The Brothers Cabal (19 page)

‘Good Lord,' said the major as he jumped down from the driver's position to land with a crunch on the gravel track. ‘Ladies in trousers!'

They were indeed, and shamefully, wearing trousers. Both were in their mid-twenties, and both would not have been suitable for polite society. Wanton smoking aside, they were dressed in what appeared to be male work clothes, one in dungarees and the other in farming trousers of denim cloth and wearing a short, brown leather jacket of the type worn by pilots. Beneath it were visible a checked shirt and a neckerchief. Neither of the pair were wearing nice shoes, either, instead seeking to compound their crimes against femininity by wearing work boots in one case and what looked shockingly like army boots in the other.

‘They're
lesbians
,' said the major in a ghastly whisper. He looked back up the meadow, searching for their pursuers; he was plainly unsure which fate was worse.

While the major agonised over whether death by otherworldly creature or associating with ladies in sensible shoes would be more injurious, Alisha called up to them, ‘We have a wounded man and…' She looked back at an exclamation from the major. The two remaining creatures were rising above the embankment by the shattered section of fence across the meadow, clearly visible in the moonlight. Alisha looked desperately up at the women. ‘Please! We're all in danger!'

The woman in the flying jacket squinted across the meadow and then, demonstrating the depths of her sapphic depravity by not swooning on the spot, threw her cigarette stub to the floor and snapped to her fellow, ‘Tell the driver to get this thing rolling
now
!' As the dungareed woman ran along towards the locomotive, the leather-jacketed woman ran back a few windows along the sleeper car before pounding fiercely on its side. After a brief moment, the narrow ventilator window popped open.

‘What the hell is it, Boom?' demanded a female voice. This one had an American accent, convincing the major that it
was
possible for things to get worse, after all.

The woman in the leather jacket—Boom—never took her eyes off the creatures, already a quarter of the way across the meadow and closing. ‘We have company, Boss.'

‘What kind of company?'

‘Bad company. The worst.'

The window's roller shutter shot up to reveal a woman in her mid-thirties, dishevelled and pulling on a dressing gown over pyjamas. She leaned close to the open window and looked up the meadow. ‘God
damn
it,' she snarled, sounding more peeved than affrighted. ‘What in creation are those?'

‘Really dangerous!' shouted Alisha. ‘Please, we need help!'

‘Boss' looked down, noticing them for the first time. She quickly took in Horst and the Dee Society survivors, and the slight wince when she saw Richard carried in Horst's arms showed she knew a man at the edge of death when she saw one, and that it was not a new experience to her.

‘Get 'em aboard! Wake everyone and tell 'em to be ready.' She vanished into the gloom beyond the glass.

‘Come on!' shouted Boom at Horst and the others. ‘Don't you wanna live?'

They stumbled up the embankment onto the earthwork to where Boom was waiting by an open door where, as they arrived, another woman was coming out. She, too, appeared to have been in slumber and she, too, was unconventionally dressed in a pair of denim trousers, hastily pulled-on work boots, their laces flailing, and a pyjama top over which she wore a navy surplus peacoat. She was also sporting a pump-action shotgun. As she jumped down beside them, the major was horrified to note that, not only was she yet another member of what was clearly some dreadful hive of perversity, but that she wasn't even a Caucasian pervert. Between the short hair, shotgun, and the epicanthic folds of the inscrutable Oriental, he was quite at a loss.

‘What the hell are those?' she demanded, and she demanded it in an American accent.

‘Weird stuff, Mink,' answered Boom. The abominations were still closing, now only a hundred yards away. ‘Dangerous weird stuff.'

‘Interesting,' said Mink, and pumped a shell into the chamber. ‘I'll let 'em get a bit closer. Choke's open on this thing.'

Alisha looked at the shotgun, and then the 9mm semi-automatic that had appeared in Boom's hand, apparently stowed in a shoulder holster. ‘You've all got guns?'

Boom had climbed into the train, but Mink remained, watching the abominations with a clear eye. ‘Oh, yeah. This is bandit country, all 'round these parts,' she said. ‘You're a fool if you don't plan for trouble.'

‘We have weapons, but no ammunition left,' explained the professor. ‘If we could reload…'

Mink jerked her head back towards the train, never once looking away from the approaching enemy. ‘Follow Boom.'

Aboard the train, the corridor ran down the side away from the meadow. The carriage had certainly seen better days; the carpet was worn down to the boards in several places, the woodwork was scuffed and scratched, and half the light fittings were devoid of bulbs. Whatever kind of circus this was, ‘lucrative' seemed unlikely to be its crowning adjective. As the group led by Alisha—the major having passed the role of pathfinder to her in case they should run into any other women in their night attire—moved forward, there were shouts and responses coming fore and aft. All, the major noted inwardly with a sense of moral defeat, were female.

A door opened inward to their left and the woman Boom had called ‘Boss' stepped out. She was in the latter stages of buttoning up some sort of one-piece boiler suit, but the simplicity of its design was offset by the cloth being of a striking crimson and the cut allowing for a double-breasted front. She left the flap of cloth across her upper chest loose and shrugged into the shoulder holster she'd had hanging from one elbow while attending to the buttons.

‘Who are you people?' she demanded. ‘And what are those things?'

The sound of a shotgun firing, slow and considered shots two seconds apart, stopped the dialogue before it had even begun. The woman gave them a wary glance, then turned her back on them, drawing her handgun and working the slide as she went.

‘It's an …
odd
sort of circus, isn't it?' said the professor.

‘I've seen odder,' replied Horst. The woman had left the door of her compartment swinging, and he shoved it open with his foot before carrying in Richard.

‘You can't just go into a lady's bedroom!' said the major, still finding some deep reserves of propriety that had not yet been scandalised in the last few minutes.

The room was not an obvious lady's boudoir, it had to be admitted. The impression it engendered was somewhere between the dressing room of an actress and a light engineering workshop. A clothes rack of the type usually found in secondhand shops—bare, grey steel tubes arranged upon castors—was in one corner, burdened with a mixture of fluffy fripperies, work clothes that would not have gone amiss on an oil rig, and a collection of pseudo-military stylings rendered upon a variety of one-piece boiler suits. The scents of jasmine and lavender mixed with that of fine machine oil, a not displeasing combination.

‘She's not in it and Richard needs medical attention,' said Horst. He laid Richard out on the bed, wincing inwardly at the mess the blood and filth were going to leave on the bedding, and stepped back. ‘I can't help him,' he said, and pushed past the Dee Society members gathered around the door. ‘But I can help defend the train.'

Horst reached the still-open carriage door to find things were going very badly, at least for the otherworldly creatures. From positions on the rail bed, an open door at the other end of the sleeper carriage, from the windows, three guns were blazing at the unhappy unearthly invaders, blowing chunks of steaming supernatural flesh from them as they advanced through the hail.

The nearer of the two had inevitably drawn most of the fire, and it finally gave up whatever it used for a ghost by the abandoned lorry, flopping to the ground and expiring with a scream that spoke of distant stars, strange angles, and the sheer bloody unfairness of being dragged to Earth just to be chopped to shribbons by gunfire.

The second creature becoming the only surviving creature coincided with a pause in the shooting. In the same way that sometimes all the conversations in a crowded room can simultaneously reach natural pauses that, in their synchronisation, seem very unnatural, so may the reservoirs of ammunition in a variety of firearms all run dry at the same time. The crack of guns was replaced by the frantic clickings of shells being slipped into chambers, and the silken swish and clatter of box magazines being withdrawn and discarded. The creature, in its non-Euclidean way, seemed to regard the cessation of fire as a declaration of unconditional surrender and desire to be butchered on the part of the defenders. Perhaps that was how such things were signalled in its home dimension. In any event, it responded by screaming more gleefully yet, and swooping towards the train, hurdling the lorry as it came on.

That it was then introduced to the concept of full automatic fire at this juncture was unkind but salutary. From the roof of the carriage came the perfunctory bark of large-calibre rounds being fired with the mechanical disinterest of a sewing machine making a hem. The creature slowed as the bullets tore through it, its scream sounding a mite less self-assured. That momentary slowing was all the time required for the other gunners to complete reloading and within a second, four guns were blazing hell and damnation at a monstrosity that had previously considered itself very much at home to both. The scream choked, returned more weakly, ululated into a flutter, and then the creature fell onto the embankment, before rolling nervelessly back down to lie dead at its base.

Horst jumped down and walked past Mink to look up onto the carriage roof. On it stood Boom, bracing a very serious-looking piece of combative machinery against her hip while she checked its action.

‘Is that a
machine gun
?' he called up to her.

‘It's a
sub
-machine gun,' she corrected him. ‘A Thompson. Fifty rounds of .45 ACP in the drum. Well, there were.' She lowered the weapon and nodded at the corpse of the last creature. ‘Most of them are in that now. That was fun. Coming down,' she said as she started to turn towards the open roof hatch through which she had gained the roof in the first place. She paused, looking back up the meadow to the road. ‘Oh, what is it now?'

A small convoy of four lorries were emerging from behind the bank on the far side of the meadow as they processed down towards the bend that would bring the road parallel to the track. Horst saw the passengers—dull-eyed and long-suffering—in the back of the first and knew the danger was far from over.

‘We have to get moving!' he shouted up at Boom. ‘How long does it take to get this thing under way?'

Boom gave the approaching vehicles a last glance of such profound suspicion that Horst could almost hear her hackles rising. She looked forward and was unhappily surprised to find the woman she'd sent to the locomotive nowhere near it, absent-mindedly slotting fresh shells into her revolver as she watched the approaching lorries. ‘Daisy! What the hell? I told you to tell the driver to get us out of here!'

‘Helmut's gone,' said Daisy, as if this were a piece of news of incidental interest. ‘Him and Tomas lit out when they saw the flying leggy things. They're probably a mile away by now.'

The Boss lady appeared at the far carriage door. ‘And you waited until
now
to tell us?'

For the first time, Daisy seemed to realise that ‘moving the train' was of more than incidental importance. ‘Sorry, Ginny,' she said, all contrite.

She had already fallen from Ginny's attention; there were more pressing matters to deal with. ‘Becky!' A woman in a flat cap, her red hair hastily crammed under it, looked up. ‘Can you drive the train?'

‘They wouldn't let me play with it, but I've watched them. I reckon so.'

‘I've driven a train,' said Horst, which was true.

Travelling between towns aboard a carnival train had not been without its pleasures, and one such had been the realisation of a childhood dream to ride the footplate of a locomotive. The crew had not complained, partially because he was one of the bosses, and partially because they were dead. Originally a pair of breathtakingly incompetent highway robbers, they had encountered his brother, Johannes, who had shot them more for the crime of irking him than any other. He had raised them in a spirit of ‘waste not, want not', and they had found service driving the brothers' diabolical carnival for a year. Being dead seemed to suit them, by all accounts. They were certainly friendlier if no brighter than when they were alive, and it would have been an ideal state of affairs but for the decomposition. Still, they had been happy enough to share their footplate on a good few nights in that strange year, and had demonstrated to Horst the esoteric art of throttle and brake, sandbox and condenser.

‘Then get to it!' snapped Ginny. ‘The rest of you, all aboard!'

Horst burnt a little blood to blur ahead and reach the locomotive as quickly as he could. He was already checking the valves when Becky climbed up. ‘What?' she said on finding him there. ‘How did you get ahead of me?'

‘I'm very quick when I want to be.' He tapped the pressure gauge. ‘There's barely a head of steam. We need more heat.' He opened the firebox door, took up the coal spade, and started shovelling fuel into the hole.

Becky was watching this performance with thin-lipped distrust. ‘And how did you open a hot firebox door without burning your hand?' she said slowly.

Horst hesitated, then looked at her. He noted her hand was on the butt of her pistol, and smiled apologetically. ‘Look,' he said. ‘It's turning out to be an unusual sort of night for you, I know. And I won't lie to you; one of those unusual things is me. But I just want us to get out of here alive, while the unusual things in those lorries really want to kill everybody here. So … can we discuss this later?'