Gun Mage 4: Surviving a Post Apocalyptic Magic Earth

by Logan Jacobs

  “Probably sleeping again,” someone suggested.

  “Didn’t anyone see him board?” the guard demanded in a frustrated tone.

  There were more shrugs, but the linemen didn’t seem concerned by the possible loss of their fellow worker. The guard let out an exasperated sigh and marched to the bunkrooms. He opened the first door on the left and stuck his head inside.

  “Just checking that everyone’s on the train,” the guard declared.

  “It’s just me and Billy in here,” Sorcha’s lilting voice replied. “I gave some of the salve to Larry, though, and he took one of the other bunks.”

  The guard stepped back and closed the door, then opened the next one. I heard him grunt when he found the room empty, and then he turned to the rooms across the hall. He opened the last door on the right, and everyone on the train heard the bellow.

  “Mind your own business!” an angry man snapped.

  “Just doing the head count,” the guard assured him as he quickly closed the door.

  That just left one more door, and the guard slid the door open as he started to explain that he was performing the head count.

  “Hey!” the guard exclaimed. “Hank’s not here!”

  The rest of the linemen suddenly perked up and looked around.

  “He helped us unload some of the equipment,” one of the linemen offered.

  The others nodded in agreement, but then one of the men, probably the youngest of the group, frowned and shook his head.

  “He went back to get extra spikes in case we needed them, but I’m not sure he ever made it back,” the young lineman mused. “He wasn’t feeling real good and said he wasn’t sure he could still lift a hammer.”

  “I just figured he went back to the bunk,” the lineman who had pulled me onto the train added.

  “Aw, geez,” the guard moaned. “This is going to look really bad if we left someone behind.”

  “Maybe he’s in one of the other cars,” I suggested. “If he was sick, maybe he decided to sit down when he went to get the extra spikes and he fell asleep.”

  “Or he might have fallen down and not been able to get up again,” Darwin added.

  “Oh, yeah,” the guard added with a bit more enthusiasm. “That would be okay.”

  “Well, Hank may not agree,” Shelton noted drily.

  “I’ll help you search,” I offered as I stood up.

  The guard nodded, and we stepped back outside. At the train’s high rate of speed, there was nowhere to hide from the blast of wind that circled the cars, and the sudden burst of cold air made my eyes water. We both took a few seconds to steady ourselves, and then the guard jumped to the platform at the back of the cattle car. I followed after him as he opened the door, and together we stepped inside.

  Dozens of eyes turned to look at us, but I barely noticed. The itch was back in my palm, and I knew there was only one thing that triggered it. I glanced toward the two bays, but we’d already removed all of the guns. At least, I thought we’d had, but maybe we’d left one behind and now it was calling to me.

  While I tried to sort out why I felt like there was a gun nearby, the guard had already started to work his way through the animals. The sheep started to complain, which drew me from my reverie. I gave up on the mystery of the gun for the moment and followed the guard through the collection of animals and back into the cold at the front platform.

  We made the next jump and stepped inside the first of the cars packed with cargo. The itch started to fade, which meant the mystery gun was probably in the cattle car. That seemed to confirm that we must have left one on the horses, though I hadn’t seen any stray packs on the saddles.

  “Here,” the guard said as he handed me a crystal about the size of my palm. “They don’t have enough magic to light this place up, but you’ll be able to avoid tripping over anything.”

  “I’m surprised they didn’t install some in the cars,” I replied. “They have them in the passenger car.”

  “The boss talked about installing them in the boxcars so we could see our way around when we passed through, but they haven’t gotten around to it yet,” the guard noted as he opened the door.

  The mage lights promptly sprang to life as the door slid shut behind us, though light might have been an exaggeration of their abilities. The crystals cast a pale pink luminescence over the nearest contents of the box car, but the rest of the space remained shrouded in darkness.

  “There’s a clear path up the middle,” the guard said as he pointed out a narrow walkway. “Makes it easier to walk between the cars if we need to.”

  “Do you have to walk back and forth that often?” I inquired as I tried to pick out the path he had mentioned. It was barely wide enough for me to walk through, and I could tell there were spots where I would have to turn sideways. It didn’t seem like a very efficient way to move between the cars, but then again, there weren’t a lot of options when the train was barreling down the rail.

  “There’s not much reason for doing that now,” the guard noted, “but once they start carrying more passenger cars with actual passengers, we’ll have to move through the cars pretty regularly.”

  “So how do we find Hank if he’s in here?” I asked as I held the crystal up high and tried to peer into the darkness.

  “Hank!” the guard called out. “You in here?”

  We waited a few moments, but no one responded, and the only sound was that of the train as it rolled along the track.

  “I’ll check behind the pallets,” the guard called out as he made his way toward the horse carriage just to our right.

  The guard glanced inside the carriage, but when Hank didn’t appear, he circled around the carriage. After a moment, the only sign I had that anyone else was even in the box car was the pink glow that bobbed among the mystery stacks and the sound of the guard’s boots as he shuffled through the darkness.

  “There’s some supplies for the linemen near those barrels,” the guard called out. “Maybe check over there.”

  I spotted the barrels near the front of the car and squeezed my way along the narrow path while the guard’s pink light disappeared between pallets stacked with what looked like bricks.

  “There’s a ton of stuff in here,” I commented as I tried to wedge my body between two towers of wooden crates.

  “The owners wanted to carry stuff that’s otherwise hard to move,” the guard replied from somewhere near the wide sliding door that was used to load the car. “Just to show what you could do with a train.”

  I made it to the barrels without knocking anything over, though it had been a tight squeeze. I held the light up high again, but all I could make out were the shapes of the barrels and the edge of light around the next door. I sidestepped past the barrels and spotted an open crate filled with spikes, two of the large hammers that the linemen used, and a few other specialized tools that I couldn’t identify. What I did not find was Hank or any sign that he had ever been in here.

  “He’s not up here,” I called out as I edged along the barrels to try and look along the other side of the car. “I’d say I don’t see him anywhere, but there’s so much stuff in here it’s hard to be sure.”

  “He’s not back here, either” the guard replied in a more dispirited tone. “I guess we should check the next car.”

  I waited for the guard to find me, and then we stepped back into the cold and made the next jump. The second cargo box was packed as well, though it was all neatly stacked boxes. A few had descriptions stenciled on the outside of the box, like ‘Schweddy Balls’ and ‘Pee Cola’, but most offered no clue as to the contents.

  “I don’t know why he’d come in here,” the guard said morosely as we took in the maze of boxes. “There aren’t any supplies for the linemen in here.”

  “Maybe he wanted to try some of the Pee Cola,” I suggested.

  “Hank, you in here?” the guard yelled again.

  There was no response, so we each took a side and agreed to meet in the mi
ddle. I worked my way over to the last row of boxes on the left, and started to squeeze my way between the rows. I had to admit, it wasn’t looking too good for Hank. As the guard had pointed out, there was no reason for him to have ventured into this box, and if the rest of it was packed as tightly as the cargo I tried to maneuver through, there wasn’t really anywhere to hide, either.

  I’d checked two rows and started on the third when I spotted a boot sticking out between two boxes. I inched closer, but the boot stayed where it was, wedged between stacks of ‘Dump Cakes’.

  “Hank?” I called out.

  There was no response, and I was practically on top of the boot by then. I pointed the light between the stacks and saw Hank tightly packed between the boxes.

  “Hank!” I yelled as I knelt down and tugged on a leg.

  “You found him?” the guard called out hopefully.

  “I did,” I called back as I tried to study the missing man in the pink light. “But he’s not responding. I think he may be unconscious.”

  Or dead, I added in my mind, though I didn’t want to say that out loud yet. It was hard to see anything besides the fact that there was a human shape, and it was always possible that Hank was simply passed out or had hit his head. Though that still didn’t explain why he was pressed between stacks of crates.

  “Ah, geez, how are we going to get him out?” the guard asked when he arrived. “Come on, Hank, wake your ass up and get out of there!”

  “I think we can pull him out,” I noted. “It looks like there’s enough room.”

  “Of course, there is,” the guard sniped. “How else would he have gotten in there. Hey, Hank, we’re going to pull you out!”

  Hank didn’t move or respond to the guard’s comments, and I had a bad feeling about why that was so. Still, we both reached in and grabbed a leg, then pulled as hard as we could. Hank slid toward us, but we soon discovered another problem. With the boxes stacked behind us, we couldn’t just pull Hank straight out.

  “If we can get his belt closer, we might be able to pull him upright and then edge him around the boxes so we can lay him down,” I suggested.

  The guard nodded when I glanced at him, and I noticed that he no longer looked hopeful. He looked pale despite the pink tint of the light, and a sadness lingered in his eyes.

  After a few more tugs, we were able to grab Hank’s belt and one arm. Hank never complained, and when we had him upright, it was easy to see why. The front of his shirt was covered in blood, and I heard the guard draw in a breath.

  “They must have got him as he was coming back into the car,” the guard said quietly.

  “You mean those people in the woods?” I asked as we finally freed Hank from his spot and laid him on the boards of the car. “Then where’s the arrow? And the blood trail?”

  “They might have had a mage with them,” the guard offered.

  The older man was determined to pin this on the group that had tried to stop the train, and certainly that would make life easier for everyone on board. But it didn’t make any sense. As I’d pointed out, there was no arrow to be seen and no blood on the path. I held the light up and checked between the boxes, and there was the expected pool of red liquid on the planks, but there was splatter on the boxes as well. In fact, it looked like Hank had received the death blow in the spot where we had found him. But why would he agree to squeeze between the boxes?

  I turned back to the body, and over the protests of the guard, I opened Hank’s shirt to look at the wound. I knew I wouldn’t find an arrow wound, but certainly a knife or blade of some sort was a real possibility. What I wasn’t expecting was the tidy little hole that I now recognized as the signature mark of a gun.

  Hank had been murdered.

  Chapter 9

  “See?” the guard said triumphantly. “It had to be an arrow.”

  “I wasn’t an arrow,” I insisted as I tried to steady my nerves.

  “Well, what else--?” the guard began, then stopped when he considered what else he had seen on the train that day. “A gun?”

  “I think so,” I replied. “But we should get Darwin to confirm it.”

  The guard took several steps away from me, and then started to fumble for the saber he carried.

  “It wasn’t one of us,” I snapped. “We were around others throughout the attack.”

  “Maybe you shot Billy, too, because he would say that you didn’t stay on top of the cars the whole time,” the guard replied when he finally had the saber free.

  “We didn’t shoot Billy,” I growled. “And you can ask him that yourself. Besides, if we were chasing Hank down, then who was firing the shots from the top of the cars that dropped all those attackers?”

  The guard stopped to consider that a moment, and then finally lowered his blade.

  “Maybe it wasn’t a gun,” the guard said hopefully. “I mean, anything could leave a wound like that.”

  “Not really,” I sighed. “But we should get him out of here, at least. We’ll let Charles take a look, and see what he says. And then we’ll have to go looking for a gun.”

  “Couldn’t they have just used one of yours?” the guard asked.

  “They could have,” I admitted. “Once we were all in position, the rest of the guns would have been left unattended in the passenger car.”

  “I guess we could put him in one of the bunks,” the guard suggested.

  “He’s a lot bigger than Billy,” I noted. “It’ll take both of us to carry him back.”

  “We’ll manage,” the guard replied as he grabbed Hank under the armpits, and then gave me a nod.

  I grabbed Hank’s feet, and together, we managed to haul the body back toward the sliding door, though Hank’s swaying body did smack into a few of the crates. We had to set Hank back down so the guard could open the door, then jump to the next car. Once the older man had propped the next door open and then set his feet, I pulled Hank toward the edge of the platform so the guard could reach across and grab his shoulders.

  We eased Hank across until it was my turn to jump, and then we repeated the whole routine again as we passed through the next cargo box and then the car with the livestock. I felt my palm itch once more as we pushed our way through the sheep once again, and I knew where the gun was hidden. Well, at least in which car. I also knew that it hadn’t been one of our guns that fired the fatal shot. This was a gun I’d never handled before, which meant someone else had carried a gun onboard.

  But we were at the last car by then, and before I could ask the guard any questions about the rest of the passengers, we were surrounded by linemen who started to curse the attackers. The guard somehow managed to push past them, and we carried Hank to one of the unoccupied bunks.

  “There’s nothing you can do for him,” the guard finally declared when too many linemen tried to push into the tiny bunk room. “We’ll get him cleaned up and presentable, but you fellows need to return to your seats. I’ll be by in a few minutes to ask some questions.”

  I spotted Sorcha and Darwin and waved them over as the men slowly returned to their seats.

  “How’s Billy?” I asked.

  “He’s fine,” Sorcha assured me. “Did they shoot Hank as well?”

  “No,” I whispered as I ushered her and Darwin inside and slid the door closed. “But tell me what you think.”

  The space was crowded with Hank’s body on the bunk, me and the guard pressed against the door, while Darwin and Sorcha loomed over the body.

  “This isn’t an arrow,” Sorcha said quickly.

  “It’s a bullet,” Darwin added as he leaned in for a closer look. “A pistol, for sure.”

  “But… that would mean someone else has a gun,” Sorcha murmured.

  “Someone else on board would be my guess,” I replied. “He was shot where we found him.”

  “Which was?” Darwin asked.

  “Wedged between some crates in one of the boxcars,” I replied.

  “But why would someone bring a gun on the t
rain and kill one of the linemen?” Sorcha demanded.

  “There could be any number of reasons,” Darwin noted. “It could be personal, or it could be tied to the train. And if it was about the train, then there’s a good chance the killer isn’t done.”

  “I think the more important question is where did the gun come from,” the guard chimed in. “Even though you seem to have a small arsenal of the things, I don’t think most people would even know where to find one or how to use it. I mean, they probably just took one of yours during the battle, right? So that would make it a personal issue, and the killer’s finished his work. Probably put the gun back when he was done.”

  I looked at Darwin, then at Sorcha, as I debated whether to comment on the gun I had felt in the cattle car while the guard was still with us.

  “It wasn’t one of our guns,” Darwin said as he frowned. “The only guns that were fired were the Glocks and the Winchesters. I would have noticed if one of the others was fired.”

  “Are you sure?” the guard pressed. “There was a lot of shooting going on.”

  “A gun being fired inside one of the box cars?” Darwin chuckled. “Yeah, I would have noticed.”

  “But I’m pretty sure that’s where he was shot,” I replied. “There wasn’t a trail of blood like you would see if he had been moved.”

  “That’s why I think someone else brought a gun onboard,” Darwin explained. “A gun with a suppressor and subsonic ammo, maybe.”

  “Ah, damn it,” the guard muttered.

  “They might have been planning this for some time,” Darwin continued. “Stop the train, blame it on the mutants, shoot anybody who got in your way. And when the body is found, you could blame that on mutants, too.”

  “But our presence ruined those plans,” Sorcha mused. “Because we stopped the attack and we know what caused this.”

  “What do you know about Ahmed?” I interjected as I thought about the weird conversation just before the attack.

  “You mean personally?” the guard asked. “Not much. Quiet type. He and his father would ride out with Mr. Riley to check the progress of the rail line sometimes. Don’t tell me you think he’s to blame?”