Vengeance Trail

by James Axler

  She seated herself gingerly on the stool. The red-ant bites no longer throbbed with that weird, expansive intensity such acid-laden bites left in their wake, but the wounds still felt raw, and the muscles of her groin and thigh ached from the venom’s aftereffects. Ben’s cooling corpse was softer than the floor, so Krysty rested her boots on him while she ate.

  As she ate, she thought about what she had learned and what it meant to her quest.

  A train! she thought wonderingly. She’d seen the tracks her whole life without thinking much of them—just another artifact from the strange lost days before skydark. A track even ran right behind the abandoned diner and gas station and she had never even taken note of it, except as a terrain feature, and the fact that the endless miniature ridge on which it was laid offered potential cover and concealment. It was just part of the landscape. She had never really thought somebody might be able to use the rails to travel any particular distance. Sure, she’d heard the legends of wild tribes of folk who actually traveled the lines on marvelous wags, paying no mind to the world to either side of the narrow right of way, and of course discounted them as legend.

  And here was this General with his giant train, armored and fusion-powered, trying to reconquer America—and killing her man and kidnapping her friends to do it.

  She shook her head. Her locks writhed sympathetically around her shoulders. Matt and Ben were right about one thing: he was a crazy old nukesucker.

  That datum was of limited use: pretty much all barons were crazy, and she also concurred he was no different from most. Just more mobile.

  The real problem from her viewpoint was that mobility. She had been correct in her surmise that the wags of the raiders who had hit them—was it only that day?—were returning to a nearby base. But that base wouldn’t stay put. And she couldn’t hope to pace a train on foot.

  But the train called MAGOG was stopped now, the deserters said. That was why they had scooped up the hapless travelers, and carefully picked only the ones who looked fit for physical labor. They couldn’t go anywhere until they fixed a break in the line.

  She wished she’d been able to string them along longer, pump even more information out of them. Oh, well. If wishes were wings, she’d be circling over the train right this instant, scoping things out like a falcon looking to stoop down and score.

  There’d been no way. Young Matt had been just about to lose it and go for the cheese right then and there. And Krysty wouldn’t submit to that, vengeance or no vengeance.

  An owl hooted somewhere out in the night, beyond the busted-out front window. The wind had come up again, temporarily scouring out the stale death smell and replacing it, temporarily, with the astringent odors of dust and dry vegetation. She finished her meal without having tasted a scrap of it, and set down her fork.

  She would find the train and do what she had to do. If the train was gone, mebbe the marauders would have left some wags behind. If not…

  She shrugged. She could come up with possible bad outcomes from now until dawn, from now until she died of old age, for that matter. Not one of them would make her road any shorter or easier to walk.

  She sighed, stood, wiped the soles of her boots carefully on an unbloodied area of Ben’s blouse to make sure the soles weren’t wet and slick from blood. She was going to have to drag the corpses outside. They were going to draw scavengers from miles around. She couldn’t lock the diner, with the windows gone and all, but there was no point inviting hungry predators inside.

  If the chase went on long, she’d need all the barter goods she could find. Krysty knelt and began to rifle through Ben’s effects for items of value.

  Chapter Four

  “Ah,” the General said in satisfaction, leaning back in a red plush chair and sipping from a goblet of brandy. “It’s definitely a rare treat to encounter a man of your culture out here in the wasteland, Doctor Tanner.”

  Doc started to reply around a mouthful of apple and cinnamon omelet and toast that he would have found ambrosial had it been served to him back in his very own long-lost house in nineteenth-century Vermont by the beloved and equally lost hand of his wife Emily. Instead it had been dished out by the hand of a solemn stone-faced servant from a brass chafing dish heated by a little cup of clear, odorless, smokeless burning fuel.

  Realizing that standard Deathlands etiquette would hardly answer these circumstances, Doc hurriedly finished chewing and swallowed, not without regret for the unseemly haste. Covering his mouth, just for security’s sake, by pretending to dab it clean with a spotless white-linen napkin, he nodded and replied. “I might say the same, General. I might well indeed.”

  They sat in oak-paneled and comfort-conditioned splendor, two men of knowledge at ease with one each other and their world, taking their breakfast and engaging in the art of conversation. Even for a man of Theophilus Tanner’s unique experience, it was one of the most—what was that eminently useful modern word?—surreal moments of them all.

  The General—that was how he had been introduced and the only way Doc had heard him spoken of—was a short burly man with buzzed grizzled hair and features that might have been carved from granite by a skilled but hasty sculptor. Even taking his ease with an apparent act of will, the enormous vigor that animated him was evident. He was a man made for action. Right now he wore a maroon robe over white pajamas with blue pinstripes. On the right breast of the robe was sewn a patch showing a fierce eagle clutching lightning bolts and weapons, with a stars-and-stripes shield over its own breast. Above it arced the legend Mobile Anti-Guerrilla Operations Group. Below it was embossed the acronym MAGOG.

  “I trust you find your accommodations to your liking, Professor,” the General said, allowing his steward, a tall, olive-skinned man in black trousers, white shirt with stand-up collar and bow tie, to replenish his coffee.

  “Quite, General.”

  He had, in fact. He’d been kept separate from his companions ever since leaving the massacre site by the Grand Canyon. Nor had he seen for sure where they were taken, although he surmised they were bound for a barbed-wire stockade with some tents pitched inside that had been erected near the work site. He hoped they were well, and not terribly mistreated. He wasn’t overly concerned. Obviously their captors wanted them alive rather than dead, and to judge by past performance, it would be but a matter of time before one of them, most likely the ever-so-resourceful John Barrymore Dix, figured out a way to spring them all.

  His captor had introduced himself as Marc Anthony Helton, Captain, Provisional U.S. Army. He was a very polite and well-spoken young man, despite his regrettable propensity for casual mass murder. He was fascinated by Doc, and grilled him about who he was, where he’d come from, and what experiences he had had. Tanner had cloaked his responses in sufficient vagueness to avoid giving away any significant information without convincing the young officer that he was too far gone mentally speaking to be of real interest to the General.

  At least, he hoped he had.

  On arrival, young Captain Helton had taken cordial leave of him. Soldiers had hustled Doc onto the train straightaway. There, he was brusquely ordered to strip and sent into a bank of showerheads to cleanse himself under a guard’s watchful eye. He would never believe a mere shower could equal the sybaritic luxury of a tub of steaming water, and candidly, he was the most inclined of their brave little band to be careless in matters hygienic, but the hot gushing water and the sense of cleanliness it produced were alike bliss-producing.

  Once dried, he had been given a rough and rather itchy set of garments of the depressing greenish shade favored by the U.S. Army of the twentieth century. After he put them on he had been marched to another car and locked into a small passenger compartment. Ironically, he had been allowed to keep his cane, although naturally, his bulky LeMat cap-and-ball revolver had been appropriated.

  Indeed, the General just upon the instant picked up the pistol and began to examine it with keen interest, turning it over and over in his hard, scarred
hands.

  In his compartment, which he had to himself, Doc had been served a better-than-adequate meal. Surprisingly, it had been a stew of game—rabbit and deer at the very least, with a possible hint of quail—along with carrots and potatoes and seasoned with sage. All seemed quite fresh, and the bread rolls that came with it were palpably hot from the oven. The butter tasted real. Doc hoped his friends were well fed and housed.

  The bench unfolded into a bed, which was the most comfortable he’d known in many a moon. He slept soundly, and blessedly without dreaming, until a peremptory knock had awakened him, and his clothes—cleaned and pressed, by the gods—had been thrust upon him.

  Now he sat in a kind of sitting room in the General’s personal car, eating another splendid meal and drinking coffee—freeze-dried, regrettably—while the General peered down the LeMat’s barrel, the long .44-caliber main barrel, and the auxiliary 12-gauge barrel in front of the cylinder. In tribute to Doc’s vast storehouse of knowledge, the General addressed him as “Professor.”

  “A remarkable weapon, Professor,” the General remarked, setting the big pistol down on a table beside his red-plush chair. “But isn’t it kind of an eccentric choice?”

  Doc gave a debonair wave of his coffee cup, pinky extended. “One who knows the proper formula, and, more important, the proper technique, it’s all in the caking—for manufacturing black gunpowder, as I do, can produce it far more simply, from much more readily available materials, than any more modern smokeless propellants.”

  “Ah, but it still requires percussion caps to ignite the powder, doesn’t it? My whitecoats tell me they need to be filled with high explosives that are unstable and fairly dangerous to handle—not to mention the chemistry’s a bit more involved than mixing saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal.”

  Doc shrugged. “I see that I am caught out. Your Excellency is not the first to observe that I am, indeed, an eccentric.”

  The General held up a hand. “No need to call me anything that fancy. I’m a pretty down-to-earth guy. ‘General’ or ‘sir” will do just fine.”

  Doc nodded and sipped. My, what fine manners he had for a murderer, he thought.

  Since joining Ryan and the rest, Doc had become a far different man from the one who had capered and spouted half-remembered snatches of poetry for the delectation of the unspeakable Jordan Teague and Strasser, his brute of a sec chief. His spine, for example, had recovered a remarkable degree of rigidity, although his grip on sanity was still not of the firmest, sadly. But he still knew how to show a pleasing face to power, and didn’t scruple to do so at need. Besides, for all the shockingly direct evidence Doc had of at least some of the General’s crimes, next to the likes of Teague he was an innocent babe.

  As a matter of fact, the General’s manners were pretty good for a Deathlands murderer.

  “I must admit that coming upon a man of your obvious culture and erudition, in the midst of this barbaric waste, is lots like finding a pearl in a midden heap,” the General remarked.

  Doc tried to stifle a wince. Owing to a saw that was old when he was young, he associated pearls with swine, and swine… He shook himself delicately. The memories didn’t bear touching upon, however lightly. Especially since Cort Strasser had already been called to mind.

  “The General is too kind,” he said. He pushed his plate away; his appetite had vanished. “And since you are a man who clearly appreciates quality when he encounters it, I feel it is incumbent upon me to point out a valuable resource that your subordinates are running a shocking risk of simply throwing away.”

  The General leaned forward with an eagerness that surprised Doc, and a hunger in his gray eyes that shocked the other man. Obviously he’d probed a nerve, he thought.

  He nodded and forged ahead. “Certain of my associates, who were…detained along with myself, are men and women of remarkable attributes. To employ them as mere manual laborers constitutes a shocking waste of valuable resources, and a truly unforgivable oversight on the part of your subordinates, I fear.”

  Slowly the General leaned back. Doc watched the tautness in his face sag into disappointment, and anger flare in his eyes. He braced himself for doom.

  The General looked aside for a moment, scowling. When he turned back to Doc his expression was returning to neutrality.

  “Very well, Professor,” he said, “tell me more.”

  “NUKEBLAST IT!” the guard howled as Jak sank sharp teeth into his wrist. He battered the youth’s head and shoulders with his free hand. Jak hung on, as tenacious as a weasel. “Leggo, you rad-sucking son of a mutie gutter slut!”

  Taking advantage of the distraction to lean on his shovel as he watched, J.B. shook his head.

  Another guard came running up and swatted Jak in the head with the butt of his M-16. Whatever its merits as a longblaster, the M-16 was reputed to have been made originally by a toy company. In any event it didn’t weigh much, having been designed not to, and its butt was mostly nylon. It was a piss-poor piece to buttstroke a body with. Without so much as flinching, Jak back-kicked the guard in the balls. The man sat down hard on a red-ant hill, then rolled onto his side, moaning and clutching himself.

  Guards converged. Along with the blasters, the soldiers overseeing the work gang carried truncheons, some actual scavenged PR-25 side-handle batons, others simply sawed out of either table legs or baseball bats—J.B. couldn’t tell which. They rained blows upon Jak’s head and shoulders until he let go and fell to the ground, grinning at them with a mouth red with blood that wasn’t his. Then they commenced to stomp him.

  J.B. sighed. The boy clearly had some hard lessons to learn about when to kick back and when to just bow your head and take what was coming and bide your time. But he couldn’t just stand by and watch his longtime comrade-in-arms get kicked to death. He was going to have to do something, which likely meant his getting stomped, as well.

  He was just shifting his grip on his shovel when the situation escalated. A young and probably fresh-minted sec man ran up and shouldered his M-16. As serious as a multiple stomping was, it was nothing to being in the way of a sleet of nasty jacketed 5.56 mm bullets. And the new arrival seemed blissfully unaware that no matter what angle he chose there was no way to shoot the miscreant without ventilating three or four of his buddies as well.

  “That’s enough! Stand down there, you men.” Banner’s voice was like the roar of an enraged gravel crusher as he strode toward the altercation.

  The guards fell back from the prostrate Jak. The boy with the M-16 stiffened like a dog pointing the grouse. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  “Bledsoe! If you don’t lower that piece right now, I’ll ram it so far up your ass you’ll be looking at the front sight cross-eyed. Do I make myself clear, you polyp on a mutant salamander’s asshole?”

  The newby hastily lowered the rifle and snapped to. J.B. nodded in appreciation of the sec man’s unexpected eloquence. An asshole Banner might be, but an asshole with style.

  The others fell back from Jak’s well-trampled form. The youth had been lying in a fetal curl, with his face hugged into his knees, protecting himself as well as he could. He rolled to his belly, got to hands and knees and shook his head.

  The guard whose wrist he had bloodied pulled out a Beretta and aimed it at Jak’s head.

  “Moredock, what’s wrong with you?” Banner shouted. “Secure that weapon.”

  “But, Sarge, we gotta make an example—”

  “Now.”

  Moredock holstered his blaster. It took him only three tries.

  “What we ‘gotta do,’ skunk ape, is get the damned railbed built up again so we can lay new rails before we all die of old age. We can’t go shooting our whole labor force just because you’re too fuckwitted to keep order. Unless you want to take his place swinging a pick, Corporal?”

  Moredock hit a brace. “Sir, no sir!”

  “Pick him up.”

  A couple of the guards who had been thundering on Jak now dragged him to his fe
et by his biceps. One red eye was puffing shut, but aside from a thin trickle out of his left nostril, the blood on his face still wasn’t his own.

  “Ah, the albino.” Banner nodded. “You were with the bunch I helped scoop up yesterday. You listen to me, boy. We need you to do a job of work. But don’t get the idea we can’t fix the track without you. Act up again and I’ll stomp your brains out your nose myself.”

  The sergeant glared around at the onlookers, guards and captives alike. “Don’t you all have things to do?” Everyone turned away, suddenly eager to be doing those things.

  With dark looks, the guards let Jak go and backed away warily. He stood panting like a winded dog, still grinning defiance.

  J.B. scooped up a shovelful of earth and walked over to Jak, to look as if he intended doing something useful with it. Then he dumped the dirt and grounded the tool again.

  “That’s no way to do it, Jak,” he said. “That’s way too hard a road to see to the end. Take an old man’s word for it.”

  Jak shook his head so that his snowy mane flew wildly, then hawked and spit a blood loogie in the sand. “Kill sergeant.”

  “If you live long enough. Keep up the way you been, though, you’ll be staring at the sky when the stars come out.”

  Anger flared like a lasing ruby in Jak’s eyes.

  “All right, party time’s over!” a guard yelled at them. “Get back to work.”

  Jak turned away. J.B. moved on to join other laborers shoveling dirt into barrows.

  Some time later Mildred approached. Across her shoulders she carried a pole with a water bucket at either end. She knelt and set down the buckets, then stood back as the thirsty laborers crowded around to ladle up water.

  She looked angry. J.B. reckoned he knew why.

  “Don’t none of us like it, Millie,” he said quietly, “but the one thing it ain’t is personal.”

  She glared at him, then shook her head. “Yeah, I know. Slavery’s an equal-employment opportunity these days. But that wasn’t how I was raised.”