Vengeance Trail

by James Axler

  Her hands were quickly pulled behind her back and fastened with nylon restraints. The General, the breast of his own jacket sodden with gore, was holding a handkerchief to Helton’s wound. The young captain was assuring his superior he was all right, although his ashen complexion belied him.

  “Marc, Marc,” the General murmured. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. You saved my life.”

  He drew the captain’s head down and kissed the side of his forehead. “Go to the infirmary and get yourself treated,” he said.

  “But, sir—”

  “Now. That wasn’t a suggestion, Captain. You, there. Quit cradling your gonads and help the captain to the med car. I got hit worse than you did, and I’m standing straight upright like a true man.”

  Reluctantly, Helton allowed himself to be led aft by the wobbly-legged guard, holding the napkin pressed to his wound. The General turned to his intel chief, who looked pretty poorly despite the fact he was one of only two people in the room not to have sustained some kind of injury.

  “Hubertus,” the General said with a ghastly smile, “why don’t you start softening my future consort up a little as we finish taking on supplies? Keep in mind, if you break anything, or leave any marks that still show in the morning, I’ll broil you in your own grease.”

  The intel chief stiffened and his mouth got even more pinched than before.

  The General gave Krysty a look that froze her blood. “We got the secret of the redoubt in Denver,” he said deliberately, “and this bitch has the secret of that matter-transfer network you’re so hot for tucked away beneath those twitching red tresses. We have all the time in the world to get it from her, you and I, which means we no longer need her friends, doesn’t it, Hubertus?”

  Hubertus got a weird little triangle smile. “I believe that is correct, Your Excellency.”

  The General nodded brusquely. “All right. Have your men round them up and lock them down. Tonight after we get under way have them shot off the train.”

  “Tonight, Your Excellency?”

  “No need to alarm the good people of the ville. Hearts and minds, Hubertus. Hearts and minds.”

  “MARC! MY GOD, what happened?”

  He grinned weakly. “I seem to’ve gotten in the way of a stray bullet,” he said.

  He was leaning on one of Hubertus’s nasty sec men. That man didn’t look too chipper, either, but he wasn’t bleeding anywhere Mildred could see. She got Marc onto a table and shooed the sec man out.

  “You want to tell me how it happened?” she asked, cutting away Marc’s blouse with a pair of broken-nosed medical scissors.

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “I mean, no. I can’t tell you how it happened.”

  She flicked her eyes sideways to his face. His expression was bleak in a way that she had never seen it before.

  She got the blouse off, forcing herself to be professional about the buff lean upper torso thereby revealed. The bullet had punched through his deltoid just inboard of his left shoulder. It had evidently missed the joint; he was moving the arm on his own, wincing when he did.

  “Stop fidgeting. Oldest medical advice on record—if it hurts when you do it, don’t do it. Now, can you at least tell me what you got nailed with? Or is that classified, too?”

  “Handblaster. A .38 Special, I think.”

  She swabbed the entry wound with alcohol. There was no exit. Probing with the rapid ruthlessness required by trauma treatment, she quickly ascertained that the soft lead slug had struck a rib, cracked without breaking it, and traveled around to come to rest at the edge of his scapula, right beneath the skin.

  Had she been back in her own time. she would’ve packed him off to the surgeons. Given where she was, and who her patient was…

  She dabbed alcohol over the lump, picked up a steel kidney pan and a scalpel. “Marc, I’m going to do a little minor surgery. It won’t take any time at all. Would you like a local anesthetic?”

  “And spoil my tough-guy image?” This time his grin was as brilliant as ever. He looked as if he’d done no more than stripped off his shirt to catch a few rays of mountain sun.

  “All right, Rambo.” She made a quick deft cut.

  The bullet popped into the pan with a clang. It was hardly deformed. The site bled barely at all.

  Which was fortunate, because a sudden horrified insight had transfixed Mildred.

  Krysty’s hideout S&W was a .38.

  She looked at him, feeling the blood drain away from her own face. He looked away.

  Quickly she stitched the incision, cleaned it, covered it with a pressure pad and wrapped Marc’s shoulder in a bandage. “We’re going to put your wing in a sling, Captain,” she said, nattering to keep from asking the questions that were churning her guts. “Need to discourage you from flapping it around.”

  The door to the infirmary opened. Four men stood there in full battle dress, including Fritz helmets and overgarment bulletproof vests that looked like something baseball umpires wore. Two had little MP-5 K machine pistols, one a Benelli autoloading shotgun, the fourth a holstered Beretta and a set of ready restraints. All wore the gorgets of Hubertus’s sec force.

  “What’s going on?” Marc demanded, rising.

  “We’ve come to arrest the healer,” the sec man with the handblaster said. His eyes wouldn’t meet Marc’s. “General’s orders, Captain Helton.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The whip struck Krysty’s naked buttock and curled around it in a slither of silk. It stung like a scorpion’s sting.

  She ground her teeth together and glared at her tormentor.

  Hubertus tittered. “You are tough and resilient. Excellent, excellent. Challenge adds spice to the game.”

  The car in front of the detention wag was the interrogation car. It was very comprehensive. Much of it consisted of a single large open compartment, with stainless-steel walls and a floor that sloped downward gently to a drain. Brackets jutted from strategic points on the ceiling, floors and walls. Along one wall was an extra-wide sliding door, to facilitate discreet disposal of prisoners who were used up in the course of their questioning.

  Krysty’s wrists were suspended from two overhead brackets by special manacles padded to avoid so much as bruising her pale skin. Similar anklets on her legs held her ankles wide apart. She was naked.

  The intel chief walked around to stand in front of her. There were strange stirrings beneath his tunic, as if agitated animals were in there with him.

  He brandished the long-handled whip. “You imagine that you can hold out. You have endured torture before, yes?” He tittered again. “You have been anticipated. This device—and certain others—have been designed especially to break down the resistance of just such as yourself. All without leaving a lasting mark. On the outside, that is.”

  He flicked the end of the lash lightly against the exposed lips of her sex. She bit her lip. Holding the lash against the handle with his gloved hand he ran the end of the handle down the inside of her right thigh.

  “A wonderful contrivance, this whip. Deceptively simple in appearance. Silk, specially weighted, thin enough to…stimulate the nerves without cutting your skin. Which is really quite remarkably tough and resilient itself. You might think this is an artifact of our own violent time. You would be wrong—such cunning work requires skill and resources quite unavailable today. This, like MAGOG itself, dates from the lost days before the big war. Indeed, like most of the rest of the appurtenances here in my thoroughly soundproofed playroom, the General found it along with the original train.”

  He stepped close. “The General is infatuated with you,” he said, voice trembling with barely suppressed rage. “He’s coddling you. But believe me—in time he’ll grow tired of you. He’ll give over this ridiculous notion of getting an heir to his empire-to-be on you. And when that day comes…you will be fully mine.

  “In the meantime—” he reached up and caught a pink nipple with
his fingers, pinched and twisted it so cruelly Krysty couldn’t prevent a gasp escaping her lips “—I still can plumb the limits of what you can endure. And exceed them.”

  AN ENDLESS TIME LATER, after the sun had set, the intercom in the interrogation chamber chimed. Hubertus’s face twitched in annoyance. “Yes?”

  “This is the General. How’s the reeducation of our recalcitrant guest coming?”

  The intel chief scowled at the limp form hanging from the ceiling. “She’s lapsed into unconsciousness.” He didn’t mention that she had done so without ever letting him hear her scream. “I was just on the point of reviving her to continue our session.”

  “Don’t bother,” the General said brusquely. “We’re getting under way. Send her to the cells.”

  “The cells?”

  A gravelly chuckle. “Let’s let her feel the hope and joy of being reunited with her friends. Then let her see them being marched off to die. The way to break a wire is to keep bending it, back and forth.”

  Hubertus paused. Then he smiled. “And I thought I was the sadist. It shall be as you command, Your Excellency.”

  THE DETENTION CAR contained an administrative area, a guard ready room and six cells isolated from the other compartments. Since being brought aboard MAGOG, Jak had enjoyed the block pretty much to himself. For minor offenses, Banner and his NCOs preferred informal punishments, often as not administered by Banner’s granite fists.

  J.B., Mildred, and Doc now shared the block with their young albino friend.

  “What now, my friends?” Doc inquired in a sonorous voice. “Pleased as I am at our reunion, I fear we shall not be vouchsafed long to savor it.”

  With a slight shock as slack was taken up in the coupling, the car began to move.

  “Let’s be a little cautious, here,” Mildred said. “The block may be bugged. Probably is, given what the train was designed for in the first place.”

  “What bastards do,” Jak asked, “chill us for talking? Gonna chill soon anyway.”

  “You’re right,” J.B. said. “But so’s Millie. We don’t want to tip our hand.”

  “Our options would appear extremely limited,” Doc said, “unless we encompass abandoning our flame-haired friend.”

  “No way,” Mildred said. “All or none.”

  “Reckon we all feel that way,” J.B. said. “But just for the sake of argument, if we could get shut of here—not like we could or anything—what’re the chances we could spring Krysty? Seems to me like lettin’ ourselves get iced down without trying to help her is just another way of abandoning her.”

  “The General spoke often of our fair Miss Wroth during the times I was his kept companion,” Doc said. “It seemed he developed rather an unhealthy obsession with her—perhaps the more so when he imagined her to be dead. She appears to have come to play a premiere role in his fantasy life.”

  “Which is to say he’s gonna guard her like his own personal living sex toy,” Mildred said grimly.

  “Inelegantly put, Doctor. Yet true in all essentials.”

  Jak was lying on his bunk watching Fist of the North Star with the sound down. The animated original, not the lame live-action version, which MAGOG also offered. He’d watched the vid enough he’d memorized all the dialogue anyway.

  “Stop yakking,” he said, “guard coming.”

  An instant later the door slid open. Four of the sec men came in, two supporting a semiconscious Krysty. She was dressed in her usual clothing, which she’d worn aboard, minus the ball cap. They thrust her down on the bunk of the cell between the ones occupied by Doc and J.B., locked her down and left without a word.

  “Krysty!” Mildred called. “Krysty, are you all right? Talk to me.”

  The woman lay on her face. Her hair hung limp to the floor, like normal hair. “Krysty!” Mildred shouted.

  She stirred. Slowly she raised her head, as if it weighed a hundred pounds. “Mildred,” she whispered. “I’m so glad to…see you again. All…of you.”

  “What on earth did they do to you, girl?”

  “Tried to…make me scream,” she said, laboring for every word. “They failed.”

  Painfully she sat up, ignoring Mildred’s urging her to take it easy. She began to massage her wrists.

  “Well,” J.B. said, “on the bright side, that’s one hurdle down.”

  He sat on his own bunk, crossed his leg and began to work on the heel of one boot.

  “John Barrymore,” Doc said, “I fear this latest development might not be a hopeful portent.”

  The Armorer looked at him from under his eyebrows. “Meaning what?”

  “Since our arrival at this remarkable conveyance, we have been kept most scrupulously separated. And now we are united, including Krysty. Does that not strike you as ominous?”

  J.B. shrugged. “Then I guess we best strike while the iron’s hot.” He twisted off the boot heel, which had been hollowed out. Inside was concealed a length of det cord. He shook it into the palm of his hand, stuck in the pocket of his leather jacket, then replaced the heel. He went to work on the other heel.

  The forward door slid open again. Banner entered, followed by two sec men, one armed with a Remington pump shotgun, the other a Benelli. “Good,” the sergeant said to Krysty. “You’re awake.”

  She licked her lips. “Why is that good?” she croaked.

  “So you can tell your pals goodbye. The rest of you, up on your feet. It’s time to die.”

  J.B. crossed his arms. “Supposing we don’t feel like cooperating?”

  Banner held up a Taser. “I zap your ass. We carry you. Then you die. Your choice—easy or hard.”

  The far door into the compartment opened. A man stepped in.

  Banner frowned. “Captain Helton. You shouldn’t be here, sir. This is a special detail. General’s orders.”

  Marc wore crisp fatigues and the spotless white sling Mildred had provided him with. “I know what the General ordered, Sergeant,” he said. “But there’s been a change.”

  “I wasn’t informed, sir.”

  “I was. We’re to take the new prisoner along.”

  Banner raised a dark eyebrow at the word “we.” “Take her along?” he said.

  “So she can watch, Sergeant. The General feels it will be highly…therapeutic.”

  “MARC, YOU BASTARD,” Mildred said quietly. “I was so wrong about you. I never imagined you were capable of something like this.”

  Their hands bound behind them by nylon restraints, all five had been marched back to the interrogation chamber. It was dark except for blackout pin lights, appropriately blood-colored, gleaming like mutie rat eyes at the junctures of walls and floor. The two sec men had slid the oversized door open. Trees rushed past outside, black in the night. Chill mountain air blasted in.

  J.B. tipped his head so that the brim of his fedora hid most of his face from his captors. He caught Jak’s ruby eye and winked.

  Jak smiled enough to just show his eyeteeth. Understanding was immediate and total. There was no plan—except that they wouldn’t die without a fight.

  “I never thought I was either, Mildred,” the young captain said. “But I’ve always been one to do my duty, however distasteful. Sergeant Banner?”

  The sergeant had taken up station by the open door, ready to usher the guests outside, one by one. He looked to Helton. “Sir?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Without haste Helton raised his hand. In it was his blocky black Heckler & Koch USP.

  The flash filled the compartment with brilliant reflection. The sound was surprisingly flat, the edge seemingly taken off by the wind-blast eddying through the compartment.

  A black hole appeared between Banner’s black brows. He flung his arms out to his side as if to balance himself and toppled backward into the night.

  Helton pivoted. The two sec men gaped, stunned by this incomprehensible spasm of events. He shot one once, through the sternum, shifted, shot the other twice in the chest, then snapped back and f
ired another shot into the center of mass of the first man.

  Both collapsed. They had made no more noise than Banner.

  Wind howled in from the void.

  Helton holstered his blaster. He moved behind Mildred and freed her wrists. She went at once to the swaying Krysty, steadied her, helped her to sit down on the floor.

  The captain liberated J.B. next. As Helton moved on to Doc, J.B. quickly picked up the dead sec man’s Remington and racked the slide. An intact shell dropped out the bottom. Not trusting a sec man’s blaster handling, the Armorer had insured his blaster had a live one up the spout. He leveled it from the waist on Helton.

  The captain looked at him, eyebrow raised. Then he finished releasing Doc and went to free Jak. Finally he knelt behind Krysty and undid her wrists.

  Jak had the Benelli now and pointed it at the captain. J.B. had tipped his weapon up to point at the ceiling.

  “Careful where you point that scattergun, son,” J.B. said gently. Realizing he was covering both Mildred and Krysty as well as Helton, Jak hastily lowered the weapon.

  Helton stood facing Mildred. “Perhaps you’ve corrupted me,” he said. “I like to think not, though. I’d like to think I’ve always retained some standards of honorable—if not always decent—behavior. But thanks for your moral guidance, just the same.”

  He took her hand. J.B. moved to her side and put his arm around her waist.

  “You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Dix,” Helton said. He kissed Mildred’s hand and stepped back.

  “You are free to go, obviously. I suggest that you do so as quickly as possible. I do have one favor to ask—do not try to harm the General. I don’t feel in my heart that I’ve betrayed him—rather, that I’ve spared him from besmirching himself for no good reason. And I will not betray him.”

  “I’m still going to kill him,” Krysty said. Her head was up, her voice clear. “You, too, for that matter.”

  “Now, Krysty—” J.B. said.

  Helton smiled at her. “All I can say is, take your best shot and welcome, Krysty Wroth. But from outside MAGOG.”

  Her eyes locked his. He didn’t flinch. She nodded. “You have yourself a deal, Captain. And—thanks.”