Vengeance Trail

by James Axler

Jak shot him in the belly with his own Raging Bull. Fat and blood splashed away from the entrance wound. Jak had some experience with large-caliber handblasters and didn’t try to fight the recoil or hold his arms rigid; that would have sprained both of his wrists. Instead he let the awesome recoil ride the big thick barrel straight up toward the ceiling, then let its weight carry it back down as the awful noise it made still ratcheted around between the walls. And fired again. And again.

  “Enough!” Maria Elena cried. “I’ve survived a lot, but if you shoot that damn thing again, my head will implode.”

  Jak lowered the blaster, looking almost sheepish. He stuck it in his waistband, where it threatened to pull down his pants. He held his hands behind his legs in hopes she wouldn’t see him shaking them to alleviate the stinging in his palms.

  He went to the Bowie and picked it up. “Nice knife,” he said. Using the chair Skeeze had hurled at him, he stood on tiptoe and cut through the captive girl’s bonds.

  Unfortunately he lacked the strength to hold up her weight. They went down in a heap, chair and chamberpot spinning away.

  “Thanks for rescuing me,” Maria Elena said. “Now, will you please take your hand off my boob and cut my wrists free? I’ll be lucky if my hands don’t swell up.”

  Jak snatched his hand away as if her skin had turned redhot. He still had hold of the Bowie, miraculously, and hadn’t sliced either one of them in the fall. He quickly freed her.

  She sat up and began massaging her legs vigorously. “Lord, it feels like my skin’s full of red ants. I’ll have to keep going on adrenaline and hope that’s enough.”

  Jak had picked himself up and secured his Python. He moved swiftly to the door and peered out. There was no sign of activity inside the house, although there was a mighty commotion going on outside.

  “There are horses,” Maria Elena said. “If we can get to them we have a chance of getting clear.”

  She was a remarkably cool one, Jak had to admit. He went to her and helped her to her feet. She started to sag, gritted her teeth, and straightened up.

  “Give me that fat bastard’s pistol,” she said.

  “No way.”

  “I can shoot a blaster.”

  “Not that one.” He frowned, then reversed the Python in his hand and proffered it to her. Volume of fire might just make a difference to their breakout chances.

  “Don’t drop.”

  She grinned. “I’ll try to keep a better hold of it than you did. Now, let’s get out of here.”

  He tested the Bowie’s edge with his thumb. The hole-faced mutie had kept it well honed.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  IN SCUTTLING OUT and leaving Jak in the lurch, the surviving MAGOG sec men had inadvertently provided him and the rescued hostage an excellent diversion. With all the general firing going on nobody paid any mind to shots coming from inside the house. Moreover, the muties still within the house, who had all been on the bottom floor, went racing out straightaway when Brassard opened fire without even noticing their three comrades weren’t dead drunk, but merely dead. When Skeeze burst out of the bedroom a moment later, tumbled down the stairs, and ran out the back door still hollering and clutching his impaled hand, he had simply fled into the hills without alerting anybody that more foes were about.

  Half the muties still functional went lurching into the forest behind the main house in pursuit, hungover or still drunk. The others stood peering outward in all directions, fearful the pesky locals had decided to mount a concerted attack, and firing off stray shots on general principle and to reassure themselves.

  When an albino youth and a beautiful naked woman, who was a head taller than he was with black hair streaming behind her like a banner, burst out of the front door and raced madly for the corral, it took a few heartbeats for anyone to notice.

  Someone finally did and shouted a warning. Shots began to crack. Dust spurted up from the yard, nowhere near the fugitives.

  The youth carried a giant blaster in one hand and a heavy burden in the other. As he and the girl neared the corral and bullets began to hit closer, he paused, crouched and fired the handblaster. It boomed and knocked him on his ass.

  The girl kept running. Despite the fact the circulation was still making its agonizing return to her limbs, Maria Elena vaulted the corral fence of peeled poles in a single bound. The horses reared and shied away from her. They all had on halters. She grabbed the lead-rope of one and swung onto its bare back.

  Jak had picked himself and his burden up.

  “Gate!” the girl screamed.

  He ran around the fence as muties fired lustily at him, yanked up the rusty baling-wire loop that held the gate shut and swung it open. Maria Elena trotted the bay mare forward and reached a hand to help pull him up behind her as he stuffed the Raging Bull down his pants again. Still holding his parcel he put his free hand around her waist and pressed his face into her hair.

  She kicked the horse’s flanks with her bare heels and they went galloping into the scrub-clad hills in an ineffectual storm of lead.

  THE BARON OF Tucumcari kept moaning, “Oh, my daughter!” Mildred kept expecting him to add, “Oh, my ducats!” but he never did.

  “Tell me again,” the General said sternly, “why you failed in your mission and left two of your comrades behind.”

  He stood, resplendent in a medal-bedecked OD jacket well-hung with medals, riding pants, spit-shined boots and chromed helmet, on the steps of his personal car looking grandly down upon the ville and its inhabitants.

  Mikkelz opened his mouth to speak, and Corporal Brassard surreptitiously ground his heel on the arch of the private’s foot.

  “That wild albino boy musta alerted the muties somehow, sir,” the corporal said. “All we know is we heard shooting and screams from the main house. Then they were all over us, firing up a storm. Poor Karnes caught a whole burst, never had a chance. Guess the kid never did neither. All we could do was shoot our way clear. We musta dropped eight, ten of ’em apiece, but they just kept coming. And your—sorry about your daughter, Baron Sanchez, sir. If anybody coulda saved her, we woulda, but there was just too many of ’em. Mutie scum!”

  The baron wailed. Brassard spit expressively in the dirt. Then as if overcome by emotion he yelled, “Let me take ’em down, General! Let me take ’em! Just give me the men, the weps, the wags—I’ll scour the filthy bastards off the face of the earth, I swear!”

  He acted as if he was about to madly hurl himself somewhere not immediately apparent, so that buddies standing near him obligingly seized his arms to restrain him. The corporal duly began to struggle with them, not so vigorously as to risk breaking free, but raving, swearing and red in the face. For his part Mikkelz looked like he didn’t know whether to laugh or puke.

  Mildred turned and buried her face in J.B.’s shoulder. To their surprise they’d both been allowed out of the train at once. Of course, Doc was still securely inside—“temporarily indisposed,” the General said. Although they seemed fully, and justly, trusted to do the jobs they’d been assigned within MAGOG, it seemed one thing hadn’t changed: they were still hostages for one another.

  “I can’t believe Jak didn’t make it,” Mildred sobbed. “Sometimes he seems so vulnerable. But then other times he was like a force of nature. I never thought it could happen to him.”

  The Armorer had never thought of Jak as vulnerable, but for once, tact—or taciturnity anyway—got the better of him. He patted her reassuringly.

  “Don’t be too sure, Millie,” he said quietly into her beaded plaits. “These rail wag heroes don’t strike me as havin’ the sense to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel. Mebbe Jak’s gone, mebbe he isn’t.”

  Mildred’s shaking shoulders told him she wasn’t convinced. “And there’s always Krysty,” he reminded her quietly.

  “Four hundred miles away in Arizona! How will we ever find her again?”

  “Dunno. But we will. We’ll get shut of these yoohoos, an
d then—”

  “I’m afraid I can’t oblige you, son,” the General was saying in a surprisingly gentle, but still carrying, voice. “We’re on a mission, one bigger even than avenging two fallen comrades. We can’t spare any more time. But I promise you this—once we’ve gotten…our objective…we shall return and hunt down these mutie scum like the filthy animals they are!”

  Corporal Brassard at last tore free of his friends and threw himself on the bare tan ground, which he commenced to beat with his fists. “Vengeance, General! Let me have my revenge on those mutie bastards! I’m beggin’ you, please!”

  “Mebbe we can save you the trouble, Corporal,” said Captain Marc Helton, who stood on the right of way just below and beside his General. He pointed over the heads of the crowd.

  Trotting down the main drag of the little shanty ville came a bay horse, rolling its eyes and flaring its nostrils. On its back rode a beautiful black-haired woman, stark naked. Behind her rode Jak Lauren.

  The crowd parted to let them through. The girl rode up to her father, who was standing openmouthed, and hauled up on the lead rope to stop the horse. She flew off its back and almost knocked the baron on his duff, seizing him in a hug.

  Corporal Brassard was on all fours like a dog. His face was about one shade darker than Jak’s.

  Private Mikkelz wasn’t as dumb as he looked. He had already begun to back through the crowd of townspeople, hoping to slide away unnoticed. But two members of Hubertus’s security police, in their white helmets, materialized on either side of him and laid hard arms upon him.

  Jak swung off the horse and swaggered up to the General. He carried a pillowcase that had been pressed into service as a sack, heavy-laden, its closed end soaked through and dripping red.

  White helmeted SPs leveled longblasters at him, and even Helton dropped a hand to the butt of his service blaster. Ignoring them, Jak grabbed the gore-sodden bottom of the pillowcase and upended it.

  The huge severed head of El Cabrón fell out, bounced and rolled so close that the twin worms of blue-green snot that had emerged from the mutie’s nostrils postmortem violated the sheen of the General’s left boot toe.

  “Got girl, got mutie,” Jak announced in a loud voice. “Mission accomplish!”

  MILDRED STARED out the window of the commissary car. For the first time she was really glad for the train’s excellent soundproofing. She wished she could believe it would be the last.

  She had been allowed one hearty loving hug of Jak, and J.B. one comradely clap on the youth’s thin shoulder—gingerly, so as to avoid the razors Jak had sewn into his vest. Then Jak had been disarmed at blasterpoint and led back to his cell: acclaimed, applauded, but treated like a wild animal, perhaps recaptured after a bold escape.

  The baron’s daughter, still naked, had thrown a fit. The General was unmoved. Hearts and minds or not, she was still just a civilian. If terms were given, if laws were laid down, they flowed from the armored train out, not the other way around. She had still broken through the youth’s armed and edgy escort to hug him and plant a fervent kiss on his pale lips before being hustled none-too-gently away.

  Jak hadn’t seemed to mind that part.

  “I can’t believe you people,” Mildred murmured.

  In the double-paned glass she saw Marc Helton’s brown Greek-god face furrow in puzzlement over her left shoulder.

  Outside, a long pole was being raised to the vertical by having the butt end dropped into a hole, freshly dug while a gang of men pulled on ropes attached to the other end. Slowly the pole swung upward as its base fell into the hole. The task was complicated by the weight of a heavy square-section crossbeam, which had been nailed to the pole a few feet from its upper end—not to mention the still-writhing weight of Corporal Brassard, buck naked and nailed in place by huge spikes through the wrists and feet. Private Mikkelz hung from an identical crude cross, which had already been erected beside the railroad right-of-way at the ville’s edge.

  “Your own people, and you do that to them,” Mildred said. She turned, not so much to look at Marc—although she had to admit, even here and now, that he was mighty easy on the eyes—but because she could no longer bear to watch the scene outside.

  The young captain’s expression was of pained incomprehension. It looked genuine to her.

  “It’s justice,” he said, his very lack of emphasis indicating utter conviction. “They abandoned comrades in the face of danger. To us, that’s a very grave crime.”

  He let his gaze slip past her, out the window, as if he were trying to marshal his thoughts.

  “I have to admit I’m puzzled by your attitude as well, Mildred,” he said at length. “It was your friend they left to the mercy of the muties.”

  She sighed explosively. “Yeah. And I guess by Deathlands standards I should be out there doing some kind of triumphant dance around the base of those poles.”

  She went to a table and sat. The officers’ commissary was empty but for them. Everybody else was either on duty or outside watching the festivities.

  After a few moments Marc joined her, bringing her a mug of steaming tea. She smiled thinly and thanked him in a small voice.

  He sat down. He didn’t feel the need to ask. Over the past few days he had repeatedly sought her out for conversation. Despite her rebuff of his initial attempt she had softened and guardedly opened to him. She was by nature a friendly and outgoing person, and desperately aware of being cut off from the friends with whom she’d lived in constant closeness for so many months. She didn’t really have anyone to talk to; the aides were so reserved around her that she suspected they had been warned not to associate with her. Singh, although totally conscientious on duty, and extraordinarily skilled given the paltry educational resources that had been available for her training, was subdued almost to the point of invisibility except when discussing necessary medical or administrative matters. The comments she had made to Mildred on the day of the coldheart attack had been the only exceptions. Mildred suspected she spent her off-duty hours drinking or drugging herself into unconsciousness, or at least as much as she could without compromising her performance.

  But it wasn’t just loneliness that made her lose her unwillingness to talk to Marc.

  Captain Marc Anthony Helton was an extraordinary young man, no getting around it. He was the son of the baron of Mobile no less. Though his childhood had been pleasant he had been rigorously trained, mentally and culturally as well as physically. He actually knew a good deal of history, from Mildred’s time and before; and almost as rare, knew something about the history of the Lost Days of nuclear winter and the ensuing time since the big war—although his knowledge was of necessity sketchy, since few records had been kept and fewer still attempts had been made to gather and collate them into any kind of coherent account.

  Even during the brief conversations they’d had, he had displayed an intelligence that seemed both broad and deep, and a quick and flexible understanding. If he had a noticeable fault it was a painful puppy earnestness. But he was never self-important, and although he seemed to try to hide it, he flashed signs of a keen sense of humor. He radiated an easy unselfconscious charm.

  He also reputedly had the courage of a lion. The hardcases of MAGOG’s sec force treated him with something like awe. She’d picked that up just from listening to the wounded soldiers talk about him. He had never been known to back down from a fight and never known to lose. He would have insisted on leading the expedition to free Maria Elena Sanchez had the General not personally ordered him to stand down.

  He was simply a hero. Mildred knew what they looked like. Marc and her late beloved leader and friend Ryan Cawdor were miles apart in many ways, but they belonged to the same breed.

  Of course it had been Marc who killed Ryan. His orders, anyway. That should have made him Mildred’s sworn enemy for life. And maybe it did. Except that whole tragedy, the massacre and enslavement of the travelers’ caravan, seemed totally at odds with everything she could see of the
character of this dashing and dutiful young officer. She felt compelled to try to understand how the parts fit together.

  And while maybe it was a too convenient a rationalization, she couldn’t exactly try to trephine him with a fork. Not with her friends—J.B. in particular—held captive as well. She might as well be civil while she was compelled to associate with him. She might even learn something which could help them escape.

  Besides, to be honest, she was flattered by the attention. Here was a man with movie-star looks and Harvard-professor brains. Women were in a minority aboard MAGOG, most in med or other support-tech roles, but from the way they looked at Marc, as had the women in the villes the train visited, he could have had his pick of any number of younger, thinner women. Yet here he was with her.

  “Mildred, you’ve already made a sizable contribution to our endeavors—”

  Don’t remind me I’m an accomplice of murderers and slavers, she thought with a mental wince.

  “—and there are people aboard this train who are alive only through your efforts. But I feel as if you have certain reservations about us, about what we’re doing.”

  “You might say that.”

  “We—the General has a vision of rebuilding America. Not the way it was before the megacull—that’s too big a project for our lifetimes. But of making a start. We can’t end the squalor and suffering, but what we are doing is building toward a day when our descendants can. That’s been the General’s consuming vision since he found this train in an underground bunker twenty years ago. And for the past five years he’s been traveling the surviving rail network, repairing as he went, working to seed little bits, oases you could call them, of civilization along the way.”

  “So you’re saying the end justifies the means.”

  He winced. “I don’t like where that leads any more than you seem to. It’s the ready-made rationalization for any sadistic swine who gets to call himself a baron because he commands enough brutal sec men to beat a starved and captive population into obedience. But it’s a large end we’re talking about here, not the selfishness and greed of a dictator. And it’s one that won’t be achieved by pious hopes and warm words alone. It’s a hard task. If we shrink from doing hard deeds, when we have to, it will never get done. And that’s the simple fact.”