Adam Baker - Juggernaut

Voss climbed a ladder to the locomotive walkway. He entered the cab.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Wish we could get hold of Gaunt. Break fingers until he showed us how to crank up this fucking thing.’

‘Think he knows how to run it?’ asked Voss.

‘How did he know about the mine? The lab? Someone gave him a detailed brief. They might have told him about the train.’

Voss didn’t reply.

Lucy crouched and pulled a battered ring binder from a shelf beneath the engineer’s console. She flipped pages.

‘This baby is some kind of diesel/electric hybrid. I’ve got juice to the driver’s desk, but I’m getting some kind of power warning.’

‘I checked the track,’ said Voss. ‘The switch-rails are set to put her in a parallel siding.’

‘So fix it.’

Voss jumped from the cab. He walked the track in front of the locomotive. He examined the rail switch. Mechanical operation. No hydraulic actuators, no electrics. A tall lever next to a rail junction. He threw his bodyweight against the lever. It wouldn’t shift.

He headed down the tunnel. He searched for something he could use as a sledgehammer.

A couple of flatbed freight wagons. He pulled bundles of tarpaulin aside. Rotted planks. Chains. Yellowed al-Ba’ath newsprint. A heavy, rusted wrench.

Voss hefted the wrench.

He became aware of a distant figure in the periphery of his vision. A man stood at the end of the tunnel, back-lit by cavern arc lights. Hunched, simian. He was staring at Voss.

Voss stood back from the wagon to get a clear view. He glimpsed a red boiler suit as the figure ducked into shadow.

‘Gaunt? Gaunt, is that you?’ His voice echoed and died.

Voss walked deeper into the tunnel, boots crunching on shingle. He crouched and peered beneath a row of ore hoppers. He glimpsed bloody, bare feet and the legs of a tattered red boiler suit.

An infected soldier.

‘Here I am, you raghead fuck. You want meat, come get it.’

He glimpsed a horribly distorted face watching him from behind a wagon. Flaking flesh. Strange, tumorous eruptions.

‘Come on. What are you waiting for?’

The face ducked out of sight. Sound of clumsy, running feet.

Voss threw down the wrench, drew his sidearm and ran between ore trucks in pursuit.

Jabril entered Lab One. He wriggled his hand into a surgical glove, and tugged at the latex cuff with his teeth.

He took a gas mask from a wall hook and pulled it on.

He unlatched the refrigerator. A cascade of nitrogen fog. Storage jars. Body parts held in sub-zero stasis.

He propped the door open. He wrenched the power cable from the back of the freezer. The temperature read-out blanked. Cooling fans slowed and died.

He dumped the suitcase on the necropsy table.

He stroked the mirrored metal. He contemplated the wrist and ankle straps, the drain hole at the foot of the table to help sluice blood.

He had supervised the murder of forty men. Stood outside the lab units and relished muffled screams as the men were strapped down and forcibly injected.

He was both horrified and aroused by the memory.

The freezer storage jars were already starting to defrost. Water dripped and pooled on the plate floor of the lab.

He slapped explosive against the side of the freezer and wired det cable.

Jabril mashed a nub of explosive onto the roof panel above the table. He pressed a blasting cap into the putty and strung detonator wire.

He stepped through the doorway into Lab Two.

Cultivation equipment laid out on steel counters. A bio-weapon production line. Microscopes. Centrifuges. Fermentation reactors.

Glass crunched beneath the leather soles of his Oxford brogues. Broken flasks. Culture dishes.

The growth chamber. Legs, spines and lungs suspended in frosted vats. Each body part floated in a thick serum of amino acids and bovine placental tissue. Metallic tendrils erupted from flesh and bone as if reaching out, seeking a fresh host to invade.

Jabril slapped explosive against the glass. Submerged body parts shivered and twitched.

He wired detonators.

Lab four.

He crouched, span wing nuts and flipped latches. He opened the steel sarcophagus. Konstantin, laid out like Tutankhamen, arms folded across his chest.

Jabril moulded a fist-sized nub of C4, wired a blasting cab, and wedged the explosive between the dead astronaut’s fingers.

He left the lab units and crossed the cavern.

The bio-dome. Spektr, under arc lights.

A stack of chemical drums. Skull stickers streaked with corrosion. Jabril rolled yellow drums of peptone, ethylene and paraformaldehyde, and stacked them beneath Spektr.

He tore nubs of plastic explosive and mashed them onto each drum lid with the heel of his palm. He took a fresh reel of cable from the case and ran det cord.

A flicker of movement. A figure outside the opaque plastic of the containment dome.

A red boiler suit brushed against polythene. Jabril crouched behind the drums and drew his pistol. He watched the blurred figure stumble the perimeter of the containment dome, hands sliding and squeaking across taut plastic.

He heard the echo of dragging footfalls as the figure shuffled down a passage, away from the cavern.

Jabril slowly climbed to his feet and continued to rig the bomb.

Lucy walked deep into the tunnel. She passed a row of flatbed cars and ore hoppers.

She found a small locomotive. A small diesel engine hitched to mine wagons, paintwork streaked with corrosion.

The engine cowling had been removed, and the motor stripped for parts.

Maybe the starter battery was still in place. Maybe it still held a charge.

She ran a quick circuit of the locomotive, rifle raised. All clear.

She climbed the ladder and pulled open the cab door. Trashed controls. Smashed dials and frayed cable.

Another mummified corpse. An engineer in a boiler suit. He was crouched prostrate, face to the floor like he was kneeling in prayer.

She prodded the dead man with the barrel of her rifle. The desiccated cadaver toppled over. The yellow wooden handle of a screwdriver wedged in his eye socket. The guy had knelt on the plate floor of the cab, positioned the screwdriver, then drove his head down onto the spike.

Must have been hell. That final night when infected prisoners broke loose and ran riot. Troops mown down by terrified Russian overseers. Young men blowing their brains out, slitting their throats, hugging grenades, anything preferable to joining the mindless mutant legion.

Lucy jumped from the cab and surveyed the exterior of the locomotive. She searched for a battery compartment.

A big metal box on the rear footplate between buffers. Padlocked. She shot the lock and kicked open the lid. A big Exide 32-volt power cell. Four times the size of a standard car battery.

Faint crunch of shingle.

She jumped from the locomotive and crouched on the track. She peered beneath wagons. She glimpsed the legs of a red boiler suit.

Jabril knelt beneath Spektr and continued to wire yellow drums of formaldehyde and ethylene.

His companion had returned. A shambling figure in a red boiler suit. A crimson ghost shape glimpsed through opaque plastic. The figure circled the perimeter of the containment tent. Bloody handprints on polythene.

‘I’m sorry, my friend,’ murmured Jabril. ‘I’m so sorry. It will be over soon.’

Jabril recognised the tall, thin figure in the boiler suit. Corporal Haq.

Haq and his twin brother Abdul tried to flee the valley one night. They wanted to reach Fallujah, make sure their mother had survived the war.

They blacked their faces with boot polish and ran from the mine. They managed to evade Russian sentries at the head of the ravine and climb the moonlit valley walls.