by James Axler
Krysty let go the big man and walked on, around the main compound, toward the wag park. The vehicles were empty. She picked out the least battered of the lot, a red Chevy S10 faded pink by the sun. She walked up, looked inside. The key was in the ignition. Once they were through with the wags the General’s gang had just walked away from them, serviceable or not. As they had from the captives.
She opened the door.
“You can’t.”
She stopped and turned. It was the woman who had spoken to her earlier, standing at the entrance to the wag corral. Thirty or so of the abandoned captives stood behind her. They didn’t look threatening. Mainly confused.
“Those wags’re our lifeline,” the woman said. “Either to get us to provisions or provisions to us. Either way, we need all of ’em.”
Krysty unslung one of the M-16s. The crowd gasped and melted back a few steps. The hatchet-faced spokeswoman swayed, swallowed, set her jaw and stood her ground.
Moving deliberately, Krysty laid the longblaster on the hardpacked earth at her feet. She set down a loaded mag as well.
“I’m taking the wag,” she said. “Here’s payment. Or I’ll fight. Your call.”
The released slaves said no more. Krysty threw her pack onto the seat on the passenger side, then climbed in behind the wheel.
The engine started the first try.
The crowd gave way slowly as she drove out of the wag corral and turned east onto the road. She drove off without so much as a backward glance.
A pair of riders were approaching the compound from the east. A scrubby little half-naked Indian-looking guy on a pinto pony and a mustached man in a dapper linen suit and Panama hat mounted a nearly white mule with black ear-tips. Krysty drove straight, without acknowledging their existence, forcing them to split to either side of the road to keep from being run down.
She kept on going, following MAGOG. Where it went, there her trail led.
“BITCH!” CHATO EXCLAIMED, waving a fist at the Chevy’s rear bumper.
“Go easy, my friend,” El Abogado advised. “There rides a remarkable young woman. She carries a load of doom with her, as weighty as the world. Best to let her go her way, out of our lives.”
Chato gave him a narrow look.
“Trust me,” he said.
Chato shrugged it off. He had important plans, far too important to be distracted by some off-the-wall white-eyes bitch. He steered his pony back onto the road and booted it toward the laborers’ camp.
At its edge, he reined in. He was pleased to see a crowd of mebbe a hundred souls assembled outside the wire. It was as if they awaited him.
Clearly, here lay his Destiny.
Chato was back in his manic phase.
He sat as tall as he could—there were advantages to being on horseback—and announced, “My friends, my name is Chato, and I have come to save you from this anarchy!”
“YOU POOR BABY,” Mildred murmured to the naked child who stood in the black rubber washtub. He was a boy about eight years old with light brown hair just beginning to cover his scalp in fuzz. The residents of the ville called Milan, just east of the Continental Divide, tended to shave their children’s heads to prevent their catching lice. His scalp, like the rest of him, was covered with red weals and weeping blisters. “That’s a good boy. Just keep still.”
She was washing him all over with a rag soaked in cool, clean water from a stream running down from the nearby mountains. She was mostly wringing the cloth near his body to soak an area in water, then more dabbing or brushing than anything like scrubbing.
Although there was a nasty hot spot to the west where a one-megaton ground-burst had taken out the Fort Wingate ordnance storage area, this part of what had been western New Mexico like much of the Southwestern desert had been spared some of the nastier chem and rad-related aftereffects of the last war. When a freak chem storm had struck early that morning, just hours before MAGOG pulled in, they had been caught almost totally unprepared. They didn’t know how to respond, although the natural reflex to get in out of the rain, amplified by the fact that the rain burned like acid, had served to keep casualties down.
Four residents, either caught flat-footed in the open or who had panicked and dashed madly about as they melted alive—rather than having the presence of mind to seek something, anything to shelter under—had been killed outright, albeit horribly: their skins seared away, the flesh bubbled and melted away from acid-discolored bones. Fifteen others, including eight children, had been hurt to varying degrees of seriousness. Many others, of course, had suffered minor contact injuries and gone about their business having done little more than wash the spot where a caustic drop had hit, frequently with their own spit. People tended not to pay a lot of mind to wounds if there wasn’t a lot of blood or bones sticking out or whatever.
The crack of a 5.56 mm longblaster from somewhere made Mildred wince. Some of the injuries had been nasty, as you’d expect from a chem storm, and the sufferers weren’t helped by their friends’ and families’ inexperience in treating the injuries such storms inflicted. The single M-16 shot meant that a victim, though conscious, had been judged terminal by Singh, who then nodded to a wooden-faced young sec man who’d drawn short straw. Unconscious no-hopers had their jugular veins opened by a quick precise slice of Singh’s scalpel.
Mildred had already daubed her patient’s body with a solution of baking powder from MAGOG’s stores, neutralizing any pockets of acid that might have been trapped in skin folds or joints. Now she was rinsing the wounds as clean as possible, as gently as possible. Next she would dust the open sores with broad-spectrum antibiotic powder. Beyond that, and keeping them clean, and treating the wounds with whatever was available to soothe pain, there was little to do.
Whatever was available in this case consisted of a brew of local herbs applied in poultices, which the locals swore alleviated pain from burns. Singh, whose education had, of necessity, included substantial training in herbalism, could only shrug. She wasn’t familiar with the local herbs, and could do no more than trust the locals’ own lore, which she knew as well as anybody was just as likely to mask toxic agents that would do more harm than good behind flat-out myth.
Yet again, Mildred wished Krysty was with them. Not simply because she loved the woman as a sister, but because Krysty’s knowledge of healing herbs was truly vast, and what she didn’t know, her instinct and intuition could tell her. She could have judged the efficacy or otherwise of the local home remedy, and if it wasn’t up to snuff could have improved it or whipped up something that would work.
A shadow fell across her. She looked up.
Captain Marc Helton was walking past. He wasn’t wearing his metal breastplate today, just OD fatigues. He carried the blistered lifeless body of a four-year-old girl in his arms. His eyes didn’t see Mildred. Tears leaked silently from them.
She stared in frank amazement. He walked on out of sight around to the back of the adobe church in front of which the MAGOG crew had set up their aid station. The deaders were being laid out there in the shade of a remuda, a sort of awning made with wood uprights and frame and roofed over with branches and brush.
“I never will understand this damn outfit, little one,” she said to her patient, who regarded her from eyes which, while the lids were blistered nearly shut, had thankfully not been damaged themselves. She straightened. “Come on, let’s get you back to your mama.”
KRYSTY’S PICKUP finally crapped in the desert around twenty-five miles on the other side of Milan, well beyond the sanddrifted ruins of the larger ville called Grants. It just coughed twice, flat died, and coasted to a stop.
Krysty didn’t waste breath on cursing the wag or her fate. Nor did she bother raising the hood. She had no idea of how to repair it.
She had been lucky, she knew, to get her hands on the wag in the first place, much less nurse it this far. She had still lost ground on her quarry. MAGOG traveled fast when it had intact rails, as apparently it had from the slave c
amp onward. While the road mostly still existed, especially once she’d reached what had been I-40, it was busted here and washed out there and drifted hopelessly over with dunes someplace else. She hadn’t been able to get the wag above forty miles per hour in the best of stretches, not without the thing setting up a nasty shuddering and chattering that she didn’t have to be a mech to know couldn’t possibly bode well. What with the stretches of even worse road, which were most of them, frequent detours and the odd false start, she knew she’d been unable to average better than twenty, twenty-five miles an hour.
Which was still immeasurably better than traveling by shank’s mare.
She had reached Milan just before dark the previous day. The little ville, which consisted of a handful of predark ruins and a number of squat adobe structures built afterward ended, was surrounded by a living hedge of some kind of mutant maguey or yucca plants. These sprouted long slim spines, all the way up to twelve or fifteen feet in length, arching away from the plant’s core. These stirred and shifted to point to her as Krysty’s wag approached on the dirt track that led from the old blacktop.
The guards who pulled aside a barrier made from an old wag chassis and waved her inside looked tense and drawn. She wondered if they feared attack, but soon learned they had been hit with a freak chem storm that morning. MAGOG had pulled into town shortly after.
The train’s personnel had provided emergency medical service to the stricken townsfolk. Several lives had been saved, the wounded succored. Supplies of antibiotics and analgesics had been left for them. In exchange, all they had asked was to top their tank cars with fresh water, which the ville had in abundance.
The townies, in short, thought the General and all his people walked on water.
By nature an outgoing person, Krysty had learned as a child how to play things close to her chest. She merely grunted and nodded. She kept her own opinion of the General, and her experience at the hands of his sec men, strictly to herself. The people wouldn’t have believed her anyway. People believe what they see. She was just a redheaded stranger from the West, well-armed but polite. Who was she to go running down their benefactors?
All she could do was attract ill will. She didn’t need that. She understood a body’s need for sleep as a healer did, and understood that she had to take care of herself to do what she had to do. If possible, she needed to sleep the night in the relative security of the ville.
She traded some of the tools she’d brought from the travelers’ caravan for a night on a cot in the back room of Sawtelle’s Possibles, a sort of general store. The room stank from the carcasses of numerous small animals and game birds, some of which Krysty was sure were mutants and not natural creatures at all, which had been hung to soften up and lose some of the edge from their gamy taste. She ignored it.
Information, meager enough, she got simply by listening to locals sitting over mugs of rank-smelling local beer, once or twice interjecting a brief, pointed question. No, the locals had no idea where MAGOG was headed, other than east. They reckoned likely it was somewhere beyond Burque on the Big River, past the Sandia Mountains that rose just to the east of there.
That meant the armored train was headed into the Great Plains. Into the belly of the Deathlands.
Krysty did learn that one of the two healers who had done most of the work was a heavyset black woman who could only be Mildred Wyeth. That filled her with a sense of relief so vibrant and foolish she almost smiled. At least one of her friends was alive. It boded well for the others.
That night she slept without dreaming.
In the morning she ate a breakfast of bacon and fresh hen’s eggs paid for with three cartridges. Outside, the sky was clear and the sun warm. She noticed a wizened old woman shaking what she took to be a rattle, made from an old can on the end of a short stick, at a small child with scabbing-over burns on arms and face, and a whiteface heifer. The child then guided the cow toward the thorn wall by switching at its haunches with the long central stalk of a yucca. Krysty loaded her pack into the truck and paused to watch as beast and boy came up to the hedge of thorns.
The thorns began to stir, as they had when Krysty neared them in her truck. But instead of rotating their needle tips toward the child and the cow, as they had for her, the plants turned the spines away. The two were able to pass through without harm, simply brushing past the shanks of the spines.
Interesting. Krysty looked around for the old woman, who had vanished into one of the buildings of the settlement. Rather than a rattle, the object she had shaken over the boy and his charge had to have been a dispenser, containing some substance that gave them safe passage through the wicked thorns. Krysty suspected it was the pollen of the mutie thorn plant itself.
Shaking her head, Krysty got into her wag and drove on. She’d never know, and she felt a pang of regret at that.
The eastern gate was another truckbed weighted down with lava boulders and chunks of concrete, which the sentries obligingly rolled out of her path. Two hours later the wag engine choked and croaked.
She was on her feet again.
From the Divide, the declining land had run from mountains forested in pine and fir, to undulating hills dotted with scrubby trees, and then back to plain Upper Sonoran cactus and bunch grass desert, with wind-cut mesas rising above and arroyos like gashes of a giant knife below. The pavement here was clear and relatively intact. By bitter irony, which she did no more than allow her mind to brush over, she could have made the best speed so far had her wag survived.
Ryan’s mentor and long-time employer Trader used to say that a man who cried over spilt milk was blinded by his tears. And women too; but Krysty hadn’t needed Trader to teach her that.
She drew a deep breath. At the moment, the breeze was from the mountains behind her, as cool and fresh as a drink of water from a mountain stream, flavored with a hint of pine. She drank it in, drew sustenance from Gaia’s sweet breath.
Then she shouldered her pack and marched east, not knowing where her quarry was, nor if it was even remotely possible she could catch it.
Her quest was all.
Vengeance was all.
Chapter Eleven
Real coffee. Mildred shook her head and drank down the aroma from her mug with the Mobile Anti-Guerrilla Operations Group logo on the side as if it were as substantial and stimulating as the bitter black brew itself. It probably wasn’t near fresh. Likely it had been irradiated and sealed away in nitrogen-filled containers while she was still walking around in the twentieth century, oblivious to the impending end of the world, and even of the ovarian cyst that would cause her own functional death and rebirth into a world she never would have imagined even if she could. But it was still coffee, and delicious.
She shook her head again, enjoyed the sound and feel of the wooden beads strung on her thin dreadlocks rattling together. She’d had a hot shower that afternoon before the rail wag pulled out of Milan. The wonders of the fusion power cells in the lead and trail engines. A shy healer named Alisha had helped her plait and bead her hair when it was dry.
Life on this train was a lot like civilization.
And that’s the pure bitch of it, girlfriend. She remembered how she came to be here. She made herself remember. It would be sheer betrayal of her martyred father’s memory to make peace with the men who had enslaved her.
No reason she couldn’t enjoy the truce, though.
She felt the presence, just at the border of her personal space. She knew who it was without looking. He seemed to radiate some kind of energy. Or maybe it was just a cloud of male pheromones, affecting a healthy human female in her sexual prime.
Reluctant to give too much away, she made herself raise her head and look him in the eye before saying, “Is there something I can help you with, Captain?”
“Mildred,” he said in that rich voice of his, like the amber of his eyes made liquid and poured, “may I join you?” She couldn’t help but shiver. Damn it!
Damn him.
She shrugged. “I’m hardly in a position to refuse, now, am I?”
His brow furrowed. He looked like a little boy puzzled by an adult’s response. Puzzled…and hurt.
“Of course you are. I’d never presume to intrude.”
She goggled at him. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to blurt out, “Are you for real?” She kept it down. She was a woman who prided herself on never bending the knee. But survival instinct imposed some constraint on her behavior. Or else she’d never have lived this long since Ryan and the rest had awakened her from her cryosleep tube.
She nodded. He pulled out a chair and sat.
Outside the night rushed past. Even though the lights were dim in the officers’ mess car, reflection blanked out the stars, or even whether they were obscured or not by overcast. Alisha had mentioned that the rail wag wasn’t rolling at anywhere near its top cruising speed of seventy miles per hour. It wouldn’t until it crossed the mountains east of the Grandee and hit the giant, gently tilted tabletop of the Plains.
“I wanted to commend you for the excellent work you did, both after the bandit attack and at the ville today,” Helton said. “Healer Singh speaks very highly of you.”
“That was nice of her.”
“My name’s Helton, by the way. Marc Helton.”
“I know who you are, Captain.”
Again that schoolboy frown of consternation. To her he looked about sixteen, maybe eighteen tops, although she knew that was mainly just her early-middle-aged perspective. In another ten years, everyone under thirty would look fourteen to her. Still, he probably wasn’t much older than that. Kids matured quick in the Deathlands, if at all. And she realized that for all of that, for all his responsibility and the heroic status he enjoyed among MAGOG’s personnel, he was, in ways, very young indeed.
Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! She could not let this man, her enslaver, murderer of innocents including her beloved friend and benefactor, become too much of a person in her mind. She understood in a way she never had why combatants throughout history had traditionally dehumanized their foes. Suddenly it didn’t seem as despicable to her as it always had.