by James Axler
“You seem…reserved with me, Mildred,” he said.
“Do I?” She stood up. “Maybe I’m unduly influenced by the circumstances of our first meeting, Captain. Now, if you’ll kindly excuse me, it’s been a long day.”
She held her breath the whole way out of the car.
THE SUN WAS DIPPING TOWARD the Continental Divide when Krysty saw a most remarkable sight.
Keeping off the road and the railway tracks for security’s sake, and at the same time trying to stay on heights in sight of both, she was walking along the rim of a cut blasted through a low mesa by the railroad’s long-dead builders. As she walked, she swiveled her head left and right, constantly scoping the surroundings.
Movement caught the hem of her peripheral vision. She stopped, shucked the pack and dropped to the ground.
A single man was riding east along the railroad on an incredible machine. It consisted of a small platform with four struts extending from it spiderleg-style, to big spoked wheels rolling on the rails themselves. The man himself sat in a kind of chair, with his legs out before him, pedaling merrily. He wore goggles, a pale cap with a puffy top and a long bill pulled low over his eyes, and a dark coat which streamed out behind him along with a substantial brown ponytail. If he had noticed her up there on the skyline—not the best concealed of positions either, but far less risky than the right-of-way—he gave no sign. He merely continued on to meet the night.
Seizing her remaining M-16, Krysty raced down the slope. This time she stayed conscious of the penalties for putting a foot wrong and crippling her ankle, or tripping and rolling down the steep slope out of control, at risk of breaking an arm or leg.
Skidding, hopping over a cluster of prickly pear, scaring little brown birds into the air, Krysty reached the bottom. The track here was still laid along a raised embankment. She had to run to it, then slog up that steep slope.
The man and his strange machine were already a good three hundred yards beyond. “Hey!” Krysty shouted at his back, waving her arms as if that would do any good. “Hey, wait!”
The wind took her words away. Or he ignored her. He kept pedaling, making surprisingly good time.
Snarling, Krysty wound the longblaster’s sling once around her left forearm, then snugged the black plastic butt to her shoulder and lined the battle sights up on that distant dark back. She drew in a deep breath, let half of it go, caught it, took up slack on the trigger.
No. She eased off the blaster’s trigger, let the weapon fall away. The shot was too long. The wind made it too uncertain. She didn’t want to spook her quarry. The landscape here seemed to consist mainly of gently angled planes, but Krysty knew the desert offered a startling amount of cover; she didn’t want him disappearing into the scrub, then setting up to ambush her when she approached the fantastic machine.
And she was unable to bring herself to shoot in the back a man who had done her no harm.
She sighed explosively and slung the M-16. Unlike MAGOG, the lone pedaler had to sleep sometime. And he was tied to the steel tracks as firmly as the monster rail wag was. She would follow him, relentlessly, and overtake him wherever he picked to rest. If she didn’t catch him up until the middle of the night—when he was likely to be sound asleep—so much the better.
She scrambled down the embankment, then began trotting back toward the top of the cut to collect her backpack.
SHIFTING UNCOMFORTABLY, clearing their throats, and scratching their balls when they figured no officer eyes were on them, almost fifty of MAGOG’s off-duty complement had packed themselves into the briefing car, a couple back from the General’s personal carriages. The forty dusty-blue seats were full, and a number of sec men stood at the rear of the darkened car. The car rocked gently. The sliding armor shutters on the windows were closed to discourage snipers. This was the General’s latest attempt at Cultural Uplift. Attendance wasn’t mandatory. Just strongly encouraged.
At the front of the car Dr. Theophilus Tanner stood behind a podium, dressed in his cleaned-up, old-timey clothes, smooth-shaven, his long graying hair parted neatly in the middle. His eyes blinked rapidly, nervously. His manner suggested he was a butterfly and the single spot slanting its beam down upon him from the ceiling was a pin.
Front and center sat the great man himself, with Captain Marc Helton at his side. Around them were clustered various aides, who were generally not much more thrilled about being here than the sec men, and terrified the General might sniff out the fact. To a man, and the one or two women, they would rather have been in the bar car pounding down shooters.
Doc swept a last, hunted look around the room. It came to rest on the General, who nodded.
Doc cleared his throat and recited:
“‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
“‘A stately elm tree newly decree
“‘Where Alph, the bastard river ran
“‘Through fields of flowers pleasant to man.
“‘And filled it with bare titty.’”
He said the last word tit-tee, emphasis on the second syllable.
There was a moment of utter silence.
Marc goggled. “What?” he asked the General sotto voce. “Where did that come from? What elms? What flowers and tits? There aren’t any tits in ‘Kubla Khan’!”
The General held a finger to his lips. “Easy, Marc, easy. The professor is having a flashback. It will pass.”
The sec men began to hoot and whistle and stamp their feet. Hot damn, mebbe this was gonna be entertaining after all!
“Stand easy, there!” bellowed a familiar roar from the rear of the carriage. Sergeant Banner didn’t add that they had better shut their pie-holes right fucking now or he’d put his boot so far up their asses they’d taste shit and shoe leather. He didn’t need to.
Silence fell.
“A flashback?” Marc asked.
“When he was held captive by a man named Teague, baron of a place called Mocsin, up north,” the General said, uncharacteristically quietly. “They made him recite poetry. Unfortunately his captors didn’t have very refined tastes. They insisted that he spice up his recitations. If he failed to meet their standards, they did something to him involving putting him in a pen with some sows. He’s vague on the details, but they seem to’ve been pretty sordid.”
Up behind the podium Doc was well and truly lost. The audience’s uproarious response had put him deep in fear mode.
He blinked past the awful spotlight at the General. “Did I make a mistake, sir?”
“You’re fine, Theophilus. Just fine. Keep going.”
His lower lip was starting to hang. It quivered. “You—you aren’t going to put me in with the sows, are you? Please, not the sows!”
“There, there. There are no sows. This is a train, Theophilus. There are no sows on a train. Would you like to sit down for a few minutes, drink some nice ice water?”
Doc nodded spasmodically. He sat in the chair behind the lectern, grabbed at the pitcher on the table beside it, brought it to his lips and tried to drink directly from it. Water and ice cubes cascaded down his shirtfront, over his crotch and onto the floor.
At the back of the car somebody tittered. The General cleared his throat. The repressed laughter got repressed the rest of the way.
“Why do you indulge the old fool?” Hubertus whispered from behind the General’s chair.
“Perhaps because I like having someone to talk who isn’t constantly plotting,” the General said.
His intel chief sank back in his own chair and hugged himself tightly. His mouth was a compressed line. Things moved around under his stiff tunic like nobody’s business.
“Don’t sulk, Hubertus,” the General said without turning. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I like the way you plot. I pay you to plot. But I confess yours is not my notion of convivial fucking conversation.”
“Fine,” Hubertus said, and hugged himself the tighter. “Just fine.”
The General sighed. He was a man of wide vision and iron
will. But sometimes even he had to acknowledge, if not defeat, a temporary setback. Sometimes he felt that the task of trying to reunite a shattered continent was trivial in comparison to bringing some measure of cultural awareness to the collection of ville rats, mud farmers, mutie bashers, loaf-about-the-forts, second sons of mad dungheap barons, failed coldhearts, shitepokes, ne’er-do-wells and general spawn of the lowest nuke-raddled gutter sluts it was his pride and privilege to command.
He rose. “If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’m going to retire to my car. Loomis—” this last was directed to one of the ADCs “—please escort Professor Tanner to his compartment.
“Oh, and—” the General conspiratorially dropped his voice “—make sure the door’s locked. He looks as if he might be inclined to wander, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes, sir!” The aide moved to the front of the car to mother-hen the professor. Marc Helton had risen, too. He excused himself and headed toward his quarters farther back in the train.
The General gestured to Banner. The NCO trotted forward. “We don’t want to, ah, disappoint the troops too much. Why don’t you let them pick out a video from the train library.”
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
Doc had been ushered from the car, quietly and uncomprehendingly, to his compartment. It was tiny and actually located in the General’s personal car, connected to his quarters by a door that locked from the General’s side. The General guessed it had been intended to house the mistress of the South American warlord for whom MAGOG had been intended. He had studied history of the building of the mighty armored rail wag in the records in its own database.
After he’d made someone teach him how to read.
As the General moved into the gangway between cars, itself shielded by accordion-pleated armor, he heard Banner rumble behind him, “All right, let’s take a vote. Our choices for this evening’s vid are Yentl and Anal Ski Adventure….”
The door hissed discreetly shut behind him. But he wasn’t alone as he pushed through into his own car.
“Yes, Hubertus?” he said over his shoulder. He was already loosening his collar.
His intel chief hovered behind his shoulder like a wasp. “The man is clearly utterly mad. What do you expect to get out of him?”
“Amusement,” the General murmured. “Companionship. In his lucid moments he’s actually quite delightful. A real gentleman. It’s almost as if he comes from a whole different time. A gentler, more refined age.”
He tugged off his tie and tossed it over the green plastic shade of a polished brass lamp. “If any such time existed, which I fucking doubt, myself.” He hoisted a decanter from behind the small bar. “Care for a nightcap?”
Hubertus shuddered and shook his head.
“Really, General, you should allow me to work on them. If they know anything that might lead you—us—to the Great Redoubt, I’d find out in a hurry, without any of this shilly-shallying.”
“Relax, Hubertus. Relax. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Although who the crap was ever triple-stupe enough to try catching flies with vinegar is way beyond me.”
He poured two fingers of brownish fluid into a tumbler. He set down the decanter, picked up the tumbler and went to sit in his red plush chair.
“When the old guys bottled this stuff, they called it Ancient Age,” he said, and laughed. “If they only knew.”
He tossed it down. “Now that’s smooth. Not Beam’s Choice, but smooth. Of course, compared to what we serve in the bar car, kerosene is smooth.”
He set down the empty glass. “Give it a chance, S-2,” he said. “We just got started with them.
“And besides, if this lead we got in Kancity pans out, mebbe we won’t need ’em.”
He picked up the tumbler, turned it over and set it down again with a thunk. “And then…we’ll just see.”
IT WAS WELL PAST DARK when Krysty caught up with the man on the odd machine. A gibbous moon hung like a madman’s swollen face over the mountains far to the east, with wisps of cloud blowing across it like lank black hair tossed by the wind. It illuminated another sorry straggle of blocky one-story buildings, these half-ruined, slumped in on themselves as if eviscerated by fire. Here the railroad tracks, gleaming like silver inlay in the moonlight, twinned themselves for a ways. A line headed off northeast, bent dead east, and paralleled the original tracks for a stretch, then curved back to flow like a river tributary back into the main line. She had no idea what that was about.
She was wary, nerves still jangled from adrenaline. As the day had drowned itself in a pool of scarlet fire in the west, she had sensed herself being watched.
Ryan and J.B. harped on how a body should pay heed to such sensations. They would argue endlessly whether it was a kind of doomie sense every person had a touch of that alerted you, or whether it was just perceiving, on a level below awareness, the fixed attention of a pair of eyes, mounted side-by-side for stereoscopic vision, that shouted “carnivore!” For the same reason, they both were big on not looking directly at somebody or thing you were spying on, lest it trigger the same instinctual alert in them.
As well as she knew both men, she never really knew who stacked up on which side of the arguments. Mebbe they switched. Anyway, it was nothing new to her; she had a doomie sense. She had learned to pay attention to it as a girl. She never forgot.
She was in the open, crossing the broad flat floor of a sandy wash. No sooner had her sentient hair begun to rise off her neck and swish around her shoulders like the tail of a nervous beast than she unslung the M-16, thumbed off the safety and raised it to her shoulder.
The blaster was an A-2 model, made with an inhibitor that restricted full-auto fire to 3-round bursts. At some point in the weapon’s lengthy history somebody has disabled that feature. Lining up the battle sights on a bush on the low bank thirty yards distant Krysty squeezed off a 6-round burst.
She saw a jet of yellow ichor arc out from behind the bush. Something began to thrash madly on the ground behind it, setting up a horrible agonized squealing that surely never came from the throat of a natural animal—or man. Krysty held down on the bush for a span, trying to keep breathing deeply and regularly, as the commotion diminished. Then she marched on. She didn’t sling the blaster again.
It never occurred to her that whatever was subjecting her to covert scrutiny might not be a threat.
Of course it was a threat.
At length the sky and the land around her came again to mirror the darkness in Krysty’s soul. She trudged on. She was convinced the man would stop to rest, somewhere she could catch up with him.
She was right. Watching from a low hill above the rail junction, she saw a fugitive little flicker of yellow inside the best-preserved of the ruins. A wisp of flame not quite cautiously enough concealed.
She stayed under cover, studying the assembly of sagging walls and rubble heaps. She saw no other sign of occupation. Her keen ears heard nothing at all but the never-ending hissing of the wind and the weird semiregular creaking of something, a door or a sign, being blown back and forth on thoroughly rusted hinges.
At last she decided the man was alone. She slipped back down her hill, circled around to a point where her approach to where she had glimpsed the flame light would be masked by the bulk of other ruins. Knowing all too well the sorts of things that stalked the night, she made herself take care not to focus too closely on the nearness of her prey, despite the eagerness singing in her veins so loud it actually roared in her ears.
She kept her confiscated M-16 at the ready in her hands. The only reason she left the safety on was to prevent an accidental discharge if she stumbled. The moonlight was bright, but deceptive. It was as likely to hide treacherous footing as reveal it, especially up among the ruins where all manner of dreck littered the ground.
Feeling naked, she crossed the open space and came in among the buildings. Slowly she worked her way between them. They were so old, had been derelict so long that they no longer sta
nk of mold or decay or even char. They just smelled of the drifting desert dust, and here and there of the animals that had found convenient prefab dens among the black truncated walls.
Once she heard motion inside a building, a skittering scrape. Shortly afterward something bolted out of a pile of unidentifiable weed-sprouted refuse and darted off into the scrub. Both times she froze. Her fear wasn’t so much for attack as some creature, disturbed, might make a commotion sufficient to alert the man with the ponytail. But whatever she startled into action was as interested in escaping attention as she was.
And then she heard…whistling. Thin, sporadic and not very skillful.
Willing her muscles to relax, knowing that tension-induced stiffness could betray her in a thousand ways, she moved toward the sound. It was more blowing half-melodically than actually whistling.
It stopped. She stopped, her heart feeling as if she’d just swallowed it.
The half-voiceless whistle started again. She moved, up to the wall of the building where she’d seen the light. There were no windows on this side.
The whistling stopped. After the space of a long breath, it recommenced. She realized the man was pausing now and again to listen. Probably not because he expected danger—unlikely he’d be whistling at all if he did—but no doubt from long habit. Few people, herself and her lost love and companions included, could remain at full red alert all the time. Or cared to.
She shed her heavy pack and made a cautious circuit of the building. It was long and narrow. Some of the eastern end had fallen down. But perhaps because it had been built of actual adobe, treated by some predark process to prevent the bricks being dissolved by the rains, the structure had mostly endured, showing far less damage than the cinder block buildings.
In the center of the rear, facing the track, there was a wide double door, hinged so that both halves swung outward. A breath-held touch, the slightest of pressure, told Krysty’s taut senses that the doors were barred from within. She ascertained this making no more noise than the constant wind—this night her friend and shield.
