Alpha Wave. James Axler
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to the ground, and was reassured that the sec man showed no reaction. Swiftly, Jak clambered away on elbows and knees, the noise of his movement masked by the vibrating gasoline generator.
Jak watched as the three nervous types instructed the others. The woman dipped a thin line of metal into the buried canister, and when she pulled it out it glistened with liquid. She looked at the dipstick for a moment, and the older man with the wispy gray hair spoke to her, writing the reading into a book he had produced from his jacket pocket. He showed her the page and the pair consulted for a half minute. Then the older man pointed to the two shirtless men who had hefted the heavy, three-foot-high cylinder over and instructed them to bring it to him.
Their companion continued to check through his tripod’s eyepiece, occasionally pulling away and using his fingers to count off some calculation, his lips moving.
The two shirtless men had brought the cylinder to the area beneath the tower, and wedged it into the dirt as they stood waiting for further instructions. The older man leaned down, clutching at a muscle in his back and wincing before he adjusted the glasses on his nose to read off something from the side of the cylindrical tank. Satisfied, he nodded and consulted with the woman and the tripod man. There was a hasty discussion, with a lot of arm waving, but Jak couldn’t hear what they were saying over the noise of the genny running the spotlights.
After a while, one of the burly sec men stepped over, his face angry, and jabbed at the older man with a meaty paw. The older man checked his wrist chron and nodded in supplication.
Jak watched as the shirtless men tipped the cylinder toward the open barrel in the ground. The younger man who had set up the tripod shouted a single word, loud enough that it carried to Jak’s ears. “Careful!” Jak shook his head, brushing his white hair from his face unconsciously as he tried to discern what it was that the group was doing. They had unscrewed a cap at the top of the smaller cylinder and were carefully tipping it until a thick drool of liquid poured from it into the barrel beneath the tower. The liquid didn’t pour easily—it had lumps in it and it trickled from the cylinder spout in fits and starts. The gunk was a grayish color, glistening in the harsh spotlights.
Suddenly the operation was called to a halt, the older man, the younger man and the woman all calling for a stop at the same time, shouting over one another. The shirtless men stopped pouring the liquid from the cylinder, tipping it backward until it rested upright again on its base, denting into the sand. One of the shirtless men leaned down, screwing the black cap back on, while the woman tried her dipstick in the liquid of the barrel once again. Satisfied with her findings, she nodded and gave a thumbs-up.
The older man and the woman turned, walking slowly back to the train, deep in conversation. The other man was busy folding the legs of his tripod back together and inserting it into a plastic carry case. An instruction was given by the thug who had pressured the group—a foreman of some kind, Jak reasoned—and the genny was shut down. The lights dimmed and went out, and the generator shuddered a few times before finally sitting still on the cart.
The whole mysterious group was making its way back to the train and it was time for Jak to make his way back, too, to tell Ryan and the others all that he had witnessed. He couldn’t begin to fathom what it all meant, but he trusted that Ryan and the others would make sense of it given enough information and time. The barrel of liquid seemed vital to the operation—was that somehow connected to the tower, beneath the sands, where they couldn’t see?
Jak eased himself backward, crab-walking, his belly touching the ground as he pulled away from the train and the tower, back toward the ville wall. The crew was getting on the train, and he could hear the engine being stoked with coal, building up a head of steam to get it moving once more along the metal tracks. And then he heard another sound: the familiar click as a blaster was cocked behind his ear.
“Don’t move, Whitey.” It was a man’s voice, impatient, anger barely held in check.
Jak spun, flipping onto his back and unleashing a blast from his Colt Python without even stopping to think about it. One of the sec men was standing there, right behind him, surprise on what remained of his face as the large-bore bullet drilled through his head. The boom of Jak’s blaster echoed across the plain, and he dropped all pretence of stealth, leaping up and running toward the gates of Fairburn.
The sec men from the train reacted swiftly, a half dozen of them chasing the fleeing teenager across the sand, shouting to one another as they zeroed in on him.
Jak looked over his shoulder, dodging as a well-muscled man in a torn T-shirt made a grab for him from over his right shoulder. The man missed, his hand clutching at Jak’s leather jacket. He pulled his hand back with a shriek, blood pouring from the lacerations where his fingers had gripped around the razor blades and sharp edges of glass and metal that Jak had meticulously sewn into the fabric.
The wounded man reached for the blaster in his hip holster, but the foreman was beside him now, barking instructions. “Keep him alive,” he called loudly, so that all of his crew could hear. “One like that, be a lot of use to us.”
Jak tossed his arms back, the Magnum blaster still in his right hand, keeping his balance as he skirted down the slope that led to the walled ville in front of him. Two more of the train sec men appeared from the shadows to his left, and one of them tossed something in Jak’s direction. Roughly the length of a man’s forearm, the thing looked like some kind of nightstick in the light cast over the wall. Jak ducked his head, swerving to avoid it as it hurtled at him. The nightstick clattered to the ground, missing him by inches, and Jak continued to run.
The gates were closed. There wouldn’t be time to negotiate with the sentries now, so Jak would have to use his speed to clamber up them, the same way he’d negotiated the wall to get out here in the first place. He was scanning the gates, looking for potential handholds, when something hit him in the left shoulder. The other sec man had to have had a nightstick, too.
Jak staggered back, raising the blaster and targeting the two men who charged him. His first shot slapped the lead man off his feet, creating a vast hole in his chest as he fell to the sand. But by then the second was on him, and the handblaster was useless. Jak swung his left fist at the sec man, the man’s stubbled face leering at him as he lunged at the teen with a dagger. The fist connected, caving in the man’s nose. The sec man staggered backward, clutching at his bloody nose, but Jak could feel a nasty throbbing in his left arm. The hit with the nightstick had caught his shoulder, and the surge of adrenaline was already passing, leaving numbness in its wake.
More guards were arriving, appearing from the shadows all around, eight of them, then ten, with blasters and knives.
Jak stepped backward, Fairburn’s gates looming over him, his hands at his sides. He dropped his Colt Python to the sand, then raised his right hand, open and empty. His left arm sagged, unmoving.
Chapter Six
“My sweet Lord,” Mildred murmured as she watched from the window. She stood immobile as the train pulled away and watched it slowly ease along the tracks, away from Fairburn.
Finally she turned and looked at Krysty, who was hunched on the bed, her knees pulled up to her chest in fetal position, her hands over her ears. “Come on, Krysty, time to go,” Mildred said firmly.
Krysty sleepily opened one eye, mumbled something incoherent.
Mildred crouched at the side of the bed, running her hand over Krysty’s fevered brow. “I’m sorry, Krysty, but we have to go. I have to find Ryan and I think it’s best if you stay with me. You understand that, don’t you?”
Krysty slurred her answer, still struggling to shake off her sleep. “O’ course,” she said around her thick tongue. After a moment she opened both eyes and pulled herself up, swinging her legs and feet over the side of the bed. “What happened?” she asked as Mildred passed the woman her cowboy boots.
“They took Jak,” Mildred stated bluntly.
“So,” Doc ASKED THE OTHERS as the three of them walked back toward Jemmy’s bar and hostelry, “what did you