The Brothers Cabal (20 page)

She considered for a moment, then went to the cab side to look back along the track. She plainly didn't like what she saw as she slipped her gun out of its holster. ‘We'll do that. Right now, keep stoking!' She sighted and fired at the newcomers while he shovelled in coal as quickly as he could without sending it flying in all directions. ‘Jesus Christ,' he heard her mutter. ‘Now it's zombies. I hate this stupid country.'

Horst shovelled until he feared the fresh coal was starting to choke the fire. Slamming the firebox door shut—making a point of using the spade for the operation this time—he checked the pressure. It was starting to build, but was still a good way from allowing the train to reach top speed. Then again, he reasoned, how fast does a train have to go to outrun a bunch of shambling undead? He released the brakes and slowly started to open the throttle.

The train shuddered forward a little, then halted. Slowly, it started to move again, slowly, and remaining slow.

‘Can't we go any faster?' demanded Becky as she reloaded. Horst was quietly impressed to note that, unlike the Dee Society, these people carried around enough ammunition to last them through any situation short of a protracted land war.

‘Not enough steam. But moving slowly's better than not moving at all.'

Becky watched as a zombie that had been trying to board the rearmost car fell on its face between the rails. It did not attempt to rise, but lay there facedown, gloomily aware that the Afterlife was proving just as frustrating as Life.

‘I think you're right,' she conceded. ‘Looks like we might just … Oh, now. What's this?'

Horst leaned out behind her to see what new developments were apparent. While the walking dead were shambling as quickly as they could, a gap was growing between their ranks and the train as it sped away from them at a heady five miles an hour. The last lorry had pulled up, however, and it was disgorging its passengers with far greater quickness. These leapt and sprinted now on two legs, now on four, and they were past the zombies already.

‘Lycanthropes.'

‘Lycan who?'

‘Werewolves. And foxes. And tigers. Maybe some bears. I think they only had one badger, and I killed him.'

One of the shapechangers—a jackal or a hyena—was hit by a shotgun blast from a window and fell, rolling down the embankment. Before it had even reached the bottom, however, it was fighting to regain its feet. In another moment, it was up and running once more.

Becky turned to Horst and said in disbelieving tones, ‘Are we going to need
silver bullets
?'

Belatedly, Horst realised why the Society's ammunition supply had been so slight compared with the circus'. ‘Ideally. Yes.'

Becky shook her head and re-holstered her pistol. She went to the controls and studied them. ‘Well, shocking news, mate. We don't have any. All we can do is keep knocking 'em over until we can outrun them. Ah, look, you're venting pressure here, see?' She closed a valve and, despite Horst's mumbled claim that he was doing nothing of the sort, the pressure started to build more rapidly. Satisfied that they were finally getting some decent acceleration, she looked back along the side of the train again. ‘They're on the train! I can see one on the roof!'

*   *   *

On the roof, Boom had just finished emptying the Thompson into the oncoming werewolf. It had staggered under the leaden hosing-down she had given it, but now the sub-machine gun was empty and she had no more loaded drums ready. She swung it into the small of her back on its sling, and drew her pistol. The wolfman grinned, the slavering lips raising to expose the long fangs, and advanced upon her in a bestial crouch.

Deciding that discretion was the better part of not being torn limb from limb by an atavistic monstrosity, Boom backed away towards the open roof hatch, firing steadily as she went. The .32 bullets did little more than make the creature flinch as it moved forward, matching her step for step, all the while its tongue lolling from the side of its mouth, waggling obscenely in the growing slipstream of the train's passage while drops of saliva flecked onto its fur. Step for step they moved, she retreating into the direction of travel, it advancing, each step punctuated by a shot, until the pistol's slide stopped in the back position, showing both antagonists that the last shot had been fired. Boom risked a quick look behind her to see if she might risk a dive for the hatch and, at that very moment, the werewolf leapt at her.

That it didn't reach her was surprising to them both, neither having allowed for the possibility of a vampire—moving at inhuman speed—intercepting the wolf in midair and the two of them crashing to the carriage roof in a tangle of fur, fangs, limbs, and aggression. The sudden change in matters caused Boom to freeze for a moment, but only a moment. Then she busied herself reloading, never taking her eyes off the fight.

It had immediately become apparent to Horst that the fundamental difference between werewolves and werebadgers were that the former were so much more
bitey
. Where the badger had led with his heavy claws (although he might have got around to biting later if he had lived that long; after all, new werebadgers have to come from somewhere), the wolf's tactics were all based around biting, grappling and biting, slashing and biting, and biting as an overture to more biting. Horst wasn't having any of that, however; he had no idea if it was possible for a vampire to contract lycanthropism, but—diverting as the concept was—he had no intention of allowing werewolf saliva into his veins to find out. Besides, he'd already drunk werebadger blood that night, so, if anything, he'd end up striped, fanged, and with claws very useful for grubbing up worms and insects. He could hardly wait. Still, what if it were possible to be infected by more than one kind of lycanthropy? By the light of a full moon, he would turn into a vampiric weremenagerie, and that would just be confusing.

Thus, he dodged and blocked the snapping jaws while ignoring the claws slashing his sadly abused clothing. He could always heal the wounds after all, and his clothes were already in such a state that a rag and bone merchant would turn his nose up at them.

He was also eager to avoid falling from the train, a fate that the roof's camber, the peripatetic nature of the fight, and the growing rocking motion as the train gathered speed were all starting to make a concern. The wolf was on him with its claws at his throat when, in an effort to re-centre the confrontation, he raised his hands between its arms and forced them apart, breaking its grip before punching it hard. As it reared back, momentarily stunned, he backhanded it, sending it stumbling backwards to fall supine along the raised centre ridge of the roof. Horst was on his feet in rather less than a second and positioning himself for the kill when he hesitated. The werewolf was possessed of dugs.

It says something about Horst that the hesitation was provoked by two considerations. Firstly, that while this was certainly a ravening monster from the realms of phantasmagoria, it was a
lady
monster from the realms of phantasmagoria, and he had been raised to find it hard even to manage impoliteness to ladies, never mind killing them in hand-to-hand combat. Also, it must be admitted, he was wondering how two managed to manifest as six during the transformation and what it must look like as they shifted from chest to midriff, and back again when wolf-time was over. Alas, it was this second thought that occupied much of his concentration at the critical—indeed,
fatal
—moment, although there are probably worse things to be thinking while one is gutted by a werewolf.

That it was not his last thought was entirely out of his hands. As the werewolf rolled to its hind feet and crouched to leap at the vampire, distracted terribly by inappropriate musings, a well-placed bullet entered its skull from behind, neatly between its laidback ears, the strange charm that usually protected the werefolk from such mundane deaths failing to protect it at all.

Horst looked forward, slightly stunned and caught in a mist of werewolf fluids. Boom was crouching by the hatch up through which had appeared the upper body of Alisha, her pistol still levelled in a two-handed grip, stabilised by laying her upper arms on the hatch's frame. She raised the gun while reaching into her jacket with her off hand, and brought it out again with a few metallic objects rolling in her palm. ‘Found some more silver bullets in my other pocket,' she called. ‘I'd forgotten all about them.'

Horst looked down at the werewolf's body. It …
she
was already beginning to transform back into a human. Standing over the carcass, the miracle of wandering breasts no longer seemed so fascinating to Horst. He knelt down and rolled the body off the roof while she was still monstrous, inhuman, and easier for him to deal with on the balance sheet of his conscience.

‘There may be others,' he shouted, distracted by an inner voice that was just pointing out that it was the wolfwoman or him who had to die, so obviously better it was the woman. If he would just put all these weak emotions in a box and burn them on a bonfire of ambitions now made possible by his elevated status, he would find things so much simpler and less painful. He ran aft to see if there were, indeed, others attackers to be dealt with. The precipitate decision surely had nothing to do with covering his confusion, oh no.

There was sporadic fire from the rear car as the train pulled away from its pursuers. The shooting had settled down into a game of ‘Knock Down the Werewhatever' after it had become apparent that the creatures were thoroughly resistant to lead. The vanguard of the pursuers were of the more fleet-of-foot varieties—wolves, mainly, along with a couple of great cats—and both they and the train's defenders had discovered that things went badly for them if they were knocked off their feet by a shot. While the bullet itself was a small inconvenience, the great werebull—a magnificent minotaur possessed of vast slabs of muscle and little brain—that was following up the rear would likely run over them. The lycanthropes' resistance to harm seemed very specific; bullets were nothing, but more immediate physical damage such as that caused by knives and the hooves of a clumsy werecow could cause great injury. Those knocked over by a flying bullet, therefore, prioritised getting out of the way rather than regaining their feet. That the minotaur was relatively slow, despite his enraged and protracted charge in pursuit of the train, meant that while he stood no chance of catching them, he was inadvertently aiding the cause of the fugitives. Finally, however, even he realised that if you're running after something and yet it continues to grow smaller, then the chances are it's getting away from you. He slowed to a halt, clouds of vapour rushing from his muzzle in gouts, and bellowed his frustration at the diminishing train.

Horst waved at him, which didn't help.

*   *   *

Finally, the time for formal introductions had arrived. The venue was a rarely used spur line leading up to a worked-out tin mine in a festering of small, heavily wooded hills between which the main line snaked. The practised manner in which switches were thrown, the metal stop sign mounted in the middle of the track was lifted and replaced after the train had moved by, and then all traces of its passage erased indicated that this was a bolthole they had had cause to retire to on several occasions.

In the penultimate carriage of the train, Ginny the Boss was holding court; whether it was a court of the royal variety or the judicial sort was open to interpretation. She sat behind a desk at one end of a large compartment that seemed to double as an office and a common room, regarding them with a jaundiced and suspicious eye, while her four colleagues sat or stood around her. Before them were Horst, Alisha, the major, and the professor. All were subdued; outside just by the tree line was a fresh grave. Richard had not survived his injuries, dying quietly while the fight had raged outside. The burial was preceded by a grim little piece of post-mortem surgery to ‘deny' him to the enemy, the professor having no more of his strange chemical mixture left to affect a convenient cremation.

Ginny regarded them one at a time, taking her time as her gaze swept along the line of her new passengers. Finally, she said, ‘That's not the kind of way I like to be woken.'

‘Apologies, madam,' said the major, bravely taking the onerous task of communicating with these unnatural women. ‘The situation was not of our choosing.'

‘Yeah. I figured that. So, since you've cost me so much time and trouble, maybe you could explain the zombies, the werethings, and'—she pointed at Horst—‘
him
.'

The major looked at Horst uncertainly. ‘While I can assay an attempt to explain all else, ma'am, to be frank I'd have a few problems explaining Herr Cabal myself.' He turned back to Ginny. ‘I am Major Haskins, late of the Guards…'

Ginny held up a hand. ‘What guards? Train guards? The Coldstream Guards?'

‘The Grenadiers, madam!' said Haskins, plainly more affronted by the second suggestion than the first. ‘As I was saying, late of the Guards. These days, however, I fight in a different sort of war. I should introduce my colleagues. This is Professor Stone'—the professor bowed, then made subsidiary side-bows to the other women of the circus—‘an antiquary and anthropologist.'

‘
Amateur
anthropologist,' the professor quickly interpolated.

‘He's too modest to say so, but he's quite the polymath. And this is Miss Alisha Bartos.' Alisha showed no inclination to bow or, heaven forbid, curtsey. Instead she simply nodded. ‘She's…' The major foundered, at a loss to explain succinctly what she was. ‘She's … well.'

Ginny looked at her. ‘What do
you
call yourself?'

Alisha considered for a few seconds; it appeared summing up her career briefly was not something she'd had to do before. Certainly, her
curriculum vitae
seemed to be of an involved sort, given her evident concentration.