Vengeance Trail

by James Axler

  “That’s a powerful inducement,” Ryan admitted. “Now, to do this, I take it I have to ingest mind-altering substances.”

  “That is customarily required, yes. Unless you care to undergo years of meditation and training, as I have done. Which, I’m afraid, still entails taking the mind-altering substances. Sorry.”

  The fuzzy shaman blinked around the sky. “Would you mind terribly if we started walking again? I feel uneasy remaining in the open too long.”

  “The bear?”

  “Screamwings.”

  Chapter Twenty

  MAGOG encountered its first chem storm. The only reason the captive companions were even aware of it was that a Klaxon sounded throughout the train, and the loudspeaker system announced an alert. All access ports to the outside from cargo bays to firing slits were to be sealed and left that way until the all-clear sounded.

  Doc, in the special apartment he had been given, continued to sit, sip sherry and read The Odyssey on the screen in his room. He rather enjoyed the sensation of being totally insulated from the evil and madness without.

  Of course, he was all too aware of the incipient madness and evil inside the armored train. For all his image of being rock-steady and straightforward as a brick, the General was mercurial, as Doc had learned from close at hand. Doc, who had long since acquired the trick of playing at having one of his spells when he was in fact perfectly lucid, knew Hubertus was pressing the General to submit them to what the intel chief termed interrogation. Of course, Doc knew a euphemism for torture when he heard one. The General wasn’t so much likely to be swayed by his intel chief’s rather whiny importuning as he was to dig in his heels and resist. But he also might decide at literally any moment to give his captives over to the question on his own whim, ignited by the obsessive lust burning within him to locate the Great Redoubt, and the key to continental conquest he believed it contained, as quickly as possible.

  What could he do about it? Personally, aside from hoping for an opportunity he understood was unlikely to present itself, nothing. Therefore he had resolved to await his fate and meanwhile enjoy the comforts of his captivity as long as possible. He, of all the companions, had spent the most time in durance, and was least bothered by it.

  But bother him it did. It always had. He longed for the day his comrades would rescue themselves, because he knew that when that time came, he would be delivered as well.

  He did wonder, though, whether the death of his great friend Ryan Cawdor might just have fatally undermined the morale of the group. It had partially deranged poor Jak, as manifested by his continued insistence that their leader wasn’t in fact dead, a phenomenon Mildred termed “denial.” Individually, they were all quite remarkable in their abilities—he modestly, and not altogether correctly, excluded himself from such characterization—but had they become so reliant upon the example, courage and resourcefulness of Ryan that they could no longer act effectively?

  He couldn’t know. All he could do was bide, and read, and pour himself another bit of sherry.

  THE TRAIN CONTINUED ON for another hour and then stopped—a surprisingly smooth and quiet process compared to the trains Mildred had heard in her previous life. It halted on a bridge over a running stream. A team in full chemical protective equipment suits from train’s stores went out to test the water for pH and presence of toxic chems. When they radioed that the water was acceptably pure, the General ordered MAGOG unsealed. Pumps were deployed, and a platoon of men clambered on top of the train to hose it down. All the wags, even the soft-shelled ones, had metal skins and thus a certain resistance to the chems. But even the special alloy armor could be degraded by too much exposure. So despite the General’s growing impatience a halt had to be made.

  Nonessential personnel were allowed to stretch their legs. J.B. and Mildred met on a dirt road that ran parallel to the tracks. They hugged, kissed—a lot less fervently than they wanted, since they had an audience—and then, fingers linked, began to saunter along the road.

  Mildred was balancing on a rut like a schoolgirl and giggling when she fell over. “Thought you’d wanna run through the flowers,” J.B. said. To the left and right of the tracks the land was covered by fields of wildflowers that stretched clear to the horizons, a scene of wildly incongruous beauty despite the overcast.

  But she shook her head, making her beaded dreads swing. “I don’t trust flowers,” she declared, “that can open up again so soon after a chem storm.”

  “Makes sense.”

  When there was no one close by she halted, faced him and took his hands.

  “J.B., they’re on to us.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Listen to me. This train has been all over the continent over the past few years. Everywhere they go, they suck up all the information the way they’re pumping water out of that stream. As if their lives depended on it, which they do.

  “And what do you think they keep hearing? These wild-ass tales about a bunch of traveling troublemakers consisting of a redheaded beauty, a feral albino teen, a doddering old fart, a blaster freak, a black woman and a one-eyed killer. And this traveling circus gets around even more places than they do.

  “Now, you can be sure our boy Captain Marc had counted the buttons on that big old coat of Ryan’s before he fell into the Grand Canyon. And if he didn’t, that crusty old rhino Banner sure did. Five hits out of a possible six. Do the math. You can bet the General or his intelligence gnomes did.”

  “But Krysty—?”

  “They got to reckon either something happened to her lately, or they just plain missed her.” She took his hand across the table. “John, they’ve got to know.”

  “What can we do about it?”

  She sighed. “I was hoping you’d know. Better yet, I was hoping you’d worked out a plan of escape.”

  He let go her hands, turned away, took off his glasses and polished them. “Been tryin’,” he acknowledged. “But they’re doin’ an ace in the line job of keeping us separated. I could spring Jak easy, I reckon. But the General’s keeping Doc tucked in his coat pocket, and the one’s no easier to get at than the other.”

  He shook his head. “I oughta know how to take care of myself. Been doin’it since I was a kid. But I surely do miss Ryan. I can’t stop thinking, if he was here, he would have worked out a way to spring us all before we cross the Grandee.”

  She touched his arm. “Don’t berate yourself, John. There are circumstances nobody can prepare for. We’re in some now.”

  “You’re right. As usual. I ought to know better than to argue with a woman so much older than me.”

  She laughed and lightly punched his arm.

  “But I think you’re right about something else. They know who we are, which means we’re living on borrowed time till they decide to really start digging into what we might know.”

  He cocked his head at her. “That pretty boy Marc been pumping you?”

  Her face turned the color of wood ash.

  “Dark night, Millie! I didn’t mean it like that! Shit, I’m no good with words. Sometimes it seems I do more damage with my mouth than with my blasters. I meant to ask if he’d been trying to get information out of you, nothin’ more.”

  “Consciously, that’s all you meant. But it’s okay, John. I understand. I know how you must wonder. I’d wonder the same if some foxy young thing was slinking around you.”

  “She’d have to get by old Leo, first.”

  She took his hands again. “I know you don’t like dealing with this kind of thing. But listen to me. You’re my man, John. I’m not shopping for any replacements. And I’m not straying.”

  She flew to him, wrapped him in her arms and squeezed him tightly. “I won’t betray you. I won’t betray myself.”

  She pulled her head back to gaze tearfully into his face. “Don’t you see? Even if I’d never met you, I couldn’t give in to Marc. Because it would mean accepting I was a slave. And I’ll die first. Do you hear me? I’ll die.”
r />   “All right, Millie, I heard you,” he croaked. “And I will, too, unless you ease off on the bear hug and let me breathe.”

  Instead she kissed him passionately. He returned it. They broke apart.

  “Whoo,” he said. “Now if I can just find somebody to put my spine back in place—”

  Wild screams interrupted him.

  “STORM COMIN’,” Paul said conversationally.

  They were fighting a head wind today. For all her determination, Krysty was endlessly tempted to ask her companion to power up his little two-stroke mill. But she knew their fuel supply couldn’t be large. One more mile, she promised herself.

  As she had for the last twenty.

  She could smell rain in the air. That was a reassuring sign; she wasn’t smelling toxic chems. When she turned in her seat to look ahead, though, the clouds looked anything but reassuring. They were clotted and yellow, shading into brown.

  That might mean tornadoes, which weren’t a big improvement on chem storms.

  Paul’s been this way before, she reminded herself. Chem storms and twisters alike were common out here. If he hadn’t learned to spot them well in advance, as well as what to do when he did, he’d have left his bones bleaching along the tracks long since.

  “Tell me more about the tech-nomads,” she said. For once she would welcome his usually unceasing patter. Anything was better than waiting to see if a chem storm would catch them out here in this featureless flat land with nothing resembling shelter in view for miles.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked, brusquely for him.

  “Who are they? How do they live? Why are they called tech-nomads?” Actually, there was a question she’d been burning to ask him. But she felt she needed to get him well-primed and flowing freely before she did. Otherwise he might clam and never answer it.

  To her relief he chuckled. “That’s a lot of questions, missy. Too many to fit in my poor old head at once, much less answer. But I’ll do what I can. Like I told you, they’re free-roving tribes. They travel all over the continent.”

  “So have I. But I’ve never run into them before. Or even heard of them.” But maybe she had: childhood tales of vagabonds with fantastic powers, sometimes malevolent, most often totally indifferent to the doings of others. Details in the stories were few and fantastic, but common themes of awe and dread skeined through them all.

  “They keep kind of a low profile. They learned that the hard way.”

  He shook his head. “Got their start back before the big war. Good ten, twenty years. People started getting dissatisfied with the way society was going. So they dropped out. Actually, all kinds of folk were doing that. But a certain breed combined that dissatisfaction with wanderlust. They decided the way to stay beneath the system’s scopes was to keep moving. So they hit the road and just kept rollin’. Perpetual Travelers was one thing they called themselves, or Permanent Tourist. But generally they came to call themselves tech-nomads.”

  “I guess I’ve got the ‘nomad’ part nailed down,” she said. They were passing now through fields of early-spring wildflowers, vast patches of color, blue and white, although muted in the poor light filtering through the clouds. She wondered how the flowers survived the acid rains. “But I’m still not too clear on the ‘tech.’”

  “Well, I’ve been told the one thing that served as a kind of bond for ’em was a fascination with technology, the latest and greatest. Not the big-scale stuff. Really gadgets, you’d call ’em. For a lot of them it was a love-hate relationship with technology. They had a general distrust of it, but they loved those parts of it that made their lifestyle possible.

  “Some of it was keepin’ in touch with one another. Stuff like satellite phones, the Internet—they were among the first people outside government to use those things. Heck, some of ’em had been government techies before droppin’out. And a big part of it was transportation.

  “See, a lot of them disliked the internal combustion engine—the automobile. Even those who didn’t had a tendency to try alternate modes of transport, just out of sheer cussedness or love of novelty if nothing else. So they loved to experiment, with wind power, or muscle power—HPVs, human-powered vehicles, were big favorites—alternate fuels. Actually, it made some sense, what with oil prices going up and down so unpredictably, and the supplies always being vulnerable. They and the survivalist movement had a lot in common. A certain amount of plain old overlap.”

  A drop hit Krysty on the cheek.

  It tingled. For a moment she thought it was just the impact. But as it lingered on her skin, she began to feel a slight but distinct burn.

  She wiped it off convulsively. “Paul—”

  He nodded. “I’m on it. Got a good five, ten minutes before it gets serious.All it’ll do till then is spit, and that mostly water.”

  She gripped the handholds on either side of the seat until her knuckles threatened to burst through the skin, and pedaled harder.

  “So, anyway, a lot of ’em took off on their bikes or trikes or land-yachts. Some took to sailing on boats. Some of ’em even took to the rails, like yours truly, the Rail Ghost—not sayin’ I was one of ’em, this was all way before my time, o’ course—”

  “Paul!” It started to sprinkle. The rain wasn’t painful, but as it lay on her skin it gave her a prickly sensation like the beginnings of a sunburn.

  “Then the big war hit. Tech-nomads had a greater survival rate than the general run of the population. One, they were mostly dispersed out of the urban centers. Two, they tended to be into self-sufficiency, things like carrying along stocks of water-purifier tabs and nonperishable foods, even when they didn’t know how to live off the land. And while many of them were loners, and they were split into a whole buncha groups and factions, they had a certain sense of kinship. They looked out for each other—helped when they could. Still did a lot of dying, just like everybody else. Or at least this is what I’ve been told.”

  It was raining quite briskly now. She only wished she trusted Paul’s assurance they’d be out of it before it started to sluice the flesh from their bones.

  “It wasn’t until after the skydark that things got real bad for the tech-nomads. See, lot of folks blamed everybody identified with technology—scientists, engineers, plain old techs—for the megacull. So they started to hunt them down and lynch them. Not everybody joined in, but plenty did. Lot of tech-nomads died, and died hard.

  “It was plenty ironic, if you go in for that sorta thing. Lot of people who were antitech in most ways died for being tech-lovers. The survivors drew in tight after that. No matter what they felt before, they dedicated themselves to preserving all the old tech lore they could, and even adding new. And they swore to keep themselves as far removed from the rest of the world—from the humans, anyway—as possible. It started off as sheer survival. But after all these years, it’s tradition.”

  Krysty’s hand burned. She saw the skin go red where a drop had hit. “Paul! We’ve got to do something. Now!”

  “Right.” He applied the brakes. She dropped her feet off the pedals, jumped off the platform, then ran alongside the Paul as he slowed the Yawl.

  She didn’t know where else to go.

  Paul hopped off to the left. “Help me get her off the track,” he called. Paul had a screw-jack system he could use for getting the Yawl on and off the rails with minimal exertion. No time for that now. They both grabbed handholds at either end of the platform and heaved it bodily up and off.

  Then Paul was trotting down the embankment, hauling on the Yawl, and Krysty was following, trying mainly to keep it from overrunning him. At the bottom, he turned and began pulling the craft into a yawning circular opening.

  A culvert! If she hadn’t been riding backward, she’d have spotted it as well, she thought.

  As she ducked into shelter, she heard sizzling as re-agents worked on her skin, smelled a burn stink from her hair, which was whipping in agitation. The corrugated metal passageway was big, enough to pass a w
ag. Stagnant water was pooled along the bottom. Paul set the brake on the Yawl, then used his hat to scoop up water to rinse first Krysty’s skin and hair, then his own.

  “Guess I cut it a little close, there.”

  “You might say that,” Krysty said stiffly. But she was already unbending. He had found them shelter in time, if only just. “But what if enough comes down to raise the water level?”

  “Don’t reckon we’ll get that much downpour,” he said. “If it does, we can move higher.”

  “And if the culvert fills?”

  He grinned beneath his mustache. “I got a few tricks up my sleeve, never you doubt. Old chem storms ain’t made a real ghost of the Rail Ghost yet.”

  Outside the tainted rain was pelting down. Krysty’s nose wrinkled at the astringent smell and she moved back from the mouth. They weren’t the only creatures who had sensed the storm’s onset and sought shelter, she saw. Dozens of frogs sat on the lower curve of the culvert or hopped around. Paul stalked one briefly and caught it up by the hips. He held it up toward Krysty.

  “Hungry?”

  She shook her head. She wasn’t famished enough yet to eat raw frog. She still had self-heats in her pack, and Paul had snared a rabbit the night before. For somebody who couldn’t bring himself to fight, he was a pretty redoubtable hunter, of very small game anyway. But Paul was Paul, and the only terms he could be taken on were his own. It would do her no more good to bother herself about his inconsistencies or even his cowardice than about his biting the head off the frog and munching contentedly away.

  “Are you a tech-nomad, Paul?”

  “Me?” He took another bite of frog. “Told ya, I’m a solitary. A perpetual floating hermit. Even though I decided to take a little sabbatical from hermitdom. Take me on a traveling companion. Mighty comely one, too.”

  Despite the occasional compliments, he had never evinced the slightest interest in her as anything but a traveling companion.