Red Herring - Chapter 2. "Train of thought"
Disclaimer: I only own the original characters in this. And yes, they will make me mega-bucks one day.
A bright flash came from the downed redhead and the driver froze on the spot. A blue light like electricity ran over him and he fell over on the floor. Dead.
The girl stood up, a hand at her waist. She opened her hand and a few flattened bullets fell out. Aviary stared wide-eyed at her empty hand and the old-looking gun that had shot the lightning… not sure which to believe less.
"That isn't possible," Aviary marvelled.
She looked at him with her small black eyes, "Ron was one of my friends. I don't have many. I have even less now…" the girl paused, unblinking, "Tell me your name."
"Aviary. A-Aviary Gardener."
"My name is Emily." She pushed off and started walking down the wooden stairs, "Stay up there for a minute, would you?"
"Why? What are you going to do?" the reporter had to shout.
Emily ran away from the display wall until she stood behind the circles of chalk and the dry, dead bones. She picked up a rather hefty book from the floor and held it flat on her hand. Aviary rubbed his eyes in disbelief of what he was seeing. The book hovered an inch above her hand, suspended in the air, then shot out towards the spider's glass cage. The pane shattered and the giant tarantula jerked just as fast. It reared up against its back wall, dropping its dead prey. The legs twitched a little. Emily reached for her gun. The spider charged at her like a cat with twice as many legs. But it ran into the chalk lines and reared up wildly. Emily flicked out the torch with her other hand and blinded the beast.
Aviary swore and climbed the display rope into the spider's cage. He dropped and rolled on the glass-spilled floor beside the gentleman's body. The old man felt cold and clammy, his eyes unnaturally bloated. Aviary saw the pocket-watch hanging out of his coat and grabbed it, pocketing it swiftly.
A crackle raced through the rafters and the spider was launched back in a web of blue electricity. Emily lowered her gun stoically, "Hold onto the floor, Aviary." She smeared a break in the chalk line with the toe of her shoe. A high-pitched wine stared up and the skeleton started jerking about on the floor.
"What the hell?" Aviary exclaimed over the roar that had started. Emily looked at the ceiling and scowled. Aviary looked up too and saw a shimmering and shaking, as if the sky outside was trying to break apart the roof. Emily grabbed the twitching skeleton and dragged it by the arm towards the hole in the ground and disappeared down into it. Aviary followed. They were running in the dark through the tunnel when an almighty gust of wind swept over their heads and knocked them over like skittles. Aviary looked up to see Emily holding a rotting corpse rather than a pile of bones.
Emily picked up the shaking figure, "Bloody hell, keep up! We've got to get out of here!"
Aviary held onto his hat and ordered his legs to start working again. The two of them clumsily darted through the shaking earth chute. A guttural scream was coming from the seizing bundle in Emily's arms. She was holding it firmly and trying not to look at it. Aviary looked down and noticed the body had grown a thick head of black hair. A face turned up to stare at him, black-brown eyes that seemed to regenerate as he watched.
"Don't stare!" Emily snapped over the noise of the rumbling cavern. Aviary tripped over a rock but kept going… but there weren't any railroad tracks any more. Amidst the confusion he heard Emily yelling again, "Aviary! Spiders!"
"The spiders?" Aviary heard himself exclaim back.
"Stop running!" The two collided and Emily held him down with the regenerating zombie. A wave of scuttling feet hit them and seemed to flow over and around them, some. Aviary watched them bite and sting the surface of some great force field in the white light of Emily's torch. The girl was clutching them both tightly.
Then she dragged them on forwards. They were getting faster and faster. Aviary feared he wouldn't keep up. They reached the dead end of the tunnel and Emily hoisted the pale body onto her shoulder. She looked up at the reporter, "Stand on my feet."
"Excuse me?" Aviary shouted.
"Stand on my feet. Don't let any part of you touch the ground." The reporter nodded, trusting this dangerous female implicitly. She took out her ancient-looking gun, aimed it at the ground, held onto Aviary and the now living body and fired. Aviary felt dirt swallow him and clawed helplessly to get to the top of it. The claustrophobia seemed to last a lifetime. All around him the earth was falling down and he felt powerless against it. One hand snagged on a solid rock and he hoisted upwards. He felt like he tore his own flesh. The man heaved himself onto a solid shelf of dirt and looked back at the new valley carved into the basin of the wasteland. Emily was lying close by, panting hard. On the ground at her knees lay a girl of about twelve years with black hair and a vividly yellow dress. She sat up, her skin pale but healthy, and looked around the destroyed landscape.
"This… this is the world? Did you bring me to help?" she asked in a small accent.
The red herring groaned and rolled onto her hands and knees, clenched tight against some pain, "The world doesn't need help, Maria. It's too late for that. Right now all I am trying to save is you."
Emily stilled, gathering her lithe limbs about her and rose with all the grace of an epitaph, "You brought a car here, didn't you Aviary?"
He nodded.
"Can you drive? I can't," she admitted, staring into his eyes in an eerie way that made one think she could read minds.
"Well, I. Yes I can. But," The reporter tilted his head back at the stars in exertion, "Shouldn't we wait a while first?"
"No," Emily snapped, "All they need is three hours and this place will be crawling with spies. The bad kind, the kind that kill children." she gripped the girl called Maria by her forearms and lifted her upon her two shaking white legs, "This is Maria. Some people are trying to kill her right now."
"There have always been people trying to kill me," Maria echoed sedately.
Aviary felt a shade colder, presently getting to his feet and slipping on the mud, "Oh-Who do you mean by some people?"
"Well there's Mister Moray who works as an accountant in the International Bank down town. He belongs to a cult that worship evil things. Evil men own various instruments that nobody for their life could understand but everyone, it seems, seem to use. He knows Maria is here. He probably knows that I'm here. In fact, he's more than likely to be rushing out of his bedroom right now to try and stop the pair of us using some evil instrument. How fast does your car travel, Mr Gardener? Because I don't want to be here."
The girls were walking too fast for Aviary to keep up without jogging every third step, "I don'tthink we should take the car."
Emily stopped, "Why not?"
"I left it very close to where we entered the tunnel. We had a black Model T… But it isn't here anymore." Aviary reached into his pocket and pulled out the pocket-watch, "Maybe this thing will help us find it."
Emily secured his wrist with an icy grip, "This was my friend's. I like you, you're very resourceful." She studied the watch face. The silver metal was highly ornate around the flickering symbols and figures that vanished and appeared on small silver squares. What's more, the markings were all glowing as if coated by phosphorous, but bright green. "See that one there?" she pointed with a sharp finger, "Aires. That means Mars. Damn it!"
"So this is how they dream up horoscopes, is it?" Aviary commented sceptically, his wrist still in the strong grip of the redhead.
"No. No, this measures planets. Mars. Mars is active. That is bad for us. Mars is the home of a very real dormant evil," her mouth worked as if she wanted to say more. Her dark and almost transparent eyes caught on his once again, "Do you really want to be a part of this?"
Mr Gardener put his hand in his pocket and felt the reassuring shape of the notebook, "Yes. Everything."
She looked back to the pocket-watch, "There are sentinels on Mars that are watching me very closely."
"Sentinels on Mars in league with this Mister Moray?"
"Bigger than Mister Moray. He is just part of an occult and the occult… to them, these sentinels act as their Gods," Emily tried to explain.
"Their Gods… are watching you? On Mars?" Aviary murmured, piqued.
"They are not Gods!" Emily snapped, "They are beings. They live, they die. They command those around them as Gods because there are such fools in our world and Mister Moray is one of them. Now where the be dammed is your car?"
The reporter stared blankly out at the abandoned plane, "Not here. I think I told you that."
The black-haired girl called Maria stepped closer to them. Emily growled, "Well, Aviary, that means they've already arrived." She spun on her heel and pulled something from the long pocket of her trousers. She hurled the handful of what looked like crushed up chalk over the edge of the cliff. "Aviary!" The redhead yelled. He looked to her and smiled helpfully. "Aviary! You need to"
At that moment the black iron of a steam engine reared up out of the solid earth behind Emily like a ghost through a wall and ploughed on forwards, collecting Emily and Maria in its wake. Emily swung herself to the top of the billowing steam engine in the blink of an eye with twists of the body that defied even Aviary's stunned imagination. The train and its tracks continued to rise out of the ground and veered suddenly away from the reporter. Aviary yelled out and ran alongside it.
"Get on!" Emily hollered. The carriages were flying past Aviary so fast he couldn't count them. He held out his arm and hooked himself onto the end of one car, the momentum slamming his shoulder into the start of the next. Aviary stiffened with a cuss. The man moved slowly to the side and slid himself over the unforgiving metal bars and into the narrow back-entrance door.
The red herring straddled the rocketing locomotive and clung onto the rough metal with her bare hands. She could hear Maria below her crying for help but shut it out. She started hearing other things. She could hear the breathing of the great fire that powered the engine and the wheels stampeding over the rails. Her mind soothed itself over the mechanical muscles of the beast. When she opened her eyes the world looked different, but she could see the rail tracks below her.
Emily felt a powerful rage flow through her that launched itself at the tracks, bending them to her will. Emily strained to the left and the tracks leading her stead obeyed.
Maria watched as her new bodyguard's eyes closed in deep concentration. When Emily opened her eyes they shone solid black from lid to lid. Otherworldly. But then again, had her Pa ever brought her less?
Inside the train all noise and rush of the outside became muffled and indistinct, the world rushing past violently and the little lights swinging freely from the ceiling. Delicate was sprinkled in shard on the carpeted floor, but unspoilt meals lay on the tables. Fresh, and in some cases, still warm.
Aviary absently grabbed a slice of pie from one of the dainty plates and paced from one car to the next, moving faster and faster through each passing door and the sudden bursts of booming noise. It was too eerie in the cabins. It looked as if the passengers had all simply vanished-not even a trace of their bones left behind. Suddenly he came across a door locked. He took a step back. The reporter slammed his foot into the door in the exact right point between the lock and the centre of the door, splintering the old wood and breaking the door in two.
Maria screamed and covered her face to avoid the splinters. Her girlish yellow dress was streaked with coal and grime, her hands completely black.
"Where's… where's the other one?" Aviary called over the roar of the engine.
Maria took her hands away and shouted back, "She's on the roof! She's driving the train!"
Aviary looked incredulous, "What do you mean driving? We're at the controls!" The locomotive swerved violently and the two of them clung to the rusty interior.
Maria poked her head out one of the windows. They were still driving over wasteland. The girl turned her head into the rushing wind, "Oh!" She pulled in and hid behind the metal wall. Aviary grabbed the ledge and thrust his head out the window. He could see the dark figure of a fat man standing very close to the tracks up ahead. The reporter watched as the train sailed past him. Aviary was sure it was the infamous Mister Moray, standing as still as ice-even the smoke from his pipe frozen in place. He disappeared into the darkness as quickly as he had appeared and the machine kept on moving.
"We must be bending time," Maria said loudly, "Like my Pa. We're not travelling through time like everyone else. Only God can see us now."
"Maria, we need to get on the roof!"
The little girl looked terrified, "No!"
"Yes! Emily's up there!"
"But she wants us, she need us to be safe," Maria whined, "I was told! We need to stay safe!"
"We're going up there because it is safer with her than anywhere else in this world. Trust me, I'm a reporter."
Maria just stared at him for a minute, but nodded, "Okay!"
"Give me your arm, I'll help you up," Aviary walked shakily to the end of the control carriage. His eyes saw the chord hanging from the ceiling. He couldn't say no. With some sort of abstract glee the reporter pulled the string and heard the steam engine blaze out a toot.
A/N: I love trains. Just telling you. Reviews are very much appreciated, and thanks again for reading this! You made it through round two! Awesome!