“I don’t think so,” Odey said.
“What?”
“I said, we won’t be blowing the cable. Tell ’em, Bron.”
“I’m sorry, Nike. He’s right. I wasn’t being careful. Odey’s got his finger on the button, and I don’t think he’ll let me near.”
“Just hold steady,” Odey said. “My friends will take us in.”
I looked down. The dog teams were pulling even with the locomotive. Good dogs, damn it. Then I noticed logs, brush, snow on the track: they were slowing the locomotive down. Rindi was leaning out the right side of the locomotive, blowing away with a shotgun. The front end of a team went down, but the rear dogs kept pulling. The guy in the basket opened up with the machine gun, almost pointblank. Rindi took a shot, clutched the back of her head, then fell to the deck of the locomotive.
Lucy hung back, taking single shots with a Suzuki rifle on semi-automatic, trying to pick a team apart. She had one team on her left down to six dogs, but she wasn’t getting them fast enough. The other team pulled even with the locomotive, and the guy in the basket leapt onto the back, crept up to Lucy. I couldn’t yell, couldn’t scream, but I could help her out. I swung the barrel of my machine gun around and started spraying up to him, getting my range. I was about ten feet from blowing that guy to bits when the gun jammed.
“Fuck!” I yelled. I slid the bolt out, started field dressing that damn gun, trying to unjam it. I heard pops coming from behind me, saw Doc North leaning out the window of the bridge, shooting at the guy on the locomotive with a Suzuki rifle like Lucy’s. But the doc didn’t have the range or accuracy.
I had my hands on the machine gun, eyes on the locomotive. The guy snuck up into the cab, and I saw Lucy pop up, turn around. She raised her Suzuki, but the G’wooder shot first. Lucy’s gun went flying into the snow, and she grabbed her right arm. The guy went for her, like he was going to throw her down into the cab. The blue braid shot out, wrapped around the guy’s throat. Lucy was on the outside of the cab now, trying to get the guy’s gun with her good hand. The guy clutched at his throat, then he looked at her, and jumped off the side of the locomotive. The braid unwrapped itself, but it was too late; the G’wooder pulled Lucy over the edge, and they tumbled down the side of the tracks and into the snow.
I went crazy.
I climbed up into the catwalk, ran down it to a small room aft of the bridge, forward of the hangar. It was a service area for the cable housing. A monkey suit, a parka, and another Suzuki gun hung on the bulkhead. I slipped the coat on, strapped the monkey harness over it, grabbed the gun and a skein of rope dangling from a hook. I tied the rope to an eyebolt in the floor, opened a hatch in the deck, threw the rope down. I looped the rope through the harness, swung my legs out, grabbed the edge, and dangled in the hole.
My legs kicked in open air. I looked below. The sleds had fallen back, and for the moment I was safe. I pulled myself along rungs on the bottom of the blimp and over to the cable. After the housing I snapped a carabiner to the cable, then rappelled down to the locomotive.
The cable was swaying in the wind, and if I looked up I could see the Wonderblimp bobbing back and forth. Nike was hanging out of the bridge now, blazing away. I looked up at Nike, waved. He waved down at the locomotive. Yeah, go, I thought. Nike was giving me his blessing.
“Meet you at the trade fair!” he screamed.
Yeah, I thought, whatever that was.
Bullets sang by me, but I had the advantage. I guess it’s hard to shoot someone dangling from a cable when you’re shooting from a running sled. I swung down, hit the deck of the locomotive—right at the cable housing. I rolled, hugged the deck. Now the fun part. I looked up at the Wonderblimp, saw Nike shooting away, saw the great colors of the blimp shining in the sky. I was going to miss her, but I couldn’t see a way out. I slipped the rope out of my harness, unsnapped the carabiner, and crawled forward to the locomotive.
The deck of the engine was slippery with blood. Rindi lay across it, bleeding from a head wound. I grabbed her by the feet, dragged her inside the cab, gun in one hand, ready to blast any trespassing G’wooders. Nada. No one home. The red button with the picture of the broken cable beckoned like a distant light. I set Rindi down, crawled to it, clicked the arming button on, then stabbed that red dot.
The deck exploded behind me and the sky yelled. I swung around, looked back. The cable was whipping across the tracks, swaying back and forth. It swung around, lashed across a dog team, sliced the dogs loose from the sled, then took off the head of the gunner. The Wonderblimp rose up and up. I thought I saw the turboprops whir into life, and then she rose, I hoped, to safety.
The back of the locomotive had been shredded into slices of steel, but she held. Rindi had been right. Sometimes you blow the engine, too. I turned around, looked forward. With the blimp gone, all that power went into the engine, and the locomotive plowed through the logs and stuff the G’wooders had put on the track. The dog teams fell behind me, and I was winning the race.
I stayed low, kept the steel of the cab around me. More screams fell across the sky, more craters blew up in the snow, but I was getting out of range of the mortars, too. I’d beat the bastards, I knew. They had Lucy, but I was alive, and I would figure out how to stop this damn train, or I’d find this Redoubt. I didn’t know, I’d do something, but I would get Lucy back.
The train rumbled on and G’wood became history. I looked up, saw the Wonderblimp heading out to sea. Snow flew off the tips of mountains; the Wonderblimp would be having problems of its own. Nasty winds.
Chug, chug, chug went the locomotive. Rindi moaned, which made me feel better; folks don’t moan if their brains have been blown to shreds. I sat down next to her, felt the patch of crusty blood on the side of her head. It oozed only a little bit, which made me think she had just been winged. I shook her a bit to try to wake her, but it was lights out for her for a while. I bandaged her wound as best I could with a first-aid kit in the cab.
I stared at the controls, tried to remember how Rindi had operated the train. Slow? Brake? I got disoriented. I had my hand on the brake and took light taps, testing it out. The wheels screeched, the car lurched. Maybe. Maybe I could stop it.
A mountain of snow loomed before me. A great tongue licked its way down a mountain side, over the old road paralleling the tracks, and onto the track in front of me. Avalanche. A blast of air thundered across the tracks and rolled down into the water. I felt the blast roll across the locomotive, but we were heading into it; I stayed on the track.
And then that mountain of snow loomed in front of me, fifty feet deep, miles long, trees and brush sticking out of the slide. I pulled back on the brake, threw my body into it. The wheels roared, the locomotive shuddered, and then I hit that snow. The front of the locomotive punched into the snow, crumpled, and the end whipped around, broadside into the slide.
I fell into white oblivion.
CHAPTER 8
His face was long and sallow, like maybe someone had gone in with a tiny little knife and peeled away the fat under his skin. He had deep blue eyes that stared through you on their way to forever. He had a nose that was just a nose, except for a little bump of scar tissue at the bridge. Blond wisps of hair hung down from under a Peruvian ski hat, the kind with the llamas and silly ear flaps. He was wearing a faded orange parka, heavy leather ski boots, and coarse olive-drab wool pants. Over his heart, on a pocket, was a hand-embroidered patch: three black triangles in a yellow circle, like the symbol on the Wonderblimp.
He smiled, sidestepped over to me on skis.
I stared up at him. I was lying flat on my back in the snow, shards of the locomotive littered around me. There was this throbbing pain in my left side and some wet stuff dripping down my chin. I looked to my right and saw red blobs freezing into spiky crystals in the snow.
These funny men in white suits stood around me. They looked like angels, weird angels, with gold wool caps and little braids sticking out from under the caps. But they looked
mean. They all looked like they weighed at least 225 pounds each, and they were all carrying big rifles, like my Suzuki but with a barrel twice the size. They held the gun point down, like maybe they were thinking they might want to fire them off and see what kind of noise they could make and what sort of things the little pieces of lead could do to my body.
The guy in the orange parka leaned over me, his skis spread slightly apart, and I smiled back. “You okay?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said. “I feel like a python just squeezed the last globs of toothpaste out of me.” I looked around at what was left of the locomotive and shivered. “Guess I could be worse off,” I added.
“You’ll live.” The nice guy turned to the angels, waved his arm down. “Put those guns away,” he said. “This guy’s not going to hurt anybody. Pigbreath, bring the dogs over here.”
One of the angels shuffled through the snow. I heard whining, saw Pigbreath pulling a large dog team and a freight sled over to me. He took a heavy hook attached to the sled, stomped it into the snow. He and a few more of the angels lifted me up into the basket of the sled, laid me down on a blanket. The nice guy stood by me.
“Where’d the Wonderblimp go?” I asked.
“Took off over the inlet,” the nice guy said. He waved down the hill, toward the sun setting behind a jagged range of mountains. “That blimp was attached to the locomotive. The cable get frazzled and snap?”
I shook my head. “We took some fire over G’wood,” I said. “But the cable didn’t snap. I blew it. Those G’wooders wanted the blimp bad; I wasn’t going to let them have it.”
Pigbreath handed a first-aid kit to the nice guy. “I checked the locomotive,” he said. “No coke, but I found this.” He held up my shattered Suzuki rifle. “He’s a blimper, all right. The memors said the blimpers carried Suzukis.”
My ears perked up at the word “coke.” How had they known about the coke? The nice guy opened the kit, took out swabs, and cleaned my wounds. He gently explored my abdomen. I winced, but the pain wasn’t too bad. He pulled the blanket over me and strapped me into the sled like I was Frankenstein’s monster.
“Who are you?” I asked the nice guy, but I had an idea.
“Maxwell Silverhammer Everton,” he said.
“Just the man I wanted to see. We going to the Redoubt?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah. How’d you know?”
“It’s a long story. Aah,” I winced as Pigbreath shifted the sled a little. “How’d you know about the coke?”
He smiled. “I didn’t, really—until just now.”
“Crap,” I murmured.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Memors have been sending messages up the line for days about a blimp coming. I just put two and two together, figured the blimp had to be from the Feds, and if so, that it might be delivering the coke the bastards told me they would give me five years ago.” He grinned again. “But thanks for confirming my suspicions.”
“Sure. Rindi okay?” I asked.
Everton raised his eyebrows at her name, nodded. “Yeah, we’ll take care of her.” He nodded at a figure strapped into a sled like me. “I bet she wasn’t running the train.”
I shook my head, winced at the pain. “Ack,” I mumbled. Things were getting blurry.
“Relax,” Everton said. “We’ll take care of you.” He turned to Pigbreath. “Let’s go.”
I saw the rest of the angels head back to other dog teams. Some were on skis, like Everton. The angels strapped headlamps to their hats, flicked the lights on. Everton shuffled up to the front of the freight sled, grabbed a pole coming off the right. The dogs got up, shook off snow.
“Hike!” Pigbreath yelled. The dogs leaned forward onto their harnesses, yanked the sled forward. The sled went over the avalanche slide, and then we hurtled down a long hill that swung down to a broad trail.
We went careening down the hill, knee-deep in powder. Max the Hammer skied in front of me, guiding the sled down the hill. Lights from the headlights of the angels bobbed around me like fireflies. I got a little woozy from ripping down the hill, and looked up at the sky. Night was falling fast, piercing bright stars were pipping on, and the twilight oozed around to hug the mountains in an orange embrace. I swore I could see the crack-the-whip glow of auroras. I watched the dance of the gods and drifted off into the dance of my own dreams.
* * *
“You’ll be all right,” Everton said.
There was warmth all around me. In a corner a soapstone stove crackled and spit, casting a dull yellow light onto the rough wood floors. I was lying on a day bed, still dressed in my quilted blues. The room I was in was an octagon of bleached logs laid like spoons one on another. The ceiling was built of strips of birch arranged in diamond patterns, like staring down a long hallway. From another room I could smell bread baking, and hear low murmurs of somber discussion. I felt safe.
“You had some cuts and contusions,” he said. “A few broken ribs. You’ll live.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Where’d the folks with the funky hairdos go off to?” I asked.
“Funky hairdos?”
“The boys in the white suits.”
“Oh, those guys.” said Everton. “The Snow Angels.” He put a finger to his nose and sniffed, so I’d know what kind of snow he was talking about. “They went back to their hole. They’re a bunch of mercenaries. They live north a bit in a place called Rainbow Valley.”
Everton had his parka off, but kept the ski hat with the little llamas and the silly earflaps on. He was wearing a flannel shirt unbuttoned to the top of his sternum. There was a thick, knotty scar that started at his neck and disappeared under his shirt. He poured two cups of tea, handed me a mug steaming with the smell of spices and orange. On his hand was a tattoo: the three-triangles-in-a-circle design again.
“Welcome to the Redoubt,” he said.
I took the tea. “Thanks.”
“So,” he said. “Who are you?”
“Oh yeah.” I shook my head. “Sorry. Holmes. Holmes Weatherby, Aye-Aye-Aye. I appreciate you taking care of me, Mr. Everton.”
“Max,” Everton said. “Least I could do, seeing as how I planted that avalanche.”
“Huh?”
“Boom,” he said. He made a pistol-firing motion with his hand. “It doesn’t take much to set off an avalanche. That one was a little bigger than I liked.”
“You set it off? Why?”
“I wanted to stop your train. It seemed the easiest way. Of course, I expected that Rindi would know how to brake. Where’d you learn to run a locomotive?”
I laughed. “I never did.” I told him about the G’wooders attacking us, the blimp, cutting the cable, Rindi. “How’s Rindi?” I asked him.
“Okay,” he said. “Except for that head wound, she’s better off than you.” He jerked his head toward the kitchen; I could hear her laugh bouncing off the walls. “But who are these G’wooders?”
“The people south of . . . well, where you picked me up. After Portage? Uh, there’s a creek there at the end of the arm?”
“Oh,” Max said. “God Weirders. That’s God Weird. Bunch of religious zealots. Bible thumpers.”
“They weren’t thumping any Bibles,” I said. “More like mortars.”
“Mortars, huh? They attacked you?”
“Yeah. Some guy named—hey, you know him? Odey? Purple flattop haircut, gold earring?”
Max shook his head.
“Said he knew you. We picked him up at Moose Pass. He said he was from Fort Kenaitze, but he wasn’t, we knew that, and when we exposed him he said, ‘The Hammer will have my ass.’ ”
“Don’t know him. Fort Kenaitze? Listen, kid, why don’t you back up a bit. Who the hell are you? And how did you get here? And why were you coming to see me?”
I smiled. “Oh. You’re no mind reader, are you? Okay. I was in Kodiak . . .”
And I told him about Kodiak, Kachemak, Fort Kenaitze, the Wonderblimp, and the coke—the lazy. Oh yeah, the funny p
ink powder. I figured he might want to know about his fortune.
* * *
“. . . so the lazy was spitting out rads like a sprinkler. I told Nike that the guy getting this drug must not be too picky about cancer.”
Max chortled, splashed tea around the edge of his cup. “Cancer, schmanncer,” he said. “That’s long-term stuff. Why worry about something that takes twenty years to get you when you’re already dead? You don’t think walking around with a nuke in your heart’s going to make you grow hair on your palms, do you?”
He took off the ski hat, revealed a splotchy scalp with thin strands of hair stuck onto his bald pate. “Cancer, hell. Who needs cancer? I got rad poisoning, kid. A rad here, a rad there . . . it adds up.”
“Hell, I’m sorry.” I said.
“Don’t be,” Max said. “You weren’t the one who put the nuke in my chest. Hell, I agreed to it. Better than lying on a gurney, watching sodium pentothal drip into my veins. I’ve had a few good years. Only thing I want to do before I die is off that bitch who put this nuke in my heart.”
I felt this cold stuff wash through my veins. It wasn’t blood. It was the knowing. I knew before he said it, but I had to ask.
“Who was that?”
“Some big shot physicist at the Livermore labs. Benelux. ‘Good light.’ What a crock. If I ever see her, I’ll flay her alive.”
Benelux? Electrolux? Lucy? Oh, damn-crap-piss. Had Lucy done this to Max?
Max the Hammer. Was he innocent? I didn’t know. Was Lucy guilty? I didn’t know that, either. I figured Max had some sort of dope on the USA Feds, something they didn’t like him knowing, so they put a bomb in his chest and exiled him to the PRAK. Only the Zap came, so whatever he knew, it didn’t matter. And here he was, a real terminal case, and when I thought about it, a heck of a nice guy. And if I could talk him into it, he was going to help me find the blimp and get the damn funny pink cocaine. Hell, maybe I’d find Lucy, too.
After the Zap Page 11
