Terminal World (7 page)

‘It’s too fast,’ he said again, this time on a falling note, because he knew that any possibility of jumping was now behind them. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You blew the extraction,’ Meroka said. ‘Less than a minute into the journey ... and you fucking blew it.’

Something snapped inside him. He shoved Meroka against the wall of the carriage, surprising himself with his own violence and the suddenness with which it had emerged.

‘Listen to me,’ he said, still pinning her in place. ‘I may seem meek and mild to you, and maybe I am compared to you, but there’s something you need to understand.’ He pushed harder, with a savagery he had not expected in himself. ‘I am not your damned package. I’m a man who’s spent nine years surviving alone, nine years after I killed two of my colleagues because they murdered someone I loved. And when I say “killed” I mean that I tortured them with drugs, slowly and painfully, until they died, because that’s what happens when you get on the wrong side of me. And I’ve been down here for nine years, minding my own business, never so much as treading on a fly. Until today, when my world turned upside down again. I’ve had to go from that, to this, in less time than it takes most people to pick somewhere nice to eat. I left work and now - only a few hours later - I’m leaving the city. So I apologise if my adjustment isn’t as quick as you’d like, but you’re just going to have to deal with it.’

He released the pressure on Meroka. She moved her chin back and forth, licked her lips.

‘You finished, Cutter?’

‘For now.’

She reached up to readjust the collar of her coat, where he had held her. ‘For something that looks like it crawled out of the ground, you have some strength, I’ll give you that. Felt good to get that off your chest, didn’t it?’

‘I’m just saying, it would be a mistake to underestimate me.’

‘You serious about the torturing and killing part?’

He closed his eyes against the memory of what he had been forced to do. ‘Yes.’

She slammed the door shut, the rushing air of their progress doing most of the work for her. Outside, the train rattled and swayed over a silvery labyrinth of criss-crossing rails. ‘Well, guess we’re on the train now, whether we like it or not.’

‘We don’t know how many of them were hiding in that station, apart from the one who got aboard. For all you know we’d be dead if we’d jumped off.’

Meroka looked down the long corridor that ran the length of the carriage on the left-hand side. ‘Whereas it’s a stone-cold certainty that there’s one of them on the train now.’

‘I don’t know that he saw us. He may just have got on this train on the off chance that we were on it.’

‘He saw us. Saw you, anyway.’

‘We should move along the train, closer to the front. Maybe he won’t have time to reach us.’

‘Next stop’s twenty minutes away, when they switch the engine. He’ll have time.’

‘That doesn’t mean we should just wait here for him, does it?’ Quillon breathed in and out, trying to find some calm, however transitory it might prove. ‘We’re not defenceless. We’re both armed. There’s two of us, just one of him.’

‘Just the one we saw. Doesn’t mean he don’t have friends already inside.’

Meroka looked along the corridor again. They could only see as far as the opposite end of this carriage, where the corridor jogged inwards to pass through the connecting bellows between one coach and the next. Four or five carriages down, Quillon thought, trying to hold the image in his mind like a photograph, scanning it for details he might have missed at the time. If the agent was working his way towards them now, the first warning they would have would be when he came around that corner.

‘You ready with that angel gun?’ Meroka asked.

Quillon squeezed his palm around the waiting weapon, still safe in his coat pocket. He drew it out slowly. ‘Do you still work?’

‘Operational effectiveness is now sixty-three per cent and falling,’ the gun answered, quietly enough that its voice would not have been heard in the adjoining compartments. ‘I will become inoperable in energy-discharge mode in four hours, three minutes. Functionality will be severely compromised within two hours, twenty-five minutes. Error margins are available for these estimates.’

‘I’ll skip the error margins.’ He returned the gun to his pocket, before someone happened along the corridor. ‘Four hours is still good, isn’t it? Once we’ve lost this tail, we’ll be fine. Won’t we?’

‘Yeah. We’ll be fine.’ Meroka opened her coat and selected one of her own weapons, a bulky machine-pistol with squared-off, utilitarian lines. It had a stamped-metal barrel and a straight grip enclosing a long magazine. Meroka thumbed a lever on the side of the black-painted housing, clicking it to its third setting. ‘Anything else you need reassuring about?’

‘I thought you didn’t do reassurance.’

‘Got two choices. Wait at the front of the train for him to find us. Which he will, sooner or later - and he’ll know he’s got us cornered. Or take the fight to him.’

‘I’m guessing you like the second one best.’

Meroka concealed the gun back inside her coat, the flap covering her hand and sleeve.

‘Stay behind me. Don’t shoot at anyone until I do.’

They started walking down the corridor, passing compartments on the right. The first two were empty, and the third contained only one passenger, a young woman looking out of the window. Neon Heights slid by in a rain-smeared blur of mingled colours, the succession of advertisements and slogans tending to a rushing electric white as the train gathered speed. The next compartment was empty, and the one after that contained two men who were smoking and laughing. The next and last compartment in that coach was also empty, with only a couple of discarded newspapers on the seats. Quillon could feel the descending grade now, the train winding its anticlockwise way down the long, gentle spiral cut into Spearpoint’s side, losing a league in altitude for every thirty leagues it travelled along the tracks. There was still a long way to go before he reached the ground. He didn’t want to think about exactly how far it was.

Meroka paused at the bend in the corridor, whipping out her gun and swinging around the blind corner. Quillon waited until she gave him the nod and followed behind, through the swaying connecting bellows between the two carriages. Then she held him back while she swung around into the next corridor.

‘Clear,’ she said quietly.

They moved along the next series of compartments. Again some were empty and some were partially occupied. Only one was anywhere near full, the second along, with five rowdy businessmen trading stories, their shirt collars and ties loosened, the smell of an evening’s hard drinking hanging in the air. In the next compartment sat a mother and daughter, bolt upright in their seats, the girl wearing a bonnet, the mother a veil that covered the upper half of her face, both of them dressed in the elaborate and formal clothes that marked them as respectable citizens of Steamville, returning from what must have been an arduous and costly excursion to Neon Heights. On the mother’s lap, clutched as if it were the most precious artefact in the universe, lay a large brown envelope. The girl was pale of complexion, thinner than she should have been and in the grip of a constant shivering tremor. The mother probably couldn’t have afforded the expense of a full operation in Neon Heights, but she might have had the means to pay for a set of X-rays, the images intended to guide the hand of an affordable surgeon back in Steamville.

He wanted to talk to them. He had the tools in his bag to perform basic tests of neurological function. Even if he couldn’t do anything for the girl, he could at least settle the mother’s doubts, reassure her that she had done all that she could.

He must have hesitated. The girl turned to look at him through the partition glass. The mother met his gaze, eyes dark and unreadable behind her veil, but there was inexpressible sadness and resignation in the lines around her mouth. The tendons stood out on the backs of her hands, clutching the envelope with its fearful cargo of medical truth.

Then Meroka was looking back at him, urging him to follow.

‘I’m sorry,’ Quillon mouthed, as if that made a difference.

Then a man came around the bend of the corridor, beyond Meroka. He saw her twitch, ready to bring out the pistol. The man wore the cap and waistcoated uniform of a railway worker. He was shorter and bulkier than the figure they had seen on the platform, his frame filling the width of the corridor. In his hand was a ticket clipper; in the other a pocket timetable.

‘Be with you in a minute,’ the man called, before sliding open the first compartment door and vanishing inside.

Meroka kept moving. There was only one person in the fourth compartment, deeply asleep, and no one in the fifth. The guard spoke to whoever was in the sixth compartment; there was the sound of his ticket punch, and then he emerged back into the corridor, to be met by Meroka, standing there with one hand still tucked into her coat and Quillon behind her, the angel gun held out of view.

‘If I could just see your tickets,’ the guard said, ‘then you can get right on back to your compartment.’

Meroka reached into her coat with the other hand and produced the tickets. The guard took them from her and squinted down the length of his nose, eyes narrowing behind glasses. ‘I think you need to turn around,’ he said, not unhelpfully. ‘Looks like you overshot your compartment back in the third coach. Guess you were coming back from the dining car?’

‘Guess so,’ Meroka said.

The guard jabbed a finger over his shoulder. ‘It’s all first class behind me, right to the end of the train.’ He held his clipper up to the tickets and punched them together, then handed them back to Meroka, beaming with the satisfaction of a job well done.

‘We need to get past you,’ she said.

The pleasant demeanour began to crack. ‘Maybe you didn’t quite understand me, miss. These tickets of yours are second class only. You really don’t have any business going into the first-class section.’

‘How would you know about our business?’ Meroka asked.

‘Let’s not make more of this than we need to. You miscounted the number of coaches, that’s all. Easy mistake, anyone could do it. You just need to turn around and—’

It was all too quick for Quillon. One instant the guard was looking down at Meroka, the next she had the machine-pistol pushed right up into his face, the barrel digging into the fleshy mound of his cheek. The guard dropped the ticket punch and timetable, falling back against the partition between the corridor and the compartments.

‘You could have made this so much easier,’ Meroka said. She spun him around, then nodded at Quillon to open the sliding door into the empty compartment next to the one the guard had just been checking. She propelled the guard through, then gave him a hard kick in the testicles, sending him sprawling onto one of the cigarette-stained couches.

‘Don’t shoot me,’ the guard said, recovering his glasses just as they slipped from his nose.

‘You think I can trust you to sit here and be awfully nice about not stopping this train as soon as we’re out of your sight?’

‘Of... of course.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Still holding the machine-pistol in her left hand, Meroka dug back into her coat and produced a small silver-plated device resembling a cross between a tiny pistol and a needle-less hypodermic. She tossed it over to the stunned guard. ‘Pick it up,’ she said, as the device tumbled down between his buckled legs. There was, Quillon noticed, a growing dark spot on his groin.

‘What do you want—’

‘Got two choices here, fat man. Either you press that against your neck and squeeze, or I have to shoot you. What’s it going to be?’

‘What’s in it?’ the man asked, picking up the device with nervous, fumbling fingers. ‘How do I know it isn’t going to kill me?’

‘You don’t.’

‘I’d do it if I were you,’ Quillon said, hoping and praying that the device was loaded with some kind of tranquilliser.

‘Trigger finger’s getting itchy here,’ Meroka said.

The guard must have realised that he had very little option, for he pressed the tip of the device against the skin of his neck, just above the starched collar of his uniform, jammed his eyes shut and pulled the spring-loaded trigger. The device clicked and hissed, firing its chemical payload through his skin. The effect was rapid. The guard’s fingers loosened, the anaesthetic device dropping to the floor. His eyes opened, rolled senselessly, and then the guard slumped against the back of the seat, only his uniform distinguishing him from another drunk commuter dozing off the booze.

‘Please tell me I was right to convince him to use it,’ Quillon said.

Meroka ducked in and retrieved the device, slipping it back into her coat. ‘He’s tranked. It’ll wear off in half an hour or so.’

‘So now we just ... leave him? Shouldn’t we remove his uniform or something, make him look less like a guard?’

‘Yeah. You do that, while I go on and kill the man who’s on his way down the train to kill you.’ Meroka came back out of the compartment and slid the partition door closed.

As she spoke the adjoining door slid open. A man poked his head out of the gap, appraising Meroka and Quillon. ‘Something the matter here?’ he asked, in a low, threatening rasp of a voice. He had the thickset face of a born troublemaker, the beady, questioning eyes of someone who wouldn’t consider the evening complete if he didn’t get into at least one good brawl.

‘No, we’re fine,’ Meroka said, the machine-pistol once more secreted within her coat.

‘Where’s the guard? He was here a moment ago.’

‘We didn’t see any guard,’ Quillon said. ‘He must have turned back and gone the other way.’

‘How’d you know which way he was going if you didn’t see him?’ The man emerged into the corridor, suspicion deepening in his face. He tried to see past Meroka, through the compartment door she had just slid shut. ‘Who’s in there? No one inside just now.’