Vengeance Trail

“Hey!” the younger of the two guards yelled from the rear of the truck. “Hey! Stop that! I’m warning you!”

He raised his M-16. J.B. smiled placatingly and held up his hands, palms forward, to show that he was unarmed and innocent of ill intent. The other guard, older and obviously case-hardened, just rolled his eyes and gave the Armorer a tough look.

“Man’s got a point,” Mildred said bitterly. She sat across from J.B. with her knees up and her arms around them. “Some defenders we turned out to be.”

“No talking!” the young guard exclaimed, jabbing the air with his weapon.

J.B. ignored him. Notwithstanding the initial fuckup about ordering the prisoners to keep hands behind heads, the raiders had obviously run this drill before. As if to emphasize the fact, the older guard was toting a 12-gauge Browning A-5 autoloading shotgun sawed-off to the gas check, a pretty serious crowd-control implement. If the prisoners got seriously frisky, and particularly if they showed signs of trying to make a break for it, the guards were ready, willing and able to commence some serious blasting.

But it was also obvious the raiders needed bodies and they needed lots of them—warm, fully functional, and not leaking from extra orifices. So the captives enjoyed a certain amount of leeway.

“We just got caught flat, Millie,” J.B. said. “The wind, the sun, the bright blue sky—we got loose and careless, and now here we are.”

“Be quiet!” the younger guard shrilled, flourishing his longblaster wildly. “I told you! I’ll shoot! I will!”

“Cody,” the older man growled, “knock off that shit before I lay this mare’s leg up alongside your empty damn head, won’t you? Who gives a rat’s red ass if the bastards talk?”

Cody sank into sullen silence. The older man held on to the upright at the front-right corner of the bed with his left hand. The other held his sawed-off across his drawn-up knees. He stared back at the captives from a face as hard and flat as a cast iron pan.

Mildred’s eyes caught J.B.’s. He tried to give her a reassuring smile, but he realized it just looked like somebody was turning a nut at the back of his head and tightening the skin around his mouth. He knew he couldn’t piss down her leg and tell her it was raining—her of all people. But she and he were paired, and he felt he owed it to at least try to do what he could to keep her spirits up.

He thought of Ryan and had to look away. He took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief he removed very gingerly from his pocket. After a few moments he put the specs back on and faced the black woman again.

Mildred was still gazing at him with curious fixity. Once she had his eyes back she let her own run meaningfully down toward his scuffed boots.

He nodded, slow and slight, a motion that would be lost to anybody not studying him a lot more closely than anybody but Mildred Wyeth seemed to be in the general jouncing and jostling induced by the truck banging along across the desert. The frisking he and the others had gotten had been professional but cursory. The sec men were looking for weapons. It didn’t occur to them that J.B. might have a full lock pick kit concealed on his person, much less a couple of odds and ends, including more picks and mebbe a weapon or two; and never in a thousand years would they suspect what might be hidden in, say, a hollowed-out boot heel.

Then J.B. shrugged. “Don’t see we got much choice but to take the cards as we’re dealt them,” he said, “than play them as they lay.”

She frowned.

“With Ryan dead—”

“Ryan not dead,” Jak said firmly.

J.B. looked at him sharply. The albino youth patted himself on the solar plexus. “Feel here if was.”

“Don’t talk nonsense, Jak,” J.B. said with quiet determination.

Jak’s eyes lit up in anger. “Listen—”

“Take it easy, you two,” Mildred said. “We got to stick together right now.”

The traveler sitting to Mildred’s right cocked his head. “What about that bitch of Cawdor’s?”

Mildred’s elbow jabbed hard into the traveler’s ribs. Air oofed out of him. “Oh, sorry, Seymour. You just take it easy now. And remember it’s not good to speak ill of the dead.”

He glared at her and rubbed his side. He said no more, though.

A woman toward the front of the wag had gotten agitated. “So that’s just it?” she demanded. “We just let them shoot down our friends and loved ones and scarf us up as slaves, and that’s it? End of story?”

“You got a better idea, Maisy?” asked a heavy black-bearded man in coveralls patched in variety of colors.

The woman gazed wildly around at her fellow captives.

“They got the drop on us,” J.B. said, loudly but very controlled. “And that’s all there is to it. Spilled blood can’t go back in the body.”

The woman at Maisy’s side took her arm and whispered urgently in her ear. The hard-bitten guard tipped up his scattergun until its foreshortened muzzle pointed at the nowovercast skies. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even change expression. But the implication was clear.

There would be no more conversation out of the captives. Not because of any silly rules, but because they were getting themselves all stirred up, talking. If they got too stirred up, it would make more work for him.

That wouldn’t happen. And even though the shot-column didn’t spread out any too quick even from a barrel that short, the odds were pretty good that whoever the coldheart picked as designated troublemaker wouldn’t be the only one to cop some .33-caliber double-aught balls.

The captives clammed up. But J.B. thought he heard Jak mutter, deep down in his throat, “Ryan not dead.”

HEAD DOWN, back bowed beneath the weight of the pack she carried, Krysty trudged toward the lowering sun.

She had begun to feel, not hope—never hope, never again—but a kind of lessened futility. Lessened immediate futility anyway.

It wasn’t her nature to analyze. Her conscious mind had been nothing but a bright blur for the past several hours. But she was far from stupe, and her subconscious kept working.

The raiders were well organized and even smart by sec men standards, let alone coldheart ones. The massacre hadn’t been sadistic butchery. It hadn’t even been casual. It had been businesslike. Whoever the murderers were, they were professional about it.

Their behavior was at the other end of the world from the wild irrationality most coldhearts displayed. Calculating.

They had been happy enough to take what loot the caravan wags offered, but they dumped the contents of the two wags they needed to transport their own people in without hesitation or question, including provisions they themselves used every day—food, water and ammo. It wasn’t so much that they spurned those items as that they didn’t even trouble to look for them, even though all were present and all reasonably expected to be. The only cargo they kept was spare fuel stored in the vehicles, and that the wags themselves obviously required.

Far from worrying about their own resupply, they had taken on two dozen extra mouths. Krysty knew why even without the sergeant having grumbled to his superior: the raiders needed slave workers. To do what, she wasn’t sure—something about a track—and didn’t particularly care. What was potentially useful to know was that the raiders hadn’t been concerned even though those same consumables were necessary to keep the captives alive so they could do the work the raiders needed done. Gaia, even ammo, if some of the captives needed extra persuading. And it was through neither inexperience nor the shit-for-brains slavery to the impulse of the moment that controlled most coldhearts, and mutie marauders too, for that matter.

This bunch knew exactly what they were doing. Every step along the path.

If they didn’t need to worry about food and water, they weren’t far from replenishing the same. It followed as inevitably as night was about to follow the desert day.

Granted, a wag could cover ground a shitload faster than a woman afoot, even one as strong and driven as Krysty Wroth. But another thing her subconscious worked out, and allowed to seep osmotically into the white void of her conscious mind, was that a job that took a lot of hands generally took a fair stretch of time to do as well. Wherever the marauders delivered their captives, they probably wouldn’t be moving on for a spell.

The knowledge, slowly assimilated, added energy to her step. It might take a few hours or many days, but she had at least some solid ground of reason on which to base a belief that she would find her friends and Ryan’s killers.

A scrub jay yammered abuse at Krysty from a bush. The sound brought the woman back to the here-and-now with a jolt of alarm. She had been in zombie mode, total whiteout.

She was lucky. In the Deathlands, if you zoned that far out, you usually came out of it about the time a stickie was pulling your face off.

She raised her head and took stock of her surroundings. The sun was falling toward a shoal of mesas with wind-scooped faces, tawny and rose. There was no sign of the raiders, and the marks their tires had left in sand were lost to the eternally restless wind. But there was something, a squat blockiness ahead at the bottom of a broad valley. Buildings. Studying her surroundings, Krysty could make out patches of dark pavement showing through drifted sand, the remnants of a flanking ditch. There had been a hard-top road here. Mebbe even a highway.

Bad news, in that if the raiders turned off along it, they’d make at least somewhat better time than along the unimproved dirt track they, like the caravan, had been following. It remained unlikely the raiders were going farther than she could walk in a matter of days.

Meantime, the buildings offered possible shelter for the night. This wasn’t the seething gut of the Deathlands, with monstrous beasts, humanoid muties and acid rain storms ready to destroy the traveler caught in the open. But there were still plenty of nasty things that came out at night. To hunt.

She began walking toward the structures.

J.B. WAS ROUSED from sleep when the stakebed wag began to slow. Despite scowls from the guards the other captives were scrambling to their feet to peer forward toward whatever awaited them.

A brown hand, strong but altogether feminine, appeared before his eyes. The Armorer grinned at Mildred as she helped him up. She gave him a taut smile back.

He couldn’t see much over the cab, so he leaned his head over the wood side of the bed and peered forward. What seemed like a couple hundred people were laboring away in the middle of the desert. And parked next to them, gleaming like polished silver in the sun’s slanting rays—

“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit and fried for a hush-puppy,” J.B. said in admiring amazement. “It’s a train!”

Chapter Three

The screen door of the derelict diner banged open. Two men were suddenly among the cracked-vinyl booths and the peeling Formica tables, longblasters in their hands.

Both aimed square at Krysty Wroth.

“Freeze, bitch!” the younger, taller intruder shouted. Blond bangs hung in his sunburned face from beneath a turned-around ball cap. His partner, who was darker and whose dark-brown hair was beating a hasty retreat from his own forehead, just grinned a nasty grin.

After only the briefest hitch in her motions, and her breathing, Krysty calmly went back to doing what she was doing—cooking corned-beef hash made from the supplies she’d brought from the massacre site over a fire built of brush and driftwood in what had been the little kitchen’s deep-fat fryer, once upon a time. The pot was one she’d found hanging behind the counter. A handful of the fine sand that had drifted against the diner’s east wall served to scrub out the accreted dust and gunk of the past century.

“Hey,” the blond intruder shouted. “Din’t I tell you to freeze, bitch?”

“Easy, Matt, easy,” his pal soothed. “They’re so much more fun when they’re warm.”

He sidled around the periphery of booths, holding his remade M-16 with one hand. In the light of the kerosene lanterns she was working by, she could tell that both men wore retread U.S. Army blouses, both OD green, both with unfamiliar round patches on the breast. Just like the men who had killed Ryan and hijacked the caravan.

The man came right up beside her. She smelled his stinking breath, felt it defile her cheek. His dirty-nailed fingertip followed it, unwinding a scarlet lock down to the line of her set jaw.

“Well, well, well,” he murmured, “what have we here?”

She didn’t shy away from the touch, just kept stirring and tossing.

“Bitch-slap the skag, Ben,” Matt said, shifting weight from left boot to right with poorly checked eagerness. “Show her who’s boss.”

“Naw, naw, gently now. She’s a cool one, aren’t you, honey? I like that. I bet a girl like you could show us a good time. Big nasty redhead like you.”

He grabbed her, lowered his face to nuzzle her neck. She fended him with the back of his hands. He yanked his head back, anger flaring in his dark eyes.

“Now, now, don’t be in too much of a hurry, boys,” she said in her throatiest voice. It was a voice guaranteed to raise wood on a week-old stiff. “Why don’t you’ll just relax and make yourselves comfortable while I fix you a nice big dinner?”

The rage drained from Ben’s eyes. He smiled. Nodded. Laughed a little laugh.

“You know, hon, you’re right. Been a long, hard day, getting shut of that asshole General and his merry men. I’ll feel a lot stronger once I get around a good old home-cooked meal.”

He let her go and went back around the counter. Matt was almost vibrating with outraged horniness. “What are you doing? What? Why are we waiting?”

“Relax, kid,” Ben said, hoisting a cheek onto one of the round pedestal stools at the counter. There had been three; one was missing entirely, the other had been uprooted and lay against the foot of the counter.

“And quit waving that damned blaster around. You make me nervous. Our little redheaded bedwarmer is a smart one. You can tell just by looking at her. She knows better than to try to run on us. Don’t you?” He propped his own blaster next to his stool.

Krysty gave him a zipper-busting smile. “Now, why would I want to run anywhere, sugar?”

“But, but—” Matt sputtered.

“Sit your ass down,” Ben commanded.

Matt complied. He sat at a table in the middle of the little room. He didn’t put his longblaster down, although he did aim it at the ceiling. “What are we waiting for?” he asked peevishly.

Ben chuckled indulgently. “Didn’t you ever hear the story of the old bull and the young bull, boy?”

“No.”

“This old bull and this young bull came upon a fence. And on th’ other side of that fence, what should they see but a whole herd of fine young heifers swishing their tails over their nice firm fannies.”

“This one’s got a nice ass,” Matt said, staring at Krysty and almost drooling. “I can tell.”

“She surely does. Now, pay attention to my story. This young bull sees them heifers, and he says, ‘I got an idea! Let’s jump the fence and fuck us one a’ them heifers.’ And this old bull just shakes his head and says, ‘No. What we gonna do, we’re gonna walk down to that gate, walk through it nice and peaceful, and fuck all them heifers.’”

He laughed, grandly amused at his own joke. His gales of laughter died slowly away as he realized his younger companion wasn’t laughing with him.

“Go ahead,” Matt demanded. “Git to the punchline.”

“That was the punchline, you triple-stupe nuke head!”

“Weren’t funny.”

“Well, did you at least get the point of the story?”

“There’s a point?”

Ben dropped an elbow to the bar and sank his face in his hand.

“Well, now, don’t go being unreasonable, Ben,” Matt whined. “You said it was a joke. You told me so. And a joke got no point. It’s supposed to be funny.” A light dawned dimly. “Except that joke weren’t funny.”

He looked questioningly at Ben. The older man just waved a world-weary hand.

“Lookit, the bitch is all done cooking. Can we do her now? Can we?” He licked his lips. “I wonder if she got red fur on her pussy. Do redheads have that? Red hair on their pussies?”

“We ain’t et yet, you damn fool.”

“I was going to make up a batch of nice biscuits,” Krysty said, “if you big, strong men can just hold on to your appetites a little longer. And wouldn’t you like something to drink while you’re waiting?” She nodded her head back toward a canteen sitting on the counter.

Ben nodded, picked it up, began to unscrew the top. Then he stopped. A cagey look came into his eye.

“You wouldn’t be trying to pull one on us, now would you, honey? Here. You take a drink first. Then we’ll know it’s safe.”

He tossed the canteen at her. Holding his eye, smiling seductively the while, she undid the lid and took a long draft. Then she put the lid back on and tossed the canteen back. He drank greedily and pitched it to Matt in turn.

“So what are two such handsome men doing way out here in the middle of nowhere?”

Water ran down the side of Matt’s chin. He lowered the canteen and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “We’re. Uh, that is—”

“We’re deserters,” Ben said cheerfully.

“Deserters?” Krysty said. In her mouth the word sounded like a marvelous thing. Like a baron combined with an old-time movie star. But better. “Does that mean, like from an army?”

“Sure does,” Matt said proudly. “The Provisional United States Army!”

“Well, that’s what they call themselves,” Ben said. “They’re really just a bunch of coldhearts under command of the General. But they like to play like they’re an army.”

“That’s why we run,” Matt said. “Got tired of all the bullshit. Get out of bed when somebody else says. Haul our asses all over this sorry-ass desert rounding up limp-dick civilians to work on the line.”

“The line?” Krysty asked.

“Railroad line. Same one runs out back of this shithole.”

“See,” Ben said, “the General ain’t just any old asshole like one of your bug-heap barons. He’s got himself a train.”

“A train?” Krysty asked.

“A train. But not just any old rail wag. It’s an armored train.”

“MAGOG,” Matt said. “That’s what he calls it.”

“What’s that mean?” Krysty asked.

Ben shook his head. “Don’t mean nothin’. It’s just what the General calls it.”

“He found it,” Matt said, with something like pride. “Scavvied it out of some big ol’ underground bunker somewhere. All fulla weps and food and everything. It’s only the biggest, most powerful rail wag ever built. The General, he says it was built for something called the War on Drugs. Gonna be sent down to someplace called Columbus—”

“Colombia, nuke breath!”

“Colombia. Except the world blew up. Everybody knew about it got iced. But it was all protected and everything. In perfect shape when the General found it. And it runs off fusion batteries so it don’t never need to refuel. Got all the power a body’d ever want.”

“Sounds…impressive,” Krysty purred. “What’s this General doing with this train of his?”

“Says he’s trying to put America back together,” Ben said. “Don’t put much stock in that myself. I think he wants to be just another baron, but mebbe carve himself out a bigger empire.”

“Sounds like a pretty big job.”

Ben shrugged. “That’s another reason we run,” Matt said. “He been at it years, conquered himself a mess of little villes along the line, keep him supplied and shit. Still just like taking a piss in the ocean.” He had another drink. “I saw a ocean once.”

“Weren’t no ocean, stupe,” Ben said. “It was the Gu’f of Mex.”

“That’s a ocean. I couln’t see acrost it, anyway.”

“You mean this General can travel anywhere he wants in this armored rail wag?”

“Not exactly,” Ben said. “Lotta breaks in the line.”

“That’s why we was stuck out here in nowhere,” his partner said. “’Nother washout in the fucking line. Had to go round up a mess of dead-ass civilian stupes to fix it. Buncha bullshit.”

“Our scout wag busted an axle a few miles down the road from here,” Ben said. “We was basically out on our own at that point. So we decided what the hey, threw away our talkies and took off. Heard us a rumor from some of the workers there was a big old buncha coldhearts gathered out in the scrub somewheres ’round here. Fixin’ to hook up with ’em, give that a roll.”

“Man got to start to think about settlin’ down, puttin’ down some roots, build him a future,” Matt said. “Can’t spend your whole danged life rollin’ aimlessly along a old steel rail to nowhere.”

Ben nodded sagely. “General says he’s looking for something called the Great Redoubt. Supposed to be where the old guys stored up everything needed to put the whole country back together after the war. Even before the war, this was. Communications, supplies, weps—the works.”

“Crazy old nukesucker.”

“No shit. Like the boy says, man gets tired chasing after phantoms. Needs somethin’ more substantial. Something with meat on the bones.”

He cocked his head and looked at Krysty. “Speaking of meat on the bones, why’n’t you hurry up there, little mama? I’m getting a real appetite worked up myself now, and not just for that chow that’s smelling so good.”

“Well,” Krysty said slowly, “since you’ve been such good boys, and told me what I needed to know, it’s time you got what’s coming to you.”

She turned quickly, her right hand filled with her .38-caliber Smith & Wesson blaster. She was already squeezing the double-action trigger, timing the lengthy pull so that the hammer released just as the short barrel came to bear on Matt’s bangs. The gun roared, making a shocking racket for such a small weapon.

Automatically, Krysty stepped sideways left, away from Ben, in case he made a grab for her. He didn’t. But he was sharp and fairly quick; he was leaning forward and trying to reel up his longblaster by the strap.

She swung her right hand around, arm still straight, bringing her left hand up to wrap the fingers and brace her grip on the piece. She fired two shots, blinding fast, into his torso at a downward angle. His leaning motion carried him off the stool and hard onto the ancient cracked linoleum.

Krysty swung her blaster back toward Matt, in case he needed another dose of what he had coming. Then she noticed the old sign by the door, a square frame on a skinny metal post, its message Please Wait to Be Seated barely visible for the years of fading—and also Matt’s blood and brains, the color of the half-baked biscuits rising unattended in the pan, dripping down the front of it.

Almost at her feet, Ben groaned and stirred. She aimed her blaster down at him.

But he was no threat. One of her bullets had smashed through his lower jaw on its way down into his chest. It was still about half-attached, his breath bubbling like a well of gore from somewhere within the mess.

Ben’s lower jaw seemed to be working with a purpose, and his half-moored tongue moving as if trying to shape a word.

“Mercy.” That’s what she thought he was trying to say.

“Of course,” she said, and shot him between the eyes.

Krysty reloaded her blaster. It would’ve been more frugal to cut the coldheart’s throat, but she had scavvied plenty of .38 Special ammo from the luggage left behind by Ben and Matt’s former comrades. No point in making things harder on herself than they already were.

She walked to where Matt lay. He was spread-eagled on the filthy, cracked, sand-gritty linoleum with his longblaster fallen across his thighs. Instead of the sky, he was staring at the diner’s cracked, discolored plaster ceiling. His cap had been flipped clean off his head, possibly by the impact of the bullet that had evacuated his skull. She knelt and picked it up. It looked new, crisp and scarcely faded by sun or sweat, meaning it had to have been salvaged from storage fairly recently. It was black. The front bore a picture of the face of a man wearing an odd cap or hood with a black stripe down the center. Curvy-blade machetes or short swords with nonstudded knucklebow guards were crossed behind his head. Above it was the word “Raiders.” Around the whole was a sort of shield.