Vengeance Trail

by James Axler

  The General grunted. “Spilled blood doesn’t go back in the body,” he pointed out. “Go and remind our damage-control crews of that fact, while we’re at it, in case we’re not ready to roll in—” he checked his wrist chron “—fifteen minutes.”

  THE DIRT ROAD THAT RAN along the rail embankment was a poor surface for the outlaw motorcycle, which wasn’t exactly a cross-country bike to begin with. Every rut and bump transmitted itself like an iron-shod kick right up through Ryan’s butt and jolting up his spine. The big bike Ryan had borrowed from the coldheart was running on fumes. Regardless, he crowded it as hard as he could, gambling on speed.

  The brutal jouncing the road gave him was actually a help. It helped him keep himself in the moment. He had clamped his mind down as tight as his prodigious will could force it. He dared not think about the future.

  The past, as always, was just a spent shell case.

  He had plenty to worry about, had he let himself. Paul told him Krysty had determined to get herself aboard the armored train. To Ryan that meant she had, even though the dreams Far Walker had guided him through faded into impenetrable fog right around Taos. He took for granted she was capable of anything. The fact she’d caught the rad-blasted train, notwithstanding the fortuitous aid of a mad genius and Rail Ghost, proved that. Not that she hadn’t already proved it to Ryan many times over.

  But even as good and smart and tough and fearless as she was, his mind could shape no image of how she might wind up any way but caught or dead, or both, once inside the monster’s metal gut. It was no different than letting yourself be swallowed by a giant beast. So he didn’t try to imagine what was happening. Instead he tried not to.

  Of one thing he was locked-down sure: time was blood.

  Then he rounded a bend to see the great train a quarter mile ahead. Its trail engine was just passing the remnants of the derailment and its aftermath. Shortly beyond that point the stream ducked under the tracks from right to left. Right after that, the line curved right—west—around a forest-crowned promontory. The lead engine was already out of sight.

  Ryan leaned into the high handlebars and twisted the throttle higher. He hadn’t dared give the bike more than about two-thirds for fear of the machine shaking itself, not to mention him, to pieces. But he reckoned it and he could hold together long enough from here.

  Nearly a thousand feet of wags lay in the stream, damming it, with the water swelling up around: a tumble, senseless and forlorn, as if a giant child had fetched his toy train a cosmic kick. A thousand feet of wealth, beyond a baron’s dreams of avarice, had been discarded without thought, as if to prove its former owner was, even without it, in many ways still the most powerful man on Earth.

  Bouncing a yard in the air with what seemed like every bump in the track, Ryan raced in pursuit of MAGOG. Some of the wrecked wags zigzagged along the embankment with one end in the stream. Before he reached them Ryan stopped, turned to face the bank directly and charged right up it. The bike made heavy going. He had to push with his legs for all he was worth to get it the last few feet up and over.

  There was just space between the ends of the ties and the edge of the embankment for him to herd the bike along. He went full-out across the trestle over the stream. At least the ride was smoother up here.

  The rear of the train was being sucked toward the bend. Ryan faced a snap decision as tough as green wood: how to get inside. The cars would be locked tight as a matter of course. He had, however, noticed what looked like little metal boxes on top of some of the armored carriages, with heads—and heavy weapons—sticking out of them. Since even a man as ruthless and profligate as the General would hardly be willing to combat the loss of his sec men, not to mention the big blasters that happened to be topside when a chem storm hit, it stood to reason those emplacements had to be connected to the interior.

  He slanted the bike down the flank of the embankment and charged up the jut of mountain around the base of which the tracks flowed. The slope was gentler than the railway bank, but he had some bad moments toward the top when his rear tire started to spin out on a bed of fallen pine-needle tripods, long, slender and slick. Sheer brutal acceleration dug the tire through the needle layer and propelled him forward by plowing at the brown earth beneath.

  At the top he saw he was in luck. The jut he had just ridden up formed the base of a huge backward L. The leg stretched off west, almost paralleling the track for several hundred yards.

  One thing Ryan knew as if he’d watched it all: however Krysty managed to get herself in, she hadn’t hesitated. He could do no less.

  Leaning forward as flat to the tank as the bars would let him get, he charged down the leg of the L. His engine whined protest as he ran up the gears.

  Cars began whipping past to his left. Men in open emplacements, hearing the mad mosquito whine of his engine, shouted and pointed at him. He heard shots.

  The promontory ran right up almost to the tracks before dropping steeply to the valley floor. Ryan and the bike went straight off the end.

  Hanging there with nothing but fifty feet of air between him and spectacular demise, Ryan had for the first time the leisure to wonder if this was a good idea.

  The answer was probably no. But he couldn’t exactly turn back. All he could do was rely on his one-eyed aim, steel muscles and tungsten nerves. And luck.

  Luck almost finished him then—that and a trick of aerodynamics. His aim was dead-on. He saw the flattened shiny-metal top of an armored carriage rushing up at his front tire. But inevitably he wasn’t traveling fully parallel to the track. Rather he was crossing at a very shallow angle. After the fact he wasn’t sure if a semiconscious attempt to correct his course caused it, but as the bike descended it suddenly started to go crosswise to its line of flight.

  And one more thing: the guy standing flatfooted on top of the wag shooting at him with his longblaster set to full-auto.

  Ryan managed to bring both tires down simultaneously, square on the flat top of the wag. That took up most of the shock of impact. Then he laid the ride down and let her go.

  Inertia had its way with things, as it always did. Screeching and sending up a tail of sparks, the bike slid on its side diagonally across the roof. Its hurtling mass took the sec man in the shins, snapped the bones like a child’s fingers and carried him right off the edge and out of sight.

  Inertia also urged Ryan strongly to follow him and the bike. He managed to catch hold of an armored vent and arrest his progress as his bootheels shot out over open space, at the cost of the Steyr’s butt fetching him a whack in the kidneys.

  He hung there a moment, taking rapid stock of his situation while his body tried to remember how to breathe. Two cars ahead, a man’s head stared back at him immobile, like a startled gopher. Three cars back, however, two alert sec men were bodily picking up a tripod-mounted M-2 machine gun and turning it to bear on the intruder. It was no easy task even for two.

  Ryan hauled himself to a kneeling position. Without time to sling up properly he braced, laid the crosshairs on a camou-clad chest and squeezed off.

  Some irregularity in the track made the wag sway slightly as the firing pin popped the cap on the cartridge. It threw the blaster’s long barrel up a few seconds of arc.

  The bullet missed the target, but not the man. He had turned his head to say something to his buddy, and the boat-tailed slug hit right on the side of his chin, tearing his lower jaw straight out of his face. Screaming a fountain of blood, he toppled from the emplacement and rolled across the roof, leaving a wide scarlet smear.

  By that time Ryan had jacked the bolt and gotten the rifle on line again. The second sec man had gone into hero mode and just sat down spraddle-legged behind the .50-caliber weapon. His thumbs were reaching for the butterfly trigger when a 180-grain bullet punched through the seam of his blouse half an inch above the second button, passed between two ribs, drilled a neat hole through his heart and, as an added bonus, knocked a chunk of vertebra right out the back of him, sni
pping the spinal cord. He just sort of slumped down with his head dropping to his chest as if he’d just fallen asleep. Which he had—forever.

  Ryan spun one-eighty and whipped off a shot without bothering with a sight picture. It was intended to make the guy or guys in the emplacement two cars up duck if they were up to anything sneaky. It did.

  He heard the bullet whack the emplacement’s armor wall and whine away. He saw neither head nor blaster barrel.

  He jumped up and ran, hunched forward to streamline himself so the slipstream wouldn’t pitch him off the train. As he did, he slung the Steyr and drew his SIG-Sauer. It was far better suited for close-quarters work than the long scoped rifle.

  He leaped the gap between cars. It wasn’t that far, not even hard for a man in his shape. It was still something better not to think about.

  Shouts and shots came from behind him. He didn’t hear the supersonic crack of any near-misses. It might have occurred to somebody that blasting right along the long axis of a train strung with open-top emplacements with your buddies’ heads sticking out of them is not the wisest course of action. Still, they inspired Ryan to pick up his speed. The last thing he wanted to stake his life on was some trigger-happy soldierwannabe’s blaster handling skills.

  He jumped the next gap, to the next car with an open emplacement. As he did, a head poked up. The eyes in it got very wide.

  Ryan snapped off two quick shots, sort of looking over the front sight as he did. The head snapped back, and a spray of blood and what he hoped was a chunk of skull shot out behind it. The head went away, to be replaced at once by a hand holding a longblaster. And spraying the roof blindly with bullets.

  Ryan launched himself in a flat dive, slid forward alongside the steel-alloy box without picking up any new orifices along the way. He grabbed the top of the wall, hauled himself up and pumped two shots into the back of the guy crouched down firing over the parapet.

  Movement caught the corner of his eye. He jerked back. Something spread out and massive clanged against the edge of the raised emplacement where his head had just been.

  A sec man had just tried to brain him with the tripod of an M-2. The MG itself lay at the bottom of the pop-up turret where its crew had dropped it while trying to get it swung around to shoot along the train instead of away from it.

  Ryan swiveled his hip and kicked the third sec man in the close-cropped head as the man struggled to chamber the tripod for another whack. The man fell back against the far wall, dropping the metal stand. Unfortunately it missed him on the way down.

  Dropping in after it, Ryan didn’t. He punched the man in the face with his left fist, knocking his head back against the armor plate. Then he shot the sec man in the left temple with the muzzle so close the flash instantly scorched away the short hair and quick-cooked the skin around the entrance wound.

  Ryan rooted quickly through the turret. If this were his rail wag, and enterprising coldhearts could escape the traverse of his heavy blasters by getting in really close and swarming up the sides of the cars, he’d have…

  Yep. Grens. A crate with a dozen or so stashed inside for easy dropping on coldheart heads. Little steel baseballs whose explosive hearts were wound round and round with yards of wire, meant to shatter into hundreds of nasty little high-speed projectiles on detonation. He tumbled a half dozen or so into his pockets, then pulled the pin on another and yanked open the hatch in the floor.

  A startled face was peering right up after him. “Surprise,” Ryan said, and dropped the gren on the bridge of the sec man’s nose. Man and gren dropped to the bottom of the compartment.

  Ryan leaned away. As usual with grens there wasn’t much visual display, especially from outside. But there was lots and lots of noise, both during and after the explosion.

  SIG-Sauer in hand, Ryan dropped to the compartment floor. It wasn’t that far a drop; evidently this was a double-deck wag. He almost landed on the headless guy.

  The other occupant of the wag, at least the upper story, was thrashing around in his own entrails. It looked as if he’d unaccountably tried to wrap himself in a twenty-foot string of greasy purple sausages. And doused himself in blood.

  It sounded like a man rolling around in his own guts.

  Ryan quieted him with a hammer: two fast shots to the head. A 9 mm CAR-4 lay on the rubber runner that covered the metal decking. It only had a little blood on the stock and receiver. Short and handy and fully automatic, it was even better suited for face-to-face interpersonal transactions than the SIG-Sauer. Always sensitive to such nuances, Ryan tucked away the SIG-Sauer where it would be handy on the off-chance the occasion for a little quiet murder presented itself, and picked up the carbine. He worked the charging handle. A cartridge spun away; he caught the yellow gleam of a fresh one going in. Golden.

  With no time for a serious search he pulled a spare magazine from the pocket of the man he’d just chilled. Pulling a gren from his pocket, he moved toward the front of the wag. He had some high-speed house cleaning to do.

  Chapter Thirty

  The little two-stroke motor snarling and sputtering like an angry badger, the Yawl rocketed along the rails at a speed Krysty never imagined it could attain. Paul had his conductor’s cap crammed far down on his head to keep his wind of passage from plucking it away. His goggles saved his eyes from being dried by the arid breeze, and from the impacts of grit and bugs that bounced off like hail. His ponytail streamed behind him like a brown pennant worked through with gray threads. He hadn’t known that his creation could attain such speeds—not for sure.

  Ryan Cawdor wasn’t the only man in desperate pursuit of MAGOG that day.

  Paul had lied to Krysty about his Yawl’s capabilities, by omission at least. But he did so, he told himself, to keep faith with her, with his promise to aid her as best he could, rather than to break it. Her intelligence was as remarkable as her beauty, but he had known from the instant of their meeting that her intelligence was far from in total control of her being. She had said as much, often enough. She was bent utterly on her revenge. It tinged her judgment.

  Had she known that Paul could really crank the engine, well past the fifteen miles per hour or so he ran it at on the flats, not to mention the ten or less that he pushed the Yawl up grades, she would have insisted that he wind the throttle as far it would go and dog it down. Which would, of course, have burned the engine out in a matter of miles, stranding them when wind, muscle and downgrades all failed them. The time they would have lost on the brutal climb out of the Plains toward Taos in her bed of high mountains alone would have lost them any time they had made up on the Plains themselves, and then some. MAGOG would have been long gone, across the sheer, thousand-foot deep Grandee gorge and away to Cali to the fabled Great Redoubt.

  And at that point, he knew, far more than just Krysty’s quest would be doomed.

  He hadn’t heard the arguments Krysty made to his kinfolk by the bonfire the night before. Beyond telling her sorrowful tale, she hadn’t spoken of her motivations to him, considering them plain enough—saving the land from the tyranny of the General was for her a far secondary consideration, abstract at best, pallid and small beside her need to chill him and the train that obsessed her as cruelly as it did Paul. If in taking her revenge she could spare the continent the risk that the mad, capricious General might conquer it—and certainly spread death and misery on a scale unprecedented since the megacull itself, even if he failed—that was fine. Whatever the future might be like, she had no great desire to be part of it. Without Ryan she would just coast along, deal with life as it was presented to her.

  But Paul understood perfectly well the threat the General and MAGOG posed. That was why the mad act of attempted murder he had been driven to by the ecstasy induced by his first vision of the great train in the steel hadn’t been repeated. He was torn by his love for the wondrous locomotive on the one hand, and on the other his love of the freedom of the open roads and skies and most of all the rails—and his love for Krysty, inev
itable as it was platonic.

  But choosing to defy his adoration of MAGOG didn’t mean it had ended. Nor even abated the least little bit. The vision of that perfect hurtling mass of metal drove him now, faster than he had ever been driven before.

  He would burn out the little engine, already crying out in its torment in a voice that tore his heart. He would sacrifice his beloved Yawl. He would catch MAGOG.

  He had no illusions about somehow aiding Ryan and Krysty. He hoped they succeeded, hoped—against hope and logic—they might somehow be united this side of the last train for the coast. But as he had said and proved time and again, he was no fighter. They would win or lose their hearts’ desire by their extraordinary skill and will. If he tried to help, he’d only be in the way.

  It was his own destiny that drew him through the bright morning as a giant magnet drew a tiny wisp of iron.

  STARTLED FACES looked at Ryan. Hands reached for blasters. At least one alert sec man ducked beside the huge cylinder that dominated the center of the wag, to use its impenetrable metal mass as cover from which to shoot at the intruder.

  Ryan chucked the gren he held ready in his hand and slammed the door again. So perfect was the wag’s soundproofing that he heard nothing of the blast, only felt it as a rattle transmitted through the fabric of the train itself as he ducked back into the open hatchway of the car he’d cleared.

  Some instinct made him shut the door. A heartbeat later he felt the slam of a gren exploding on the other side.

  He yanked the door open, the CAR-4 in his right hand blasting. He saw a young face open in a look of total astonishment a handbreadth from his own, underlit by flickering muzzle flare in the dim passageway. The sec man wore no armor. A handful of the pointy copperjacket 9 mm slugs punched through him to lance into the chest and belly of the man behind and drop him as well.