Freedom Express

by Maloney, Mack;

  “Rico, take a look at them ledges,” Tony Three said, thinking he’d found the solution to his fuel problem. “How about we put some big reflectors up there? That way, we can cut down on using some of the lights, and maybe the generators won’t go dry on us.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Rico said, shading his eyes to view the cliffs. “If we can get a good f-stop reading, and protect against camera flash, it should work, That is, if we got enough sun when the train finally gets here. If not, we’ll have to stop down a couple notches and throw on the auxiliary lights.”

  Tony Three spat in disgust. “That asshole Devillian will just have to live with it,” he said. “Fucking jerk that he is. We come to make porn flicks, and he has us in the middle of Gone with the fucking Wind.”

  Chapter 42

  THE MEXICAN BANDIT NICKNAMED Sin Dientes—literally “No Teeth”—couldn’t believe his good fortune.

  In the sack on his back there was more gold than he had seen in his life—fifty pounds, in coins and in chips. Best of all, most of it belonged to him.

  All he had to do was attack a train.

  The money—as well as his orders—had come straight from Devillian himself. The cross-eyed terrorist had hired Sin Dientes and the hundred-man bandit gang that bore his name to set up an ambush in the vicinity of Arroyo Honda, the pass that ran through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near the Rio Grande Gorge, approximately thirty miles west of Eagle Rock. Train tracks passed hard by the gorge itself, and a dense forest bordered the other side of the railway bed.

  Their orders said that the Freedom Express would soon be passing through and Sin Dientes should attack it.

  “But do not disable it or blow up the tracks,” Devillian had told him. “Or I will personally make you bleed to death. Kill as many men on board as you can, but let the survivors continue on their way.”

  Sin Dientes did not question the strange orders, nor the fact that Devillian had provided him with several video cameras on which to record the bloody action. The leader of the Burning Cross had signed up the bandit gang just a week before, and already Sin Dientes knew the penalty for challenging the man’s slightest whim. If Devillian wanted the bandit gang to simply sting the train, then Sin Dientes and his men would do just that.

  It had been two days since the bumpy helicopter ride from Sin Dientes’ hideout near Palomas, Mexico to the place called Arroyo Honda.

  Devillian had provided ten big Chinook helicopters for the airlift, as well as new rifles and plenty of ammunition for his men. However, the pilots of the choppers—Roman Empire gangsters who seemed bewildered that they would be making such a flight—got lost several times on the way. What was worse, the holds on their helicopters were already filled with big black boxes and huge lights and other strange things, so much so that No Teeth and his men could barely squeeze aboard. Finally, Devillian had to dispatch two F-4’s to guide the dangerously overloaded Chinooks to the correct coordinate. After all that, unloading the Sin Dientes gang and their meager equipment proved easy.

  No Teeth carried the gold himself. There was not one of his men that he could completely trust, and just watching over the treasure would be as hard as attacking the train itself. Still, each man knew he was in for at least a quarter of a pound of the stuff, and that was more than most of them had been able to rob and/or steal in the past three years. They also knew that if they failed, Devillian would send the Skinheads to hunt them down—and there was no fate worse than that. In fact, they had spotted at least three Skinhead F-4’s flying over their position just in the past few hours alone, and even a cutthroat like No Teeth got nervous with people like the Skinheads circling above him, like so many vultures waiting to rip into the carcass of some still-squirming prey.

  No Teeth had taken a full day to examine the terrain around Arroyo Honda, starting soon after the Chinooks had departed for the Grand Canyon. He found the place exactly as Devillian had described it—a long sloping hill next to the Rio Grande Gorge that the train would have to slow down and climb before proceeding over a bridge that spanned the Rio itself.

  The bandit leader finally decided to position his men in clumps of twos and threes along the edge of the thick forest that skirted the railway bed. Most of the men were equipped with either a brand new AK-47 assault rifle or an M-16 with an M203 grenade launcher attached. A half dozen were manning flamethrowers, and three would be shooting the videotape. There would be no use of heavier weapons, and the men launching the grenades were ordered not to shoot at the wheels of the railway cars, although most of these were thought to be protected with armor-plating anyway.

  Once his men were dug in and the ambush was set, No Teeth sat and counted his gold again. Around midnight, he’d heard from Devillian’s communications officers that the train was expected to pass through Arroyo Honda sometime before dusk the next evening.

  That gave No Teeth enough time to count his gold at least ten more times.

  Chapter 43

  La Casa de las Estrellas

  “WHEN IS IT MY turn, boss?”

  Studs Mallox spun around and confronted the whining man.

  “You ain’t going to get a turn, you pansie,” he told the transgressor, a less-than-dedicated Skinhead named Ant. “We decided to cut you out.”

  Mallox turned back to the matter at hand. He was sitting in his barracks headquarters, it being a heavily camouflaged building on the far end of the fortress mesa. Sixteen of his men were there; two others had pulled night duty flying over the train.

  The entertainment for the evening was a gang bang of two of Devillian’s pretty young love slaves. The girls were already there—tied up and ready to be violated. They’d been properly pumped full of speed and crack and were now unwittingly titillating the Skinheads with their authentic whimpering. Mallox had just drawn lots for the order of penetration when one of his group—the man named Ant—realized he was being left out.

  “But what the hell did I do to deserve this?” Ant foolishly demanded of Mallox.

  The evil squadron commander smiled and took a toke of crack. “You just fucked up one too many times, Ant,” he said. “We don’t want a candy-ass like you in here anymore.”

  “That’s right!” one of the other ’Heads screamed.

  “Fairy!” yelled another.

  “Pansie!”

  “You prissy fuck!”

  Ant started sweating at this point—and with good reason. After belonging to the Skinhead squadron for nearly a year, he knew that deep down the ’Heads were really just a bunch of cowards—dangerous cowards. They were only brave when they were together and the odds were overwhelmingly in their favor. It was a total group-think situation with them. When frustration set in—like of late after having spent the last two days doing little more than flying over that stupid fucking train and bombing railroad tracks—their release valve was to gang up on one member, usually with fatal results.

  And they had just picked Ant on which to work out their infantile unfulfillments.

  “Why me, Studs?” he asked in a jittery voice. “I’ve been doing OK.”

  Mallox laughed. “You’re right, Ant, you have been doing OK,” he replied. “But I guess the guys and me just don’t like you anymore.”

  “What are you going to do to me, Studs?” Ant foolishly asked.

  “Stomp him!” someone yelled.

  “Yeah! Stomp the shit out of him!”

  Suddenly the room was filled with the bloodcurdling cries of “Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!”

  Mallox smiled again as the terrified Ant backed into a corner of the barracks.

  “The jury has spoken, Ant,” he said, standing over the cowering man. “See you in hell.”

  With that, Mallox delivered a mighty blow to Ant’s forehead, cracking the man’s skull with his heavy hobnail boot. Ant reeled backward, hit the wall and fell facedown on the barracks floor.

  In an instant, the rest of the Skinheads rushed toward his twitching body and began viciously kicking him with their boot
s, all the while screaming: “Stomp him! Stomp him!”

  It took the screaming Ant three long minutes to die.

  Mallox considered it a stroke of genius to have the two love slaves clean up the blood and waste and cranial matter that had once been Ant.

  Killing their colleague was just the tonic the ’Heads needed to keep their edge. Fucking the girls after they’d been covered in blood would serve to raise their killing lust even higher.

  But even Mallox had his limits; he didn’t want to ravage the women with a stiff in the room. So, after dutifully taking photos of the body to give to Devillian later, Mallox had the corpse wrapped in a plastic sheet and tied with twine.

  Then he selected a ’Head named White Smoke to help him carry the body outside and to the edge of the mesa, where they would unceremoniously dump it over.

  “Don’t do a thing until I get back,” he told his drooling legion while he roughly fondled one of the terrified girls before heading out the door with White Smoke. “Remember, I’m always the first one in and the last one out.”

  It was a fairly cool, moonlit night.

  Mallox had White Smoke do all of the heavy lifting of course, leaving the man to drag Ant’s body alone while he strolled ahead to the dumping spot, admiring the broad expanse of stars above him.

  Studs was proud of the Skinheads’ little corner of the fortress, it being well away from the other Burning Cross units. At his insistence, Devillian had even built a separate runway and parking strip for the ’Heads’ Phantom jets. Knowing the Skinheads’ reputation as human vomit was well-deserved, the rest of the Burning Cross members were more than happy with the mesa-top’s segregated living arrangements.

  Mallox reached the edge of the mesa and waited impatiently as White Smoke dragged the damp corpse across the landing strip and passed the row of F-4’s.

  Finally he reached the place where the ’Heads dumped all of their snuffs.

  “Must be getting pretty crowded down there,” White Smoke said, peering over the mesa to the ravine below. “Kind of smelly, too.”

  “Are you kidding?” Mallox told him. “Those bodies don’t stay down there very long. Either some big cat eats ’em up or the bugs get them. You’re history in a matter of days.”

  “What a way to go,” White Smoke replied.

  Mallox resisted the temptation to push the man over the side, just for the hell of it. He would have done it—he was in that kind of a mood—but at the same time he knew it was foolish to lose a perfectly adequate pilot.

  “C’mon, let’s get this over with,” Mallox told the man. “We got some young pussy waiting for us back there.”

  White Smoke was about to lift the body up and over some edge rocks when suddenly both men heard a strange noise—kind of a whoosh-thump!

  It was dark, and at first they could not see what had caused the odd sound.

  “What the fuck was that?” Mallox asked, instinctively reaching for his sidearm.

  Suddenly White Smoke grabbed hold of his arm. “Jessuz, Studs—look!”

  Mallox looked down at the corpse and was astonished to see an arrow was now embedded in its throat.

  “Where the fuck did that come from?” White Smoke asked.

  An instant later, they heard the noise again.

  Whoosh-thump!

  This time, they looked down to see another arrow had pierced the body bag in the stomach region.

  “Shit, Studs, those stories are true!”

  Even a big, bad brave guy like Studs was nervous now. The Burning Cross fortress had been rife with rumors that some kind of a ghost was running around on top of the mesa, fucking with the equipment, starting little fires and scaring the shit out of the midnight-to-dawn guards. About a half dozen regular Burning Cross soldiers had sworn they’d seen the spirit in the past few days, but the Skinheads had always just attributed the sightings to the fact that the rest of the soldiers on top of the mesa were just pansie-asses.

  Until now, that was.

  “Shut up,” Mallox told White Smoke, trying to calm his own nerves by talking brave. “There’s nothing up here.”

  Whoosh-thump!

  Mallox spun around to see the shaft of a third arrow suddenly embedded in White Smoke’s throat.

  Neither of them could believe it. There was no blood—yet. But White Smoke’s face had drained completely of color in a half-second.

  “Is it bad?” he gurgled to Mallox before tumbling backward.

  Studs began to panic. Instantly he kicked White Smoke’s still-twitching form over the side of the mesa, pushing over Ant’s stiffening corpse for good measure. Then he hit the ground and covered his head with his hands, petrified that he would be on the receiving end of the next deadly arrow.

  What seemed to Studs like an hour passed—it was really only a few seconds—before he became aware of a figure standing over him. Too terrified to even open his eyes and look up, he began crying, certain that a painful death awaited him. In a second, his mind flashed over the scores of people he had killed. Bloody and decaying faces, they were all laughing at him.

  He felt the cold edge of an extremely sharp knife slowly slide under his throat. Every time he would whimper, the knife would slice a little deeper into his Adam’s apple. Finally he heard someone say to him: “Get up.”

  Studs slowly rolled over, his eyes still closed and crying. One mighty hand lifted him up to his feet, the knife at his throat never moving an iota.

  Finally, he had no choice. He opened his eyes and found himself staring into those of an Indian.

  Chapter 44

  HAWK HUNTER ONLY STOPPED writing long enough to splash a handful of cold water onto his face.

  He could not even smell the incense now; in fact, the cabin didn’t even look that smoky anymore. However, Diamond still looked beautiful—even more so.

  Her beauty was the only bright spot in his increasingly darkened consciousness. His prediction that Devillian was very much alive and preparing for battle had proved all too true. He had just gotten a report from Jones that Burning Cross fighter-bombers had destroyed all the track junctions to the north and south of them, meaning that if the train was to keep moving, it could only move on tracks Devillian deigned to keep open for it.

  Plus, the madman’s recon planes were now keeping the train under hourly surveillance.

  But like buzzards, Hunter knew they would not attack the train—and for the moment, he would not attack them.

  He had picked up pen and paper about three hours before and, for the first hour, drew nothing but squares and triangles. By letting his hand move where it wanted, his sheets of paper would quickly become filled with intricate patterns using only those two shapes: squares inside of the squares, triangles within triangles. Soon, he began drawing the triangles inside of squares and vice versa. Then hundreds of tiny triangles inside of one huge square.

  He knew what an unbeliever would call it: automatic writing. The supposed written link with the spirit world. But Hunter knew better. The seemingly endless drawing actually had a meaning, one connected to the flow of information from his psyche. His continual mining of this strange wellspring had simply taken on another manifestation.

  At the beginning of the third hour, he began writing down the phrases that were now coming to him with renewed regularity.

  When you traverse mountains, forests, steep defiles or any route difficult to travel, this is called bad ground.

  When the way is narrow and a small enemy force can strike at you even though your numbers are greater, this is called surrounded ground.

  When you will survive if you fight quickly and perish if you do not, this is called dying ground.

  By the fourth hour, his hand was stiff and getting numb from writing. But he knew the words of wisdom were just a trigger. They were telling him of things to come. He was certain they would be attacked soon.

  “Diamond?” he called out into the smoky room. “Please ask Fitz to come here.”

  Chapter 45

>   Over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains

  THE SKINHEAD PILOT KNOWN as Duzz checked the time, then called back to the mesa.

  “This is Black Flight Two with the quarterly time report,” he told the Burning Cross communications officer on the other end of the radio. “The train is still moving very slowly. I estimate no more than ten to twelve miles per hour. It is presently climbing an incline, approximately twenty miles west of Arroyo Honda, and approaching the Rio Grande Gorge, which is marked at Red Area Two on my map. You got all that?”

  “Affirmative” came the reply. “Any weapons display?”

  “No” was the reply from Duzz.

  “Any warning tones or radar emissions?”

  “No.”

  “Any aircraft launched from the train?”

  “No.”

  “Roger Black Flight Two, stay on station…. Out.”

  Duzz clicked off his radio and put the F-4 into yet another of the endless sweeping orbits needed to keep the train in sight.

  “This is a drag,” he whispered. “A real fucking drag.”

  Duzz was more on edge than usual. This was the day after a strange night on the mesa. First of all, the anticipated gang bang never happened because Studs never returned from getting rid of Ant’s stompified body. White Smoke never reappeared either—but that made little difference to ’Heads waiting to pounce on their intended female victims. Studs’ last word to them was not to commence until he got back. When he didn’t, most of the ’Heads simply passed out or eventually went to sleep.

  They awoke to find Studs had still not turned up, but this wasn’t all that unusual. Their leader had been summoned to Devillian’s mansion at odd hours before, and Studs was not the type to send a note back to his worried brood.

  Still, it was peculiar that the man still hadn’t appeared by the time Duzz lifted off just after two in the afternoon. When he flew out over the mesa, he saw the search parties were just starting to organize on the ground below.