Vengeance Trail

by James Axler

  It was Krysty’s turn to be reserved, although she hoped she didn’t approach Bryanna in haughtiness. She had half-consciously been putting together all kinds of wild stories she had heard in her youth, of bands of tinkers with fantastic gadgets and fantastic skills, which they often bartered for food and other supplies, who traveled by mysterious means, often at night. They tended to remain aloof from the affairs of the people they encountered, but they supposedly harbored a darker side as well: there were stories of missing children and midnight murders. Krysty had tended to dismiss such tales as legends. Now she suspected some of them had really concerned the tech-nomads.

  As usual, she was willing to follow Paul’s lead, though, which in this case was into a building between the siding and the main track where they had built a campfire at the end where the roof had fallen down, while Paul borrowed some of their tools to work on his Yawl at the other end by some kind of artificial light. They had hot food, and spearmint tea, which they shared with Krysty as they talked.

  “You’re after the great train MAGOG?” asked the senior of the group, a robust elderly woman named Matilda. She had merry red cheeks, and white hair hanging in a pageboy bob from beneath a knit cap into which had been worked little metallic-looking spangles or charms in the shapes of stars and crescent moons. “You’ve missed her, I’m afraid. She took the line due west about fifty miles back. She stopped for water at a ville a day back. Locals say she was making for Denver.”

  Denver. The food Krysty had already wolfed down turned to lead in her stomach. She slowly placed the plate between her feet. They had added miles to their chase, so many miles. If MAGOG had clear tracks, she might be in Denver already!

  Pain hit her like a bullet in the gut.

  She stood up, only to double over the pain. Her hair started to thrash. Matilda jumped to her feet. “Child! What’s the matter?”

  She tried to take Krysty’s arm. The redheaded woman waved her off. The first thing to leap into Krysty’s mind had been dark legends of poison. But she already knew that wasn’t the case.

  Paul appeared, wrench still in hand, looking concerned. She shook her head at him. He seemed to shimmer and fade, and her vision went somewhere else.

  In a moment she was back to herself. The tech-nomads had sat her on a pack safely away from the little fire. She tentatively accepted a water bottle; her mouth was dry as a bone. The cool water soothed the pain in her belly, which was already fading. She drank the bottle dry and handed it back with thanks.

  “I’m all right now, I think,” she said.

  Standing over her with arms folded, Matilda nodded. “You’re a bit of a doomie, aren’t you? I’ve seen such fits before.”

  Krysty looked up sharply. In her altered state she had committed the deadly sin of losing track of her longblaster. She still had the snubby tucked away, of course…

  “Don’t worry your head,” the tech-nomad said. “We don’t persecute espers. Any more than we do mutants. We don’t hate anybody. Although anyone who tries to impose on us lives to think better of it.”

  She went back to her folding stool by the fire and sat. “Why, some of us might even be mutants, or espers, or even both. Imagine that, if you will.”

  Paul was hunkered anxiously at her side. She patted his shoulder.

  “Taos,” she said.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Taos. I—the train is going to Taos. I can catch her there. And something about…flying. Me, or MAGOG, I don’t know which. Or both.”

  Paul grinned his grin full of skewed stained teeth. “I don’t know much, missy, but I do know trains, and I’m here to tell you, rail wags don’t fly.”

  “Mebbe…. I can’t explain what I saw. Not even clear what it was. Just—”

  She shook her head. “Hungry,” she said. “Anybody know where I put my food?”

  THE BURROW WAS COOL. The smell of earth and juniper fronds filled Ryan’s nostrils and took the edge off the smoke of whatever pungent herbs the Little Ones were burning in the fire. The burrow was low, just high enough for him to sit cross-legged. The smoke collecting at the top was starting to get thick enough that it was surrounding the top of his head. He suspected that was the idea. Eventually he’d breathe in a good dose of the fumes. The smoke itself wasn’t psychoactive, though. Far Walker had explained it was meant to open and cleanse him, physically and spiritually.

  He hoped that wasn’t going to involve puking.

  Far Walker’s assistant, a young female, daubed paint from a tiny basket-covered pot on Ryan’s belly. Despite himself he gasped. “That’s bastard cold.”

  “We keep it buried in a deep burrow,” the old shaman said. His old eyes danced in the firelight. “Helps keep it fresh.”

  The assistant was drawing symbols on Ryan’s chest. He looked down at himself. Upside down they made no sense to him. He didn’t think seeing them right side up would help.

  “What do these mean?”

  “Nothing,” Far Walker told him cheerfully. “They’re just mumbo jumbo to help get you in the properly mystical frame of mind. What you see in the World Behind the World will be real—real enough, anyway—but to see it you have to let go off all resistance to fantasy.”

  “That almost makes sense,” Ryan said, “so I guess what you’re doing is working. Is this where I eat a magic mushroom?”

  Far Walker held up a pouch. It appeared to be made of coyote hide, with the silvery fur outside. Ryan wondered where the pacifist Little Ones got it. Well, dead coyotes weren’t exactly rare.

  “Naturally,” Far Walker said.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Denver wasn’t as bad as Kancity. Most of the damage had been done by airbursts, which produced little fallout. The city had gotten a good dose of it anyway, courtesy of the hellacious hot spot ninety miles to the south, where the NORAD command center had been buried beneath Cheyenne Mountain. As J.B. explained to Leo the story that had come down to him, the U.S. had tried to build a stronghold impervious to nukes. The Russians had tried to prove it couldn’t be done.

  That round, it seemed, had gone to the Russkies. But they’d had to work for it.

  Overall Denver wasn’t too hot. The main rad danger came from localized pools of gamma emitters—basically spots rad dust had fallen and accumulated.

  This time the tracks had survived all the way to their destination, a spur that led into the federal center itself. With a little help from the dozer attachment, they were clear enough to traverse.

  As they entered the huge sprawling compound, moving scarcely faster than a man could walk, the General sat in his chair of command in his command center. Hubertus hovered behind his left shoulder. To the intel chief’s immense but unvoiced disgust, Doc stood behind the General’s right.

  All around were monitors, with techies monitoring what was to be seen on them. Doc looked here and there and overall didn’t derive much information from it all. Until—

  “Movement, sir!” a tech on the port side sang out. “Got somebody flitting around in the rubble.”

  It was straight-up noon and fairly bright. They had the armored window shutters down and were relying totally on the cameras and other sensors. The General was taking a risk barging straight in with his train without sending scouts ahead. But he believed in hedging his bets.

  “Stay sharp, everybody!” he commanded. He twisted his neck to grin at Doc and Hubertus.

  “Action this day!” he declared. “I could welcome a good fight. Anything’s better than this damned waiting.”

  “I would venture to say, General,” Doc said, “that a fight is precisely the sort of guest to wear out its welcome rather quickly.”

  “Ridiculous,” Hubertus hissed.

  “Be quiet, Hubertus.”

  As if to validate Doc’s warning, something thunked against the left-hand side of the command car. “Here!” called another tech, swinging his pickup so that the screen was centered on a puff of white smoke from a vertical V-shaped gap in a wall. It dissipate
d quickly in the stiff breeze.

  The tech fiddled with his controls. A pale figure began to resolve out of the shadows beyond the thinning smoke.

  “Tell Turret Bravo-One he’s free to neutralize that nuke suck when he gets a target. All other stations, hold your fire unless you perceive an immediate threat to the train. And I don’t mean a kid with a rock!”

  The image gained clarity. It showed a figure in a hooded white jacket of some kind, possibly a rainslick, frantically pushing a ramrod down an upturned longblaster barrel with a black-gloved hand. Its features were indistinguishable shadows within the hood, but when it glanced nervously at the rail wag, Doc saw glints as from a pair of goggles or dark glasses.

  “MAGOG-One, Bravo-One,” said a voice from the arm of the General’s chair. “Target acquired.”

  “Bravo-One, MAGOG-Six,” the General said. “You are cleared to fire.”

  Evidently Bravo-One was armed with what J.B. so quaintly termed a Ma Deuce. Doc felt the familiar slow-paced pounding vibrating up through the floor as the turret gunner squeezed off a three-round burst.

  The figure onscreen simply went away.

  The techies began to cheer and stamp and pump their fists and exchange high fives. A somewhat uncalled-for display, Doc thought, for an armored train that had just vanquished a primitive with a musket.

  “What in the hell was that?” asked Lieutenant Nguyen, an aide to the General.

  “Long as it dies when you shoot it,” the General said, “who cares? And if a front-stuffing charcoal burner’s the best they got to offer, this’ll be a breeze. Step it up, driver, we’re almost there.”

  The buildings fell away to either side. What Doc took for the center of the compound seemed to be an open space several hundred yards wide. Most of it appeared to have been paved at one time, although between years of frost heave and vegetation pushing up from below, it was impossible to be sure. The sight lines were still clear all the way across, though.

  Doc leaned toward the central screen at the front of the compartment, the largest display in the room. “I say, General, but is that not—”

  “Driver,” the General shouted, “reverse, reverse, reverse!”

  “—a tank?”

  A wag-sized tongue of flame stabbed out of the long cannon barrel of the low, dark war wag squatting across the open space several hundred yards away. Black bars shot across the main screen and it went black.

  Doc felt more than heard the crump of the shell exploding against the engine’s nose. He swayed forward, staggered, caught himself as the driver hit the electromagnetic brake. It gave the impression the shell had stopped the train dead.

  That was absurdly wrong; even if it shattered the engine a mere shell couldn’t stop MAGOG’s thousands of tons. In fact, slow as it was already going, it moved ahead a further fifty yards before it stopped all the way and began to reverse.

  In the meantime, the General was ordering the train’s weapon emplacements to fire at any target that presented itself, and those on the front cars to concentrate on the tank. Finally he ordered, “Alpha-One, MAGOG-Six. Blast that bastard!”

  “It will take them time to deploy the pop-up turret, sir.” Alpha-One carried very special ordnance not usually called upon in a fight, and so was customarily kept retracted, out of harm’s way.

  “I know that, Nguyen, I’m not a stupe,” the General said. Nguyen’s face paled slightly between his natty white cravat and black beret.

  By this time, another camera’s imaging had come on the main screen, from slightly higher up than before. “Damage control reports negative damage to engine,” a tech said from the front of the compartment. “Damage negative, sir. Uh, except for the camera, sir.”

  “They can’t hurt us!” Hubertus exulted.

  “Until they figure out to load armor-piercing rounds,” the General said. “Can’t you back this thing up any faster?”

  No. As he of all people knew. But it was apparently enough to throw off the tank gunner. His next shot missed MAGOG clean and exploded inside the shell of a building to the left. A slumping second-story floor promptly caved in, pumping out big clouds of dust. Another building cut off view of the tank as MG backed deliberately out of the line of fire.

  “They shoot like they got their heads in a bucket,” the General murmured. “That’s something.”

  “Profile of the tank is consistent with a main battle tank, M-1 Abrams, General,” reported a tech. “We’re still trying to identify which mark.”

  “I don’t know what nuke fire difference that makes,” the General growled, “but carry on.”

  Several other techs began to talk at once, reporting that the train was starting to take fire from the sides. Doc fancied he could feel the vibrations, scarcely more than a tingle, as heavy weapons mounted on other cars cut loose. He could see the results on the monitors: machine-gun bursts knocking craters in walls, explosions.

  “A most civilized way to watch a war,” he said half to himself, “if any such can be said to exist.”

  “All that’s missing is the popcorn, Theophilus,” the General said. “Driver, stop us with the front of the engine two hundred yards back from the corner. We don’t want to have that beast right on top of us when it comes hauling around the corner.”

  Turret Alpha-One reported itself fully deployed and ready to fire. “Ace,” the General said. “Now we wait.”

  They waited. More hooded, shadow-faced figures popped up in the rubble to either side to shoot at the rail wag. They didn’t all have muzzle-loaders, but they didn’t have anything larger than small arms, either. They could do little damage to the train, and every shot they fired was met with an enthusiastic cascade of return fire from the train. Doc wasn’t sure how much damage it was doing them, either; but it made an impressive display.

  “Well?” the General demanded. “Where’s that goddamned tank?”

  The seconds ticked by. The war wag failed to appear. The asymmetric firefight thumped and boomed along outside.

  “That’s enough!” the General burst out. “Send some men out to take a look, see what the holdup is.”

  “We’re still taking fire, sir,” Nguyen said.

  “I can see that. I’m not a chowderhead. Are you a chowderhead, Nguyen?”

  “Sir! Yes, sir!”

  “Well, at least you’re decisive. You can stay. We will provide them covering fire, and they can take their chances like the rest of us.” He rolled his head back and rolled a pale blue eye up at Doc, who for some reason was reminded of a vulture.

  “Send the new recruits, Dix and Jak Lawrence, or whatever his name is.”

  “Lauren,” Doc corrected automatically. His lips were very dry.

  “Him. The albino. Let ’em earn their keep. And send a laser designator with them.”

  J.B. AND JAK BROKE from the side of MAGOG like startled quail and scuttled for the building fronts on the right-hand side of the train. Bullets cracked and ricochets zinged around them, and little dirt fountains spurted as they ran. Behind them MAGOG’s awesome firepower boomed a hearty reply.

  They slammed their backs right up against a blank concrete wall of a building. J.B. clutched his fedora to his head—they had both refused helmets—as a burst of launched 40 mm grens from an MK19 raked the second story over their heads and brought dust and fist-sized chunks of concrete cascading down on them.

  “Dark night!” he exclaimed. “We’re in more danger from our own rad-blasted side!”

  Scarred lips twisted in a snarl, Jak nodded toward the train. “Not on their side.”

  “What’s that? A pronoun? You must be serious.” He ducked as a shot from the buildings on the far side of the train pinged off the wall above their heads. “Right now I’m more on the side of the people inside the train shooting out than I am of the people outside the train shooting at us. Let’s move!”

  They ran along the building fronts, dodging around piles of slumped rubble too big to jump over. The train provided excellent cover on
their left. That was, until they passed the end of the train and had to dash on another two hundred yards in the clear.

  J.B. let Jak take the lead. The youth was toting a Franchi SPAS-12 riot shotgun while J.B. carried his own beloved Uzi. It didn’t have great range, but if somebody too far away seriously needed to die, the boys back in the rail wag turrets would do their enthusiastic best to oblige.

  For just a moment he wondered how the friends would ever get around the MAGOG bastards. A few hundred men had the firepower of a pre-war regiment. Then a white-hooded figure stepped out of a building ahead of them and raised a bolt-action longblaster, returning J.B. to the present in a hell of a hurry. Jak splashed the being with two rounds from the SPAS in semiauto mode.

  They ran on.

  “GREAT BIG RAIL WAG,” a voice crackled from the arm of the General’s chair. “This is your boys with their ass in the grass. We have the war wag in sight.”

  Hubertus and Nguyen both started to carp about proper radio procedure—the shocking lack thereof. The General held up a hand.

  “Ass in the Grass, this is the General. I read you loud and clear. What’s the status of the tank?”

  “Looks to be shy a track on the left-hand side, General. Can’t tell about the right. Don’t guess it matters.”

  The General smiled. “No. Don’t guess it does. You boys sit tight. Daddy’s coming. And make sure you keep it down in the grass so it doesn’t end up in a sling.”

  “EVERYBODY’S A COMEDIAN,” J.B. said to his talkie. He wasn’t thumbing the Send button. “Still, it’s too bad the old bastard’s such a bastard. Different circumstances, I could get to like him.”

  Just past the corner a long-dead wag lay on its side with its nose up against a squat concrete planter. It provided a nice convenient observation post for J.B. and Jak, both covered and concealed from the immobile but still lethal tank.

  “Look here,” Jak said.

  He was hunkered over the body of a white-hood who had caught a couple rounds from an M-60. The hood had fallen askew, revealing a head concealed by a midnight blue ski mask. A busted pair of shades lay slaunchways across the masked face.