Part of her expected to wake to scorching agony, but that was not the case. A chilly darkness surrounded her; for that she was grateful.
Foreign sensations assailed her.
Her immediate environment shuddered. The jostling sway put her on her guard. She promptly rolled over and planted her palms and knees firmly on the ground, hoping that might establish some steadiness. But it didn’t. The ground was a wooden floor littered with what felt like sawdust, and it transferred the overall tremble up her arms to rattle her entire body.
I’ve arrived in the middle of an earthquake?
The smell wasn’t as horrendous as she’d expected, in fact it had an earthy tingle that wasn’t all that unpleasant—just strange. It was a fresh odor, nothing ancient about it.
I’ll get used to it—I really have no choice.
Something moved in the darkness. Through the air’s fecal demeanor, she smelled a nefarious blend of cautious haste and palpable hostility.
Feral instincts drove her to act without thinking. As her arm lashed out, her claws extending to tear out the throat of her attacker, she reminded herself that she shouldn’t kill. Too late.
The man’s death rattle was lost in the gush of blood that drenched her. She resisted her stomach’s imperative response. She heard the clatter of a knife as it dropped from his spasming grasp. A minute later, he fell on her in a posthumous attempt to pin her to the floor. She effortlessly avoided the corpse’s collapse, her body moving with astounding grace in the darkness. As she came erect, she plucked the discarded knife from the floor.
Her nostrils flared, her ears strained, but she could detect no one else nearby. Switching to night vision, she scanned her surroundings and verified that judgment. She was alone.
She stood in a rectangular room that had no windows. Cubic piles filled a good portion of the chamber. That earthy stench belonged to dried vegetable matter. It had been decades since she’d savored that smell, she’d almost forgotten it. Reaching out her hand to one wall of them, the tactile sensation confirmed her suspicion: bales of hay.
I’m in a stable? A stable in an earthquake?
She made her way along the cramped space between the looming piles and ultimately came to a doorway. It took her a minute to figure out how to operate the handle, it was an unnecessarily complex device.
When she slid the door aside, a rush of frigid air splashed in her face. She tasted the night.
Across from her lay another doorway set into a lurching facade. A rhythmic-yet-harsh racket rose from below where the ground flashed by in utter darkness. To each side, gray landscapes rushed past. Above hung a nocturnal sky.
I’m aboard a train.
That accounted for the lurching unsteadiness of her new environs. But it didn’t explain her assailant.
Before she could ponder why a hobo had attacked her without provocation, her acute hearing picked up voices from the next freight car.
“Watch it with that thing!”
“I got it.”
“It could blow us to kingdom come, man.”
“Don’t worry. I know how to handle explosives.”
“That’s why we brought him in on this caper, Frank,” came a third voice.
Thieves, she told herself. I’ve stumbled upon a train robbery.
Was this the right century?
“All set,” proclaimed the explosives expert.
“Where’d Jimmy get to?” complained the first voice.
The third replied: “Checking out the next car.”
“Well, it’s time for us to join him. We can set off the charge from there.”
They were coming this way. Her far sense felt their energy signatures moving in her direction.
Now she knew why she’d been attacked. Scouting the freight car, Jimmy had mistaken her for a potential witness and moved to take her out. His cohorts would find his corpse, but they’d have to get past her first.
Do I really want to deal with this? She felt no urge to thwart this robbery, nor to get involved with these crooks. She certainly had no loyalty for the local authorities. The smartest thing she could do was jump from the train and escape.
But—did she dare leave Jimmy’s mutilated body for his associates to find?
She ground her teeth, remonstrating herself for her killer instincts. She’d been warned about this, but her reflexes had kicked in before conscious thought could intervene. She’d have to be more careful, have to restrain herself from now on.
If she stayed, she’d be forced to slay these thieves to cover up Jimmy’s murder. But she wasn’t supposed to wantonly slaughter people, especially not human beings; her targets had been meticulously selected. She should flee and leave Jimmy’s murder to go unexplained.
But before she could leap from the moving train, the far door slid open and three men trampled forth. The beams of their flashlights fell upon her startled form. With a chorus of surprise, they jumped her, brandishing crowbars and knives of their own.
Striking the side of her head, the first crowbar blow should have crushed her skull like a ripe fruit. Stabbing into her chest, the knife should have torn a lethal gash in her heart. But these wounds had scarce effect on Ashlee.
Moving with feral speed, she used the borrowed knife to slit the throat of the crook welding the crowbar. He toppled back into the doorway through which he’d come. A downward chop snapped the knife-bearing crook’s arm. Screaming and flailing his unnaturally floppy limb, he was thrown over her shoulder and cast into the freight car of hay bales. The last man, though, refused to die easy.
A lucky kick sent her knife flying from her hand. A mighty fist drove itself into her gut. A beefy arm wrapped itself around her throat, dragging her into a submissive pose. Fetid breath spilled out against her cheek as the man clutched her close and hissed, “Bitch!”
An unexpected lurch threw them from the train.
For a frantic moment she flew through the air, tangled in combat with the surviving thief. His curses rasped in her ear. She suppressed the urge to free herself by ripping his limbs from their sockets. She doubted that her plummet from the moving train would cause her any serious injuries, but as long as the man’s body provided her with a slab of meat to cushion her fall why discard this fortuitous protection? So instead of fighting him off, Ashlee clutched him closer.
When they landed, the ground atomized beneath their impact. They tumbled down a loose incline, head over heels in an environment of cold powder, finally slamming into a solid barrier in the gloom. Her attacker went limp around her; she cast him off like an offensively damp coat and scrambled to her feet.
Clumps of snow clung to her drab slacks and woolen sweater. Similar frigid moisture plastered her spiky red hair to her scalp. Her lithe body was limber, ready for anything. Her wounds were trivial annoyances. Her squinty green gaze scanned her surroundings.
The air was thick with snowflakes whirling in a fierce wind, but these frozen water particles did little to mask the region from her acute senses. Knee-deep in a drift, she crouched at the base of a ditch near the edge of some woods. Except for the bole that had broken her fall, the trees were heavily decorated with snow. Unseen in the dark at the top of the slope, the rest of the train loudly clattered along the tracks. Nothing else moved in the night.
Her attacker lay against a tree trunk, his body twisted in an anatomically improbable position. The impact had shattered his spine. Some blood trickled from the corner of his slack mouth.
Her nostrils flared. A turbulent spasm twisted her gut, urging her to take advantage of the situation. So vivid was the stimulus, she had to force herself to suppress the craving. An unscheduled death was bad enough without adding to the problem by leaving a drained corpse to further confound the authorities.
Now she had four mistakes to worry about.
She stepped away from the thief’s cadaver, momentarily desperate to ignore her hunger by concentrating on her next move now that she had—
An enormous crash boomed through the storm. The ground danced, throwing Ashlee on her ass. A hellish glow blossomed in the distance to her right, the apex of an blast peering above the treetops.
“What the hell—” she gasped.
Climbing the snow-crusted slope, she stood at the edge of the ravine and gawked at the fireball that sat on the tracks about four hundred meters along the line. The blaze didn’t diminish with time. Colossal tongues of fire reached into the night sky.
The train had crashed…or blown up. Perhaps the thieves’ explosives expert hadn’t been as adept as he’d claimed. Instead of wiring the safe (presumably their target had been some industrial strongbox) with just enough C4 to blow open its door, the charge had been excessive enough to vaporize most of the train.
She smiled.
Fate had intervened to erase her mistakes. Now the crash would take the blame for the deaths of the train robbers, not her. The corpse of the thief down in the ditch—everyone would simply presume he had jumped from the ill-fated train. Their deaths would cause no deleterious ripples; these thieves had been destined to perish in this crash, victims of their own accidentally overzealous bomb.
“Lucky girl,” she muttered to herself. She would have to be more careful.
The blaze was guaranteed to attract someone—a rescue crew with nothing to do but sift through the ashes—and Ashlee had no intention of sticking around to help or watch.
Striking off into the woods, she disappeared into the night.
Please visit the Gray Trilogy page for information on how you can follow the rest of the adventure!