The partition doors hissed and thunked open. The guard came through, a tall, stooping man in a uniform, with a holstered pistol on his hip.
“Tickets from Carlisle, please.” He had a slightly camp voice, gentle and pleasant. He smiled and checked the tickets of the business executive sitting opposite and across from Myra.
“Scuse me,” the steward sang out, behind him. The steward was a small, scrawny youth in a white shirt, tartan bow-tie and trews. Spiky black hair.
The trolley rattled and jangled into the compartment. The guard stepped aside to let it pass. As he did so the train lurched a little, setting the trolley’s contents ringing again, and the brakes squealed as the train came to a halt.
There was a crackly announcement, from which Myra could only make out the words “trees on the line”.
A ripple of derision ran through the carriage. Myra added her hoot to it, and glanced out of the windows. There were trees beside the line, to the right, but they were about a hundred yards away, across a puddled meadow, On the other side, a sharp slope, with trees above the scree.
She heard a gasp from the steward, and a sort of cough from the guard. A large quantity of some red liquid splashed across the table she was sitting at, and some of it poured over the edge and on to the lap of her skirt. Myra recoiled, looking up with a momentary flash of civilised annoyance—her first impression was that somehow the steward had spilled a bottle of red wine over her.
The guard fell sideways across the table with a shocking thud. His throat gaped and flapped like a gillnslit, still pumping. She could see the rim of his severed windpipe, white, like broken plastic. His mouth was open too, the tongue quivering, dripping spitde. His eyes were very wide. He raised his head, and looked as though he were trying to say something to her. Then he stopped trying. His head hit the table with a second thump,
The steward was still standing, clutching a short knife in one hand and an automatic pistol, evidendy the guard’s, in the other. His shirtcuff had blood on it, as did the front of his shirt. It looked like he’d had a nose-bleed which he’d tried to staunch on his sleeve. It was surprising how thin a liquid blood was, when it was freshly spilled, still splashy, a wine-dark stream.
The steward flicked his tongue across his lips. He waved the pistol in a way that suggested he was not entirely familiar with its use. Then, in a movement like a conjuring trick, he’d swapped the knife and the pistol around and worked the slide. Lock and load; he knew how to use it, all right.
“Don’t fucking move,” he said.
Myra didn’t fucking move. She’d stuck her small emergency-pistol in the top of her boot when she’d taken off the holster with the Glock, which was now lying under her jacket on the luggage-rack above. There was no way she could reach either weapon in time. Nor could she blink up a comms menu on her eyeband—the phone was in her jacket, too. The other passenger, who was sitting across the aisle and facing the opposite direction, didn’t move either. Somebody, not a child, in the Second-Class compartment was screaming. The steward had his back to that compartment, and at least several people in there must have been aware of what had happened. Without moving her head, or even her eyes, Myra could see white faces, round eyes and mouths, through the glass partition.
She was thinking
Far behind her, near the back of train she guessed, there was a brief exchange of fire and a distant, thin screaming. It went on and on like a car alarm.
Every door in the train, internal and external, thunked open. OK, so somebody’d got to the controls. Myra felt a cold draught against the warm and now sticky liquid on her knees. The colour washed out of the world. Myra realised that she was about to go into shock, and breathed hard and deep.
Some of the horsemen, dismounted, leapt aboard the train. At the end of each carriage, a pair of them faced opposite ways, covering the passengers with rifles. The man who landed facing Myra filled the partition doorway. “Barbarian” was not an epithet, applied to him; he was tall and broad, he had a beard and pony-tail gleaming with grease, and his jacket and chaps bore smooth-edged, irregularly shaped plates of metal attached to the leather with metal rings, a crude and partial armour.
“Hands on heads! Everybody outside! On to the track!”
Myra put her hands on top of her head and stood up and shuffled sideways into the aisle. The steward-punk who’d murdered the guard still had her covered, and was backing out past the big fellow, whom he obviously knew. The businessman, standing up, had a curiously intent look on his face. Myra guessed instantly that he was about to make himself a hero, and in a fortuitous moment of eye contact she shook her head. His shoulders slumped slighdy, even with his hands in the air; but he complied with the shouted command and the minutely gestured suggestion, jumping out to the right and landing on the permanent way on his feet and hands, then scrambling up and running across the adjacent track to the low bank with the fence by the flooded meadow.
Myra raised her hands and stepped over the guard’s buckled legs, edged past the barbarian and the steward and jumped out. She landed lightly, the impact jolting her pistol uncomfortably but reassuringly deeper down the side of her boot, and walked across the track and up the bank, then turned to face the train.
People were all doing as she had done, or helping kids—silent now—down to the broken stones. The Greens strode or stood or rode up and down, yip-peeing, all the time keeping their rifles trained on the passengers. There were at least a score of the attackers on each side of the train, probably more. About a hundred people, passengers and crew, had come off the train. Somebody was still on the train and still screaming.
Myra stood with her hands on her head and shivered. The sight of so many people with their hands up made her feel sick. The barbarians probably intended to loot the train—they must know that some at least of the passengers would be carrying concealed weapons, but they weren’t as yet even bothering to search for them. The hope that they would be spared would be enough to stop almost anyone from making an inevitably doomed attempt to fight. It might just stop them until it was too late. If the Greens intended a massacre they would do it, of that she was sure, just when least expected. The Greens would manoeuvre inconspicuously so that they were out of each other’s lines of fire, and the fusillade would come. Then a bit of rape and robbery, and a few final finishing shots to the head for the wounded if they were lucky.
One tall man in a fur cloak and leather-strapped cotton leggings was stalking around from one group of passengers to another, peering at and talking to every young or young-looking woman. When he reached Myra he stopped on the slope just below her, rested his hand on his knee and looked up, grinning. He was clean-shaven, with long sun-bleached red hair tied back with a thong around his brow. On another thong, around his neck, hung a whistle. Beneath his fur cloak he wore a faded green T-shirt printed with the old UN Special Forces motto: SORT ’EM OUT—LET GOD KILL ’EM ALL.
“Ah,” he said, “
He had a London accent and a general air of enjoying himself hugely. Myra stared at him, shaken at being thus singled out. He recognised her, and she had a disquieting feeling that she’d seen him somewhere before.
“Yes,” she said. “What’s it to you?”
“You got any proof of that?”
“Diplomatic passport, jacket pocket, above the seat I was in.”
“I’ll check,” he warned, eyes narrowing.
“Oh, and bring my fucking Glock as well. You are in deep shit, mister.”
“We’ll see about that,” he said. He turned around and yelled at the big man who’d emptied her carriage; he was still standing in the doorway, rifle pointed upward.
“Yo! Fix! Get this lady’s stuff out. From above her seat.”
He didn’t take his eyes off her as the big man passed him the folded jacket and he fingered through it. One quick glance down at the opened passport, and he put the whistle to his lips and blew a loud, trilling note, twice.
“Right, Fix, spread the word,” he said. “We got her. Tax them and leave. Let’s get outta here before the helicopters come.”
The other man jogged off, shouting orders. In a minute, out of the corner of her eye, Myra could see the tax being organised: the people from the train had all been herded into one group, and a man with a shotgun and a woman with a sack were going around, taking money and jewellery and small pieces of kit and personal weapons.
