Thicker Than Water (Blood Brothers) (16 page)

As the valuables were being gathered, Tyr was opening a cabinet in one of the rooms and finding a small child inside it. She was curled up in the fetal position and looked frightened, but there were no tears in her eyes when she looked at him without making a sound when he found her.

Tyr smiled. There was a very strong quality to this little girl. Despite all the chaos erupting around her, she was calm and innocent.

Because he couldn’t think of anything else to say, Tyr asked, “What’s your name?”

“Eva,” answered the little girl. And after a moment she said, “Are you the seeker?”

Tyr laughed.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Why are you dressed like that?”

“I was playing Cowboys and Indians earlier. I kicked the shit out of the Indians.”

He put out his hand for her to take but she just stared at it. He moved it gently to her shoulder and she slinked away in the same gentle panic with which she would slink away in the Las Vegas bar thirteen years later. And once again, Tyr gave a comforting smile and a consoling rub to her skin.

“I want Mommy,” the little girl said.

“You want Mommy? Okay, let’s go find Mommy.”

Tyr reached out again, but Eva just stared at him silently. She didn’t trust him. She was strong and she had sense, all in that undeveloped little body of hers. How charming.

“I already found Mommy,” Tyr told her. “She’s with all the other people I’ve found. I found a whole bunch of them. Come on, you don’t want to just sit here by yourself, do you?”

Still, Eva was unsure. Tyr gave up, got to his feet, and walked away, playing a child’s game.

“Fine,” he said. “Have fun hiding from nobody. I’m gonna go play with your mommy.”

A moment after he left the room, Eva ran to the door. He turned to face her again.

“Did you change your mind? You want to come after all?” His voice was overly sensitive and compassionate.

Eva took a moment to carefully deliberate this before she nodded her head yes.

“Look what I found!” Tyr cried excitedly, returning to the hostage situation with a six-year-old girl in his arms.

Richard pushed to the front of the crowd, shouting, “Put her down! Let go of her!”

Loki pointed his rifle at two girls in their late teens who were standing away from the commotion and minding their own business. Pressing the barrel to one of their faces, he screamed to the rest of the crowd, “Y’all best keep that asshole back! Cause these bitches don’t deserve shit!”

The crowd obeyed, keeping Richard away from his daughter. Richard obeyed as well, not wanting to hurt anyone innocent.

“I thought we made it clear to you that we suck at following orders,” Thor said.

He raised his gun and pointed it at little Eva. People in the crowd jumped forward and others held them back. Richard and Monica were screaming for their daughter, who sat silently in Tyr’s arms, grabbing at him as if for protection.

Tyr was deeply disappointed in this. He had a lot of respect for the strong-willed little girl. Minutes ago he had blown the head off of a weak and cowardly man who seemed to have half the sense, half the courage, half the character of this little thing. It was a shame to treat her as collateral. To kill this one would be like putting a bullet through Michelangelo’s David—and why would you want to do that before it was finished?

Tyr pushed Thor’s gun aside.

“Not this one, Thor,” he said.

Thor would have had no trouble respecting this decision, but Loki was another story. Barking orders was his entitlement, and he didn’t tolerate seeing it done by the others. Being sure to preserve his position of authority, he put his gun to the girl’s head and said, “Oh come on now, Tyr. How could one be made to resist this one?”

Tyr pressed Loki’s gun aside the same has he had Thor’s.

“No, Loki. Kill the rest of them if you want. Kill them all. I’ll help you. But I like this one.”

Loki gritted his teeth and exhaled loudly.

“No,” he said. “I think I want that one.”

Loki grabbed for Eva and Tyr fought him off saying, “Come on, Loki. How often do I ask for anything? Give the girl a break.”

Loki turned to the onlookers, “See this is why I’m the honcho. He gets attached too easy.”

He said it as a joke, but nobody laughed. Monica and Richard were trying to run for their child, now wholly unconcerned for anyone else in the train, but a couple of others were holding them off.

“It’s not necessary. We don’t have to.”

“I know we don’t have to. But I want to.”

Loki grabbed for Eva again and this time Tyr struck his face, sending him reeling into a wall. Tyr shut his eyes, instantly recognizing his bad decision. Loki stepped back from the wall and stood upright, completely silent for a long moment.

“It’s not necessary,” he repeated Tyr’s words with a mocking tone to his voice. “We don’t have to.”

Loki grabbed a young woman from the crowd and ripped the bandanna off his face. As she tried to pull away from him, he grabbed hold of her head and jerked it back, sinking his teeth into her neck.

He drank greedily of the young girl’s blood in front of a crowd of petrified viewers, each standing in his own trance of a terrorized awe. While he would have liked to drink more from the delicious young beauty, he discarded her in the name of showmanship and took a deep breath, projecting his chest forward and making eye contact with as many members of his audience as he could. Then he released an inhuman growl that shook the floor and ceiling, cracked eardrums, and sent humans recoiling into corners. He flashed his elongated canines to anyone who dared to look at him as he roared the shrieking roar of a damned creature with the image to prove it if the sound should leave any skeptic unconvinced.

As the passengers scrambled and cried vainly for help, Loki turned his gaze to Tyr who was still holding the delicate Eva to his chest.

“Guess what, Tyr! Now it’s necessary! Now they’ve all gotta die!”

The passengers were all dead. Loki was right. To let one walk away was to jeopardize their entire way of life. None of them could be allowed to leave this train with a memory of what had happened because none of them were worth the risk.

But surely a six-year-old girl was a different story. If the little girl survived, she would be taken away by other humans and when she was asked what happened on the train, she wouldn’t know. She wouldn’t understand. And if she did tell them, ‘There were vampires. They were sucking people’s blood and hissing and roaring,’ the humans would say, ‘Poor young child. She’s seen such horror, and she has such an imagination.’ They would tell her, ‘Of course there were vampires. What did the vampires look like? Did they tell you their names?’ But they would never believe her. And as she came to mature she would begin to doubt it herself and she would eventually dismiss it as a trick of the brain. She was young at the time. Her mind played tricks on her. Blah, blah, blah. Humans were easy this way.

Mostly it was Tyr’s pride that told him all this, but it was true. While he kept the girl at the forefront of his mind as he took action, the true base of his impulse was for saving face. He wanted Loki to know they were living under the rule of Loki
and
Tyr, not just Loki. For once he wanted to stand up to Loki and prove he had a voice. He was lashing out against his Brother for the sake of lashing out, for the sake of taking a stance, and mostly because he wanted recognition, a little bit of clout.

But he liked the little girl, too. He didn’t want her to die a sucker’s death in this train. That was no lie.

As for the rest of the passengers, they were zombies. The walking dead. They had to be put down before they escaped the train and infected others with their knowledge. Thor fired his Uzi blindly into the crowd of spectators. While only two of them were killed, a few others were hit as they screamed and ducked away.

The crowd broke. It was every man for himself. People ran for cover, pushing past friends and loved ones, stepping on the dying bodies of brothers and sisters as they ran for the doors.

Monica had been hit in the head by one of Loki’s bullets. She was dead on the floor. Richard grabbed Tyr and forced him back into a wall, his forearm against the vampire’s neck. Tyr pulled up his shotgun and shot Eva’s father in the face in front of her. His body dropped to the ground with all the others.

Most of the crowd was dead or mortally injured in seconds. Five or six people had escaped past Loki and back into the train, likely hoping to escape through doors and windows in the dining car.

As one of them made a run from the baggage car, he pulled a bowie knife from his side and drove it into Thor’s heart.

Thor gasped in pain and grabbed the man’s shirt, pulling him back face to face and putting his hand on his neck. The man stared into Thor’s eyes, wide-eyed in terror. Thor grasped the bowie knife with his free hand and tugged it out of his ribs, taking a moment to look down at it. There was a silent moment between them as a thousand thoughts were exchanged, and then Thor drove the knife into the base of the man’s neck.

He shrieked, grabbing at Thor as he fell to his knees, trying with all his will not to die.

“Yeah!” shouted Thor. “It’s fuckin’ annoying!”

Loki chuckled. Thor looked up at him. A silent glance passed between them and it was decided Loki was to stay here with Tyr and Eva while Thor hunted the passengers heading into the rest of the train.

He hooted for a moment and fired his Uzi into the air, then he ran out toward the rest of the passengers, bellowing in an obnoxious singing voice, “Early in the mornin’ we round up the dogies. We mark ‘em and brand ‘em and bob off their tails.”

In the luggage car, a wounded man had climbed up on one hand and knee and unlatched the back of the train. He pulled open the hatch and the door flung open, letting a gust of wind fill the car and blow the hair on Loki, Tyr, and little Eva.

Loki shot the man in the head and his corpse dropped out of the train and rolled to a resting place on the tracks behind them.

 
“The hell was the point in all this, Loki?” Tyr asked. Eva was sobbing loudly in his arms now and clutching to his chest. At this point he didn’t blame her. “This was supposed to be a fun evening. You had to go and get competitive?”

Loki grunted, turning his gaze down to his AK.

Thor was singing as he ran through the sleeping cars, firing wildly at everything around him. “Round up the horses, load up the chuck wagon, then throw the little dogies out on the long trail!”

As he sang this, he would have liked to have tossed somebody through a window for the irony in the lyrics, but he was not near enough to any windows to make it practical. He settled instead for shooting a teenage boy in the spine.

“Just shoot her, Tyr,” Loki all but begged. “We can all go hunt the rest of them together. Maybe we can let some of them escape into the desert for a bit. You know, make it fun for everybody.”

Tyr raised his gun and pointed it at Loki.

Loki drew the AK to shoot Eva but Tyr fired before he could, opening up a gaping wound on his hand and sending the AK spinning onto the floor.

Loki reared up and ran at Tyr, locking the shotgun sideways between himself and Eva.

Thor was chasing the last two living passengers down, still singing, “Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies. It’s your misfortune and none o’ my own!” He fired a few shot’s into a young woman’s head as he sang this, leaving her handsome boyfriend as the only remaining survivor of the unfolding massacre.

The boyfriend had been pulling open an emergency exit at this point. When the shots were fired, he ran at Thor shouting. The two fought for the Uzi and spun in circles until the man punched Thor and forced his weight into him, knocking him backward onto the floor. As he hit the ground, Thor used his momentum to force the young man over his head and into the wall behind him, not noticing he was actually throwing him through the open emergency exit.

“Pain in the ass,” Thor mumbled under his breath. He jumped out of the train, tucking and rolling, to make sure the young man had died.

Back in the storage car, Loki had grabbed hold of the trigger on Tyr’s gun and aimed it up at little Eva’s face. Tyr forced Loki back with his foot, sending him sprawling back to the other side of the car. As he fell back, he kept a tight hold of the shotgun and managed to pry it from Tyr’s hands. He trained the gun on Tyr as soon as he landed.

Tyr turned to face toward the open end of the car and away from Loki, using his own body to shield little Eva from the shotgun. Led pellets ripped into his back, tearing open his clothing and spraying his blood in a cloud of mist.