The Tin Man and Toto, he had just met. And thanks to the actions of the Southern Marshal, Dorothy was also a stranger. Despite knowing what the Southern Marshal had done to her, it still felt strange that he knew her so well and yet she did not recognize him.
Every time he looked at her, the flood of memories of what they shared together ran through his mind. But because she had been turned into a scarecrow, he didn’t see the same emotions from her when they made eye contact.
If they didn’t succeed in getting the weapon, and returning it to the Southern Marshal, Dorothy might stay this way; forever.
He jumped when someone tapped him on the shoulder. His eyes focused on Dorothy, who had knelt in front of him.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
He snapped the shovel’s tether onto the hook and futilely tried to wipe the coal dust from his hands. “It’s okay. I was lost in thought and didn’t notice you.”
“Well I’ve noticed you watching me.”
Caleb’s heart felt like it was being squeezed. “I’m sorry about that.”
She gripped his hands in hers. “No. Don’t be. I was told, when I first woke up, that my memory had been erased and I would get it back when we finished this task. I take it, from how you keep looking at me and turning away, we knew each other before.”
“We did.”
“How well did we know each other?”
Now his heart was being twisted around unnaturally inside his rib cage. He didn’t know how much to tell her. Or how much he should tell her.
“Caleb?”
She snapped him out of his reverie again. She looked up at him with innocent eyes.
“How well did we know each other?”
“We were very good friends.”
“This must be hard for you. I don’t remember you at all. I actually don’t remember much of anything.”
He gripped her hands tightly and gave her a reassuring smile.
“Don’t worry. We will get your memory back; no matter what.”
She returned his smile. “I won’t have to live out my days as a scarecrow?”
“Not if I can help it.”
Dorothy clung to the hand rail and stared out at the passing scenery as the locomotive rocketed through OZ. She searched the horizon for something that would jog her memory, any memory, of the life she had lived before waking up this morning.
For several hours, the scenery gradually shifted from one type of terrain to another. A few times, they passed close enough to a town to make out the individual stones of the varied buildings and houses but, fortunately for the inhabitants of these cities, their uncontrolled journey did not take them directly through the center of town for any of them.
Caleb slammed the firebox door shut. “Well, that’s the last of our coal. All we can do now is wait for this ride to end.”
They smiled briefly at each other before they each returned to looking out their respective windows. Dorothy tried to conjure up any feelings she had for Caleb, but came up empty. She tried desperately to remember something, anything, from before today. But each time she thought she might have caught a glimpse of some old memory, it faded into oblivion before she could focus on it.
She had been put into an impossible situation. She woke up with no memory of who she was or how she got there, with people she never remembered meeting before, telling her who to trust and what to do to get her memory restored.
She didn’t have any reasons to trust anyone. She also didn’t have any reasons to distrust anyone, other than her lack of memories. But was that reason enough to distrust everyone? With the exception of Toto, who had followed her everywhere ever since she awoke, the three of them were on this quest under one form of duress or another.
They were all in this together. But, they each had different reasons to be here. And while she couldn’t fully understand why this frightened her, it did.
However, nothing frightened her more than the Tin Man. Whenever she looked in his direction, she always found herself staring at the sharp, claw-like hands. Claws that could cut her in half with a single swiping motion. She shook her head and tried not to dwell on such things. Fortunately, the Tin Man had moved to the roof of the locomotive a couple of hours earlier. He said he wanted to watch the path ahead, to keep an eye out for any signs of trouble. She didn’t care why he went up to the roof. As long as it kept him, and his claws, as far away from her as possible.
Whatever programming was used for the Tin Man, she hoped it was not prone to insanity. Why was she thinking like that? She had to be positive if they were going to succeed in their quest.
Just as she was trying to banish the negative thoughts from her mind, the Tin Man jumped down into the engineer’s compartment, grabbed Caleb in a huge claw and threw him off the locomotive.
Dorothy’s scream caught in her throat as the Tin Man reached for her and Toto.
Before his mind could even properly register the fact that the Tin Man had thrown him out of the locomotive, Caleb hit the ground at high speed. His armored suit hardened instantly and he tumbled several hundred feet across the sun-baked ground before coming to a stop on his back.
Something streaked across the sky in his field of vision, leaving behind a trail of fire and black smoke. A shrieking sound pierced his eardrums and hackled the fur over his entire body.
The head splitting scream was coming from the fireball, and judging by the angle of smoke trailing behind it in the wide arc it made across the sky, it was coming back down to the ground.
He sat up and focused his attention on the screaming fireball.
His mouth went dry when it impacted with the locomotive and exploded.
The shock wave shoved him back several feet, his armor easily deflecting the shards of thick cast iron that tried to impale him with their twisted shards.
He regained his footing and gawked at the meters wide crater where he last saw the locomotive. For the next minute, twisted pieces of metal, each no bigger than his fist, dropped out of the sky. Whatever hit the locomotive, had exploded with more destructive force than he had ever seen before in his life.
However, the shrieking sound was something he had heard before.
And it never meant anything good.
He heard the whooshing sound of jump jets right before the Tin Man, holding a terrified Dorothy and struggling Toto in each bent arm, landed near him. He didn’t bother releasing them and instead surveyed the crater where the locomotive used to be. “What the hell was that?”
Caleb scanned the skies for more trouble. “I don’t know, but I have an idea of who sent it. I hope, for all our sakes, I’m wrong.”
He saw them moments before their wailing sounds reached him.
He was not wrong.
They flew through the sky, born on black and brown stained canvas wings, like large bats against the pale blue sky. Even at this distance he recognized the cone shaped face masks that came to a sharp point, like the beak of a bird, and the large plume of black feathers extending out from their helmets.
But the dead giveaway, of who was fast approaching, were the black steel gauntlets worn over their left hands. The elongated metal claws always sharpened to a razor’s edge and dipped in poison before they engaged the enemy.
Their name alone was enough to send even the hardest criminals in OZ into a flurry of blind panic. It was a word rarely spoken in hushed whispers or during polite conversation.
It was usually screamed in terror.
Caleb screamed that word right now. “Banshees!”
The five Banshees adjusted their angle of flight when they spotted the survivors from the obliterated locomotive.
A quick glance around proved Caleb’s worst fear. There was nowhere to run, and there was nowhere to hide.
His sword and gun sprang out at his nonverbal commands while the Tin Man set Dorothy and Toto down.
Without a single word passing between them, Caleb, Toto and the Tin Man placed themselves between Dorothy and the coming threat.
And prepared for the worst.
Because the worst was coming.
The Banshees landed ten meters away, shed their canvas wings, and extended their clawed hands. They did not rely on brute force to overcome their enemies. They relied on their speed and agility. And they let the poison dripping from the tips of their extended claws do most of the heavy lifting. One scratch was an assured, and painful, death sentence. Caleb’s special armor might protect him from the claws, but he still had exposed skin at every joint that still left him vulnerable. The only ones immune to any kind of poison were Toto and the Tin Man. With the two automatons, and his armored suit, they might stand a chance against the five Banshees.
Worse than the screeching that signaled their impending arrival was their silence as they moved in for the kill.
Toto was the first react. He charged at the closest Banshee, growling and snarling fiercely. He leaped through the air and the Banshee caught him with her clawed hand. He let out a terrified yelp and dropped to the ground, lifeless.
The Tin Man raised his gun and fired. The Banshees scattered in every direction, each one avoiding the steady barrage of bullets. One held up her clawed hand and sparks of lightning shot out to engulf the Tin Man. He stopped firing, and fell face down into the dirt.
These Banshees had upgraded their gauntlets to deal with automatons. With both his strongest members down and out for the count, and with all five Banshees still untouched, he was not going to win this fight. The only way to protect Dorothy, and save himself, was to get as far away from them as possible.
He spun around and bear-hugged Dorothy. He crouched and felt the jump jets engage right before every muscle in his body constricted.
Still gripping Dorothy, they both collapsed into the dust.
He and Dorothy stared at each other, unable to move. He was not unconscious, but had no control over anything. He couldn’t turn his head. He couldn’t move his eyes. He couldn’t even blink.
It took three Banshees working together to pry them apart and lay them each on their backs.
A Banshee entered his field of vision and removed her metal beak. If he still had voluntary control over his body, he would’ve gasped in surprise. He knew that only women were allowed in the ranks of the Banshees, but he hadn’t expected any of them to be so beautiful.
They were ruthless killers, and it was rare that anyone saw them without their mask. He had expected them to look more mannish.
Maybe he’d listened too long to the drunken rationalizations of men in pubs, discussing why a woman would choose to become a Banshee. They always seemed to settle on the same reason. She must be as ugly as a mule and couldn’t find herself a man.
Clearly, as he stared up at the smooth features of her face, that was not the case. She spoke softly to him, like a mother tending to a sleepy child.
“I’m going to close your eyes now. We wouldn’t want them to dry out.”
She swiped her hand across his face and the world became nothing more than a bright orangish hue as sunlight filtered through his eyelids.
As he lie perfectly still on the ground, he listened to the Banshees speak to each other in a language he’d never heard before. It was a lilting, breathy language that seemed to be very old, and not as consonant heavy as the modern languages.
He heard wagon wheels crunching on the hard ground and sensed, rather than felt since he still had no control or feeling of his body, the motion of being lifted and placed in the wagon. It must’ve been a covered wagon, because the light filtering in through his eyelids darkened slightly.
It was unsettling to be awake and aware, yet not be able to move or feel any part of your body. The only senses he had were sight and sound. He could not feel anything, but he could hear his heartbeat, and his breathing and swallowing at regular intervals. Even though he lost control of his body, at least the involuntary functions were still working.
The sense he missed the most, was smell. He hadn’t realized how much he relied on it to gauge his surroundings until it was gone.
He always closed his eyes upon entering a new city so that he could memorize the smells. Every city had its unique smell and he was able, during the few times he’d been hooded and whisked away to meet a contact in a secret location, to know exactly where he was.
For the first time in his life, he was flying blind and had no idea where they were taking him.
Or why.
He tried to focus on possible reasons why they destroyed the locomotive and captured them. But not being able to feel one’s own body was too distracting. His mind wandered too easily from the lack of stimulus. Reduced to the single reddish color of his eyelids and the random sounds around him, his brain struggled to reconstruct the rest of his environment. But rather than try to reconstruct the environment around him, he instead hallucinated that he was seated at the dinner table back in Nero’s casino, years ago.
He could smell the food. He could turn his head and look all around the dining hall like he was there.
But none of it was real, and he forced himself to focus on the sounds around him rather than let his brain create a new reality.
The rumbling of the wooden wagon wheels shifted tempo as they moved from a dirt road to cobblestone pavement.
He had no way of judging which city they had just entered, because he had no way of knowing how long they had been traveling, or at what speed.
The only indication that time had passed was the gradual darkening on the other side of his eyelids. He couldn’t hear Dorothy in the wagon next to him, or anyone from the rest of his group. Which made sense. He couldn’t speak himself, so none of them would be making any noise.
A chilling thought suddenly occurred to him. What if they had been split up. What if Dorothy, the Tin Man, Toto, and he were sent to different locations?
His mind grabbed that thought and propelled him beyond the boundaries of sanity. He used all his will to force himself back to reality. He focused on the details of his quest, which only made him angry about his current situation.