with his hands, then seemed to think better of it. “Fuckin’ monsters.”

  It was a convincing performance, Mag thought coldly. “Clarence. Odalia. I got to talk to you for a minute.” She crossed her arms and waited for them both to nod, then took them outside. She shut the door with her foot. This close to the mine, the rattle and clank of the drive chain would help cover them talking.

  “Mag, what is–” Odalia began.

  “I got Coyote and Hob in Clarence’s kitchen. Coyote said a Mariposa squad in plain clothes snatched him up off the street when he was on his way to meet Omar. They put him on a train – must’ve been a special one.”

  “Better ask if anyone saw the train leavin’, and comin’ in,” Clarence said. “If anyone was awake around there.” Unscheduled night trains happened now and then, and the crew on them was always blue and green, with no other workers called in. They were like damn ghost stories.

  “How’d Coyote get back here?” Odalia demanded.

  “That’s for him and Hob to know and us to pay ’em good money for if we want one of their trade secrets.”

  “You thinkin’ Omar betrayed him?” Clarence asked, slow and thoughtful.

  “How the hell else did they know who to snatch and where to find him?” Mag asked.

  “Anyone been in that warehouse the last three days knew he was here. And that man’s got a mouth a mile wide. Why d’ya think they were lookin’ for him?” Odalia asked. “And what, they beat the hell out of Omar to give him cover? That’s a hell of a lot of cover.”

  Mag could admit, now that her anger was cooling a little, that Omar looked like he’d been worked over damn hard. And yet. Coyote had a big mouth, but not for secrets.

  “This town ain’t that big,” Clarence added. “If they were lookin’ for people to harass, could have just been damn dumb luck.”

  “When did we start believing in coincidences? Why’d they take Coyote and not Omar?” Mag asked. “There’s too much at stake. We know they got spies.”

  “Do we know that?” Odalia asked. “Ain’t ever found one for sure.”

  “What’re you suggesting, Mag? We beat him some more?” Clarence asked, expression going darker.

  Tempting, Mag thought. Very tempting. But also unnecessary. “Let me at him.”

  “With your damn witchy powers?” Odalia whispered. “Are you insane? Want to turn ’em on your own?”

  “Won’t hurt him if he’s got nothin’ to hide,” Mag said, though this turn of conversation grew a thread of sickness into her anger. She looked at Clarence, urging him silently to be on her side. He frowned.

  “Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad way to check…” Clarence said.

  “Don’t you go leanin’ on Clarence either,” Odalia snapped.

  “I wasn’t!” Mag said, shocked. She hadn’t been, she was sure of it. Not consciously. She’d never had the thought cross her mind, not once she figured out what she could do. Clarence had always been good to her, and trusted her, and watched over her.

  The look Odalia gave her wasn’t one of trust. “This is just what they want us to do, don’t ya see? Sowin’ seeds of discord by pickin’ on people here and there.” It was an unsubtle reminder that they were less than a week from getting their answers on the vote, and only a day or so later would be payday.

  “We got to be careful, though,” Clarence said. “So you keep an eye on him, Mag. But only an eye.”

  Omar already knew so much, Mag thought with frustration. He was always volunteering for things, always ready to help. She’d been grateful to have that kind of help, even if he was too curious about her late uncle and his mercenaries. But how could she even try to compensate for this, when he had his fingers in damn near every bit of supplies they’d found?

  That was her problem, she supposed. They’d put her in charge of it, and she had to figure it out. “What do you want me to tell Hob?”

  “Tell her we’re takin’ care of it,” Odalia said. “You think she’s gonna make trouble? Like in…”

  The unspo
ken name Rouse hung in the air. Mag shook her head. They’d all learned some hard lessons from that, and she knew Hob had taken them to heart. “No. I’ll… make sure.” Hob wouldn’t like it, but Hob trusted her. She hated to call on that without having a real answer. But Odalia and Clarence had put enough doubt in her mind that she no longer wanted to just throw Omar to the Wolves. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Hob hadn’t been happy. She hadn’t shouted, like Mag had been half-afraid. No, she’d just listened grimly and said, “Coincidence, huh.”

  It had made Mag feel sick all over again. And then Hob left without looking back, which always scared Mag. She remembered too well another time when Hob hadn’t looked back, and then had disappeared for years. But Hob had also promised that would never happen again. No, Mag told herself, Hob was mad, but she’d also get over it, because she always did.

  Feeling sicker, as if without somewhere for it to go she’d swallowed down that anger like a poison, Mag made herself a cup of coffee. Her head was starting to hurt too, but it was tension tight across her skull like a steel band, not the stabbing, burning pain behind her eyes that came from pushing her witchiness too hard. She ended up sitting, coffee cooling in front of her, elbows on the kitchen table and her face in her hands.

  The kitchen door opened and she looked up, expecting maybe Clarence, with something quick to say before he had to be up at the mine for morning checkthrough. Instead, Anabi slipped inside and shut the door behind her.

  “I thought you’d gone back to bed,” Mag said. “What were you doing?”

  Anabi’s beautiful face was drawn down in lines of concern. She sat across from Mag and stroked one of her hands lightly, then took out her slate. She wrote: I followed you and eavesdropped.

  “What did you think?”

  Anabi shrugged and wrote: I don’t know. Too many things to be suspicious about. But. She erased the slate and continued, Odalia talked after they sent Omar off.

  “Oh?”

  Told Clarence you’re getting more witchy. Getting more paranoid. She erased, then wrote: “Is she really hearing what people think, or does she just think she is?”

  Mag put her face in her hands again. “Fuck,” she whispered. Because some of it, she’d wondered herself. It was like Odalia had reached into the dark shadows of her brain and pulled out her own worst thoughts, then said them aloud to Clarence. There was always too much doubt. But had she been leaning on Clarence without meaning to? Was she influencing Anabi too?

  She felt Anabi’s hands, gentle on her shoulders. She covered one with her own. Anabi rubbed her other shoulder lightly for a moment, then leaned over to write something. She pushed the slate along the table so it sat in front of Mag’s face. I trust you no matter what.

  “Might be the only one.” And maybe she shouldn’t, Mag thought.

  Hob does too.

  “Not any more, I reckon.”

  Now you’re being dramatic.

  Mag laughed. “Don’t I get to, now and then?”

  Anabi kissed her on the part in her hair, light as a feather. When you’re different, everything is doubt, she wrote. If they can’t hurt us directly, they try to make us destroy ourselves.

  Mag squeezed her hand. Anabi felt like a small, fragile point of stability in a world that was spinning out in all directions. Maybe if she just held on tight enough, something would make sense again. “Thank you.”

  Chapter Twenty

  28 Days

  “The train is this way, sir.”

  Shige followed the green-uniformed security guard down off the station platform, leaving the bright lights behind them. They both snapped on their flashlights. His boots – he’d had the presence of mind to change out his office shoes before he left Newcastle – crunched on the crushed synthcrete that lined the tracks. Segundo was a large enough, old enough mining town that it sported something close to a proper railyard with multiple sets of tracks; most of the lines ran through it, claustrophobically close and squeezed by the canyon walls. Lights on those walls were few and far between, the further they got from the depot building.

  “This far back?” he asked mildly.

  “We didn’t want to risk any of the workers seeing it.”

  Shige raised his eyebrows, but saved his breath. He’d see for himself soon enough. All he’d been told, when roused out of bed and sent out here by Ms Meetchim, was that there’d been an urgent problem with one of the special security trains, and that it was being held at Segundo for inspection. Which, to be fair, was all the report given to her had said. Shige was fairly certain his implied secondary task here would be to give the security people a little pep talk about writing reports that communicated useful information.

  But it did stir a little hope in his heart. He’d been frustrated in the last week, at how little real reaction there’d been to the start of the pay change rollout. That could mean they were either more cowed than he’d feared – or better organized than he’d hoped. His preference was decidedly with the latter option. A terrorist attack on a train would be just what the doctor ordered, so to speak.

  The train came into sight around the gentle curve of the canyon wall. Silver, dulled to gray in the dim light, and smooth with an enormous sand plow as a prow, the engine itself looked fine, as did the first few cars. At the third car, the security guard stopped and played her light over the siding. The metal skin gaped raggedly open, shreds curling inward, the frame of the car itself bent. Shige swept his light low to see that some of the car’s wheels no longer properly met the rail.

  “Explosion?” Shige asked. He already knew the answer to that question, however. He’d seen enough explosions to know what their wreckage looked like – bent outward, not inward. And how would a train car come to implode?

  “You tell me,” the security guard said.

  Shige paused to pull on a pair of thick leather gloves before he cautiously climbed into the train car through that tear. The inside was a mess of torn metal, spatters and sprays of blood gone brown, shattered glass, and surviving items scattered in all directions. No sign of anything melted, no blackened chemical residue. “Bodies?” he asked the security guard.

  “Four security, three medical. They’re laid out in one of the warehouses if you want to see them.”

  “I will.” He bent to look at one of the patterns of blood, then glanced up. “Medical?”

  “This op had a high probability of encountering contamination. They were on standby.”

  That hadn’t been mentioned in the report either. “Any surviving records out of this mess?”

  “A few things. You want those first, or the bodies?”

  “Bodies first,” Shige said, straightening.

  All seven of the bodies were laid out on the gray synthcrete floor of a railyard warehouse, each in its own dark green body bag. The warehouse was guarded by grim-faced Mariposa employees, with one white-coat wearing doctor idling just outside the door, smoking a cigarette with shaking fingers. They all filed silently inside ahead of Shige.

  As he walked the row of body bags, Shige kept his mouth covered with a handkerchief, trying to give the impression of a sheltered secretary disturbed by such a sight. All of the security guards were too grim-faced to smirk about it, as they unzipped the bags one by one, and he couldn’t blame them on that account. They were the messiest bodies he’d seen in recent memory, though thankfully the smell was minimized because they’d been stored in one of the warehouse refrigeration units normally reserved for perishable food items.

  He let the company doctor from Segundo point out the salient details: approximately two days post-mortem, bones snapped, limbs bent completely out of shape by whatever force had been able to tear the train car apart and bend its frame. More important were the soft tissue wounds: eyes plucked out to leave bloody hollows behind, great rends in flesh like claw marks, leaving trailing flaps of skin and muscle.

  “So, not an explosion,” Shige remarked, voice muffled behind his handkerchief.

 
“No,” the doctor said, and dragged another cigarette out of her pocket. No one seemed to care that she might be contaminating the bodies with ash and fumes. “Wild animal attack, maybe.”

  “What animal, do you think?”

  That was the question, of course. The biggest introduced species known to still survive were the great eagles, and none left damage like this. Shige eyed the teeth marks, plainly human, that stood out on the soft underjaw of one of the corpses in green. The doctor hadn’t mentioned those, and he wondered if the oversight was due to overwhelmed horror or pure denial.

  “Dune lion, maybe,” the doctor said, not looking at the last body and its obvious teeth marks. “We still get reports of them now and then. Sightings.”

  “One wonders how a lion came to be inside the train. I’ll see the records now,” Shige said. He’d seen enough over the past months on Tanegawa’s World that he did not disbelieve on its face that a human, or something human-shaped, could have done this. The question now on his mind was how he could use this to his advantage. It might prompt Ms Meetchim into another witch hunt, which could be useful if he pushed the timetable properly. But he’d have to find a way to keep the details from making the populace too cooperative. This sort of horror would make them much less sympathetic to the witches in their midst.

  In the security office, someone shoved a mug of coffee, its surface skimmed with oily skin, into his hand. He ignored it in favor of the flimsies the chief of security spread across the conference table. “These are the notes we pulled out of there. Found other pages blown out along the tracks, but no idea what else has been lost to the wind,” the chief said.

  Handwritten pages, out of order. Shige turned them over with care – some were badly torn and splashed with blood or chemicals that had made them brittle. Medical terminology, graphs that he could not decipher but might be able to use Dr Kiyoder at the office to translate, part of the security report about having obtained the “subject” due to an operative tip-off in Ludlow, a note that he was likely an as-yet undocumented associate of the so-called “Ghost Wolves” terrorist group.