For a moment Ryan couldn’t work out what it was that had awakened him. The lights had dimmed, and be could now see something of the countryside.
They were moving at a little better than walking pace through a dense forest of forbidding conifers, so tall that Ryan couldn’t make out their tops.
Then he realized that Trader was outside the train, his head and shoulders level with the window of the compartment, moving steadily along and keeping up with it. He was smiling, his head turned toward Ryan, with a feathery crest of gray hair running down the center of his angular skull.
Ryan blinkedblinked both eyes.
The train was gathering momentum, its acceleration pressing him back into the embroidered cushions of the seat.
It was astounding the way that Trader was able to keep up with it, matching it for speed, the old Arma-lite resting across his shoulders. He was still smiling, his face closer to the glass than before.
Now Trader lifted his right hand and began to scratch on the window. Ryan noticed that the nails were hooked and as thick as horn, more like the claws of a big puma. They were leaving gouges on the glass.
The smile was still there, but it had become deeply sinister and vulpine, the lips peeling back, revealing crooked teeth, jagged and yellow, poking from raw and bleeding gums.
Faster.
Trader was floating effortlessly alongside the coach, nodding and beckoning to Ryan.
“You can never go back, Ryan You can never go back, Ryan Never go back, Ryan Go back, Ryan Ryan”
It was the familiar voice of the Trader.
Terror held Ryan in thrall, paralyzed, frozen, unable to move a limb to escape from the prison of the compartment.
The rest of the universe was a blur.
Ryan couldn’t turn his head away from the macabre specter that flowed with the train, now moving at unimaginable speed. So fast that the glass was beginning to melt, beads of it turning molten and starting to trickle toward the rear of the window.
Trader’s hand was pressed against it, the flesh blackening from the intense heat, smoldering and smoking. Tiny blue flames erupted from each curved claw.
And the smile never wavered.
It had become so hot that Ryan was dripping with perspiration, feeling it trickle down into both his eyes, over his cheeks, across his stomach.
It was only a matter of seconds before the glass, the only thing protecting him from the ghastly apparition, would totally disintegrate.
One hand broke through and seized Ryan by the jaw, the broken nails digging into his flesh. Trader was laughing now, and calling out to him in a wild shriek of triumph.
“Dark night, Ryan, can you stop that rad-blasted noise and let me get some sleep?”
The train was still going, going
Ryan opened his eye, finding that he had rolled on his side, so that the bolt of the Steyr was digging into his jaw. The compartment of the LAV was warm and he had been sweating.
“Sorry, J.B.,” be said. “Sorry.”
Chapter Seven
The two men walked quietly through the early-morning forest. It had been cold in the middle part of the night, and dew was dripping from the dark needles of the pines. The trail was soft with mulched leaves, making it easy to keep silent.
At a turn in the track they surprised a doe with a fawn, feeding from the tender shoots in the undergrowth. One of the men instinctively raised a weathered old Armalite rifle to his shoulder, then shook his head and lowered it again.
“Might as well beat a drum to let the sons of bitches know we’re coming,” he said.
The deer stared at the two human intruders with large, frightened eyes, then spun and darted off into the protection of the shadows, the little fawn following at his heels in a gawky, skipping leap.
“Your lucky day, young fellow,” Abe said, his breath feathering out in front of him.
THE VILLE WAS a nameless collection of scattered huts, around the sides of a bowl-shaped valley. A wide river flowed flatly through the settlement, with plum trout rising to the swarms of flies in the muddy hollows.