by James Axler
The guards who held Ryan’s arms were watching in amazement and growing apprehension. They were apprehensive about the wrong thing.
With a powerful twist of his hips, Ryan yanked his left arm free. The guard on that side had let his grip go slacker than his buddy’s. Ryan instantly reversed the rotation of his hips and came back with a savage knife-hand strike that collapsed the guard’s windpipe.
Strangling on his own cartilage, the guard clutched his throat. The other guard leaped on Ryan’s back. He wrapped his arms around the one-eyed man’s head, clawing for his eye.
Ryan backed up hard against an oak-paneled wall, trying to dislodge the guard, who bit at the top of his head and began pummeling him with one hand.
Ryan staggered from the wall. He was punching back over his shoulder with one hand and trying to haul the man off with the other.
Hubertus appeared before him. The sides of the man’s tunic bulged and worked as if some creature trapped inside with him was trying desperately to escape. Then a side seam parted and a greenish jointed crustacean-claw unfolded, tipped with a sting like a scorpion’s tail. It lashed out at Ryan.
Ryan ducked and leaned forward. The sting sank into the sec man’s trapezius muscle just behind his left shoulder.
The man almost blew out Ryan’s eardrum with a bone-chilling shriek. Ryan threw him off, then dodged to his right to avoid a darting thrust as a second claw snapped as if spring-loaded from the intel chief’s other side. The poison tip struck the wall and stuck momentarily in the paneling.
The injured guard was howling as if he were on fire, spinning around the room, grabbing at the place where the stinger had gone home. Already his neck and shoulder were swelling with great purple-green buboes as the hematotoxin injected by the sting made the blood cells in his veins literally explode. His wild gyrations took him right into the General and knocked the .45-caliber handblaster the commander had just drawn spinning from his hand.
Hubertus’s glasses had fallen away. His eyes, rimmed in red and yellow, stood out on short fleshy stalks. The pupils were hooded slits in golden irises. The intel chief wrenched his claw free from the wood.
Ryan circled clockwise as he backed away from the monster. Something bumped the back of his leg.
The stricken guard’s screaming reached a crescendo as the whole left side of his neck ruptured. Blood already shot through with the black of corruption erupted and painted the low ceiling with arterial spray.
Ryan’s hand reached reflexively behind him. Heat seared his skin.
He grabbed the chafing dish by one brass leg and hurled it at Hubertus. Liquid fire soaked the front of his tunic.
The cloth blazed up as if it had been drenched in gasoline. Hubertus screamed. The skin and flesh of his face began to melt.
The intel chief burned with an acrid chemical stink. Ryan wondered in a flash whether it was flesh over the weird carapace or some clever plastic mask. Hubertus turned and ran blazing to the outer door. He yanked it open and flung himself from the train.
The General hit Ryan on the blind side, slamming him into the wall. The wood veneer split where Ryan’s head smashed into it. His vision wavered.
The General’s weight bore him down to the luxuriant carpet. The man was twenty years older than he, but powerfully muscled and fit.
“I am so fucking sick of you and all your fucking friends.” Every time he said “fucking” he hit Ryan with a brass lamp. Blood obscured Ryan’s eye. He grappled blindly for the hand that held the lamp.
“General,” the intercom yelped. “The track!”
The General paused with the lamp cocked and ready for another whack. “What about the fucking track?”
“It’s broken!”
Chapter Thirty-Two
With a convulsive shake of his head, Ryan cleared blood from his good eye and joined the General in staring at the big monitor.
The view field had shifted to show the bridge. At this magnification it was glaringly obvious how the tracks had been pried up and bent to run to the right of the bridge.
Straight off the sheer cliff above a thousand-foot drop.
The sight was enough to distract anyone. Even the General. And then the car lurched forward as the driver hit the brakes in a frenzied futile attempt to slow the monster engine.
Ryan dug his heels into the carpet and gave a mighty upward pelvic thrust. It didn’t dislodge the older man, but it did get him off balance and into position for Ryan to slam his right boot into the side of his head and knock him sprawling.
Ryan was up on all fours and scrambling wildly for the open door. The howl of the wind was like mocking laughter. Lying a few feet aside on the carpet was his SIG-Sauer. He veered aside just far enough to snag it in passing and then followed Hubertus out into the morning.
The General laboriously picked himself up. Locked steel wheels screamed like banshees. Krysty was back in frame on the monitor. She wasn’t even pretending to aim the wag-chiller anymore. It had only been a prop, an added distraction to keep MAGOG’s crew from noticing the diversion of the track before it was too late. Although by the time the train had come around the final bend before the gorge, given its enormous mass and length, it had almost certainly been too late already.
As the General stood, the tall redheaded woman looked up straight into the camera. It was as if their eyes met.
He came to attention and snapped off a perfect salute. And held it as MAGOG rushed off the edge and into space at forty miles an hour.
THE BRAKES WERE SINGING their last useless song. People were dropping off the train like ripe fruit in an orchard. Nonetheless, Krysty’s companions, including their tech-nomad helpers, stood up from the rocks where they had been hiding near the track to watch. It wasn’t the sort of thing you couldn’t watch.
The people baling off of MAGOG had other things on their minds anyway.
“There was good tech on that train,” Robear said. He had piloted one of the parasails.
“There were good people on that train,” Mildred added.
“Mebbe,” Jak said. “But helping do bad things.”
“Gone’s gone,” Corwin said. “I make it a habit never to miss what I never had, myself.”
J.B. removed his fedora. He couldn’t have said why.
“One thing I believe we may safely say, my friends,” Doc announced. “That is something one does not see every day.”
ON THE FAR SIDE of the train Ryan made himself go limp as he hit. He bounced, rolled, bounced, rolled. He felt an odd sense of detachment, as if this were happening to somebody else. He certainly had no control of the situation, or any hope of gaining any. He just went along and hoped he wouldn’t hit anything too big.
And that he’d stop rolling shy of the canyon.
AS THE ENGINE LAUNCHED itself on its final journey, Krysty began walking forward, heedless of the proximity of the linear avalanche of steel. Her safety didn’t matter now.
She wasn’t exultant. She felt a certain sense of completion. Mostly she felt a floating numbness, as if her feet had gone to sleep and could no more sense the track-bed beneath them.
The train was a waterfall of metal and noise. The noise of a mighty crash floated up from below, distance-softened but still loud, as the engine struck the valley floor. With a squealing, crunching, rending cacophony the train began to telescope and bend as more and more cars piled on.
She approached the end of the bridge. Still the cars swept by to their doom. People were flinging themselves off, heedless of the speed.
The last car passed. She saw a figure clinging to the rear. A familiar figure.
Waving.
Grinning like a boy with a brand-new toy, Paul the Rail Ghost shouted something to her. She would live out the rest of her life believing she had somehow heard him say, “Lookit, Krysty! I really did catch the last train for the coast!”
And then they were dropping away, he and his beloved behemoth. With the roar of its motion gone, the crunching and grinding from th
e bottom of the gorge sounded almost subdued.
Another figure was rolling along the ground toward her. A man who had possessed enough sense to relax and just let himself roll, rather than stiffen his limbs so they’d shatter on impact. Her friends were approaching from her left, calling out to her.
The man stopped almost at the toes of her boots. A blue eye looked up at her.
A single blue eye.
“Morning, lover,” Ryan said to her. “Nice day for a little spin.”
She sagged. The strength went out of her knees. She folded down beside him. He sat up and caught her.
Their lips joined in a kiss that lasted a lifetime.
Standing nearby beside his gaping friends, Jak nodded in quiet satisfaction.
“See?” he said. “Said Ryan not dead!”
ISBN: 978-1-4603-7334-7
VENGEANCE TRAIL
Copyright © 2005 by Worldwide Library.
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