by Dalton Wolf
“That didn’t really answer the question, Hef.”
“No, Calvin. I would rather be heading to your uncle’s fortress. I would rather be swimming on a beach in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. I would love to be flying my new air car over the Grand Canyon or Machu Picchu. There are a thousand other things I would rather be doing than what we are actually going to do. But this is the path you have chosen for us and I trust your judgment.”
“You have an air car?” Tripper interrupted.
“Is that an important issue right now, Tripper?”
“It’s an air car, when is that not worth talking about?”
“Yes, I have an air car. It is a box-like, oval base chamber that has blimp-like bags underneath filled with inert gasses. The seats are set down into the center of the oval to distribute the weight under the lift point. The gas is heated by glow plugs. When the gas reaches the right temperature, the car lifts into the air like a blimp. It gets additional lift as it moves through small wings on the sides and its forward momentum and steering are initiated by high-powered fans.”
“I hope you patented that.” Calvin said in wonder.
“Some parts I have, but most I have not.”
“Why?”
“Some things should be done for the good of all of Mankind. Unfortunately, I do not suppose it will matter much now.”
“You never know, Hef. Things might not be as bad as they seem.”
“I hope you are right, Calvin. I truly do. Perhaps we will actually get your doctor to his lab and he will fix this.”
“I’m hoping so, Buddy.”
“Then let us do this thing.”
“Right. We do his thing first and then we head south to hide for a while. Maybe we can eventually find a way to turn things around.”
“Ok, Calvin.”
“And then I get to fly that air car,” Tripper added, a feverish gleam in his eyes.
The others ignored him.
With a flick of Hephaestus’ massive fingers on the simple red toggle switch, the rumble of the double, fifteen-hundred horse power diesel engines growled to life as only two rumbling locomotive engines could. Felicia jumped up from her perch with a screech and stood looking at the area in surprise with a rosy blush coming to each cheek.
“Yes, some of these covers and flooring materials get up a good vibration when the engines begin turning. It is a nice little surprise if you have the wrong body parts resting on them,” Hephaestus commented with an evil grin.
Her blush increased and she nodded enthusiastically. “I’d tell the others, but I want to see their faces when it happens to them,” she added with a smirk.
“Hold on to something solid, my friends!” Hephaestus shouted and revved up the twin engines, slowly releasing the energy into the drive train through the custom Dragon-head throttle arm. “This deafening noise should not last long! I have put powered sound neutralizing technology inside the engine compartment!” he yelled over the mic. “In a few seconds the controller will activate and we will be able to hear again! The more power we pull from the engines, the harder the buffers should work!”
“Just remember I’m from Missouri!” Tripper complained.
“Why do you always doubt me?” Hef asked feigning hurt.
“Because you always—oh,” Tripper started to insult his friend, but then the sound-dampeners kicked in and the roar of the engines morphed into a much quieter and gentler, yet deep and persistent hum.
“Yeah. Um…good work,” Tripper corrected himself.
Watching their progress in a monitor in front of the control console, Hephaestus backed the train across the turntable and through the section of the building he had previously kept them from. Everyone pushed and shoved, trying to find a viewport from which to observe his ‘shop’, which resembled nothing less than a full factory floor with dozens of massive machines and conveyors for the manipulation and transport of metals. Scattered throughout were dozers for rolling metal, torch tables for cutting patterns, several overhead cranes, some with large chains wrapped around larger parts, ready to be taken across the massive chamber to be bent, welded or bolted to other parts. In the middle sat several very large robotic manipulating machines whose purpose none of them could discern. Along the far end of the massive chamber and halfway up the wall sat a glassed-in set of offices where Hephaestus clearly did most of his official engineering work. Computer screens and monitors flashed information at them from those offices, but otherwise the rest of the equipment was turned off. The shop was closed.
Finally tired of the narrowed field of view, Trip spun the lock on a navy-style hatch that opened onto a thin walkway on the outside of the train, stepping out with the others in tow. Hef punched an oversized, beige garage door opener and half of the fifty-foot end of the building ahead rolled behind the offices. Revving up the engines a little more pushed the train slowly backwards out of the Dungeon and onto a small turnaround track. There were no zombies anywhere to be seen, but the sound must surely be attracting everything for miles.
Hef made Gus, Joel and Scaggs and Felicia run out and manually switch the tracks while the others watched so that some people would know how to do it in case the situation came up at some point in the future. Everyone carried a weapon. Scaggs and Felicia each now had one of the mobile air guns while Boomer and Trip climbed into the turrets on the engine, and the rest carried M-16s. Hephaestus quickly punched the close button on the gigantic sliding door and took one long, affectionate look at his favorite home, a hint of sadness tugging at the corners of his dark eyes. As a reward for taking the dangerous work switching the tracks, Calvin let Joel and Gus take the first turn on the turrets with their new girlfriends.
“And for my next trick…” Hef said with a flourish, waving one bronze muscular arm at a console with a touch screen imbedded within. The blank screen flashed on and went from black to a picture of the surrounding area, the view quickly switching from ground view to an angle several hundred feet above. He had launched a cubed drone from a protective compartment on top of one of the rail cars.
“With this we can scout the tracks ahead,” he explained.
Trip studied the silver and black drone floating above the train. Cube-shaped, shorter than it was wide, it flew by the force of powerful fan motors mounted on each corner. The entire device was only about as large as Quinn’s massive chest and had five extremely lightweight but durable digital video cameras fixed within the cube, including two with infrared capabilities.
“This should keep us out of trouble,” he explained to the others.
Lucy immediately grabbed the laptop with the video feed, tapping buttons.
“Careful,” Hef warned her. “It is pre-programmed to follow this track. If you deviate too far from the programmed route, it will return home for reprogramming.”
“I can fix that,” Lucy assured him and set her fingers to tapping on the silent keyboard, entering new code into the simple program. Within five minutes she had re-written the program. “There. This should allow us to send a new search pattern without defaulting the core. I’ve stacked the control GUI over the GPS map and linked them.”
“You can do all of that in a few minutes?” asked Scaggs, brown eyes wide.
“It wasn’t really as hard as it sounds. I only had to add a few dozen new parameters. The hardest part is linking the touch points to both screens. See here, you just open the GUI over the map, put check points on the train map, and it will automatically fly to each one and return when finished if we don’t send more data. We can also change the path in route, which for some reason you couldn’t do before.”
“Excellent,” Hef replied. “The usual rate?” he asked.
“What? No. No charge. This one is for everything isn’t it?”
“Good point.”
“But I get the copyright and patents again,” she added stiffly. “Just in case…”
Lucy left unspoken the hope echoed within every single person present as she faded into a dark cor
ner of the engine room to work. Trying to keep her mind busy, she studied the track ahead through the drone video feeds as the light from the screen of her new laptop shrouded her face in a glowing halo that seemed to make it float without a body in an inky void.
The rest of the group, excepting Hef, Lucy, Boomer and Trip, stayed out on the walkway watching the city roll by. In the beginning Hef kept the train at ten mph so they could check out the areas of the city as they passed through. But this quickly became decidedly un-fun as all they seemed to see was the same sad desolation that was shown in all of those crappy movies. The rail yards lay abandoned, the great engines that had moved the country for so long sat immobile and driverless, already on their way to becoming worthless, rusty hulks. Nothing moved in the backyards of the dense housing projects or along the sidewalks of the city streets. Trails of smoke rolled freely skyward from several of the two dozen buildings they could see along the northern skyline.
Not one living person was spotted for the entire journey to the outskirts of the Metropolitan area. After clearing the major cities, Hef still kept the speed down under twenty miles per hour to properly break the engines in and to ensure that the drone could give them suitable warning of any dangers ahead.
“This is the maiden voyage. If something goes wrong, I’d rather be going slow enough to stop in time,” he explained.
Calvin felt it was just Hef being the proper engineer and sticking to his specs. Somehow the group couldn’t build up the enthusiasm one should feel knowing one was escaping a terrible fate. Most felt they were letting their city down even though their mission would, hopefully, save everyone. Still, after watching the empty hillsides, vacant streets and lonely homes pass by for a half hour, one-by-one the group began trickling back into the engine compartment and, after a pause at the heavy hatch for one final look, shuffling aimlessly to their designated cabins for some rest and introspection.
Three hours later, the train was moving freely through the flatlands of Kansas. If they built rails in straight lines, the train would have traveled more than fifty miles already, but they didn’t and it hadn’t. The Quarantine Wall still lay about sixty miles to the west, still nothing but a myth in their minds. Calvin and his friends sat in discussion with the soldiers, half of the group in the engine room, the rest sitting in the office just inside the second car, well within hearing range of the compartment. “Better slow it down…” Lucy announced from the corner. “There’s something up ahead.”
“What is it?” Calvin asked, from the adjacent console where he was trying to learn the controls while Hephaestus danced on the balls of his feet like a father teaching his son to drive the family car, trying not to point out the obvious, silently hoping he didn’t scratch the paint or kill them all.
“I don’t know. Something on the tracks ahead,” she clarified, sort of.
Hef slowed to fifteen mph, and then ten. The custom train slowed at a much faster rate than anyone thought possible, but it was still a train, big and heavy, taking a quarter-mile to drop to only a few mph so they could properly investigate the track ahead.
“What tracks ahead?” Tripper cried, using one of the forward-looking cameras.
The rails were laid next to the river with a hill on the north side, leaving no room on either side for road or trail. It was the perfect spot to trap a train and keep it from moving anywhere. At the floor of the valley before them should have been a bridge over an offshoot creek, currently raging from several days of consecutive rain, so much so that it could easily be called a river. Instead of a bridge, however, a large round dent in the side of the hill seventy feet across gazed back at the group, a raging river ran freely through its center. Though he didn’t want to be the first to voice his suspicions, Trip believed the tracks ahead had been destroyed.
“The tracks have been blown up,” Gus explained needlessly.
I knew it!, Trip’s mind screamed. It was the fucking government trying to stop us.
Gus sat on the top front turret with the clearest view, but no one really needed a good view once Scaggs transferred the drone feed onto the engine room monitors.
“Oh, that’s what I’m seeing,” Lucy mused. “There isn’t something on the tracks, there was a little bridge over a stream and it has been blown up. It looked different from a few thousand feet up.”
Captain Batmouche’ stepped forward from the second car to watch the monitor and spat out a curse. “Damnit! That’s a missile strike,” she said confidently.
Of course it is. That’s how the government stops trains, Trip didn’t say.
“Sure is, ma’am,” the sergeant agreed, moving up to leer over her shoulder.
“Shit,” Calvin hissed, having no doubt their assessment was correct.
“Now the military is trying to stop us?” he asked in frustration. “What did you do?” he demanded of Batmouche’ angrily.
“I did nothing,” she replied calmly.
Some shadow of honor in her eyes or perhaps the self-assured tenseness in her shoulders or the confident set of her jaw convinced him she was telling the truth. “Check it out,” he ordered.
The Captain nodded and marched to the radio in the next car, the sergeant in tow. Two minutes later the livid captain was shouting at some poor Lieutenant back at Ft. Riley. Not long after this heated discussion, she was transferred to Whiteman Air Force base to another captain. “What do you mean you were ordered to?” Batmouche’ shouted into the microphone. “I gave them the track coords, the times, hell, I gave them two hours to make sure something like this didn’t happen! They knew we were coming!”
“It was a miscommunication, Captain,” the other captain replied in a conciliatory manner, thankful he was on the other side of the radio from this pissed bitch.
“Who the fuck made the miscommunication and why?” she demanded.
“There was a train stolen from downtown yard in KC a half-hour after your team pulled out, Captain Batman. The—”
“—Batmouche’,” she interrupted.
“Yes, of course. My apologies, Captain Batmouche’. The Warthogs were supposed to be taking out the track after your team went through.”
“Yeah? What happened to the after part of those orders?”
“There were conflicting orders, Captain. It’s been sorted out.”
“No, it hasn’t been sorted out. If it had been sorted out, there would still be a fucking bridge ahead of us instead of a natural spring pouring from that hillside,” she spat into the mic. “I’m staring at a gaping fucking hole where my safe route for the package used to lay. Do you know how important this mission is, Captain?”
“Yes, ma’am. I do now. I’m sorry about that,” the truly apologetic sounding Air Force Captain murmured quietly. “But it’s not our fault here. Someone reported an escape attempt from inside and before the spotters heard from up top that the shiny blue train was yours, you’d been tagged as the breakout risk and the Warthogs had already been there and gone. Look, it won’t happen again.”
“Well yippety fucking do!” the Captain shrieked. “Who’s going to build me a new goddamn bridge?”
The sergeant harrumphed into her ear. Eyes shooting lasers at first, quickly softened and she sighed and set the noncom a nod.
“I’m sorry, Captain Pendleton,” she quickly amended her speech. “Look, I’m sure this isn’t your fault. I’m just a little pissed off here. I was almost home after a cluster-fuck of a mission. Now I have to backtrack through unfamiliar territory without recon.”
“I’m glad they didn’t decide we needed to be stopped permanently,” Trip commented over the mic with a grimace.
The captain looked at him and nodded agreement, belatedly informing Trip that Calvin had given the soldiers earbuds for their com system.
Thanks for the heads up, Buddy, he thought sourly. His thoughts soured further when Calvin shot him an evil grin and rubbed his hands together like he was Rumplestiltskin about to collect on his bet. “By the way, everyone please welcome the
military to our communication channel.” He mumbled lightly into the mic on his cheek. He then motioned the others to the corner of the meeting room away from the door through which they had been listening. He motioned for Athena to keep listening to the rest of the captain’s conversation while the others turned off their mics.
“What do we do, Hef?” he asked.
“The captain has it right. We have to backtrack. There are too many hills out there to do anything else and this track stays on the other side of the river from the highway for a very long time. We have to go back,” he stated with a cold dread. No one wanted to go back. Forward was freedom…or at the very least the illusion of freedom.
“Tsk. See, if we had a boat, we could just take the river,” Lucy tsked at them from her shadow with a delayed grin that glowed like the crescent moon in the laptop light.
Tripper laughed and Hef smiled. Calvin, however, was weighing options…option. Not really much to weigh; they only seemed to have one. “Let’s hope there’s still a track behind us,” he declared what they were all undoubtedly thinking.
“It should be ok,” the Captain informed them casually. “They have no problem with us using the rail if we’re not trying to leave. But they have to keep the Quarantine.”
“If I remember correctly,” Hephaestus mumbled, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “There is another switch a few miles back. I am not sure how far south that track goes before we reach another northern switch, though. But there is one that travels north to join this one just before Manhattan. We can go south until we meet that one or a link to it. It should not be too difficult to find on our map, but this will delay our arrival for several more hours.”
“How long to turn this thing around?” Calvin asked, knowing that just ‘turning it around’ wasn’t how it was done.
“I need someone in the caboose watching the rails,” Hef replied. “And Lucy, you should fly the drone back and make sure the track is still intact and then follow the path along that southern route.”
“Boomer, get to caboose and keep a sharp eye out,” Calvin ordered.