deserters said. That was why they had scooped up the hapless travelers, and carefully picked only the ones who looked fit for physical labor. They couldn’t go anywhere until they fixed a break in the line.
She wished she’d been able to string them along longer, pump even more information out of them. Oh, well. If wishes were wings, she’d be circling over the train right this instant, scoping things out like a falcon looking to stoop down and score.
There’d been no way. Young Matt had been just about to lose it and go for the cheese right then and there. And Krysty wouldn’t submit to that, vengeance or no vengeance.
An owl hooted somewhere out in the night, beyond the busted-out front window. The wind had come up again, temporarily scouring out the stale death smell and replacing it, temporarily, with the astringent odors of dust and dry vegetation. She finished her meal without having tasted a scrap of it, and set down her fork.
She would find the train and do what she had to do. If the train was gone, mebbe the marauders would have left some wags behind. If not…
She shrugged. She could come up with possible bad outcomes from now until dawn, from now until she died of old age, for that matter. Not one of them would make her road any shorter or easier to walk.
She sighed, stood, wiped the soles of her boots carefully on an unbloodied area of Ben’s blouse to make sure the soles weren’t wet and slick from blood. She was going to have to drag the corpses outside. They were going to draw scavengers from miles around. She couldn’t lock the diner, with the windows gone and all, but there was no point inviting hungry predators inside.
If the chase went on long, she’d need all the barter goods she could find. Krysty knelt and began to rifle through Ben’s effects for items of value.
Chapter Four
“Ah,” the General said in satisfaction, leaning back in a red plush chair and sipping from a goblet of brandy. “It’s definitely a rare treat to encounter a man of your culture out here in the wasteland, Doctor Tanner.”
Doc started to reply around a mouthful of apple and cinnamon omelet and toast that he would have found ambrosial had it been served to him back in his very own long-lost house in nineteenth-century Vermont by the beloved and equally lost hand of his wife Emily. Instead it had been dished out by the hand of a solemn stone-faced servant from a brass chafing dish heated by a little cup of clear, odorless, smokeless burning fuel.
Realizing that standard Deathlands etiquette would hardly answer these circumstances, Doc hurriedly finished chewing and swallowed, not without regret for the unseemly haste. Covering his mouth, just for security’s sake, by pretending to dab it clean with a spotless white-linen napkin, he nodded and replied. “I might say the same, General. I might well indeed.”
They sat in oak-paneled and comfort-conditioned splendor, two men of knowledge at ease with one each other and their world, taking their breakfast and engaging in the art of conversation. Even for a man of Theophilus Tanner’s unique experience, it was one of the most—what was that eminently useful modern word?—surreal moments of them all.
The General—that was how he had been introduced and the only way Doc had heard him spoken of—was a short burly man with buzzed grizzled hair and features that might have been carved from granite by a skilled but hasty sculptor. Even taking his ease with an apparent act of will, the enormous vigor that animated him was evident. He was a man made for action. Right now he wore a maroon robe over white pajamas with blue pinstripes. On the right breast of the robe was sewn a patch showing a fierce eagle clutching lightning bolts and weapons, with a stars-and-stripes shield over its own breast. Above it arced the legend Mobile Anti-Guerrilla Operations Group. Below it was embossed the acronym MAGOG.
“I trust you find your accommodations to your liking, Professor,” the General said, allowing his steward, a tall, olive-skinned man in black trousers, white shirt with stand-up collar and bow tie, to replenish his coffee.
“Quite, General.”
He had, in fact. He’d been kept separate from his companions ever since leaving the massacre site by the Grand Canyon. Nor had he seen for sure where they were taken, although he surmised they were bound for a barbed-wire stockade with some tents pitched inside that had been erected near the work site. He hoped they were well, and not terribly mistreated. He wasn’t overly concerned. Obviously their captors wanted them alive rather than dead, and to judge by past performance, it would be but a matter of time before one of them, most likely the ever-so-resourceful John Barrymore Dix, figured out a way to spring them all.
His captor had introduced himself as Marc Anthony Helton, Captain, Provisional U.S. Army. He was a very polite and well-spoken young man, despite his regrettable propensity for casual mass murder. He was fascinated by Doc, and grilled him about who he was, where he’d come from, and what experiences he had had. Tanner had cloaked his responses in sufficient vagueness to avoid giving away any significant information without convincing the young officer that he was too far gone mentally speaking to be of real interest to the General.
At least, he hoped he had.
On arrival, young Captain Helton had taken cordial leave of him. Soldiers had hustled Doc onto the train straightaway. There, he was brusquely ordered to strip and sent into a bank of showerheads to cleanse himself under a guard’s watchful eye. He would never believe a mere shower could equal the sybaritic luxury of a tub of steaming water, and candidly, he was the most inclined of their brave little band to be careless in matters hygienic, but the hot gushing water and the sense of cleanliness it produced were alike bliss-producing.
Once dried, he had been given a rough and rather itchy set of garments of the depressing greenish shade favored by the U.S. Army of the twentieth century. After he put them on he had been marched to another car and locked into a small passenger compartment. Ironically, he had been allowed to keep his cane, although naturally, his bulky LeMat cap-and-ball revolver had been appropriated.
Indeed, the General just upon the instant picked up the pistol and began to examine it with keen interest, turning it over and over in his hard, scarred hands.
In his compartment, which he had to himself, Doc had been served a better-than-adequate meal. Surprisingly, it had been a stew of game—rabbit and deer at the very least, with a possible hint of quail—along with carrots and potatoes and seasoned with sage. All seemed quite fresh, and the bread rolls that came with it were palpably hot from the oven. The butter tasted real. Doc hoped his friends were well fed and housed.
The bench unfolded into a bed, which was the most comfortable he’d known in many a moon. He slept soundly, and blessedly without dreaming, until a peremptory knock had awakened him, and his clothes—cleaned and pressed, by the gods—had been thrust upon him.
Now he sat in a kind of sitting room in the General’s personal car, eating another splendid meal and drinking coffee—freeze-dried, regrettably—while the General peered down the LeMat’s barrel, the long .44-caliber main barrel, and the auxiliary 12-gauge barrel in front of the cylinder. In tribute to Doc’s vast storehouse of knowledge, the General addressed him as “Professor.”
“A remarkable weapon, Professor,” the General remarked, setting the big pistol down on a table beside his red-plush chair. “But isn’t it kind of an eccentric choice?”
Doc gave a debonair wave of his coffee cup, pinky extended. “One who knows the proper formula, and, more important, the proper technique, it’s all in the caking—for manufacturing black gunpowder, as I do, can produce it far more simply,
