by James Axler
"Black bitch!" Cort Strasser roared.
He jumped off to one side, diving full length in the bloodied sand, behind the two most recent bodies. Around him, the men and women of his gang were reacting with varying degrees of speed.
Mildred shifted her aim from Strasser at the last fraction of a second, putting her fourth bullet through the side of the head, just above the left ear, of the nearest guard. The bearded man spun to the cobbles.
Out of the corner of her eye she noticed another man in a camouflage jacket drop his rifle, hands flying to his throat, where blood was gushing from a gaping wound.
"Ryan," she breathed.
By one of the broken windows of the firehouse, Ryan cursed. "Fireblast! Missed the dog. He got down fast. Took out one of his curs."
The woman with the barely healed scar that disfigured her face was close to Mildred's left. "Bitch!" she yelped, the word mutilated by her badly broken nose. She spun and opened fire with her M-16, nearly cutting in half the man next to Mildred, whose flesh saved the black woman from instant death.
"Bitch yourself," Mildred spit, putting a fifth bullet through the shattered bridge of her nose.
"Doc! Run for it!" Mildred had backed again into the half-open doorway, wincing as a burst of fire tore splinters from the frame near her head. She wasn't sure, but the blaster sounded like Strasser's Russian Stechkin pistol.
But now it was the lords of chaos who leaped grinning into the arena of death.
Ryan had gunned down two more of the attacking band with his Heckler & Koch, cutting Strasser's force still further. The original thirty was now barely half.
The survivors had begun to open fire, shooting indiscriminately, spraying the huddled masses of the settlers, killing twenty of them in the first few seconds.
Doc saw his chance and took it, knees cracking like cherry bombs as he hurdled a dying woman and dodged around a crimson-masked man who tried to tear him into his embrace. Mildred was beckoning frantically to him, waving his own beloved Le Mat pistol in her free left hand.
A blaster kicked sand around his feet and something plucked at the sleeve of his old-fashioned frock coat, but he ignored it.
Mildred moved farther into the doorway, holding her revolver with its vital, last bullet set under the hammer. She saw Doc closing fast, then she spotted one of Strasser's thugs with his rifle at his shoulder, drawing a bead on the old man.
She didn't hesitate, aiming and firing in one sinuous movement. The big .38 round struck the stock of the M-16, took off the top joint of the shootist's thumb, then ripped into his right cheek. Splinters of wood and lead peeled away the flesh like a surgeon's scalpel, shredding the sighting right eye.
J.B., Krysty, Jak and the major watched the killing ground. Only a little group of women, clutching children, remained upright. Everyone else was either lying down taking cover, or they were chilled. Ryan had taken out six of Strasser's butchers, accidentally killing one of the settlers when he darted for cover across the line of fire.
"Chill the old man!" Strasser shouted, keeping himself safely behind cover, not realizing that Mildred's blaster held only six rounds.
A stunted man in a camouflage jacket, and pants cut off at the knees, suddenly erupted from the ground in front of Doc, holding his carbine at the hip. His face was twisted with anger and hatred, and a thread of spittle hung from his lip.
Ryan saw him and fired a shot, but he was too quick and the bullet missed by a clear couple of feet.
Doc skidded to a halt, looking past the venomous dwarf to Mildred, appealing for her to shoot. Like Strasser, he hadn't been counting rounds.
The woman shoved the empty revolver in her belt and tugged out the massive Le Mat. Its scattergun barrel wouldn't do the job at anything over a few feet. It might wound the killer or distract him, but it wouldn't save Doc's life. Holding the gun by its polished walnut grips, Mildred lobbed it high in the air.
"Catch it!"
There was a brief cessation in the fusillade, and her voice rang out like a warning bell, making Strasser's man half turn toward her, a nervous tic pulling at the corner of his mouth.
Ryan saw something flying through the air, reflecting the sun. It hung for a long moment at the zenith of its flight, then began to fall earthward, toward the waiting hands of Doc.
"Catch it," Ryan said quietly.
Doc realized that the Le Mat was going to drop short and he began to move, powering himself forward and to his right. Fingers straining, he brushed the metal, dropped it, fumbling again and plucking it from the air, inches from the dirt. He nearly let it fall as he landed, rolling clumsily on one shoulder and coming up, miraculously, with the blaster cocked and ready in his fist.
Strasser's man stood gaping, less than a yard away, his finger numb on the trigger of his M-16, half second away from buying the farm.
Doc pulled back on the Le Mat's trigger, feeling the powerful jolt from the .63-caliber shotgun round.
There was the boom of the charge and a burst of black powder smoke. Standing behind the diminutive killer, Mildred had a ringside view of the effect of the big Le Mat blaster.
Sharon Vare was cowering in the dirt just behind, and the shock of the Le Mat lifted the small man's body clear on top of her. The scattered round had starred into his throat and ripped it apart. The artery fountained with bright blood, and chips of shattered vertebrae peppered the wall near Mildred. His lower jaw vanished in a welter of crimson, speckled with fragments of ivory.
"Come on, Doc!" Mildred yelled, seeing the old man frozen on his knees, a rictus of delight on his face at his own agility and the success of the shot.
He rose and lumbered toward her, sliding through the door moments before Strasser emptied his machine pistol at him.
"Thank you, my dear Mildred," Doc panted. "I am considerably in your debt."
She squeezed his arm, fighting to control her own incipient shock. "Yeah. Now let's haul ass out of here."
Cort Strasser shared her sentiments. It had to be Ryan Cawdor who was picking off his forces from cover somewhere on the edge of the ville, and using a long gun with lethal accuracy. At a quick count, Strasser could only see about a dozen of his original strength still moving.
"We got them cold," Ryan said, squinting out of the firehouse. "Mildred and Doc are safe away. Bastard Strasser's lost his cards. We circle around him and we could hit the ones left."
"How many of the good folks are still living?" Ward asked, voice trembling.
J.B. answered him. "Could be half of 'em chilled, Major. Still means a lot more living than if we'd held off."
Krysty was leaning against a rotting window-frame, shading her emerald eyes as she stared toward Salvation. "They're breaking for it," she said. "Strasser's hiding behind a group of the women, going for the loco wag."
Ryan managed to shoot two more of the gang as they moved toward the waiting locomotive. They didn't bother to use the turntable to move the train the right way. As soon as Strasser was aboard, encouraged from a carriage window by his woman, smoke began to gush from the stack. The wheels spun around as the reverse gear was engaged too quickly, but the train eventually began to move slowly toward the mountains.
The last that Ryan saw of Strasser was a fist shaken from the driver's cab of the vanishing train.
WHEN SHARON VARE saw Jak she ran to him, throwing her arms around his neck, crying in great sobbing gulps. She was covered in dappled patches of drying blood.
The scene was one of total confusion. The cobbled yard was slippery with pools of scarlet, and the dead and dying were everywhere. By the time Ryan led his group back into the ville, every one of Strasser's gang within Salvation was dead. Most had died quick and clean, taken out by Mildred or Ryan himself. Two had been wounded, and they'd been butchered by the women of the wag train, who'd used scissors and knives.
Major Ward took a swift count of the losses of the settlers, reporting back to Ryan with a grim face. "Hell, son, it's bad. More'n half gone to meet their make
r, another dozen with bullet wounds. Elder Vare was first to go, it seems."
"Yeah. Doc and Mildred told us that already."
The wag master had aged ten years in a single morning, and he shook his head in bewilderment. "Over seventy dead right here."
"Strasser would have slaughtered every one," Mildred told him. "You have to believe that."
"I guess so, ma'am. But what happens now?"
The twin steel rails arrowed away from the township. A black dot topped with a smudge of gray showed that Strasser was nearly in the hills.
"Shame there isn't another of those loco wags," Ryan said. "The odds are way down now, and I'd like to go after Strasser. Try to end it."
Mildred managed a smile. "Not exactly a loco wag, Ryan. But it'll do."
Chapter Thirty
THERE WERE FAREWELLS.
From most of the settlers there was a bitterness that verged on outright hatred and violence. Several of the older women survivors spit at Ryan and the others. Sharon Vare wouldn't be separated from Jak, throwing herself at him even when she was forcibly removed.
"Let him be, child," urged a white-haired matriarch. "Him and the one-eyed man and the rest just brought us trouble and a mess of dying. We got to leave this place of blood as quick as we can. Set him by, girl."
"I won't, y'old witch, Carrie Reece! He come back and saved us. Jakkie loves me true and wants to come with us and be with me forever and ever. Don't you, lover?"
"Jakkie!" exclaimed J.B., who stood with the others, watching the touching scene.
"Fuck you," the teenager said very quietly. Despite his pallid complexion, Ryan could almost have sworn that the albino was blushing.
"He wants to stay, don't you, honeybunch?" the girl protested.
"Do you, Jak?" Ryan asked. "Often said you wanted to drop out when you meet the right woman. You met her?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah?" Krysty said, her eyes wide in surprise.
"Want drop out one day."
"But you also said something about wishing to make the acquaintance of a suitable young person of the opposite gender, did you not, Jak?" Doc asked.
"Yeah. Find woman."
Sharon Vare clutched at his hand, pressing it to her lips. "And now you've found me, dear heart, haven't you?"
"No."
"Oh, my breaking heart! You said you'd met the right woman." She stood, hands on hips, glaring at him accusingly.
"Yeah."
"Me!"
"No."
Everyone was now thoroughly confused. Ryan was the only one who saw the gleam of light in what Jak had been saying.
"You mean that Sharon here isn't the lady you've found. But you have, somewhere, found yourself a lady. And you want to leave us now to go and be with her. That it?"
"Two out three, Ryan." The albino grinned, eyes glittering like tiny chips of living fire.
"Now I don't know what the dark night's going on."
Jak sighed. "One. Not her." He pointed a long, slender figure at Sharon Vare. "Two, woman someplace. Yeah." He smiled at Ryan. "Three, not leave you now. One day. Mebbe close, Ryan. Not yet."
"Want to tell us who the lucky young woman is?" Mildred asked.
"No."
EVERYONE DRIFTED away from the outlanders, leaving only Major Ward to watch them as they got the pump trolley out of the cobwebbed building, heaving it up onto the rails.
"Wish I could come with you, folks," he said, tugging at his mustache. "Like to see that Strasser down in his own blood."
"It'll happen," Ryan promised. "You got these people to get on the way to their own promised land. Won't be easy."
The wag master smiled. "Just between you and me, son, I'm not heartbroken that Elder Vare ain't with us no more."
Ryan grinned. "Know what you mean. But we gotta go."
"Man's got to do what a man's got to do," Krysty said, shaking the gnarled hand of the wag master. "Know what I mean?"
"Indeed I do, little lady. You go after Strasser to make him pay the price for his evil."
Ryan also shook Ward's hand. "Partly that. But we're heading that direction, anyway. See you, Major. Take care now."
With a little food and some fresh water, the six friends climbed aboard their flatbed wag.
Only Major Seth Ward waved goodbye. The others were busy burying their dead.
IT WAS A LITTLE before noon when Ryan and the others began to move along the rails, pumping on the double handle that propelled the trolley. The sun beat down directly overhead with a ferocious intent. It didn't take long to establish a good rhythm.
The handles would accommodate two people on each side, leaning into them and riding the rise and fall. Ryan and J.B. took one side while Jak and Krysty started on the other.
The speed began to pick up, and the wind tugged at their clothes. Mildred and Doc sat perched on the front of the trolley, enjoying the movement and the breeze.
"Washes away the smell of blood, Doc," she commented.
"I fear that nothing ever quite removes that oppressive stench," he replied.
Pale pink soapberry bushes flashed by, lining the banks of the winding creek. Ahead of them the locomotive had vanished in among the hills, though they could still catch a glimpse of its pillaring smoke now and again.
"This is going to get one hell of a lot harder if we have to start pumping away up a grade," J.B. said, his fedora pushed to the back of his head. Sweat trickled down his narrow cheeks.
"Major's map shows it near another river," Ryan panted, timing his words in short rushes to fit in with the pumping of the driving handles.
"Heading which way?" Krysty asked, her flaming red hair streaming out behind her like a crimson veil.
"South. Lands shifted since before the long winters. Cuts toward where we want to go, toward Big Bend and the Grandee."
Jak had been working with a grim intent, the snowy wraith of his hair flowing around his lean shoulders. "Chill Strasser then south," he grunted.
"Couldn't have put it better myself," Ryan agreed.
J.B.'S CONCERN SOON became fact. As they neared the far side of the open plateau, Salvation only a vague smudge on the distant horizon, it became obvious that the rails were already beginning to climb into the foothills. They crossed the narrow creek over a crumbling trestle bridge that sang and hummed beneath the clattering wheels. The relic of a spur line wound away to the north, the wooden sleepers rotted into the dry earth. It occurred to Ryan that the speed they were moving at, on a brakeless vehicle, could leave them vulnerable to any kind of sabotage of the mainline track.
Very faintly, at the edge of hearing, they caught the sound of the loco wag's whistle, echoing from peak to peak, like the lonesome wailing of a lost soul.
"Could mean he's reached the ville up there," Krysty suggested.
"Sounded high," Jak said.
Ryan eased off a moment, wiping sweat from his eyes, viewing the contours ahead of them, seeing that the rails were climbing and twisting.
"Let's try three a side," he said. "Get as far as we can."
The going became harder and harder, the handles seeming to move slower and slower.
"He won't expect us to be trying to follow him, will he?" Mildred asked. "This trolley was partly hidden, and there wouldn't be any other way we could get close."
Ryan didn't waste any breath on words, contenting himself with simply nodding. It was something that had featured large in his tactical planning. If Strasser had suspected he was being pursued, then he could simply have reversed the direction of the locomotive again and turned hunters into hunted.
By the time they reached the crown of the first shallow bend, their speed had fallen away from near thirty miles an hour to something less than ten miles an hour. And it was taking all of the energy of all six of them to even maintain that.
"Can't go much farther," Krysty said. "Soon be quicker to walk."
Once the ascent became even steeper, Ryan called a halt. Krysty was right, and they all hopped off
the trolley. Nobody bothered to try to hold it, and it rattled ponderously away from them, gathering speed as it vanished round the bend.
"Should make it halfway back to Salvation," J.B. grinned.
Doc slumped down against a moss-crusted pile of railroad ballast. "Upon my soul!" he gasped. "When I was filled with the warm sap of youth, I would hike many a mile across the wilderness trails. Now in my sere days, I confess to feeling more than somewhat… somewhat buggered!"
"You fit to go on?" Ryan asked. "Want to get after Strasser as quick as we can."
"I shall not let the side down, Ryan. I hope you can rely upon me for that."
The one-eyed man patted Doc on the shoulder. "Course I know it."
Jak was eager to go, leading the party along the side of the iron road, his eyes raking the hills ahead and above for any sign of a potential ambush.
The cliffs closed in on either side of the tracks, dotted with sparse clumps of pine trees. A couple of times in the next half hour they spotted small groups of goats, picking their way along invisible trails.
J.B. moved alongside Ryan, walking step for step. "What happens when we get up there? We going to go for Strasser, no matter what?"
"Depends. Don't know if he'll stay in this ville. Knowing Strasser, he'll likely run and keep running. Bastard's not stupid. He knows he's lost so many that he can't guarantee to take us out."
The Armorer shook his head. "Mebbe right, Ryan. But you never know when a rabid dog'll turn and snap at you."
The middle of the afternoon drew near, the sun vanishing behind banks of dark purple cloud that threatened a chem storm come evening.
The long bends had become steeper and sharper, finally leveling out between tree-covered slopes. Ahead, Ryan could make out the shallow notch where the lines ran toward Strasser's hiding place. Once they'd startled a group of marmots, gamboling together in a sunny clearing, and they could hear the thunderous sound of fast-running water.
