The Loyal Ones

Ch 20

The rail-car's meat had the same sour-bile taste as its blood, but felt more like real food. They ate it raw, cutting long strips off the machine's sagging flanks.

"Eat, eat," said the pale soldier, "be sick later." She pushed more into their hands.The pale soldier's name was Inka, and she wasn't actually Brairi. Just descended from them. Her father's parents and her mother had both been captured as children. Dally had known there were a few like that, but he hadn't thought it was this many. Now that he was looking closer almost half the thralls around him looked pale for Savosi.

When Dally and the others had reached the front of the rail-car, they finally saw what had killed it. Or at least they saw something. The car's head was lassoed in some kind of wet, red cable, like a a web of muscular intestines. The cord had yanked the head down, down, down into the rails, crunching into the dirt under its own wheels. It's monstrous, heavy body had kept going, though. The left over speed carried it right off the rails.

"That's the food vein?" Dally had said, after staring at the cord for a long time. "The vein strangled it."

Inka had waved her hand, and started cutting into the car's flank. "Captain gets what he wants."All the thralls in the cars had survived, it looked like, though there were plenty of cuts and broken bones. The humans mostly weren't so lucky. Dally and the others helped pull shattered bodies from the wreck, their clothes dripping with the greasy car blood. Dally had never seen a dead human before. Their dead eyes stared at the sky, exactly like Seth Greenlees had.When they were laid out in a row the Captain came back. He sucked on a cigarette, glancing at the bodies in heavy lidded boredom.

The thralls that had been trapped in the wreck were still crawling out, sliding covered in gore from holes that they'd cut in the sides of the car. As they retched and shivered Captain Bailla blew hard on a tin whistle. They turned to him.

"Thanks to that enemy trap, you'll have to stay here," said Bailla, standing in front them. "You're mine now, understand?"

The thralls shivered, squinting at him in the sudden daylight. "Yes boss."

By midnight they were all fed, and at least partly-clothed. No one had a spare jacket big enough for Ansel. He hunched near the fire with his arms crossed over his scarred chest.

"Did your Captain really wreck the car?" he asked the closest Front thrall, and got a vague grunt for an answer. The soldier turned away.

This had been going on all night - the quiet. Apart from Inka, the Front thralls didn't say much, good or bad, to any of the newcomers. They sang with each other — new songs — and played a version of serbat with about ten thousand different rhyme patterns. But, whenever someone tried talking to them, they gave one-word answers.

Meanwhile, Inka laughed loudly and constantly at Dally's fumbling Corps, but at least she talked. And she had a baby, which none of them had realised at first. As soon as they were out of sight of any humans she pulled him from the rubble; a chubby, flailing creature only a year old. He was beyond cute, and still doing couldn't sit still, or even stay in one shape for more than a couple seconds. As Dally watched he screeched, trying to reach a bug on the ground, then started started bawling when Inka wouldn't let him go.