Vengeance Trail

The sec man who’d thrown the gren joined his comrades who were crammed into the two travelers’ wags they had emptied. Engines growled. The convoy rolled off along the bare-earth track, to the west, raising roostertails of khaki dust.

The derelict wag’s gasoline tank, ruptured by the blast, caught fire with a whump and billow of yellow flames. The vehicle began to burn ferociously, puking black smoke into a sky that was already beginning to mask its clean blue face with clouds.

Krysty emerged from her hiding place. Her joints ached from maintaining the unnatural position she’d been forced to endure. Red ants had crawled up her legs inside her jumpsuit and bitten her shin and thigh. Their venom made the tiny wounds pang like stabs. She ignored all.

She walked with the deliberation of a drunk to the edge of the precipice, where Ryan had stood, where last she had seen her lover. Her beautiful high-cheekboned face was set like stone. She looked down, half fearing what she would see.

There was nothing. The slope angled sharply down for perhaps forty yards, pitched over a cluster of granite boulders, which resisted erosion better than the prevalent sandstone, and straight down in a sheer fall to the floor a mile below. Ryan’s body wasn’t in sight. Presumably it was way down at the bottom, hidden by sheer height.

She turned away, looking over the bodies of their former traveling companions: Kurtiz, Elane, Natty and the rest. The little girl Sallee lay facedown, with her toy inches from her outflung fingers, its grime glistening with her blood.

Moving as if through water and all her limbs were lead, Krysty picked through the items the coldhearts had so contemptuously pitched into heaps on the ground. She needed what supplies she could carry: food, water, meds. Even something extra for barter.

She wouldn’t just lie down and die. She would follow the men who had murdered Ryan and the travelers and kidnapped her friends. She would kill them all, and free her friends.

Of course, she was but one woman, alone in the wasteland, afoot in pursuit of wags. And all the supplies she could lift, as strong as she was, would be quickly exhausted in this waste. Particularly water.

It meant nothing to her. Nothing at all. She would follow her vengeance trail to the end, whatever it would take.

She set out along the track the wags had taken. She had no hope, but hate was enough. Concern for herself was no part of the picture.

She was dead already. Inside.

SOMEWHERE AT THE BOTTOM of a deep well of darkness and misery, Ryan stirred.

It felt to him as if the skin of his chest was a big bag wrapped around forty pounds of busted glass. With every laboring breath he drew, it felt as if a thousand jagged points stabbed and rasped at his raw nerve endings.

Worse, as he became aware again, was that he could hear his breathing. Not just the ragged in and out of exhalation that was always with you whether you paid it mind or not, but a nasty wet slurping noise combined with a hiss. And it was hard to breathe—bastard hard.

Sucking chest wound, he realized. So-called, one of his father’s healers had told him back home in Front Royal long ago, because it really sucked if you got one.

And unless you got pretty quick attention, so did your chances of living.

Krysty! The name went off like ten pounds of smokeless powder off a blasting cap in his mind. She and the companions hadn’t come to his aid, which meant they weren’t able to.

For a moment, in the damp, dark misery of his mind and body, he fought the clammy jaws of panic. He was hurt bad and alone.

He tried one of the deep-breathing exercises Krysty had taught him to calm himself and banish the terror that threatened to rob him of the last remnants of his selfhood, his manhood, and whatever he might laughingly call hope, sucking the air way down with his abdominal muscles.

It worked, too. Not because supercharging his system with oxygen had its usual soothing effect on the system. But because it felt as if some giant mutie bastard had plunged a twenty-inch saw into his flat belly and was sawing for all he was worth.

Whatever else you could say about it, it took his mind off feeling sorry for himself.

His eye opened. It was resisted by some kind of thick gumminess, but the jolt of white-hot agony that racked his being, as he breathed in, did the trick.

The first thing he saw was lots of nothing much: blue dimness as far as his eye could see. After a moment he noticed it deepened in the direction the not-so-gentle pull of gravity was telling him was downward, was banded in various shades and hues, was molded into cone and curtain shapes.

He was lying on the very lip of the Big Ditch itself, with his outflung right hand, fingers tingling as though with crawling fire as circulation restored by some unnoticed movement returned feeling to them, hanging over a mile of space.

He rolled his eye down. The right side of his face was pressed to a rough rock surface. The tarry looking pool spread around it tended to confirm his suspicion that what had glued his eyelid shut was his own blood, spilled in a copious quantity.

He rolled the eye up. A granite outcrop, almost black in the dusk, hunched over him like a leering gargoyle. He could only guess that after being shot—a remembered flash of pain in his chest, of spinning dizzily into blackness vaster by far than the Grand Canyon—he had tumbled down the steep, but not sheer, slope and bounced over that last humpback boulder to come flopping to a stop on a hard ledge of rock.

Needless to say, it had busted hell out of him. Needless to say, it was nothing compared to what would have happened had he actually gone over.

But it wasn’t going to matter a bent, spent shell case if he couldn’t do something for himself and fast. He’d suffocate if the wound wasn’t tended to. He knew what had to be done: apply what Mildred called an “occlusive dressing,” a sort of valve that would flap shut and seal the hole when he inhaled, but relax and expel air when he breathed out. It wasn’t all that complex an operation, and anything reasonably airtight would do for a patch. Nuke it, he even had the proper material for the job tucked away in one of his pockets.

The problem was, could he even get to it, or use it if he could?

Then he heard, above the mocking whistle of the wind and the thin shrill cry of a redtailed hawk on the hunt, the tiniest scrape of something moving on stone. And he realized that the injuries he already had might turn out to be the least of his problems.

He wasn’t alone.

Having another living being find you helpless in the Deathlands was an almost automatic death sentence. Even if that being walked on two legs like a human being. Mebbe worst if it was a human being. Ryan had known plenty humans, no few of them barons or their sec men, who gave away nothing to stickies when it came to rapacious cruelty.

He took stock of his resources. He still had all the weapons he could want. He could feel the familiar weight of the Steyr lying across his left leg, the big broad-bladed panga in its sheath on his hip. Even his SIG-Sauer with the built-in suppresser—he reckoned that was the hard object prodding a busted-end rib around in him every time he fought down a breath. He had feeling back in his right hand, even if it was feeling like it was being held in a fire, and could move his fingers.

But his left wasn’t responding. A node of unusually savage ache in the giant throb of pain that was his being suggested he might have a busted clavicle on that side. Which meant he could count that arm completely out. No force of his will would get the limb to so much as move. It just mechanically couldn’t happen, any more than the toughest man could walk with a broken pelvis.

He looked around, hoping his stalker would miss the motion of his eyeball in the gloom. Stalkers. That was the first thing he saw. Shapes, strangely hunched, gathered around him. He could make out no detail in the gloom. They were small, no more than three feet high, max. Not that it mattered. A three-legged coyote pup could put him on the last train west in his current condition.

A shape loomed over him. He could make out the glint of moisture on big staring nightmare eyes, big teeth gleaming pale behind animal lips. He tried to roll away. His body refused to obey. He tried to bring his right arm up to ward off the monster. It didn’t work. All he could do was turn his head frantically from side to side on his neck and make animal sounds, half-panic, half-defiant fury, deep in this throat.

A small paw stretched out over him.

Blackness took him.

Chapter Two

“Robbed!” howled the tall man with the painted ax-blade face. “Cheated! All our days of scouting and waiting gone for nothing.”

Red Wolf paused dramatically, glaring out from below the wolf’s head he wore like a cap over his own, with the rest of the pelt hanging down his broad bronze back. He was a onetime war leader of the Cheyenne from the Medicine Bow country. Or so he said. The multimegaton pasting that had taken out the Warren missile complex had left that very part of southern Wyoming and northern Colorado a howling wasteland as virulent as anything the Midwest boasted.

Not that anyone was going to go up there and check. He had proved time and again that his heart was as cold as the coldest, his case as hard as the hardest, and justified his role, not just as a member of Chato’s outlaw horde, but one of its leaders. If he wanted to dress in dead animal parts and various colors of paint, nobody was going to challenge him—who wasn’t ready to chill or be chilled on the spot, anyway. Chato himself was an Indian, though much smaller and with quieter tastes.

The problem with Red Wolf wasn’t what he claimed to be. The problem was that he was a bone outlaw, a seething vessel of barely repressed murder at the best of times, and he was taking the loss of the travelers even harder than the rest of what passed for Chato’s command council.

The other eight stared at him from the circle, where they squatted in the flickering feeble light from a fire of dried brush scraped together in the center of the cave. They looked lean, predatory and expectant. They also looked as if they were trying desperately not to bust down and cough their lights out. The cave etched into the sandstone bluff by wind and water and maybe, just maybe, improved by the hands of similar bands of desperados of ages past, was cool even in the heat of summer, which this wasn’t. But there was no smoke-hole, much less a chimney. Consequently a fogbank of nasty sage-colored smoke that went up the nostrils and down the throat like prickleburrs hung from a height of two feet off the floor to somewhere near the irregular arch of ceiling above.

“Not much we can do about it, pinche,” muttered El Gancho, a bandit from northern Mex. He was a squat, leering man with a bad eye and a worse mustache.

“But we know who to blame,” the tall Indian chiller said, eyes glittering like obsidian chips. Chato felt what had seemed like a fluttering of butterflies in his belly turn into a minor temblor.

“Easy now, friend,” said ginger-bearded Ironhead Johnson. He was a woods-running coldheart originally from up on the Musselshell, and more recently from Taos and parts south, who had headed west and hooked up with Chato’s growing band when the upper Grandee valley got too hot for him. He had been shot in the head on at least four occasions, with no more effect than minor deteriorations of personality and impulse control, neither of which had been notable before. One bullet scar was a white pucker over the inside end of his right eyebrow, like an off-center third eye. “Spilled blood can’t go back in the body.”

“No?” Red Wolf smiled like his namesake. “At least we can spill the blood of the one who is responsible. The one who brought us together, the one who held us back from raiding ranches and villes. The one who said there was no point alerting potential targets before we’d got at least one fat score.”

He was glaring straight at Chato now. Chato felt sweat run down his face. The yellow headband that restrained his own heavy black hair was already soaked.

“Who?” Red Wolf demanded, voice rising, with a crazy edge to it. “Who? I know who. I’ll tell you who. I’ll—”

The crash of a shotgun blast in the close confines seemed to implode Chato’s head even as the flash from a cutdown muzzle dazzled his eyes. Red Wolf staggered back as a buck-and-ball load—four chunks of double-ought buck and a .72-caliber lead ball—took him about the short ribs on the right side. Blood, flesh and chunks of yellow-gleaming bone were blasted free.

Red Wolf was a strong man all the way through. He staggered back only two steps, doubling over, grabbing at his ruined midsection. He raised his head for the charge from the second barrel to shatter his face like a clay shitpot. He measured his length backward on the sandstone, arms outflung, the last reflex spasms of his heart pumping out great gushes of blood that was black in the firelight and steamed like lava.

Chato became aware that he had screamed. Thankfully no one had heard him. No one was hearing anything at all but a loud ringing and echoes of the enormous roars.

Len Hogan allowed his Izhmash scattergun to tip forward from where recoil had sent it pointing toward the low ceiling. Smoke seeped from the muzzle, and then from the breech as he cracked it open to eject two red plastic-hulled empties and feed in a couple more from a pocket of his colors, the grime-blackened sleeveless denim jacket he wore as a vest.

Shave-headed, taller even than Red Wolf had been even before partial decapitation, and as lean as a gallows pole with an incisor missing from a mostly lipless mouth framed by a black handlebar mustache, he had been thrown out of the Satan’s Slaves biker gang for unpredictable violence and brutality. Actually, his erstwhile buds had been intent on lynching him, but he proved to be better than they were at tracking.

He was one of the cooler heads on Chato’s executive council.

“Enough of that owl-screech shit.” The ringing had subsided enough for Chato to hear him speak. He snapped the shotgun action closed with the flick of a massive wrist enclosed in a studded leather bracer. The rest of the group was busy surreptitiously trying to sidle even farther away from him than they’d been sitting before. Owing to certain peculiar rituals of the northwest bike gangs, the giant coldheart smelled like a chop-shop shitter with backed-up plumbing. “Who, your ass. Talk don’t load no mags.”

Chato made himself relax. At least a little. Otherwise he was going to lose it here and now, and that would put him in a world of hurt. Hogan had not, he knew, killed Red Wolf, because Red Wolf was stirring up rebellion against Chato. Hogan did it because he liked to kill people, and this was the first handy excuse he’d been presented for some time.

And that, in a spent casing, was pretty much the problem staring him in the face.

A White Mountain Apache by birth and upbringing, Chato was in many ways an actual genius. For example, taking best advantage of the coldhearts’ natural propensities for speed and sneakiness, he’d crafted the scouting system that had passed the word of the caravan’s capture back to headquarters, by means of a relay of flashing mirrors, within hours of it going down.

He could talk a snake into paying in advance for a year’s tap dancing lessons. He was a triple-wizard organizer. He could spin grand schemes all day long, and all night, too, if the Taos Lightning held out.

And there, unfortunately, his military ability screeched to a brake-burning halt. Right on the edge of the Big Ditch.

He was first off a coward. It wasn’t just physical cowardice, but really physical cowardice, physiological reactions to threat over which he had utterly no control. The very prospect of physical danger would induce a terrible quaking that started in his belly and moved outward till the shaking threatened to jar loose one molecule from another. An immediate threat simply launched him in uncontrolled flight, assisted by explosive voiding of the bowels.

Red Wolf’s fury had already set Chato to shaking. It was only a stroke of bastard luck that Hogan chilled him before his threat-level reached Chato’s voiding stage.

That was manageable. Lots of great war leaders have been more than a little nervous in the service.

The other problem was more serious. He had no clue how to actually fight.

All his life, it seemed, he had been adept at talking his way out of trouble. As an orphaned runt, small even by Apache standards, he’d had ample opportunity to acquire the gift growing up. When exiled by vengeful tribal fellows on totally false charges of witchcraft, and totally true charges of misappropriation of tribal resources, he had stumbled into the midst of a band of mostly white-eyes coldhearts whose natural first impulse was to kill him in some picturesque and protracted way and he would let his well-tried tongue spin its silver web just to have something to do.

Unfortunately, sometimes that tongue moved faster than his brain. He talked himself into positions not even his cunning and insight could then see any way out of.

So it was with that fast-talk extravaganza out beneath a swollen desert moon. Not only had the outlaws spared him. They had become the nucleus of a whole coldheart army. Bad men had flocked to him, until he had a force of between one and two hundred of the best of worst of the region’s outlaws: the scum de la scum. Men so bad even average, everyday coldhearts had got a bellyful of them.

And he had no clue what to do with them.

The approach of the caravan had been a godsend. As Red Wolf complained, Chato had been reluctant to allow his men to attack any of the villes in the surrounding area, nor even try to pick off any isolated ranches. He did know enough to understand a very little of that would raise the country against them, but his more immediate motivation had been simple fear. Leave aside the fact he had no remote intention of exposing his own hide to puncturing by irate sec men or sharpshooting ranchers. What if something went wrong? He was operating on zero tolerance here. One serious setback and all the smoke he’d spun would evaporate and all his mirrors would shatter—and his boys were just the ones to know how to give him a proper send-off with the sharp-edged shards.

It was a classic politician’s cleft stick. He couldn’t afford to fail, but he couldn’t afford to put off action much longer. So the word his intelligence system brought him of a caravan moving through his territory came as a godsend. Even the report that they’d hooked up with a half-dozen hard-core fighters to enhance their security didn’t bother him unduly, once he’d got a description of those “fighters.” Their leader was a one-eyed mystery man who, granted, anybody in the whole Deathlands above the age of three would make for a stone chiller and no mistake. But the others: an albino boy, a sawed-off runt with glasses, a gaunt old crazie who carried a cane and a couple of bitches. What could they bring to the dance?

So the caravan looked like easy pickings. And because the travelers simply couldn’t afford to carry much that wasn’t extremely valuable, it was rich—relatively. Split among a hundred and a half marauders, though, with the subchiefs naturally taking extra-large bites of the pie, it wouldn’t seem rich for long. Chato, however, hadn’t thought past that point, not because he lacked the mental ability, but because he didn’t dare. Something would come up. Or else.

Unfortunately the train had been such easy pickings that a bunch of damned paramilitary interlopers had gone right ahead and picked them. And “or else” had arrived ahead of schedule.

“So now,” said the dapper outlaw, perhaps the most feared of all, known only as El Abogado, in the mildest of tones, “what do we do? Like any creature, we must feed.”

Trust a coldheart named El Abogado never to lose sight of the son of a bitching bottom line, Chato thought bitterly.

There was only one thing to do.

Chato sucked down a deep breath. By a miracle, he managed not to choke on the smoke.

“I have a plan…” he said.

“WHOA!” J.B. EXCLAIMED, grabbing at his fedora to hold it clamped firmly on his head as the splintery wood floor of the wag whacked him hard in the tailbone and bounced him a good four inches in the air. The wag was jolting along at a good fifty clicks an hour—or not so good, on a road that wasn’t much more than a couple tire tracks in the hardpan, already starting to deepen and widen into arroyos from the erosive force of infrequent but fierce rains. Way too fast for the suspension, one way or another.

Almost all the chosen from the wag caravan had been herded together in the coldhearts’ stakebed wag, including three of the captive companions. Doc was riding in the cab of the lead wag, second in line behind a Baja-buggy scout with its own rollbar-mounted machine gun, squeezed between the captain and his driver. It couldn’t have been too comfortable for him, all crammed up against that unyielding body armor, even leaving aside the company, J.B. reckoned.

At the outset the pair of guards keeping watch on the prisoners in the bigger wag had ordered them to keep their heads bowed and their fingers interlaced behind their necks. That hadn’t lasted. Even free to grab on to what handholds the wag offered and one another when it didn’t it was all the prisoners could do from getting tossed in a big snake-mating-ball of butts and elbows. Their captors, while coldhearted enough, were more than just coldhearts, it was painfully apparent. They were sec men, probably calling themselves soldiers, from the way they dressed in odds and ends of uniforms and gave one another salutes and titles, military-fashion.

And if there was one thing sec men hated it was disorder. It made their jobs harder. So the order about clasping hands went by the dusty way.

The captives rode mostly in shocky silence. Overhead, the glorious blue that had so fatally intoxicated them was being blotted as clouds came racing in, lead-gray. The Armorer saw Mildred looking up at them. To her, their speed was unnatural and still alarming for all the time she’d spent unfrozen and in the present day. To the others, it was the fact that the sky had been almost clear that was disconcerting.

The late Hizzoner’s bodyguards, Amos and Bub, had left women behind, bleeding out in the dust. Lanky rawboned Bub had two kids, a boy and a girl, who now had flies crawling on their eyeballs. He was blubbering about it with his huge slab of ham hands covering his face. At least J.B. reckoned he was mourning his woman and children. It stood to reason not even a would-be sec man would be wasting tears on the once and never mayor of New Tulsa.

Stacked right next to J.B., Bub, the burlier and relatively smarter half of the team, was glaring at the companions with little pig eyes which, if bloodshot, were as dry as the goat track beneath them.

“That bastard Kurtiz was right about one thing,” he said in a voice like a rusty old oil drum rolling down a rocky slope. “You nuke-suckers weren’t shit when it came to being guards.”

Jak, sitting on the Armorer’s left, stiffened and snarled. J.B. touched him lightly on the arm.

“You got one thing right, friend,” J.B. said. “We aren’t shit.”

“Don’t crack wise with me, you sawed-off little—”

The first two fingers of J.B.’s right hand lashed out and snapped the backs of the tips against Bub’s blond-stubbled jowl, as quick as a diamondback strike. They did no damage, but stung. Bub shook his head once and blinked, totally off balance.

Which meant that when J.B. brought his left hand whipping around in a hooking palm-heel strike that mashed Bub’s already generally shapeless nose across his face, the blow slammed the back of the goon’s skull into one of the heavy uprights rising from the periphery of the truckbed. Bub’s moaning subsided, he clutched his face as blood trickled between his fingers and down his spine. It began to diffuse in thin, red spiderweb nets through the sweat coating his thick neck.