by Tom Abrahams
Sally raised her eyebrows. “They’re what?”
“We don’t have a lot of conductors willing to kill,” Gladys said. “You won’t hesitate to do what’s needed.”
The words slapped Sally across the face. Her face flushed and twitched. Her shoulders hunched and she shifted her body away from her host. All of it was subtle and simultaneous gut reactions to the assertion that Sally was a killer who put mission above self, who saw gradations of morality.
Gladys must have noticed the change in Sally’s demeanor. She forced a smile. “I didn’t mean that to sound the way—”
“Yes, you did,” said Sally. “And you’re not wrong. If it’s me or my passenger versus a Pop Guard soldier, I’m taking out the soldier.”
The women sat silently for a moment. Both of them exchanged glances, held them, averted them.
“I’ll be honest,” said Gladys. “You’re not my first choice for this. Well, you weren’t. I had someone else in mind. It fell through. And after what happened the other night with the chopper…”
“The guards I killed.”
Gladys nodded. “That told me all I needed to know.”
“Who was the other choice?”
Gladys sighed. “His name was Booth. At least, that was his working name. He disappeared. We’re pretty sure the Pop Guard has him.”
Sally nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Just do your job when the time comes. I’m convinced that, even in the throes of withdrawal, you’re better than anyone else I’ve got.”
“That’s not encouraging,” said Sally.
Gladys forced a weak smile. “No. It’s not.”
CHAPTER 5
APRIL 20, 2054, 4:00 PM
SCOURGE +21 YEARS, 7 MONTHS
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Rickshaw pulled the trigger again and Booth gasped. It was a ragged breath born of mental exhaustion and unadulterated terror. Rickshaw had heard it before.
“Every time I spin it,” said the captain, “you’ve got a one in six chance of losing that hand. One in six is less than seventeen percent.”
“I don’t know anything more,” said Booth. “I told you what I know.”
Rickshaw lifted the weapon and spun the cylinder. It ratcheted to a stop and he lowered it again, pressing the muzzle against the back of Booth’s hand. Booth held his breath. His face reddened. Rickshaw smirked as he pulled back the revolver hammer. He pulled the trigger.
Click.
Booth exhaled and slumped. He shook his head again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I swear. I—”
Rickshaw lifted the gun. “Blah, blah, blah,” he mocked in a whiny voice. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” He spun the cylinder. His face hardened. His eyes bored into Booth’s. “You do know. You’ve already told me about two of the conductors. You already gave me an address. You know more.”
Booth shook his head. Sweat flung from his face, snot stuck to his nostrils, and thick spittle clung to his chin.
Rickshaw pressed the gun down. Hard.
“Please,” Booth begged breathlessly.
Rickshaw pulled the trigger.
Click.
“I’m new!” Booth sobbed. “I’m new. I told you what I know. They don’t tell us much. Only what we need to know for our job. We—”
Rickshaw pulled the trigger again without spinning the cylinder. Click. He grimaced and pulled the trigger again. Click. Click.
“It’s fifty-fifty now,” said Rickshaw. “And you’re not new. You’ve been doing this a long time. You’ve killed my men. Ten of them in the last year.”
He lifted the weapon and opened the cylinder without spinning it. A broad grin formed on his face. His gray eyes darkened. He started to lower the weapon when he looked at the floor. His expression soured. He stepped back and shook his leg.
With his chin still lowered, he raised his gaze and glared at Booth from beneath his heavy lids. The corner of his mouth lifted when he spoke. “Again?” Derision more than pity dripped from his words. “I didn’t think you had any more piss left in you, Booth.”
“Okay,” said the captive. “Okay. I do know one thing.”
Booth’s head hung low against his sweat-drenched collar. He squirmed in his seat. His hands were balled into tight fists now, like that would protect him from a point-blank gunshot. A glossy sheen of sweat, tears, snot, and spit coated his face and neck.
Rickshaw took a step around the spreading bright yellow puddle on the floor and moved to Booth’s side. He bent at his waist and spoke softly into the trembling man’s right ear. “Good for you,” he said, the words like venom. “I knew you’d come around.”
“T-t-t-hey have a p-p-place,” said Booth, “where they take all of the passengers.”
“I’m listening,” Rickshaw slithered.
“It’s c-c-called the H-H-Harbor.”
“Where is it?’ asked Rickshaw. “I already know what they call it. I don’t know where it is. They move it around.”
“W-W-West V-V-Virginia,” said Booth. “Th-th-the G-G-Greenbrier.”
“The resort?”
Booth nodded. A string of drool stretched from his lower lip to the edge of the stainless-steel table. “Yes,” said Booth. “It—”
The percussive blast of the single gunshot shook the air in the room. A resonant ringing pierced Rickshaw’s ears. The guards by the door jerked from their positions, startled by the unexpected shot.
Booth’s head, what was left of it, was limp. It was forward and to the left, hanging on his stretched neck, chin on chest. His eyes were open. He’d never seen Rickshaw lift the weapon and pull the trigger with the muzzle at the back of his head. The Pop Guard captain did it too quickly, too quietly for anyone in the room to notice.
Blood and gore mixed with the rest of the slimy mess on the floor, chair, table, and wall. Rickshaw licked the front of his teeth and flipped open the cylinder. From his pocket he pulled a handful of rounds and slowly pinched them into the cylinder until he’d filled it.
He spun the weapon twice and dropped it into his holster. He edged his hands along the side of his duster and straightened the heavy fabric. He jutted his chin toward Booth and eyed the guards. “Clean this up. It’s disgusting.”
Rickshaw exited the room and marched along the brightly lit hallway. They were two stories underground, and the sound of his boots clacking on the solid floor was thick. The walls and ceiling absorbed what might have otherwise echoed along the corridor.
His duster rippled at his sides and billowed behind him like a heavy cape. His broad shoulders, carried with immaculate posture, and confident swagger told anyone who passed him in the hall to make way. He wasn’t shifting course. If they didn’t give him a wide berth, he’d bowl them over.
One guard, not paying attention, traded shoulder blows with Rickshaw as the captain neared the end of the hall and a bank of twin elevators. The collision knocked the guard off to one side. Rickshaw was unmoved. His body, like the walls and ceiling, was good at absorption.
He punched the elevator call button and waited. At his sides his fingers flexed in and out and the knuckles cracked. Soft pops of air relieved the building pressure in his joints.
The elevator doors hissed open and Rickshaw stepped into the empty car. He leaned into the bioscanner and stared into the pulsing red light. The doors hissed closed and the system’s androgynous voice addressed him.
“Captain Greg Rickshaw,” it said, “to which level are you traveling?”
“Four.”
“Please stay clear of the door and hold onto the provided handrails. We are ascending to level four.”
Rickshaw felt the push of the floor under his feet, his stomach lurched, and the elevator accelerated skyward. He gathered himself and stumbled back a step to grab a handrail opposite the car’s door.
The interior of the elevator car was as cold as the cell from which he’d come. It was bathed in the same bright white LED light the government engineers seemed to prefer. Ric
kshaw would have preferred something more antique, the soft yellow glow of a filament lightbulb.
The elevator slowed to a stop.
“Approaching level four, Captain Greg Rickshaw,” the computer voice said. “Please watch your step and have a pleasant day.”
Rickshaw thanked the computer. The door hissed open and he exited. He acknowledged a man and a woman waiting to step aboard the elevator with a tip of his bolero. They pressed tight smiles onto their wary faces and hurried into the car behind him.
The buzz of the bioscanner preceded the door hiss, and Rickshaw moved with purpose toward an office midway down the hall on the right. He thought about how he’d thanked the computer for doing its job. A smirk twitched at the corner of his mouth. It struck him as odd, but funny, that he’d ignore people for their niceties but thank a computer. He wondered, for a brief moment, what that said about his psyche. Then he pushed it from his mind and leaned into another biometric device that scanned the particulars of his eye, pressing his right thumb to a pad underneath the pulsing red screen.
“Thank you, Captain Greg Rickshaw,” said the voice. It was the same one from the elevator. “Welcome back.”
With a metallic click and hum, the door was unlocked. He pulled the handle and pushed. The door swung into his office, and the overhead lights immediately flicked on. These lights were canned and recessed into the high ceiling of his unremarkable office space. The door clicked shut behind him, locking him inside and everybody else out.
It was sparse, with white walls, a solid gray floor that matched the rest of the fourth floor and his eyes, and a clear Lexan desk built into one of the walls. From one spot in the office the desk and its contents appeared to be floating. From another spot, the desk disappeared altogether.
He flipped back the tail of his duster and dropped into the ultramodern ergonomic chair at the desk. His weight sank onto the hydraulics, and air puffed from the chair’s mechanics.
It was remarkable to Rickshaw that as bad as things had gotten in the world, he still had a comfortable chair in a climate-controlled office run by a centralized computer system, which ran the entirety of the government headquarters.
As much of North America lived in what was best described as the Wild West, and most of it was without reliable power, the central government had revived much of the technology lost in the years after the Scourge.
The Centers for Disease Control was a big part of that. As it worked to find a cure for the disease and then replicate it so that Texas might again fall into the fold, its scientists and researchers had reverse engineered surviving tech. Then they’d made it better.
While there wasn’t the infrastructure, or the governmental desire, to make the tech available to the masses, it served those in power nicely. Never before in modern history had the divide between the haves and have-nots been so wide. It was good to be one of the haves.
Rickshaw tapped his desk, and a virtual keyboard glowed in its surface. He tapped a few keys in memorized succession, and the wall in front of the desk produced a large projection of a topographical map. He swiped his fingers on the wall to zoom in on the map. Red dots appeared in clusters along the map. There were dozens of them stretching from Arizona to Nebraska and Florida. There were dots sprinkled through Texas, though the concentration was sparser there, and in Georgia the dots merged together into larger red markings.
Rickshaw leaned back in his chair as far as the ergonomics would allow, and scratched his chin. He studied the spots where he had Pop Guard teams deployed. There were two thousand stationed all over the place.
His job was twofold. It was to run the Population Guard program and, at the same time, snuff out any rebellions against it. Neither of the tasks were easy. Both made it difficult to sleep. Both made him anxious, ornery, and quick triggered.
Despite record numbers of captures and reassignments for the families who had thumbed their noses at the government mandate of only one child per couple, Rickshaw’s superiors put increasing pressure on him to stop the railroad.
The tribes in Texas cities were a threat too. The larger they grew, the more zealous their indoctrinated members became; the central government understood what they might attempt, the power they might seek to grab. It was no secret. But those tribes were easily a generation away from wreaking havoc beyond the wall. The railroad, however, was now. It was happening. It was giving lawbreakers an out, a sense of control, a way to free themselves of the constrictions to which they should relent.
Rickshaw was getting close. With each capture of a conductor, a porter, or a would-be passenger, he was piecing together how the celled structure of the railroad functioned. He believed he was at the precipice of a real breakthrough, a significant gain in intelligence. This could be the thing that relieved the constant pressure.
He leaned forward, the chair creaking its disapproval as the hydraulics pushed out air, and slid his fingers along the wall-projected display. The image zoomed in and Rickshaw touched one of the red dots.
The display changed and gave him detailed information about a team he had on the move from Charlottesville to Lynchburg, Virginia. They were the closest to The Greenbrier, an old resort and spa built in 1778.
They were motorized, which was better than the horseback teams in Texas, and patrolling the edge of the wall, so they could be there in hours. Rickshaw typed in another set of commands, and the display on the wall changed again. From this screen, he could access the government’s radio network. They had enough transceivers and working towers that he could either directly or indirectly communicate with many of his teams in the field.
He could dictate his orders to the central computer. The computer would find the latest route to the end user. It wasn’t perfect, but it did the trick most of the time. Though the farther the communication was intended to travel from the headquarters in Atlanta, the less likely it was to be virtually instantaneous. That was one drawback of the government’s insistence on keeping all of its tech consolidated in Atlanta.
“Computer,” said Rickshaw, “send a message to Population Guard team 304-681. This communication is classified.”
“Hello, Captain Greg Rickshaw,” said the computer. “I am standing by to receive and forward a classified message to Population Guard team 304-681.”
“Have the team go to The Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia,” he said. “I want recon. They are to observe, and if the specified area is occupied they are to question anyone there to determine there numbers and status.”
He waited for the computer to respond. It took a couple of seconds before it repeated his message verbatim.
“Is there anything else?” it asked.
“Yes,” said Rickshaw. “Alert the team to check the bunker.”
The computer acknowledged his request. It alerted him that the message was sent.
“I’ll notify you when the message is delivered, Captain Greg Rickshaw.”
Rickshaw exited the messenger application and entered the government search engine. He typed in his keywords, and the wall populated with detailed information about Greenbrier’s history.
In the late 1950s a one-hundred-twelve-thousand-square-foot bunker was built underneath part of the resort. It was maintained for thirty years as an emergency bunker with its own power plant, diesel fuel storage, and water supply. A call team of undercover workers employed by Forsythe Associates managed the facility in the event of a large-scale disaster. It was a secret until the news media revealed it in the last decade of the twentieth century. It became the stuff of legend and a popular tourist activity. The resort gave tours of the bunker until it shuttered a year after the Scourge. Rickshaw had once stayed there with his family. It was 2018 maybe. He couldn’t remember the exact year. He’d taken the tour and remembered joking about how, when the world ended, it would be the perfect place to hide. Apparently others agreed with him.
CHAPTER 6
APRIL 20, 2054, 4:05 PM
SCOURGE +21 YEARS, 7
MONTHS
BAIRD, TEXAS
Norma stepped onto the porch and carefully shut the screen door. She clung close to the front of the house, inching along its facade with her back to the wall. The shotgun was in both hands. Her right was underneath the butt, her left under the barrel.
Norma had picked the shotgun instead of a rifle for two reasons. One, the rack of a shotgun was as big a deterrent as a gun to the head. She liked the sound of it, the fear it instilled in would-be targets on the other end of it. And two, she imagined that any confrontation would be at close range. She didn’t have to be as accurate. And while she didn’t have as many rounds in the shotgun as she could carry in the rifle mag, the handgun tucked into her jeans would provide secondary defense if needed. Norma hoped she wouldn’t need it.
Her heart pounded so loudly in her ears she worried the intruders might hear it. She worked to keep her shallow, rapid breathing under control. Around the side of the house, men chattered. They spoke in low tones, almost whispers.
One careful step at a time, Norma inched her way toward the corner. Her feet slid along the pine slats of the porch so as not to induce a creak or groan from the aging boards.
A horse nickered. The barn door creaked. She drew the shotgun closer to her.
“Easy there,” said one voice. “It’s all good.”
The horse nickered again. The voice, a man’s, reassured the horse with shushing noises.
A second voice, deeper than the first. “Ain’t nothing of value in that building. Maybe a little bit of food. Nothing else worth taking.”
A third voice. “There’s some electronics in the barn. Radios and such. We could sell it. Maybe trade for something.”