1931 The Grand Punk Railroad: Local Read Online Free PDF Page A

standing had smoke-wreathed gun muzzles trained on the stunned Nader.
    “Y-you!”
    “What did I tell you, Nader? I said, ‘There is a traitor in our midst.’ However, I meant that
you
had been betrayed.”
    As Goose spoke, he was expressionless. In contrast, possibly because he hadn’t been able to process the sudden turn of events, Nader said nothing, but he was visibly bathed in cold sweat.
    “Each of these thirty men brought me reports that you intended to betray us. It seems they were unable to follow you. What a pity.”
    Maybe because he’d finally managed to get a handle on his situation, with his jaw chattering, Nader suddenly reached into his jacket and pulled out a glossy black handgun.
    A sharp, hot pain ran through his right hand.
    Thunk.
    The piece he’d just pulled fell quietly to the floor. It wasn’t until he saw the woman who’d appeared in front of him, unnoticed, that he realized his hand had gone with it, from the wrist down.
    “Cha…Chané…”
    Chané the Fanatic. The woman, who wore a military uniform, always followed Huey’s orders to the letter and was the best assassin in the organization. They said the assassins of Asia paralyzed their senses with drugs; she had paralyzed her entire body with ideas, to the extent that one wondered if she’d forgotten she was a woman, or even a human being.
    As Nader fought the pain in his arm, he desperately scanned the woman in front of him.
    “I-I thought you were dead. Didn’t you die when they caught Huey?!”
    Even at Nader’s scream, Chané stayed silent from beginning to end. Goose answered the question in her place.
    “She lived. She regrets it more than anything. I expect that’s precisely why she feels she must remove anything that threatens to obstruct the operation tomorrow evening.”
    Still silent, without even nodding in agreement, Chané quietly raised her weapon, which was dripping with blood. It was a thick, sharp military knife. The one that had just severed Nader’s hand.
    “Wait, Chané.”
    At Goose’s voice, they turned; Chané’s face looked questioning, while Nader seemed to be clinging to hope.
    And then Nader learned: Hope was something he should never have expected in the first place.
    “It would be boring to kill him easily.”
    “You sure about this, Goose? If you settle him like that, he might come back alive.”
    From the covered bed of a military truck, a subordinate spoke to Goose, who was in the driver’s seat.
    After the failed coup, Goose had tied Nader up, welded shut all the doors that led to the outside, and left the factory behind him. They’d stopped the bleeding from his wrist, but they’d destroyed all the vehicles except the ones they were using. This meant that, in order for Nader to be saved, he’d have to get out of the factory, then reach a town that lay several dozen miles away.
    “That isn’t an impossible distance to travel on foot, and it’s not as if he doesn’t have food.”
    “That’s true. You’re right. Right about now, he’s probably worn through his ropes by scraping them against a post and is trying to break down an exterior door.”
    “In that case…”
    “By the way, Spike. I trust your sniping skills haven’t deteriorated?”
    Stopping the truck when they were about three hundred yards from the factory, he interrupted his subordinate with a question.
    “Uh…”
    “Shoot the white box beside the building entrance.”
    “…Ah. Roger that, Goose.”
    Responding with understanding, the man named Spike unfolded a bundle that had been in the back of the truck.
    Inside was a jet-black sniper rifle. It had been specially manufactured, and its barrel was longer than normal. Cheerfully, the man set it up in the back of the truck, took careful aim, and—
    “Annnd kaboom.”
    With those anticlimactic words, Spike pulled the trigger.
    A few seconds after the shot rang out, they saw the white box beside the entrance burst into flames. After Goose gained visual