by Wilson, Tia
The engine let out a roar as he accelerated and drew up beside the train again. He reached out and his hand grabbed the railing and held on tight. Vibrations ran though his arm from the train. He glanced ahead and then swung his leg over the bike and grabbed with his other hand for the railing. Tom hung from the railing as his feet scrabbled for a foothold. His bike careened away from the train and hit a mud flat and flipped end over end before coming to a stop. Toms shoulders and arms ached as he hung on. His hands began to slip and his eyes were wide as he began to slip off. His right foot found a foot hold and he pushed himself up and over the railing. He lay on the floor of the small viewing platform breathing hard. You were nearly finished before you even started, he thought to himself.
Tom peered in the window into the rear carriage. It was empty. He slid the door open a crack and went inside. Tom stayed crouched and listened. The roar of the train was all he could hear. Maybe his intel had been right and the only other people on the train would be a lone guard with the sleepers. Tom didn’t believe that he was going to get that lucky. He kept low and moved to the end of the carriage and poked his head out to see into the next one. It was empty as well. This is all seeming too easy, he thought to himself and I don’t like it.
He entered the next carriage and slid the door shut. He smelt the other occupant nearly immediately. It was one of Tulimak's augmented assassins with the metal teeth. Tom could smell the metallic twang of the composite biting plate these particular assassins favoured. He stood up, no point in hiding now.
A man stood up from a seat at the end of the carriage. He had been hunkered down, waiting for Toms arrival. He wore a dark suit and as he watched Tom he took his bright red tie off and wrapped it around the knuckles of his right hand. The suited man was twice the size of Tom, pumped up from a course of steroids and gene tweaking by Doctor Clavin.
“Come on freak, time for a lesson,” the man said gesturing for Tom to approach.
Tom sniffed the air again and he could sense it, the train was studded with obsidian. He suspected it was in the walls and floor. If he tried to shift now it could tear him apart.
The suited man smiled and said, “Clever boy. I was hoping to see you turn yourself inside out. Looks like I get to dispose of you the old fashioned way,” and punched his hand into his open palm.
Tom took a step forward and then he charged at the suited man. The first punch whizzed by Toms head as he ducked out of the way and kicked at the mans knee in one smooth movement. The suited man went down on one knee and Tom punched with all his force into the mans exposed neck. The man let out a guttural yell and grabbed Tom by his kevlar jacket. The suited man lifted Tom into the air and smashed him into the ceiling. Plastic shards from a light fell and clattered across the floor. The wind was knocked out of Tom as he was crushed against the metal ceiling. He could feel his ribs protest in pain from the pressure as the man held him aloft and tried to crush the air out of him.
Tom flicked his wrist and the hidden blade flipped out from its housing. He stabbed downwards and cut a shallow gash across the other mans face. This seemed to anger him even more. He lowered Tom like a rag doll and slammed him against the ceiling again with a smash. Tom swung the blade again and the man dodged it. Tom plunged his hand down and with a liquid squelch the blade slid into the mans eye socket. His arms buckled and Tom fell on top of him and they fell backwards into the aisle.
The breath was knocked out of Tom and he scrambled to get away to try to catch a breather. He rolled back away from the man and wiped the sweat out of his eyes as he prepared to fight again. The suited man didn’t move. Tom stood up and saw that his blade had snapped off and it was buried up to the hilt in the mans eye socket. A trail of blood ran from it and pooled on the floor underneath him. That’s one less augmented freak, Tom thought to himself, as he threw the knife housing from his wrist onto the floor.
He crossed the back of the chairs never taking his eyes off the corpse on the floor. You can never be too careful with these freaks, he thought as he passed him. Tom knelt at the end of the carriage and looked through the window into the next one, it looked empty. Tom moved through the next three carriages at speed. Each one was empty and stunk of disinfectant. He got to the last carriage and peered through the dirt grimed window. The carriage was lit by a bulb that cast a dark blue hue. In the centre of the carriage was a steel box strapped to the floor with ropes attached to loops in the floor. The whole carriage was empty except for the box.
Tom opened the door half expecting an alarm to sound as soon as he entered. Nothing happened. He stepped inside and closed the door and leaned against it. The door at the other end was bolted and a heavy padlock hung from it. He allowed himself a moment to relax and then approached the box. He could smell the rich aroma of forest earth as he got near to it. It had to be a resting place for a shifter, now he was about to find out who. There was something else he could smell, something familiar and long forgotten.
Tom tested the lid of the box and it moved under his touch. He lifted up a corner and prepared to open it. He was going to hold onto the lid and keep it between him and what ever was hibernating in the box, shifters could be extremely viscous when disturbed, even to their own kind. Tom pulled the wooden lid off and backed away into the corner of the compartment. He looked at the loose packed soil and it began to stir as the inhabitant began to wake. He had seen a shifter wake up from a ten year sleep and go into a rage. He had to be held down by three other shifters to get him under control. Disturbing a shifter before it was his time to leave hibernation could be disastrous. I don’t have time to worry about that now, he thought, we need the person in this box now more than ever.
The soil began to shift and a thin arm poked though as clumps of the damp soil fell through. It was the delicate and fine boned arm of a woman. Toms stomach clenched in a tight knot as he watched, his mouth hanging agape. A face broke through the soil as the inhabitant began to rise. Dirt fell away from the woman to reveal long silvery hair, high cheekbones and skin as pale as milk.
No it can’t be, Tom thought to himself, as she began to rise and turn in his direction. She stepped out of the box with stiff legs. A long white dress clung to her body, streaked in mud and dirt and showing off her ample chest. In her right arm slept a small baby who was sleeping peacefully against his mothers soft chest. Toms eyes were wide as he watched the women sniff the air around her. She reached up to her face and with her thin bony finger scraped away the mud covering her eyes. Her eyes blinked several times as they adjusted to the blue light of the room. She turned towards Tom and looked at him with her large salmon pink eyes.
“I knew it would be you,” Oishin said taking a step towards Tom. “I always knew you would come back for me. Don’t worry he is not yours,” she said clutching the baby tight against her body. “We can be together again, finally after all these years,” she said as she walked towards him.
Tom backed away not believing who was before him, his mouth hung agape as Oishin approached him and reached out with a pale dirt flecked hand. “It can’t be,” he stuttered as he backed up against the wall. “I gave up on you a long time ago,” he said his eyes wide with disbelief.
“We can be together again,” Oishin said as her cool fingers brushed Toms cheek.He did everything he could not to recoil in horror from her. She was a ghost from his long dead past, a memory that was now standing in front of him as if the over hundred years absence had never happened.
“How is this possible. I heard you were dead,” Tom said.
“An exaggeration no doubt. Maybe from someone that wished I were. I wished I was dead those first few years when we were apart. It pained me to think of you scouring Ireland trying to find me,” Oishin said in her soft voice. The same voice that had made Tom almost fall in love with her on the first meeting. This time it left him cold, a whisper from the depths of a tomb.
“I searched for you for a decade,” Tom said feeling the old bitterness towards her rise again.
&nb
sp; “I thought it,” she said, not getting to finish her sentence when the door at the end of the carriage opened.
A man with a thick neck covered in tattoos stepped into the carriage and grabbed a gun from his holster. Tom turned and ran towards the man, fast and low. The man fired two bullets as loud as firecrackers in the confined space, and the bullets ripped into Toms shoulder and flank as he tackled the man. Two more shots fired in rapid succession. Both embedding into the ceiling with a metallic clang. Tom grabbed the large mans arms and twisted his wrist until he dropped it. The man reached for a knife in his boot with his free hand and Tom snapped his wrist and arced back as the man lunged with the serrated blade.
The large mans damaged hand hung by his side and his whole face tensed and went the colour of a roasted ham. The cords in his neck stiffened as his eyes bulged in pain. He darted forward again with the blade, quick for a man his size. The blade swished past Toms face in a silvery blur. Blood ran down Toms side from the bullet wounds and he didn’t notice it. His attention was fixed on the tip of the blade, waiting for the man to lunge again so he could swipe down and snap his wrist. The blade swung back and forth glinting from the over head lights.
The man let out a roar and dropped the knife clattering to the floor. Oishin was on his back and had sunk her teeth deep into his neck. Blood bubbled out from her mouth and the man staggered back all strength going from his legs because of the surprise attack. Tom stepped back and watched Oishin hold on tight, her legs like wiry steel wrapped around the mans waist as he swatted her like a fly. Oishin wrenched her head back and ripped a strip of flesh off as the blood arched out from the wound and sprayed all over the ceiling. The mans knees buckled and he fell face forward with a crash. Blood bubbled from his mouth as his eyes flickered and then shut for the last time.
Oishin climbed off the mans back and stood up wiping the blood from her mouth. She smiled at Tom. Her teeth covered in a red foam. “You’re getting slow in your old age,” Oishin said. She sauntered over to the soil filled container and looked in at the sleeping baby and smiled.
“You haven’t changed,” Tom said, as images of their shared past flooded his mind.
“The Tom I once knew would not have let that beast of a man get the drop on us like that. I think it’s you that’s changed. Have you been slumming it with the humans for too long? You know how bad an influence they can be on us shifters,” She said approaching him.
She stood close to Tom and the smell of cold earth and fresh blood filled his nose. Oishin leaned in to him and sniffed deeply. “I can smell them off you. I can practically smell how weak and feeble they are. Always have been and always will be,” she said laughing.
“Times have changed Oishin. We need to get moving,” Tom said checking his watch. “There’s a drop off point coming up in five minutes. We bail and then I have orders to take you to Twin Rock.”
“Twin Rock,” Oishin said elongating the words as if she was tasting them and wanted to savour how they felt in her mouth. “Let me guess the clan finally made the utopia you have all been dreaming about for centuries. Good for you. I want no part of any shifter society after what they did to me.”
“The clan obviously needs you, otherwise they wouldn’t have sent me to get you. Do you know where this train is going?”
Oishin shook her head.
“Straight into white bear clan territory. All we know is they have been tracking down ancients from both clans and taking them out of deep hibernation. You would have woken up in enemy territory without a hope if it wasn’t for our clan. If they weren’t sorry for past transgressions then they would have sat on the intel and let you fall into the white bears control,” Tom said.
Oishin looked at him as if she was appraising him and said, “I’m sure they have changed.”
Tom grabbed the dead man by his legs and dragged him across to block the door of the carriage. “Lets get to the back of the train,” he said.
They left the cabin and started to make their way to the back of the train. Tom left a trail of blood as they made their way. The wound in his flank was a flesh wound and was beginning to heal, the bullet in his shoulder was embedded inside him and would need to be removed before he could heal properly. As they passed the first man that Tom had killed Oishin glanced back at him and said, “I see you are just as capable as you where back then. I don’t think much has changed since I was gone.”
Tom looked at her without answering. Now is not the time to get into this with her Tom thought as he stepped over the body. In the last carriage of the train Tom checked his watch.
“In five minutes the train slows down at a junction at the end of a bridge. There should be a car waiting for us under the bridge,” Tom said.
Oishin sat down and looked out at the wide open plains outside the windows. “Can you imagine running side by side across that vast and unknowable landscape,” she said with a sigh, “It would be like old times. You remember those days don’t you? When we were both in love and you couldn’t tell where one part of your being ended and the others started. Those were some beautiful times,” Oishin said in a soft voice her eyes half closed as if she could see images dancing on her eyelids. She looked over at him and gave him a half smile with her eyes half closed as if she was intoxicated on memories of the past. “We could make new memories,” she said in a whisper.
There was a time when this would of worked on Tom, that time was long gone. The distance of time and the revelations that he had discovered about Oishin in the years when he tried to find her had warped his opinion of her. In the beginning he would of done anything for her, all in the pursuit of purely being in close proximity to her. Being with Oishin was an exhilarating experience and when he was in the midst of it she commanded full power over his body and mind. She was the first shifter he ever loved and when he eventually found out about her digressions and betrayals he came close to hibernating long term and taking the route that many shifters in the past had used to vanquish their pain. Feeling every moment of the pain made him stronger and for that he could thank her for. She holds no power over me now Tom thought to himself.
“Your thinking of her right now, aren't you?” Oishin said not looking at Tom.
“Who?” Tom said.
“I know you well enough. I can see you are with someone,” Oishin said standing up and leaning against the door out of the carriage. “Who is she?” she asked in a teasing whisper.
“Now is not the time,” Tom said sounding more defensive than he wanted to.
“Interesting,” Oishin said as a wicked smile curled the corners of her lips.
She’s loving this, she still likes to see me squirm Tom thought as he checked his watch again.
“You seem awfully defensive. Did Tom go and fall in love with someone from the white bear clan. Is that the reason you are bristling. Is it because the elders don’t condone what you are doing?” she said looking at him for any kind of reaction.
“We are two minutes from the bridge,” Tom said not engaging her.
“You will only have your heart broken mixing up with the other side, you know they are no better than wild animals. No good can,” and she paused mid sentence her smile widening. “It’s a human, isn’t it.”
Toms shoulders stiffened and he checked his watch again.
Oishin laughed and then kissed the head of her sleeping baby and whispered to him, “Tom has only gone and fallen for a human. How times have changed my son. A once strong and noble shifter who would sooner kill a human than bed down with one is now going all gooey on the inside for one of those pathetic creatures.”
“You don’t know what you are talking about,” Tom said through gritted teeth.
“Don’t play this game with me Tom. I know you better than yourself. Remember I was there during that little rampage you went on in Copenhagen. I had to clean up the mess you caused and I couldn’t return to my beloved city for nearly eighty years because of you,” Oishin said.
She’s loving this Tom
thought as he looked at her and felt nothing but coldness and a burning hate for her. He was different back then and his mistakes of the past deserved to stay there.
“I’ve changed Oishin. I’m a different man now,” he said.
“The type of man that wipes out a whole family can never change. I’ve been around a lot longer than you Tom and you are fooling yourself if you think that bear is not slumbering within you. All he needs is the right conditions and the old Tom, the one I knew and loved back then will rise to the surface,” Oishin said in a soothing voice.
The train carriage jerked as it entered a long slow curve towards the bridge ahead. Tom opened the rear door and stood out on the platform and felt the cold slap of the wind against his face. His head felt like it was filled with crunching static and he squeezed his eyes shut.
Only a few mores hours of her company and then she is the elders problem Tom thought to himself. Stay calm and hold it together until then.
Oishin stepped out onto the platform and gave him a smile. “How did this change come about?” she asked.
“Elder Silas helped me. Lets drop it for now. When the train slows down we have a couple of seconds to jump off. The car should be parked behind that first series of concrete struts,” he said pointing at the bridge ahead.
They stood in silence as the train neared the bridge and as soon as it began to slow Tom nodded at Oishin and then jumped off. He hit the gravel at the side of the tracks and rolled into the tall grass growing by the side. He got up and dusted himself off. Oishin was still standing on the platform and for a second Tom thought she was going to stay on the train. She leapt from the platform and landed perfectly and then jogged the last few steps to Tom.
She smiled at Tom and said, “One of the advantages of being older. I remember a time when you would of made a jump like that look a hell of a lot more graceful. You must be spending too much time around the humans it’s making you soft.”