Vengeance Trail

by James Axler

“Course he can’t, Mikkelz. Muties’ll eat his lunch. Then we shag ass back to the rail wag and report we done our level best, too bad about the baron’s daughter.”

  IT WAS A STRETCH to call the boss of the little ville of Tucumcari “baron.” Miguel “Mike” Sanchez was a nervous fat man with sweeping white side-whiskers and watery blue eyes, one of which displayed a distracting tendency to look everywhere except where the other one was. He had a silver fob watch in the pocket of his sun-faded, sweat-stained vest, which didn’t work, but did serve as a symbol of authority, such as it was. His handful of sec men weren’t particularly sinister for the breed, lacking much of the usual vicious swagger, but likewise weren’t real effectual.

  His domain, which was just a little straggle of buildings, halfway reclaimed ruins or shanties scratch-built from materials scavvied out of the ruins of the old town, on whose erstwhile eastern outskirts it lay. He ran it with a sort of absentminded indulgence. Contrary to the current wisdom that held that the more ruthless the baron, the better off the ville, Tucumcari didn’t seem to have suffered greatly from his slackness. As small as it was, the ville prospered, relatively, off scavvie grubbed out of the ruins of the old town, and off the game that thrived in the rolling plains and wooded hills surrounding. The inhabitants mostly grew up skilled trackers and dead shots, owing to the scarcity of ammo for modern cartridge blasters, and the slow reload rate of the black-powder longblasters they also used, both of which made it important to make every shot count. Their marksmanship probably accounted for the fact that neither coldhearts nor muties—animal or vaguely human—had taken much advantage of Baron Mike’s laxity.

  Until recently. In the past few months a band of about forty muties—with, rumor had it, a few norm renegades thrown in—had moved into the vicinity from the east, in hopes of easier pickings. They had successfully surprised the large Taitt family on its homestead in the woods a few miles northwest of town, overpowered them, and then killed, raped and, rumor again said, eaten them, in no particular order. The initial success, however, had proved hard to repeat once the countryside was aware of them. The locals seemed none too inclined to avenge the Taitts, who had been powerful enough almost to constitute a barony themselves and displayed some nasty tendencies toward their neighbors. And anyway, the Taitt stead was well-defensible for a sizable band. However they were inclined to come to one another’s aid. They also liked to skulk and snipe.

  Just like that the mutie leader, a hugely fat mustachioed scabbie called El Cabrón, found himself down to twenty-five assorted goons. So he decided to avail himself of the rule of law.

  Now, the baron of Tucumcari had a daughter, Maria Elena, of legendary beauty, waist-length raven tresses, ivory skin and notable rack. She was largely thought to be a virgin, which lent her a certain novelty value.

  So one night not long ago a picked band of muties had slipped into the ville and made off with the baron’s daughter, leaving the head of her chaperone, an elderly lady cousin of impeccable respectability on the globe surmounting the end post of the banister in the foyer of the baron’s splendid two-story frame mansion.

  The raiders had also left a written message, which after it was painstakingly interpreted proved to contain an ultimatum: the baron would either compel his people to submit and pay tribute to El Cabrón and his band, or Maria would be guest of honor at an old-fashioned Deathlands mutie hoedown.

  Enter MAGOG. The new ville happened to lie smack by a divide in the tracks, one line running southeast, the other northeast. The locals, like most people, had paid no heed to the old weed-grown rails until mighty rail wag had miraculously turned up along them a couple years past, gleaming and throbbing. Tucumcari was well up in the watershed of the mountains just to the west, and its denizens eager to trade fresh water and game to the General’s posse for trifling quantities of ammo and meds. So amenable were the folk of the ville, from Baron Mike down, that the General hadn’t bothered leaving any sort of garrison, a constant drain on his limited manpower.

  But the General was about empire building, or rebuilding, and he understood the enormity of the task as maybe no one else then alive did. That was why he was so hipped on getting hand on the Great Redoubt, no matter how obdurately his intel chief failed to understand. So he jumped at the chance to bind the ville to him more closely through goodwill. It was also a chance to try to get some use out of another of the odd but highly capable band of captives—now quasi-recruits—Hubertus was always wanting to torture.

  The albino youth, Jak Lauren, had been kept in a cell since the coldheart attack. It wasn’t as punishment; the General had ordered him to be well treated, but considered him a feral rogue. Doc spoke glowingly of his combat prowess, though, so the General directed that the youth and a trio of MAGOG sec men be dispatched to rescue the baron’s daughter.

  MIKKELZ TITTERED. “Yeah. Too bad. Hear she got a rack.”

  “Besides,” the corporal went on, ignoring the outburst, “he’s a mutie. Who gives a rat’s diseased dick about a lowlife nukesuck mutie?”

  “He ain’t a mutie. Says he ain’t.”

  “Shut up, stupe. ’Less you want me to reckon you for a taint, too. That what you are, a dirty mutie lover?”

  “Both of you shut the fuck up,” Karnes snarled. He had a hard thin stubbly face and mad eyes. The camou-stick face paint he like the other two wore in jags of brown and green and black made his eyes seem to stand right out of his head. He was junior to Brassard, just a scrubby private, but he came from a long line of woods-runners from the mountains up Taos way and put up with no man’s shit.

  They were all hunkered down behind an outbuilding near the woods in back of the former Taitt main house. Mikkelz, Karnes and the corporal carried M-16s. It was broad daylight. Despite that fact there was no sign of muties moving about the place. Just a few skinny horses browsing hopefully in the bare dirt of a corral. Along with Baron Mike’s daughter, the raiders had made off with a startling percentage of his stock of scavvied predark liquor, which might have accounted for the lack of apparent activity.

  “Corporal?”

  “Shut up, Mikkelz.”

  “But that girl. You think—”

  What Brassard thought they were being solicited about would remain a mystery, because just then a shirtless mutie scratching at one raw red edge of a fistula in his chest came around the rear of the shed in search of a place to take a leak and all but stepped on Karnes.

  JAK WASN’T a lot of things, and squeamish was right up there.

  All the same he was having trouble breathing in the ground floor of what had been the Taitt house. The miasma was made up of mildew, rancid human grease, dreck, piss so well fermented it seemed like the muties weren’t to blame for it all, rotting food, burned bedding, farts, spilled alk, decomposing flesh and various vintages of puke. Squeamish Jak wasn’t, but he did have a sensitive nose. And the nastiest stagnant black water bayou with an old swollen-up dead gator festering in it back home couldn’t hold a candle to this majestic reek.

  Also, somebody—the muties or the former occupants—had tacked up bedspreads and tablecloths and random scraps over the windows, casting the interior of the big old two-story structure into dismal gloom.

  Slipping the hook-and-eye lock on the back door with the leaf blade of one of his throwing knives, Jak had come in through the kitchen, down a short corridor to the front room and the foot of the stairs. He had come upon three marauders, two sleeping muties and an apparently normal human passed out with his bearded face sideways in a pool of vomit. Three quick sure strokes of a throwing knife had insured that no ensuing ruction, no matter how frenetic, would disturb their rest. Nor anything else.

  At the base of the stairs he paused. He heard voices from above, muffled as by a door. No hope existed of detecting any sentries or anybody abroad in the upstairs hall by body odor. However foul it might be, it just had too much competition. He put his hand to a wall and listened and felt, trying to sense footprints, breathing, even shifting of weight
.

  Nothing he could perceive.

  He stole carefully up the stained hardwood stairs, as mindful not to slip in any pools of anything as to avoid making noise. Though his knives were tucked away in sundry convenient location, his hands were empty. His .357 Magnum Colt Python, returned to him by his captors for this mission, rode inside a shoulder holster in his left armpit. On the opposite side were pouches for three speed-loaders. A collapsible aluminum spear, provided for the raid, was stuck through his belt.

  Sergeant Banner had been almost solicitous in making sure he had everything he wanted or thought he needed for this snoop and poop. He had also been almost eager when making it clear that if the albino youth ran on them, his friends would suffer.

  Halting at the top of the stairs, Jak stuck his head tentatively up above floor level. The window at the hall’s end was swaddled in a big pale paisley comforter, stained with water or whatever, which allowed through a dim tobacco-spit colored light. Nobody was in the hall, and the only door closed was on his left. The voices came from behind it. Seemingly insubstantial as fog, he flowed up onto the second floor and up beside the closed door.

  MARIA ELENA SANCHEZ hung naked by her wrists from the ceiling of the bedroom. Although bruised and contused here and there from rough handling and being tied, she was alive, unmutilated and even unraped. Her captors had even placed a flowered metal bowl beneath her feet in case she leaked from time to time. Despite not having slept for two days and nights she was wide awake. Because it was looking as if her intact condition was subject to change any moment now.

  A huge hideous mutie ran the clipped back of the foot-long Bowie knife blade down a bare thigh. The curve of the metal seemed to fit by nature against the smooth creamy skin. The mutie made a sound in the center of him halfway between a purr and a gurgle.

  The mutie wasn’t El Cabrón. El Cabrón was huge, sure enough, a good 350 pounds of him propped on a brass bed, bare from the waist up. And he was unsightly enough, with scabs and seeping pustules all over his broad face and hairy body. But he was nowhere near so large nor so hideous as the mutie now caressing Maria Elena’s shrinking face with fine forged steel.

  “Hole says he’s tired of waiting,” said the mutie standing next to the one with the knife. This one wasn’t near as huge, scarcely four feet tall. “Hole says he wants some fun, now.”

  El Cabrón glared with little bloodshot piggy eyes. His cheeks puffed out either side of the extravagant mustache that grew down the sides of his mouth to about his second chin. They were so fuzzed with coarse grizzled stubble they looked like blowfish bellies.

  “I give the orders here, Skeeze,” he said. “Remember that!”

  Hole emitted a gargling outcry. The captive squeezed her eyes shut as the awful stench rolled up out of the depths of him and over her like a chem storm off the Plains.

  He was really huge, maybe seven feet tall, maybe five hundred pounds. It was hard to tell for sure, since his vast body from the tops of his lumberjack boots to the collar was concealed in a black baggy garment that looked like an outsized duffel bag and may have been. The fabric was so heavy and loose that it made it impossible even to guess details about what lay within. Which was no doubt for the best, since sprouting from the top of the sacklike outfit was a trunk-thick neck topped by, well, a hole. Topped in turn by a hank of dirty dark brown hair.

  How he saw or smelled or heard, the terrified Maria Elena had no clue. He surely had no visible eyes, nose or ears. Just a huge reddish cavern in place of a face, fringed with scalloped yellow flesh that reminded the girl of toothless gums. But he didn’t seem to miss much, and got around well enough to be El Cabrón’s chief enforcer.

  And he seemed to be on the brink of staging a palace coup.

  “Hole says,” Skeeze relayed, “that can change.”

  “We can’t damage the merchandise.” The mutie chief had changed his tone, wheedling now. “Just give it a day or two until her father caves. Then we get all the sweet thing we want.”

  “Hole,” Skeeze said, “is not big on deferred gratification.”

  The door slammed open. So did Maria Elena’s eyes.

  The figure standing there seemed to fit right in with the others: a slim youth with a shockingly scarred face the color of a sheet of paper, and ruby eyes blazing above the sights of a gigantic silver revolver.

  “Not move!” the intruder said. He seemed to be grinning with pleasure, but it might have been just the way a healed knife-cut pulled up the corner of his mouth.

  “Back away from girl,” the intruder said, gesturing at Hole with the blaster.

  Outside a blaster yammered on full automatic.

  Chapter Fourteen

  At the sound of the mutie colliding with Karnes, Brassard spun and lit off half of a 30-round magazine from his M-16.

  Right into Karnes’s back.

  Not all the rounds hit the private. None of them hit the mutie. He turned and fled, squalling at the top of his lungs.

  Karnes went right down. He wasn’t dead, though, even with a huge swatch of his blood sprayed all over the side of the shed and more squirting out of a dozen holes. He kicked and thrashed and made bubbling noises.

  Shots cracked from somewhere. Brassard fired off the rest of his mag into the wooded slope behind the Taitt house, for no very good reason. Then he dropped it, slammed in a new one and grabbed Mikkelz by the sleeve.

  “C’mon! We gotta get outta here!”

  Muties came pouring out of the buildings. Some staggered. Some carried blasters, which they fired enthusiastically, as if they could compensate for a lack of visible targets that way.

  Mikkelz stood as if he’d put down roots. Appropriately, he was getting a little green in the face.

  “B-but Karnes!” he blubbered. Puke slopped out over his lower lip and down the front of his camou blouse.

  Brassard tugged harder. “He’s had it. If we don’t get outta here, we’ll join him.”

  “But the kid—”

  “Fuck him. He’s mutie meat now. If we can make it back to the wag we have a chance. But we got to move.”

  As if on cue, a mutie appeared around the end of a lump of weeds and rust that had once upon a time been a tractor, thirty yards away at the end of another outbuilding. He raised a longblaster and shot at them.

  Mikkelz bolted right past his corporal and into the woods, heading for the wag parked on the far side of the hill to safety. Brassard followed, blazing off his new mag at the mutie for good measure as he ran.

  More muties poured around the corner of the shed they’d just fled and began to kick the still-thrashing Karnes and beat him with farm implements and rocks as others fired after the fugitives.

  THE SOUND OF BLASTERFIRE momentarily distracted Jak. The hunchback mutie Skeeze acted at once. With rattlesnake speed, he snatched up a wooden chair and hurled it at the youth.

  Jak fired at the motion. The chair struck his hand at the instant the Python bellowed. The impact and recoil knocked the big revolver from his hand.

  Hole held out his arms to either side, one gnarled hand brandishing the knife, which looked like a toy. The monstrous mutie bellowed a challenge. Standing silhouetted in the full force of morning sunlight blasting through what had to be the one uncovered window in the house, he seemed more a walking nightmare than a flesh-and-blood horror.

  Jak was superstitious, but he wasn’t easily awed. He also knew an opportunity when he saw one. He sprinted straight at the roaring mutie. Halfway across the floor he launched himself into the air, coiling his legs and then planting a perfect dropkick against Hole’s chest right where his clavicle would be, in case he had one.

  The impact of Jak’s slight body was pitifully insufficient to damage the gigantic mutie. He’d have been hard-pressed to hurt him even if he was fired out of a blaster. But it was just enough to overbalance the mutie.

  Hole bellowed again as he went over backward flailing his arms. He smashed the back of his hand against the wall and lost the Bowie. The
n he fell right out the window, carrying most of the frame with him.

  Jak rebounded off his chest and landed in a crouch in the center of the floor. Skeeze uttered a squeak of terror and scuttled for the fallen Bowie. As he reached for it, a throwing knife seemed to sprout from the back of his hand. He held up the wounded member in horror as blood ran down his arm. Then he dashed out of the room screeching in agony.

  Ancient bedsprings creaked as El Cabrón leaped to his feet with surprising agility. His belly, covered in scabs and black hair, slogged ponderously back and forth and up and down with an almost tidal motion.

  “You got balls, jodido,” the scabbie chieftain said, “but mebbe not so much brains. I’m three times your size, and I ain’t standing by no window.”

  As he spoke, he was reaching behind his enormous back to the waistband of his dungarees. Jak drew the short knurled aluminum rod from his belt.

  “That little stick ain’t gonna do you no good, Whitey,” El Cabrón said.

  He whipped his hand around. In it was a truly enormous pistol, a Taurus Raging Bull double-action revolver in .454 Casull caliber, chromed like a gaudy house witch-ball. A blaster truly worthy of the huge mutie chief.

  Even as the revolver rose, Jak flicked his wrist. Four feet of aluminum tipped with a slim steel head snapped from the batonlike handle. El Cabrón’s eyes widened. Jak pivoted toward him, getting a two-handed grip on the spear. The butt smashed the thumb of the mutie’s gun hand. El Cabrón howled and dropped the piece.

  Jak leaned back, ducking beneath the potent but clumsy swipe of the mutie chieftain’s left arm. Then he thrust the spear hard between El Cabrón’s flabby, scabby breasts.

  The man sat down hard on the edge of the bed. Jak let go of the spear and danced back out of range. The mutie wrapped a huge hand around the haft of the spear and pulled. Pain made his eyes cross and his face turned blue beneath its pustules.

  The spear came out with a sucking sound. El Cabrón’s eyes blazed with triumph as he brandished it.