Earth-Thunder Read online

  The Amtrak Wars

  The Talisman Prophecies

  Book 6:

  Earth-Thunder

  PATRICK TILLEY

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter One

  Armed with a stolen carbine, Cadillac marched slowly through the drifting plumes of smoke that rose from the charred remains of the huts which – just one brief day ago – had been the home of the Clan M’Call.

  Roz – clutching another carbine with the awkwardness of someone trained to save lives not terminate them – followed him as he scoured the settlement from end to end. The soldiers had done their work with the thoroughness that was the mark of the Federation. Goods and chattels had been put to the torch, every living soul regardless of age had been killed.

  The decapitated bodies of the den mothers, their children, and the She-Wolves who had stayed to defend them were scattered everywhere. Some, burnt beyond recognition, lay smouldering in the glowing rings of ashes that had once been huts of skin and wood; others, partially stripped, their naked bodies ripped by bayonet thrusts, lay sprawled awkwardly where they had been gunned down – either running away from, or towards the enemy: the tall faceless figures in their blood-red and flame-orange uniforms who showed no mercy and expected none.

  When the last hope of finding any survivors finally expired, Cadillac turned to Roz, his eyes brimming with bitter tears. His lips moved but no words came. He had come down from the hills fearing the worst, but the shock of discovering this scene of senseless slaughter had driven the breath from his body.

  Roz threw aside her carbine and supported him as he lurched towards her. She knew what he was thinking. He was the last of the M’Calls; the only one still alive. The remainder of his clanfolk – every man, woman and child of fighting age – had gone forth to do battle with one of the dreaded iron-snakes, the Mute name for the wagon-trains of the Amtrak Federation.

  And despite falling into a trap, they had confounded their enemy, capturing and destroying The Lady from Louisiana before being surrounded by four more of the giant land-cruisers – each one carrying a thousand Trail-Blazers. When Cadillac had flown west, taking Roz with him on the orders of Mr Snow, the M’Call Bears and She-Wolves, bloodied but triumphant from their victory over The Lady, were preparing to make a last stand as the circle of fire closed in remorselessly around them.

  Roz and Cadillac had escaped in the last aircraft to leave the flight-deck of The Lady and they had not been fired upon because no one on the advancing wagon-trains had suspected that the Skyhawk was being flown by a Mute. The same thing had happened when they had overflown the settlement and seen the groups of camouflaged Trail-Blazers moving through it sowing a trail of death and destruction. Some had even paused long enough to lower their weapons and raise their dark, visored faces as Cadillac circled overhead.

  His first impulse had been to dive down and spray them with a prolonged burst from the mini-Vulk in the nose of the Skyhawk, but he did not dare risk damaging his precious cargo: Roz – the young stranger whom Mr Snow had given into his care. Gritting his teeth, Cadillac had made two low passes, dipping his wings to salute the murderers of his clanfolk.

  The Trail-Blazers had waved to him. And then, as he flew off – wracked with guilt – to find a landing place higher up in the hills, those same hands had dropped back onto their weapons to continue the slaughter of the innocents.

  From an overlooking crag, he and Roz had watched the distant fiery glow wax and wane throughout the night then, in the grey dawn of the following day, they had gone down to take stock of his inheritance.

  But there was nothing left.

  On the very same day he had become wordsmith to the Clan M’Call – the greatest clan ever to spring from the bloodline of the She-Kargo – his clanfolk had perished in a last blaze of glory and the hell-fires of vengeance.

  As the first shock faded and new breath forced its way into his lungs, Cadillac stepped away from Roz, raised his face to the sky and howled with grief. A heart-rending cry that came from deep within the soul. Inarticulate, more animal than human, but which expressed his deep-felt sense of loss and desolation in a way which mere words could not encompass.

  Falling to his knees, he pounded the blood-stained earth then furrowed it with clawed fingers, scooping it up and smearing it over his neck, arms and chest.

  Roz knelt down beside him – this clear-skinned, smooth-boned Mute whose future was now inextricably enmeshed with hers. They had met less than 24 hours ago, surrounded, as now, by the stench of death, but it had only served to strengthen the instinctive bond between them.

  She watched patiently as Cadillac, oblivious to her presence, continued to claw at the crimson earth and daub it on his body. To the detached medical side of her mind, he seemed, by these frenzied gestures, to be trying to share the dying agonies of his clanfolk. Gradually, the raw edge of his guilt and anger became blunted. He slumped back on his heels, round-shouldered under the burden of sorrow and lapsed into total immobility, hands hanging limply between his thighs, his expressionless eyes blind to all external sensation – the classic symptoms of catatonia. For nearly an hour, not a muscle twitched. Nothing moved except for the occasional tear which rolled down his cheeks then, suddenly, he jerked into life and when he turned his bloodied, dirt-streaked face towards her, the eyes were dry and clear.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We have work to do.’

  Using Tracker machetes, they cut down and hauled back a large quantity of pine saplings which they hewed into eight-foot lengths and built a square funeral pyre, interleaving the layers of slim logs with the broken bodies of the women and the young children, laid on a bed and under a cover of pine branches.

  Despite her training, Roz found it a heart-breaking task. In the Federation, dead bodies were whisked away by the bag-men. Some were delivered to the Medical College for autopsies and dissection by students but once again the bag-men collected the bits. And it occurred to Roz that she had never enquired what happened next. She had merely assumed that the mortal remains of its soldier-citizens were disposed of with the same clinical efficiency that characterised most of the procedures evolved by the Amtrak Federation.

  True or false, she was certain of one thing. The operation was not something the kin-folk of the deceased were required to perform or watch – as she had to do now.

  They piled more branches around the outside of the log squares to mask the bodies from view, then Cadillac set light to it using a potful of glowing ashes from one of the burnt-out huts. There was a pungent smell of resin as the pine needles caught fire, and with a crackling roar the flames leapt skywards, carrying the spirits of the dead into the arms of Mo-Town on a rising current of air.

  With his half-naked body smeared with grey ash in the traditional style of the Plainfolk, Cadillac squatted before the column of fire, just out of range of the blistering heat, his arms wrapped around his rib-cage. And so began the second period of mourning.

  For the rest of that day and throughout the following night, Cadillac rocked silently back and forth, his heart and mind imprisoned in a private world of grief which Roz could comprehend but could not wholly share.

  The funeral pyre blazed throughout the evening, then around midnight
, as he maintained his vigil while she slept fitfully nearby, it slowly collapsed with a shower of sparks into a mound of glowing embers. By morning, all that remained was a grey-shrouded hump in the middle of a blackened square of earth. But it still gave off a fierce heat, and quickly ignited the odd branch and bits of debris that Roz threw onto it as she tidied up around her seated companion.

  Cadillac did not utter a word throughout the whole of that second day. And Roz did not attempt to engage him in conversation. She was content to be; to savour to the full the expansive beauty of the surrounding landscape, the fathomless depths of the blue sky world above her head. A sky flecked with ever-changing patterns of cloud that stretched away towards a horizon that was so distant it surpassed understanding.

  Up here in the hills, the world about her was much vaster than the one she had experienced from the flight deck of Red River. Coming from a life-time spent in the confines of the Federation, she had – like most Trackers – no proper sense of scale, no grasp of the truly awesome dimensions of the universe. If someone had told her that from where she now stood the farthest point she could see towards the east lay over a hundred miles away it would have meant nothing. And to have talked about the size of the earth or the distance between it and the moon would have meant even less.

  On the first day, while Cadillac sat grieving in front of the blazing pyre, she had taken the edge off her hunger by dipping into the emergency ration pack that all Skyhawks carried. Now, on the second day, as the sun reached its zenith, Cadillac rose, made a cooking fire and silently prepared a meal for two.

  Not everything had been been destroyed by the soldiers or thrown onto the funeral pyre. Cadillac had salvaged and set aside pots and pans, tools and implements, sleeping furs, some walking skins, even some dried food – everything they needed to survive the immediate future and were able to carry on trucking poles between them.

  Without being asked, Roz had brought water from the stream that burst from the moss-covered rocks deep within the forested slopes to the north of the settlement. The same stream that cascaded over the glistening tongue of rock overhanging the bluff then fell in a long filmy ribbon onto the rocks below. The same rocks on which Steve Brickman had stood to refresh himself before his fateful second encounter with Clearwater.

  Roz helped Cadillac prepare the meal, her gestures complementing his without a hint of awkwardness. They ate in silence, but on the occasions when their eyes met they fixed each other with an unwavering gaze that was only broken by mutual, unspoken agreement.

  They were like two castaways, marooned on a wooded island amid an ocean of red grass. But although they had only been in each other’s presence for a matter of hours, they were not strangers. Neither Roz nor Cadillac had anything to hide. There was no need for timid, furtive glances; no time for anything other than a frank appraisal. There was no need to say anything. The eyes said it all.

  The afternoon lengthened into evening. Roz helped him erect a hut using a selection of unburnt poles and a patchwork of skins, then they went into the forest to fetch more wood for the fire.

  While they were there Cadillac bathed in the stream, washing away the grey ash that had covered his body. Night fell. They communed in silence over the evening meal that Cadillac prepared with her help, then he gathered up the sleeping furs that had been warming by the fire and took them into the hut.

  A short while later he crawled out through the low door flap and picked up the two carbines. Seating himself with his back to the hut, he laid one of the guns across his lap and placed the other on the ground beside him.

  ‘Sleep now.’ They were the first words he had uttered in two days.

  Roz stood up and slowly unzipped her camouflage fatigues, then rolled them into a neat bundle. Cadillac averted his eyes as she stripped off her underclothes, but she stood before him and willed him to look up at her naked body, its smooth artificially-tanned skin tinted deep orange by the firelight glow. When their eyes finally met, she held up the garments that marked her out as a Tracker and dropped them onto the red-hot embers.

  They both watched as the flames took hold.

  When there was nothing left, Roz said: ‘There is no need to stand guard. My power will protect both of us.’ She walked past Cadillac, brushing his head lightly with one hand.

  Entering the hut, Roz saw the firestone had been trimmed, leaving only a tiny flame to light the way to bed. Picking up the stone, she pushed it out through the door flap then found her way back to the bed in the pitch dark and snuggled down between the soft layers of furs.

  She knew what was going to happen; had known with an overwhelming certainty ever since she had been introduced to Cadillac on the flight-deck of The Lady. It was just a question of time. Her whole life had been a voyage of discovery, but in the past year the pace had accelerated. One revelation had succeeded another with bewildering speed. It was like being in a sail-boat driven by a hurricane which preceded a gigantic storm: a storm that threatened to sweep away the world she had known.

  She had learned that Steve was not a true kin-brother. Neither of them had been born to Annie Brickman. They had been placed in her care by the First Family. And to the mystery surrounding their origins had been added another: inexplicably and without warning, her already extraordinary mental gifts had been expanded, giving her access to powers that enabled her to warp the perceptions of those around her. Through her telepathic link with Steve had come the shared discovery that they were both Mutes and this had helped to open her mind further, enabling her to understand that her life had a deeper purpose.

  With the deliberate burning of her uniform she had severed all links with her past, just as Cadillac’s previous existence as part of the Clan M’Call had been consumed by fire.

  They both had to begin anew. Together.

  As she waited, she stroked her breasts and belly, and pressed down hard in an effort to contain the love-heat that was building up between her tightly-closed thighs. A fleeting shaft of moonlight illuminated Cadillac’s glistening body as he entered the hut on all fours and slid between the furs. There was a moment’s hesitation before he edged into contact then they turned towards each other, bodies moulding, arms and legs enfolding, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  Roz did not possess the detached professionalism of the Thai body-slaves who with the help of liberal doses of sake had inflamed his desires in Ne-Issan, but it felt right and it felt good. For both of them. Each in their own way had loved their former partners but this was different. Cadillac did not feel overawed as he had when sharing a bed with Clearwater, and Roz, for her part, was freed from the confused feelings of shame and desire which had always surrounded her furtive couplings with Steve. Feelings which, for the last two years, had been compounded by her jealousy for Clearwater.

  With the opening of her mind and the realisation that her hated rival was a soul-sister, those negative feelings had been transformed. Now at last she was able to give full expression to her emotions. Here at last was the love she had yearned for – unencumbered, unrestricted; not hedged about with petty rules and regulations. A love that could now be expressed in words that had been denied to her since birth. An emotion which, through her inability to express it, had become distorted and misdirected towards her kin-brother.

  She was still linked closely and intimately to Steve, but only through her mind. Her heart and body were now her own, and she had found the person with whom she was destined to exchange these precious gifts. In so doing she had found her place in the world, a new identity, and a mission which gave her life meaning beyond mere physical existence.

  Then it happened. A sweet burning that brought a sharp cry to her lips and a juddering sigh to his. Everything flowed together, their minds and bodies fusing in a convulsive star-burst of ecstasy that left them feeling utterly fulfilled for at least half an hour, at which point – being healthy young animals with the stamina to match their sexual appetite – both were ready to go round again.
r />   The dawn of the fourth day (the third having been spent mostly in bed) found Cadillac hollow-eyed through lack of sleep but feeling on top of the world. The secret envy and lingering distrust of his rival, the confusion of brotherly love, jealousy and hatred had vanished, leaving him brimming with a new self-confidence which caused him to be immensely satisfied with the world in general and – being Cadillac – with himself in particular.

  As the days passed, the super-charged emotional state generated by their discovery of one another gradually subsided and their life together assumed its natural rhythm. But it was not achieved without a great deal of hard work. Hearing about life on the overground was not the same thing as being there. Even though Roz felt – like Steve – that she belonged to the blue-sky world, there was much to learn. And a great deal to do.

  In the Federation, nearly everything came at the turn of a tap, or the flick of a switch. Food was literally handed to you on a plate. Okay, there were Trackers manning the hydroponic tank-farms, the water-pumping and power-gen stations, the materials and food processing units. And there were the Seamsters sweating away down in the A-Levels to keep everything going.

  Roz herself had put in the statutory number of PD hours on a variety of mundane chores. The point was, in the Federation, all these processes were performed with the aid of mechanical or hi-tech equipment. If you wanted hot water you tapped a line that came from one of the geo-thermal plants; to prepare a hot meal you simply peeled the foil lid off a pre-pak and put it in a micro-wave cooker. Sixty seconds max. Dirty clothes you tossed into a unit at the block laundromat and selected the correct wash-rinse ’n’ dry cycle; any worn, torn or damaged garments or kit you took down to the company quarter-master and exchanged old for new.

  But not out here. Out here, there was nothing on line and there wasn’t a serviceman in sight. Everything had to be figured out in advance. Hot water needed a fire, a fire needed wood, the wood needed to be cut from a tree, to cut it you needed a Tracker machete, an Iron-Master axe or saw, and you had to know how to put a keen edge on the blade. The only alternative was to go around picking up fallen branches, dead wood that was usually rotten and powdery and which burned quickly without producing any real heat.