Scarecrow Returns

ZACK HEARD them before he saw them.

He heard Emma struggling. “No! No! Leave me alone!”

A sharp slapping sound followed.

“Shut up, bitch!” Bad Willy’s voice echoed through the tangle of pipes, tanks and vats. “No knights in shining armor left to save you now.”

Zack rounded the corner and beheld the scene: Emma on the ground with Bad Willy standing over her.

“There’s still one left,” he said loudly.

They both snapped around. Emma’s face lit up with both hope and horror. Bad Willy’s face transformed from surprise to wicked glee.

“Zacky-boy,” he grinned. “Who’da thunk it? The weedy little poindexter coming to save the girl from the nasty fucking rapist?”

Zack raised his pistol.

Bad Willy said, “I don’t have a gun, Zacky. You’d shoot me in cold blood?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t miss.”

His jaw clenched, Zack fired. Twice.

And missed high with both shots. They sparked off a large pipe behind Willy’s head.

He pulled the trigger again, several times: click-click-click.

Bad Willy grinned more darkly. “I am going to kick the fucking shit out of you, you little pansy-assed dandy, and then I’m going to do every kind of nastiness to your woman here.”

Willy shoved Emma into a nearby storage cage and snapped its bolt home, locking it.

Emma shook the gate, but it was no use, she was trapped there, trapped to watch what was to come: a fight between Bad Willy of the Army of Thieves and Zack Weinberg of DARPA.

Willy lunged at Zack, teeth bared, fists flying.

Zack ducked beneath Willy’s first two blows, bobbed up, and managed to land a killer punch on Willy’s face. Willy froze in mid-stride.

Zack paused. Had he—?

Willy started laughing.

“Is that it? Is that the best you’ve got? Oh, this is not fair. Not fair at all.” Quick as a rattlesnake, Willy hit Zack in the face and Zack dropped to the ground, nose bleeding.

Then Bad Willy grabbed him by the lapels and head-butted him, dropping him again.

Emma screamed.

Bad Willy stood over Zack. “Keep doing that, honey. Keep screaming. I love screams, feed off ’em.”

He lifted Zack and rammed him up against a thick round pipe, narrowly missing a pressure valve sticking out of it.

Dizzy and in considerable pain, Zack’s vision was becoming blurred. He felt ill. He was about to pass out, and if he passed out, this was all over. Willy would kill him and then take Emma and—

Through his blurred vision, Zack saw something on the valve beside his head. Letters that gradually came into focus: T . . . E . . .

Suddenly Willy was right in his face.

“You blasted my ear off, you little fuck,” Willy growled. “To pay you back for that, I’m going to hack off both your ears and make you eat ’em. Then I’m gonna slash your fucking throat and drink your blood.”

Willy unsheathed a long-bladed hunting knife and held it up to Zack’s eyes.

Zack gasped, coughing.

Willy said, “Got something to say, eh?”

Zack whispered something.

“Speak up! I can’t hear you!”

“I said . . .” Zack began as, with his last ounce of strength, he quickly reached up and yanked hard the lever on the gas valve beside his head, the valve whose label read TEB.

The valve opened and a high-pressure spray of green liquid came blasting out of it, directly into Bad Willy’s eyes.

Willy wailed as the searing-hot liquid gushed into his face. He dropped his knife and clutched at his eyes as the skin on his forehead, cheeks and chin immediately began to melt.

His wails became shrieks as the searing explosive fuel mixture—the undiluted raw concentrate that was the basis of the combustible gas in the sky—ate through the skin of his face.

Willy clawed at his cheeks, but this only served to pull away the melting skin, revealing flesh and bone. Then his hands came away and Zack saw that Willy’s eyes were melting, too. The whites of his eyeballs dribbled down his melted-away cheeks and stuck to his fingertips.

Willy shrieked a hideous, inhuman scream.

He lunged at Zack, clutching at him with his disgusting hands, but Zack kicked him hard in the chest, pushing him away and Bad Willy fell to the ground, whimpering.

Moments later, the acid ate into his brain and Bad Willy lay still, dead.

Zack ran to the cage, threw it open, and Emma leapt into his arms and sobbed as he held her.

As the megatrain left the siding, Mother and Baba ran up alongside it and leapt onto its last carriage, a backward-facing armored locomotive.

The train lumbered forward. It was truly a Soviet monster, double-sized in every way: two stories high, two train-widths wide and riding on two sets of train tracks.

But it wasn’t designed for speed. It had been designed for heavy cargo freight, to carry the building materials for Dragon Island from the northeast dock—now reconfigured as a submarine dock—to the central complex, which meant it was a relatively slow beast.

Today, however, it only had to clear the station and stop in a firing position to launch one of its missiles.

“We have to get to the forward locomotive,” Mother called to Baba, “to keep this train moving!”

Blocking their way, though, was the Chilean lieutenant, Big Jesus, and his six-man team. While two men drove, Big Jesus and the other four had established a defensive position around the central missile carriage—where Big Jesus was currently busy bent over the missile, inserting the uranium sphere into its warhead.

Mother assessed the situation. They had to get past that missile car.

“Okay, handsome,” she said to Baba. “You’re gonna lay down a shitload of fire on those cocksuckers from here while I go forward and take the locomotive. Then you come and join me.”

“I beg your pardon, but how are you going to get past them?” Baba asked.

“Not going past them,” Mother said. “Going under them. Now, gimme some hot lead, baby.”

“With pleasure.”

Baba hefted his AK-47 and started firing at Big Jesus and his men, while Mother jumped off the slow-moving train and crouch-ran under it.

Big Jesus returned fire at Baba . . . with Baba’s own Kord machine gun. Its mighty rounds clanged loudly off the rear locomotive’s armor, forcing Baba to take cover.

“Merde!” Baba growled to nobody. “Fired on by my own beautiful gun.”

He returned fire as best he could with the puny AK-47.

By doing so, however, he captured the full attention of Big Jesus and his men, distracting them from the figure running underneath the rumbling carriages of the megatrain: Mother.

The train was only moving at about five miles an hour, and its immense size meant that Mother could run bent-over along the tracks underneath it. She hurried forward under the first cargo car, then—careful not to be seen by Big Jesus and his men—under the missile car.

When she crossed the gap between the missile car and the second cargo car, she was briefly exposed and found herself standing in daylight. The first half of the train had cleared the siding! Once its missile carriage was fully outside, it would be ready to fire.

Huffing and puffing, she pushed on and was halfway along the second cargo car with the lead locomotive in sight when she realized the train was slowing.

It was already coming to a halt, coming into a firing position.

“Outta time, must run faster,” she said to herself, ducking out from under the cargo car and running at full stride alongside it.

Behind her, she could hear Baba exchanging fire with the men on the missile car, still taking the attention from her.

Mother came to the forward locomotive, bounded up onto a running board mounted on its side and just as the train’s wheels were squealing, announcing its impending halt, she swung up into its cab, leading with her gun.

The two Army of Thieves men driving the megatrain turned from its controls, eyes wide, and reached for their weapons.

Blam! Blam!

Starbursts of blood splattered the forward windshield behind their heads. Both men fell.

Mother hurried to the controls and just as the train was about to come to a stop, she pushed forward on the throttle and the train lurched, accelerating.

On the missile car, Big Jesus felt the lurch and spun.

“They’ve taken the engine car!” he called to the four men with him. To two of them, he said, “You two, stay here, keep the missile safe and hold that big fellow where he is!” He nodded to the other pair: “You two, come with me. We must stop this train!”

With that pair at his side, Big Jesus hurried forward, leading with the Kord, going after Mother in the lead locomotive.

Mother saw them coming. “Uh-oh . . .”

She snapped round, peered out the forward windshield.

The entrance to the submarine dock was about a mile away, at the end of a flat plain of open, barren ground. It looked like a tunnel, with the megatrain’s tracks burrowing down into the ground near the coastal cliffs. Plenty of time to stop the megatrain and fire the missile.

I can’t let them stop us, Mother thought desperately. But how can I make sure of that?

The solution struck her immediately.

And as the first massive round from the Kord clanged against the steel roof above her head, Mother jammed the throttle all the way forward, causing the megatrain to pick up speed alarmingly.

Then she left the lever, scooping up her AK-47, and rejoined the battle.

She was now defending the lead locomotive alone, one against three, and woefully outgunned. In her heart of hearts, Mother knew she couldn’t win this battle, but if she could hold out long enough, she might just win the war.