by Tom Abrahams
“Who didn’t want you?”
Marcus chuckled wryly. “Who did?”
Dallas’s expression flattened.
“Seriously,” said Marcus, “I was a liability. I don’t remember if you were there or not, but after the last big blowup in Baird, when that army of losers came looking for me and killed good people, some things were said. Those things were right.”
“About you bringing as much death as you stop?”
“Yeah, that.”
“You can’t help that you’re a magnet for that stuff,” said Dallas. “If I remember, you never started anything. You just finished it. Lou told me about what you did for that woman.”
“Which woman?”
Dallas raised an eyebrow. “Lola? The one who came to your house in Rising Star. You helped her find her kid. That’s what started the whole Mad Max thing, right?”
A smile threatened to form at the corner of his mouth. Marcus hadn’t heard that nickname in years.
Mad Max.
A reference to his resilience and penchant for over-the-top violence to survive whatever he faced. Of all the movies he’d watched in the early years after the Scourge, Road Warrior hadn’t been one of them. The humor of it gave way to the memory of what ultimately befell Lola and Sawyer and Penny.
A pain as acute as that when he’d seen their bodies in the yard, on the floor, in the bed, tightened in his chest. It surpassed the deaths of his wife and son in the early days of the Scourge. Not because he loved them more, but because he’d failed to protect his charges a second time.
His mind flashed to the burial plots behind his house outside Rising Star, Texas. Marcus looked at his hands and balled them into fists, remembering the cold, hard feel of the chisel in his hands as he carved the epitaphs on their graves.
A prayer he’d long since pushed to the darkest parts of his memory clawed its way forward, and he whispered it, the words hanging on his lips. It was like he’d never forgotten them or, better yet, tried to forget them.
“As far as the east is from the west,” he said, “so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”
Dallas looked confused. “What?”
Marcus looked up without lifting his chin. “Nothing. It’s something I used to say before killing a man. Sometimes I’d say it after.”
Dallas looked at Marcus’s hands, then back at Marcus. The train jostled him and he extended an arm to brace himself.
“There was a farmer,” said Marcus. “Before I went to Atlanta, he gave a truck to me. Told me I didn’t have to thank him for it.”
“I think I remember this,” said Dallas.
“He told me that if I took the truck, that meant I would be taking my violence with me. He said it was more than an even trade.”
“Yeah,” said Dallas, nodding, “I do remember this.”
“Lou tried defending me. She told the farmer that I’d kept Baird safe for more than a year. She was sassy when she said it.”
“Sounds like Lou.”
Both men chuckled.
“The farmer was defiant,” Marcus went on, his eyes in some distant place now. “He said I’d nearly gotten everyone in town killed that day, and the week before that, and the month before that. He said my being sheriff had only brought him a never-ending rot in his gut. He said he’d give me ten trucks if it meant I’d never come back.”
Dallas scratched his chin. “That didn’t mean you couldn’t write, stay in touch, let Lou know how you were doing.”
Marcus chuckled, his gaze still absent. “Rudy defended me, sort of. Norma stopped him. I remember looking at her. Her eyes told me she loved me like a brother, but she didn’t want me around anymore.”
“Yeah, but—”
Marcus blinked back to the moment. “It was better I keep my distance. Once I got settled in Virginia, it was better. Lou knew I was alive. I was okay. That was enough.”
“It really wasn’t,” said Dallas. “You hurt her.”
“Better than getting her killed.”
Dallas frowned and was about to speak when the pop of gunfire and a scream from the room next door stopped him cold. The hair on Marcus’s neck stood on end when another pop cut short a second screaming plea for mercy.
“Bandits,” said Dallas, his eyes wide.
Marcus stood, Mossberg in hand. He motioned for Dallas to grab his weapon. Dallas picked it up, shouldered it, and looked to Marcus for direction.
The Mossberg in Marcus’s hand was a unique weapon. It was a short-barreled shotgun with a pistol “bird’s-head” grip. Technically, the Shockwave model was a pistol-grip weapon with a fourteen-inch barrel. From muzzle to grip it was less than twenty-seven inches, which meant it wasn’t really a shotgun, but it walked like a duck, it talked like one, and its quack was loud as hell.
Marcus’s left hand was under the pump-action barrel, between the grip and the nylon strap. He racked it, snicked off the gun’s safety, and motioned for Dallas to open the door.
The world slowed as Marcus stepped into the narrow hallway. Two men were to his right, both wearing bandanas over their faces. They held pistols aimed into the cabin in front of them. They didn’t see him. They didn’t hear him.
Marcus unloaded the first of the nine one-and-three-quarter-inch mini-shells into the man closest to him. The buckshot hit the man in the side and he grunted in pain. Dropping his weapon, he reached for the peppering of wounds.
Marcus pumped again and pulled the trigger. A second blast hit the man’s face and he toppled back into his partner.
With the Mossberg raised above his shoulder and in front of him, Marcus took two deliberate steps forward. Pump. Boom. Pump. Boom. The sound was deafening in the narrow confines of the train corridor.
The blasts dropped the second man. Both were on the floor writhing in pain.
Dallas was in the hall behind him now. Marcus pumped again. Five shots left.
“Deal with them,” he said of the men in the hallway. He didn’t wait for Dallas to respond.
Two more steps and he was at the open doorway at the moment a third bandit peeked his head out from the cabin. Marcus lifted the Shockwave and pulled the trigger. The mini-shell left major wounds on the man’s face and neck. He dropped to his knees, his cries deafening in the small space.
Pump. Four shots left.
Marcus stepped over the men and into the room. He lifted a boot and drove the heel into the man on his knees, hitting him squarely in the jaw. It knocked him unconscious and he dropped to the cabin floor with a whack. The train shimmied on the tracks, knocking Marcus off balance. He caught himself against a wall and scanned the room for more threats. There were none. He pried the pistol from the bandit’s cold hand and tucked it in his waistband behind his belt buckle.
It was a Glock. Not sexy, but reliable, and unlikely to jam.
Slumped in the corner, still in his seat, was an older man, his chin on his chest. There was a hole in the center of his forehead and a Rorschach of blood on the wall behind him. A matching wound was at the center of his chest.
A woman was next to him, holding his hand, her alabaster skin almost translucent with shock. Mascara stained her cheeks, making her look like a crying clown. Marcus didn’t know women still wore makeup.
Across from them was another couple. The man had money in his trembling hands. A faint yellow puddle was at his feet. A broad dark spot painted his pants at the crotch. An unconscious woman was at his side, leaning awkwardly in the corner of her seat at the window.
Marcus aimed the Mossberg at her. “She okay?”
The man nodded. “F-f-f-fainted.”
Marcus wondered how people so ill-equipped for violence had made it this long. Hadn’t they seen death? Hadn’t they killed?
The money in the man’s hands was folded neatly in a thick stack. Marcus wondered why money was still a thing. He would have figured digital currency would have long ago replaced otherwise worthless cotton paper. Why did money have any value at all now?
; Somehow these people, worthless as money should have been in a post-apocalyptic world, were still alive. At the moment, they had Marcus to thank for that. He considered emptying the Mossberg to put them out of their misery.
“There are more,” the woman said tentatively, her voice warbling with emotion.
Marcus spun to her and lowered the weapon. Behind him Dallas put a bullet into one of the men on the floor. The woman jumped, her body shaking uncontrollably now.
“More what?” Marcus asked.
The man answered. “Robbers.” He rested the money on his knee and plucked at his crotch. His sour face flushed and he looked at the floor in front of him. The woman next to him was still out, her body jostling with the train’s movement on the tracks.
“Where?” asked Marcus.
The man hooked a thumb behind him. “Back there.”
“How many?”
The man held up three fingers.
Marcus nodded. He stepped back into the hall. Dallas stood over two dead men. They locked eyes and Marcus motioned with his fingers toward the front of the train car.
“Are we doing this?” asked Dallas.
“What do you think?”
Marcus started moving. Heads peeked out from cabins and disappeared back inside. Doors slammed shut.
Marcus bumped against the walls with his shoulders. “They should put locks on these things,” he said. “Would cut down on the crime.”
He reached the end of the car. The cabin door was open. Inside were large canvas bags. They were on the floor, on the seats, open and empty. Marcus recognized them as the kinds of bags that held weapons and ammunition. This was where the bandits had waited until starting their assault. Instead of attacking a moving train, as Dallas had suggested might happen, these bad guys had bought tickets.
“We could wait here,” said Dallas, joining him at the doorway. “Ambush them when they come back.”
Marcus considered it. Not a bad idea. It would contain the violence to come. But what havoc would these bandits wreak if they waited, if they allowed them to go compartment to compartment and person to person? They’d already killed one man in cold blood.
He shook his head. “We can’t wait for them.” He stepped to the door at the front of the car and pressed his face to the window that looked into the car in front of them.
That car didn’t have cabins. It had a narrower center aisle and rows of seats on either side. There were six across, three on each side of the aisle. No bandits. There was blood on the floor. It leached from underneath one of the rows to the left.
Marcus clenched his jaw. He heaved open the heavy metal door and stepped onto the platform between the two cars. A wind, colder than he expected, swirled around him and cut through him.
The night air was dry, the sky above cloudless. Stars twinkled against the black. A waxing gibbous moon glowed white. Marcus adjusted the black hat on his head. A shiver ran along his spine and he tugged open the door in front of him.
Dallas shut the door behind him, and heads turned. Eyes widened. Chins trembled. Hands went into the air.
“Where did they go?” asked Marcus, knowing the answer.
Several hands pointed toward the next car. Whimpers grew into sobs to his left. Marcus moved forward, one slow step at a time, his body turned to the side to accommodate the narrow aisle.
“How many?” Marcus asked. “Three?”
Heads nodded. More cries. Marcus stepped over the spreading pool of blood in the aisle and looked to his left.
A young woman was slumped into the empty middle seat, her hands still clutching her bag. The man at the window tugged at his hair, threatening to pull it out by the roots. His red eyes darted around the room until they found Marcus.
“She wouldn’t give it to them,” he said. “There’s nothing in it. It’s empty. But she wouldn’t give it to them.”
Marcus’s voice was like a low growl. He sounded almost feral. “We’ll get them. All of them.”
He moved faster now. Dallas was behind him, walking backward. The men were back to back, keeping watch for each other as they approached the front of the car.
Marcus stopped at the window and peered through it. The next car was identical to this one. The bandits were there. Three of them. They worked the rows one at a time. All three were armed. One had a handgun; two had rifles or shotguns. With their backs turned, and the grime on the windows, Marcus couldn’t tell for sure. He paused to pull more shotgun shells from his coat pocket and feed them into the bottom of the Mossberg.
He slung open the first door and stepped back into the chill. The wind swirled around him, and he put a free hand on the top of his hat. He pulled it down on his brow, above his eyes, and glanced back at Dallas.
“As soon as I open this door, they’re gonna turn around and fire,” he said above the whoosh of the wind and the deafening rumble of the steel wheels on the tracks. “I’m gonna drop to a knee and fire. I need you to stand here, firing the second that door swings open.”
Dallas nodded. He steadied himself against a railing and drew the rifle to his shoulder.
Marcus knelt down and laid the Mossberg on the lip in front of the door. He pulled the pistol from his waistband and checked the magazine.
“Ready?” he called out to Dallas.
“Ready.”
Marcus pulled back the door. Dallas fired his rifle, a percussive blast popping above Marcus’s head. Then a second shot. A third. A fourth.
Pistol already leveled in his right hand, Marcus raised his left to the grip and fired. The Glock 19 popped and he pulled the trigger again.
The onslaught sounded like firecrackers. Multiple rounds drilled into the bandits before they knew what hit them. Two of them dropped immediately, tumbling awkwardly over one another into the aisle. The third was hit twice but kept his balance. He returned fire, slamming two rounds into the rear wall of the train car before Dallas finished him.
The echo of gunfire evaporated into the car. It gave way to heavy breathing, sighs and prayers of relief, emotional whimpers. Ahead of him was what was left of the bandits. Two of them didn’t move, either unconscious or dead. The third was conscious. His moan was a low hum, barely audible above the other noises and mechanical pulse of the train.
Marcus motioned toward the bodies with his chin. “Keep an eye on them for a second.”
“What—” Dallas started to question.
“Just do it.”
Marcus squeezed past Dallas and marched back to the previous cabin until he reached the frightened, pale man next to the dead woman slumped in her seat. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder, looped it under his arm, and lifted him into the aisle. Then he placed the Glock into the man’s hand.
“You ever fired one of these?”
The man’s face was drawn long with shock. He nodded. His teeth chattered.
“I’m sorry about her,” Marcus said. “Wife?”
Tears welled in the man’s eyes and spilled onto his cheeks. He didn’t speak.
“Come with me.”
Marcus tugged him along the aisle to the next car and to the dying bandit on the aisle floor. They stopped there and stood over the man. Dallas inched out of their way.
The man glanced at the bloody criminal on the floor and back at Marcus, the gun hanging loosely in his hand at his side.
“Do it,” said Marcus.
“Do…what?”
“Finish him,” said Marcus. “Eye for an eye.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They killed your wife,” said Marcus.
The man waved the gun across the heap of bodies in front of him. For a moment it appeared as though he might pull the trigger. He didn’t. He lifted his head and locked eyes with Battle.
“Nothing’s going to bring her back,” he said. “Nothing I do, nothing you do. Nothing. She’s gone. For nothing.”
The man lowered the Glock, then offered it to Marcus. He lowered his head, turned, and started walking back to his seat, to
his dead wife.
Marcus took the gun and started to put it back into his waistband, but stopped short. Extending his arm, he took aim at the gurgling man on the floor and pulled the trigger twice.
It silenced the car. It silenced the bandit. But the dead woman’s husband spoke.
Voice cracking, he called out to Marcus, “Why did you do that?”
Marcus put the Glock into his waistband behind his belt buckle and stomped toward his own car. Dallas followed. As they passed the dead woman’s husband on their way to the back of the car, Marcus shot the man a steely glare.
“He had it coming,” said Marcus.
He gripped the handle on the car door and slid it open, stepping onto the platform. The wind whistled through the gap between the cars. Cold air filled his lungs when he inhaled.
Marcus bent down and picked up his Mossberg from where he’d left it on the lip beyond the entry. Moving with speed and against the whipping wind, he led Dallas to the second car. His gaze was straight ahead, intentionally avoiding the dead woman in her seat. As he passed her row, he muttered a prayer and kept moving.
When they’d entered the third car, Marcus made his way past the bandits’ cabin and to the one next to his. The survivors were huddled next to one another, consoling and commiserating.
Marcus stood in the open doorway. A strong whiff of urine stung his nostrils. “Why’d they pick you?”
“What?” asked the man with the money still in his hand.
“This cabin,” Marcus said. “They skipped a bunch of others. Why you first, before they hit the cars with open seating?”
“I went to the ladies’,” said the woman. “They waited for me outside the door and forced me back here.”
Marcus nodded. “They’re dead,” he said to the cabin. “Every one of them.”
He backed away from the opening and took the few steps back to his cabin. He sank into his seat, resting the Mossberg in his lap. The Glock’s pistol grip dug into his belly at his navel. He ignored it.
Dallas sat across from him. “Dumb luck.”
“What was dumb luck?”
“The woman going to take a piss,” he said. “She holds it a little longer and they’re all alive.”