Vengeance Trail

by James Axler

  Jak had run the mask’s lower edge up the side of the chill’s face, using the tip of the former Hole’s former Bowie knife, which he had kept as a trophy of his Tucumcari adventure. Actually, the armory more kept it in trust for him, and issued it back to him when he was let out to fight.

  What was being revealed was a chin and cheek and nose that looked entirely normal, except for being the same chalk-white as Jak’s. “Relative of yours?” J.B. joked.

  Jak slipped the mask up farther to reveal a blue eye staring intently at nothing in particular. “Not so good-looking,” he said.

  Behind them came the squeal of metal on metal under the pressure of enormous weight, loud even over the gun battle still going on. “Here comes train,” Jak commented.

  “Time to do the deed,” J.B. said. He lay flat on his belly and slithered to peer around the edge of the planter. He brought the little laser pointer up by his face, aimed it at the tank and pressed the button.

  DOC COULD FEEL the tension mount as the train crept back toward the corner. As near as he understood it, the General needed to knock out the tank before it landed a penetrating hit on the engine. The fusion power plant wouldn’t explode even if it took a direct hit, he gathered. But it couldn’t be repaired. Not even MAGOG’s library held sufficient data for that, and probably no one alive had the skill to fix it anyway.

  They were themselves at risk, should the gunners get a shot at the command car. That didn’t concern him. Neither did the fate of the General’s engine. He was worried about Jak and John Barrymore.

  At least the great train’s umbrella of fire had kept them safe so far. And when MAGOG hove into view, it was highly unlikely the tankers would spare much thought for the pair even if they somehow became aware of them.

  The empty plaza approached. “‘For what we are about to receive,’” Doc quoted a Royal Navy prayer ancient in his own time, “‘dear Lord, make us thankful.’”

  “MAGOG-Six, Alpha-One. We have acquisition, we have a tone!” Doc could hear a buzzing in the background of the talkie call.

  “Fire, dammit!” the General barked. Alpha-One already had.

  So did the Abrams. Its 120 mm main blaster roared and ejaculated flame, rocking the sixty-ton monster back on its suspension. The shell struck with almost mathematical precision.

  In the center of the rubble-clearing blade.

  The shaped-charge warhead went off, turning the copper lining the inverted cone molded into the front of the charge into a jet of high-velocity plasma. It burned a hole the size of an old fifty-cent piece right through the heavy steel blade. In the interval of open air between blade and MAGOG’s armored prow, as brief as it was, the incandescent stream lost heat and velocity with dramatic swiftness. Such that when it actually reached MAGOG’s hull, all it did was spray-paint a pretty, shiny copper circle on the metal.

  The Hellfire missile launched from Alpha-One’s rack, however, homing on the tiny laser spot J.B. was shining on the tank, struck the turret ring and blew the Abrams’s turret right off.

  THE DATA RECOVERY TEAM had a brisk time of it going into the building to which Hubertus’s analysis directed them. The sunlight-hating defenders, whatever they were—humans with some shared skin disease, muties, health cultists who worried way too much about melanoma—fought with wildly assorted weapons and not much skill, but tenaciously. The MAGOG sec men picked were expert at their craft, which was chilling, and they had the blasters, the bullets and the grens to do it. They left eight men cooling to ambient temperature, and brought back nine wounded, three of whom would die later. But they also brought back a Zip disk in a special lead-lined, Faraday-cage case.

  Before the train had fully backed out of the DFC, the General had his heart’s desire. Not the Great Redoubt itself, yet, but the key, the ultimate key: the redoubt’s exact location, and how to get inside.

  Only the General himself and Hubertus were permitted in the General’s sitting room when the disk was read on a laptop not connected to the train’s local network. But before the train had rolled out of Denver south, word had flashed the length of the train.

  The Great Redoubt was in south Cali. Somewhere that hadn’t fallen into the Cific.

  From prior exploration, MAGOG’s crew knew the rail lines through Vada were too badly cut up to fix or find a way through. The quickest route west lay south.

  Through Taos, in what had been New Mexico.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  His sawed-off Izhmash 12-gauge double-aught gun snugged in its holster beneath his unwashed left armpit, his Mini-14 riding in a sheath strapped to his Fat Bob gas tank, Hogan, late of Noo Berdoo and Chato’s nameless army, made his break for it.

  It was a leisurely break, at least here in its earliest stages. He rode at a walking pace down a knife-blade canyon, actually a cleft split out from the side of a mesa, so narrow he could stretch out his long arms and almost touch the striated sandstone walls with his fingertips. In case he wanted to fall over. His big sled wasn’t really made for cross-country work, and was none too stable at this pace, but he didn’t dare crowd it any faster.

  Since making good his escape from the goat-screw the attack on the armored train had turned into, he had been hiding out on top of a mesa twenty miles to the northeast. It was getting warm up there, and he was getting low on water.

  It was in his mind to split back for the Coast. Odds were his erstwhile bros had cooled down a bit in his absence. Or with any luck they were all dead—whatever. He’d had a bellyful of the desert and the weird-ass crazies a man encountered therein.

  At last he reached the bottom. He hit the accelerator. The big bike responded with a characteristic farty roar. Soft sand sprayed in a roostertail as his back tire spun and launched him toward the mouth of the cleft twenty feet away. The open road beckoned. He let out a wolf howl of triumph.

  As he charged out of the cleft, a black-leather-clad arm chopped down over his ape-hanger bars from the side and clotheslined him neatly, busting his nose and somersaulting over his seat to the pale sand.

  THE BIG BIKE ROLLED a few more feet and toppled over. Ryan watched it dispassionately.

  Thanks again, Far Walker, he thought. The Little One and the rest of his tribe were miles away, but Ryan reckoned the little shaman could hear him right enough. Despite his refusal to guarantee accuracy of any of the prophetic visions Ryan had received on their shared spirit journey, this one had panned out just right.

  With a grunt of effort, Ryan hauled the bike upright again. He had to be careful; his clavicle was still sore, and the banging he’d gotten from the armored bear hadn’t done it any good, even though nothing had gotten broken or rebroken. He forked the tiny saddle and rolled back to the fallen rider, wheels crunching in the sand.

  Moaning, the biker raised his shaved head. Ryan kicked him in the temple, but not hard enough to break his neck. Probably. The coldheart subsided.

  Ryan dropped the kickstand, dismounted and walked to where his own traps waited behind a bush. He pulled the biker’s panniers off the rack over the rear tire, dropped them to the ground, then lashed his own pack in their place. The one-eyed man drew the Mini-14 from its sheath and threw it onto the half-conscious biker’s chest. He slipped his own Steyr SSG into its place.

  Finally he took an extra water jug—a clay pot with a basket woven around it that could be soaked with water to keep it cool by evaporation—he’d brought from the Little Ones’ settlement and tossed it to the sand beside the prostrate biker.

  “Sorry,” he said. He swung a long, lean leg over the bike again, gunned the engine and was gone in a swirl of dust.

  “TAOS,” PAUL EXPLAINED as they coasted, gratefully resting their weary legs, down the last grade toward the ville, “is one of your bigger villes between the coasts. It’s a rendezvous for pilgrims off the Plains as well as the mountain men, woods runners, coldhearts, and all the other curious two-legged fauna that range the Rocks. Ol’ baron’s notorious for welcoming anyone, man or mutie, so long as they
got jack or goods to pay for their stay.”

  They had pushed hard to make the prophesied rendezvous, Paul seeming as driven as she. Unlike the earlier stages of their journey, in which they had been following MAGOG directly, they had encountered frequent breaks in the track. Strangely, these worked to their advantage. While MAGOG had to stop at every break and wait for repairs to be made, it was easy enough for Krysty and Paul to portage the Paul Yawl to intact line. If necessary, they could even take off the baffles that held the little craft to the rails and pedal to the next good section on its bicycle tires, which had solid cores themselves, and never went flat. Mad and obsessed he might be, but Paul was a certifiable genius as designer and builder.

  They rolled around a hip of mountain cloaked in tall Ponderosa pines and saw the ville then. The usual straggle of shacks and reclaimed ruins dominated a sprawling multiple-storied adobe structure like a combination fortress and apartment block. Krysty’s heart gave a quick pulse.

  MAGOG was here.

  Paul made a strange, soft sound. “Looks like you done it, missy.”

  She smiled at him through sudden tears. “We did it.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t remind me.”

  They stashed the Yawl in the ruins of an old motel outside the current limits of the ville. Krysty twisted her hair into a knot and covered it with the cap she’d taken from the dead deserter. Then she shouldered her pack and M-16, and she and Paul walked the rest of the way along the track.

  On their approach she had noticed strange platforms dotted along what seemed to be paths into the ville. Although no one appeared to be watching the tracks, and from the way weeds grew up alongside and between the tracks, obscuring them from view, she judged that here as elsewhere people paid them little mind. But beside it stood a tall pole with an outsized wagon wheel nailed to the top of it like a piss-poor attempt at a windmill. With a start, Krysty realized there was a twisted half-mummified corpse attached to the wheel. On the other side of the track stood a more conventional gallows pole, with a partial skeleton, still clad in the faded and tattered remnants of a frock coat, dangling from a rope. As they approached, a raven perched atop the gibbet uttered a dismal cry and flapped off.

  Krysty turned a questioning look to Paul. He shrugged.

  “I should mention he welcomes anybody as obeys his laws, as well as can pay,” he said. “Brutal but fair, the baron of Taos.”

  NUMB, WITH A SENSE of almost floating unreality, Krysty pushed her way through the throng of gawkers and sec men toward the great gleaming train. The bracing mountain air was freighted with the smells of unwashed bodies and piñon smoke. And worse, apparently the baron focused his mania on law and order at the expense of considerations such as a working sewer system. Paul trotted at her elbow, pale and drawn.

  “How do you think the baron feels about this General and his rail wag?” she asked.

  “Baron’s a realist,” Paul said. He was double glum because even from a distance it was obvious the General had set sentries on the ground and atop the cars to discourage the curious from getting close enough to touch MAGOG. They hadn’t had to shoot while Paul and Krysty were watching. Largely because no one doubted they would in the first place. “Guess he reckons an armored train with the firepower to level his whole ville, ice down all him and all his sec men, all their relatives, and ever’body in the whole wide world so much as looks like ’em, all without working up a sweat, can pay its way sorta by definition.”

  “There’s something I still don’t understand,” she said. “I’ve been wondering more and more why more people don’t use the rails. The fact the lines are mostly forgotten doesn’t quite seem to explain it.”

  “Well, it’s one thing to travel light, like we been doin’ and the tech-nomads do, with vehicles and goods that you can portage past breaks. It’s another to carry enough goods to make trade pay. That’s why the tech-nomads deal in services and little gadgets. The General, now, he has unique advantages.”

  They had almost reached the juncture of the line they had arrived on and the one which MAGOG had followed down the Grandee valley from Denver. The great lead engine gleamed in the morning sun. Paul paused and wiped a tear from his eye, overwhelmed.

  “He’s got fusion power and carloads of pre-war supplies, plus plenty of manpower and the means to get more, and he spends half his time stopped to fix the line. Which, after all, is why we…why we caught him.”

  She stopped and touched his arm. “Better we split here,” she said in a throaty voice. “Won’t do you any good to be seen with me.”

  “You sure you know what you’re doin’?”

  “No. Only what I have to do.”

  “Wait.” He flicked furtive glances up and down the narrow mucky lane, then stepped back into a noisome narrow alley. She followed him warily.

  His hand fished in the pocket of his coat and came up with a heart-shaped locket on a silver chain. “Take this.”

  “Why Paul, how sweet.” She opened it. It contained a portrait of a handsome woman in a high-collared blouse, painstakingly hand-painted in miniature. It looked as if it were decades old, not centuries—not a survival from predark days.

  “Thank you. Who is it?”

  “Nobody. Just never mind. What’s important is this.”

  He reached out, tapped a tiny stud barely visible on the left-hand lobe of the heart-shaped case. “This’ll call any tech-nomads within a twenty-mile radius.”

  He shut the locket, then pressed another button on the right lobe. A tiny red light began to blink from the top. “That means there’s tech-nomads within twenty miles of here. Friendly ones, at least to me. Gotta be cautious with strangers, though. Not all those tales you hear are false.”

  He shut off the light. She paused, staring down at the locket.

  “I can’t take this and leave you no way to contact your friends.”

  He laughed. “Why, missy, whatever makes you think that’s the only way I got to reach ’em? I told you, I’m a gadget kinda guy. Just naturally tend to collect ’em. Even when they don’t got anything to do with trains.”

  She smiled and slipped the chain around her neck. Then she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Thank you, Paul. For everything.”

  She started to turn away. He caught her by the arm. She swung back, surprised. It was the first time since they had met that he had laid a hand on her.

  “Chill him,” he said in a voice clotted with emotion. “Bastard defiled the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen or ever will see. Spreadin’ slavery, death and misery, all in the name of doin’ good. Chill him.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I will.”

  She walked away without looking back.

  THE GUARDS EYED HER appreciatively, but warily, as she approached a car several wags back of the engine that had a door open. “That’s close enough,” one called. “What do you want?”

  “Looking to sign on,” she said.

  “Shee-it,” said the other guard. “I was hoping the local gaudy made outcalls.”

  “Don’t pay him no mind,” said the first guard, who was older and harder-looking. “His momma dropped him on his head. He ain’t right. Why you want to enlist, anyway?”

  “Tired of scavvin’ and scufflin’. Three hots and a cot a day sound pretty good, and bein’ a train trooper can’t be no more dangerous than the way I been living.” Which, she reflected, was if anything an understatement.

  “You wanna be, like, a comfort-gal, mebbe?” the second soldier asked hopefully.

  She glared at him until he wilted. “I can fight. Better’n most.”

  “You can, huh?” the older sec man said. He nodded with his chin. “Know how to use that longblaster?”

  “I’d be triple stupe to lug it around if I didn’t, now, wouldn’t I?”

  “Well, you got the sand in your craw for the life, anyway. And bringing your own weps… But it ain’t my say-so.”

  He stood up off the step. “C’mon aboard and talk to the sarg
e.”

  As she put one of her blue cowboy boots up on the brief metal stairs, he leaned forward. She recoiled, dropping a hand toward her concealed handblaster.

  “Keep it lifted, girl. You ain’t local, are you?”

  “Do I look like a nuke-sucking ville rat?”

  He smirked. “You get signed on, come by some evening after duty and I’ll tell you what you look like. No, it’s just that we got orders not to let no local yokels onboard without we hose ’em down. They all smell like last week’s dreck. You pass the sniff test. So move it along, sweetcheeks.”

  HOPING AGAINST HOPE that Sergeant Banner’s falcon-sharp eyes wouldn’t catch the gesture, Mildred put out a hand to support herself against the stainless-steel top of an examination table.

  “Come on in, recruit.” Fortunately a doctor learned to mask her emotions with brisk professionalism long before leaving med school. “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Marcy, ma’am,” Krysty Wroth said.

  The redhead was playing ingenue country girl to the hilt. Ingenue by Deathlands standards, anyway. It didn’t stop her exuding that don’t-fuck-with-me menace that was baseline for anybody who ventured out into the devastated and desperate world on their own, except for full-metal-jacket coldhearts and a few dedicated pacifists.

  With her clear skin and fresh face she did a fair job of passing as a woman in her early twenties or even late teens. She was aided by the shocking amount of weight she had lost in the weeks since Mildred had seen her. Never remotely plump, Krysty was so pared down it gave her limbs an appearance of near-adolescent coltishness.

  “If you’d excuse us, Sergeant,” Mildred told Banner.

  He shook his head. “You know better.”

  Mildred grimaced. But she knew it was standard operating procedure that a new recruit be supervised constantly by someone in authority until the powers-that-be were satisfied he—or occasionally she—wasn’t some kind of coldheart infiltrator or vengeance-bent survivor of one of their casual atrocities in the name of “progress.”