Vengeance Trail

by James Axler

  She slipped down around the eastern end. The wall had collapsed enough to see within, but she couldn’t see the man or his machine. Some kind of curtain had been hung to block light and sight from the occupied portion of the structure. Around the fringes, though, she could see the yellow glow of what she guessed for a lantern.

  Around to the front, stopping frequently not just to listen for sign that the man had become aware of her but to scan the surrounding night with eyes, ears, nose and gut. Becoming too fixated on prey was a fine way to become it.

  If anything was stalking her it was better at it than she was detecting it.

  The front door was wood, intact, with the knob in place. It was locked. There was a round metal key inlet above, indicating a deadbolt. The door frame seemed solid, untouched by rot.

  Krysty frowned, considering. While she carried little excess weight in the flushest times, and had been pared down further by the exertions of the past few days, she had some mass to her. It wasn’t impossible she could slam the door with enough force to break the bolts out of the wood frame, or more likely, rip loose the screws that held the hinges. But she couldn’t afford so much as one failed attempt. It was all or nothing, because the noise of her hitting the door would alert her prey, allow him to set up in ambush and just wait for her to come through.

  She went back to the east end. The wall had slumped enough to see over, therefore far enough to scramble over, hopefully without making too much racket. Holding her longblaster by the flash suppressor she reached it over the wall, probed with the butt for major obstructions. Finding none, she let the blaster slide down to the floor, holding it by its sling. Then she flowed up and over with serpentine grace.

  She got her blue cowboy boots onto what seemed to be a concrete floor, drifted with an inch or two of sand. Taking up the rifle she crouched, tried to soak in every detail of her immediate surroundings through the very pores of her skin. There didn’t seem to be much except some heavy fallen-in roofbeams that had been burned through in the middle.

  The whistling kept on. With something of a start she recognized the tune. Her mother had sung it to her as a child: “Whistle While You Work.”

  She stole forward, placing her bootheels deliberately and then rolling her weight onto the soles to minimize noise. The whistling stopped. She stopped. The whistling began again. She reached out to touch the barrier. It was some sort of dark plastic, stiff and brittle from cross-linking, hung from a beam overhead. She brought the longblaster up in front of her, hooked the left edge with the muzzle, swept it aside as she stepped through.

  The man inside had been whistling as he worked on his marvelous machine. It lay in the midst of the open floor, glinting like a metalloid spider in the light of a kerosene lamp.

  Whistle congealed in his throat, the man looked up at her with brown eyes made huge by the lenses of his glasses.

  Chapter Twelve

  Ryan dreamed.

  Across a vast dusty plain approached rank upon rank of men. Sunlight glittered yellow off their breastplates and funnel-shaped helmets. They carried bows. Before them trotted other men, half naked, bearing tall curved shields, brightly painted.

  Ryan shifted his grip on the hilt of the bronze sword in his hand. The leather windings were wet with sweat. A round wooden shield was strapped to his other arm. To left and right of him stood ragged lines of men clutching spears and wearing heavy quilted cloth for armor.

  It didn’t seem fair, somehow.

  The advancing ranks halted. The shield bearers scuttled out before the armored bowmen and planted the shields on the ground. Sling-launched rocks bounced futilely off them.

  Knowing it was no less futile, Ryan felt himself shouting the order to charge. He and the men began to run forward, screaming hoarsely.

  The screams turned shrill as arrows rose like smoke from the bearded men, then fell among Ryan’s charging companions. Ryan felt one strike into his thigh, stinging like a serpent’s bite. He ripped it out using two fingers of his sword hand and threw it aside. But he felt other impacts, other deep-biting stings.

  He stumbled. His breath turned to jagged glass in his chest. He tried to force himself on but his muscles wouldn’t respond.

  Then he was running forward across what had been a broad field of grass. It was trampled flat, now, and huge patches were stained dark red with blood. The forms of men wearing uniforms in pale brown and gray lay in singles and in clumps. Some of them still moved and screamed. Thin sounds wisped past his head. He heard one terminate in a meaty thud, heard a moaning gasp from the man who ran behind him, sensed that he tumbled headlong in the blood-matted grass.

  He had a longblaster in his hands, heavy and ungainly, with a big lock on the side with a heavy curving hammer drawn back above a percussion cap on its nipple, just like on Doc’s LeMat revolver, but much larger. They were running toward a wall of ridge topped with an unbroken bank of thick dirty-white smoke, through which stabbed little daggers and great broad blades of flame. As they ran they voice high wild cries, like wolf-howls interspersed with shrill fierce yipping. From the rawness of his throat he knew that he was, too. But the thunder of the cannon and the rifles drowned all other sound.

  Directly in front, a fire-flower unfolded, huge though it was hundreds of yards away. He saw the white cotton-ball puff of the bursting charge, and heard the sound of the cloud of musket-balls launched by the shrapnel shell even before they reached him and the men to either side, like the sighing of wild goose wings, like the arrows of the Assyrians—

  Red searing pain. Krysty! Then black…

  Peace, Ryan Cawdor.

  This time he didn’t fall into blackness. Instead he hung suspended in white brilliance. The soft voice was familiar.

  Out of the dazzle a shape resolved. It was one of the little squat humanoid muties he had seen during his earlier bout of wakefulness. He was walking on his hind legs with an odd waddling gait. He seemed bent by more than his natural body structure, and the fur on his muzzled half-human face was largely silver. But the brown eyes seemed both warm and wise.

  Somehow he didn’t seem ridiculous at all.

  You dream, the little mutie said.

  Ryan already knew that.

  We Little Ones have learned much of the ways of healing in all the snows and suns since Men made us. Some of us have learned as well to walk in the World Behind the World. I am one. I am called Far Walker.

  So mebbe he hadn’t been dreaming before. But it was hard to accept. Human-Ewok hybrids? Who talked American and called themselves Little Ones?

  No way. Likely he had been dreaming, and dreamed still, and would too soon be awakened by the pain of a raven stabbing out his remaining eye with its beak.

  No. Rest easy, Ryan Cawdor. You are as safe as you can be anywhere in the world. We who cannot fight have learned to hide quite well.

  “What do you want?” Ryan was surprised that he could speak. He seemed to be just hovering there, naked but for the patch on his eye. It didn’t bother him particularly. He’d never been real modest, and anyway, what was the point? What did Ewoks care?

  That you help us. But first, that you heal. And to do that you must rest.

  “I’m asleep, aren’t I?”

  You sleep. But you do not rest. You struggle constantly.

  Krysty. The name tolled like a bell inside his soul. “It’s the way I am.And there’s someone I need to fight my way back to.”

  You fight only yourself.

  The little stubby arm gestured. Ryan saw more clearly the enemies he had battled and died against in his dream. They all had long curly black hair and a single piercing blue eye each, staring at him from scarred, sun-bronzed faces. With our assistance your body can heal you quickly and well. But your spirit must not fight against itself.

  “How can I not fight?”

  A wise and cunning man such as you should know the answer better than anybody. Did not your own mentor say, “There is a time to fight, but more important, was the time whe
n you decided not to fight?”

  Ryan sighed. Or dreamed he did. Who the hell knew? But if the Little One was going to quote Trader at him, he knew he was beat.

  “But how do I do it?”

  Let go. Free yourself and let yourself fall, not into blackness, but into light.

  Ryan’s eye narrowed suspiciously. “Is this one of those near-death things?”

  It will be an experience of death considerably closer than “near” if you continue to fight yourself. We’re at the crisis. You block your own body’s attempts to heal.

  “All right.”

  He shut his eye, exhaled, made the tension and resistance flow out of him.

  Then he was the light, and the light was him, and consciousness went away.

  “YOU GONNA SHOOT ME?” the man in the dark coat asked mildly. He laid his wrench on the floor and straightened slowly. “If you are, why don’t you just get to it and save me the suspense, lady?”

  “Not if you do what I tell you,” she said. “Step back from the machine.” Hands held up before his shoulders, palms toward her, he obeyed. Watching him intently, lest he whip out some holdout weapon and chill her, she moved forward for a closer look at the object he’d been working on.

  Though she was no lover of tech, it was obvious this was a marvel. As she had seen from a distance, it was a platform six or seven feet long and about three wide. It had a seat at one end, made of plastic-looking mesh slung over a tubular metal frame. A square-section metal post jutted from the base of a platform at a forward angle, holding up a pedal set. A chain was looped around the crank and vanished into a slot in the base of the platform. There were various low housings that looked like compartments or built-in chests. Spindle limbs, actually tapering tubing frameworks, sprang from the corners and angled out to hubs. Beyond these were large narrow wheels that looked like metal, with wide spokes—really more like big disks that had been cut out, probably to save weight. Mounted outside these were simple spoked bicycle tires. She realized the cutout disks were spacers set to fit just inside the rails, and keep the actual tires rolling smoothly along the work-hardened and polished track.

  There was no provision for steering the wag that she could see. Likely it didn’t need such. This was a machine meant to go where the rails went.

  She raised her head and looked at him. She had never allowed him to slip fully from her awareness, nor her peripheral vision, which was better at detecting slight movement than direct-vision anyway. He had to have made this thing. From the way his eyes flicked from it to her and back again ceaselessly, the way his grayish tongue kept slipping out to moisten his lips beneath the mustache that swept down either side of his mouth, she knew that to be so. It struck her as almost perverse that anyone would even think of doing so, much less lavish the time and effort—the love—required to craft such a mechanism. She couldn’t help marveling.

  “I’m taking this,” she said. “I won’t hurt you if you don’t try to stop me.”

  “So you’re just gonna rob me, just like that,” he said. “You don’t seem the type.”

  She frowned. She wasn’t the type, but she didn’t exactly welcome him reminding her of the fact. She jabbed air in his direction with her longblaster.

  “Don’t get in my way.”

  “Got no intention of doing that, let me assure you. But what exactly are you going to do with it?”

  She looked at the machine. She looked at him, then looked back at the machine. It was as light as he could make it, she didn’t doubt, but she could also tell it had to weigh several hundred pounds at least, especially with provisions packed on board. The man who stood across it from her was an inch or two shorter than she, and skinny. Even allowing for the greater efficiency of his masculine muscles, if he could manage it, so could she.

  If she knew the same tricks he did.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Go ahead.” He nodded at the machine. “Try it. Try an’ pedal it. See how far you get.”

  To her astonishment he sounded almost eager. Her first thought was naturally that the wag was booby-trapped. But none of her senses, none of her experience of human body language, could detect the least quiver of threat from him. What she got, remarkably, was pride. He wanted to show off his marvelous toy.

  “Don’t try anything,” she said. He shook his head. He was grinning openly now, his teeth a crooked jumble in the kerosene light.

  Holding down on him with one hand she slipped into the seat. It was very comfortable. She put her feet on the pedals. They fit fine; apparently his legs were about the same length as hers. She pushed.

  Nothing happened.

  It was as if the crank was welded in place.

  Scowling, she dropped her boots off the pedals and leaned forward. She took hold of a pedal and pulled. It rotated back at her as if mounted on glass bearings.

  She pushed. Rock solid.

  “See?” he told her. “You don’t know how to make it go. What’re you gonna do with it?”

  “Are you triple stupe?” she snarled. She shouldered the blaster and aimed it at the bridge of his nose, right where a dirty piece of tape held the heavy frame together. “You jack me around, I’ll chill you.”

  To her fury he laughed at her. “Ice me down. I’ll sure teach you a whole lot about how to run my Yawl,” he said.

  “Oh.” Her muscles spasmed with fury.

  She dropped the point of her aim to just south of the buckle of his belt. She felt a dirty thrill to see his eyes widen slightly.

  “I can shoot you without killing you. I can make you want to tell me.”

  “Mebbe you can and mebbe you can’t,” he said. He looked her in the eye, calm and straight. “I’m no fighter, furthest thing there is from a coldheart. But I might be a tougher nut to crack than you think, missy.

  “And besides, even if I did tell you how to make my Yawl go, then what? You know how to fix it when it breaks? You know what kind of traps the muties or even the norms will lay to catch you? You know how to live through a chem storm, riding out there right under the sky of the Deathlands?”

  Her eyes answered him. He nodded. “Anyway, if you won’t drop the hammer on me for saying so, you don’t rightly look the type.”

  Slowly she lowered the blaster and backed up off the machine. She wasn’t the type. His pointing it out made her mad enough to wish she were.

  She thought her heart had gone cold as the heart of a burnt-out star. Cold as chilled titanium. She saw now it wasn’t so—not all the way through, anyhow.

  She’d drilled the deserters Ben and Matt without a thought or a single regret. She’d do it again and have dinner if she were hungry. If they were hunting her or hers, she would chill them from cover without giving them a chance to defend themselves and her sentient scarlet hair wouldn’t so much as stir. And what she would do if she caught the General, or his fine young captain, or any of his sergeants and merry men…

  But she couldn’t put this man down in cold blood. Much less torture him.

  Ryan could have. Mebbe. If it was what he had to do to save himself and his companions. He could be as stone a chiller as the coldest coldheart. She had loved him for that, too, along with so many other things.

  But even now, a woman bent only on revenge, she couldn’t.

  “And anyhow,” her captive said, shaking his shaggy head, “why do you want to go and steal what might just be on offer for free, Krysty Wroth?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “You know my name?”

  “Appears I do, since you answer to it.”

  “How?”

  He shrugged. “I been around. Kinda like you and your friends. Can I put my hands down now? Not like you’d need a blaster to kick my skinny butt, anyway. Like I said, I ain’t no fighter.”

  She sighed from the soles of her boots. Then she clicked the safety back on and slung the M-16. He was right; she didn’t need it to take him. But she knew that wouldn’t be an issue.

&n
bsp; She didn’t fear him rabbiting on her, either. She doubted he would voluntarily be separated from his marvelous machine.

  “You know my name,” she said. “Would you mind telling me yours?”

  He cackled. “Pretty lady with a longblaster can call me anything she likes except late for supper.” He grabbed the left breast of his open shop coat and held it up. “See? My name’s Paul. Just like it says here.”

  She leaned forward slightly and squinted. The name tag was filthy, but she could only just make out, embroidered in red on once-white, the name Paul. Right enough.

  “That’s as in Paul, the Rail Ghost.” He paused. He seemed to be waiting. “Mebbe you heard of me?”

  She shook her head. “Can’t say as I have. But I guess I’m pleased to meet you anyway, Mr. Ghost.”

  He laughed, this time a nervous titter. “Just Paul is fine. They call me the Rail Ghost ’cuz I go everywheres the rail does, which is everywhere at all, and people scarcely ever see me.And never can catch me.” He said the last a little wistfully.

  “Until now.”

  He shrugged. “Hear you’re better than most. You and your friends. Where are they, anyhow?”

  Her brow furrowed suspiciously. Then it smoothed. She suspected the man could be as devious as anybody at need. She could not honestly suspect he was being so now. It just went against what all her senses told her.

  “It’s a long story,” she said. “We…got separated.”

  Paul nodded judiciously. “So you’re chasing after MAGOG to go and get ’em back, huh?”

  “Y’THINK HE KIN DO IT?”

  Corporal Brassard flicked the private a glance of pure contempt. The tow-headed youth was a newbie they’d picked up on the coast from a nest of inbred surf rats. They were bad as hillies, in the corporal’s estimation. The kid was lucky to have a chin and only ten fingers. But he hadn’t missed out on dumb.