Vengeance Trail

by James Axler

  She was quickly working up a mighty head of anger toward the cowardly Rail Ghost. Before she could say anything more a tall figure strode through what had been the kitchen doorway, followed at once by a second.

  Krysty had already shifted her right hand to the longblaster’s pistol grip. Now she let her forefinger rest lightly on the trigger. She didn’t aim the blaster at the interlopers. Somebody had bowled that gren between Hole’s feet. These two were the obvious candidates.

  The first and taller of the two new arrivals was a woman, as thin and taut as a wire sculpture, her face and hands tanned dark, her hair a blond scarcely darker than Jak’s silver mane. It was caught in a long ponytail at the crown of her skull. She wore a silver cord around her temples, form-fitting white trousers and shirt beneath a loose, many-pocketed khaki vest. A heavy-duty web belt cinched around her impossibly narrow waist carried many objects in pouches and holsters whose purpose was unknown to Krysty. Her face was of a beauty so finely chiseled and haughty as to seem scarcely human. Krysty was reminded of childhood tales of elves.

  Her companion was a lean man with dark brown hair receding from a vulpine face, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt tie-dyed in a riot of color, with a white oval in the center printed with the visage of a rotund, richly bearded man. Krysty thought to recognize the image as the Blessed Jerry Garcia, but wasn’t sure.

  “What took you so long?” Paul asked.

  The tall, ice woman gave him a blue-laser glare. “We have other things to do than redeem your poor judgment, Mark.”

  “Paul. The name’s Paul.” He held up the nametag stitched in his coat. “See?”

  “Have it your way.”

  Outside blaster shots cracked in a sudden ragged volley. Wolf-howl war cries mingled with screams of fear and pain.

  “What’s happening?” Krysty asked. The newcomers ignored her.

  “What’s going on out there, Bryanna?” Paul asked.

  “The baron’s daughter escaped when the mutants came for her in the night,” the tall woman explained. “She rallied homesteaders from the surrounding countryside. They’re attacking now.”

  “Well, thanks for saving us, anyway,” Krysty said stiffly, her hair swishing about her shoulders.

  “You have much to answer for,” Bryanna said past her to Paul. “This mutant band is known to have interfered with the folk’s free passage in the past. Acting against them is acceptable and does not constitute interference in the outside world. But you’ve come deadly close to dragging us into the affairs of the Mundanes… Paul.”

  He held up his hands. “Sorry, Bree. I didn’t know. I just walked in here cold.”

  “‘Flat-footed’ is more like it. Try to exercise more caution in future.” She regarded him a moment. Then her austere features seemed to soften ever so slightly. Or maybe it was a trick of the light, or maybe the room’s closeness and the reek of death was getting to Krysty.

  “You’re still chasing the armored train?” Bryanna asked quietly.

  Paul nodded. “It went northeast. According to the locals, members of the crew spoke of heading for Kancity.”

  Paul let his breath out in a long, “Hooo,” and glanced sidewise at Krysty. “That’s a rough one.”

  “Listen,” Krysty said, wanting to grab the ice goddess, but thinking it wasn’t a good idea. “You might not want to acknowledge my existence, here. But there’s something I have to know, nuke-blast it—”

  Bryanna finally turned her winter-sky eyes on the other woman. “The townsfolk saw three of your friends alive and well, Krysty Wroth. Only your Doc Tanner was missing.”

  She smiled thinly. “Perhaps he’s having one of his spells, and was restrained to keep him from harm. And perhaps the General did not wish to risk allowing all four outside at once.”

  Breath hissed out of Krysty and her shoulders slumped. “Well, thanks. But how come everybody on the continent knows our names all of a sudden?” But she had phased out of existence for the gaunt blond woman again.

  A black man with what appeared to be a polished steel headband clamped around his medium-length Afro appeared in the doorway. His eyes were covered by heavy goggles with dark lenses that seem to swim with muted colors like oil on water. He wore a camou blouse and OD cargo pants, and held a longblaster one-handed by a pistol grip. It appeared to be made from white plastic of some kind, and was a design unfamiliar to Krysty. Bryanna’s mouth, none too generous to begin with, all but disappeared into a fine line. Krysty had the impression the woman disapproved of her seeing the wep.

  “We got a way out open,” the newcomer said. “Best we take it.”

  Bryanna nodded. “Ride free,” she said to Paul with brisk formality.

  “Live to ride,” he replied. “Nationwide.”

  The trio left the way they had come.

  The battle outside was rocking. Krysty heard the distinctive crash-tinkle-whump of a gasoline bomb going off not far away.

  “Let’s go before this death house burns down around us,” she said tautly. Ashen behind his mustache, Paul nodded.

  KRYSTY STRODE through bright sunlight and noise. Shots cracked. Men on horseback hunted muties through the narrow crooked streets of Tucumcari New Town. She ignored them. The only thing bubbling more furiously inside her than her anger was way too many questions.

  “Who were those people?” was what got out her mouth first.

  A mutie with three mouths spread across his face—all of them open in cries of panic—pelted past them. Behind him, a man turned and reared his big palomino gelding and threw an ax after the fleeing mutie. Not a hatchet, a whole single bit ax, spinning through the dusty-impregnated air like a giant circular-saw blade. It smacked between the mutie’s shoulder-blades and put him on his face into the dirt, so close to Krysty he almost struck her with a flailing arm. An outflung hand scrabbled hardpan dead in her path. She trod on it as if it were a tarantula without even looking and kept walking.

  “Tech-nomads,” Paul said.

  A crash erupted as a heavy chunk of concrete was hurled through a thin plywood window shutter, then another molotail burst on the house they were approaching on their right.

  A figure burst out of the door shrouded in flame and screaming wildly. It teetered and spun in front of them, arms waving flags of flame in a semaphore of intolerable pain. Krysty stopped to let the burning mutie pass. He staggered on, howling, to vanish between buildings. Her set expression never flickered.

  Paul turned aside and puked.

  When he straightened, Krysty had already marched a dozen steps toward the railroad tracks. Wiping his mustache on his sleeve, he trotted to catch up.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “Are you triple crazy?”

  As an answer, she grabbed a handful of hair on the side of his head, stepped back and yanked down hard. He doubled with a squawk of surprised outrage and pain.

  A teenaged norm in a doorway five yards to their right touched off a replica Civil War Springfield. The black powder charge gave it up in a giant billow of dirty white smoke and a four-foot spear of orange flame. The .577-caliber Minie ball howled as it passed through the space occupied by Paul’s scrawny neck half a heartbeat before, on the way to pulverizing the left shoulder joint of a mutie charging in from the left with a spear made out of a broomstick tipped and edged with shards of broken glass.

  Krysty hauled him upright by the ponytail and towed him briefly after her like a Sippi tugboat with a barge, to make sure he got moving again, and in the proper direction.

  “What are tech-nomads?” she demanded again. She didn’t look at him.

  “They’re like a tribe,” he sputtered, batting furiously at flecks of burning black powder thrown out by the longblaster that had landed on his coat sleeve and set it smoking. “A nation, more like. Bands of people who travel all the time. Some by road, some rail, some water, some…other ways.”

  They were at the southern edge of town, having left the massacre behind. Not all the erstwhile parti
cipants, however. A mutie was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Paul Yawl, pressing frantically on the pedals with long two-toed feet.

  Also futilely. On leaving the rail craft, Paul had repeated the trick that had frustrated Krysty’s initial attempt to make it go: simply a matter of leaving it in the highest gear. No being of even approximately human strength could budge the several-hundred-pound wag a thousandth of an inch by pedaling, although it would roll as pretty as you please if you pushed. Caught in the grip of ultimate panic, the mutie didn’t really notice he was having no effect. He just kept pushing harder until the quads threatened to pop out the black rubbery skin of his bare legs.

  Krysty pointed the longblaster at him one-handed and squeezed off a single burst. Black flesh, skin strips and liquid spewed out the far side of the panicked mutie. He threw up his hands, emitted a dismal croak and toppled over onto the cinders.

  “Look! Look there!” Paul sang out in outrage. “You got blood on my Yawl!”

  “Shut up,” Krysty said. She planted her butt on her own seat.

  As Paul scrambled into his, forcing himself to ignore the ooze and odd bit of tissue clinging to the mesh, three more muties pelted desperately toward the Yawl. They were unarmed, stretching out various empty appendages in supplication. Krysty mowed them down with the rest of the rounds in her 30-round mag.

  Paul used the twist-grip mounted on his handhold to downshift, then began to pedal the Yawl. Krysty dropped the empty box, reflexively tucked it into a pocket of her jumpsuit and pushed a fresh mag home. Then, still cradling the M-16 in case anybody else got notions of riding without a ticket, she put her feet up on the pedals and added the power of her strong shapely legs to Paul’s wiry, skinny ones.

  A shift of the wind blew a bloated worm of brownish smoke across the track ahead. They drove through it without slowing. They gathered speed.

  When they were a hundred yards past the smoke, Krysty saw a figure appear out of it beside the tracks. Paul saw her eyes narrow and turned, fearful at what he’d see.

  It wasn’t anything he expected. That was sure.

  A young woman with long hair streaming from her head like a raven’s outstretched wing had reined in a big bay horse. The horse was bareback. So was she—aside from what looked at this range like a pair of lumberjack boots she was neonate-naked.

  She reared the horse and waved, of all things, an FN-FAL longblaster over her head. “Godspeed!’ she cried. “And bring Jak Lauren back safe!”

  “Lordy,” Paul said. “Baron Mike’s little daughter Maria Elena’s done a mite of growing since last I laid eyes on her.”

  “She seems to know how to rally troops,” Krysty admitted grudgingly.

  The nude rider turned and vanished into the smoke again with a last Comanche whoop. Krysty found herself almost wishing she might make it back this way someday to see how the ville fared under its new baron. Life wouldn’t be dull, she was sure.

  That was triple-silly even to think, she chided herself savagely. Her path led right out of this life. Her itinerary left no room for doubling back, much less sightseeing.

  She swung her eyes onto Paul like guns tracking in a mount. “You were a lot of help back in the baron’s house.”

  He shrugged. “I told you at the outset. I’m no fighter. I avoid trouble when I can. When I can’t—” Another shrug.

  “I fight when I have to.”

  “And how much misery have you left in your wake, Krysty Wroth? Plenty more’n I have, I bet.”

  She scowled, said nothing.

  “What I do,” Paul explained earnestly, “is I try to move through life leaving as little of a mark as possible. Just go with the flow, like moving through water.”

  “No matter what marks you make in water,” Krysty replied grimly, “they’re instantly gone as if they’d never been.”

  “And is that how you see people, Krysty Wroth? Like drops of water merging facelessly into a stream, without individuality or meaning?”

  “Guess I do,” she said, “now. Except a few drops of water still hold meaning for me. And that’s how it’s going to be, until it’s my turn to become one with the river.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Just hold still,” Mildred murmured, “and this’ll all be over before you know it.” She reflected, not for the first time, about what babies even the staunchest warriors could be when it came time to treating the wounds they feared so little to risk incurring.

  Not that the baby-fist-sized crater in the troopie’s leg was a combat trauma, exactly. They’d been stopped for yet another line repair a couple days back, a relatively minor one, fortunately—just a washout the train’s own complement could fix expeditiously enough. Mildred dreaded the next labor roundup.

  Her patient had taken a break from repair work to walk in among a field of head-high sunflowers, not yet in bloom, to take a leak. It wasn’t the smartest thing a body ever did, given that they were now in the serious Deathlands—what had been western Kansas—with hotspots all around and attendant mutie menaces abounding. One had gotten him, in fact. Fortunately it hadn’t been lethal—he wasn’t sure what it was, even. Something had stung him. He’d screamed at the sudden white-hot pain and brushed something off his leg that vanished instantly among the tall green stalks. He’d run a dangerous fever for twenty-four hours, and the wound had swollen up in a huge blister that Mildred had lanced. She then had to debride necrotized flesh from the gaping hole it left behind, grateful once again they had actual anesthetics on board. Stupefying a patient on jolt and then tying him down and cutting him open was not her idea of a clean, efficient procedure.

  But no anesthetic could be spared for just changing the dressing and disinfecting the wound. So the patient squirmed and sniveled and generally took on like a child. Of course, he was a child to Mildred’s eyes. No more than seventeen, a dirtfarm boy who was drawn to swearing the General’s oath by the lure of adventure or, more likely, the prospect of three hots and a cot each and every day.

  As she was finishing up rebandaging the wound, the carriage vibrated. It wasn’t the usual swaying of MAGOG underway. It felt like slow, heavy pounding.

  It came again. The kid perked up.

  “Ma Deuce,” he said.

  That meant one of the train’s .50-caliber Browning machine guns corking off. Mildred knew the nickname from J.B, who come to think of it may’ve taught it to the sec men. He and that rasty old fart Leo were as thick as thieves, playing back in their gunsmith’s wet dream armory car.

  She snipped the last bandage with her broken nose scissors, then left the boy to pull his own BDU trousers back on and went to the window to look out.

  The sky was all the colors of a really nasty bruise: bluish green, red, orange, yellow. It was going to take her a while to get used to that again, after the relatively clean skies of the desert southwest. It looked threatening, as in, more than the deep Deathlands sky always looked. At least I don’t got to sweat the chem storms, she thought, or—

  A dark mass slammed into the window with a thud muffled by two polycarbonate panes. Giant talons raked at the plastic, a horrific visage snapped at her with a long toothed beak as claw-tipped wings beat against the window. She screamed and jumped back, dropping her scissors.

  “Screamwing,” the kid soldier said.

  The window held, as it would against anything short of a wag-chiller round, or maybe a kiss from Ma Deuce. The mutie vanished, whipped away by its wings or the wind of MAGOG’s passage.

  Maybe to prove to the kid—or herself—she wasn’t, Mildred went right back to the window, pressed her face against it and looked up. A cloud of the winged horrors circled above the train, darting down now and again to attack it.

  “There’s millions of the things!” Mildred exclaimed, exaggerating slightly. “And they’re a lot bigger than what I’m used to.”

  She was feeling all kinds of blaster-induced vibes now through the very fabric of the train: the .50s’ deliberate mighty pounding, the quicker tempo o
f the lighter M-60s and MAG-58s, the ripping snarl of Minimis. As she watched, a burst caught a slow-flapping creature not thirty yards from the windows and ripped it apart in a spray of black.

  “Yes!” whooped the kid, pumping his fist in triumph. He promptly fell over. Mildred helped him up, concerned he might’ve dislodged the fresh bandage or done some new hurt to himself. She kept a firm grip on his biceps to restrain any further displays of juvenile exuberance.

  “That’ll show the bastards!” he cried.

  “Right. Now just calm down till you get your damn pants on.”

  He obeyed. Looking out again, Mildred saw something that made her heart feel as if someone had punched its Pause button.

  From the train’s crew Mildred had learned that with few exceptions only the steel-shelled carriages were part of MAGOG’s original complement. The General had added cars as he’d come across intact ones that seemed to serve his need—with fusion-powered engines fore and aft, and some kind of special magnetic setup to increase the traction of the driving wheels on steel rails for stopping and starting, the engine could haul some improbable and unprecedented number of carriages. The armored carriages were almost all twodeckers, which accounted for the low ceilings, since the cars could be no more than fifteen and a half feet high overall to be sure of clearing existing U.S. tunnels and overpasses. The upper levels were usually the fighting decks. Some of the cars even carried pop-up heavy weapons turrets, that nestled within the armor shell—and the max height—until they were needed for action, then as the name indicated popped up to take care of business.

  Some also sported casements that could open to the sky. These were intended to allow the crew to launch shoulder-fired SAMs at attacking aircraft. Mildred had been dubious about that—had the drug lords and guerrillas of South America been buying fleets of F-16s when the balloon went up?—until J.B., during one of their rare, fleeting encounters in the commissary, explained that lethal ordnance could be bolted onto just about any kind of airplane or helicopter, not just military jets.

  One thing about the modern Deathlands: attack planes were as rare as good teaching hospitals. The General usually left the antiaircraft emplacements open to the sky, some reinforced with sandbags, to serve as additional firing points.