One Shot Kill - Robert Muchamore Page 0,18

The trickling stream was deafening and trees seemed to loom over her like ghosts.

Notes

4 Gendarmes – French civilian police officers.

CHAPTER NINE

The railway line bisected the landscape, making it easy for Rosie to find in the dark. She’d taken a single horse and ridden slowly. She was lucky not to sight trouble, because it would have been impossible to go faster with Edith slumped unconscious over the saddle behind her.

Just after midnight a fully-laden coal train began shaking the ground Rosie sat on. It wound down the hillside at more than twenty kilometres an hour, curving around a large S, designed to ease the gradient when it climbed back up.

Rosie squatted as close to the track as she dared. She’d imagined square-sided trucks like the wagons on her brother’s clockwork train set, but much to her relief, these wagons carried coal in V-shaped pivot-mounted skips, enabling them to be emptied rapidly by tipping. At one end each wagon had a metal platform used to access and maintain the mechanism.

‘I’m so thirsty,’ Edith said weakly.

Rosie almost missed her voice over the clattering train, but dived into the trackside bushes where she was lying and allowed her to drink greedily from a canteen.

‘You’re doing great,’ Rosie lied, stroking Edith’s hair as she raised her head to stop her choking.

‘I’m seeing funny shapes,’ Edith said.

‘It’s the fever. You’re delirious.’

The train seemed endless and by the time fifty coal wagons passed Edith had drifted back into unconsciousness.

Rosie had no idea how long it would take for the train to offload and steam back, but Eugene had expected it well before sunrise. She sat beside Edith, cradling her head and envying the carefree horse munching grass a few metres away.

It was near 3 a.m. when Rosie heard the first rumblings of the train heading back. Edith couldn’t hold on, so Rosie aimed her bag on to the platform of a passing wagon, then grabbed Edith off the grass and needed all the muscle she’d built up in training to sling her over her shoulder.

Jumping aboard was precarious, but Rosie got a foot on a metal step and steadied herself by grabbing a metal rung used for climbing inside the container. After lying Edith out on the metal platform and tucking her under the angled side of the coal skip to make her invisible, Rosie crawled along the ledge at the side of the wagon to retrieve her backpack from two wagons up.

She had no problem getting there, but the train crested the hilltop as she turned back. Noise and vibration grew as the train picked up speed. The pack made it hard to balance and she had to pull herself in desperately as overhanging branches thrashed the side of the wagon.

When the ordeal was over, her heart was belting. She was black with coal dust, and even more alarmingly the increased vibration had moved Edith’s body several centimetres, leaving her head poking off the metal platform.

‘Quite an adventure,’ someone said.

Rosie jolted with fright as she saw two white eyeballs peeking over the end of the skip in the next wagon.

‘You’re better off using the foot holds,’ a boyish voice explained. ‘Climb through the skip and out at the other end.’

Rosie went for her pistol, making the eyes panic and drop back into the skip. ‘How’d you get here?’ she yelled. ‘What are you after?’

‘How’d you get a gun?’ the voice asked back. ‘Don’t shoot me. I was trying to help.’

Rosie thought before answering. Someone this young was probably no threat, but unlikely to be travelling the middle of the night without company.

‘What are you doing here?’ Rosie asked.

‘Nabbing coal,’ the boy explained, his voice now echoing from deep in the skip.

‘Are you alone?’

The boy considered this question for a few moments before answering. ‘I’m alone. Will you shoot me if I stick my head back up?’

‘Not unless you try something,’ Rosie said.

But she felt vaguely ridiculous saying this, because the coal-black creature that swung its leg over the side of the truck was ten years old at most.

‘I saw you jump on,’ the boy said. ‘Never hang off the sides like that. We’re coming up to some tunnels. They’d have caught your luggage and minced you.’

Rosie nodded as the boy landed on the platform with a clank. He wore tattered trousers and boots held together with twine.

‘I’m Justin,’ the boy said, as he studied Edith. ‘Your friend looks bad.’

‘She’s sick,’ Rosie said. ‘Are you running away, or something?’

‘I would if I didn’t have a mum and three