Vengeance Trail

by James Axler

  “But you have some means of communicating with them?”

  He took the frog out of his open mouth and looked at her. Then he laughed. “Ah, but you’re a sly one, aren’t you? Just been waiting to pop that one on me, all the way from Tucumcari.”

  “The arrival of Bryanna the ice bitch and her pals was a little timely, you have to admit. Then there was the fact you said, ‘What took you so long?’, or words to that effect.”

  “Shoot. Here I was hoping you’d pass that off as ironic repartee. All righty, then. I knew they were in town. I saw the signs they left.”

  “Signs?”

  “Hobo sign. Some of them fellers were the first tech-nomads in ways, long time back before the Nuke, although they din’t have that much to do with the technology, mostly just used it in furtherance of their nomadic ways. Rail riders like me. With real trains to ride on… Oh, well. To a Mundane—to a normal person—their marks just look like graffiti or even random scratches. But if you know the code, ah! Amazing what you can learn.”

  “You sure you don’t have some other means to get in touch with them? You didn’t exactly seem to be surprised to find them in Tucumcari, even when you were looking at that wall.”

  He was down to just the little froggy drumsticks now. He took a last bite, chomping them off at the knees. He threw away the flippered feet.

  “I hate that part. Too much like eating a miniature scuba diver.”

  “Well?”

  “You gotta allow a Rail Ghost a few mysteries, missy. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  She glared at him. He gave her a placatory smile, then hunkered down to rest his butt on the curving tin wall of the culvert.

  After a moment Krysty made herself ease up. She remained dependent on him. She had no practical pressure she could apply. If she applied threats or actual physical force, he might tell her what she wanted to know. He also might not. He had an awful lot of fortitude for a self-proclaimed coward, even without any stomach for fighting. But he would almost certainly look to escape her after that, and might well be willing to lead her into a trap to do so. He knew this environment, this odd in-between world of the rails. She didn’t.

  She went and stood in the mouth of the culvert, staring out into the chem storm. Black despair seemed to open like an abyss inside her.

  “Don’t worry, missy,” Paul said gently. “We’ll catch that old train. You’ll see.”

  If only she could believe him! But they had come so far, risked so much. And they seemed no closer to MAGOG than ever.

  She made herself draw a deep breath, forced her mind blank.

  The chase would continue.

  It wasn’t like she had a choice.

  MOST OF MAGOG’s troops were young men not long out of their teens if at all. As such, and with each other overwhelmingly for company, they were prone to fits of sheer adolescent exuberance that were purely inexplicable to the rest of the population.

  So there wasn’t any point in looking for a good reason Private Jasper MacComb, formerly of the Zarks, should take it into his mind to race into the field of wildflowers extending north of the tracks, tearing off his utilities as he ran, to the wild cheers and applause of twenty or so of his buddies. He did it because they dared him to. It was spring, after all, even if it was spring in the Deathlands right on the heels of a chem storm. Spring makes wild animals do strange things. Adolescent human males definitely fell into that category.

  Besides, they were backed up by what was likely the most potent killing engine extent in all the Earth. What could possibly harm them? What would be stupe enough to try?

  Forty yards out and down to his skivvies, MacComb turned and waved his white undershirt over his head. “I did it!” he hollered back at his buddies. “Told you I would!”

  “All they way!” they screamed back. “Take it all off!”

  It wasn’t that they actually cared to see his skinny white ass. They were wild young animals, too, and mainly wanted to see if he was triple stupe enough to do it.

  Naturally, he was.

  He skinned the shorts down his pale shanks. He had somehow been able to shed his baggy trousers on the run without great difficulty. But the underpants hung up on his boots. He started hopping around, cussing wildly, while his friends whistled and catcalled.

  Standing down by the stream in the cut it had made, supervising repair of a balky pump, Sergeant Banner heard the ruckus. His jaw set. He knew that when the troops sounded like they were having that much fun, they were doing something prejudicial to discipline. He marched up the bank to tell them to stop.

  He was way too late.

  MacComb had come to a little clear spot in the field of flowers, which was why he stopped there to begin with. Now he hopped right over to the edge of it. And one of the flowers moved extending on its stalk—so it appeared to the watchers—to give him a kiss right on the left butt cheek.

  They went loco at that. Their uproar drowned out MacComb’s exclamation of annoyance and pain as he jumped and slapped the blossom away. They didn’t see the red mark it left behind.

  MacComb’s jump took him in among the flowers. Another darted at his leg. He yelped again, recoiled, tripped on his skivvies and fell down.

  The boys loved that. They hollered and punched one another and threw their hats in the air.

  “What in the name of thermonuclear devastation is going on here!” a familiar voice roared.

  The commotion instantly ceased. “Aw, shit, Sarge. We weren’t doin’ nothing. Just having us a little fun.” That was when the screaming started.

  MACCOMB JUMPED to his feet and began racing madly back to the train, taking spraddling, high-kicking steps. He looked like all the sluts in the biggest gaudy in the Deathlands had painted their lips with crimson lipstick and just smooched him all over his bony fish-white body.

  Except gutter-whore lip paint didn’t tend to run like that.

  He screamed in a shrill high voice like a wounded horse. He got no more than a dozen steps before he tripped again and fell. There was a wild commotion out among those lovely innocent blue blossoms. The screaming rose and rose until it sounded like it had to be tearing apart the body that produced it.

  MacComb reared up once more. The blossoms were planted all over him, faces stuck to him like sucking mouths. Which they seemed to be. He looked as if he had been showering in gore.

  His own.

  A couple of his buddies plunged right in after him. Others began to follow. “You men, halt!” Banner shouted. “Stand firm there!”

  The mass of would-be rescuers stopped. The blood-flowers, roused by MacComb’s headlong passage, had been ready and waiting for the first two. They were already thrashing and screaming and batting at the blossoms that struck like rattlesnakes and clung like napalm.

  Their baggy fatigues saved them, more or less. They came stumbling out of the flowers, one supporting his buddy, with their uniforms in tatters and blood steaming from dozens of punctures, each rimmed with a red circle like a tentacle’s sucker mark. The one doing the helping lived. The other, his femoral artery opened by a particularly well-aimed bloom, bled out and died within fifteen seconds of Mildred’s reaching his side at a dead run. Not even MAGOG’s treasure of meds could save him.

  The General ordered no effort be made to recover MacComb’s body. No one kicked about it.

  MAGOG drove on remorselessly toward the ruins of Kancity.

  Unknown parties sniped.

  A gaggle of wags drove alongside the train as heavily armed coldhearts tried to clamber aboard. Though they appeared too close for MAGOG’s emplaced heavy weapons to bear her crew drove them off with handheld blasters and grens. Before that happened several raiders managed to get inside the shell by blasting open the armored passage between cars with a shaped-charge warhead salvaged from an M-72 LAW wag chiller. Doc himself killed one in the sitting room of the General’s personal car, using his sword cane, which the General had ordered returned to him.

  MAGOG never
slowed.

  The great train was halted for three days by a major washout of a bridge across a river swollen by spring runoff. Despite being in a near-constant frenzy of impatience to get to Kancity, the General decided to repair the bridge rather than risk backing up and trying to look for another route.

  After six men were washed away to their deaths when a wall of water came howling down from upstream, the General himself literally waded in to help with the operation. When a tribe of stickies attacked the repair party, the train’s commander himself was wading waist-deep in water near midstream.

  A stickie got an acid-oozing fingertip sucker affixed to the General’s left cheek. The General blew the mutie’s head apart with the .45 blaster he carried in a shoulder holster. When it fell back into the torrent the stickie tore open his face.

  Streaming blood, the General continued to work until his men begged him to get attention. He headed in to the med wag long enough for a silent Mildred to neutralize and clean away the acid and bandage the wound. Then he went back in the river.

  The bridge was patched enough to pass the armored train’s weight. MAGOG rolled on.

  And finally it approached its destination.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Kancity was anticlimax.

  Thanks to its proximity to the Whiteman ICBM launch complex, it had gotten plastered during the big war. The silos had attracted swarms of megaton-range warheads set for groundburst, which meant fallout and lots of it. It remained one of the hottest hot spots on the North American continent.

  So much attention had been paid to the missile silos that little had been spared for the rails, in spite of the fact that the town had been a major rail junction. The Russians in charge of drafting the targeting-priority plan had probably figured that between the fallout and the near misses, not a lot of traffic was going to be flowing along the lines for a few thousand years anyway.

  But as the General himself had gleefully pointed out, in a loudspeaker address to the troops as they approached the giant hot spot, rails are one of the very hardest things to damage with nukes, or any kind of area-effect weapons. They’re steel, they’re hard—extraordinarily so, from the work-hardening of having millions of tons pass over them—they’re low to the ground. Anything in a nuke’s radius of total destruction, well, they called it that for a reason. The thermal effect of an airburst could melt or warp rails, but for a surprisingly limited range. Blast effects were tricky, but most cases the dynamic overpressure from a blast—of any kind—simply rolled over the rails.

  “Any fool with a cutting torch and a wag can cut a train line in a matter of hours,” the General rasped. “But the highest tech, most powerful weapons ever devised practically had to score direct hits to target them at all.”

  He had chuckled as if it were a swell joke. Whether most of the crew found it funny or just incomprehensible was another issue. J.B. and Leo, in the armory car prepping for the final expedition—on which J.B. had been ordered to go—thought it was a hoot. But then they were that way.

  Nonetheless the most direct lines for MAGOG, coming in from the west and southwest, had been cut—how the General knew that nobody was sure. Leo told J.B., though, that the General had spent years in preparation after finding the great train, and may have reconnoitered then.

  After crossing the river the train circled north and east and came in from almost due north. They left the soft-shelled cars in a siding north of the ruins of the metropolis with most of the troop complement. Only the crews necessary to man the hardpoint-mounted heavy weapons and the train itself accompanied the armored engines and carriages into the city—and a recovery team of twelve men picked especially to fill the twelve rad suits the General had scavvied somewhere.

  One of these was a not entirely thrilled J.B.

  “I checked the suits myself,” Leo told him as MAGOG picked its way through what had been the northern suburbs. The crew had rigged a specially designed dozer blade to clear obstructions from the line. It could deal with a lot of rubble, up to a collapsed building; but anything the blade couldn’t handle, the rad suit boys would have to go out to play with. “They’re good suits. Perfect condition.”

  “Still triple stupe to go into a place where the rads’ll just knock a man right down dead without even bothering with convulsions and the bloody shits,” J.B. observed.

  Leo laughed his gravel-road laugh. “Welcome to the army, son.”

  J.B. grinned at him. “So how do I get outta this chicken-shit outfit?”

  Leo’s grin faded. “Die.”

  J.B. was also less than enchanted with the weapon he’d been assigned. His friends would’ve been amazed.

  “Never used a flamethrower before,” he groused. “Never wanted to. One thing I know about them—everybody on the whole battlefield shoots at them. Oh, and one more thing—they explode on impact.”

  “And just who in the name of glowing night shit is gonna be shooting at you, J.B.? Wasn’t you just fifteen seconds ago bitching and moaning that it’s too hot to live without lead long johns?”

  J.B. was turning the nozzles in his hand. “Muties,” he said shortly. “This thing hasn’t got milspec markings on it. It’s got a GE logo. Dark night, what’d General Electric be making a flameblaster for?”

  “Did a lot of contract work for the gummint. U.S. didn’t actually have no flamethrowers as such in their arsenal by the time the big Nuke rolled around. Used flame rockets and shit.” He nodded to the twin tanks. “This here was prob’ly built for some gummint group.”

  Coarse and loud and obnoxious as he was, Leo was a consummate craftsman. As part of his job keeping MAGOG’s weapon systems firing on all barrels, he had studied the train’s data libraries almost as extensively as the General had, including the history and purpose for which MAGOG was built.

  For the chief armorer and J.B. it had been love at first sight. Like many master craftsmen, Leo was deliberately rude to outsiders so he wouldn’t have to deal with them peering over his shoulder, jogging his elbow and asking triple-stupe questions. In person he was still vulgar, cranky and obnoxious, but less aggressively so. And of course the slightest hint of incompetence brought instant thermonuclear retribution down upon the perpetrator’s ass.

  Small chance of that with J.B. For one of the few times in his life the Armorer had encountered somebody who was as obsessed with weapons as he was. Each man internally paid the other the highest compliment each could imagine: Leo and J.B. each knew things the other didn’t. J.B., of the four captive friends, was as happy as a pig in shit.

  But J.B. never forgot that he and his companions were prisoners. Slaves, if honored, valued and well-treated ones.

  But Leo wasn’t the one responsible for J.B.’s plight. For the rest, he would relax and enjoy it as long as it was inevitable. When it wasn’t, well, he’d be the first to act, and trusted himself to see the opening smart-quick.

  “Were they any good at making flameblasters?” he wanted to know.

  “Works,” Leo said. “Test fired it myself. Don’t forget, GE made miniguns.”

  J.B.’s whole face lit up in a smile. “Yeah. I did forget that. Double stupe of me.”

  “Yep.” Leo grinned. “Tell you what.” He went to a keyboard and brought up a display of what armored train’s sensor suite was reading. “Rad count outside’s nothing much. A body could go an hour or two unprotected and not even have his hair fall out. Why’n’t we pop a door and let you try the thing out. It’s a good idea, anyhoo. You gotta be prepared for the kick these babies have. Remember, what blasters launch is measured per grain, but these—” he relieved J.B. of the flamer’s business end “—are measured in gallons per minute. You let this muzzle kick up vertical on you, boy, that’ll ruin ever’body’s day.”

  “Somebody’ll notice from the telltales if we open a door. Hubertus’s sec men, if nobody else.”

  Leo chuckled deep in his vast chest and vaster belly. “So? What’re they gonna do, fire us? One thing to learn about life in
this man’s army, John Barrymore—it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.”

  MAGOG’S ELECTRIC BRAKES finally brought it to a stop in a railyard, mostly intact per the General’s prediction, next to a river, with the rusted skeletal remains of what looked like an old hotel close on the left and a private airstrip, its runways heaved and cracked by an explosion of exotic mutie foliage, on the far bank. The river itself ran with a weird iridescent green fluid that put J.B. in mind of radiator coolant. It bubbled.

  Three wags, a Hummer and two pickups were driven out of an armored transport car. It was a measure of how seriously the General took whatever it was they were after that he would sacrifice a prized Hummer. They couldn’t spare the decontamination fluid to cleanse the wags, which would be abandoned after the mission.

  They rolled a few blocks, up a hill and east. This part of Kancity, getting on toward what J.B. reckoned was downtown, looked as if it had been picked up whole to maybe a thousand feet and then dropped. The streets were surprisingly clear, though. There hadn’t been many buildings in this part of town multistoried enough to rubble-out seriously. Most of the wags on the street had been burned-out early, and then worked on by years of chem storms and the real enemy of wags, rain. What they mainly encountered was vaguely wag-shaped mounds of rust and corrosion so fragile they fell away to red powder at a nudge from the Hummer’s reinforced front bumper.

  They came to what could only be called a compound, surrounded by fences topped with razor tape. Chain link was another thing that survived explosions, even nukeblasts, well. Whatever the fence had been treated with, it kept off water and acid better than the wags had.

  The gate, however, was open. Inside lay several low but massive-looking concrete buildings. They had apparently been designed to survive a nuke near miss, and had. They were overgrown with lush green-black growth with obscenely fleshy leaves similar to what had busted up the old airstrip’s runway.

  J.B. did not like the looks of that in spades. An ambush here might be way unlikely, but the Armorer had come across rad-immune muties in his time. The Hummer provided nominal armor protection to its crew, the pick-’em-up wags none at all. To drive in close to the bunkers and bushes was just asking for something the Deathlands was only too eager to provide. Despite his lowly status as the grunt with the flamethrower, he opened his mouth to comment.