A heavy body crashed into Lari's back, throwing the boy off his feet and sending him tumbling across the greasy floor tiles in a mess of scraped knees and elbows. Before he could scramble back into some form of control, the thing was already atop of him, a grotesque mask leering before his eyes.
Like some desiccated and rotted corpse pulled out of the ground, the thing looked like it could have been human once, only now with shrivelled skin stretched across a bag of bones. Where once there would have been a nose and ears, there were now only vacuous nubs, rotted to nothing, and only a few struggling molars were hanging still in its skull. It all came together into the facsimile of what was once a thin man, all but for the eyes, which contained nothing. No pupils, no iris, just pure white cue balls dropped into sunken sockets.
The beast screeched, stretching it's jaw to the limit of it's rubbery sinews.
In a sudden, primal urge, Lari's arm thrust upwards, swinging a hand still stubbornly gripped to the handle of his handgun, directly into the monster's stretched maw with all the heft he could muster.
His knuckles seemed to briefly sink into the doughy insides of the thing's mouth before the force of his blow knocked it clean off the boy. A respite he seized to scramble back up and back down the hallway, only vaguely aware of the couple of new scraps and bruises from his face-to-face.
The boy skipped down the stairs to the platform and all but hopped across the tiles into the driver's cabin where the Traveller awaited with face caught between puzzlement and deeply ticked off.
"Please don't tell me all that noise up there was you. I know I didn't, personally, say the words 'don't touch anything', but that was only because I figured that would be implicit- oh. Oh no."
Lari followed the Traveller's bug-eyed stare to the avalanche of naked animated rotten bodies tumbling over themselves to collapse down the stairs he had just jumped down, onto the station platform.
The Traveller yanked Lari by the collar and pulled him through the passenger cabin door he had finished jimmying open, slipped Lari's rifle off his back and slammed the sliding door shut- jamming the long-barrel rifle through the length of the handle-bar for goof measure.
Not that the monsters seemed overly inconvenienced by the makeshift barricade, as they mindlessly charged into the driver's cabin and threw themselves skull-after-skull into the steel door, slamming their weight hard enough to jolt the whole train carriage.
The door held, however, even as the screaming creatures took their turns to try ramming the steel door open to seize their prey, driven by some primal hunger for the warm fleshed. Lair's rifle took the brunt of each impact, and the boy could not help but wince in kind each time his faithful weapon rattled against the force of crashing bodies.
Eventually the banging rhythm stopped making his bones jump at every collision, and Lari's jaw slowly began to unclench, he could detach himself from the hoard outside. They were in danger still, but not immediately. Not until either his rifle snapped or door gave in, and Lari had faith in the sturdiness of least half of that equation. As his tense started to smooth and boy began breathing again, a dull stabbing sting in his hand rose up from behind the blood pumping noise in his ears that had drowned it out. It was the same hand still tightly gripping the pistol he had chose to punch with. Two rotted teeth was stuck in the back of that hand from the force of his strike, embedded deep enough into the skin to draw blood. The wound arrested the boy for a moment, as he watched the blood build into a bubble and burst into tiny trickles that ran down his hand in rivulets. Not a wound, a battle medal.
"What- are they?" Lari asked as he picked the teeth out of the, somewhat shallow, hand cuts.
"Ghouls." The Traveller replied in a dead tone. "Same as Catha's doctor buddy."
"The Doctor?" Catha has sat up well past curfew telling Lari about the silly rotted man in the middle of the Mutant camp who seemed to always be speaking for an invisible audience. "But Catha said he was harmless. Weird, but harmless."
"Okay, not exactly the same." The Traveller took a seat on one of the passenger chairs, pointedly resting the barrel of his short-barrelled shotgun towards the pounding carriage door, before returning his attention back to the young boy. "Ghoulification is a process, not an infliction. The prolonged life and rotted body parts are just the first half of the radiation poisoning. The second comes from the rot reaching inside the head, and destroying reason canters in the brain. Even for a healthy ghoul, exposure to radiation rots away from the inside and erases the person you are until all that's left is..." His gaze wandered over to the throngs of men and women turned into animal husks by that invisible poison. "Feral."
Lari swallowed something lumpy and hard lodged in his throat. "So that- is what happens to every ghoul?"
The Traveller sighed. "Eventually. Inevitably. Immortality always comes at a price, isn't that what the stories say?"
There was no light of intelligence to be found in the eyes of those Feral Ghouls, scratching and clawing at the tempered glass behind its dusty lens. They yelped and barked like burning rats, full of bile, spit and desperation; but not much else besides. "How long will they keep like that?"
"Until they break through. They're pretty one-track minded like that." The Traveller squeezed up against one of the side windows of the passenger carriage and lifted up the torch on his Pip-Boy to shine against the tight squeeze of the train tunnel wall. More Ghoul bodies were trying in vain to push themselves through that miniscule gap, and behind them even more lined up. From a quick messy headcount, he could pick several dozens of Ghouls braying for their blood at least. Not a feasible crowd to try and wrestle against. Not nearly enough ammo. "Where did all these ghouls even come from?"
Lari looked down at the silver slide of the firearm clenched in his locked hand. He still struggled to pull the release in his hand muscles and let the thing go, it was less a tool and more akin to some malignant growth out of his skin tissue. "I set them off. There was this huge lobby room upstairs with all of these abandoned stands and glass-box rooms. I found a store full of guns and I... took a gun. Nothing big but... when I grabbed for ammo, all the alarms went off."
The Traveller cast a quick appraisal over his bounty. "Nine millimetre. Good condition. I can see why it caught your eye. Not exactly fancy enough to warrant setting off a zombie army though."
"I know! I mean- I'm sorry, I trapped us here." Lari's head drooped over his knees as he kneaded at his brow with his unburdened hand. His 'Pathfinding' was like a bad-luck curse, his instinct was the guiding rod for everyone left in his world, but without the Traveller that same 'instinct' would have killed him and the Tribes several times over. He wish he could at least find resolve in facing these ghouls in the place of his Tribes, but that would be little relief unless he could also solve their infestation problem. The tribes were stuck with his inadequacies.
"It just doesn't add up." The Traveller cut through Lari's piteous internal whining as he paced back and forth scratching behind his ear with frustration. "Did you see anything toxic up there? Any dangerous looking chemical barrels? Leaked puddles of green ooze? Anything like that?"
"Uh- No. It was pristine up there, like stepping into a photograph of the old world."
"You people had photographs? No, don't answer I don't care." He waved his errant thought away, pinched at his temple, took one of the padded passenger seats and formalized his thoughts. "Ghouls don't just rise out of the ground. They're born from an influx of radiation that mutates their molecular structure whilst rotting away at their skin. But if these ghouls came from before the war, or even after; how did they come to be? It's like you said, this place is pristine, and too far underground for the Gamma Radiation to penetrate. It would soak into the rocks." He roughly poked his own head. "There's something I'm not seeing."
Lari rose to his feet and snuck a quick glance at the throngs of Ghouls rattling against passenger carriage's back door. Their clothes had faded to tatters for the most part, but some of the girthier Ghouls still wore scraps of faded green armour on their bodies. "How far do Ghouls usually travel underground?" The boy mused.
"Depends what drives them there. They don't have the reasoning to thoughtfully migrate, they're hunger-driven beasts. There's no way they came here from the other end of the tunnel but this end is..." He indicated the stationary train car around them with carriage after carriage of connecting rusted-shut doors. "-Preoccupied. Unless... unless that wasn't always the case." The Traveller slowly nodded as his liquid theories coalesced and gelled into something solid. "What if these Ferals were made somewhere at the other end of this train tunnel before being drove into here intentionally? And then, to seal the deal, what if someone moved this train car into place to block them in?"
Lari sat up straight. "You mean this big tube can move?"
"Maybe, I can't say for sure. Most pre-war junk are nothing more than rusted hunks of twisted metal by this point, but I'm seen some lucky exceptions. This train car might just be one of them. No, it must be! Nothing else makes sense. But the Driver's panel up this end is shot." He ran up to the rattling window and stood on his toes, peering over the throngs of rotted Ghouls falling over themselves to feast on him at the smashed array of instruments hanging off the Driver's console panel "Maybe intentionally now that I look at it. Like someone didn't want any mindless Ghoul to accidentally set something off. But the Driver's cabin at the other end? If this is sabotage, it only makes sense they'd keep some way to move this hunk if they ever needed to. Yes, I'm willing to bet that's our way out!" His head nodded and shook along to his own thought train with a natural ease, like someone who had grown a little overly comfortably with their own company. Some part of Lari questioned the idea of the Traveller whenever he noticed quirks like that. A wandering nobody, bedecked with weaponry and lethal experience, with a cold metal heart. An ace in one hand, a curse in another.
Lari tried to peek through the dusty windows of the passenger carriage. "How many doors do you think we need to get through?"
"Hmm? Oh we're not going through the doors, are you kidding me? That one there took me ten minutes to carve through all the rust! They'll break that door down before I even get us over to the next carriage. I've got a much better idea." With that the Traveller whipped his travel blanket from his duffle, wrapped the thick sheet around his forearm and slammed his makeshift battering glove repeatedly into the side window of the carriage
At first the glass bounced in it's frame, then it cracked into a thousand spider-web fractures. With his next strike the whole window shattered in a hail of tiny ice-like shards.
"What are you doing?" Lari shivered as the chorus of half-dead groans exploded into the carriage again, an unbearable cacophony that seemed to flood the air around him. "Are you suggesting we climb? On the roof? But what about the space up there? There's not enough room!" Lari proved his point by reaching out between the broken shards of glass still jutting out the sil and tapping the muck on the tunnel wall this his fingers, barely a hand deep out of the carriage.
The Traveller nodded slyly. "No I can't. You're absolutely right there. If only we had someone small and agile who could climb atop the train and crawl his way to the front... but where, oh where, would we ever grab the services of a guy like that?"
Lari went white. "But- how could I... Would I even fit?"
"Sure you will, small guy like you, might take a squeeze but you'll definitely make it!"
"How do you even drive this... train?"
"I- actually have no clue." The Traveller frowned, suddenly annoyed about a surprisingly simple experience he had somehow managed to miss. "But most tech from the Pre-war is made to be idiot-proof; just tap the buttons that feel right, you'll hit the right one eventually."
"But... but..." Heat flushed up and churned in the boy's gut, boiling his stomach acid into a nasty cocktail. "I can't. I'll mess it up."
"Lari, please-"
"No!" The boy shouted, clenching his fists until they imprinted his nails against his palm. "I'm not meant for this. I can't do it. I thought I could, but I can't. I shouldn't have come. I should have stayed back in camp. I've known ever since yesterday. Ever since I froze when that Mutant was about to shoot me. Catha's the one who should be here; she's the real Pathfinder..."
The Traveller grimaced, calling to mind the first time he placed the weight of life and death in his own hands. And the words he would have liked to hear then. "Lari, listen; I know this isn't easy, none of living this kind of life ever is. Sometimes it gets too much, sometimes you make mistakes and sometimes messing up puts you in danger. Sometimes mistakes get people killed. That's the reality of walking the Wastes, and I'm sorry but there is no alternative. But take my word; if you can climb out of the holes you trip into, no matter how deep you dug 'em; well that's a victory already. Because every mistake you survive is one less mistake you're going to make again, if you're smart. That's all it takes to survive out here, the luck to live and the brains to adapt. Now I know you've got the luck, yesterday proved that; today I'm hoping you've got a solid enough head not to slip up again. Hell, I need you to have that head on you. And if you can do that, then you've got no need to doubt yourself, have you?"
Lari stopped focusing on the turmoil in his chest as something deeply weird trumped that emotion. The boy looked to the Traveller, kindly but hardened and cold on the inside, squeezing a half smile between chapped lips; like a crack in a mountain face. The sight of it unnerved Lari, like he was seeing something exceedingly uncommon, and the uncomfortable timbre of his plea reinforced that perception. The Traveller was not a man given to asking for help.
And strangely, that sole idea was lifting to the boy. That this man, of everyone he had met, a self-reliant, past-less, wasteland survivor, needed him; that woke a power he had missed since the day Cede gave him his title. A power that had whittled away from weeks trailing down a never ending road, dragging a camp of dejected refugees that seemed to have given up and lost hope in everything, him included. But in that moment he saw the same vision they all saw in the slurred Golden dreams of that scraggly old Prospector who had sent them on this path all that time back. He saw purpose.
Finally, the boy nodded. "What exactly do I need to do?"
Clambering up on the window frame was a challenge on it's own, with the jagged shards of broken glass still poking out in every direction. Not to mention the uncomfortably snug fit of the train tube tunnel against Lari, which made his scramble more of a squeeze spurred on with help of the Traveller, who helped the boy slip up both feet and swing them over onto the roof of the train. Once the boy was away and clear, each hopped to their respective tasks; Lari tucked his body flat on the sloped roof of the train, distributing his weight as evenly as possible, whilst the Traveller got to work chipping the worst of the rust away from the connecting door leading to the next carriage, because you never know.
The slime on the bricks of the tunnel had dripped onto the metal roof of the train carriage over years of disuse, the slick coat squished and squelched under his fingers, robbing friction and grip wherever Lari tried to grab on to shuffle forth along the roof.
The consequence of a fall would be dire, the tunnel was lean but offered just enough room for a clumsy body of around about his size to tumble off the roof and become wedged between the wheels and the tunnel wall, were he not careful. Not so dissimilar to the days that Lari and Catha would scale the valley rocks in the middle of storms, crawling across wet, slipping rocks whilst enduring ceaseless buffering from howling winds. Rather than let the conditions and luck seal his fate, he boy adapted. He positioned both thighs flat on both sides of the roof slope and found little indents in the roof panelling he could use to pull his body forwards across the grime stricken train roof. Sometimes by the tips of his pulled nails. With this method, the teenager could slowly wiggle his way down the tunnel without risking the fifty/fifty of shoe friction.
His only real hurdles were the spaces from one carriage to another, sizeable gaps that would allow the body of the train to bend going around corners, and a logistical nightmare for his careful progression. The gap was only a couple of feet by the boy's estimation, but space was more enough to become his tomb with a single careless stumble. Lodged in the tunnel, starving to death; an end not fit for animals.
Blocking out the mindless raving shouts of the Ghoulish hoards still only a few carriages behind, and the thought of The Traveller impatiently waiting below, he tackled the first of these gaps.
Lari slid his fingertips up against the very rim of the roof and pulled his body as close up to it as he could, a rigid and laboured process without the headroom to sit up in the slightest.
Gritting his teeth, as though that extra placebo of concentration would will his body not to slip, he slowly swung his left leg over the roof over the carriage slope to meet his right, and then shimmied his whole body around in a pivot until his feet were sticking out over the gap.
Then, facing backwards over the gap, Lari blindly pushed his body over the open space with nothing beneath him, all the time focusing on keeping as stiff as a plank of wood.
He felt the grounding presence of the roof leave his knees, then his thighs, and then his own stomach as the boy realised the gap was longer than he anticipated. For one mad moment he contemplated whether or not the next train carriage was even still there, or if it had silently rolled away and he was about to slip off the back of his roof and become lost in the black tunnels.
But then a welcome metal thud of the next roof greeted his legs, followed by a stomach lurch as his feet slipped on the grime.
The boy kicked and flailed his legs about wildly until they slammed back onto the carriage roof, solidly this time. He deliberately and cautiously secured both legs around the either edge of that carriage's roof slope, and let his lungs fill with the air they lost in that moment of abject panic. Given freedom that would have been the moment Lari took to let his heart settle, but time was a commodity they were short on.
Then Lari, quickly as he dared, backward shimmed the rest of his body onto the carriage roof and began crawling feet first across the next passenger carriage, occasionally rubbing his ear against decades-old grime just to try and steal a glance over his shoulder of where the next gap might be.
The Traveller chipped away at the welded rust economically, sliding the bevel of his bowie knife inside door cracks and hinges and whatever might be preventing the door mechanism from budging every time he tried to force it. The last few attempts gave a bit of a shudder to the door, so he was hopeful, but the carriage door behind him was certainly shaking looser quicker, what with the combined thumping bodies of a horde of Ghouls taking their turns ramming it. That door stood firm for the moment however, standing the brute force of battering in a way no standard model public train door would.
The Traveller had walked the bones of the old world long enough to pick up on some of the clues that might indicate why that train track was there, and for what purpose it might have served. Tucked away at the bottom of a mountain that no one would expect to have access through, a single track rail for one-way trips, the irradiated ghouls, maybe from before the war themselves, all donned in olive green ballistic weave with the tell-tale American military white stars printed on their backs. The set-up clearly belonged to some sort of clandestine military station before the world stopped, probably some unlisted base hidden in the hills for the higher echelon of service member.
On the list of negatives, before they are ridden of their minds and autonomy, ferals carry all the vestiges of the people they once were into their post-life torment; and animated bodies wearing body armour were a pain to deal with. But under the positives, secret military bases tended to be pretty well stocked and not commonly picked clean by scavs; so the Traveller could catch up on some that packing he stubbornly forwent before he ran away- that is to say, 'before he departed'.
The Traveller chuckled dryly. He made his case so nobly in his head before he packed up and snuck out of his home between the throngs of confused crowds of suddenly displaced 'tourists', and around the over-packed and overworked neighbourhood clinics manned by volunteers far out of their depths and budgets and beside pockets of angsty fleeing soldiers who had very suddenly found themselves stationed on foreign soil. Stepping away from the spotlight had some silent dignity to it, at least in a vacuum. Now he was trapped under several thousand miles of rock in a metal tomb with a few pockets of ammo and about to be feasted on by a horde of starving zombies, he failed to recall what that 'dignity' felt like.
Clank.
A metal knut flew out of one of the hinges in the Ghouls' favourite beating door and loudly clattered under one of the passenger seats. That was it, time up.
The Traveller gave one last experimental nudge on the door he was working. Still rusted shut. Shame, he could have used the extra room.
He slugged the heavy travel duffel from his back and unzipped it on the furthest seat back from the impending breech point. Rustling through his supplies offered very little wiggle room to play with. A single remaining stick of dynamite (he still couldn't believe he remembered to pack bloody dynamite but nothing actually useful.) his Laser Pistol, not overly useful against bodies long-ago burnt to a crisp by nuclear radiation, and about fifteen twenty-gauge Shotgun shells. And a couple of twelve gauge Shells for spare, because apparently he was too busy sniffing his own 'dignified' waste to check his supplies properly before leaving. What a way for a life lived like his to be snuffed out; ran aground by poor planning. Sis would rib me raw for screwing myself so royally!
His idle smile creased with that thought, as did the rest of his face. What a ghost to incite at a time like this. Time was he would clench at his chest whenever thoughts like that swam up. Feel the subtle imprint of the little toy guitar wrapped in a neckless and tucked under his shirt. These days he did not have to touch it anymore, he could feel it beat next to his heart.
The Traveller turned to look through the musty glass of the next carriage over, as though he could peer through the various layers of wrought steel between him and the boy to catch eyes with him. He nodded, to no one, and then readied the barrel of his caravan shotgun to the rustling door, just as the next hinge bolt flew through the air and trickled across the floor.
A Ghoul headbutted the glass, cracking the surface into little strings of webs.
He slipped that last red stick of dynamite out of his duffel.
The carriage door bore the brunt of another almighty shove, this time shaking so madly that the hinges jostled out of position, the remaining bolts proving too weak to hold the metal door steady.
The Traveller steadied the stick's wick against a silver metal handrail and placed the blade of his bowie knife against the same pole.
The next Ghoul shouldered the door so hard that the last few bolts either shot free or twisted out of their hinge for release.
He struck his blade against the length of the handrail, like a flint striking along a heft of steel, alighting the wick with a shower of sparks.
The passenger carriage door flung open against the force of another flung Ghoul body.
The Traveller threw his lit red stick right in the midst of the waiting horde.
An explosion of force shook the entire train Lari was clung to, popping him briefly into the air and banging the back of the boy's skull head against the stone of the tunnel.
Bright white dots flashed across his vision in a sudden throbbing haze, as the boy landed awkwardly, his thighs failed to set in their balanced place and his entire body began slipping on the grime and over to the left of his train roof.
Through the fuzzy haze of his spinning world, the boy about felt his body slipping away from his perch and a instinctual kick to his mind registered how weird that was. A brief second before his lucid brain jolted back into action and Lari began madly groping at the roof panels for anything to grab, only to feel his nails scratch against the ridge of the panel they were just clutched to.
He slipped, rolled and tumbled right off the train roof.
It was in total fluster that his slipping hands clenched and managed to catch on the short side railings off the train carriage roof, hooking the boy and plastering him up against the musty glass window of the carriage, just before his body plunged down into the unpleasant dark below.
The stitched flesh of his shoulder ripped and screamed at the sudden jerking strain, but stubborn adrenaline flushed the boy's body dry of the prickling pains. He clung to that railing like it was the last rigid olive branch in a world drowned in monsoon.
Lari had heard explosions just like that one before, more of a loud pop than a roaring earthquake, but still packing a nasty punch. And what more, he could guess exactly why it was that the Traveller might be throwing dynamite all the way from the back of the train. They were out of time, but as Lari took stock of his surroundings he could see he was only a single carriage away from the front Driver's cabin.
The train rail's would carry him the rest of way, provided he could manage to carry his whole weight for the distance, and Lari was always a better runner than a lifter. But the Traveller was counting on him, Lari knew he could make it last fifteen or so meters. He had to.
A black musty cloud of gunpowder singed at the Traveller's nostrils, graciously masking the underline stench of blown open rotten bodies that now caked the far side of the carriage. Most people suffer ringing ears and spotty vision when caught around the radius of a sudden and violent blast, but years of involuntary and often impromptu 'practice' tended to mitigate those symptoms once you have no more eardrum left to have rung.
And so the thick choking smoke had hardly began to settle before the Traveller was rushed forward and picked through the clumps of Ghoul limbs, identifying any largely intact body that needed an extra blade-to-skull treatment.
Little can actually disrupt the primal drive of a psyche as butchered as a feral ghoul's, except of course for stimulate that appeals even to the primitive function of any brain. As such, the screaming hoards paused their baying and bawling for a prolonged moment of bemused fascination, blank white eyes fixed to the flying rubble and billowing smoke. Until, inevitably, the dust started to clear and their sharp scent once again picked up on a living body for them to dine on.
The first such soul to clamber into the driver's cabin and through the same spot his brethren were just ripped apart at, was met with a not so dissimilar fate as a 20 Gauge shell blew it's skull apart. The creature's crudely decapitated form slumped out into the waiting crowds of dozens, eliciting a rumble-like hiss amidst their number.
Their prey had fangs.
The Traveller stretched every breathing moment out in his mind, searching for an advantage and settled on the half-formed plan of limiting his window of approach.
He snatched up his laser pistol which he had previously written off and grabbed at the nearest metal handrail pole. Two red hot laser shots at the floor and ceiling junctions cut the pole from it's nest, giving the man a makeshift spear.
Which the Traveller then used to ram the next curious Feral brave enough to climb through the smoke of his atomized brethren through the chest, with a driving force enough to skewer the red-hot metal 'spear'-head inside the belly-button of the Ghoul and out through the spine. The man wedged the stick as deeply as he could, until it's searing tip scratched up against the window of driver's cabin's viewing port.
A half-conceived turn-style to confuse and congest the coming flood of mindless Ferals.
Each new Feral that tried to climb over that metal pole found a faded wooden shotgun stock slammed directly in the centre of their skulls, courtesy of the Traveller. Each squelched a little as the softer-than-expected skull material collapsed inwards and he needed to summon as much effort pulling the weapon out as he did digging it in. But it staunched their numbers and preserved his precious ammunition, for a while.
The Traveller was so preoccupied dealing with the greedy grabbers who had climbed onto the driver's cabin and attempted to scale over his ramshackle buffer bar, he paid no notice to the trampled Ghouls that those Ferals were climbing over in their scramble. That was, until one crushed crawling Ghoul managed to reach between the legs of it's competitors, and dig it's cold rotten nails into the warm flesh of the the Traveller's ankle.
His foot flew out from him. He fell backwards.
The back of his head wacked solid against the hard metal floor of the passenger cabin, ringing his skull with the sort of violence no amount of familiarity could mitigate.
Consequently, the next Feral to scale his buffer bar flopped atop the dazed Traveller, teeth bared and ready. The Traveller reacted to the basic level of his shattered senses. His sight, faded into hexagons, went dark with the looming toothy shadow atop of him.
All he could do was jam the business end of his shotgun in the air and loosen his buckshot. Splattering fluid viscera over his own already foggy face.
Bony fingers pulled on his boot, scratching into the flesh of his leg with broken dagger-like nails. He kicked wildly at anything his foot could connect with, until he hit something hard and with the give of a mouldy melon.
One solid wind-back and kick and the melon-shape flew back, his leg wiggled free.
Screams of the Feral seemed to flood out from everywhere, bouncing off the walls and striking the fresh throbbing in his head. The Traveller scrambled back to his belongings by the far end of his passenger cabin, partially just to get away from the cacophonous carnage as much as to buy himself some room. By the time he could settle his head, with a quick focusing slap across his own sore temple, The Traveller flipped back around to see three more Ferals already stumbling into his carriage.
Allowing too many bodies in the passenger cabin and becoming overwhelmed would spell a quick and messy death, buying himself more time would have to take precedent over resource preservation. He set up his firing position behind his passenger chair; one straight leg to lean off, one knee on the seat and his elbow propped on the head rest supporting the kick of his shotgun.
Fire.
Reload the hot empty buck shells.
Two shots, one pump.
Wait for the third feral to madly rush forward with flailing hands, strike it across the temple with the gun stock and then crush it's skull open with the heel of his boot. An expensive routine with his reserves, but with luck and hope it only needed to last for a short while.
Some providence of fate decreed the side window into the front driver's cabin which Lari had shuffled towards to be open for the boy to enter. Actually, the glass pane itself was actually missing from the frame, as though the window had been smashed in and picked clean of pointy shards. Whatever the circumstance, the boy still had cause to bless his good fortunes, looking up to where the sky would be in a manner not so dissimilar to what the White Doves tribes would do before meals. They said it was thanking some one looking over their fortune, and he liked to hope someone up there was looking over his too.
The tell-tale bang of regular gunfire had started to pick up from the back of the train. Two quick blasts followed by some silence, and then the pattern would repeat. With each prolonged bout of nothingness, Lari's pulse would quicken and his hands would shimmy a little faster along the side-rail than what was safely comfortable, but tension would release when that gun kicked into life again. Still, he knew ammo was supposed to be dire.
The Traveller was counting on him.
Positioning himself directly in front of the small driver's window, Lari had to place his hands in a V-stance either side of the open window in order to hoist his entire body up high enough to squeeze through the window hole.
His forearm's rattled under a pressure they were in no way used to, and his shoulder seized and seared from its wounds, but a steel determination beat out the weak flesh as the boy managed to shove himself in that window slot and drop himself into the driver's cabin. There, however, he was met with a roadblock.
Consoles and readouts, levers and chains, all manner of instruments jutted out of the front of this metal wagon and none-of-them made one iota of sense to the boy. He had anticipated being somewhat lost, but the mind's ability to 'wing-it' can be severely overestimated when you are not directly faced with the size of the problem before you. He counted maybe fifty knobs and twist dials littered over every surface before his brain gave up trying to track them all, and not a one of them were clearly labelled. In fact- yes, some of the labels had been intentionally scrubbed clean! Some dick had intentionally modified the consoles to be extra unreadable!
As for what would actually move the Train- well that could be anyone's guess, and Lari much preferred the straightforward challenge of reaching this point over the open-ended challenge of randomly guessing what could work. He could just pick at every button and lever and hope for the best, but that seemed desperately irresponsible, who knows what sort of havoc that could wrought?
"LARI!" bounced a screaming voice from down the tunnel. "HURRY UP!"
The flood of Ghouls had managed to work their way around his buffer bar and more than one had fallen atop of the Traveller with their swiping fists and gnashing teeth. The dual barrels of his Caravan shotgun had been spent on the first two, but his shotgun-bat follow-up approach fell short against the wave of three Ferals behind them.
Their rush wrestled the Traveller to the cold cabin floor and the man had to keep them chewing on and biting on his left arm to bring them close enough to stab at with his bowie knife. But each corpse that slumped dead whenever his bowie tip would slam under the thick head bone and slide into their brains, would be replaced by a new body as their swarm began to overwhelm the survivor.
Rotten teeth were poor for really ripping off any flesh through the tough leather fabric of his coat jacket, but their grinding force still cut up the man's arm like spare meat on a butcher's slab.
One annoying Feral had found a its snack on the Traveller's unprotected ankle. That bite earned the rotted bastard a boot to the skull, but he could not easily kick off the several others who had crawled into the carriage and, taking their friend's example, lunged for his feet.
The Traveller had to jerk and twist like a trout just to fend off the five biters trying to gorge themselves on his body.
A new pair of teeth clamped down upon the one part of his sacrificial arm he had intentionally tried to keep clear, the soft fleshy palm of his hand.
Panic surged over the man as he envisioned his digits being ripped off, and whether by strategy or fresh instinct those same endangered fingers clamped back around the inside of creature's slime-filled jaw. With his fingertips dug into the flesh on the inside of it's saliva-free mouth, the Traveller slammed the Ghoul's forehead into his own with a stabbing headbutt that audibly cracked.
Whether that was a crack in his own skull or the Ghoul's he could not tell, the pain was everywhere.
The force of that impact careened the Ghoul back, onto a nearby passenger seat that knocked something heavy and clanging off the chair and onto the carriage floor. The silver metal finish caught the Traveller's eye for a slight second before it slipped somewhere near his feet, but his racing mind pieced it together.
It had to be the handgun that Lari had found, the boy must have left it there before climbing atop the train. And even better; it was certainly loaded the last time the Traveller checked.
Two more Ferals launched themselves atop the Traveller and began their assault, beating and slashing deeply and suddenly enough to slip past his sacrificial arm and catch at his face, squirting red ribbons of blood into his eyes.
He couldn't see.
He tried blindly groping around with the heel of his right foot for the shape of the gun, but the moment his leg stopped flopping like a wild fish, several sets of teeth found their mark all the way up his leg. He screamed and jerked but the Ghouls bit solid.
All over his body searing jabs of Feral bites immobilized his nerve receptors with burning pain, building up enough to bring him into a state of shock.
The Traveller's body stopped responding. The Feral cries drowned out his mind. His limbs locked completely up. the Ghouls piled over each other to reach him.
The fires flooded his veins and shot up his neck. The teeth started to rip.
And then the train moved.
A violent lurch threw that tangle of bodies off the Traveller as ancient wheels sputtered back to life. The moment slid something hard and metal across the carriage floor into his leg and the Traveller's instinct took over. He quickly sat up, snatched the pistol up with his still-functioning right hand, flicked back the slide against his jacket, emptied his lungs, and put the five Feral beasts down with a single shot to each forehead.
The Traveller collapsed back onto the carriage floor as the aches and pains of his close-call with death flared back up to match the rising groans of frustration from the Ferals now caught chasing the steel train as it slowly rolled away from them and began building momentum. It had been a very long time since the Traveller had slipped into a pit that steep without a rope to get out of it, time spent not fixing for the company of others; turns out that sort of recipe starts to get one thinking their invincible after long. The Wasteland has it's curt and crude way of punishing the delusional.
The rumble stopped.
That soothing thrum of the train wheels skipping over tracks cut itself short and the fading roar of charging Ferals began to build up once again.
The Traveller jerked straight up in alarm, only to be bowled over once again when the train jolted into life again. But in the other direction.
Feral Ghouls are mindless and thoughtless creature driven to a murderous rage, although even in their all-consuming hunger some vague sliver of natural preservationism must play about in their heads. Such that some of the huge hoard chasing after the metal tube train as it rolled away from them must have stopped to at least consider the situation when that same train started rolling back towards them. Perhaps it would be going too far to assume that fear or worry were still feasible in their radiation ravaged minds, but the Traveller at least liked to hope for some Karmic-moment of fatal realisation before their bodies were knocked over and squashed flat by the unyielding butt of the ten thousand pound rail-car. He liked to imagine a little bump in the wheels as the train rolled over them, but in truth the monstrous thing utterly eviscerated the hoard, turning their bones to dust and splattering the back windows with ugly squirts of blood and mucus.
Lari rolled the train all the back into the station that he and the Traveller had escaped from, before pulling back on the lever he had come to rely most on, back to a neutral position. The wheels hissed and spat as the huge metal beast rolled to a slow halt.
Timidly, the boy climbed out from the driver's cabin and glanced over towards the far carriage where he had last left his travelling companion, worried about what exactly he would find there. Panic had taken over back when the boy got in front of the train controls and heard the last shotgun blast from the back of the train. He had pulled and pushed everything to make the thing go, and sent it back into reverse by accident. But the hot flush of fear and guilt that his actions came too late only rose. Replacing that fear with a much more potent and black dread.
That spur of bravery had run out, now he could not dare even walk down the length of the train to gauge the carnage his lethargy had wrought. All he could manage was to stand there, sheepishly, praying for some sign of life to vindicate his efforts.
And to his utmost relief, the Traveller, pants soaked red, arm dripping a trail, stumbled out of the last passenger carriage, carrying a long shape in his right hand. Lari's mania become progressively tempered with concern as he ran up to the man and was hit by the stench of gore emanating from the back of the carriage, rich and heady on the air like an entire cellar of freshly bled carcasses.
The Traveller barely registered the boy until the kid was close enough to stir his drowsy senses. Several hits of morphine mixed with anti-rad tablets tended to rob the reflex out of you. He grinned with blood-stained teeth, winked and chucked the boy his old rusty Hunting rifle. With horrible accuracy. The weapon clattered to the floor.
"What did I say? No reason to doubt!"
The Traveller was far too proud a man to accept Lari's repeated offers to shoulder his weight on their journey back to the camp, despite the pained labour with which the man had to drag his leg over each rail as they walked. "I'm fine." He would say. "Or I will be. I don't have that Cell Breeder for nothing!" He rapped his chest with a knowing wink as Lari starred on blankly. 'Men become stupid when their hearts lead them', Lari figured. Coloumbia spoke as soundly as the Seer sometimes. And so the both of them took about as twice as long coming back the same way as they did scouting out originally. Not least of all for that climb up to where the caves met the train tunnels; Lari was worried the heavily-panting bleary-eyed fool would pass out from the sheer strain of it.
They had hardly re-entered the camp before becoming realising something was wrong. The camp was not alive with activity like it usual was, and not just due to the general disdain for being locked away from the sun. All the tribes were gathered in throngs around the Elder's tents, some whispering nervously whilst others quietly wept. Lari had to slip his way through the mass of bodies, with the Traveller politely pushing behind him, in order to break forth to the trio of Apothecaries kneeling over the form of Old Man Pinac.
Dark spotches boiled under sallow sheets of old skin as the healers did their best to make sense of his ailment. They dabbed at the sweat pouring out of him, wafted spice concoctions over his body and rubbed Vera leaves against the tips of his swelling fingers, but the old man's eyes never flicked more than a hair's width open. Never once in his life had Lari even seen the old Seer so fragile and reduced, too weak to do anything but shudder slightly.
"Give me space." The Traveller shoed away that trio of Apothecary women, who seemed almost affronted as his suggestion until Catha echoed his sentiments with a hiss. The little girl looked up at the Traveller with big, pleading eyes.
"Help him." She commanded.
For the next hour, the Displaced huddled nervously inside their conjoined living tent under the supervision of Catha whilst the Traveller tirelessly operated on the old man. Lari silently volunteered to be his assistant, serving as two hands to make up for the Traveller's left arm, which was still stiff from it's ghoulish mauling. Inside of his duffel, the Traveller made the boy produce several sets of shiny metal tools and clear plastic syringes, a rubber pipe and a little silver tray; all sealed inside of plastic baggies and carefully cleaned. Contrary to the 'try everything' approach of the healers, the Traveller's hands and orders worked methodically and precisely, with exacting knowledge of where they would be working. He personally dragged a silver scalpel down the old man's chest and opened him up.
Sickly ripe red that would have once churned in the young boy's mind now hardly even registered, not after the evening he had. He grimly held the thin cuts of man open with metal pliers whilst the Traveller carefully slotted rubber tubing inside of the Old Seer's chest and pumped out yellowish gunk he said was trapped inside of the lung.
It was a messy and long operation, for which young Lari performed exactly as the Traveller needed. The man preferred to mount the precision actions by himself, but otherwise the boy proved a critical assets in stabilizing the old man enough for his chest convulsions to settle back in a calm rise and fall. His ragged, wheezes relaxed into drawn out breaths. He almost looked like he was asleep. Still, when it was all said and done and the old man was bandaged up, the Traveller shook his head bitterly.
"I've done what I can but... I'm pretty much just plugging holes here." He said, wiping the bloody tips of his plastic gloves off in one of the water basins that a clothes washer had sacrificed. "The problem is in his lungs, they're giving out and I don't have the tools to- hell, even if I could he wouldn't accept it."
"Accept what?" Lari's heart sank as the Traveller sighed a deep, resigned, breath.
"I've seen the way you look at me, Kid. When you think I won't. Ever since I told you about this Ticker, you've had a funny eye on me." He rapped a knuckle over his left breast. "I get it; metal man with metal parts ain't exaclty your idea of what a human should be. How they should grow. I take it that's not an opinion exclusive to you, is it?"
Lari turned red. He tried to defend himself, deny the trepidation he had worn more openly than expected, but the Traveller saw right through it before he could formulate a sentence.
"That's okay, Lari. I'm not angry at you. I just need you to know that in the state he's in, only cybernetic organs can get his body working like it needs to. I'm sorry Lari, there's nothing more I can do."
The boy swallowed hard, allowing himself to steal a glance at the old man's face, an act he had avoided throughout the entire operation. Pinac really was a pillar of strength for the entirety of The Displaced ever since they fled the valley, in a way that only seemed to become obvious right now. He really was an ancient man, sallow skin, thinning white hair, translucent iris; but he let none of it show, he never walked slow and tried not to lean too heavily on his cane, never let his mind waver, kept the same hours as the young folk. He really drove himself to be the spine of everyone, until now. "He is the last of them." Lari realised.
"Of who?"
"The Dead Trees. He is the last to grow up in that Valley, live his whole life in the way that his ancestor's dictated, balancing the health of nature and the tribe. When he goes, so do the Dead Trees."
The Traveller frowned. "But that's not true at all. What about you? Or Catha? Or the other babies and kids?"
"We're something else." The boy spoke coldly, with bitterness. "We live hunted. Homeless. Displaced. None of us have been around long enough to see the world he did. We learned how to scavenge, and scrounge. How to barely survive. There is no name for us."
The Traveller thought on the boy's reckoning, picking out the loathing and harshness and reaching that fear of loneliness. He squeezed on Lari's shoulder with his good hand. "There might be others out there." He offered. "Other Dead Trees not down here with us."
The boy shook his head flatly. "Cede is dead. Those who stayed to fight, died on the soil where their homes used to stand. Everyone knows that."
"And what about his brother? The one who ran away and never returned?" The Boy twisted his shoulder free and glared hard at the Traveller, as though the man had struck him across the cheek. He looked for mocking malice in the older man, and found only innocent confusion. "Did I say something wrong?"
"Ketel? You mean Ketel? You said he left and never returned?" The boy's lip twisted.
The Traveller slowly nodded, gauging each word as he said it. "That's what Pinac told me. Yesterday. He said Ketel left the tribe with his supporters."
Lari scowled, then looked once more at the sleeping innocence of the old dying seer. "Perhaps that was the way he saw it. But Pinac lied, Ketel did return."
After the two of them put the Old Seer to rest in his tent, watched over carefully by that returned trio of Apothecaries and the Elders, they waited until the camp had settled down into an disquiet silence before moving to the far corner of the camp to speak in private. Those of The Displaced were in no mood for dreams that night, even less so than usual, and most sat staring at the patchwork knit of their tents or the uneven surface of the cave roof, hoping that exhaustion would take over them. But stress has it's way of running you ragged.
When they were clear, Lari continued to clarify. "When Ketel left he did so with most of the Tribe's best. The Huntmaster, Lari's tutor, the shift organisers; half the Dead Trees walked out of the valley that day. For the next few years the rest of us had to fill their absence, as best as we could without the experience and training of hereditary succession. But crop yield fell for the first year, and even more the next. That last year we were rationing everything we managed to grow between the Tribes as much as we could. There were weeks we would split an ear of corn for the week per tent. It was... hard. And then the Black Trees came."
"The Black Trees?"
Lari nodded grimly. "We saw their banners poking over the rim of the valley first. No one knew yet that the radiation had settled down enough for people to draw that close to the cliff edge, until we saw our own 'Three lined tree' emblem chalked in black charcoal ontop of red fabric. And those who held those flags, we saw them too. Those that left, clad in leather skirts and foot-ball helmets."
The Traveller's eyes went wide. "They joined The Legion?"
The boy's face was stone. "Ketel was at the front of them. The same Ketel me and Catha used to play with on the rocks when Cede sent him to drag us back to camp for dinner. Now he wore paint, held a spear and stood at the rim of the basin. Looking down on us like... like... an angry god." His voice dropped to a whisper. "He was just standing there. For hours. Him and his lost. Cede was so happy when the scouts first confirmed it was him. He wanted to go see his brother. Hug him. But Pinac said 'No'. He said 'We need to wait, see what he wants.' And at midday that was exactly what we saw. More shadows arrived at the rim of our valley, with the Dread Bull painted on their Standards. They lined up along the edge of valley. They stretched to either end of the horizon, you would see their shadow against the sky wherever you looked."
That image resonated with the Traveller as he tried to work the logistics under his breath. "So many of them that deep into the West... we never should have let them..."
Not hearing the Traveller, or the mumbles from the camps, or anything outside of the words of his story, Lari continued. "The Chief understood then. Where they had gone. Why they returned. What they wanted. But he just would not believe he... Cede was shocked. Horrified. I can only imagine..." His mind wandered to the only parallel he could conjure. But even then, the thought of little Catha baring arms against any one of the Tribes, let alone him. Impossible. "By night it was undeniable. Ketel wanted the Tribe, all of the Tribes. That was when... that was when he made his plans. Cede sent for all the Elders to gather by the thicket of the Trees and plan what would happen before the next day break. Ketel's courtesy not to attack us outright would only stretch until the next morning; that was how long we would have. After that the Chief told us all... he said... there would be an evacuation. The able bodied would stay to protect the escape. Our escape." His pupils dimmed into rusty pennies. "I wanted to stay. I tried to make top hunter for a whole year, I should have- The Chief took me aside and made me promise. Promise to look after the retreating. Promise to look after Catha. He made me leave..."
Lari's speech deteriorated as the memory behind it tortured at his mind. The Traveller recognised the havoc playing across the young boy's features, but he kept hard-faced and detached, even as the boy took a break to hold his own mouth to keep from breaking into sobs. "The first night after we left, we were in shock the whole time. The world outside the Basin looked so... empty and... wide. The only landmark was this one big rock in the middle of a highway. We waited there for the rest of the Tribe to catch up to us. To tell us it was safe to come back to the valley. The next night we moved a little, not as far as we should have, and Catha scouted behind us to see if the Tribes had come looked for us. She said the Black Trees were at that rock. That was when we knew..."
A tiny pop from perhaps half a mile away bounced through the quiet caves ringing with the frequency of a tapped wine glass by the time it touched the same cave the Tribes were in. But for a people with sensitive ears wrapped in blankets of silence as they tried to fall to sleep, the slight disturbance might as well have been the crash of a cymbal by their ears.
Every tribal perked up in alarm. Tribe members sat up in their beds, Elders poked out from their tents and Lari and the Traveller snapped around with extra concern granted by context. Both of them knew that noise well enough by now, the small bang of a stick of dynamite; but not one lit or thrown by either of them, the only explosive carriers that were meant to be present. The Traveller, however, was also saddled with the added context of how few people in the modern Wasteland made use of such an archaic and weak tool as dynamite. Cheap prospectors would, as they made use of whatever got the job done, there was a Gang of ex-cons further east who based their whole identity around the stuff, but they were not really the travelling type. And when the utmost need arises, given their 'moral aversion' to more advanced weapons and tools, dynamite would be the explosive of choice by The Legion.
The Traveller turned to Lari "We need to leave tonight."
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