Valknut: The Binding, page 3
He scowled up at her. “Oh, and I suppose you face down jack-rollers and gangbangers every day. How are you in a knife fight? Are you bullet-proof?”
He was right, but she resented the sarcasm in his voice. She glared at him and wished she could think of some sharp reply.
“I didn’t think so,” he said when she didn’t answer. “You’ll have to find your father some other way.”
The boxcar floor jumped as the wheels hit a bump. She sat down hard, sending a painful jolt through her strained shoulder. Her temper flared. “Then how the hell do you suggest I find him! I can’t leave him out there. I don’t desert people just because things get a little rough.”
She stopped, realizing she was shouting at him. None of this was Junkyard’s fault. He wasn’t her father. She rubbed her shoulder and tried to control her voice. “Look, I have no other way to find him. I have no money for detectives. I live on student loans and part time waitressing—”
She stopped, wide-eyed, and smacked her hand to her head, “Damn—my job! I’m supposed to work lunch tomorrow!”
Disaster piled on disaster, all because of this compulsion to find her father. She grimaced. “Scratch that, I now live solely on student loans. My grandparents are dead, my mother is dead, and there is no one else. So if anyone is going to find my dad, it’s me.”
Lennie glared defiantly at Junkyard. His gaze was equally fierce, his expression as stubborn as she felt. The wheels rattled over track joints with the steady rhythm of a clock. The wind swept through the open door, pushing Lennie’s hair into her face, but she refused to blink.
Then she felt a nudge on her arm and found Jungle Jim looking at her, his face sad and serious, and his eyes had gone clear again. “Like Dougie said, ten years is sure a long time. Long enough for a man to do a lot of changin’. Now don’t be takin’ this wrong, Missy, but are you really sure you want to find your dad?”
“What? Of course I do!”
But those gentle eyes waited, not letting her hide behind glib words. She knew what he meant. Her father could have turned into one of those human derelicts, like those she had seen while searching the hobo jungles along Iowa railroad tracks. Vacant eyed, smelling of urine and ancient sweat, they hardly moved and barely responded to anything. She shied from the thought of bringing something like that home and calling it father.
If only Ramblin’ Red hadn’t shown her the pocket watch. She remembered its cool, metallic weight in her hand. It had made her father seem more real, like he could still be alive.
“I can’t just give up on him,” she said, as much to herself as to Jungle Jim.
Junkyard groaned and sandwiched his head in his hands as though trying to keep it from exploding. “You have no idea what’s out there. I do. Petey is only one of a dozen murders on the trains over the last year, and they all happened the same way. There’ve been three in the last two weeks—all of ’em on the FRC Railroad. And those are only the ones I’ve heard about!”
Her insides ran cold, but this time the fear wasn’t just for herself. “All the more reason to get my father off the rails.”
Junkyard lifted his head and studied her, his lips pressed together in a tight frown. Finally he sighed. “Okay. It’s your skin. But you’ve at least got to go home and get some gear. The hobo life doesn’t take much, but it does take something.”
He lay back on the cardboard and, rolling so his back was to her, said nothing more. Jungle Jim settled down beside him and began snoring immediately. Lennie watched them for a moment, feeling alone and frightened.
Her original plan had been to visit hobo jungles and rail yards on weekends to show her father’s picture around. But now she realized this would never work. The rail system was too vast. It swallowed people without leaving a trace. If she truly wished to find her father, she would have to track him from the inside. The prospect terrified her.
Both men lay as though sleeping on feather beds rather than cardboard on a hard floor. Time to learn from the masters, she figured.
The boxcar had grown dark. Too dark. She tried to remember where she had seen a piece of cardboard big enough to sleep on, but instead her imagination supplied an image of a spider-like serial killer lurking in a corner, ready to pounce and wind her up in a mile of silk.
“Cowering at shadows,” she muttered. “I’m sure Junkyard would be impressed,”
Wincing in pain from banged up legs and a wrenched shoulder, she crawled deeper inside, feeling ahead until her hand brushed cardboard. Hopefully it wasn’t covered with grease. Or worse. She lay down and tried to convince herself that she was comfortable, that a million eyes weren’t watching her from the shadows. She couldn’t imagine actually sleeping. The noise, the rough track, the strong scent of manure on the breeze, not to mention Jungle Jim’s story, would keep her awake.
In the dark, the cardboard felt like a tiny raft on a sea of metal. The train hit a bumpy stretch and she clutched the cardboard’s edges, irrationally fearful of being thrown off. Dust floated thickly around her and she sneezed. Something skittered over the floorboards nearby. Was it an animal? A rat? Or shifting debris? She wanted to move the cardboard closer to Junkyard and Jungle Jim, but a strange lethargy overcame her. The wheels settled into a rhythmic clickity-clack. The cardboard drifted farther into the metal sea, taking her with it, until the smells and noises faded away and she was asleep.
The dream came, and it was like no other she had ever had.
***
She was floating.
She no longer felt the train and its infernal vibrations. Her bones rested easy in her skin. She heard the train, with its banging and clanging and eternal clickity-clack, but—there! Now that, too, faded away.
Something rough curled around her neck, loosely, like the touch of her night-tangled hair. She opened her eyes.
She was floating.
Her hair drifted about her head as if alive. The rough thing about her neck was a rope. Its lazy, snaking length tethered her to a thick branch above her head.
She was floating, but she did not float free.
The branches of a great ash tree stretched all around. She looked for their twig-fingered ends but couldn’t find them. The limbs reached for the horizon, curling over it as though cradling the world in a leafy bower. Deer and goats leaped among the branches, nipping young leaves and tender sprigs. Wasps hummed all around, taking their fill of dripping sap. An eagle cried far above, its perch lost in the tree’s distant crown.
She floated among them, but apart. She was not of this world.
Whirling wings and black feathers exploded through the branches. Two ravens danced and tangled in the air before her. One landed on her right shoulder. It cocked its head as though listening to her thoughts. The other settled on her left shoulder. It turned its eye on her and she could feel it leafing through her memory.
A squirrel raced its tail up the tree trunk as if running from the devil. He scrambled to a nearby branch and smoothed his red fur, attempting to regain some dignity. Then he hopped closer, nosing his face into hers. One eye shone vivid blue. The other was nothing but a puckered hole. The hair rose on Lennie’s arms.
The ravens croaked and launched from her shoulders, their claws drawing bright dots of blood. They fluttered to the branch, flanking the squirrel like bodyguards.
The squirrel plucked a twig and used its splintered end to trace a symbol on Lennie’s left hand.
“With this Valknut, I bind you to me in service against the Wolf,” it said in a deep voice. “You be not king nor warrior chief, yet I claim you. In this battle, you shall prevail or perish.”
She thought it was a silly statement coming from a squirrel, but before she could say so, its one eye began to glow. The twig writhed in its paw, lengthening, straightening, its ragged end growing sharp, until it became a spear so large the squirrel couldn’t possibly hold it in its tiny paws. Yet it lifted the spear and threw. A sharp pain lanced Lennie’s side. Before she could cry out, her weight fell hard on the rope about her neck. Her spine cracked with a red bloom of agony. The air burst into flame around her, and the tree, the ravens, the squirrel, even the very light were gone.
She dreamed no more.
Chapter 2
The knots in Junkyard’s shoulders eased when he heard Lennie crawl into the dark interior of the boxcar. He rolled to his back, stretched, and resumed his cross-legged position by the door. Despite what he had said, he had no intention of sleeping.
Another murder. The victim, Tin Can Petey, was an old hobo with a dopey, gap-toothed smile and sheepdog hair. A bit eccentric, maybe, but harmless.
As harmless as my brother.
Junkyard tried to picture Tin Can Petey as he had last seen him, playing spoons by the fire in an Owatonna jungle, but he couldn’t separate Petey’s face from his brother’s, murdered the same way a year before. He closed his eyes, succumbing to the memory that had looped endlessly through his head on so many sleepless nights since Austin’s death.
Back then—a lifetime ago, it seemed—there was no Junkyard Doug. Just Captain Douglas Harding on his last day of leave. He could still hear the ring of the early-morning phone call that had started it all. He had reached for the phone, certain the caller was Lieutenant Matthew Patterson, who had stopped by for a few beers the night before. Doug had just found Matt’s wallet behind the toilet.
“Hey, Matt,” he said, smiling. “What exactly were you doing in my bathroom last night?”
The other end was silent for a moment. Then a deep voice said, “Captain Harding, this is Colonel Norton. I have some bad news, son. Can you be at my office at 0830 hours?”
An hour later, the Colonel’s adjutant showed Doug into a large, sparsely furnished office. As soon as Doug saw the somber face of the Chaplain seated next to Norton’s desk, he knew.
Something had happened to Austin.
The Chaplain told him that an FRC railroad detective had called. They’d found a man’s body on a freight train, on the platform of a grain car. The wallet was still in the back pocket of his jeans. Austin’s wallet. Doug had put Austin on a train just two days before.
Doug moved through the next few hours in a stupor. He felt gutted, robbed of the ballast that had given him a sense of place, of duty. After his father had died years before, Doug had tried to be as much a father as a brother to Austin. It was for Austin that Doug had forgone college scholarships and signed with the army, sending his paychecks home to give Austin the childhood Doug never had. Where Doug had spent high school working at a scrap yard, Austin played sports, went on dates, even ran for school president. Doug had shaved his head, survived basic, and got his butt shot at, all so Austin could grow a ponytail and join the flannel and denim brigade at the University of Minnesota.
And now Austin was gone. Murdered. Doug was to fly to Topeka to ID the body.
Doug packed without thinking, shoving a mismatched assortment of army and civilian clothing into his duffle bag. Out of habit, he stood before the mirror to don his dress greens for the flight. Cleaned and pressed, pants tucked neatly into his jump boots, the uniform looked perfect. But the face that looked back at him belonged to a stranger—too pale, already too haggard to fit the uniform.
When the Humvee arrived to drive him to Pope Air Force Base, he grabbed his bag and reached for the beret hanging on the coat rack. Next to it, his brother’s jean jacket hung from a hook, forgotten in Austin’s rush to catch a train. Doug lifted it down and held it like a baby. It clinked with buttons that encrusted it like barnacles, a lifelong collection obtained anywhere from science fiction conventions to political rallies to garage sales.
The Humvee’s horn blared. Doug ignored it and fingered a stark, black button pinned to the jacket’s collar: My brother jumps from perfectly good airplanes. He had given it to Austin on his eighteenth birthday. Doug’s fingers moved on, touching other buttons—the rusted California Raisin button that had gone an inch into Austin’s foot while he swam in Lake Josephine, the Resistence is Futile button signed by Patrick Stewart himself at a Star Trek convention. Every button had its own story, which Austin would tell to anyone who listened. Doug unzipped his duffle bag and stuffed the jacket inside.
As Junkyard Doug, he had worn that jacket so much over the following months that he sometimes forgot that it wasn’t his. But never for very long.
The train bumped over rough track, rattling the old boxcar. Junkyard opened his eyes and lifted his chin to let the cool, night air stroke the heat from his face. Light spilled from a three-quarter moon, glinting off Austin’s collection. Sometimes the jacket was the only thing that kept him from giving up on the hunt—and on his own life. Without its constant reminder, his disguise would have become reality. As it was, he had nearly forgotten what it was like to have a bed, daily showers, and regular meals. Or to meet the eyes of strangers without their gazes sliding away as if he didn’t exist.
If he didn’t find Austin’s killer soon, even the jacket might not be enough to save him.
A woman’s scream pierced the boxcar’s steady rumble. Junkyard swore and scrambled out of the moonlit doorway. Jungle Jim still lay sleeping on his cardboard bed in a patch of moonlight, but Junkyard couldn’t see Lennie in the boxcar’s dark interior. No one could have swung inside from the roof and gotten to her while Junkyard was in the doorway. Could they? He had only closed his eyes for those few seconds.
He waited, listening, but heard no voices or sounds of struggle above the drone of the wheels. He felt around, found his pack, and yanked a flashlight from a side pocket. The light would make him a target, if someone had managed to enter the boxcar from above. He wouldn’t turn it on until he had to. For now, he held it like a club and began to worm across the dirty floor in the direction of the scream.
In the dark, every noise seemed amplified and full of threat. He paused, listening, ready to launch to his feet. Dust irritated his nose but his hands were too gritty to rub it. He sneezed into the jean jacket’s sleeve, rattling Austin’s buttons. Cursing silently, he lifted his head and waited. Nothing happened. He moved on.
After what seemed like a month, his fingers brushed something warm and yielding. He gasped and jerked his hand back. The clean smell of soap and lavender reached him through the odor of rotting apples that stained the floor. No self-respecting hobo or thug would smell like lavender. He came to a crouch, pulled a knife from his jump boot, and switched on the flashlight.
It was Lennie. She moaned and turned her head away from the light. Knife ready, Junkyard swept the beam around the boxcar. Jim had rolled off his cardboard and lay wedged against the wall by the door. There was no one else. He returned the light to Lennie and looked for anything that might have made her scream.
She lay unmoving on a piece of cardboard, arms and legs rigid, fingers clutching its edges. Her face twisted in fear, but her eyes moved under closed lids.
A nightmare. Junkyard stared at her, working his jaw. He had dragged himself through dirt and who knows what else, terrified of finding her mutilated corpse, expecting a knife in his own back at any moment, all for a lousy nightmare. Disgusted, he straightened his cramped legs.
He was about to return to his post when Lennie groaned and rolled to her side. Her t-shirt rode up, exposing flesh above the waist of her jeans. A dark stain glistened on her skin. Junkyard leaned closer and drew a sharp breath. Blood pooled in a puncture wound the size of a fifty-cent piece. The injury looked deep and fresh—the skin around it was clean and there was not yet blood on her t-shirt.
An injury like that hadn’t sprouted on its own.
He whipped the flashlight around and searched the boxcar again, this time methodically examining every inch. An attacker had nowhere to hide and Junkyard saw no object that could punch a hole like that. A puncture wound that big could be serious, especially if it went as deep as it looked.
“Upper right side...right side,” he muttered. “Uh, spleen...no—no, liver. Could have hit the liver. Damn it! Lennie, wake up.”
He patted her face, but she didn’t respond. He directed the flashlight at her eyes and pulled back first one lid, then the other. Pupils responsive—at least until her eyes rolled back into her head. “Come on, Lennie, you gotta wake up.”
She didn’t move. Abandoning caution, he strode back to his pack in a fraction of the time it had taken him to crawl across the floor on his face. He tore through clothes and gear until he found the first aid kit. By the time he returned to Lennie’s side, blood was beginning to well out of its neat circle. Better staunch it fast, or she’d never make it to Minneapolis.
Wedging the flashlight between his knees, he pressed his palm down hard on the wound. His hand slipped over skin made slick with blood. He fumbled the kit’s lid open with his other hand and spilled half of its contents onto the floor. The train lurched and his only roll of gauze took off for the door.
“Shit!”
He let go of Lennie and scrambled after it, but the wind caught the roll’s trailing end. Before he could catch it, a streamer of gauze fluttered into the night. Swearing fervently, he returned to Lennie’s side, ripped the bandana from his head, and wadded it into a ball. Her shirt had fallen over the injury again. He pushed it back, ready to apply pressure.
A wound the size of a dime stared up at him like a mocking red eye, so shallow he could see a layer of skin under the blood.
“What the hell?”
He sat back, stunned. As he watched, the blood seemed to evaporate and the hole slowly closed. Nothing remained but a red splotch on her shirt and a small white dimple on her side. He reached a hand toward it—a hand sticky with her blood—but the dimple disappeared under his fingers. He couldn’t bring himself to touch the smooth space where it had been.
