Vengeance Trail

by James Axler

  “Pull inside the gate and park,” the mission commander’s voice came over the talkie built into J.B.’s rad-suit helmet. “We’ll go the rest of the way on foot.”

  It was a considerable irony for the Armorer to find himself in a squad commanded by the very man who had gunned down his best friend, marooned another, and taken him and his friends captive. Had J.B. been minded to risk tossing away not just his life, but Jak’s, Doc’s and Mildred’s, this little pleasure trip would no doubt provide ample opportunities to arrange an accident to avenge Ryan.

  But J.B. was the where-there’s-life-there’s-hope type. Otherwise he’d’ve just gone postal in the first heartbeats of the attack and gotten chilled wasting train sec men. The time would come to act. It had to.

  In the meantime, if Captain Marc was the boy wonder everybody said he was, he might just be J.B.’s best shot of getting back to the rail wag alive.

  “Dix,” the voice said as the men climbed warily from the vehicles, clumsy in the suits and slow to avoid snagging them on anything and risking a tear. That’d be a sweet death. Here we fuckin’ go, J.B. thought.

  “Go forward and burn back some of that growth. The building we want is twenty yards in from the first one.”

  “Right.”

  “Woolf, go with him and cover him. And be careful.”

  “Yes, sir.” The sec man’s sullen response struck J.B. as less respectful than his own nonreg reply.

  J.B. trudged manfully forward. The flamethrower was heavier than he’d guessed it would be and made him feel clumsy and conspicuous. The captain deployed the remaining men in a firing line. Having eight or nine blasters pointed at his back made J.B. feel special, too, but he had to admit the MAGOG bunch displayed decent fire discipline. Still, much as he hated to admit it, he wished Sergeant Banner was along. Nobody would dare imagine a negligent discharge with that blood-drinking old bastard on the line.

  Woolf was a tall lanky black guy with a rolling gait. He carried an M-16 with an M-203 40 mm gren launcher slung beneath the barrel. It was loaded with a multiple projectile, which in effect made it a giant shotgun. He was a kid from Seattle with an attitude. He wasn’t much impressed by killer weeds, despite the little incident with the bloodflowers. He strolled out in front of J.B.

  The Armorer opened his mouth to warn him how triple stupe it was to wander in front of the muzzle of a flamethrower.

  One of the plants stirred. A big pod, dark green with yellow stripes running to its underside lifted up. Its tip exploded.

  Hundreds of tiny pellets blasted out. Woolf took most of the charge. J.B. was in his blast shadow. The other projectiles spit harmlessly across what had been the parking lot.

  Woolf dropped his blaster and staggered back. He turned. The front of his rad suit was peppered with holes, black but quickly going red. J.B. marveled he was still on his feet.

  The sec man went to his knees, then he screamed and stood.

  Tendrils were sprouting from Woolf’s chest, nasty pale things that became veined with red as they grew, writhing, spreading red leaves. Woolf screamed again, his voice piercing even through his helmet and J.B.’s, though their talkie system had some kind of filter system that cut him out of the circuit when he got loud. He seemed to be trying to bat at his punctured chest, but wasn’t in control of his arms. His body began to vibrate.

  He took a slow step toward J.B. Another.

  That was enough. J.B. aimed the flame nozzle at him and prepared to light him off.

  A blast from the side almost took off J.B.’s head with overpressure and noise. Captain Marc stood at the Armorer’s side. At his shoulder was the stubby blunderbuss shape of an M-79 gren launcher. That was another reason the Armorer had to hate him: he craved that weapon, instead of his triple-stupe squirt blaster. It was a treasure, far superior to the M-203 even though it had been dropped from U.S. service in the hybrid gren blaster’s favor.

  The triple-aught buck loaded in Helton’s MP round shattered the visor of Woolf’s helmet preparatory to ripping it—and his head—clean off its shoulders.

  The headless body reeled back a step, then it advanced again.

  “Do it, Dix,” Helton said tersely.

  J.B. hadn’t actually been waiting. Already well-braced he gave the headless thing a quick pulse of flame.

  A scream like a tortured child’s burst straight out of the neck stump. Engulfed in orange fire and black smoke, Woolf kept walking forward, swinging his hips rather than his legs. The captain and J.B. moved to either side. Woolf passed blindly, walked half a dozen blazing steps toward the line of increasingly nervous squaddies, then collapsed.

  Helton had broken open his gren launcher. It really was just a supersized break-action shotgun. He stuffed in a fat HE round and popped it into the vegetation. Green chunks and black ooze went flying.

  “Roger that,” the captain said. “That’s how it wants to play, that’s how we play it.”

  From then it was a cakewalk. A cakewalk where a single misstep or bad break could fry your nuts, true, but that didn’t happen. Helton and a couple privates with M-203s shattered the foliage in their path from a safe distance with launched high-explosive grens. Then J.B. torched the rudely pruned shrubbery. He was especially gratified when several of the blaster-pod plants writhed in something like animal agony as they burned. Woolf had been a cocky prick, and too stupe to live, but when it came to a fellow human versus militant mutie topiary, J.B. was clear which side he stood on.

  Once the weeds were well and truly whacked, Helton had the wags driven right up next to the bunkers. Then the team cautiously, but without further incident, penetrated the bunkers. It was difficult: their doors had been left swinging, too. The insides, as revealed by the beams of their helmet lamps, were well-covered in mold of myriad colors. Unlike the plants outside, the mold displayed no kung fu fighting skills. At least it didn’t resist as the rad-suited men went in and out toting old computer CPUs as pointed out by Hubertus, the intel chief himself, who was MAGOG’s resident living-steel expert and had been sent to supervise this phase of the op.

  They piled a couple dozen boxes into the wags, then they drove back to MAGOG without incident, unloaded them into a special sealed compartment to be examined by techies, and stripped them and wrung them for their own decontam procedures. The rail wag was rolling as they unsealed their suits.

  And that was Kancity.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The dark on the plains was so deep that only the polychromatic discharges within the seething, low-slung clouds provided any illumination to navigate by. Fortunately, steering wasn’t much of an issue for the Yawl. The tracks did twist and turn occasionally to pass low hills or ridges, the countryside having at last begun to show some relief again. Except when running fair before a favorable wind, which they didn’t have now, they never went fast enough to worry about curves.

  As time ground on and they penetrated deeper into the Deathlands, Krysty became almost feverish with anxiety to catch up with MAGOG. Fear beset her that whatever its crew might find in Kancity might send it off in some random direction. Not even Paul’s resourceful cunning and inexhaustible store of survival lore would enable the unprotected pair to follow the armored rail wag through the heart of the dead city and live. If they lost MAGOG here, they might never catch her up at all.

  And so they were rolling on through the night, and crickets and creatures less identifiable sang to them as they passed. Night was the tech-nomads’ natural domain. That’s what Paul told Krysty. So she insisted they put it to the test, pushing on as long as they could stand to, each taking turns pedaling solo while the other slept, eating on the fly, stopping only to answer the call of nature, stretch-aching legs, replenish their water tanks.

  She was half-drowsing. She hadn’t slackened in her pedaling; she was almost able to do it in her sleep. At the moment, she could hardly feel her legs. She was surprised she didn’t have thighs as big as barrels by now.

  Paul was as always indefatigable in
two areas: pedaling and talking. He was happily running his head on his favorite target, the history and lore of the rails. And how he fit into them, in however small a way.

  “Travel out on the rail line at night often enough, you’ll see ghost trains,” he declared. “Mark my words.”

  “What?” she asked sleepily. It was almost outrageous enough to awaken her interest.

  “Ghost trains I said, and ghost trains I meant. These tracks are haunted. Haunted by the ghosts of trains that plied them centuries ago.”

  “That sounds unlikely.”

  “Unlikely? Unlikely? So you’re now the expert on railroads, I suppose, missy?” He shook his head. “Some people. Teach ’em a little and they think they know all. Why, I’ll have you know I’ve seen them my very own self!”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “It’s true. I seen ’em myself. Great hurtling black masses of shadow, complete with phantom air-horns! You see ’em in the distance, maybe even feel the vibration on the tracks. And suddenly they loom up over you like some kinda giant black sea wave, and your heart goes right up your throat and you get ready to kiss you’re a—You reckon it’s all over for you. And then, whoosh! It rolls right over you, doin’ no more than rufflin’ your hair. And then it’s gone, leaving no trace but maybe the dwindling ghostly red glow of a lantern swinging at the rear of the caboose.”

  She laughed. Even after having talked incessantly for what seemed like months Paul still had the capacity to be wonderfully entertaining. “This happened to you, did it?”

  “Many’s the time,” he said. “Oh, all right. Not but a few times. But I remember ’em well, you bet I do—I’ll carry those mem’ries to my grave.”

  He cocked his head to the side. “In fact, hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you hear it? I think it’s one now.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She’d listened to—and told her share of—campfire ghost stories as a girl. She wasn’t about to fall for whatever trick he had up his sleeve.

  Then she felt a tingling in her palms.

  “Paul, what’s going on?”

  “Shh!”

  She could hear it now: low and deep, like far-off thunder. But regular. Almost metronomic.

  “It’s coming!” He was hopping around in his seat as if he needed to pee immediately. “A ghost train’s coming!”

  Her first suspicion had been that they were coming within earshot of a natural, or maybe nuke-caused, phenomenon whose existence Paul was aware of and which he had decided to weave into a nifty little guerrilla folklore session. He had a mighty histrionic gift; she’d worked that out long ago. But she didn’t think he was nearly a good enough actor to fake his excitement.

  She could hear it now, a rushing sound like a wind whirling up. She turned in her seat, craned her head around to see a beam of white light stab out across the terrain from behind a hill less than half a mile away. In a moment the source appeared, inundating both of them with actinic glare.

  “The ghost train!” Paul sang in ecstasy.

  “Ghost train my ass!” she began backpedaling furiously, although it did no good. “Stop the Yawl, Paul. Stop it now!”

  He blinked at her. “Stop us? Why?”

  “That’s no ghost, you rad-addled crazy! That’s MAGOG!”

  He did a comical take from her to the train and back. Then he reached down and yanked the emergency brake. Krysty thumped against the back of her seat. He was almost pitched out of his.

  At once, Krysty was up and off the platform. The mighty train’s approach was like an earthquake now. Paul had definitely been right about one thing: having that thing rushing down on you, looming higher and higher in the night, was exactly like being on the business end of a tidal wave.

  Paul had snapped out of his religious trance. He caught the handhold at his end and together they heaved the several hundred pounds of the Yawl up and off the track.

  MAGOG blasted by. The wind of its passage tumbled them down the embankment into a swamp. Fortunately the water wasn’t toxic and only ankle-deep. Unfortunately it was pretty stagnant.

  Feet sloshing in her boots, Krysty slogged back up the bank. The train flashed by, car upon car. Almost mindless with urgency, she looked for some handhold, something she could grab on to and try to haul herself aboard.

  “Best not try it,” Paul shouted from beside her. “She’s goin’ seventy at least. Lord, ain’t she a beauty?”

  Krysty lowered her arms to her side. They were rigid as bars of steel.

  When the last wag, the armored blaster car, had clattered past, she lurched onto the tracks and dropped to her knees.

  She felt Paul’s hand gentle on her biceps. “Come on. Let’s get the Yawl and out of sight and find us a place to catch some z’s.”

  She shook him off. “No. Let’s get the Yawl turned around and follow that son of a bitch!”

  “NUKE SUCK!” the driver yelled.

  The duty engineer jumped. “What?” He’d been slouched down peering sleepily at the readouts.All systems looked nominal—not that he would have been able to do anything but alert the brass if they hadn’t been. There were some techs aboard who had studied the specs and manuals enough to have some clue what was wrong and maybe even what to do about it. He wasn’t one of them. He was just a watch-stander who, it was hoped, would someday learn enough to be of some actual use himself.

  MAGOG’s control compartment was blacked-out, lit only by a few red lights and the glows of the monitors themselves, to preserve the crews’ night vision in case the sensor systems caught the last train to the coast, so to speak, and they had to slide back some armored shutters and actually look outside. It had never really happened, so far as any of the crew knew. But it was the Book: it didn’t have to make sense. You just did it. That was what being in the army was all about.

  “We missed ’em,” the driver said.

  “Missed who?”

  The driver gestured at the big central screen showing the view from straight ahead. The main windscreen shutters were up, and they could see out; but the front-mounted cameras had light-enhancement capabilities, and even with the giant multimillion candlepower headlight lit they could see better on the monitor. So the blackout still didn’t make much sense.

  “I don’t see anybody,” the engineer said.

  “Of course not. We’re past ’em now.” The engineer glared at him. “Some of that rail trash. Buncha crazies ride around the tracks on little wags, use sails, all kinda crazy shit.”

  “People do that?”

  “Yeah. Just rail rats, is what I call ’em.”

  “You ever actually run any down?” The engineer moistened his lips.

  The driver nodded. “Oh, yeah.” He gestured at a white-board pad hung next to his station. It showed sixteen hatch marks. “We even keep score.”

  The engineer sat up. “Think mebbe we might catch some more?” he asked.

  THE GENERAL WAS LOSING at chess to Doc when Hubertus appeared down his spiral metal stairs and cleared his throat. He looked even more funereal than usual with his pinched face underlit by a single dim green-shaded lamp.

  “Theophilus, would you do me a favor here, please?” the General asked.

  Doc rose and bowed. “It’s past time that I retired in any event. I bid you good evening, gentlemen.”

  He withdrew.

  “This better be good, Hubertus,” the General said. “Do we have the location?”

  He and his techs had extracted and decontaminated the hard drives from the computers they’d scavvied out of the Kancity bunkers. The drives were of a special top-secret design that protected the contents from being flash-erased by thermonuclear warheads’ electromagnetic pulses. The intervening decades hadn’t done them any good, but MAGOG, constructed to carry on the War on Drugs, had good facilities for recovering data from damaged or even deliberately erased disks.

  “We do not, General.”

  The General scowled. “I know I have a policy a
bout not shooting the messenger, Hubertus. But I have to admit I’m just a little pissed off here.”

  “I didn’t say we had failed. I merely don’t know the actual location of the Great Redoubt.”

  “And that differs from failure how?” But he sat up straighter in his plush red chair.

  “Our analysis indicates that the information you desire is to be obtained at the Denver Federal Center.”

  The General made a constricted sound deep in his thick throat. “This is like one of those damned Russkie puzzle dolls. You just keep opening ’em and finding yet another one inside. I’m not getting any younger, here. I’m getting nuke-blasted tired of chasing leads.”

  He slammed the flat of his hand down on his chair arm. “But damn! If this is the last one…” He squinted up at his intel chief. “You wouldn’t want to wind up crucified on the cow-catcher, now, would you, Hubertus?”

  “In Denver, we will discover the final piece of the puzzle. Our analysis is conclusive.”

  He paused. “And the prisoners, sir?”

  “Just keep the hammer lifted, there, Hubertus,” the General growled. “If they don’t spill by Denver and it doesn’t pan out, I’ll let you take them apart. If I don’t decide to crucify you on the cow-catcher and give your job to the simp who cleans the heads.”

  “I am ever at Your Excellency’s disposal,” Hubertus said, and bowed behind steepled fingers.

  KRYSTY WOKE to find Paul straddling her, with his hands clutching for her throat.

  She pushed up with her own hands, pushing his arms up—those hands, so disproportionately large and powerful-looking—away from her windpipe. He straightened in surprise. She threw her legs up, locked her ankles around his neck and heaved him off her to her left.