Vengeance Trail
Vengeance Trail
James Axler
As megalomaniac barons and savage anarchy compete to lay claim to post-nuclear America, perseverance and a will to live are what keep Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists roving through the worst and best of a new world. Armed with secrets of pre-Dark tech, they possess what few in Deathlands can imagine: hope for a better tomorrow.Ryan Cawdor is gunned down and left for dead by the new provisional U.S. Army, commanded by a brilliant general with a propensity for casual mass murder and a vision to rebuild America. Waging war from his pre-Dark, fusion-powered armoured locomotive, he's poised to unlock the secrets of the Gateways–as the rest of Ryan's group stand powerless. All except one. Hope may be lost for Krysty Wroth. But revenge is enough. In the Deathlands, vengeance is the only justice.
Her desire for vengeance was an unwavering flame
But even if Krysty had known beyond doubt her bullet would split that dark-haired skull, she wouldn’t have taken the shot. Yes, the captain had to die. She had to kill him, or at least be the cause of his death even if her finger didn’t pull the trigger or her hand plunge the blade.
But he was just one among many. A significant one, but merely one. To claim his life would risk throwing her life away—with her friends still unrescued and the bulk of her blood debt unpaid.
Krysty wouldn’t do that.
So she watched them drive off out of sight, unmolested. Intuition told her they were heading back to the massacre site, to the rim above Ryan’s unmarked resting place a mile toward the center of the earth. Why they might be bound there she couldn’t say. It didn’t matter, and speculation was no part of her nature in any event. She let all thought of whys and wherefores slip from her mind.
There could be only her quest. Worry, fear, anticipation—these could only weaken the resolve Krysty needed to keep her weary legs driving her relentlessly on.
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Crater Lake
Homeward Bound
Pony Soldiers
Dectra Chain
Ice and Fire
Red Equinox
Northstar Rising
Time Nomads
Latitude Zero
Seedling
Dark Carnival
Chill Factor
Moon Fate
Fury’s Pilgrims
Shockscape
Deep Empire
Cold Asylum
Twilight Children
Rider, Reaper
Road Wars
Trader Redux
Genesis Echo
Shadowfall
Ground Zero
Emerald Fire
Bloodlines
Crossways
Keepers of the Sun
Circle Thrice
Eclipse at Noon
Stoneface Bitter
Fruit Skydark
Demons of Eden
The Mars Arena
Watersleep
Nightmare Passage
Freedom Lost
Way of the Wolf
Dark Emblem
Crucible of Time
Starfall
Encounter:
Collector’s Edition
Gemini Rising
Gaia’s Demise
Dark Reckoning
Shadow World
Pandora’s Redoubt
Rat King
Zero City
Savage Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
Salvation Road
Amazon Gate
Destiny’s Truth
Skydark Spawn
Damnation Road Show
Devil Riders
Bloodfire
Hellbenders
Separation
Death Hunt
Shaking Earth
Black Harvest
Vengeance Trail
DEATH LANDS ®
James Axler
Like to the Pontick sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellspont,
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up.
—William Shakespeare,
Othello, III, iv, 454
THE DEATHLANDS SAGA
This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.
There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.
But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.
Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.
Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.
J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.
Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.
Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.
Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.
In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….
Contents
Chapter One (#uc4834e15-97df-5968-92d1-ba87fe0bdee1)
Chapter Two (#ue3a541cc-57f3-59c9-bb81-e87637442a14)
Chapter Three (#u5f44ee85-7567-5c2e-b63a-051ad3975d84)
Chapter Four (#u15124220-4d48-52fd-8c24-597101b5a4dd)
Chapter Five (#uc4a31da3-0df2-5fbb-93e0-464528883454)
Chapter Six (#u868679fa-4503-5230-bf59-028bd0d8aeff)
Chapter Seven (#udadc4e9c-2431-5076-a26e-7fc90de4857e)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
J. B. Dix chewed a dust-dry blade of buffalo grass and leaned back against the wag, its sun-heated metal pinging as it cooled in the breeze. Beneath the low-tipped brim of his fedora, he watched a little girl named Sallee, scabbed legs splayed in the dust by the track, as she played with a flop-eared, vaguely humanoid bundle of rags.
“What do you reckon that thing is, anyway, Jak?” he asked his companion, who perched on the wag’s hood walking a short leaf-bladed throwing knife along the backs of his bone-white fingers. “Rabbit or mutie?”
Jak Lauren flicked his keen ruby toward the rags and laughed. He was scarcely more than a child himself, despite a veteran’s scars. His skin was chalk white, and his long hair, wind-whipped around his shoulders, was the color of fresh-fallen snow.
“Mutie,” he said.
The sky’s blue skin was bare of clouds. The layers of earth defining the walls and pinnacles of the Big Ditch, the old Grand Canyon, glowed as though lit from within the Earth itself in bands of colors—yellow, red, burnt-orange—muted but so rich they seemed to vibrate. The sun that brought out all that glory shone down on the desert above the great canyon like a laser beam, and struck those below with the impact of heat of molten steel. But the tall, statuesque redheaded woman in the jumpsuit and blue cowboy boots didn’t mind. It was the sort of day that Krysty Wroth loved most. The kind of day where you didn’t have to be an initiate of Gaia, as she was, to find the beauty hidden in the devastation that was the Deathlands.
She let her green eyes slide from her two friends, to the caravan of a dozen battered wags parked by the edge of the Big Ditch with their engines cooling, while several people labored to change a flat tire, on to Doc Tanner, standing by offering unsolicited advice to Mildred Wyeth as she checked the dressings on the stump of a woman’s shin. A diamondback had bitten her on the ankle three days before, just outside the ville of Ten Mile, and her own husband had chopped off her leg with an ax to keep the venom from spreading.
Nothing was dampening the travelers’ spirits, though. They were bound from the fringes of the Deathlands proper, away to the east across the Rocks, to the fledgling ville of New Tulsa, where some of their kin had already begun to carve a living out of the land. The land wasn’t much less desolate than what surrounded them, although better watered by rain. But that very land, sere tan land dotted with cactus and hardly less unfriendly scrub, looked like Paradise to a folk accustomed to rains of acid and skies of murk.
And that sky of pure, open blue, with only a few clouds as white and innocent as baby lambs, affected them like some kind of happy drug: jolt without the edge. They laughed and chattered like kids and even sang. Some just wandered aimlessly, gazing around themselves in wonder.
“I’m going into the bushes for a bit,” Krysty called to her friends, “to answer the call.”
Ryan Cawdor, her lover, acknowledged her with a wave of his hand. He stood with his back to her on the rim of the precipice, the wind ruffling his shaggy black curls and gazed out and down into the giant cut in the earth’s flesh with his lone eye. A single dark shape wheeled out over that emptiness and the strange land forms striped with muted colors—ochre, orange, buff—at the level of the small party of humans and their machines perched perilously on the rim. From the fingerlike tips on the wings, Krysty was satisfied it was an eagle, not a screamwing.
No threat. Having duly notified her companions, she went off into the scrub to tend to her affairs. For all the utter naturalness of such functions, Krysty had been raised to be modest.
She didn’t hear the raiders until they were right upon them. No one did. The wind’s unceasing whistle and mutter masked the sound of engines coming fast from the east until the wags they propelled were braking to a stop alongside the halted caravan in a swirl of dust.
Suddenly men were leaping off half a dozen wags, longblasters in their hands. Krysty caught a flashing impression they all wore olive or camouflage, military-style.
Several travelers cried out in fear. Kids squealed and ran to parents frozen by shock. By reflex, Ryan spun, bringing his Steyr sniper rifle to his cheek.
Two of the intruders’ wags were pickups with M-249 machine guns mounted on welded-together pintles behind the cabs. One MG snarled a burst. Krysty saw dust spout off Ryan’s coat.
He fell from sight, straight into the Big Ditch.
A woman broke shrieking toward the brush with a toddler in her arms. Several longblasters cracked, including at least one on full-auto. Mother and child fell kicking in a whirl of dust and bloodied rags. Their cries subsided into bubbling sobs. Another burst stilled them.
Hidden behind scrub and a rise in the earth around the roots of a mesquite bush, Krysty felt as if she had been frozen into a block of amber like a mosquito Ryan had once shown her in some half-destroyed museum. Her hair, possessed of its own mobility and nerve-endings, flattened to her skull and neck.
Her companions still in the open—J.B., Mildred, Jak and Doc—stood just as still, hands raised. She felt a flash of rage that they hadn’t fought as Ryan had tried to do, but she stifled the thought in the sure knowledge that had they done so they, too, would be staring at the sky right now.
A coldheart stepped down from the cab of wag whose gunner had downed Ryan. Though he wore no insignia he was clearly the man in charge. He was tall, broad-shouldered, long-limbed, slim waisted. His clean-shaved face was as beautiful as a statue’s, smooth and unscarred, the rich warm brown of a light-skinned black man’s. His hair, curly bronzed brown, was cut short on top, though not buzzed. In back it was caught into a long braid at the nape and thrown forward over the right shoulder of the steel breastplate he wore over his camouflage blouse. A well-maintained 9 mm Heckler & Koch blaster rode in a combat holster at his right hip. Command presence radiated from his face and posture, the way the light and heat of the sun radiated from his mirror-polished armor.
He shook his head and sighed. “All right. Let’s get this done. Line them up for inspection.”
The surviving travelers, Krysty’s companions among them, had their hands on their heads, except for mothers with children too small to know what was going on. These kept one hand on the head while the other clasped the youngsters to their skirts. The coldhearts herded them into a line at the edge of the clearing in the scrub near the rim, well away from the canyon itself. It seemed the raiders wanted no part of that long drop.
Other raiders had clambered onto a couple of the travelers’ wags and began pitching out their possessions. These were few and mostly valuable. Some of the travelers had taken a piece or two of furniture with them, but these were the exception. There was plenty of nonperishable stuff left over from the megacull, lots more than there were people to use it. Bulky items like chairs and chests of drawers weren’t worth dragging across the Deathlands unless they had powerful sentimental value. Otherwise the travelers’ wags contained tools, clothes, meds, food, water, even some weapons. All stuff needed for survival in their new homes and, for that matter, on the long and perilous journey to get there. All, with the possible exception of clothing, commanding good value in trade.
The coldhearts didn’t seem to care. They just pitched whatever was on the wags they selected into the dust.
“Some guards you turned out to be,” spit Kurtiz, a young man with shaggy light brown hair and beard prematurely shot with gray, whose front two incisors were missing. It gave his voice a sort of lisp. He was straw boss of the travelers’ train, the man who actually got things done. He was able at his job and generally quiet—until now.
J. B. shrugged. A sec man had already relieved him of his M-4000 shotgun and was searching him for weapons.
“Friend,” the Armorer said, “you can’t argue with a leveled blaster.”
“Can argue,” Jak said with a bitter snarl as a coldheart took his .357 Magnum Colt Python and a collection of throwing knives. “Not win.”
J.B. had sounded casual, but Krysty saw the way a muscle twitched at the hinge of his jaw. She knew then as if she felt it herself the terrible void he had to be feeling, and what it was costing him not to so much as look at the place from which his friend had dropped off the earth. He had been best friend and comrade in arms to Ryan Cawdor for years before either man ever met Krysty Wroth.And even though Krysty was Ryan’s mate and soulbond, it was only because she herself had shared mortal danger and hardship with him that their own kindredship was as close as that between the two blood brothers.
Beside him, Jak vibrated with fury, lips skinned back from his teeth. But he kept his hands knotted in the snow-colored hair at his nape. Doc gazed into nothingness. Mildred was as impassive as a stone statue, but her eyes were bloodshot. Krysty knew that meant she was in the grip of fury every scrap as hard to control as Jak’s.
“The next one who gets chilled,” rasped a short, wide white man wearing a Kevlar coals coop helmet with sergeant’s chevrons painted on the front. His face looked as if it had been cut out of granite with a none-too-deftly wielded geologist’s pick.
The tall handsome sec chief stalked along the line of quaking backs. As he passed some he tapped lightly on shoulders. Those so indicated were yanked from the line by the coldhearts and ramrodded toward a stakebed truck that had earlier been full of raiders. When Kurtiz was chosen, he suddenly shook off the soldiers holding his arms, as if the awful implication of the process had suddenly struck home.
“Nukeblast it, you can’t—” he began.
The crack of a longblaster put a premature period to his exclamation. He dropped as if the long shabby coat he wore were suddenly untenanted. The hole the 5.56 mm bullet had made in his homespun shirt on its way to drill clean through the heart wasn’t visible from where Krysty crouched.
The short sergeant kept his M-16 leveled from his waist. “Next one gives any shit gets bursted in the belly,” he said. His voice was as rough as lava rock, and as hard and cutting.
When he came to the companions, the sec chief selected J. B. and Jak without hesitation, paused at Doc, then passed him by to select Mildred. Mildred seemed to hang back as soldiers grabbed her arms. J.B. caught her eye and shook his head all but imperceptibly.
She bowed her head and went where they took her. In the Deathlands, survival wasn’t optional. The time to go down fighting had passed. There was no fool like a dead one, as Trader used to say.
The ones chosen were fit-looking men and women without children, a few teenaged boys and girls, twenty-two or -three in all. Many still stood shivering despite the warmth of the sun, waiting with their hands on their heads.
As the implication of their being left unselected sank in, they began to cry and plead despite the example made of their trail boss. Then again, it now made little difference, and they knew it.
A stout figure whose repetitively chinned face was flanked by great winging gray side-whiskers stepped forward from the ranks of those not chosen. Sweat poured down in streams from the brim of his battered leather top hat. This was Elliot, called Hizzoner, by himself anyway, self-proclaimed mayor of the travelers’ settlement-to-be. As to what his precise contribution was to the welfare of the train to justify his claims of leadership, his two knuckle-dragging bodyguards, Amos and Bub, discouraged the others from asking impertinent questions.
“Now, just a minute here, boys,” he said, “let’s not be too hasty here. Happens I’m the leader of this here little procession across the wasteland.”
Banner, the sergeant, who happened to be nearby, backhanded him across the face with casually brutal force. The plump self-proclaimed mayor measured his none-too-considerable length in the dust.
“Triple-stupe,” a sec man muttered, prodding the selected captives into the bed of a wag. “Ain’t figgered out what he was don’t mean shit to a tree, now.”
With surprising agility, Elliot rolled to his knees, clasped his hands prayerfully and commenced to plead. “No, you can’t do this! I can help your baron. I’m a man who unnerstands the way of the world!”
The raiders wordlessly began to line up behind the weeping, imploring rejects.
Elliot reached back and grabbed a nine-year-old girl by a bony grubby wrist, dragging her forward. She was clad in a torn smock that was all over stains in shades of yellow and brown.
“Take my little girl—do with her what you will,” he blubbered. “She’ll please you up right. Trained her proper, myself!”
One of the mothers of the other children spoke up. “They’re gonna take what they want anyway, Elliot, you damn fool,” she said bitterly. “They got the blasters. Now stop your sniveling and die like a man!”
“Wait! Amos, Bub! Help me! Ya gotta!”
His two heavyweight henchmen evaded his eyes as they took their places in the wags. Banner cuffed the politician on the side of his head. “Back in line, asshole. Make this messy for us, we shoot you in the belly and just leave you.”
“‘’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves…’” Doc began to recite loudly as the weeping would-be mayor crawled back into line. His eyes, aged beyond his years as much by the horrors of being snatched from his family and hurled through time as by the desperate sights they had witnessed in the Deathlands, had lost all hint of focus.
The commanding coldheart halted with one boot up in the cab of his wag. His men had already secured the travelers’ wags and begun firing up their engines. He turned his head and stared at Doc.
“What did you say?”
“‘All mimsy were the borogroves—’”
“‘And the mome raths outgrabe,’” the coldheart officer finished, striding back to him. “You know something of the classics, then, old man. Can you read?”
“Read, yes,” Doc responded, as though replaying to a voice from beyond the moon. “Read, breed, if you prick me do I not bleed?”
“Nuke-sucking oldie’s mad as Fire Day,” the sergeant said. “Do him with the others.”
“No, Sergeant Banner,” the sec chief said. “The General will want this one.”
The sergeant scowled. “It’s strong hands and backs we need to fix the track—”
The sec chief tossed him a single look. His eyes were pale brown and as clear as new glass.
“Yes, Captain Helton, sir,” the blocky sec man said briskly. He seized Doc’s arm and yanked him out of line. “Come on, then, you crazy old shit. General’s got his little hobbies.”
For a moment no one breathed. The coldhearts were clearly not used to anything but instant obedience to their commands, nor slow to let their blasters enforce them. Surely if Doc continued raving; the youthful captain would lose patience and allow Banner to ice him with the others who’d been deemed useless.
But since it no longer required the shelter of lunacy from the imminence of certain death, Doc’s rational mind reasserted itself. He lowered his hands—Banner’s finger never so much as twitched on the trigger—and shot his frayed cuffs. “Lead on, my good fellow,” he said to the sergeant.
As the old man was dragged toward the wags, Krysty felt tension flow out of her muscles. The future was a void a million times greater than all the Big Ditch and then some. But on some level below thought she wouldn’t watch another of her companions—the only family she had left to her—die before her eyes. Even if it meant her own death.
Of course, her future was empty without Ryan. But she had duties: as a friend, as mate to the companion’s fallen leader, she couldn’t allow herself to die.
Yet.
The children wailed and sobbed and clutched their mothers’ skirts. The mothers, Deathlands women, tousled their children’s hair, bit back their own tears and murmured reassurances they knew were lies. One little girl was trying to break from the line, screaming and crying and tugging at her mother’s hand. The sec chief frowned. He followed the direction her free hand was stretching in. He walked to where the small rag rabbit—or mutie—lay at the bash of a clump of salt-bush; picked it up, brought it to the little girl, knelt and handed it gravely to her. She took it, suddenly quiet, her grimy cheeks scoured by her tears. He smoothed the dark hair on her head, stood, pivoted on his heel and walked back to his wag.
As he passed Banner, he nodded once.
The sergeant barked a command. The machine gun that had killed Ryan and its mate on a second raider wag snarled. The bullets raked the line of rejects carefully between two and three feet off the ground, to take adults in legs or bellies and kids in heads and chests, anchoring all neatly in place. Most screaming and thrashing in agony, a fortunate few lifeless-limp, the unarmed travelers went down in the dust.
The firing stopped. Arcs of flying brass empties flashed in the sunlight to fall with an almost musical tinkle to the hardpan. The moaning of the wind was joined by the shrieks of the injured.
Banner spoke again. Again the machine guns ripped the bodies, those that stirred and those that didn’t. It seemed the marauders had bullets to burn. Finally the sergeant walked along the line of now-motionless travelers, firing a handful of single shots from his longblaster. Then he turned and joined his comrades in the wags.
One of the raiders who had come in the stakebed truck that now contained the caravan’s survivors took a frag gren from his web gear, pulled the pin and let the safety lever fly free, then tossed the bomb under the broken-down wag that had caused the caravan to halt. He turned and walked away without waiting to watch the result. The gren went off with a crack muffled by the wag’s bulk.
The sec man who’d thrown the gren joined his comrades who were crammed into the two travelers’ wags they had emptied. Engines growled. The convoy rolled off along the bare-earth track, to the west, raising roostertails of khaki dust.
The derelict wag’s gasoline tank, ruptured by the blast, caught fire with a whump and billow of yellow flames. The vehicle began to burn ferociously, puking black smoke into a sky that was already beginning to mask its clean blue face with clouds.
Krysty emerged from her hiding place. Her joints ached from maintaining the unnatural position she’d been forced to endure. Red ants had crawled up her legs inside her jumpsuit and bitten her shin and thigh. Their venom made the tiny wounds pang like stabs. She ignored all.
She walked with the deliberation of a drunk to the edge of the precipice, where Ryan had stood, where last she had seen her lover. Her beautiful high-cheekboned face was set like stone. She looked down, half fearing what she would see.
There was nothing. The slope angled sharply down for perhaps forty yards, pitched over a cluster of granite boulders, which resisted erosion better than the prevalent sandstone, and straight down in a sheer fall to the floor a mile below. Ryan’s body wasn’t in sight. Presumably it was way down at the bottom, hidden by sheer height.
She turned away, looking over the bodies of their former traveling companions: Kurtiz, Elane, Natty and the rest. The little girl Sallee lay facedown, with her toy inches from her outflung fingers, its grime glistening with her blood.
Moving as if through water and all her limbs were lead, Krysty picked through the items the coldhearts had so contemptuously pitched into heaps on the ground. She needed what supplies she could carry: food, water, meds. Even something extra for barter.
She wouldn’t just lie down and die. She would follow the men who had murdered Ryan and the travelers and kidnapped her friends. She would kill them all, and free her friends.
Of course, she was but one woman, alone in the wasteland, afoot in pursuit of wags. And all the supplies she could lift, as strong as she was, would be quickly exhausted in this waste. Particularly water.
It meant nothing to her. Nothing at all. She would follow her vengeance trail to the end, whatever it would take.
She set out along the track the wags had taken. She had no hope, but hate was enough. Concern for herself was no part of the picture.
She was dead already. Inside.
SOMEWHERE AT THE BOTTOM of a deep well of darkness and misery, Ryan stirred.
It felt to him as if the skin of his chest was a big bag wrapped around forty pounds of busted glass. With every laboring breath he drew, it felt as if a thousand jagged points stabbed and rasped at his raw nerve endings.
Worse, as he became aware again, was that he could hear his breathing. Not just the ragged in and out of exhalation that was always with you whether you paid it mind or not, but a nasty wet slurping noise combined with a hiss. And it was hard to breathe—bastard hard.
Sucking chest wound, he realized. So-called, one of his father’s healers had told him back home in Front Royal long ago, because it really sucked if you got one.
And unless you got pretty quick attention, so did your chances of living.
Krysty! The name went off like ten pounds of smokeless powder off a blasting cap in his mind. She and the companions hadn’t come to his aid, which meant they weren’t able to.
For a moment, in the damp, dark misery of his mind and body, he fought the clammy jaws of panic. He was hurt bad and alone.
He tried one of the deep-breathing exercises Krysty had taught him to calm himself and banish the terror that threatened to rob him of the last remnants of his selfhood, his manhood, and whatever he might laughingly call hope, sucking the air way down with his abdominal muscles.
It worked, too. Not because supercharging his system with oxygen had its usual soothing effect on the system. But because it felt as if some giant mutie bastard had plunged a twenty-inch saw into his flat belly and was sawing for all he was worth.
Whatever else you could say about it, it took his mind off feeling sorry for himself.
His eye opened. It was resisted by some kind of thick gumminess, but the jolt of white-hot agony that racked his being, as he breathed in, did the trick.
The first thing he saw was lots of nothing much: blue dimness as far as his eye could see. After a moment he noticed it deepened in the direction the not-so-gentle pull of gravity was telling him was downward, was banded in various shades and hues, was molded into cone and curtain shapes.
He was lying on the very lip of the Big Ditch itself, with his outflung right hand, fingers tingling as though with crawling fire as circulation restored by some unnoticed movement returned feeling to them, hanging over a mile of space.
He rolled his eye down. The right side of his face was pressed to a rough rock surface. The tarry looking pool spread around it tended to confirm his suspicion that what had glued his eyelid shut was his own blood, spilled in a copious quantity.
He rolled the eye up. A granite outcrop, almost black in the dusk, hunched over him like a leering gargoyle. He could only guess that after being shot—a remembered flash of pain in his chest, of spinning dizzily into blackness vaster by far than the Grand Canyon—he had tumbled down the steep, but not sheer, slope and bounced over that last humpback boulder to come flopping to a stop on a hard ledge of rock.
Needless to say, it had busted hell out of him. Needless to say, it was nothing compared to what would have happened had he actually gone over.
But it wasn’t going to matter a bent, spent shell case if he couldn’t do something for himself and fast. He’d suffocate if the wound wasn’t tended to. He knew what had to be done: apply what Mildred called an “occlusive dressing,” a sort of valve that would flap shut and seal the hole when he inhaled, but relax and expel air when he breathed out. It wasn’t all that complex an operation, and anything reasonably airtight would do for a patch. Nuke it, he even had the proper material for the job tucked away in one of his pockets.
The problem was, could he even get to it, or use it if he could?
Then he heard, above the mocking whistle of the wind and the thin shrill cry of a redtailed hawk on the hunt, the tiniest scrape of something moving on stone. And he realized that the injuries he already had might turn out to be the least of his problems.
He wasn’t alone.
Having another living being find you helpless in the Deathlands was an almost automatic death sentence. Even if that being walked on two legs like a human being. Mebbe worst if it was a human being. Ryan had known plenty humans, no few of them barons or their sec men, who gave away nothing to stickies when it came to rapacious cruelty.
He took stock of his resources. He still had all the weapons he could want. He could feel the familiar weight of the Steyr lying across his left leg, the big broad-bladed panga in its sheath on his hip. Even his SIG-Sauer with the built-in suppresser—he reckoned that was the hard object prodding a busted-end rib around in him every time he fought down a breath. He had feeling back in his right hand, even if it was feeling like it was being held in a fire, and could move his fingers.
But his left wasn’t responding. A node of unusually savage ache in the giant throb of pain that was his being suggested he might have a busted clavicle on that side. Which meant he could count that arm completely out. No force of his will would get the limb to so much as move. It just mechanically couldn’t happen, any more than the toughest man could walk with a broken pelvis.
He looked around, hoping his stalker would miss the motion of his eyeball in the gloom. Stalkers. That was the first thing he saw. Shapes, strangely hunched, gathered around him. He could make out no detail in the gloom. They were small, no more than three feet high, max. Not that it mattered. A three-legged coyote pup could put him on the last train west in his current condition.
A shape loomed over him. He could make out the glint of moisture on big staring nightmare eyes, big teeth gleaming pale behind animal lips. He tried to roll away. His body refused to obey. He tried to bring his right arm up to ward off the monster. It didn’t work. All he could do was turn his head frantically from side to side on his neck and make animal sounds, half-panic, half-defiant fury, deep in this throat.
A small paw stretched out over him.
Blackness took him.
Chapter Two
“Robbed!” howled the tall man with the painted ax-blade face. “Cheated! All our days of scouting and waiting gone for nothing.”
Red Wolf paused dramatically, glaring out from below the wolf’s head he wore like a cap over his own, with the rest of the pelt hanging down his broad bronze back. He was a onetime war leader of the Cheyenne from the Medicine Bow country. Or so he said. The multimegaton pasting that had taken out the Warren missile complex had left that very part of southern Wyoming and northern Colorado a howling wasteland as virulent as anything the Midwest boasted.
Not that anyone was going to go up there and check. He had proved time and again that his heart was as cold as the coldest, his case as hard as the hardest, and justified his role, not just as a member of Chato’s outlaw horde, but one of its leaders. If he wanted to dress in dead animal parts and various colors of paint, nobody was going to challenge him—who wasn’t ready to chill or be chilled on the spot, anyway. Chato himself was an Indian, though much smaller and with quieter tastes.
The problem with Red Wolf wasn’t what he claimed to be. The problem was that he was a bone outlaw, a seething vessel of barely repressed murder at the best of times, and he was taking the loss of the travelers even harder than the rest of what passed for Chato’s command council.
The other eight stared at him from the circle, where they squatted in the flickering feeble light from a fire of dried brush scraped together in the center of the cave. They looked lean, predatory and expectant. They also looked as if they were trying desperately not to bust down and cough their lights out. The cave etched into the sandstone bluff by wind and water and maybe, just maybe, improved by the hands of similar bands of desperados of ages past, was cool even in the heat of summer, which this wasn’t. But there was no smoke-hole, much less a chimney. Consequently a fogbank of nasty sage-colored smoke that went up the nostrils and down the throat like prickleburrs hung from a height of two feet off the floor to somewhere near the irregular arch of ceiling above.
“Not much we can do about it, pinche,” muttered El Gancho, a bandit from northern Mex. He was a squat, leering man with a bad eye and a worse mustache.
“But we know who to blame,” the tall Indian chiller said, eyes glittering like obsidian chips. Chato felt what had seemed like a fluttering of butterflies in his belly turn into a minor temblor.
“Easy now, friend,” said ginger-bearded Ironhead Johnson. He was a woods-running coldheart originally from up on the Musselshell, and more recently from Taos and parts south, who had headed west and hooked up with Chato’s growing band when the upper Grandee valley got too hot for him. He had been shot in the head on at least four occasions, with no more effect than minor deteriorations of personality and impulse control, neither of which had been notable before. One bullet scar was a white pucker over the inside end of his right eyebrow, like an off-center third eye. “Spilled blood can’t go back in the body.”
“No?” Red Wolf smiled like his namesake. “At least we can spill the blood of the one who is responsible. The one who brought us together, the one who held us back from raiding ranches and villes. The one who said there was no point alerting potential targets before we’d got at least one fat score.”
He was glaring straight at Chato now. Chato felt sweat run down his face. The yellow headband that restrained his own heavy black hair was already soaked.
“Who?” Red Wolf demanded, voice rising, with a crazy edge to it. “Who? I know who. I’ll tell you who. I’ll—”
The crash of a shotgun blast in the close confines seemed to implode Chato’s head even as the flash from a cutdown muzzle dazzled his eyes. Red Wolf staggered back as a buck-and-ball load—four chunks of double-ought buck and a .72-caliber lead ball—took him about the short ribs on the right side. Blood, flesh and chunks of yellow-gleaming bone were blasted free.
Red Wolf was a strong man all the way through. He staggered back only two steps, doubling over, grabbing at his ruined midsection. He raised his head for the charge from the second barrel to shatter his face like a clay shitpot. He measured his length backward on the sandstone, arms outflung, the last reflex spasms of his heart pumping out great gushes of blood that was black in the firelight and steamed like lava.
Chato became aware that he had screamed. Thankfully no one had heard him. No one was hearing anything at all but a loud ringing and echoes of the enormous roars.
Len Hogan allowed his Izhmash scattergun to tip forward from where recoil had sent it pointing toward the low ceiling. Smoke seeped from the muzzle, and then from the breech as he cracked it open to eject two red plastic-hulled empties and feed in a couple more from a pocket of his colors, the grime-blackened sleeveless denim jacket he wore as a vest.
Shave-headed, taller even than Red Wolf had been even before partial decapitation, and as lean as a gallows pole with an incisor missing from a mostly lipless mouth framed by a black handlebar mustache, he had been thrown out of the Satan’s Slaves biker gang for unpredictable violence and brutality. Actually, his erstwhile buds had been intent on lynching him, but he proved to be better than they were at tracking.
He was one of the cooler heads on Chato’s executive council.
“Enough of that owl-screech shit.” The ringing had subsided enough for Chato to hear him speak. He snapped the shotgun action closed with the flick of a massive wrist enclosed in a studded leather bracer. The rest of the group was busy surreptitiously trying to sidle even farther away from him than they’d been sitting before. Owing to certain peculiar rituals of the northwest bike gangs, the giant coldheart smelled like a chop-shop shitter with backed-up plumbing. “Who, your ass. Talk don’t load no mags.”
Chato made himself relax. At least a little. Otherwise he was going to lose it here and now, and that would put him in a world of hurt. Hogan had not, he knew, killed Red Wolf, because Red Wolf was stirring up rebellion against Chato. Hogan did it because he liked to kill people, and this was the first handy excuse he’d been presented for some time.
And that, in a spent casing, was pretty much the problem staring him in the face.
A White Mountain Apache by birth and upbringing, Chato was in many ways an actual genius. For example, taking best advantage of the coldhearts’ natural propensities for speed and sneakiness, he’d crafted the scouting system that had passed the word of the caravan’s capture back to headquarters, by means of a relay of flashing mirrors, within hours of it going down.
He could talk a snake into paying in advance for a year’s tap dancing lessons. He was a triple-wizard organizer. He could spin grand schemes all day long, and all night, too, if the Taos Lightning held out.
And there, unfortunately, his military ability screeched to a brake-burning halt. Right on the edge of the Big Ditch.
He was first off a coward. It wasn’t just physical cowardice, but really physical cowardice, physiological reactions to threat over which he had utterly no control. The very prospect of physical danger would induce a terrible quaking that started in his belly and moved outward till the shaking threatened to jar loose one molecule from another. An immediate threat simply launched him in uncontrolled flight, assisted by explosive voiding of the bowels.
Red Wolf’s fury had already set Chato to shaking. It was only a stroke of bastard luck that Hogan chilled him before his threat-level reached Chato’s voiding stage.
That was manageable. Lots of great war leaders have been more than a little nervous in the service.
The other problem was more serious. He had no clue how to actually fight.
All his life, it seemed, he had been adept at talking his way out of trouble. As an orphaned runt, small even by Apache standards, he’d had ample opportunity to acquire the gift growing up. When exiled by vengeful tribal fellows on totally false charges of witchcraft, and totally true charges of misappropriation of tribal resources, he had stumbled into the midst of a band of mostly white-eyes coldhearts whose natural first impulse was to kill him in some picturesque and protracted way and he would let his well-tried tongue spin its silver web just to have something to do.
Unfortunately, sometimes that tongue moved faster than his brain. He talked himself into positions not even his cunning and insight could then see any way out of.
So it was with that fast-talk extravaganza out beneath a swollen desert moon. Not only had the outlaws spared him. They had become the nucleus of a whole coldheart army. Bad men had flocked to him, until he had a force of between one and two hundred of the best of worst of the region’s outlaws: the scum de la scum. Men so bad even average, everyday coldhearts had got a bellyful of them.
And he had no clue what to do with them.
The approach of the caravan had been a godsend. As Red Wolf complained, Chato had been reluctant to allow his men to attack any of the villes in the surrounding area, nor even try to pick off any isolated ranches. He did know enough to understand a very little of that would raise the country against them, but his more immediate motivation had been simple fear. Leave aside the fact he had no remote intention of exposing his own hide to puncturing by irate sec men or sharpshooting ranchers. What if something went wrong? He was operating on zero tolerance here. One serious setback and all the smoke he’d spun would evaporate and all his mirrors would shatter—and his boys were just the ones to know how to give him a proper send-off with the sharp-edged shards.
It was a classic politician’s cleft stick. He couldn’t afford to fail, but he couldn’t afford to put off action much longer. So the word his intelligence system brought him of a caravan moving through his territory came as a godsend. Even the report that they’d hooked up with a half-dozen hard-core fighters to enhance their security didn’t bother him unduly, once he’d got a description of those “fighters.” Their leader was a one-eyed mystery man who, granted, anybody in the whole Deathlands above the age of three would make for a stone chiller and no mistake. But the others: an albino boy, a sawed-off runt with glasses, a gaunt old crazie who carried a cane and a couple of bitches. What could they bring to the dance?
So the caravan looked like easy pickings. And because the travelers simply couldn’t afford to carry much that wasn’t extremely valuable, it was rich—relatively. Split among a hundred and a half marauders, though, with the subchiefs naturally taking extra-large bites of the pie, it wouldn’t seem rich for long. Chato, however, hadn’t thought past that point, not because he lacked the mental ability, but because he didn’t dare. Something would come up. Or else.
Unfortunately the train had been such easy pickings that a bunch of damned paramilitary interlopers had gone right ahead and picked them. And “or else” had arrived ahead of schedule.
“So now,” said the dapper outlaw, perhaps the most feared of all, known only as El Abogado, in the mildest of tones, “what do we do? Like any creature, we must feed.”
Trust a coldheart named El Abogado never to lose sight of the son of a bitching bottom line, Chato thought bitterly.
There was only one thing to do.
Chato sucked down a deep breath. By a miracle, he managed not to choke on the smoke.
“I have a plan…” he said.
“WHOA!” J.B. EXCLAIMED, grabbing at his fedora to hold it clamped firmly on his head as the splintery wood floor of the wag whacked him hard in the tailbone and bounced him a good four inches in the air. The wag was jolting along at a good fifty clicks an hour—or not so good, on a road that wasn’t much more than a couple tire tracks in the hardpan, already starting to deepen and widen into arroyos from the erosive force of infrequent but fierce rains. Way too fast for the suspension, one way or another.
Almost all the chosen from the wag caravan had been herded together in the coldhearts’ stakebed wag, including three of the captive companions. Doc was riding in the cab of the lead wag, second in line behind a Baja-buggy scout with its own rollbar-mounted machine gun, squeezed between the captain and his driver. It couldn’t have been too comfortable for him, all crammed up against that unyielding body armor, even leaving aside the company, J.B. reckoned.
At the outset the pair of guards keeping watch on the prisoners in the bigger wag had ordered them to keep their heads bowed and their fingers interlaced behind their necks. That hadn’t lasted. Even free to grab on to what handholds the wag offered and one another when it didn’t it was all the prisoners could do from getting tossed in a big snake-mating-ball of butts and elbows. Their captors, while coldhearted enough, were more than just coldhearts, it was painfully apparent. They were sec men, probably calling themselves soldiers, from the way they dressed in odds and ends of uniforms and gave one another salutes and titles, military-fashion.
And if there was one thing sec men hated it was disorder. It made their jobs harder. So the order about clasping hands went by the dusty way.
The captives rode mostly in shocky silence. Overhead, the glorious blue that had so fatally intoxicated them was being blotted as clouds came racing in, lead-gray. The Armorer saw Mildred looking up at them. To her, their speed was unnatural and still alarming for all the time she’d spent unfrozen and in the present day. To the others, it was the fact that the sky had been almost clear that was disconcerting.
The late Hizzoner’s bodyguards, Amos and Bub, had left women behind, bleeding out in the dust. Lanky rawboned Bub had two kids, a boy and a girl, who now had flies crawling on their eyeballs. He was blubbering about it with his huge slab of ham hands covering his face. At least J.B. reckoned he was mourning his woman and children. It stood to reason not even a would-be sec man would be wasting tears on the once and never mayor of New Tulsa.
Stacked right next to J.B., Bub, the burlier and relatively smarter half of the team, was glaring at the companions with little pig eyes which, if bloodshot, were as dry as the goat track beneath them.
“That bastard Kurtiz was right about one thing,” he said in a voice like a rusty old oil drum rolling down a rocky slope. “You nuke-suckers weren’t shit when it came to being guards.”
Jak, sitting on the Armorer’s left, stiffened and snarled. J.B. touched him lightly on the arm.
“You got one thing right, friend,” J.B. said. “We aren’t shit.”
“Don’t crack wise with me, you sawed-off little—”
The first two fingers of J.B.’s right hand lashed out and snapped the backs of the tips against Bub’s blond-stubbled jowl, as quick as a diamondback strike. They did no damage, but stung. Bub shook his head once and blinked, totally off balance.
Which meant that when J.B. brought his left hand whipping around in a hooking palm-heel strike that mashed Bub’s already generally shapeless nose across his face, the blow slammed the back of the goon’s skull into one of the heavy uprights rising from the periphery of the truckbed. Bub’s moaning subsided, he clutched his face as blood trickled between his fingers and down his spine. It began to diffuse in thin, red spiderweb nets through the sweat coating his thick neck.
“Hey!” the younger of the two guards yelled from the rear of the truck. “Hey! Stop that! I’m warning you!”
He raised his M-16. J.B. smiled placatingly and held up his hands, palms forward, to show that he was unarmed and innocent of ill intent. The other guard, older and obviously case-hardened, just rolled his eyes and gave the Armorer a tough look.
“Man’s got a point,” Mildred said bitterly. She sat across from J.B. with her knees up and her arms around them. “Some defenders we turned out to be.”
“No talking!” the young guard exclaimed, jabbing the air with his weapon.
J.B. ignored him. Notwithstanding the initial fuckup about ordering the prisoners to keep hands behind heads, the raiders had obviously run this drill before. As if to emphasize the fact, the older guard was toting a 12-gauge Browning A-5 autoloading shotgun sawed-off to the gas check, a pretty serious crowd-control implement. If the prisoners got seriously frisky, and particularly if they showed signs of trying to make a break for it, the guards were ready, willing and able to commence some serious blasting.
But it was also obvious the raiders needed bodies and they needed lots of them—warm, fully functional, and not leaking from extra orifices. So the captives enjoyed a certain amount of leeway.
“We just got caught flat, Millie,” J.B. said. “The wind, the sun, the bright blue sky—we got loose and careless, and now here we are.”
“Be quiet!” the younger guard shrilled, flourishing his longblaster wildly. “I told you! I’ll shoot! I will!”
“Cody,” the older man growled, “knock off that shit before I lay this mare’s leg up alongside your empty damn head, won’t you? Who gives a rat’s red ass if the bastards talk?”
Cody sank into sullen silence. The older man held on to the upright at the front-right corner of the bed with his left hand. The other held his sawed-off across his drawn-up knees. He stared back at the captives from a face as hard and flat as a cast iron pan.
Mildred’s eyes caught J.B.’s. He tried to give her a reassuring smile, but he realized it just looked like somebody was turning a nut at the back of his head and tightening the skin around his mouth. He knew he couldn’t piss down her leg and tell her it was raining—her of all people. But she and he were paired, and he felt he owed it to at least try to do what he could to keep her spirits up.
He thought of Ryan and had to look away. He took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief he removed very gingerly from his pocket. After a few moments he put the specs back on and faced the black woman again.
Mildred was still gazing at him with curious fixity. Once she had his eyes back she let her own run meaningfully down toward his scuffed boots.
He nodded, slow and slight, a motion that would be lost to anybody not studying him a lot more closely than anybody but Mildred Wyeth seemed to be in the general jouncing and jostling induced by the truck banging along across the desert. The frisking he and the others had gotten had been professional but cursory. The sec men were looking for weapons. It didn’t occur to them that J.B. might have a full lock pick kit concealed on his person, much less a couple of odds and ends, including more picks and mebbe a weapon or two; and never in a thousand years would they suspect what might be hidden in, say, a hollowed-out boot heel.
Then J.B. shrugged. “Don’t see we got much choice but to take the cards as we’re dealt them,” he said, “than play them as they lay.”
She frowned.
“With Ryan dead—”
“Ryan not dead,” Jak said firmly.
J.B. looked at him sharply. The albino youth patted himself on the solar plexus. “Feel here if was.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Jak,” J.B. said with quiet determination.
Jak’s eyes lit up in anger. “Listen—”
“Take it easy, you two,” Mildred said. “We got to stick together right now.”
The traveler sitting to Mildred’s right cocked his head. “What about that bitch of Cawdor’s?”
Mildred’s elbow jabbed hard into the traveler’s ribs. Air oofed out of him. “Oh, sorry, Seymour. You just take it easy now. And remember it’s not good to speak ill of the dead.”
He glared at her and rubbed his side. He said no more, though.
A woman toward the front of the wag had gotten agitated. “So that’s just it?” she demanded. “We just let them shoot down our friends and loved ones and scarf us up as slaves, and that’s it? End of story?”
“You got a better idea, Maisy?” asked a heavy black-bearded man in coveralls patched in variety of colors.
The woman gazed wildly around at her fellow captives.
“They got the drop on us,” J.B. said, loudly but very controlled. “And that’s all there is to it. Spilled blood can’t go back in the body.”
The woman at Maisy’s side took her arm and whispered urgently in her ear. The hard-bitten guard tipped up his scattergun until its foreshortened muzzle pointed at the nowovercast skies. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even change expression. But the implication was clear.
There would be no more conversation out of the captives. Not because of any silly rules, but because they were getting themselves all stirred up, talking. If they got too stirred up, it would make more work for him.
That wouldn’t happen. And even though the shot-column didn’t spread out any too quick even from a barrel that short, the odds were pretty good that whoever the coldheart picked as designated troublemaker wouldn’t be the only one to cop some .33-caliber double-aught balls.
The captives clammed up. But J.B. thought he heard Jak mutter, deep down in his throat, “Ryan not dead.”
HEAD DOWN, back bowed beneath the weight of the pack she carried, Krysty trudged toward the lowering sun.
She had begun to feel, not hope—never hope, never again—but a kind of lessened futility. Lessened immediate futility anyway.
It wasn’t her nature to analyze. Her conscious mind had been nothing but a bright blur for the past several hours. But she was far from stupe, and her subconscious kept working.
The raiders were well organized and even smart by sec men standards, let alone coldheart ones. The massacre hadn’t been sadistic butchery. It hadn’t even been casual. It had been businesslike. Whoever the murderers were, they were professional about it.
Their behavior was at the other end of the world from the wild irrationality most coldhearts displayed. Calculating.
They had been happy enough to take what loot the caravan wags offered, but they dumped the contents of the two wags they needed to transport their own people in without hesitation or question, including provisions they themselves used every day—food, water and ammo. It wasn’t so much that they spurned those items as that they didn’t even trouble to look for them, even though all were present and all reasonably expected to be. The only cargo they kept was spare fuel stored in the vehicles, and that the wags themselves obviously required.
Far from worrying about their own resupply, they had taken on two dozen extra mouths. Krysty knew why even without the sergeant having grumbled to his superior: the raiders needed slave workers. To do what, she wasn’t sure—something about a track—and didn’t particularly care. What was potentially useful to know was that the raiders hadn’t been concerned even though those same consumables were necessary to keep the captives alive so they could do the work the raiders needed done. Gaia, even ammo, if some of the captives needed extra persuading. And it was through neither inexperience nor the shit-for-brains slavery to the impulse of the moment that controlled most coldhearts, and mutie marauders too, for that matter.
This bunch knew exactly what they were doing. Every step along the path.
If they didn’t need to worry about food and water, they weren’t far from replenishing the same. It followed as inevitably as night was about to follow the desert day.
Granted, a wag could cover ground a shitload faster than a woman afoot, even one as strong and driven as Krysty Wroth. But another thing her subconscious worked out, and allowed to seep osmotically into the white void of her conscious mind, was that a job that took a lot of hands generally took a fair stretch of time to do as well. Wherever the marauders delivered their captives, they probably wouldn’t be moving on for a spell.
The knowledge, slowly assimilated, added energy to her step. It might take a few hours or many days, but she had at least some solid ground of reason on which to base a belief that she would find her friends and Ryan’s killers.
A scrub jay yammered abuse at Krysty from a bush. The sound brought the woman back to the here-and-now with a jolt of alarm. She had been in zombie mode, total whiteout.
She was lucky. In the Deathlands, if you zoned that far out, you usually came out of it about the time a stickie was pulling your face off.
She raised her head and took stock of her surroundings. The sun was falling toward a shoal of mesas with wind-scooped faces, tawny and rose. There was no sign of the raiders, and the marks their tires had left in sand were lost to the eternally restless wind. But there was something, a squat blockiness ahead at the bottom of a broad valley. Buildings. Studying her surroundings, Krysty could make out patches of dark pavement showing through drifted sand, the remnants of a flanking ditch. There had been a hard-top road here. Mebbe even a highway.
Bad news, in that if the raiders turned off along it, they’d make at least somewhat better time than along the unimproved dirt track they, like the caravan, had been following. It remained unlikely the raiders were going farther than she could walk in a matter of days.
Meantime, the buildings offered possible shelter for the night. This wasn’t the seething gut of the Deathlands, with monstrous beasts, humanoid muties and acid rain storms ready to destroy the traveler caught in the open. But there were still plenty of nasty things that came out at night. To hunt.
She began walking toward the structures.
J.B. WAS ROUSED from sleep when the stakebed wag began to slow. Despite scowls from the guards the other captives were scrambling to their feet to peer forward toward whatever awaited them.
A brown hand, strong but altogether feminine, appeared before his eyes. The Armorer grinned at Mildred as she helped him up. She gave him a taut smile back.
He couldn’t see much over the cab, so he leaned his head over the wood side of the bed and peered forward. What seemed like a couple hundred people were laboring away in the middle of the desert. And parked next to them, gleaming like polished silver in the sun’s slanting rays—
“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit and fried for a hush-puppy,” J.B. said in admiring amazement. “It’s a train!”
Chapter Three
The screen door of the derelict diner banged open. Two men were suddenly among the cracked-vinyl booths and the peeling Formica tables, longblasters in their hands.
Both aimed square at Krysty Wroth.
“Freeze, bitch!” the younger, taller intruder shouted. Blond bangs hung in his sunburned face from beneath a turned-around ball cap. His partner, who was darker and whose dark-brown hair was beating a hasty retreat from his own forehead, just grinned a nasty grin.
After only the briefest hitch in her motions, and her breathing, Krysty calmly went back to doing what she was doing—cooking corned-beef hash made from the supplies she’d brought from the massacre site over a fire built of brush and driftwood in what had been the little kitchen’s deep-fat fryer, once upon a time. The pot was one she’d found hanging behind the counter. A handful of the fine sand that had drifted against the diner’s east wall served to scrub out the accreted dust and gunk of the past century.
“Hey,” the blond intruder shouted. “Din’t I tell you to freeze, bitch?”
“Easy, Matt, easy,” his pal soothed. “They’re so much more fun when they’re warm.”
He sidled around the periphery of booths, holding his remade M-16 with one hand. In the light of the kerosene lanterns she was working by, she could tell that both men wore retread U.S. Army blouses, both OD green, both with unfamiliar round patches on the breast. Just like the men who had killed Ryan and hijacked the caravan.
The man came right up beside her. She smelled his stinking breath, felt it defile her cheek. His dirty-nailed fingertip followed it, unwinding a scarlet lock down to the line of her set jaw.
“Well, well, well,” he murmured, “what have we here?”
She didn’t shy away from the touch, just kept stirring and tossing.
“Bitch-slap the skag, Ben,” Matt said, shifting weight from left boot to right with poorly checked eagerness. “Show her who’s boss.”
“Naw, naw, gently now. She’s a cool one, aren’t you, honey? I like that. I bet a girl like you could show us a good time. Big nasty redhead like you.”
He grabbed her, lowered his face to nuzzle her neck. She fended him with the back of his hands. He yanked his head back, anger flaring in his dark eyes.
“Now, now, don’t be in too much of a hurry, boys,” she said in her throatiest voice. It was a voice guaranteed to raise wood on a week-old stiff. “Why don’t you’ll just relax and make yourselves comfortable while I fix you a nice big dinner?”
The rage drained from Ben’s eyes. He smiled. Nodded. Laughed a little laugh.
“You know, hon, you’re right. Been a long, hard day, getting shut of that asshole General and his merry men. I’ll feel a lot stronger once I get around a good old home-cooked meal.”
He let her go and went back around the counter. Matt was almost vibrating with outraged horniness. “What are you doing? What? Why are we waiting?”
“Relax, kid,” Ben said, hoisting a cheek onto one of the round pedestal stools at the counter. There had been three; one was missing entirely, the other had been uprooted and lay against the foot of the counter.
“And quit waving that damned blaster around. You make me nervous. Our little redheaded bedwarmer is a smart one. You can tell just by looking at her. She knows better than to try to run on us. Don’t you?” He propped his own blaster next to his stool.
Krysty gave him a zipper-busting smile. “Now, why would I want to run anywhere, sugar?”
“But, but—” Matt sputtered.
“Sit your ass down,” Ben commanded.
Matt complied. He sat at a table in the middle of the little room. He didn’t put his longblaster down, although he did aim it at the ceiling. “What are we waiting for?” he asked peevishly.
Ben chuckled indulgently. “Didn’t you ever hear the story of the old bull and the young bull, boy?”
“No.”
“This old bull and this young bull came upon a fence. And on th’ other side of that fence, what should they see but a whole herd of fine young heifers swishing their tails over their nice firm fannies.”
“This one’s got a nice ass,” Matt said, staring at Krysty and almost drooling. “I can tell.”
“She surely does. Now, pay attention to my story. This young bull sees them heifers, and he says, ‘I got an idea! Let’s jump the fence and fuck us one a’ them heifers.’ And this old bull just shakes his head and says, ‘No. What we gonna do, we’re gonna walk down to that gate, walk through it nice and peaceful, and fuck all them heifers.’”
He laughed, grandly amused at his own joke. His gales of laughter died slowly away as he realized his younger companion wasn’t laughing with him.
“Go ahead,” Matt demanded. “Git to the punchline.”
“That was the punchline, you triple-stupe nuke head!”
“Weren’t funny.”
“Well, did you at least get the point of the story?”
“There’s a point?”
Ben dropped an elbow to the bar and sank his face in his hand.
“Well, now, don’t go being unreasonable, Ben,” Matt whined. “You said it was a joke. You told me so. And a joke got no point. It’s supposed to be funny.” A light dawned dimly. “Except that joke weren’t funny.”
He looked questioningly at Ben. The older man just waved a world-weary hand.
“Lookit, the bitch is all done cooking. Can we do her now? Can we?” He licked his lips. “I wonder if she got red fur on her pussy. Do redheads have that? Red hair on their pussies?”
“We ain’t et yet, you damn fool.”
“I was going to make up a batch of nice biscuits,” Krysty said, “if you big, strong men can just hold on to your appetites a little longer. And wouldn’t you like something to drink while you’re waiting?” She nodded her head back toward a canteen sitting on the counter.
Ben nodded, picked it up, began to unscrew the top. Then he stopped. A cagey look came into his eye.
“You wouldn’t be trying to pull one on us, now would you, honey? Here. You take a drink first. Then we’ll know it’s safe.”
He tossed the canteen at her. Holding his eye, smiling seductively the while, she undid the lid and took a long draft. Then she put the lid back on and tossed the canteen back. He drank greedily and pitched it to Matt in turn.
“So what are two such handsome men doing way out here in the middle of nowhere?”
Water ran down the side of Matt’s chin. He lowered the canteen and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “We’re. Uh, that is—”
“We’re deserters,” Ben said cheerfully.
“Deserters?” Krysty said. In her mouth the word sounded like a marvelous thing. Like a baron combined with an old-time movie star. But better. “Does that mean, like from an army?”
“Sure does,” Matt said proudly. “The Provisional United States Army!”
“Well, that’s what they call themselves,” Ben said. “They’re really just a bunch of coldhearts under command of the General. But they like to play like they’re an army.”
“That’s why we run,” Matt said. “Got tired of all the bullshit. Get out of bed when somebody else says. Haul our asses all over this sorry-ass desert rounding up limp-dick civilians to work on the line.”
“The line?” Krysty asked.
“Railroad line. Same one runs out back of this shithole.”
“See,” Ben said, “the General ain’t just any old asshole like one of your bug-heap barons. He’s got himself a train.”
“A train?” Krysty asked.
“A train. But not just any old rail wag. It’s an armored train.”
“MAGOG,” Matt said. “That’s what he calls it.”
“What’s that mean?” Krysty asked.
Ben shook his head. “Don’t mean nothin’. It’s just what the General calls it.”
“He found it,” Matt said, with something like pride. “Scavvied it out of some big ol’ underground bunker somewhere. All fulla weps and food and everything. It’s only the biggest, most powerful rail wag ever built. The General, he says it was built for something called the War on Drugs. Gonna be sent down to someplace called Columbus—”
“Colombia, nuke breath!”
“Colombia. Except the world blew up. Everybody knew about it got iced. But it was all protected and everything. In perfect shape when the General found it. And it runs off fusion batteries so it don’t never need to refuel. Got all the power a body’d ever want.”
“Sounds…impressive,” Krysty purred. “What’s this General doing with this train of his?”
“Says he’s trying to put America back together,” Ben said. “Don’t put much stock in that myself. I think he wants to be just another baron, but mebbe carve himself out a bigger empire.”
“Sounds like a pretty big job.”
Ben shrugged. “That’s another reason we run,” Matt said. “He been at it years, conquered himself a mess of little villes along the line, keep him supplied and shit. Still just like taking a piss in the ocean.” He had another drink. “I saw a ocean once.”
“Weren’t no ocean, stupe,” Ben said. “It was the Gu’f of Mex.”
“That’s a ocean. I couln’t see acrost it, anyway.”
“You mean this General can travel anywhere he wants in this armored rail wag?”
“Not exactly,” Ben said. “Lotta breaks in the line.”
“That’s why we was stuck out here in nowhere,” his partner said. “’Nother washout in the fucking line. Had to go round up a mess of dead-ass civilian stupes to fix it. Buncha bullshit.”
“Our scout wag busted an axle a few miles down the road from here,” Ben said. “We was basically out on our own at that point. So we decided what the hey, threw away our talkies and took off. Heard us a rumor from some of the workers there was a big old buncha coldhearts gathered out in the scrub somewheres ’round here. Fixin’ to hook up with ’em, give that a roll.”
“Man got to start to think about settlin’ down, puttin’ down some roots, build him a future,” Matt said. “Can’t spend your whole danged life rollin’ aimlessly along a old steel rail to nowhere.”
Ben nodded sagely. “General says he’s looking for something called the Great Redoubt. Supposed to be where the old guys stored up everything needed to put the whole country back together after the war. Even before the war, this was. Communications, supplies, weps—the works.”
“Crazy old nukesucker.”
“No shit. Like the boy says, man gets tired chasing after phantoms. Needs somethin’ more substantial. Something with meat on the bones.”
He cocked his head and looked at Krysty. “Speaking of meat on the bones, why’n’t you hurry up there, little mama? I’m getting a real appetite worked up myself now, and not just for that chow that’s smelling so good.”
“Well,” Krysty said slowly, “since you’ve been such good boys, and told me what I needed to know, it’s time you got what’s coming to you.”
She turned quickly, her right hand filled with her .38-caliber Smith & Wesson blaster. She was already squeezing the double-action trigger, timing the lengthy pull so that the hammer released just as the short barrel came to bear on Matt’s bangs. The gun roared, making a shocking racket for such a small weapon.
Automatically, Krysty stepped sideways left, away from Ben, in case he made a grab for her. He didn’t. But he was sharp and fairly quick; he was leaning forward and trying to reel up his longblaster by the strap.
She swung her right hand around, arm still straight, bringing her left hand up to wrap the fingers and brace her grip on the piece. She fired two shots, blinding fast, into his torso at a downward angle. His leaning motion carried him off the stool and hard onto the ancient cracked linoleum.
Krysty swung her blaster back toward Matt, in case he needed another dose of what he had coming. Then she noticed the old sign by the door, a square frame on a skinny metal post, its message Please Wait to Be Seated barely visible for the years of fading—and also Matt’s blood and brains, the color of the half-baked biscuits rising unattended in the pan, dripping down the front of it.
Almost at her feet, Ben groaned and stirred. She aimed her blaster down at him.
But he was no threat. One of her bullets had smashed through his lower jaw on its way down into his chest. It was still about half-attached, his breath bubbling like a well of gore from somewhere within the mess.
Ben’s lower jaw seemed to be working with a purpose, and his half-moored tongue moving as if trying to shape a word.
“Mercy.” That’s what she thought he was trying to say.
“Of course,” she said, and shot him between the eyes.
Krysty reloaded her blaster. It would’ve been more frugal to cut the coldheart’s throat, but she had scavvied plenty of .38 Special ammo from the luggage left behind by Ben and Matt’s former comrades. No point in making things harder on herself than they already were.
She walked to where Matt lay. He was spread-eagled on the filthy, cracked, sand-gritty linoleum with his longblaster fallen across his thighs. Instead of the sky, he was staring at the diner’s cracked, discolored plaster ceiling. His cap had been flipped clean off his head, possibly by the impact of the bullet that had evacuated his skull. She knelt and picked it up. It looked new, crisp and scarcely faded by sun or sweat, meaning it had to have been salvaged from storage fairly recently. It was black. The front bore a picture of the face of a man wearing an odd cap or hood with a black stripe down the center. Curvy-blade machetes or short swords with nonstudded knucklebow guards were crossed behind his head. Above it was the word “Raiders.” Around the whole was a sort of shield.
She stuck the cap on her head. She had miles of open desert to walk. It would be good to have something to keep the sun out of her eyes.
Her biscuits had burned on the bottom. Indifferently, she flipped them over. She finished cooking the biscuits and put them and the hash on the counter, still in their respective pans. What she was making looked as if it would have been enough for all three, in fact, but she had planned to eat it all herself and still did. She was a tall, muscular, extremely active woman who generally had a hearty appetite. And even if she didn’t have much appetite this night—and doubted she ever would again, beyond sheer pangs of hunger—it had been a calculated decision to fix herself a large and proper meal. Her vengeance trail stretched long and hard before her. She would need every ounce of strength she could muster to see it through to the end.
She seated herself gingerly on the stool. The red-ant bites no longer throbbed with that weird, expansive intensity such acid-laden bites left in their wake, but the wounds still felt raw, and the muscles of her groin and thigh ached from the venom’s aftereffects. Ben’s cooling corpse was softer than the floor, so Krysty rested her boots on him while she ate.
As she ate, she thought about what she had learned and what it meant to her quest.
A train! she thought wonderingly. She’d seen the tracks her whole life without thinking much of them—just another artifact from the strange lost days before skydark. A track even ran right behind the abandoned diner and gas station and she had never even taken note of it, except as a terrain feature, and the fact that the endless miniature ridge on which it was laid offered potential cover and concealment. It was just part of the landscape. She had never really thought somebody might be able to use the rails to travel any particular distance. Sure, she’d heard the legends of wild tribes of folk who actually traveled the lines on marvelous wags, paying no mind to the world to either side of the narrow right of way, and of course discounted them as legend.
And here was this General with his giant train, armored and fusion-powered, trying to reconquer America—and killing her man and kidnapping her friends to do it.
She shook her head. Her locks writhed sympathetically around her shoulders. Matt and Ben were right about one thing: he was a crazy old nukesucker.
That datum was of limited use: pretty much all barons were crazy, and she also concurred he was no different from most. Just more mobile.
The real problem from her viewpoint was that mobility. She had been correct in her surmise that the wags of the raiders who had hit them—was it only that day?—were returning to a nearby base. But that base wouldn’t stay put. And she couldn’t hope to pace a train on foot.
But the train called MAGOG was stopped now, the deserters said. That was why they had scooped up the hapless travelers, and carefully picked only the ones who looked fit for physical labor. They couldn’t go anywhere until they fixed a break in the line.
She wished she’d been able to string them along longer, pump even more information out of them. Oh, well. If wishes were wings, she’d be circling over the train right this instant, scoping things out like a falcon looking to stoop down and score.
There’d been no way. Young Matt had been just about to lose it and go for the cheese right then and there. And Krysty wouldn’t submit to that, vengeance or no vengeance.
An owl hooted somewhere out in the night, beyond the busted-out front window. The wind had come up again, temporarily scouring out the stale death smell and replacing it, temporarily, with the astringent odors of dust and dry vegetation. She finished her meal without having tasted a scrap of it, and set down her fork.
She would find the train and do what she had to do. If the train was gone, mebbe the marauders would have left some wags behind. If not…
She shrugged. She could come up with possible bad outcomes from now until dawn, from now until she died of old age, for that matter. Not one of them would make her road any shorter or easier to walk.
She sighed, stood, wiped the soles of her boots carefully on an unbloodied area of Ben’s blouse to make sure the soles weren’t wet and slick from blood. She was going to have to drag the corpses outside. They were going to draw scavengers from miles around. She couldn’t lock the diner, with the windows gone and all, but there was no point inviting hungry predators inside.
If the chase went on long, she’d need all the barter goods she could find. Krysty knelt and began to rifle through Ben’s effects for items of value.
Chapter Four
“Ah,” the General said in satisfaction, leaning back in a red plush chair and sipping from a goblet of brandy. “It’s definitely a rare treat to encounter a man of your culture out here in the wasteland, Doctor Tanner.”
Doc started to reply around a mouthful of apple and cinnamon omelet and toast that he would have found ambrosial had it been served to him back in his very own long-lost house in nineteenth-century Vermont by the beloved and equally lost hand of his wife Emily. Instead it had been dished out by the hand of a solemn stone-faced servant from a brass chafing dish heated by a little cup of clear, odorless, smokeless burning fuel.
Realizing that standard Deathlands etiquette would hardly answer these circumstances, Doc hurriedly finished chewing and swallowed, not without regret for the unseemly haste. Covering his mouth, just for security’s sake, by pretending to dab it clean with a spotless white-linen napkin, he nodded and replied. “I might say the same, General. I might well indeed.”
They sat in oak-paneled and comfort-conditioned splendor, two men of knowledge at ease with one each other and their world, taking their breakfast and engaging in the art of conversation. Even for a man of Theophilus Tanner’s unique experience, it was one of the most—what was that eminently useful modern word?—surreal moments of them all.
The General—that was how he had been introduced and the only way Doc had heard him spoken of—was a short burly man with buzzed grizzled hair and features that might have been carved from granite by a skilled but hasty sculptor. Even taking his ease with an apparent act of will, the enormous vigor that animated him was evident. He was a man made for action. Right now he wore a maroon robe over white pajamas with blue pinstripes. On the right breast of the robe was sewn a patch showing a fierce eagle clutching lightning bolts and weapons, with a stars-and-stripes shield over its own breast. Above it arced the legend Mobile Anti-Guerrilla Operations Group. Below it was embossed the acronym MAGOG.
“I trust you find your accommodations to your liking, Professor,” the General said, allowing his steward, a tall, olive-skinned man in black trousers, white shirt with stand-up collar and bow tie, to replenish his coffee.
“Quite, General.”
He had, in fact. He’d been kept separate from his companions ever since leaving the massacre site by the Grand Canyon. Nor had he seen for sure where they were taken, although he surmised they were bound for a barbed-wire stockade with some tents pitched inside that had been erected near the work site. He hoped they were well, and not terribly mistreated. He wasn’t overly concerned. Obviously their captors wanted them alive rather than dead, and to judge by past performance, it would be but a matter of time before one of them, most likely the ever-so-resourceful John Barrymore Dix, figured out a way to spring them all.
His captor had introduced himself as Marc Anthony Helton, Captain, Provisional U.S. Army. He was a very polite and well-spoken young man, despite his regrettable propensity for casual mass murder. He was fascinated by Doc, and grilled him about who he was, where he’d come from, and what experiences he had had. Tanner had cloaked his responses in sufficient vagueness to avoid giving away any significant information without convincing the young officer that he was too far gone mentally speaking to be of real interest to the General.
At least, he hoped he had.
On arrival, young Captain Helton had taken cordial leave of him. Soldiers had hustled Doc onto the train straightaway. There, he was brusquely ordered to strip and sent into a bank of showerheads to cleanse himself under a guard’s watchful eye. He would never believe a mere shower could equal the sybaritic luxury of a tub of steaming water, and candidly, he was the most inclined of their brave little band to be careless in matters hygienic, but the hot gushing water and the sense of cleanliness it produced were alike bliss-producing.
Once dried, he had been given a rough and rather itchy set of garments of the depressing greenish shade favored by the U.S. Army of the twentieth century. After he put them on he had been marched to another car and locked into a small passenger compartment. Ironically, he had been allowed to keep his cane, although naturally, his bulky LeMat cap-and-ball revolver had been appropriated.
Indeed, the General just upon the instant picked up the pistol and began to examine it with keen interest, turning it over and over in his hard, scarred hands.
In his compartment, which he had to himself, Doc had been served a better-than-adequate meal. Surprisingly, it had been a stew of game—rabbit and deer at the very least, with a possible hint of quail—along with carrots and potatoes and seasoned with sage. All seemed quite fresh, and the bread rolls that came with it were palpably hot from the oven. The butter tasted real. Doc hoped his friends were well fed and housed.
The bench unfolded into a bed, which was the most comfortable he’d known in many a moon. He slept soundly, and blessedly without dreaming, until a peremptory knock had awakened him, and his clothes—cleaned and pressed, by the gods—had been thrust upon him.
Now he sat in a kind of sitting room in the General’s personal car, eating another splendid meal and drinking coffee—freeze-dried, regrettably—while the General peered down the LeMat’s barrel, the long .44-caliber main barrel, and the auxiliary 12-gauge barrel in front of the cylinder. In tribute to Doc’s vast storehouse of knowledge, the General addressed him as “Professor.”
“A remarkable weapon, Professor,” the General remarked, setting the big pistol down on a table beside his red-plush chair. “But isn’t it kind of an eccentric choice?”
Doc gave a debonair wave of his coffee cup, pinky extended. “One who knows the proper formula, and, more important, the proper technique, it’s all in the caking—for manufacturing black gunpowder, as I do, can produce it far more simply, from much more readily available materials, than any more modern smokeless propellants.”
“Ah, but it still requires percussion caps to ignite the powder, doesn’t it? My whitecoats tell me they need to be filled with high explosives that are unstable and fairly dangerous to handle—not to mention the chemistry’s a bit more involved than mixing saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal.”
Doc shrugged. “I see that I am caught out. Your Excellency is not the first to observe that I am, indeed, an eccentric.”
The General held up a hand. “No need to call me anything that fancy. I’m a pretty down-to-earth guy. ‘General’ or ‘sir” will do just fine.”
Doc nodded and sipped. My, what fine manners he had for a murderer, he thought.
Since joining Ryan and the rest, Doc had become a far different man from the one who had capered and spouted half-remembered snatches of poetry for the delectation of the unspeakable Jordan Teague and Strasser, his brute of a sec chief. His spine, for example, had recovered a remarkable degree of rigidity, although his grip on sanity was still not of the firmest, sadly. But he still knew how to show a pleasing face to power, and didn’t scruple to do so at need. Besides, for all the shockingly direct evidence Doc had of at least some of the General’s crimes, next to the likes of Teague he was an innocent babe.
As a matter of fact, the General’s manners were pretty good for a Deathlands murderer.
“I must admit that coming upon a man of your obvious culture and erudition, in the midst of this barbaric waste, is lots like finding a pearl in a midden heap,” the General remarked.
Doc tried to stifle a wince. Owing to a saw that was old when he was young, he associated pearls with swine, and swine… He shook himself delicately. The memories didn’t bear touching upon, however lightly. Especially since Cort Strasser had already been called to mind.
“The General is too kind,” he said. He pushed his plate away; his appetite had vanished. “And since you are a man who clearly appreciates quality when he encounters it, I feel it is incumbent upon me to point out a valuable resource that your subordinates are running a shocking risk of simply throwing away.”
The General leaned forward with an eagerness that surprised Doc, and a hunger in his gray eyes that shocked the other man. Obviously he’d probed a nerve, he thought.
He nodded and forged ahead. “Certain of my associates, who were…detained along with myself, are men and women of remarkable attributes. To employ them as mere manual laborers constitutes a shocking waste of valuable resources, and a truly unforgivable oversight on the part of your subordinates, I fear.”
Slowly the General leaned back. Doc watched the tautness in his face sag into disappointment, and anger flare in his eyes. He braced himself for doom.
The General looked aside for a moment, scowling. When he turned back to Doc his expression was returning to neutrality.
“Very well, Professor,” he said, “tell me more.”
“NUKEBLAST IT!” the guard howled as Jak sank sharp teeth into his wrist. He battered the youth’s head and shoulders with his free hand. Jak hung on, as tenacious as a weasel. “Leggo, you rad-sucking son of a mutie gutter slut!”
Taking advantage of the distraction to lean on his shovel as he watched, J.B. shook his head.
Another guard came running up and swatted Jak in the head with the butt of his M-16. Whatever its merits as a longblaster, the M-16 was reputed to have been made originally by a toy company. In any event it didn’t weigh much, having been designed not to, and its butt was mostly nylon. It was a piss-poor piece to buttstroke a body with. Without so much as flinching, Jak back-kicked the guard in the balls. The man sat down hard on a red-ant hill, then rolled onto his side, moaning and clutching himself.
Guards converged. Along with the blasters, the soldiers overseeing the work gang carried truncheons, some actual scavenged PR-25 side-handle batons, others simply sawed out of either table legs or baseball bats—J.B. couldn’t tell which. They rained blows upon Jak’s head and shoulders until he let go and fell to the ground, grinning at them with a mouth red with blood that wasn’t his. Then they commenced to stomp him.
J.B. sighed. The boy clearly had some hard lessons to learn about when to kick back and when to just bow your head and take what was coming and bide your time. But he couldn’t just stand by and watch his longtime comrade-in-arms get kicked to death. He was going to have to do something, which likely meant his getting stomped, as well.
He was just shifting his grip on his shovel when the situation escalated. A young and probably fresh-minted sec man ran up and shouldered his M-16. As serious as a multiple stomping was, it was nothing to being in the way of a sleet of nasty jacketed 5.56 mm bullets. And the new arrival seemed blissfully unaware that no matter what angle he chose there was no way to shoot the miscreant without ventilating three or four of his buddies as well.
“That’s enough! Stand down there, you men.” Banner’s voice was like the roar of an enraged gravel crusher as he strode toward the altercation.
The guards fell back from the prostrate Jak. The boy with the M-16 stiffened like a dog pointing the grouse. His finger tightened on the trigger.
“Bledsoe! If you don’t lower that piece right now, I’ll ram it so far up your ass you’ll be looking at the front sight cross-eyed. Do I make myself clear, you polyp on a mutant salamander’s asshole?”
The newby hastily lowered the rifle and snapped to. J.B. nodded in appreciation of the sec man’s unexpected eloquence. An asshole Banner might be, but an asshole with style.
The others fell back from Jak’s well-trampled form. The youth had been lying in a fetal curl, with his face hugged into his knees, protecting himself as well as he could. He rolled to his belly, got to hands and knees and shook his head.
The guard whose wrist he had bloodied pulled out a Beretta and aimed it at Jak’s head.
“Moredock, what’s wrong with you?” Banner shouted. “Secure that weapon.”
“But, Sarge, we gotta make an example—”
“Now.”
Moredock holstered his blaster. It took him only three tries.
“What we ‘gotta do,’ skunk ape, is get the damned railbed built up again so we can lay new rails before we all die of old age. We can’t go shooting our whole labor force just because you’re too fuckwitted to keep order. Unless you want to take his place swinging a pick, Corporal?”
Moredock hit a brace. “Sir, no sir!”
“Pick him up.”
A couple of the guards who had been thundering on Jak now dragged him to his feet by his biceps. One red eye was puffing shut, but aside from a thin trickle out of his left nostril, the blood on his face still wasn’t his own.
“Ah, the albino.” Banner nodded. “You were with the bunch I helped scoop up yesterday. You listen to me, boy. We need you to do a job of work. But don’t get the idea we can’t fix the track without you. Act up again and I’ll stomp your brains out your nose myself.”
The sergeant glared around at the onlookers, guards and captives alike. “Don’t you all have things to do?” Everyone turned away, suddenly eager to be doing those things.
With dark looks, the guards let Jak go and backed away warily. He stood panting like a winded dog, still grinning defiance.
J.B. scooped up a shovelful of earth and walked over to Jak, to look as if he intended doing something useful with it. Then he dumped the dirt and grounded the tool again.
“That’s no way to do it, Jak,” he said. “That’s way too hard a road to see to the end. Take an old man’s word for it.”
Jak shook his head so that his snowy mane flew wildly, then hawked and spit a blood loogie in the sand. “Kill sergeant.”
“If you live long enough. Keep up the way you been, though, you’ll be staring at the sky when the stars come out.”
Anger flared like a lasing ruby in Jak’s eyes.
“All right, party time’s over!” a guard yelled at them. “Get back to work.”
Jak turned away. J.B. moved on to join other laborers shoveling dirt into barrows.
Some time later Mildred approached. Across her shoulders she carried a pole with a water bucket at either end. She knelt and set down the buckets, then stood back as the thirsty laborers crowded around to ladle up water.
She looked angry. J.B. reckoned he knew why.
“Don’t none of us like it, Millie,” he said quietly, “but the one thing it ain’t is personal.”
She glared at him, then shook her head. “Yeah, I know. Slavery’s an equal-employment opportunity these days. But that wasn’t how I was raised.”
She looked around. There was still water, and the workers were still jostling one another to drink.
“Bastards almost killed Jak,” she said. “I wish I could look at him.”
“Boy’s tough. Knows how to handle himself, too. I don’t reckon they hurt him much.”
“We’ve got to get away from this madness.”
He nodded. “Looks like they’ll finish their repairs here in two, three more days. What do you think they’ll do with all us civilian laborers then?”
“We can’t leave Doc.”
“That’s the angle I haven’t figured yet. Give me time—unless you got any ideas?”
She shook her head. “Well, then we need to spring the Doc, blow out of here, and double back to find Krysty.”
“That poor child. I can’t imagine how she must be feeling—”
“Hey! You! Get back to work, you lazy bastards.” Moredock was striding toward the knot gathered around the water buckets, a fresh white bandage on his wrist and blood in his eye.
Then he dropped to his knees. A wondering expression came over his face. He opened his mouth and burped blood. It ran down his chin in a torrent. He fell onto his face as a gunshot echoed off the railway embankment.
The desert bloomed with howling coldhearts.
Chapter Five
It wasn’t a good plan.
Chato might not know anything about strategy and tactics, but he was glumly convinced his plan sucked anyway.
The plan was not to try creepy-crawling the giant rail wag in the dark. Oh, no. It was bristling with weapons: machine guns in turrets, gren launchers, rockets—who knew what? And it had sensors, sirens and searchlights.
Chato may have been clueless when it came to strategy and tactics, but he did know the basics of breaking and entering. He and all his coldhearts had zilch for a chance of sneaking in undetected and making off with any worthwhile loot.
What he had sold the others on, if not himself, was this: it was by night that the soldiers expected to be attacked. By night they hunkered down inside their giant invincible armored wail wag and just waited for somebody to be stupe enough to try them on. Even the captives in their compound—and whoever was stuck in the majority of the train’s cars that weren’t armor-plated—were protected by the monster’s sensor envelope and its truly stupendous firepower. Chato’s bandits could fire up the tents and the soft-skinned wags, but that wouldn’t bring them jack. What would be the point?
No. The coldhearts were intent on stealing shit. Torture, murder, rape—who didn’t like that? But it was merely sugar. Plunder paid.
And while the lost travelers’ caravan had represented a pretty piddly haul, all things taken with all, the armored train held treasure beyond the coldhearts’ wildest dreams.
So the coldhearts would attack by high, wide daylight. That was when the greatest number of sec men would be outside their protective metal shell, spread out and vulnerable. The heavy weapons mounted on the train would be reluctant to fire and risk killing their own, or even the slaves they needed to fix their steel highway. And mebbe the slaves would take the attackers for liberators, and rise up against their captors. Or at least bolt in panic, and one way or another cause a hell of a mess. Under cover of which the raiders could get in at the train, overpower the defenders, and give themselves over to the customary orgy of rape, slaughter and, of course, pillaging.
Chato’s followers had bought it, anyway. Especially when it was presented with all the power of his magic gift for talking people into things. Which was what got him into this mess in the first place. But he had no choice now. It was go forward or die.
They’d catch him if he ran.
ONE OF IRONHEAD JOHNSON’S mountain men fired the opening round, the one that chilled Moredock, from a scoped and heavy barreled Remington 700. He lay on his belly on a low hogsback five hundred yards south of the train, and used his possibles bag for a rest. Johnson’s men were probably the most formidable fighters, man for man, of all the coldheart army. Johnson himself had disposed of the three-man observation post dug in on the rise, using his trademark foot-and-a-half-long, double-edged Arkansas toothpick.
At this point the track ran east and west straight as a laser beam. A road, its pavement still largely intact, but serving now mainly as a super-durable bed for layers of drifted sun-baked mud, ran along the south side of the embankment. The compound where the slave-laborers were sheltered under canvas was south of the road and the giant, gleaming, fusion-powered engine, to allow trucks to trundle back and forth carrying supplies from freight cars well back in the train.
From the east appeared a small fleet of dune buggies and wags, filled with young men waving longblasters. These were the Wild Boys, a local crew of coldhearts commanded by Wild Wess Wilhelm.
An arroyo cut from six to ten feet deep, with steep walls that had fallen in places because of rare but intensely savage downpours, ran at a diagonal south of the road, passing about two hundred yards from the slave stockade. From it now erupted most of the rest of Chato’s misfit army: El Gancho’s pistoleros from northern Mex, mounted on horseback.
Hogan’s contingent of fifteen outlaw bikers on lowslung, snarling sleds. No dirt bikes, to say the least, the heavy motorcycles had been wheeled by hand along the soft sand of the arroyo bottom, to a place where a cave-in provided a natural ramp. Small in numbers, his band was unsurpassed in cruelty.
Most of Red Wolf’s band of Plains Indian cutthroats had ridden off in a huff after their leader’s demise. However, staunch individualists that they were, seven or eight had remained and now joined the charge on their painted ponies.
And finally, twenty or so random chillers, who had drifted into the army at large, but not yet into any kind of affinity group. These loose ends had been sent off with the main body under the command of Bug Eye Mueller, who was suspected by many of being a mutie because of his unfortunately protuberant eyeballs, but who was so mean nobody ever so much as mentioned it.
The throat and purse-slitters of El Abogado, snoop and poop specialists all, formed no part of the attack. They had their own assignment.
And finally, Chato himself sat nervously on his paint pony atop a hill well to the south, leading from the rear where he could keep a good eye on the proceedings as was appropriate to a coldheart warlord of his stature. Or so he’d told his faithful followers.
No, it wasn’t a good plan. But it was shitloads better than admitting he’d drawn a blank, and having his coldheart followers decide to see what his insides looked like, preparatory to picking out a new leader.
“DOWN! Everybody get down!”
J.B. had already followed his own advice, and was speed-crawling toward the fallen corporal on leather-jacket clad elbows. Mildred, as seasoned a combat veteran as any, had also hit the dirt before the shot finished echoing.
Pretty much everybody else, guards and captives alike, was standing around, completely clueless to what was going down—even as two more guards were nailed by snipers.
However, not even the slowest or most stunned of wits could long mistake about 150 coldhearts, armed to the eyeballs and howling for blood, charging at them on horses, outlandishly modified motorcycles, and their own hind legs. The soldiers on guard, well-trained by Deathlands standards—meaning they had some—unslung their blasters, took up firing positions and started shooting.
So did the crews manning the heavy weapons mounted in casements and pop-up turrets on the armored wags of the train. MAGOG was like a weird monster millipede: its first ten or so segments were armor-plated, as were the very last two wags, a second engine and a gun-bristling caboose. Other armored wags were spaced at intervals among the more conventional freight and passenger wags. As he pulled Moredocks’s Beretta from its flap-covered field holster, the Armorer heard the snarl of 5.56 mm machine guns, the throaty growl of 7.62 mm M-60s and, sweetest of all, the Thor’s-hammer pounding of the .50-caliber Browning M-2. He could feel the muzzle-blasts, beating on the back of his jacket and stinging the exposed back of his neck.
Looking up, he saw the nearest attackers were still 150 yards off. He rifled the stiff for spare mags.
AS PLANS WENT, Chato’s wasn’t really all that bad. Given the resources, it was about as good as might have been come up with.
Of course, it was doomed. He’d been right about that.
For one thing, MAGOG carried more dedicated fighters than Chato had, not to mention another hundred or so support types, cooks and clerks, who could fire a CAR-15 or submachine gun out windows and firing ports about as well as anybody. And neither Chato nor any of his followers had the remotest conception of how much sheer firepower MAGOG mounted.
Two could play the sharpshooting game, for instance. There were four dedicated antisniper turrets, each containing a shooter behind a Barrett Light Fifty sniper rifle and a separate spotter, each using mounted optics far superior to what Ironhead Johnson and his boys had. As Johnson realized, peering at the train through ancient but excellent Zeiss binocs for the few short heartbeats before his head turned into pink mist. Not even iron was proof against a 709-grain jacketed slug traveling about four times the speed of sound, it turned out.
Nor had the coldhearts grasped the fact the General had dozens of machine guns of various calibers at his command. And here came the first serious hitch in the plan: however reluctant the rail wag soldiers may have been about firing up their own buddies, much less the laborers, many of their machine guns were mounted on top of the train, where they could fire right over the heads of guards and prisoners alike.
Then there were the automatic grenade launchers, and the 82 mm mortars that quickly began to chug and cause big gouts of earth and assorted body parts to spout up out of the desert.
And Wild Wess Wilhelm received the surprise of his life—and death, as it happened—when a rack popped out the top of the train’s engine. He didn’t see it, because it was infrared and invisible to the unaided eye, the laser-designation spot painted right on the pearly third snap-button of his shirt as he rode standing up behind the roll bar of his Baja buggy. He did see the puff of white smoke as the Hellfire antitank guided missile came off the rack, however.
He had time to shout a hysterical command to his driver, who was already yanking the wheel hard right in a turn, which would have rolled the buggy and spilled them all out to their deaths or at least painful and crippling injury. The huge missile, however, struck the lower edge of the roll bar before the tires had even broken loose in a skid. A jet of copper from the shaped-charge warhead, so incandescent hot it was almost plasma, simply vaporized young Wilhelm’s midsection and right shoulder and about half the head of the driver. Then the speeding wag began to roll broadside, but now as a ball of fire, trailing blazing fuel and a giant caterpillar of black smoke. Another buggy lost it, veered from the road and took off end for end trying to avoid the blazing wreck, scattering its occupants in every direction. And then the machine guns began raking the wags that were attacking along the road.
The second serious problem with Chato’s plan now appeared: the expectation that the slaves would either flee in panic, disrupting the defenders, or better still actually begin to fight with their guards. But few of the captives had grown up in what anybody would call sheltered circumstances; life really was tough all over. As for regarding the attackers as liberators, trust of scruffy wild-acting guys with blasters wasn’t deeply engrained in the contemporary psyche. After all, however badly the soldiers had treated and were treating their slaves, it was the coldhearts who were shooting at them.
Of course, there are always a few who don’t get the message. Ten or fifteen captives did try bolting and got ripped to wet red rags, some with fingertips scraped bloody from trying to claw their way up the steep railway embankment. Most of the slaves had too much sense to try to outrun the bullets cracking past their ears, and instead just dropped flat against the ground.
Doomed, but not entirely futile. The attackers boiling out of the arroyo had appeared suddenly and were fairly close at hand. A lot of the slower ones got minced and mulched by the horizontal lead storm. Others went to their bellies and opened vigorous, if not particularly accurate, fire.
The rest quickly got under the heavy weapons’ arcs of fire, so close the blasters mounted atop the train couldn’t depress any farther to track them. It was one of the few true cracks in mighty MAGOG’s defenses. And eighty or ninety armed and angry coldhearts were pouring through it.
Crawling with less alacrity than J.B., Mildred had reached the body of a soldier downed in the first ragged volley of sniper fire. With MAGOG’s blasters thundering overhead and shutting out the screams of the injured, she pulled free his M-16. She assumed a classic prone firing position, her body at forty-five degrees to the target, behind the stiff, using him as cover and a rest. She was a devoted pistol shooter—an Olympic competitor, in fact—but she could shoot a longblaster with a high degree of accuracy.
Clicking the selector to single shot, she began to take out targets. She aimed at the coldhearts she deemed most threatening—the ones who seemed to be shooting most effectively themselves. At almost every shot, a bandit dropped.
J.B. had taken cover behind the late Corporal Moredock and was firing aimed singles from the Beretta with a two-handed grip. Thirty yards away from his friends, Jak had scooped up two M-16s from downed guards, one gazing sightlessly at the sky, the other rolling around shrieking and clutching a shattered shin, out of the fight. Not a great marksman, he was firing both at once.
From the hip.
Normally there was no craftier fighter than the albino youth from the bayou. Not now. All the fury that had been building within him since he had watched his friend and revered leader fall into the Grand Canyon the day before boiled up within him and out his mouth in an unending scream of fury, and out the muzzles of the M-16s in uninterrupted streams of lead.
One of Red Wolf’s hawk-faced Plains chillers, riding a buckskin, charged Jak with a feathered lance. Jak stood his ground and blasted the mount with both rifles. The horse screamed in mortal agony as it reared, fountaining blood from a dozen holes, and fell over backward, trapping its rider’s leg and crushing his pelvis and the lowest three vertebrae of his spine. As he howled in his own death agony, a second Plains rider charged, raising a war club with a cast-iron ball for a head. He was already too close to take down with the M-16s’ lightweight bullets.
Having spent some time on his own ranch in New Mexico, Jak knew a thing or two about horses. Specifically, that a horse wouldn’t run over anything it thought could trip it. He knelt and ducked his head, making an X of the two longblasters before his face. The horse, disregarding its rider’s intentions, launched himself and jumped clean over the white-haired boy, who was dropping and rolling to his right even as the great shadow passed over him. From his back he emptied both magazines into the bare back of the rider. Uninjured, the horse ran on, eyes rolling, foam flecks flying from its nostrils.
A biker roared toward J.B., firing an Uzi over his T-bar handlebars. He didn’t hit anything, the way his ride was jouncing all over the place. More concerned with the imprint the front tire would make on his forehead, J.B. recoiled by reflex to a sitting position, firing the Beretta as fast as it would cycle. He wasn’t just spraying and praying. The biker went over the back of his postage-stamp-sized seat with the Uzi still blazing.
For another heart-stopping instant the heavy bike charged on. J.B.’s eyes got wide behind his glasses and he cocked himself for a wild spring to the side. The outlaw sled wobbled, toppled and slid toward him broadside, raising a big bow-wave of khaki earth and dried weeds. J.B. held his hands up before his face.
The bike stopped with its tires spinning inches short of Moredock’s corpse.
J.B. heard a familiar voice cry out. Reflexively he looked toward it—to see Mildred, in a perfect kneeling position, aiming her M-16 right between his eyes.
Chapter Six
Leading four of his bros, Hogan rode his bike back along the road toward the rear of the train. He realized the machine guns couldn’t reach them here. Laughing and shouting in triumph, he was firing away into the passenger cars, their metal skins too thin to stop the bullets from his Ruger Mini-14. He couldn’t tell if he was actually hitting anybody, but it didn’t matter. He was laying some hurt on the monster. It wasn’t invincible after all.
But neither was MAGOG helpless.
The bikers came to an armored wag. Fearing shooters firing out blasters, Hogan stopped busting caps himself, leaned low between his high curved bars and accelerated rapidly.
As a result, he was past the killing zone when a strip of four Claymore mines mounted along the side of the armored car were initiated remotely from within. They went off with a rippling, ear-busting crack that spewed the roadway with about ten thousand steel marbles. The four riders behind Hogan simply disintegrated in shreds of flesh and steel, blood and gasoline, that all instantly began cooking in a hell-stew on the road as the gasoline lit off.
That was enough for Hogan. He was braver than most, man or mutie, but he knew when his match had been met. He kept the throttle cranked and went rocketing along the rest of the train, past the armored wags at its tail, relying on speed and surprise to keep him untouched by the sprays of bullets and 40 mm grenades that hosed out after him, until he vanished safely through the smoke from two downed wags, all blazing away on the road barbecuing their occupants who hadn’t been lucky enough to bail, some of whom were still bitching about the fact with wild screams.
Of course, the bullets weren’t stopped by the smoke. And MAGOG’s gunners, who had a whole freight car full of them, didn’t stop shooting them blind. But as soon as he was well within the smokescreen—steering around the furnace wrecks by sheer road-weasel instinct—he cranked the bike ride and lit out cross-country, passing quickly between a low rise and getting clean away.
J.B.’S EYES WIDENED again as flame blossomed in four yellow petals from the flash suppressor of Mildred’s M-16. A vicious crack left his left ear hearing nothing but a loud ringing. Hot air stung his cheek like a red ant’s bite.
He turned. A squat man in a filthy grayish sweatshirt and baggy sweat pants loomed over him with a fire ax raised over his head in both hands. He had a weird bowl-shaped haircut and was looking cross-eyed at a small, neat blue hole right through the bridge of his nose. He collapsed at the tip of the Armorer’s boot, the back of his head missing.
J.B. blew out a long breath, then threw himself down behind Moredock again to take stock of the tactical situation.
Shots were still cracking in both directions. The heavy weapons still split the sky overhead. They mostly seemed to be working the far ridgeline, trying to hose off any snipers the Barrett gunners had missed. But nobody was charging.
J.B. grinned at Mildred and gave her the thumbs-up. She grinned and bobbed her head back. He dropped the empty mag out of the Beretta’s well, stuffed in one of the extras he’d gotten from the corporal, then shoved the weapon down inside the back of his waistband. He scuttled around Moredock and the bike that had almost run him over, to snag the machine pistol its rider had no further use for. J.B. had a particularly soft spot for that particular piece of Israeli ironwork, overly heavy as it was and shit-for-blowback besides. It was reliable, and it got the job done; he frequently carried one. He was pleased to find three full—he hoped; no time to count rounds now—magazines stuffed in the pockets of the coldheart’s vest.
“Jak,” he shouted, looking around through the smoke and dust that hung in the air. There was a breeze, as always, but the embankment and the train caused it to eddy right here and do a piss-poor job of clearing the air. “Jak, are you all right?”
“Fine.” The Armorer saw the youth staggering toward him through the smoke, holding a trench knife with a spiked knuckle-duster handguard in one hand and a baseball bat studded with cut-off nails in the other. He looked as if he’d bathed in blood, then rolled around in the dust to dry it off. Which was probably about what happened. It made him look even more menacingly unearthly than usual.
“Find a blaster and follow me,” J.B. called. “You, too, Millie.”
“Got him covered, John. Catch, Jak.” She tossed him a Marlin lever-action carbine with brass brads pounded decoratively into it, outlining the stock and foregrip. He dropped the bat and caught it deftly.
He led them up the railway embankment, which, while steep, was climbable. Bullets kicked up little spouts of dust near them, none near enough to pay attention to.
Once at the top he went to his belly and rolled right under the train. Mildred and Jak goggled. They looked at each other, shrugged and followed his example.
ROCKING IN HIS PLUSH CHAIR out of fear for his friends he couldn’t quite suppress, Doc watched the battle unfold on a bank of monitors mounted in the command center in the car just behind MAGOG’s engine. Escorted by a pair of guards armed with MP-5 machine pistols in pristine condition, the General had led him forward through a flexible armored gangway that connected his personal car to the headquarters wag. They had then sat in climate-conditioned comfort, sipped sherry and watched the ultimate in reality TV.
Guilt panged him at sitting there in safety while his friends risked their lives. He wasn’t the greatest asset in a fight, he knew, but he held his own and longed at least to share their peril. But there was nothing he could do.
As with the General’s quarters, the soundproofing was almost perfect. He could hear nothing of the shooting outside, much less the shouts of rage and screams of mortal anguish. He could sense the vibrations of the heavy guns firing outward from the train, weird harmonics weaving subsonic melodies he felt in his bones rather than heard. One sound unnervingly not blocked out was the irregular thunk, thinkthunk, like hail on a rooftop, of bullets striking the armored shell right by their heads and bodies.
“Don’t worry,” the General had said, when Doc’s head had jerked away reflexively from the sound of an early impact. “Nothing’ll get through this baby. And the walls won’t spall, even from point-blank hits from a 30 mm chain gun.” Doc wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded duly impressive.
Doc had been far more impressed by the volcanic outpouring of fire from the train. He was also impressed by how surprisingly ineffective it was, comparatively speaking. To be sure, he could see scores of bodies, or sizable chunks of them, strewed across acres of desert. But that kind of outgoing firepower should’ve scoured the land, not just of all life, but everything, right down to bedrock. Or so it seemed to him.
Still, the carnage had been quite exemplary. He had to admit that. He hoped he hadn’t turned too green.
Something beyond worry and incipient nausea began to bother him as the volume of fire began to diminish.
“If I may be so bold as to speak, General—”
“Go ahead.”
“I notice that all our attention is being drawn to the south side of the train.”
The General nodded crisply. “I was just noticing the same thing. You’ve an acute military eye along with your other accomplishments, Professor.”
He uttered orders. His words broke off crisply and decisively without being barked or snapped, and men obeyed them, it seemed, because it never occurred to them that they might not. Whatever else one could say about the man, he had a gift of command, which Doc couldn’t help but admire.
The techs pressed keys and the views on the monitors rearranged themselves, so that the largest ones showed what the hardpoint-mounted cameras on the train’s north side showed. Even as they did so, the hailstorm thumping suddenly began to sound from that side of the train.
The monitors showed muzzle-flashes sparking from the brush hard by that side. Doc could make out forms prone or crouching in concealment. He realized they were too close for the train’s mounted weapons to touch them.
The General grunted. “I should’ve ordered that brush cleared back at least two hundred yards,” he said. “I’m getting lazy in my old age. Still, we can’t clean up the whole Deathlands.”
He smiled. “At least, not until we find the Great Redoubt. Then what won’t we be able to accomplish? It’ll be a great day, Professor, eh? What’s that?”
Apparently some of the cameras were dirigible. An operator had swept one back to look along the side of the train, then panned back out again. He swung the remotely operated camera inward once more to reveal the heads and shoulders of three people, lying on their stomachs firing outward at the coldhearts attacking from north of the line.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “Those are my friends!”
“ESCAPIN’?” Jak asked J.B. as they crouched beneath an armor-shelled wag.
“Not without Doc,” Mildred said quickly.
“Like Millie said,” J.B. agreed.
“Then what?”
“Fighting. Don’t you think it’s a little funny that all the excitement’s been happening on one side of the train?”
Jak looked surprised, bobbed his head.
“What can the three of us do if they’re sneaking up from that direction?” Mildred asked.
“Mebbe keep ‘em from getting onto the rail wag. Mebbe get somebody’s attention, draw us some help. At least keep from getting back-shot, sure.”
“I’ll buy that.” For a moment it looked as if she might say more. After all, the Armorer was talking about helping the people who had murdered Ryan and a lot of helpless women and children, and carried them all off as slaves.
But the MAGOG soldiers held at least some constraints on their behavior, some code of something at least a bit like decency, which was more than the attackers had.
She popped the mag from her M-16, made sure it was loaded, then drove it home with the heel of her hand. “Let’s do it.”
EL ABOGADO’S creepy-crawling artists had been sent, indeed, to creepy-crawl the train. With the major assault attracting everyone’s attention everywhere except to the north, it was hoped that would give them some opening to slip inside the train proper. And once within that impregnable metal shell, who knew what they might be able to accomplish?
Fearing, correctly, that the great rail wag had automatic sensors that might detect their approach whether or not any human was looking for them, the would-be infiltrators had been ultracautious. It worked, in that they approached within sprinting distance of the train without detection. It didn’t, because their approach had taken longer than planned. The main assault had already petered out, allowing defenders to think about something other than immediate survival.
J.B., Mildred and Jak had spread out and crawled forward on their bellies just far enough to bring their blasters to bear on the scrub north of the track. The Armorer and Mildred both had M-16s. J.B. had passed Jak the Uzi. Since Jak was an indifferent shot, it made sense for him to have the least accurate blaster.
Marksman or not, Jak’s predator’s eyes spotted movement behind a creosote bush. He splashed 9 mm bullets at it from the Uzi. He missed. The wiry little outlaw reared up and fired back with a decrepit bolt action .22 rifle. He didn’t come any closer to his mark than Jak had, but Mildred planted a bullet unerringly between his eyes.
Detected, the infiltrators went to ground and opened a brisk but wild fire at the trio. The friends fired back, killing two and tagging at least three more.
Then shots cracked out to the left and right of them along the north side of the train. Soldiers were crawling beneath the train and shooting from inside the cars through windows and firing ports. Grens thrown from the top of the train began to burst in the scrub.
By this time, the shooting from the train had almost stopped for lack of targets. The attackers on that side were dead, fled, or hiding. El Abogado’s posse weren’t hang-and-bang fighters by skill or temperament. Sensing that all chance of success was blown, they melted back into the scrub.
A squad of sec men began a fire-and-movement advance into the scrub in pursuit. Several wounded coldhearts were dispatched with bullets behind the ear. The sec men kept moving forward by cover-to-cover rushes, but without much chance of catching any more.
A new voice began barking out orders in a voice not much softer than the crack of a .308. The soldiers at the train redeployed into a semicircle facing the three companions.
Pointing their longblasters at them.
ANOTHER PARTY profoundly impressed by the volume of fire laid down by MAGOG was Chato. The sudden stunning coruscation of really big muzzle-flashes had made his decision for him on a preconscious level. He turned and gave the boot to his pony, and was already below line of sight heading away when the thunderous roar rolled over the hill.
He hadn’t gone half a mile before he rode into a broad shallow wash with a bottom of fine, almost-white sand. At the far side sat a solitary rider: El Abogado in his immaculate frock coat and Panama hat, astride his cream-colored mule with black-tipped ears.
“Where are you going in such a hurry, my friend?” the coldheart asked the fleeing warlord in Spanish.
His life suddenly become a misery, Chato answered truthfully, “Away from this fiasco.”
“Indeed. I believe I shall accompany you.”
“But what of your followers? Do you not seek to avenge them?”
“They’re dicks.”
“Well, do you…do you intend to drag me back in disgrace so that you can take my place?”
El Abogado laughed. “As what? Leader of an even bigger bunch of dicks? Ah, no, my friend. In all the Deathlands, there is no commodity so plentiful as violent fools. It’s as well to be unburdened of this lot, don’t you think?”
Dumbly, Chato found himself nodding.
“What do you want of me?” he asked, still incapable of believing anything but disaster—bloody, painful disaster—impended.
“You are an exemplary sociopath, Chato.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you have yourself a new partner. Such gifts as yours are useful. Shall we ride on? The brighter of our former followers will be fleeing the debacle behind us by now. It would hardly do for them to overtake us, now, would it?”
And so they rode away south together, Chato on his paint pony, El Abogado on his fine mule. As they did, it seemed the weight of the whole world dropped away from Chato’s skinny shoulders.
Chato’s coldheart army was a monster. Sooner or later it would devour him. He had known that from the start. But now—
Now he was free.
He began to smile.
It had been a good plan after all.
Chapter Seven
J.B. carefully laid his black longblaster on the cinders and rose, hands spread and raised. “All right, boys. Everything’s easy. Just stay back off the trigger.”
His two companions did likewise. It wasn’t as if they had much choice.
“I hope we just did the right thing, John,” Mildred murmured from the side of her mouth. Any chance they had of slipping away in the confusion had evaporated.
“All right, you three,” Banner commanded. “Down the embankment. Hands behinds your heads.”
Half crouching, Jak shot the Armorer a questioning glance, as did Mildred. He shrugged, then slowly complied. The other two followed.
“Walk over there by the brush,” Banner said. “Don’t turn around.”
“Now, let’s not get way ahead of ourselves, here, Banner,”J.B. said over his shoulder. “We’re on your side.”
“Penalty for civilians carrying blasters is death.”
“But we fought the coldhearts for you,” Mildred said.
“No exceptions.” The wind blew through an endless pause. “Sorry.”
“Yeah, that makes everything just fine.”
“Won’t die this way,” Jak snarled as they approached the scrub, barely bothering to keep his voice down.
“Me, neither,” the Armorer said. “Slim chance is better’n none. When I count three, scatter like quail, children.”
“Sergeant Banner!” It was another familiar voice. “What’s going on here?”
“Firing party, Captain Helton, sir.” The sergeant sounded disgusted. Whether with the handsome young officer, with himself, or with the situation, J.B. couldn’t tell.
“What are you talking about? These people fought for us.”
“That’s what we’re trying to tell the man,” Mildred called. The three had stopped on the edge of the brush. The chance offered by the captain’s intercession seemed better than that of bolting. And anyway, the Armorer counted fast.
“Regulations, sir,” Banner said.
“That’s absurd!”
“One,” J.B. said under his breath.
“General order number twenty-three,” Banner said. “Prisoners caught in possession of weapons are to be executed immediately. No appeal, no exceptions. General’s a real stickler about that. You know that, sir.”
“Two.”
Helton’s face fell. “Well, if that’s the way it’s got to be…”
J.B. flexed his legs slightly and opened his mouth to say “three.”
Somebody new sang out, “Captain Helton, Sergeant Banner! Orders from the General.”
“Don’t leave us in suspense, Corporal McKie,” Helton said.
“General wants to see these three prisoners in his office at once, sir.”
RYAN CAWDOR OPENED his eye.
Blackness. Hintless of stars. Was he blind?
If he was, it would be the capstone misery of a mighty pyramid of them. His whole body was a pulse of pain timed to the pounding of his heart. His head hurt as if it had been recently used as an anvil. He felt the mixed sensations of clammy heat, nausea, and being somehow unmoored from the world that indicated a fever raged in his body. And beneath it all there lay a vast aching void, a sense—a knowledge—of loss.
He realized, then, that dim light was seeping into the lower edge of his field of vision. He expelled a long breath in relief and rolled his eye down. Dust-colored light, as if it were shining in through a tunnel mouth just out of sight around a curve. He lay on his back with his head propped on something yielding. His body was swaddled in what he guessed for blankets.
He suddenly remembered. Wags appearing out of nowhere. Uniformed coldhearts with blasters. A great flickering muzzle-flash, pale yellow in the sun. A blow like a sledgehammer to the upper chest.
Falling.
“Krysty,” he croaked. His voice was like a gate that hadn’t been opened in a hundred years.
A strange high-pitched chittering sounded in the darkness right by his head, causing him to start. After the fact he realized it had said, “What’s the matter with his eye? He can’t seem to see us.”
“You forget, Light Sleeper,” said a second voice, lower-pitched enough that Ryan understood it in real time. “Real humans don’t see in the dark as we do. Their eyes are so small.”
Real humans. That could mean only one thing—he’d been captured by muties. He remembered his previous brief flirtation with consciousness, as he lay broken on a rock, half-hanging over the maw of the Big Ditch. The small, furtive figures sidling toward him in the twilight, the misshapen hand reaching out for him…
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James Axler
As megalomaniac barons and savage anarchy compete to lay claim to post-nuclear America, perseverance and a will to live are what keep Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists roving through the worst and best of a new world. Armed with secrets of pre-Dark tech, they possess what few in Deathlands can imagine: hope for a better tomorrow.Ryan Cawdor is gunned down and left for dead by the new provisional U.S. Army, commanded by a brilliant general with a propensity for casual mass murder and a vision to rebuild America. Waging war from his pre-Dark, fusion-powered armoured locomotive, he's poised to unlock the secrets of the Gateways–as the rest of Ryan's group stand powerless. All except one. Hope may be lost for Krysty Wroth. But revenge is enough. In the Deathlands, vengeance is the only justice.
Her desire for vengeance was an unwavering flame
But even if Krysty had known beyond doubt her bullet would split that dark-haired skull, she wouldn’t have taken the shot. Yes, the captain had to die. She had to kill him, or at least be the cause of his death even if her finger didn’t pull the trigger or her hand plunge the blade.
But he was just one among many. A significant one, but merely one. To claim his life would risk throwing her life away—with her friends still unrescued and the bulk of her blood debt unpaid.
Krysty wouldn’t do that.
So she watched them drive off out of sight, unmolested. Intuition told her they were heading back to the massacre site, to the rim above Ryan’s unmarked resting place a mile toward the center of the earth. Why they might be bound there she couldn’t say. It didn’t matter, and speculation was no part of her nature in any event. She let all thought of whys and wherefores slip from her mind.
There could be only her quest. Worry, fear, anticipation—these could only weaken the resolve Krysty needed to keep her weary legs driving her relentlessly on.
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Crater Lake
Homeward Bound
Pony Soldiers
Dectra Chain
Ice and Fire
Red Equinox
Northstar Rising
Time Nomads
Latitude Zero
Seedling
Dark Carnival
Chill Factor
Moon Fate
Fury’s Pilgrims
Shockscape
Deep Empire
Cold Asylum
Twilight Children
Rider, Reaper
Road Wars
Trader Redux
Genesis Echo
Shadowfall
Ground Zero
Emerald Fire
Bloodlines
Crossways
Keepers of the Sun
Circle Thrice
Eclipse at Noon
Stoneface Bitter
Fruit Skydark
Demons of Eden
The Mars Arena
Watersleep
Nightmare Passage
Freedom Lost
Way of the Wolf
Dark Emblem
Crucible of Time
Starfall
Encounter:
Collector’s Edition
Gemini Rising
Gaia’s Demise
Dark Reckoning
Shadow World
Pandora’s Redoubt
Rat King
Zero City
Savage Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
Salvation Road
Amazon Gate
Destiny’s Truth
Skydark Spawn
Damnation Road Show
Devil Riders
Bloodfire
Hellbenders
Separation
Death Hunt
Shaking Earth
Black Harvest
Vengeance Trail
DEATH LANDS ®
James Axler
Like to the Pontick sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellspont,
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up.
—William Shakespeare,
Othello, III, iv, 454
THE DEATHLANDS SAGA
This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.
There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.
But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.
Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.
Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.
J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.
Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.
Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.
Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.
In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….
Contents
Chapter One (#uc4834e15-97df-5968-92d1-ba87fe0bdee1)
Chapter Two (#ue3a541cc-57f3-59c9-bb81-e87637442a14)
Chapter Three (#u5f44ee85-7567-5c2e-b63a-051ad3975d84)
Chapter Four (#u15124220-4d48-52fd-8c24-597101b5a4dd)
Chapter Five (#uc4a31da3-0df2-5fbb-93e0-464528883454)
Chapter Six (#u868679fa-4503-5230-bf59-028bd0d8aeff)
Chapter Seven (#udadc4e9c-2431-5076-a26e-7fc90de4857e)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
J. B. Dix chewed a dust-dry blade of buffalo grass and leaned back against the wag, its sun-heated metal pinging as it cooled in the breeze. Beneath the low-tipped brim of his fedora, he watched a little girl named Sallee, scabbed legs splayed in the dust by the track, as she played with a flop-eared, vaguely humanoid bundle of rags.
“What do you reckon that thing is, anyway, Jak?” he asked his companion, who perched on the wag’s hood walking a short leaf-bladed throwing knife along the backs of his bone-white fingers. “Rabbit or mutie?”
Jak Lauren flicked his keen ruby toward the rags and laughed. He was scarcely more than a child himself, despite a veteran’s scars. His skin was chalk white, and his long hair, wind-whipped around his shoulders, was the color of fresh-fallen snow.
“Mutie,” he said.
The sky’s blue skin was bare of clouds. The layers of earth defining the walls and pinnacles of the Big Ditch, the old Grand Canyon, glowed as though lit from within the Earth itself in bands of colors—yellow, red, burnt-orange—muted but so rich they seemed to vibrate. The sun that brought out all that glory shone down on the desert above the great canyon like a laser beam, and struck those below with the impact of heat of molten steel. But the tall, statuesque redheaded woman in the jumpsuit and blue cowboy boots didn’t mind. It was the sort of day that Krysty Wroth loved most. The kind of day where you didn’t have to be an initiate of Gaia, as she was, to find the beauty hidden in the devastation that was the Deathlands.
She let her green eyes slide from her two friends, to the caravan of a dozen battered wags parked by the edge of the Big Ditch with their engines cooling, while several people labored to change a flat tire, on to Doc Tanner, standing by offering unsolicited advice to Mildred Wyeth as she checked the dressings on the stump of a woman’s shin. A diamondback had bitten her on the ankle three days before, just outside the ville of Ten Mile, and her own husband had chopped off her leg with an ax to keep the venom from spreading.
Nothing was dampening the travelers’ spirits, though. They were bound from the fringes of the Deathlands proper, away to the east across the Rocks, to the fledgling ville of New Tulsa, where some of their kin had already begun to carve a living out of the land. The land wasn’t much less desolate than what surrounded them, although better watered by rain. But that very land, sere tan land dotted with cactus and hardly less unfriendly scrub, looked like Paradise to a folk accustomed to rains of acid and skies of murk.
And that sky of pure, open blue, with only a few clouds as white and innocent as baby lambs, affected them like some kind of happy drug: jolt without the edge. They laughed and chattered like kids and even sang. Some just wandered aimlessly, gazing around themselves in wonder.
“I’m going into the bushes for a bit,” Krysty called to her friends, “to answer the call.”
Ryan Cawdor, her lover, acknowledged her with a wave of his hand. He stood with his back to her on the rim of the precipice, the wind ruffling his shaggy black curls and gazed out and down into the giant cut in the earth’s flesh with his lone eye. A single dark shape wheeled out over that emptiness and the strange land forms striped with muted colors—ochre, orange, buff—at the level of the small party of humans and their machines perched perilously on the rim. From the fingerlike tips on the wings, Krysty was satisfied it was an eagle, not a screamwing.
No threat. Having duly notified her companions, she went off into the scrub to tend to her affairs. For all the utter naturalness of such functions, Krysty had been raised to be modest.
She didn’t hear the raiders until they were right upon them. No one did. The wind’s unceasing whistle and mutter masked the sound of engines coming fast from the east until the wags they propelled were braking to a stop alongside the halted caravan in a swirl of dust.
Suddenly men were leaping off half a dozen wags, longblasters in their hands. Krysty caught a flashing impression they all wore olive or camouflage, military-style.
Several travelers cried out in fear. Kids squealed and ran to parents frozen by shock. By reflex, Ryan spun, bringing his Steyr sniper rifle to his cheek.
Two of the intruders’ wags were pickups with M-249 machine guns mounted on welded-together pintles behind the cabs. One MG snarled a burst. Krysty saw dust spout off Ryan’s coat.
He fell from sight, straight into the Big Ditch.
A woman broke shrieking toward the brush with a toddler in her arms. Several longblasters cracked, including at least one on full-auto. Mother and child fell kicking in a whirl of dust and bloodied rags. Their cries subsided into bubbling sobs. Another burst stilled them.
Hidden behind scrub and a rise in the earth around the roots of a mesquite bush, Krysty felt as if she had been frozen into a block of amber like a mosquito Ryan had once shown her in some half-destroyed museum. Her hair, possessed of its own mobility and nerve-endings, flattened to her skull and neck.
Her companions still in the open—J.B., Mildred, Jak and Doc—stood just as still, hands raised. She felt a flash of rage that they hadn’t fought as Ryan had tried to do, but she stifled the thought in the sure knowledge that had they done so they, too, would be staring at the sky right now.
A coldheart stepped down from the cab of wag whose gunner had downed Ryan. Though he wore no insignia he was clearly the man in charge. He was tall, broad-shouldered, long-limbed, slim waisted. His clean-shaved face was as beautiful as a statue’s, smooth and unscarred, the rich warm brown of a light-skinned black man’s. His hair, curly bronzed brown, was cut short on top, though not buzzed. In back it was caught into a long braid at the nape and thrown forward over the right shoulder of the steel breastplate he wore over his camouflage blouse. A well-maintained 9 mm Heckler & Koch blaster rode in a combat holster at his right hip. Command presence radiated from his face and posture, the way the light and heat of the sun radiated from his mirror-polished armor.
He shook his head and sighed. “All right. Let’s get this done. Line them up for inspection.”
The surviving travelers, Krysty’s companions among them, had their hands on their heads, except for mothers with children too small to know what was going on. These kept one hand on the head while the other clasped the youngsters to their skirts. The coldhearts herded them into a line at the edge of the clearing in the scrub near the rim, well away from the canyon itself. It seemed the raiders wanted no part of that long drop.
Other raiders had clambered onto a couple of the travelers’ wags and began pitching out their possessions. These were few and mostly valuable. Some of the travelers had taken a piece or two of furniture with them, but these were the exception. There was plenty of nonperishable stuff left over from the megacull, lots more than there were people to use it. Bulky items like chairs and chests of drawers weren’t worth dragging across the Deathlands unless they had powerful sentimental value. Otherwise the travelers’ wags contained tools, clothes, meds, food, water, even some weapons. All stuff needed for survival in their new homes and, for that matter, on the long and perilous journey to get there. All, with the possible exception of clothing, commanding good value in trade.
The coldhearts didn’t seem to care. They just pitched whatever was on the wags they selected into the dust.
“Some guards you turned out to be,” spit Kurtiz, a young man with shaggy light brown hair and beard prematurely shot with gray, whose front two incisors were missing. It gave his voice a sort of lisp. He was straw boss of the travelers’ train, the man who actually got things done. He was able at his job and generally quiet—until now.
J. B. shrugged. A sec man had already relieved him of his M-4000 shotgun and was searching him for weapons.
“Friend,” the Armorer said, “you can’t argue with a leveled blaster.”
“Can argue,” Jak said with a bitter snarl as a coldheart took his .357 Magnum Colt Python and a collection of throwing knives. “Not win.”
J.B. had sounded casual, but Krysty saw the way a muscle twitched at the hinge of his jaw. She knew then as if she felt it herself the terrible void he had to be feeling, and what it was costing him not to so much as look at the place from which his friend had dropped off the earth. He had been best friend and comrade in arms to Ryan Cawdor for years before either man ever met Krysty Wroth.And even though Krysty was Ryan’s mate and soulbond, it was only because she herself had shared mortal danger and hardship with him that their own kindredship was as close as that between the two blood brothers.
Beside him, Jak vibrated with fury, lips skinned back from his teeth. But he kept his hands knotted in the snow-colored hair at his nape. Doc gazed into nothingness. Mildred was as impassive as a stone statue, but her eyes were bloodshot. Krysty knew that meant she was in the grip of fury every scrap as hard to control as Jak’s.
“The next one who gets chilled,” rasped a short, wide white man wearing a Kevlar coals coop helmet with sergeant’s chevrons painted on the front. His face looked as if it had been cut out of granite with a none-too-deftly wielded geologist’s pick.
The tall handsome sec chief stalked along the line of quaking backs. As he passed some he tapped lightly on shoulders. Those so indicated were yanked from the line by the coldhearts and ramrodded toward a stakebed truck that had earlier been full of raiders. When Kurtiz was chosen, he suddenly shook off the soldiers holding his arms, as if the awful implication of the process had suddenly struck home.
“Nukeblast it, you can’t—” he began.
The crack of a longblaster put a premature period to his exclamation. He dropped as if the long shabby coat he wore were suddenly untenanted. The hole the 5.56 mm bullet had made in his homespun shirt on its way to drill clean through the heart wasn’t visible from where Krysty crouched.
The short sergeant kept his M-16 leveled from his waist. “Next one gives any shit gets bursted in the belly,” he said. His voice was as rough as lava rock, and as hard and cutting.
When he came to the companions, the sec chief selected J. B. and Jak without hesitation, paused at Doc, then passed him by to select Mildred. Mildred seemed to hang back as soldiers grabbed her arms. J.B. caught her eye and shook his head all but imperceptibly.
She bowed her head and went where they took her. In the Deathlands, survival wasn’t optional. The time to go down fighting had passed. There was no fool like a dead one, as Trader used to say.
The ones chosen were fit-looking men and women without children, a few teenaged boys and girls, twenty-two or -three in all. Many still stood shivering despite the warmth of the sun, waiting with their hands on their heads.
As the implication of their being left unselected sank in, they began to cry and plead despite the example made of their trail boss. Then again, it now made little difference, and they knew it.
A stout figure whose repetitively chinned face was flanked by great winging gray side-whiskers stepped forward from the ranks of those not chosen. Sweat poured down in streams from the brim of his battered leather top hat. This was Elliot, called Hizzoner, by himself anyway, self-proclaimed mayor of the travelers’ settlement-to-be. As to what his precise contribution was to the welfare of the train to justify his claims of leadership, his two knuckle-dragging bodyguards, Amos and Bub, discouraged the others from asking impertinent questions.
“Now, just a minute here, boys,” he said, “let’s not be too hasty here. Happens I’m the leader of this here little procession across the wasteland.”
Banner, the sergeant, who happened to be nearby, backhanded him across the face with casually brutal force. The plump self-proclaimed mayor measured his none-too-considerable length in the dust.
“Triple-stupe,” a sec man muttered, prodding the selected captives into the bed of a wag. “Ain’t figgered out what he was don’t mean shit to a tree, now.”
With surprising agility, Elliot rolled to his knees, clasped his hands prayerfully and commenced to plead. “No, you can’t do this! I can help your baron. I’m a man who unnerstands the way of the world!”
The raiders wordlessly began to line up behind the weeping, imploring rejects.
Elliot reached back and grabbed a nine-year-old girl by a bony grubby wrist, dragging her forward. She was clad in a torn smock that was all over stains in shades of yellow and brown.
“Take my little girl—do with her what you will,” he blubbered. “She’ll please you up right. Trained her proper, myself!”
One of the mothers of the other children spoke up. “They’re gonna take what they want anyway, Elliot, you damn fool,” she said bitterly. “They got the blasters. Now stop your sniveling and die like a man!”
“Wait! Amos, Bub! Help me! Ya gotta!”
His two heavyweight henchmen evaded his eyes as they took their places in the wags. Banner cuffed the politician on the side of his head. “Back in line, asshole. Make this messy for us, we shoot you in the belly and just leave you.”
“‘’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves…’” Doc began to recite loudly as the weeping would-be mayor crawled back into line. His eyes, aged beyond his years as much by the horrors of being snatched from his family and hurled through time as by the desperate sights they had witnessed in the Deathlands, had lost all hint of focus.
The commanding coldheart halted with one boot up in the cab of his wag. His men had already secured the travelers’ wags and begun firing up their engines. He turned his head and stared at Doc.
“What did you say?”
“‘All mimsy were the borogroves—’”
“‘And the mome raths outgrabe,’” the coldheart officer finished, striding back to him. “You know something of the classics, then, old man. Can you read?”
“Read, yes,” Doc responded, as though replaying to a voice from beyond the moon. “Read, breed, if you prick me do I not bleed?”
“Nuke-sucking oldie’s mad as Fire Day,” the sergeant said. “Do him with the others.”
“No, Sergeant Banner,” the sec chief said. “The General will want this one.”
The sergeant scowled. “It’s strong hands and backs we need to fix the track—”
The sec chief tossed him a single look. His eyes were pale brown and as clear as new glass.
“Yes, Captain Helton, sir,” the blocky sec man said briskly. He seized Doc’s arm and yanked him out of line. “Come on, then, you crazy old shit. General’s got his little hobbies.”
For a moment no one breathed. The coldhearts were clearly not used to anything but instant obedience to their commands, nor slow to let their blasters enforce them. Surely if Doc continued raving; the youthful captain would lose patience and allow Banner to ice him with the others who’d been deemed useless.
But since it no longer required the shelter of lunacy from the imminence of certain death, Doc’s rational mind reasserted itself. He lowered his hands—Banner’s finger never so much as twitched on the trigger—and shot his frayed cuffs. “Lead on, my good fellow,” he said to the sergeant.
As the old man was dragged toward the wags, Krysty felt tension flow out of her muscles. The future was a void a million times greater than all the Big Ditch and then some. But on some level below thought she wouldn’t watch another of her companions—the only family she had left to her—die before her eyes. Even if it meant her own death.
Of course, her future was empty without Ryan. But she had duties: as a friend, as mate to the companion’s fallen leader, she couldn’t allow herself to die.
Yet.
The children wailed and sobbed and clutched their mothers’ skirts. The mothers, Deathlands women, tousled their children’s hair, bit back their own tears and murmured reassurances they knew were lies. One little girl was trying to break from the line, screaming and crying and tugging at her mother’s hand. The sec chief frowned. He followed the direction her free hand was stretching in. He walked to where the small rag rabbit—or mutie—lay at the bash of a clump of salt-bush; picked it up, brought it to the little girl, knelt and handed it gravely to her. She took it, suddenly quiet, her grimy cheeks scoured by her tears. He smoothed the dark hair on her head, stood, pivoted on his heel and walked back to his wag.
As he passed Banner, he nodded once.
The sergeant barked a command. The machine gun that had killed Ryan and its mate on a second raider wag snarled. The bullets raked the line of rejects carefully between two and three feet off the ground, to take adults in legs or bellies and kids in heads and chests, anchoring all neatly in place. Most screaming and thrashing in agony, a fortunate few lifeless-limp, the unarmed travelers went down in the dust.
The firing stopped. Arcs of flying brass empties flashed in the sunlight to fall with an almost musical tinkle to the hardpan. The moaning of the wind was joined by the shrieks of the injured.
Banner spoke again. Again the machine guns ripped the bodies, those that stirred and those that didn’t. It seemed the marauders had bullets to burn. Finally the sergeant walked along the line of now-motionless travelers, firing a handful of single shots from his longblaster. Then he turned and joined his comrades in the wags.
One of the raiders who had come in the stakebed truck that now contained the caravan’s survivors took a frag gren from his web gear, pulled the pin and let the safety lever fly free, then tossed the bomb under the broken-down wag that had caused the caravan to halt. He turned and walked away without waiting to watch the result. The gren went off with a crack muffled by the wag’s bulk.
The sec man who’d thrown the gren joined his comrades who were crammed into the two travelers’ wags they had emptied. Engines growled. The convoy rolled off along the bare-earth track, to the west, raising roostertails of khaki dust.
The derelict wag’s gasoline tank, ruptured by the blast, caught fire with a whump and billow of yellow flames. The vehicle began to burn ferociously, puking black smoke into a sky that was already beginning to mask its clean blue face with clouds.
Krysty emerged from her hiding place. Her joints ached from maintaining the unnatural position she’d been forced to endure. Red ants had crawled up her legs inside her jumpsuit and bitten her shin and thigh. Their venom made the tiny wounds pang like stabs. She ignored all.
She walked with the deliberation of a drunk to the edge of the precipice, where Ryan had stood, where last she had seen her lover. Her beautiful high-cheekboned face was set like stone. She looked down, half fearing what she would see.
There was nothing. The slope angled sharply down for perhaps forty yards, pitched over a cluster of granite boulders, which resisted erosion better than the prevalent sandstone, and straight down in a sheer fall to the floor a mile below. Ryan’s body wasn’t in sight. Presumably it was way down at the bottom, hidden by sheer height.
She turned away, looking over the bodies of their former traveling companions: Kurtiz, Elane, Natty and the rest. The little girl Sallee lay facedown, with her toy inches from her outflung fingers, its grime glistening with her blood.
Moving as if through water and all her limbs were lead, Krysty picked through the items the coldhearts had so contemptuously pitched into heaps on the ground. She needed what supplies she could carry: food, water, meds. Even something extra for barter.
She wouldn’t just lie down and die. She would follow the men who had murdered Ryan and the travelers and kidnapped her friends. She would kill them all, and free her friends.
Of course, she was but one woman, alone in the wasteland, afoot in pursuit of wags. And all the supplies she could lift, as strong as she was, would be quickly exhausted in this waste. Particularly water.
It meant nothing to her. Nothing at all. She would follow her vengeance trail to the end, whatever it would take.
She set out along the track the wags had taken. She had no hope, but hate was enough. Concern for herself was no part of the picture.
She was dead already. Inside.
SOMEWHERE AT THE BOTTOM of a deep well of darkness and misery, Ryan stirred.
It felt to him as if the skin of his chest was a big bag wrapped around forty pounds of busted glass. With every laboring breath he drew, it felt as if a thousand jagged points stabbed and rasped at his raw nerve endings.
Worse, as he became aware again, was that he could hear his breathing. Not just the ragged in and out of exhalation that was always with you whether you paid it mind or not, but a nasty wet slurping noise combined with a hiss. And it was hard to breathe—bastard hard.
Sucking chest wound, he realized. So-called, one of his father’s healers had told him back home in Front Royal long ago, because it really sucked if you got one.
And unless you got pretty quick attention, so did your chances of living.
Krysty! The name went off like ten pounds of smokeless powder off a blasting cap in his mind. She and the companions hadn’t come to his aid, which meant they weren’t able to.
For a moment, in the damp, dark misery of his mind and body, he fought the clammy jaws of panic. He was hurt bad and alone.
He tried one of the deep-breathing exercises Krysty had taught him to calm himself and banish the terror that threatened to rob him of the last remnants of his selfhood, his manhood, and whatever he might laughingly call hope, sucking the air way down with his abdominal muscles.
It worked, too. Not because supercharging his system with oxygen had its usual soothing effect on the system. But because it felt as if some giant mutie bastard had plunged a twenty-inch saw into his flat belly and was sawing for all he was worth.
Whatever else you could say about it, it took his mind off feeling sorry for himself.
His eye opened. It was resisted by some kind of thick gumminess, but the jolt of white-hot agony that racked his being, as he breathed in, did the trick.
The first thing he saw was lots of nothing much: blue dimness as far as his eye could see. After a moment he noticed it deepened in the direction the not-so-gentle pull of gravity was telling him was downward, was banded in various shades and hues, was molded into cone and curtain shapes.
He was lying on the very lip of the Big Ditch itself, with his outflung right hand, fingers tingling as though with crawling fire as circulation restored by some unnoticed movement returned feeling to them, hanging over a mile of space.
He rolled his eye down. The right side of his face was pressed to a rough rock surface. The tarry looking pool spread around it tended to confirm his suspicion that what had glued his eyelid shut was his own blood, spilled in a copious quantity.
He rolled the eye up. A granite outcrop, almost black in the dusk, hunched over him like a leering gargoyle. He could only guess that after being shot—a remembered flash of pain in his chest, of spinning dizzily into blackness vaster by far than the Grand Canyon—he had tumbled down the steep, but not sheer, slope and bounced over that last humpback boulder to come flopping to a stop on a hard ledge of rock.
Needless to say, it had busted hell out of him. Needless to say, it was nothing compared to what would have happened had he actually gone over.
But it wasn’t going to matter a bent, spent shell case if he couldn’t do something for himself and fast. He’d suffocate if the wound wasn’t tended to. He knew what had to be done: apply what Mildred called an “occlusive dressing,” a sort of valve that would flap shut and seal the hole when he inhaled, but relax and expel air when he breathed out. It wasn’t all that complex an operation, and anything reasonably airtight would do for a patch. Nuke it, he even had the proper material for the job tucked away in one of his pockets.
The problem was, could he even get to it, or use it if he could?
Then he heard, above the mocking whistle of the wind and the thin shrill cry of a redtailed hawk on the hunt, the tiniest scrape of something moving on stone. And he realized that the injuries he already had might turn out to be the least of his problems.
He wasn’t alone.
Having another living being find you helpless in the Deathlands was an almost automatic death sentence. Even if that being walked on two legs like a human being. Mebbe worst if it was a human being. Ryan had known plenty humans, no few of them barons or their sec men, who gave away nothing to stickies when it came to rapacious cruelty.
He took stock of his resources. He still had all the weapons he could want. He could feel the familiar weight of the Steyr lying across his left leg, the big broad-bladed panga in its sheath on his hip. Even his SIG-Sauer with the built-in suppresser—he reckoned that was the hard object prodding a busted-end rib around in him every time he fought down a breath. He had feeling back in his right hand, even if it was feeling like it was being held in a fire, and could move his fingers.
But his left wasn’t responding. A node of unusually savage ache in the giant throb of pain that was his being suggested he might have a busted clavicle on that side. Which meant he could count that arm completely out. No force of his will would get the limb to so much as move. It just mechanically couldn’t happen, any more than the toughest man could walk with a broken pelvis.
He looked around, hoping his stalker would miss the motion of his eyeball in the gloom. Stalkers. That was the first thing he saw. Shapes, strangely hunched, gathered around him. He could make out no detail in the gloom. They were small, no more than three feet high, max. Not that it mattered. A three-legged coyote pup could put him on the last train west in his current condition.
A shape loomed over him. He could make out the glint of moisture on big staring nightmare eyes, big teeth gleaming pale behind animal lips. He tried to roll away. His body refused to obey. He tried to bring his right arm up to ward off the monster. It didn’t work. All he could do was turn his head frantically from side to side on his neck and make animal sounds, half-panic, half-defiant fury, deep in this throat.
A small paw stretched out over him.
Blackness took him.
Chapter Two
“Robbed!” howled the tall man with the painted ax-blade face. “Cheated! All our days of scouting and waiting gone for nothing.”
Red Wolf paused dramatically, glaring out from below the wolf’s head he wore like a cap over his own, with the rest of the pelt hanging down his broad bronze back. He was a onetime war leader of the Cheyenne from the Medicine Bow country. Or so he said. The multimegaton pasting that had taken out the Warren missile complex had left that very part of southern Wyoming and northern Colorado a howling wasteland as virulent as anything the Midwest boasted.
Not that anyone was going to go up there and check. He had proved time and again that his heart was as cold as the coldest, his case as hard as the hardest, and justified his role, not just as a member of Chato’s outlaw horde, but one of its leaders. If he wanted to dress in dead animal parts and various colors of paint, nobody was going to challenge him—who wasn’t ready to chill or be chilled on the spot, anyway. Chato himself was an Indian, though much smaller and with quieter tastes.
The problem with Red Wolf wasn’t what he claimed to be. The problem was that he was a bone outlaw, a seething vessel of barely repressed murder at the best of times, and he was taking the loss of the travelers even harder than the rest of what passed for Chato’s command council.
The other eight stared at him from the circle, where they squatted in the flickering feeble light from a fire of dried brush scraped together in the center of the cave. They looked lean, predatory and expectant. They also looked as if they were trying desperately not to bust down and cough their lights out. The cave etched into the sandstone bluff by wind and water and maybe, just maybe, improved by the hands of similar bands of desperados of ages past, was cool even in the heat of summer, which this wasn’t. But there was no smoke-hole, much less a chimney. Consequently a fogbank of nasty sage-colored smoke that went up the nostrils and down the throat like prickleburrs hung from a height of two feet off the floor to somewhere near the irregular arch of ceiling above.
“Not much we can do about it, pinche,” muttered El Gancho, a bandit from northern Mex. He was a squat, leering man with a bad eye and a worse mustache.
“But we know who to blame,” the tall Indian chiller said, eyes glittering like obsidian chips. Chato felt what had seemed like a fluttering of butterflies in his belly turn into a minor temblor.
“Easy now, friend,” said ginger-bearded Ironhead Johnson. He was a woods-running coldheart originally from up on the Musselshell, and more recently from Taos and parts south, who had headed west and hooked up with Chato’s growing band when the upper Grandee valley got too hot for him. He had been shot in the head on at least four occasions, with no more effect than minor deteriorations of personality and impulse control, neither of which had been notable before. One bullet scar was a white pucker over the inside end of his right eyebrow, like an off-center third eye. “Spilled blood can’t go back in the body.”
“No?” Red Wolf smiled like his namesake. “At least we can spill the blood of the one who is responsible. The one who brought us together, the one who held us back from raiding ranches and villes. The one who said there was no point alerting potential targets before we’d got at least one fat score.”
He was glaring straight at Chato now. Chato felt sweat run down his face. The yellow headband that restrained his own heavy black hair was already soaked.
“Who?” Red Wolf demanded, voice rising, with a crazy edge to it. “Who? I know who. I’ll tell you who. I’ll—”
The crash of a shotgun blast in the close confines seemed to implode Chato’s head even as the flash from a cutdown muzzle dazzled his eyes. Red Wolf staggered back as a buck-and-ball load—four chunks of double-ought buck and a .72-caliber lead ball—took him about the short ribs on the right side. Blood, flesh and chunks of yellow-gleaming bone were blasted free.
Red Wolf was a strong man all the way through. He staggered back only two steps, doubling over, grabbing at his ruined midsection. He raised his head for the charge from the second barrel to shatter his face like a clay shitpot. He measured his length backward on the sandstone, arms outflung, the last reflex spasms of his heart pumping out great gushes of blood that was black in the firelight and steamed like lava.
Chato became aware that he had screamed. Thankfully no one had heard him. No one was hearing anything at all but a loud ringing and echoes of the enormous roars.
Len Hogan allowed his Izhmash scattergun to tip forward from where recoil had sent it pointing toward the low ceiling. Smoke seeped from the muzzle, and then from the breech as he cracked it open to eject two red plastic-hulled empties and feed in a couple more from a pocket of his colors, the grime-blackened sleeveless denim jacket he wore as a vest.
Shave-headed, taller even than Red Wolf had been even before partial decapitation, and as lean as a gallows pole with an incisor missing from a mostly lipless mouth framed by a black handlebar mustache, he had been thrown out of the Satan’s Slaves biker gang for unpredictable violence and brutality. Actually, his erstwhile buds had been intent on lynching him, but he proved to be better than they were at tracking.
He was one of the cooler heads on Chato’s executive council.
“Enough of that owl-screech shit.” The ringing had subsided enough for Chato to hear him speak. He snapped the shotgun action closed with the flick of a massive wrist enclosed in a studded leather bracer. The rest of the group was busy surreptitiously trying to sidle even farther away from him than they’d been sitting before. Owing to certain peculiar rituals of the northwest bike gangs, the giant coldheart smelled like a chop-shop shitter with backed-up plumbing. “Who, your ass. Talk don’t load no mags.”
Chato made himself relax. At least a little. Otherwise he was going to lose it here and now, and that would put him in a world of hurt. Hogan had not, he knew, killed Red Wolf, because Red Wolf was stirring up rebellion against Chato. Hogan did it because he liked to kill people, and this was the first handy excuse he’d been presented for some time.
And that, in a spent casing, was pretty much the problem staring him in the face.
A White Mountain Apache by birth and upbringing, Chato was in many ways an actual genius. For example, taking best advantage of the coldhearts’ natural propensities for speed and sneakiness, he’d crafted the scouting system that had passed the word of the caravan’s capture back to headquarters, by means of a relay of flashing mirrors, within hours of it going down.
He could talk a snake into paying in advance for a year’s tap dancing lessons. He was a triple-wizard organizer. He could spin grand schemes all day long, and all night, too, if the Taos Lightning held out.
And there, unfortunately, his military ability screeched to a brake-burning halt. Right on the edge of the Big Ditch.
He was first off a coward. It wasn’t just physical cowardice, but really physical cowardice, physiological reactions to threat over which he had utterly no control. The very prospect of physical danger would induce a terrible quaking that started in his belly and moved outward till the shaking threatened to jar loose one molecule from another. An immediate threat simply launched him in uncontrolled flight, assisted by explosive voiding of the bowels.
Red Wolf’s fury had already set Chato to shaking. It was only a stroke of bastard luck that Hogan chilled him before his threat-level reached Chato’s voiding stage.
That was manageable. Lots of great war leaders have been more than a little nervous in the service.
The other problem was more serious. He had no clue how to actually fight.
All his life, it seemed, he had been adept at talking his way out of trouble. As an orphaned runt, small even by Apache standards, he’d had ample opportunity to acquire the gift growing up. When exiled by vengeful tribal fellows on totally false charges of witchcraft, and totally true charges of misappropriation of tribal resources, he had stumbled into the midst of a band of mostly white-eyes coldhearts whose natural first impulse was to kill him in some picturesque and protracted way and he would let his well-tried tongue spin its silver web just to have something to do.
Unfortunately, sometimes that tongue moved faster than his brain. He talked himself into positions not even his cunning and insight could then see any way out of.
So it was with that fast-talk extravaganza out beneath a swollen desert moon. Not only had the outlaws spared him. They had become the nucleus of a whole coldheart army. Bad men had flocked to him, until he had a force of between one and two hundred of the best of worst of the region’s outlaws: the scum de la scum. Men so bad even average, everyday coldhearts had got a bellyful of them.
And he had no clue what to do with them.
The approach of the caravan had been a godsend. As Red Wolf complained, Chato had been reluctant to allow his men to attack any of the villes in the surrounding area, nor even try to pick off any isolated ranches. He did know enough to understand a very little of that would raise the country against them, but his more immediate motivation had been simple fear. Leave aside the fact he had no remote intention of exposing his own hide to puncturing by irate sec men or sharpshooting ranchers. What if something went wrong? He was operating on zero tolerance here. One serious setback and all the smoke he’d spun would evaporate and all his mirrors would shatter—and his boys were just the ones to know how to give him a proper send-off with the sharp-edged shards.
It was a classic politician’s cleft stick. He couldn’t afford to fail, but he couldn’t afford to put off action much longer. So the word his intelligence system brought him of a caravan moving through his territory came as a godsend. Even the report that they’d hooked up with a half-dozen hard-core fighters to enhance their security didn’t bother him unduly, once he’d got a description of those “fighters.” Their leader was a one-eyed mystery man who, granted, anybody in the whole Deathlands above the age of three would make for a stone chiller and no mistake. But the others: an albino boy, a sawed-off runt with glasses, a gaunt old crazie who carried a cane and a couple of bitches. What could they bring to the dance?
So the caravan looked like easy pickings. And because the travelers simply couldn’t afford to carry much that wasn’t extremely valuable, it was rich—relatively. Split among a hundred and a half marauders, though, with the subchiefs naturally taking extra-large bites of the pie, it wouldn’t seem rich for long. Chato, however, hadn’t thought past that point, not because he lacked the mental ability, but because he didn’t dare. Something would come up. Or else.
Unfortunately the train had been such easy pickings that a bunch of damned paramilitary interlopers had gone right ahead and picked them. And “or else” had arrived ahead of schedule.
“So now,” said the dapper outlaw, perhaps the most feared of all, known only as El Abogado, in the mildest of tones, “what do we do? Like any creature, we must feed.”
Trust a coldheart named El Abogado never to lose sight of the son of a bitching bottom line, Chato thought bitterly.
There was only one thing to do.
Chato sucked down a deep breath. By a miracle, he managed not to choke on the smoke.
“I have a plan…” he said.
“WHOA!” J.B. EXCLAIMED, grabbing at his fedora to hold it clamped firmly on his head as the splintery wood floor of the wag whacked him hard in the tailbone and bounced him a good four inches in the air. The wag was jolting along at a good fifty clicks an hour—or not so good, on a road that wasn’t much more than a couple tire tracks in the hardpan, already starting to deepen and widen into arroyos from the erosive force of infrequent but fierce rains. Way too fast for the suspension, one way or another.
Almost all the chosen from the wag caravan had been herded together in the coldhearts’ stakebed wag, including three of the captive companions. Doc was riding in the cab of the lead wag, second in line behind a Baja-buggy scout with its own rollbar-mounted machine gun, squeezed between the captain and his driver. It couldn’t have been too comfortable for him, all crammed up against that unyielding body armor, even leaving aside the company, J.B. reckoned.
At the outset the pair of guards keeping watch on the prisoners in the bigger wag had ordered them to keep their heads bowed and their fingers interlaced behind their necks. That hadn’t lasted. Even free to grab on to what handholds the wag offered and one another when it didn’t it was all the prisoners could do from getting tossed in a big snake-mating-ball of butts and elbows. Their captors, while coldhearted enough, were more than just coldhearts, it was painfully apparent. They were sec men, probably calling themselves soldiers, from the way they dressed in odds and ends of uniforms and gave one another salutes and titles, military-fashion.
And if there was one thing sec men hated it was disorder. It made their jobs harder. So the order about clasping hands went by the dusty way.
The captives rode mostly in shocky silence. Overhead, the glorious blue that had so fatally intoxicated them was being blotted as clouds came racing in, lead-gray. The Armorer saw Mildred looking up at them. To her, their speed was unnatural and still alarming for all the time she’d spent unfrozen and in the present day. To the others, it was the fact that the sky had been almost clear that was disconcerting.
The late Hizzoner’s bodyguards, Amos and Bub, had left women behind, bleeding out in the dust. Lanky rawboned Bub had two kids, a boy and a girl, who now had flies crawling on their eyeballs. He was blubbering about it with his huge slab of ham hands covering his face. At least J.B. reckoned he was mourning his woman and children. It stood to reason not even a would-be sec man would be wasting tears on the once and never mayor of New Tulsa.
Stacked right next to J.B., Bub, the burlier and relatively smarter half of the team, was glaring at the companions with little pig eyes which, if bloodshot, were as dry as the goat track beneath them.
“That bastard Kurtiz was right about one thing,” he said in a voice like a rusty old oil drum rolling down a rocky slope. “You nuke-suckers weren’t shit when it came to being guards.”
Jak, sitting on the Armorer’s left, stiffened and snarled. J.B. touched him lightly on the arm.
“You got one thing right, friend,” J.B. said. “We aren’t shit.”
“Don’t crack wise with me, you sawed-off little—”
The first two fingers of J.B.’s right hand lashed out and snapped the backs of the tips against Bub’s blond-stubbled jowl, as quick as a diamondback strike. They did no damage, but stung. Bub shook his head once and blinked, totally off balance.
Which meant that when J.B. brought his left hand whipping around in a hooking palm-heel strike that mashed Bub’s already generally shapeless nose across his face, the blow slammed the back of the goon’s skull into one of the heavy uprights rising from the periphery of the truckbed. Bub’s moaning subsided, he clutched his face as blood trickled between his fingers and down his spine. It began to diffuse in thin, red spiderweb nets through the sweat coating his thick neck.
“Hey!” the younger of the two guards yelled from the rear of the truck. “Hey! Stop that! I’m warning you!”
He raised his M-16. J.B. smiled placatingly and held up his hands, palms forward, to show that he was unarmed and innocent of ill intent. The other guard, older and obviously case-hardened, just rolled his eyes and gave the Armorer a tough look.
“Man’s got a point,” Mildred said bitterly. She sat across from J.B. with her knees up and her arms around them. “Some defenders we turned out to be.”
“No talking!” the young guard exclaimed, jabbing the air with his weapon.
J.B. ignored him. Notwithstanding the initial fuckup about ordering the prisoners to keep hands behind heads, the raiders had obviously run this drill before. As if to emphasize the fact, the older guard was toting a 12-gauge Browning A-5 autoloading shotgun sawed-off to the gas check, a pretty serious crowd-control implement. If the prisoners got seriously frisky, and particularly if they showed signs of trying to make a break for it, the guards were ready, willing and able to commence some serious blasting.
But it was also obvious the raiders needed bodies and they needed lots of them—warm, fully functional, and not leaking from extra orifices. So the captives enjoyed a certain amount of leeway.
“We just got caught flat, Millie,” J.B. said. “The wind, the sun, the bright blue sky—we got loose and careless, and now here we are.”
“Be quiet!” the younger guard shrilled, flourishing his longblaster wildly. “I told you! I’ll shoot! I will!”
“Cody,” the older man growled, “knock off that shit before I lay this mare’s leg up alongside your empty damn head, won’t you? Who gives a rat’s red ass if the bastards talk?”
Cody sank into sullen silence. The older man held on to the upright at the front-right corner of the bed with his left hand. The other held his sawed-off across his drawn-up knees. He stared back at the captives from a face as hard and flat as a cast iron pan.
Mildred’s eyes caught J.B.’s. He tried to give her a reassuring smile, but he realized it just looked like somebody was turning a nut at the back of his head and tightening the skin around his mouth. He knew he couldn’t piss down her leg and tell her it was raining—her of all people. But she and he were paired, and he felt he owed it to at least try to do what he could to keep her spirits up.
He thought of Ryan and had to look away. He took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief he removed very gingerly from his pocket. After a few moments he put the specs back on and faced the black woman again.
Mildred was still gazing at him with curious fixity. Once she had his eyes back she let her own run meaningfully down toward his scuffed boots.
He nodded, slow and slight, a motion that would be lost to anybody not studying him a lot more closely than anybody but Mildred Wyeth seemed to be in the general jouncing and jostling induced by the truck banging along across the desert. The frisking he and the others had gotten had been professional but cursory. The sec men were looking for weapons. It didn’t occur to them that J.B. might have a full lock pick kit concealed on his person, much less a couple of odds and ends, including more picks and mebbe a weapon or two; and never in a thousand years would they suspect what might be hidden in, say, a hollowed-out boot heel.
Then J.B. shrugged. “Don’t see we got much choice but to take the cards as we’re dealt them,” he said, “than play them as they lay.”
She frowned.
“With Ryan dead—”
“Ryan not dead,” Jak said firmly.
J.B. looked at him sharply. The albino youth patted himself on the solar plexus. “Feel here if was.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Jak,” J.B. said with quiet determination.
Jak’s eyes lit up in anger. “Listen—”
“Take it easy, you two,” Mildred said. “We got to stick together right now.”
The traveler sitting to Mildred’s right cocked his head. “What about that bitch of Cawdor’s?”
Mildred’s elbow jabbed hard into the traveler’s ribs. Air oofed out of him. “Oh, sorry, Seymour. You just take it easy now. And remember it’s not good to speak ill of the dead.”
He glared at her and rubbed his side. He said no more, though.
A woman toward the front of the wag had gotten agitated. “So that’s just it?” she demanded. “We just let them shoot down our friends and loved ones and scarf us up as slaves, and that’s it? End of story?”
“You got a better idea, Maisy?” asked a heavy black-bearded man in coveralls patched in variety of colors.
The woman gazed wildly around at her fellow captives.
“They got the drop on us,” J.B. said, loudly but very controlled. “And that’s all there is to it. Spilled blood can’t go back in the body.”
The woman at Maisy’s side took her arm and whispered urgently in her ear. The hard-bitten guard tipped up his scattergun until its foreshortened muzzle pointed at the nowovercast skies. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even change expression. But the implication was clear.
There would be no more conversation out of the captives. Not because of any silly rules, but because they were getting themselves all stirred up, talking. If they got too stirred up, it would make more work for him.
That wouldn’t happen. And even though the shot-column didn’t spread out any too quick even from a barrel that short, the odds were pretty good that whoever the coldheart picked as designated troublemaker wouldn’t be the only one to cop some .33-caliber double-aught balls.
The captives clammed up. But J.B. thought he heard Jak mutter, deep down in his throat, “Ryan not dead.”
HEAD DOWN, back bowed beneath the weight of the pack she carried, Krysty trudged toward the lowering sun.
She had begun to feel, not hope—never hope, never again—but a kind of lessened futility. Lessened immediate futility anyway.
It wasn’t her nature to analyze. Her conscious mind had been nothing but a bright blur for the past several hours. But she was far from stupe, and her subconscious kept working.
The raiders were well organized and even smart by sec men standards, let alone coldheart ones. The massacre hadn’t been sadistic butchery. It hadn’t even been casual. It had been businesslike. Whoever the murderers were, they were professional about it.
Their behavior was at the other end of the world from the wild irrationality most coldhearts displayed. Calculating.
They had been happy enough to take what loot the caravan wags offered, but they dumped the contents of the two wags they needed to transport their own people in without hesitation or question, including provisions they themselves used every day—food, water and ammo. It wasn’t so much that they spurned those items as that they didn’t even trouble to look for them, even though all were present and all reasonably expected to be. The only cargo they kept was spare fuel stored in the vehicles, and that the wags themselves obviously required.
Far from worrying about their own resupply, they had taken on two dozen extra mouths. Krysty knew why even without the sergeant having grumbled to his superior: the raiders needed slave workers. To do what, she wasn’t sure—something about a track—and didn’t particularly care. What was potentially useful to know was that the raiders hadn’t been concerned even though those same consumables were necessary to keep the captives alive so they could do the work the raiders needed done. Gaia, even ammo, if some of the captives needed extra persuading. And it was through neither inexperience nor the shit-for-brains slavery to the impulse of the moment that controlled most coldhearts, and mutie marauders too, for that matter.
This bunch knew exactly what they were doing. Every step along the path.
If they didn’t need to worry about food and water, they weren’t far from replenishing the same. It followed as inevitably as night was about to follow the desert day.
Granted, a wag could cover ground a shitload faster than a woman afoot, even one as strong and driven as Krysty Wroth. But another thing her subconscious worked out, and allowed to seep osmotically into the white void of her conscious mind, was that a job that took a lot of hands generally took a fair stretch of time to do as well. Wherever the marauders delivered their captives, they probably wouldn’t be moving on for a spell.
The knowledge, slowly assimilated, added energy to her step. It might take a few hours or many days, but she had at least some solid ground of reason on which to base a belief that she would find her friends and Ryan’s killers.
A scrub jay yammered abuse at Krysty from a bush. The sound brought the woman back to the here-and-now with a jolt of alarm. She had been in zombie mode, total whiteout.
She was lucky. In the Deathlands, if you zoned that far out, you usually came out of it about the time a stickie was pulling your face off.
She raised her head and took stock of her surroundings. The sun was falling toward a shoal of mesas with wind-scooped faces, tawny and rose. There was no sign of the raiders, and the marks their tires had left in sand were lost to the eternally restless wind. But there was something, a squat blockiness ahead at the bottom of a broad valley. Buildings. Studying her surroundings, Krysty could make out patches of dark pavement showing through drifted sand, the remnants of a flanking ditch. There had been a hard-top road here. Mebbe even a highway.
Bad news, in that if the raiders turned off along it, they’d make at least somewhat better time than along the unimproved dirt track they, like the caravan, had been following. It remained unlikely the raiders were going farther than she could walk in a matter of days.
Meantime, the buildings offered possible shelter for the night. This wasn’t the seething gut of the Deathlands, with monstrous beasts, humanoid muties and acid rain storms ready to destroy the traveler caught in the open. But there were still plenty of nasty things that came out at night. To hunt.
She began walking toward the structures.
J.B. WAS ROUSED from sleep when the stakebed wag began to slow. Despite scowls from the guards the other captives were scrambling to their feet to peer forward toward whatever awaited them.
A brown hand, strong but altogether feminine, appeared before his eyes. The Armorer grinned at Mildred as she helped him up. She gave him a taut smile back.
He couldn’t see much over the cab, so he leaned his head over the wood side of the bed and peered forward. What seemed like a couple hundred people were laboring away in the middle of the desert. And parked next to them, gleaming like polished silver in the sun’s slanting rays—
“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit and fried for a hush-puppy,” J.B. said in admiring amazement. “It’s a train!”
Chapter Three
The screen door of the derelict diner banged open. Two men were suddenly among the cracked-vinyl booths and the peeling Formica tables, longblasters in their hands.
Both aimed square at Krysty Wroth.
“Freeze, bitch!” the younger, taller intruder shouted. Blond bangs hung in his sunburned face from beneath a turned-around ball cap. His partner, who was darker and whose dark-brown hair was beating a hasty retreat from his own forehead, just grinned a nasty grin.
After only the briefest hitch in her motions, and her breathing, Krysty calmly went back to doing what she was doing—cooking corned-beef hash made from the supplies she’d brought from the massacre site over a fire built of brush and driftwood in what had been the little kitchen’s deep-fat fryer, once upon a time. The pot was one she’d found hanging behind the counter. A handful of the fine sand that had drifted against the diner’s east wall served to scrub out the accreted dust and gunk of the past century.
“Hey,” the blond intruder shouted. “Din’t I tell you to freeze, bitch?”
“Easy, Matt, easy,” his pal soothed. “They’re so much more fun when they’re warm.”
He sidled around the periphery of booths, holding his remade M-16 with one hand. In the light of the kerosene lanterns she was working by, she could tell that both men wore retread U.S. Army blouses, both OD green, both with unfamiliar round patches on the breast. Just like the men who had killed Ryan and hijacked the caravan.
The man came right up beside her. She smelled his stinking breath, felt it defile her cheek. His dirty-nailed fingertip followed it, unwinding a scarlet lock down to the line of her set jaw.
“Well, well, well,” he murmured, “what have we here?”
She didn’t shy away from the touch, just kept stirring and tossing.
“Bitch-slap the skag, Ben,” Matt said, shifting weight from left boot to right with poorly checked eagerness. “Show her who’s boss.”
“Naw, naw, gently now. She’s a cool one, aren’t you, honey? I like that. I bet a girl like you could show us a good time. Big nasty redhead like you.”
He grabbed her, lowered his face to nuzzle her neck. She fended him with the back of his hands. He yanked his head back, anger flaring in his dark eyes.
“Now, now, don’t be in too much of a hurry, boys,” she said in her throatiest voice. It was a voice guaranteed to raise wood on a week-old stiff. “Why don’t you’ll just relax and make yourselves comfortable while I fix you a nice big dinner?”
The rage drained from Ben’s eyes. He smiled. Nodded. Laughed a little laugh.
“You know, hon, you’re right. Been a long, hard day, getting shut of that asshole General and his merry men. I’ll feel a lot stronger once I get around a good old home-cooked meal.”
He let her go and went back around the counter. Matt was almost vibrating with outraged horniness. “What are you doing? What? Why are we waiting?”
“Relax, kid,” Ben said, hoisting a cheek onto one of the round pedestal stools at the counter. There had been three; one was missing entirely, the other had been uprooted and lay against the foot of the counter.
“And quit waving that damned blaster around. You make me nervous. Our little redheaded bedwarmer is a smart one. You can tell just by looking at her. She knows better than to try to run on us. Don’t you?” He propped his own blaster next to his stool.
Krysty gave him a zipper-busting smile. “Now, why would I want to run anywhere, sugar?”
“But, but—” Matt sputtered.
“Sit your ass down,” Ben commanded.
Matt complied. He sat at a table in the middle of the little room. He didn’t put his longblaster down, although he did aim it at the ceiling. “What are we waiting for?” he asked peevishly.
Ben chuckled indulgently. “Didn’t you ever hear the story of the old bull and the young bull, boy?”
“No.”
“This old bull and this young bull came upon a fence. And on th’ other side of that fence, what should they see but a whole herd of fine young heifers swishing their tails over their nice firm fannies.”
“This one’s got a nice ass,” Matt said, staring at Krysty and almost drooling. “I can tell.”
“She surely does. Now, pay attention to my story. This young bull sees them heifers, and he says, ‘I got an idea! Let’s jump the fence and fuck us one a’ them heifers.’ And this old bull just shakes his head and says, ‘No. What we gonna do, we’re gonna walk down to that gate, walk through it nice and peaceful, and fuck all them heifers.’”
He laughed, grandly amused at his own joke. His gales of laughter died slowly away as he realized his younger companion wasn’t laughing with him.
“Go ahead,” Matt demanded. “Git to the punchline.”
“That was the punchline, you triple-stupe nuke head!”
“Weren’t funny.”
“Well, did you at least get the point of the story?”
“There’s a point?”
Ben dropped an elbow to the bar and sank his face in his hand.
“Well, now, don’t go being unreasonable, Ben,” Matt whined. “You said it was a joke. You told me so. And a joke got no point. It’s supposed to be funny.” A light dawned dimly. “Except that joke weren’t funny.”
He looked questioningly at Ben. The older man just waved a world-weary hand.
“Lookit, the bitch is all done cooking. Can we do her now? Can we?” He licked his lips. “I wonder if she got red fur on her pussy. Do redheads have that? Red hair on their pussies?”
“We ain’t et yet, you damn fool.”
“I was going to make up a batch of nice biscuits,” Krysty said, “if you big, strong men can just hold on to your appetites a little longer. And wouldn’t you like something to drink while you’re waiting?” She nodded her head back toward a canteen sitting on the counter.
Ben nodded, picked it up, began to unscrew the top. Then he stopped. A cagey look came into his eye.
“You wouldn’t be trying to pull one on us, now would you, honey? Here. You take a drink first. Then we’ll know it’s safe.”
He tossed the canteen at her. Holding his eye, smiling seductively the while, she undid the lid and took a long draft. Then she put the lid back on and tossed the canteen back. He drank greedily and pitched it to Matt in turn.
“So what are two such handsome men doing way out here in the middle of nowhere?”
Water ran down the side of Matt’s chin. He lowered the canteen and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “We’re. Uh, that is—”
“We’re deserters,” Ben said cheerfully.
“Deserters?” Krysty said. In her mouth the word sounded like a marvelous thing. Like a baron combined with an old-time movie star. But better. “Does that mean, like from an army?”
“Sure does,” Matt said proudly. “The Provisional United States Army!”
“Well, that’s what they call themselves,” Ben said. “They’re really just a bunch of coldhearts under command of the General. But they like to play like they’re an army.”
“That’s why we run,” Matt said. “Got tired of all the bullshit. Get out of bed when somebody else says. Haul our asses all over this sorry-ass desert rounding up limp-dick civilians to work on the line.”
“The line?” Krysty asked.
“Railroad line. Same one runs out back of this shithole.”
“See,” Ben said, “the General ain’t just any old asshole like one of your bug-heap barons. He’s got himself a train.”
“A train?” Krysty asked.
“A train. But not just any old rail wag. It’s an armored train.”
“MAGOG,” Matt said. “That’s what he calls it.”
“What’s that mean?” Krysty asked.
Ben shook his head. “Don’t mean nothin’. It’s just what the General calls it.”
“He found it,” Matt said, with something like pride. “Scavvied it out of some big ol’ underground bunker somewhere. All fulla weps and food and everything. It’s only the biggest, most powerful rail wag ever built. The General, he says it was built for something called the War on Drugs. Gonna be sent down to someplace called Columbus—”
“Colombia, nuke breath!”
“Colombia. Except the world blew up. Everybody knew about it got iced. But it was all protected and everything. In perfect shape when the General found it. And it runs off fusion batteries so it don’t never need to refuel. Got all the power a body’d ever want.”
“Sounds…impressive,” Krysty purred. “What’s this General doing with this train of his?”
“Says he’s trying to put America back together,” Ben said. “Don’t put much stock in that myself. I think he wants to be just another baron, but mebbe carve himself out a bigger empire.”
“Sounds like a pretty big job.”
Ben shrugged. “That’s another reason we run,” Matt said. “He been at it years, conquered himself a mess of little villes along the line, keep him supplied and shit. Still just like taking a piss in the ocean.” He had another drink. “I saw a ocean once.”
“Weren’t no ocean, stupe,” Ben said. “It was the Gu’f of Mex.”
“That’s a ocean. I couln’t see acrost it, anyway.”
“You mean this General can travel anywhere he wants in this armored rail wag?”
“Not exactly,” Ben said. “Lotta breaks in the line.”
“That’s why we was stuck out here in nowhere,” his partner said. “’Nother washout in the fucking line. Had to go round up a mess of dead-ass civilian stupes to fix it. Buncha bullshit.”
“Our scout wag busted an axle a few miles down the road from here,” Ben said. “We was basically out on our own at that point. So we decided what the hey, threw away our talkies and took off. Heard us a rumor from some of the workers there was a big old buncha coldhearts gathered out in the scrub somewheres ’round here. Fixin’ to hook up with ’em, give that a roll.”
“Man got to start to think about settlin’ down, puttin’ down some roots, build him a future,” Matt said. “Can’t spend your whole danged life rollin’ aimlessly along a old steel rail to nowhere.”
Ben nodded sagely. “General says he’s looking for something called the Great Redoubt. Supposed to be where the old guys stored up everything needed to put the whole country back together after the war. Even before the war, this was. Communications, supplies, weps—the works.”
“Crazy old nukesucker.”
“No shit. Like the boy says, man gets tired chasing after phantoms. Needs somethin’ more substantial. Something with meat on the bones.”
He cocked his head and looked at Krysty. “Speaking of meat on the bones, why’n’t you hurry up there, little mama? I’m getting a real appetite worked up myself now, and not just for that chow that’s smelling so good.”
“Well,” Krysty said slowly, “since you’ve been such good boys, and told me what I needed to know, it’s time you got what’s coming to you.”
She turned quickly, her right hand filled with her .38-caliber Smith & Wesson blaster. She was already squeezing the double-action trigger, timing the lengthy pull so that the hammer released just as the short barrel came to bear on Matt’s bangs. The gun roared, making a shocking racket for such a small weapon.
Automatically, Krysty stepped sideways left, away from Ben, in case he made a grab for her. He didn’t. But he was sharp and fairly quick; he was leaning forward and trying to reel up his longblaster by the strap.
She swung her right hand around, arm still straight, bringing her left hand up to wrap the fingers and brace her grip on the piece. She fired two shots, blinding fast, into his torso at a downward angle. His leaning motion carried him off the stool and hard onto the ancient cracked linoleum.
Krysty swung her blaster back toward Matt, in case he needed another dose of what he had coming. Then she noticed the old sign by the door, a square frame on a skinny metal post, its message Please Wait to Be Seated barely visible for the years of fading—and also Matt’s blood and brains, the color of the half-baked biscuits rising unattended in the pan, dripping down the front of it.
Almost at her feet, Ben groaned and stirred. She aimed her blaster down at him.
But he was no threat. One of her bullets had smashed through his lower jaw on its way down into his chest. It was still about half-attached, his breath bubbling like a well of gore from somewhere within the mess.
Ben’s lower jaw seemed to be working with a purpose, and his half-moored tongue moving as if trying to shape a word.
“Mercy.” That’s what she thought he was trying to say.
“Of course,” she said, and shot him between the eyes.
Krysty reloaded her blaster. It would’ve been more frugal to cut the coldheart’s throat, but she had scavvied plenty of .38 Special ammo from the luggage left behind by Ben and Matt’s former comrades. No point in making things harder on herself than they already were.
She walked to where Matt lay. He was spread-eagled on the filthy, cracked, sand-gritty linoleum with his longblaster fallen across his thighs. Instead of the sky, he was staring at the diner’s cracked, discolored plaster ceiling. His cap had been flipped clean off his head, possibly by the impact of the bullet that had evacuated his skull. She knelt and picked it up. It looked new, crisp and scarcely faded by sun or sweat, meaning it had to have been salvaged from storage fairly recently. It was black. The front bore a picture of the face of a man wearing an odd cap or hood with a black stripe down the center. Curvy-blade machetes or short swords with nonstudded knucklebow guards were crossed behind his head. Above it was the word “Raiders.” Around the whole was a sort of shield.
She stuck the cap on her head. She had miles of open desert to walk. It would be good to have something to keep the sun out of her eyes.
Her biscuits had burned on the bottom. Indifferently, she flipped them over. She finished cooking the biscuits and put them and the hash on the counter, still in their respective pans. What she was making looked as if it would have been enough for all three, in fact, but she had planned to eat it all herself and still did. She was a tall, muscular, extremely active woman who generally had a hearty appetite. And even if she didn’t have much appetite this night—and doubted she ever would again, beyond sheer pangs of hunger—it had been a calculated decision to fix herself a large and proper meal. Her vengeance trail stretched long and hard before her. She would need every ounce of strength she could muster to see it through to the end.
She seated herself gingerly on the stool. The red-ant bites no longer throbbed with that weird, expansive intensity such acid-laden bites left in their wake, but the wounds still felt raw, and the muscles of her groin and thigh ached from the venom’s aftereffects. Ben’s cooling corpse was softer than the floor, so Krysty rested her boots on him while she ate.
As she ate, she thought about what she had learned and what it meant to her quest.
A train! she thought wonderingly. She’d seen the tracks her whole life without thinking much of them—just another artifact from the strange lost days before skydark. A track even ran right behind the abandoned diner and gas station and she had never even taken note of it, except as a terrain feature, and the fact that the endless miniature ridge on which it was laid offered potential cover and concealment. It was just part of the landscape. She had never really thought somebody might be able to use the rails to travel any particular distance. Sure, she’d heard the legends of wild tribes of folk who actually traveled the lines on marvelous wags, paying no mind to the world to either side of the narrow right of way, and of course discounted them as legend.
And here was this General with his giant train, armored and fusion-powered, trying to reconquer America—and killing her man and kidnapping her friends to do it.
She shook her head. Her locks writhed sympathetically around her shoulders. Matt and Ben were right about one thing: he was a crazy old nukesucker.
That datum was of limited use: pretty much all barons were crazy, and she also concurred he was no different from most. Just more mobile.
The real problem from her viewpoint was that mobility. She had been correct in her surmise that the wags of the raiders who had hit them—was it only that day?—were returning to a nearby base. But that base wouldn’t stay put. And she couldn’t hope to pace a train on foot.
But the train called MAGOG was stopped now, the deserters said. That was why they had scooped up the hapless travelers, and carefully picked only the ones who looked fit for physical labor. They couldn’t go anywhere until they fixed a break in the line.
She wished she’d been able to string them along longer, pump even more information out of them. Oh, well. If wishes were wings, she’d be circling over the train right this instant, scoping things out like a falcon looking to stoop down and score.
There’d been no way. Young Matt had been just about to lose it and go for the cheese right then and there. And Krysty wouldn’t submit to that, vengeance or no vengeance.
An owl hooted somewhere out in the night, beyond the busted-out front window. The wind had come up again, temporarily scouring out the stale death smell and replacing it, temporarily, with the astringent odors of dust and dry vegetation. She finished her meal without having tasted a scrap of it, and set down her fork.
She would find the train and do what she had to do. If the train was gone, mebbe the marauders would have left some wags behind. If not…
She shrugged. She could come up with possible bad outcomes from now until dawn, from now until she died of old age, for that matter. Not one of them would make her road any shorter or easier to walk.
She sighed, stood, wiped the soles of her boots carefully on an unbloodied area of Ben’s blouse to make sure the soles weren’t wet and slick from blood. She was going to have to drag the corpses outside. They were going to draw scavengers from miles around. She couldn’t lock the diner, with the windows gone and all, but there was no point inviting hungry predators inside.
If the chase went on long, she’d need all the barter goods she could find. Krysty knelt and began to rifle through Ben’s effects for items of value.
Chapter Four
“Ah,” the General said in satisfaction, leaning back in a red plush chair and sipping from a goblet of brandy. “It’s definitely a rare treat to encounter a man of your culture out here in the wasteland, Doctor Tanner.”
Doc started to reply around a mouthful of apple and cinnamon omelet and toast that he would have found ambrosial had it been served to him back in his very own long-lost house in nineteenth-century Vermont by the beloved and equally lost hand of his wife Emily. Instead it had been dished out by the hand of a solemn stone-faced servant from a brass chafing dish heated by a little cup of clear, odorless, smokeless burning fuel.
Realizing that standard Deathlands etiquette would hardly answer these circumstances, Doc hurriedly finished chewing and swallowed, not without regret for the unseemly haste. Covering his mouth, just for security’s sake, by pretending to dab it clean with a spotless white-linen napkin, he nodded and replied. “I might say the same, General. I might well indeed.”
They sat in oak-paneled and comfort-conditioned splendor, two men of knowledge at ease with one each other and their world, taking their breakfast and engaging in the art of conversation. Even for a man of Theophilus Tanner’s unique experience, it was one of the most—what was that eminently useful modern word?—surreal moments of them all.
The General—that was how he had been introduced and the only way Doc had heard him spoken of—was a short burly man with buzzed grizzled hair and features that might have been carved from granite by a skilled but hasty sculptor. Even taking his ease with an apparent act of will, the enormous vigor that animated him was evident. He was a man made for action. Right now he wore a maroon robe over white pajamas with blue pinstripes. On the right breast of the robe was sewn a patch showing a fierce eagle clutching lightning bolts and weapons, with a stars-and-stripes shield over its own breast. Above it arced the legend Mobile Anti-Guerrilla Operations Group. Below it was embossed the acronym MAGOG.
“I trust you find your accommodations to your liking, Professor,” the General said, allowing his steward, a tall, olive-skinned man in black trousers, white shirt with stand-up collar and bow tie, to replenish his coffee.
“Quite, General.”
He had, in fact. He’d been kept separate from his companions ever since leaving the massacre site by the Grand Canyon. Nor had he seen for sure where they were taken, although he surmised they were bound for a barbed-wire stockade with some tents pitched inside that had been erected near the work site. He hoped they were well, and not terribly mistreated. He wasn’t overly concerned. Obviously their captors wanted them alive rather than dead, and to judge by past performance, it would be but a matter of time before one of them, most likely the ever-so-resourceful John Barrymore Dix, figured out a way to spring them all.
His captor had introduced himself as Marc Anthony Helton, Captain, Provisional U.S. Army. He was a very polite and well-spoken young man, despite his regrettable propensity for casual mass murder. He was fascinated by Doc, and grilled him about who he was, where he’d come from, and what experiences he had had. Tanner had cloaked his responses in sufficient vagueness to avoid giving away any significant information without convincing the young officer that he was too far gone mentally speaking to be of real interest to the General.
At least, he hoped he had.
On arrival, young Captain Helton had taken cordial leave of him. Soldiers had hustled Doc onto the train straightaway. There, he was brusquely ordered to strip and sent into a bank of showerheads to cleanse himself under a guard’s watchful eye. He would never believe a mere shower could equal the sybaritic luxury of a tub of steaming water, and candidly, he was the most inclined of their brave little band to be careless in matters hygienic, but the hot gushing water and the sense of cleanliness it produced were alike bliss-producing.
Once dried, he had been given a rough and rather itchy set of garments of the depressing greenish shade favored by the U.S. Army of the twentieth century. After he put them on he had been marched to another car and locked into a small passenger compartment. Ironically, he had been allowed to keep his cane, although naturally, his bulky LeMat cap-and-ball revolver had been appropriated.
Indeed, the General just upon the instant picked up the pistol and began to examine it with keen interest, turning it over and over in his hard, scarred hands.
In his compartment, which he had to himself, Doc had been served a better-than-adequate meal. Surprisingly, it had been a stew of game—rabbit and deer at the very least, with a possible hint of quail—along with carrots and potatoes and seasoned with sage. All seemed quite fresh, and the bread rolls that came with it were palpably hot from the oven. The butter tasted real. Doc hoped his friends were well fed and housed.
The bench unfolded into a bed, which was the most comfortable he’d known in many a moon. He slept soundly, and blessedly without dreaming, until a peremptory knock had awakened him, and his clothes—cleaned and pressed, by the gods—had been thrust upon him.
Now he sat in a kind of sitting room in the General’s personal car, eating another splendid meal and drinking coffee—freeze-dried, regrettably—while the General peered down the LeMat’s barrel, the long .44-caliber main barrel, and the auxiliary 12-gauge barrel in front of the cylinder. In tribute to Doc’s vast storehouse of knowledge, the General addressed him as “Professor.”
“A remarkable weapon, Professor,” the General remarked, setting the big pistol down on a table beside his red-plush chair. “But isn’t it kind of an eccentric choice?”
Doc gave a debonair wave of his coffee cup, pinky extended. “One who knows the proper formula, and, more important, the proper technique, it’s all in the caking—for manufacturing black gunpowder, as I do, can produce it far more simply, from much more readily available materials, than any more modern smokeless propellants.”
“Ah, but it still requires percussion caps to ignite the powder, doesn’t it? My whitecoats tell me they need to be filled with high explosives that are unstable and fairly dangerous to handle—not to mention the chemistry’s a bit more involved than mixing saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal.”
Doc shrugged. “I see that I am caught out. Your Excellency is not the first to observe that I am, indeed, an eccentric.”
The General held up a hand. “No need to call me anything that fancy. I’m a pretty down-to-earth guy. ‘General’ or ‘sir” will do just fine.”
Doc nodded and sipped. My, what fine manners he had for a murderer, he thought.
Since joining Ryan and the rest, Doc had become a far different man from the one who had capered and spouted half-remembered snatches of poetry for the delectation of the unspeakable Jordan Teague and Strasser, his brute of a sec chief. His spine, for example, had recovered a remarkable degree of rigidity, although his grip on sanity was still not of the firmest, sadly. But he still knew how to show a pleasing face to power, and didn’t scruple to do so at need. Besides, for all the shockingly direct evidence Doc had of at least some of the General’s crimes, next to the likes of Teague he was an innocent babe.
As a matter of fact, the General’s manners were pretty good for a Deathlands murderer.
“I must admit that coming upon a man of your obvious culture and erudition, in the midst of this barbaric waste, is lots like finding a pearl in a midden heap,” the General remarked.
Doc tried to stifle a wince. Owing to a saw that was old when he was young, he associated pearls with swine, and swine… He shook himself delicately. The memories didn’t bear touching upon, however lightly. Especially since Cort Strasser had already been called to mind.
“The General is too kind,” he said. He pushed his plate away; his appetite had vanished. “And since you are a man who clearly appreciates quality when he encounters it, I feel it is incumbent upon me to point out a valuable resource that your subordinates are running a shocking risk of simply throwing away.”
The General leaned forward with an eagerness that surprised Doc, and a hunger in his gray eyes that shocked the other man. Obviously he’d probed a nerve, he thought.
He nodded and forged ahead. “Certain of my associates, who were…detained along with myself, are men and women of remarkable attributes. To employ them as mere manual laborers constitutes a shocking waste of valuable resources, and a truly unforgivable oversight on the part of your subordinates, I fear.”
Slowly the General leaned back. Doc watched the tautness in his face sag into disappointment, and anger flare in his eyes. He braced himself for doom.
The General looked aside for a moment, scowling. When he turned back to Doc his expression was returning to neutrality.
“Very well, Professor,” he said, “tell me more.”
“NUKEBLAST IT!” the guard howled as Jak sank sharp teeth into his wrist. He battered the youth’s head and shoulders with his free hand. Jak hung on, as tenacious as a weasel. “Leggo, you rad-sucking son of a mutie gutter slut!”
Taking advantage of the distraction to lean on his shovel as he watched, J.B. shook his head.
Another guard came running up and swatted Jak in the head with the butt of his M-16. Whatever its merits as a longblaster, the M-16 was reputed to have been made originally by a toy company. In any event it didn’t weigh much, having been designed not to, and its butt was mostly nylon. It was a piss-poor piece to buttstroke a body with. Without so much as flinching, Jak back-kicked the guard in the balls. The man sat down hard on a red-ant hill, then rolled onto his side, moaning and clutching himself.
Guards converged. Along with the blasters, the soldiers overseeing the work gang carried truncheons, some actual scavenged PR-25 side-handle batons, others simply sawed out of either table legs or baseball bats—J.B. couldn’t tell which. They rained blows upon Jak’s head and shoulders until he let go and fell to the ground, grinning at them with a mouth red with blood that wasn’t his. Then they commenced to stomp him.
J.B. sighed. The boy clearly had some hard lessons to learn about when to kick back and when to just bow your head and take what was coming and bide your time. But he couldn’t just stand by and watch his longtime comrade-in-arms get kicked to death. He was going to have to do something, which likely meant his getting stomped, as well.
He was just shifting his grip on his shovel when the situation escalated. A young and probably fresh-minted sec man ran up and shouldered his M-16. As serious as a multiple stomping was, it was nothing to being in the way of a sleet of nasty jacketed 5.56 mm bullets. And the new arrival seemed blissfully unaware that no matter what angle he chose there was no way to shoot the miscreant without ventilating three or four of his buddies as well.
“That’s enough! Stand down there, you men.” Banner’s voice was like the roar of an enraged gravel crusher as he strode toward the altercation.
The guards fell back from the prostrate Jak. The boy with the M-16 stiffened like a dog pointing the grouse. His finger tightened on the trigger.
“Bledsoe! If you don’t lower that piece right now, I’ll ram it so far up your ass you’ll be looking at the front sight cross-eyed. Do I make myself clear, you polyp on a mutant salamander’s asshole?”
The newby hastily lowered the rifle and snapped to. J.B. nodded in appreciation of the sec man’s unexpected eloquence. An asshole Banner might be, but an asshole with style.
The others fell back from Jak’s well-trampled form. The youth had been lying in a fetal curl, with his face hugged into his knees, protecting himself as well as he could. He rolled to his belly, got to hands and knees and shook his head.
The guard whose wrist he had bloodied pulled out a Beretta and aimed it at Jak’s head.
“Moredock, what’s wrong with you?” Banner shouted. “Secure that weapon.”
“But, Sarge, we gotta make an example—”
“Now.”
Moredock holstered his blaster. It took him only three tries.
“What we ‘gotta do,’ skunk ape, is get the damned railbed built up again so we can lay new rails before we all die of old age. We can’t go shooting our whole labor force just because you’re too fuckwitted to keep order. Unless you want to take his place swinging a pick, Corporal?”
Moredock hit a brace. “Sir, no sir!”
“Pick him up.”
A couple of the guards who had been thundering on Jak now dragged him to his feet by his biceps. One red eye was puffing shut, but aside from a thin trickle out of his left nostril, the blood on his face still wasn’t his own.
“Ah, the albino.” Banner nodded. “You were with the bunch I helped scoop up yesterday. You listen to me, boy. We need you to do a job of work. But don’t get the idea we can’t fix the track without you. Act up again and I’ll stomp your brains out your nose myself.”
The sergeant glared around at the onlookers, guards and captives alike. “Don’t you all have things to do?” Everyone turned away, suddenly eager to be doing those things.
With dark looks, the guards let Jak go and backed away warily. He stood panting like a winded dog, still grinning defiance.
J.B. scooped up a shovelful of earth and walked over to Jak, to look as if he intended doing something useful with it. Then he dumped the dirt and grounded the tool again.
“That’s no way to do it, Jak,” he said. “That’s way too hard a road to see to the end. Take an old man’s word for it.”
Jak shook his head so that his snowy mane flew wildly, then hawked and spit a blood loogie in the sand. “Kill sergeant.”
“If you live long enough. Keep up the way you been, though, you’ll be staring at the sky when the stars come out.”
Anger flared like a lasing ruby in Jak’s eyes.
“All right, party time’s over!” a guard yelled at them. “Get back to work.”
Jak turned away. J.B. moved on to join other laborers shoveling dirt into barrows.
Some time later Mildred approached. Across her shoulders she carried a pole with a water bucket at either end. She knelt and set down the buckets, then stood back as the thirsty laborers crowded around to ladle up water.
She looked angry. J.B. reckoned he knew why.
“Don’t none of us like it, Millie,” he said quietly, “but the one thing it ain’t is personal.”
She glared at him, then shook her head. “Yeah, I know. Slavery’s an equal-employment opportunity these days. But that wasn’t how I was raised.”
She looked around. There was still water, and the workers were still jostling one another to drink.
“Bastards almost killed Jak,” she said. “I wish I could look at him.”
“Boy’s tough. Knows how to handle himself, too. I don’t reckon they hurt him much.”
“We’ve got to get away from this madness.”
He nodded. “Looks like they’ll finish their repairs here in two, three more days. What do you think they’ll do with all us civilian laborers then?”
“We can’t leave Doc.”
“That’s the angle I haven’t figured yet. Give me time—unless you got any ideas?”
She shook her head. “Well, then we need to spring the Doc, blow out of here, and double back to find Krysty.”
“That poor child. I can’t imagine how she must be feeling—”
“Hey! You! Get back to work, you lazy bastards.” Moredock was striding toward the knot gathered around the water buckets, a fresh white bandage on his wrist and blood in his eye.
Then he dropped to his knees. A wondering expression came over his face. He opened his mouth and burped blood. It ran down his chin in a torrent. He fell onto his face as a gunshot echoed off the railway embankment.
The desert bloomed with howling coldhearts.
Chapter Five
It wasn’t a good plan.
Chato might not know anything about strategy and tactics, but he was glumly convinced his plan sucked anyway.
The plan was not to try creepy-crawling the giant rail wag in the dark. Oh, no. It was bristling with weapons: machine guns in turrets, gren launchers, rockets—who knew what? And it had sensors, sirens and searchlights.
Chato may have been clueless when it came to strategy and tactics, but he did know the basics of breaking and entering. He and all his coldhearts had zilch for a chance of sneaking in undetected and making off with any worthwhile loot.
What he had sold the others on, if not himself, was this: it was by night that the soldiers expected to be attacked. By night they hunkered down inside their giant invincible armored wail wag and just waited for somebody to be stupe enough to try them on. Even the captives in their compound—and whoever was stuck in the majority of the train’s cars that weren’t armor-plated—were protected by the monster’s sensor envelope and its truly stupendous firepower. Chato’s bandits could fire up the tents and the soft-skinned wags, but that wouldn’t bring them jack. What would be the point?
No. The coldhearts were intent on stealing shit. Torture, murder, rape—who didn’t like that? But it was merely sugar. Plunder paid.
And while the lost travelers’ caravan had represented a pretty piddly haul, all things taken with all, the armored train held treasure beyond the coldhearts’ wildest dreams.
So the coldhearts would attack by high, wide daylight. That was when the greatest number of sec men would be outside their protective metal shell, spread out and vulnerable. The heavy weapons mounted on the train would be reluctant to fire and risk killing their own, or even the slaves they needed to fix their steel highway. And mebbe the slaves would take the attackers for liberators, and rise up against their captors. Or at least bolt in panic, and one way or another cause a hell of a mess. Under cover of which the raiders could get in at the train, overpower the defenders, and give themselves over to the customary orgy of rape, slaughter and, of course, pillaging.
Chato’s followers had bought it, anyway. Especially when it was presented with all the power of his magic gift for talking people into things. Which was what got him into this mess in the first place. But he had no choice now. It was go forward or die.
They’d catch him if he ran.
ONE OF IRONHEAD JOHNSON’S mountain men fired the opening round, the one that chilled Moredock, from a scoped and heavy barreled Remington 700. He lay on his belly on a low hogsback five hundred yards south of the train, and used his possibles bag for a rest. Johnson’s men were probably the most formidable fighters, man for man, of all the coldheart army. Johnson himself had disposed of the three-man observation post dug in on the rise, using his trademark foot-and-a-half-long, double-edged Arkansas toothpick.
At this point the track ran east and west straight as a laser beam. A road, its pavement still largely intact, but serving now mainly as a super-durable bed for layers of drifted sun-baked mud, ran along the south side of the embankment. The compound where the slave-laborers were sheltered under canvas was south of the road and the giant, gleaming, fusion-powered engine, to allow trucks to trundle back and forth carrying supplies from freight cars well back in the train.
From the east appeared a small fleet of dune buggies and wags, filled with young men waving longblasters. These were the Wild Boys, a local crew of coldhearts commanded by Wild Wess Wilhelm.
An arroyo cut from six to ten feet deep, with steep walls that had fallen in places because of rare but intensely savage downpours, ran at a diagonal south of the road, passing about two hundred yards from the slave stockade. From it now erupted most of the rest of Chato’s misfit army: El Gancho’s pistoleros from northern Mex, mounted on horseback.
Hogan’s contingent of fifteen outlaw bikers on lowslung, snarling sleds. No dirt bikes, to say the least, the heavy motorcycles had been wheeled by hand along the soft sand of the arroyo bottom, to a place where a cave-in provided a natural ramp. Small in numbers, his band was unsurpassed in cruelty.
Most of Red Wolf’s band of Plains Indian cutthroats had ridden off in a huff after their leader’s demise. However, staunch individualists that they were, seven or eight had remained and now joined the charge on their painted ponies.
And finally, twenty or so random chillers, who had drifted into the army at large, but not yet into any kind of affinity group. These loose ends had been sent off with the main body under the command of Bug Eye Mueller, who was suspected by many of being a mutie because of his unfortunately protuberant eyeballs, but who was so mean nobody ever so much as mentioned it.
The throat and purse-slitters of El Abogado, snoop and poop specialists all, formed no part of the attack. They had their own assignment.
And finally, Chato himself sat nervously on his paint pony atop a hill well to the south, leading from the rear where he could keep a good eye on the proceedings as was appropriate to a coldheart warlord of his stature. Or so he’d told his faithful followers.
No, it wasn’t a good plan. But it was shitloads better than admitting he’d drawn a blank, and having his coldheart followers decide to see what his insides looked like, preparatory to picking out a new leader.
“DOWN! Everybody get down!”
J.B. had already followed his own advice, and was speed-crawling toward the fallen corporal on leather-jacket clad elbows. Mildred, as seasoned a combat veteran as any, had also hit the dirt before the shot finished echoing.
Pretty much everybody else, guards and captives alike, was standing around, completely clueless to what was going down—even as two more guards were nailed by snipers.
However, not even the slowest or most stunned of wits could long mistake about 150 coldhearts, armed to the eyeballs and howling for blood, charging at them on horses, outlandishly modified motorcycles, and their own hind legs. The soldiers on guard, well-trained by Deathlands standards—meaning they had some—unslung their blasters, took up firing positions and started shooting.
So did the crews manning the heavy weapons mounted in casements and pop-up turrets on the armored wags of the train. MAGOG was like a weird monster millipede: its first ten or so segments were armor-plated, as were the very last two wags, a second engine and a gun-bristling caboose. Other armored wags were spaced at intervals among the more conventional freight and passenger wags. As he pulled Moredocks’s Beretta from its flap-covered field holster, the Armorer heard the snarl of 5.56 mm machine guns, the throaty growl of 7.62 mm M-60s and, sweetest of all, the Thor’s-hammer pounding of the .50-caliber Browning M-2. He could feel the muzzle-blasts, beating on the back of his jacket and stinging the exposed back of his neck.
Looking up, he saw the nearest attackers were still 150 yards off. He rifled the stiff for spare mags.
AS PLANS WENT, Chato’s wasn’t really all that bad. Given the resources, it was about as good as might have been come up with.
Of course, it was doomed. He’d been right about that.
For one thing, MAGOG carried more dedicated fighters than Chato had, not to mention another hundred or so support types, cooks and clerks, who could fire a CAR-15 or submachine gun out windows and firing ports about as well as anybody. And neither Chato nor any of his followers had the remotest conception of how much sheer firepower MAGOG mounted.
Two could play the sharpshooting game, for instance. There were four dedicated antisniper turrets, each containing a shooter behind a Barrett Light Fifty sniper rifle and a separate spotter, each using mounted optics far superior to what Ironhead Johnson and his boys had. As Johnson realized, peering at the train through ancient but excellent Zeiss binocs for the few short heartbeats before his head turned into pink mist. Not even iron was proof against a 709-grain jacketed slug traveling about four times the speed of sound, it turned out.
Nor had the coldhearts grasped the fact the General had dozens of machine guns of various calibers at his command. And here came the first serious hitch in the plan: however reluctant the rail wag soldiers may have been about firing up their own buddies, much less the laborers, many of their machine guns were mounted on top of the train, where they could fire right over the heads of guards and prisoners alike.
Then there were the automatic grenade launchers, and the 82 mm mortars that quickly began to chug and cause big gouts of earth and assorted body parts to spout up out of the desert.
And Wild Wess Wilhelm received the surprise of his life—and death, as it happened—when a rack popped out the top of the train’s engine. He didn’t see it, because it was infrared and invisible to the unaided eye, the laser-designation spot painted right on the pearly third snap-button of his shirt as he rode standing up behind the roll bar of his Baja buggy. He did see the puff of white smoke as the Hellfire antitank guided missile came off the rack, however.
He had time to shout a hysterical command to his driver, who was already yanking the wheel hard right in a turn, which would have rolled the buggy and spilled them all out to their deaths or at least painful and crippling injury. The huge missile, however, struck the lower edge of the roll bar before the tires had even broken loose in a skid. A jet of copper from the shaped-charge warhead, so incandescent hot it was almost plasma, simply vaporized young Wilhelm’s midsection and right shoulder and about half the head of the driver. Then the speeding wag began to roll broadside, but now as a ball of fire, trailing blazing fuel and a giant caterpillar of black smoke. Another buggy lost it, veered from the road and took off end for end trying to avoid the blazing wreck, scattering its occupants in every direction. And then the machine guns began raking the wags that were attacking along the road.
The second serious problem with Chato’s plan now appeared: the expectation that the slaves would either flee in panic, disrupting the defenders, or better still actually begin to fight with their guards. But few of the captives had grown up in what anybody would call sheltered circumstances; life really was tough all over. As for regarding the attackers as liberators, trust of scruffy wild-acting guys with blasters wasn’t deeply engrained in the contemporary psyche. After all, however badly the soldiers had treated and were treating their slaves, it was the coldhearts who were shooting at them.
Of course, there are always a few who don’t get the message. Ten or fifteen captives did try bolting and got ripped to wet red rags, some with fingertips scraped bloody from trying to claw their way up the steep railway embankment. Most of the slaves had too much sense to try to outrun the bullets cracking past their ears, and instead just dropped flat against the ground.
Doomed, but not entirely futile. The attackers boiling out of the arroyo had appeared suddenly and were fairly close at hand. A lot of the slower ones got minced and mulched by the horizontal lead storm. Others went to their bellies and opened vigorous, if not particularly accurate, fire.
The rest quickly got under the heavy weapons’ arcs of fire, so close the blasters mounted atop the train couldn’t depress any farther to track them. It was one of the few true cracks in mighty MAGOG’s defenses. And eighty or ninety armed and angry coldhearts were pouring through it.
Crawling with less alacrity than J.B., Mildred had reached the body of a soldier downed in the first ragged volley of sniper fire. With MAGOG’s blasters thundering overhead and shutting out the screams of the injured, she pulled free his M-16. She assumed a classic prone firing position, her body at forty-five degrees to the target, behind the stiff, using him as cover and a rest. She was a devoted pistol shooter—an Olympic competitor, in fact—but she could shoot a longblaster with a high degree of accuracy.
Clicking the selector to single shot, she began to take out targets. She aimed at the coldhearts she deemed most threatening—the ones who seemed to be shooting most effectively themselves. At almost every shot, a bandit dropped.
J.B. had taken cover behind the late Corporal Moredock and was firing aimed singles from the Beretta with a two-handed grip. Thirty yards away from his friends, Jak had scooped up two M-16s from downed guards, one gazing sightlessly at the sky, the other rolling around shrieking and clutching a shattered shin, out of the fight. Not a great marksman, he was firing both at once.
From the hip.
Normally there was no craftier fighter than the albino youth from the bayou. Not now. All the fury that had been building within him since he had watched his friend and revered leader fall into the Grand Canyon the day before boiled up within him and out his mouth in an unending scream of fury, and out the muzzles of the M-16s in uninterrupted streams of lead.
One of Red Wolf’s hawk-faced Plains chillers, riding a buckskin, charged Jak with a feathered lance. Jak stood his ground and blasted the mount with both rifles. The horse screamed in mortal agony as it reared, fountaining blood from a dozen holes, and fell over backward, trapping its rider’s leg and crushing his pelvis and the lowest three vertebrae of his spine. As he howled in his own death agony, a second Plains rider charged, raising a war club with a cast-iron ball for a head. He was already too close to take down with the M-16s’ lightweight bullets.
Having spent some time on his own ranch in New Mexico, Jak knew a thing or two about horses. Specifically, that a horse wouldn’t run over anything it thought could trip it. He knelt and ducked his head, making an X of the two longblasters before his face. The horse, disregarding its rider’s intentions, launched himself and jumped clean over the white-haired boy, who was dropping and rolling to his right even as the great shadow passed over him. From his back he emptied both magazines into the bare back of the rider. Uninjured, the horse ran on, eyes rolling, foam flecks flying from its nostrils.
A biker roared toward J.B., firing an Uzi over his T-bar handlebars. He didn’t hit anything, the way his ride was jouncing all over the place. More concerned with the imprint the front tire would make on his forehead, J.B. recoiled by reflex to a sitting position, firing the Beretta as fast as it would cycle. He wasn’t just spraying and praying. The biker went over the back of his postage-stamp-sized seat with the Uzi still blazing.
For another heart-stopping instant the heavy bike charged on. J.B.’s eyes got wide behind his glasses and he cocked himself for a wild spring to the side. The outlaw sled wobbled, toppled and slid toward him broadside, raising a big bow-wave of khaki earth and dried weeds. J.B. held his hands up before his face.
The bike stopped with its tires spinning inches short of Moredock’s corpse.
J.B. heard a familiar voice cry out. Reflexively he looked toward it—to see Mildred, in a perfect kneeling position, aiming her M-16 right between his eyes.
Chapter Six
Leading four of his bros, Hogan rode his bike back along the road toward the rear of the train. He realized the machine guns couldn’t reach them here. Laughing and shouting in triumph, he was firing away into the passenger cars, their metal skins too thin to stop the bullets from his Ruger Mini-14. He couldn’t tell if he was actually hitting anybody, but it didn’t matter. He was laying some hurt on the monster. It wasn’t invincible after all.
But neither was MAGOG helpless.
The bikers came to an armored wag. Fearing shooters firing out blasters, Hogan stopped busting caps himself, leaned low between his high curved bars and accelerated rapidly.
As a result, he was past the killing zone when a strip of four Claymore mines mounted along the side of the armored car were initiated remotely from within. They went off with a rippling, ear-busting crack that spewed the roadway with about ten thousand steel marbles. The four riders behind Hogan simply disintegrated in shreds of flesh and steel, blood and gasoline, that all instantly began cooking in a hell-stew on the road as the gasoline lit off.
That was enough for Hogan. He was braver than most, man or mutie, but he knew when his match had been met. He kept the throttle cranked and went rocketing along the rest of the train, past the armored wags at its tail, relying on speed and surprise to keep him untouched by the sprays of bullets and 40 mm grenades that hosed out after him, until he vanished safely through the smoke from two downed wags, all blazing away on the road barbecuing their occupants who hadn’t been lucky enough to bail, some of whom were still bitching about the fact with wild screams.
Of course, the bullets weren’t stopped by the smoke. And MAGOG’s gunners, who had a whole freight car full of them, didn’t stop shooting them blind. But as soon as he was well within the smokescreen—steering around the furnace wrecks by sheer road-weasel instinct—he cranked the bike ride and lit out cross-country, passing quickly between a low rise and getting clean away.
J.B.’S EYES WIDENED again as flame blossomed in four yellow petals from the flash suppressor of Mildred’s M-16. A vicious crack left his left ear hearing nothing but a loud ringing. Hot air stung his cheek like a red ant’s bite.
He turned. A squat man in a filthy grayish sweatshirt and baggy sweat pants loomed over him with a fire ax raised over his head in both hands. He had a weird bowl-shaped haircut and was looking cross-eyed at a small, neat blue hole right through the bridge of his nose. He collapsed at the tip of the Armorer’s boot, the back of his head missing.
J.B. blew out a long breath, then threw himself down behind Moredock again to take stock of the tactical situation.
Shots were still cracking in both directions. The heavy weapons still split the sky overhead. They mostly seemed to be working the far ridgeline, trying to hose off any snipers the Barrett gunners had missed. But nobody was charging.
J.B. grinned at Mildred and gave her the thumbs-up. She grinned and bobbed her head back. He dropped the empty mag out of the Beretta’s well, stuffed in one of the extras he’d gotten from the corporal, then shoved the weapon down inside the back of his waistband. He scuttled around Moredock and the bike that had almost run him over, to snag the machine pistol its rider had no further use for. J.B. had a particularly soft spot for that particular piece of Israeli ironwork, overly heavy as it was and shit-for-blowback besides. It was reliable, and it got the job done; he frequently carried one. He was pleased to find three full—he hoped; no time to count rounds now—magazines stuffed in the pockets of the coldheart’s vest.
“Jak,” he shouted, looking around through the smoke and dust that hung in the air. There was a breeze, as always, but the embankment and the train caused it to eddy right here and do a piss-poor job of clearing the air. “Jak, are you all right?”
“Fine.” The Armorer saw the youth staggering toward him through the smoke, holding a trench knife with a spiked knuckle-duster handguard in one hand and a baseball bat studded with cut-off nails in the other. He looked as if he’d bathed in blood, then rolled around in the dust to dry it off. Which was probably about what happened. It made him look even more menacingly unearthly than usual.
“Find a blaster and follow me,” J.B. called. “You, too, Millie.”
“Got him covered, John. Catch, Jak.” She tossed him a Marlin lever-action carbine with brass brads pounded decoratively into it, outlining the stock and foregrip. He dropped the bat and caught it deftly.
He led them up the railway embankment, which, while steep, was climbable. Bullets kicked up little spouts of dust near them, none near enough to pay attention to.
Once at the top he went to his belly and rolled right under the train. Mildred and Jak goggled. They looked at each other, shrugged and followed his example.
ROCKING IN HIS PLUSH CHAIR out of fear for his friends he couldn’t quite suppress, Doc watched the battle unfold on a bank of monitors mounted in the command center in the car just behind MAGOG’s engine. Escorted by a pair of guards armed with MP-5 machine pistols in pristine condition, the General had led him forward through a flexible armored gangway that connected his personal car to the headquarters wag. They had then sat in climate-conditioned comfort, sipped sherry and watched the ultimate in reality TV.
Guilt panged him at sitting there in safety while his friends risked their lives. He wasn’t the greatest asset in a fight, he knew, but he held his own and longed at least to share their peril. But there was nothing he could do.
As with the General’s quarters, the soundproofing was almost perfect. He could hear nothing of the shooting outside, much less the shouts of rage and screams of mortal anguish. He could sense the vibrations of the heavy guns firing outward from the train, weird harmonics weaving subsonic melodies he felt in his bones rather than heard. One sound unnervingly not blocked out was the irregular thunk, thinkthunk, like hail on a rooftop, of bullets striking the armored shell right by their heads and bodies.
“Don’t worry,” the General had said, when Doc’s head had jerked away reflexively from the sound of an early impact. “Nothing’ll get through this baby. And the walls won’t spall, even from point-blank hits from a 30 mm chain gun.” Doc wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded duly impressive.
Doc had been far more impressed by the volcanic outpouring of fire from the train. He was also impressed by how surprisingly ineffective it was, comparatively speaking. To be sure, he could see scores of bodies, or sizable chunks of them, strewed across acres of desert. But that kind of outgoing firepower should’ve scoured the land, not just of all life, but everything, right down to bedrock. Or so it seemed to him.
Still, the carnage had been quite exemplary. He had to admit that. He hoped he hadn’t turned too green.
Something beyond worry and incipient nausea began to bother him as the volume of fire began to diminish.
“If I may be so bold as to speak, General—”
“Go ahead.”
“I notice that all our attention is being drawn to the south side of the train.”
The General nodded crisply. “I was just noticing the same thing. You’ve an acute military eye along with your other accomplishments, Professor.”
He uttered orders. His words broke off crisply and decisively without being barked or snapped, and men obeyed them, it seemed, because it never occurred to them that they might not. Whatever else one could say about the man, he had a gift of command, which Doc couldn’t help but admire.
The techs pressed keys and the views on the monitors rearranged themselves, so that the largest ones showed what the hardpoint-mounted cameras on the train’s north side showed. Even as they did so, the hailstorm thumping suddenly began to sound from that side of the train.
The monitors showed muzzle-flashes sparking from the brush hard by that side. Doc could make out forms prone or crouching in concealment. He realized they were too close for the train’s mounted weapons to touch them.
The General grunted. “I should’ve ordered that brush cleared back at least two hundred yards,” he said. “I’m getting lazy in my old age. Still, we can’t clean up the whole Deathlands.”
He smiled. “At least, not until we find the Great Redoubt. Then what won’t we be able to accomplish? It’ll be a great day, Professor, eh? What’s that?”
Apparently some of the cameras were dirigible. An operator had swept one back to look along the side of the train, then panned back out again. He swung the remotely operated camera inward once more to reveal the heads and shoulders of three people, lying on their stomachs firing outward at the coldhearts attacking from north of the line.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “Those are my friends!”
“ESCAPIN’?” Jak asked J.B. as they crouched beneath an armor-shelled wag.
“Not without Doc,” Mildred said quickly.
“Like Millie said,” J.B. agreed.
“Then what?”
“Fighting. Don’t you think it’s a little funny that all the excitement’s been happening on one side of the train?”
Jak looked surprised, bobbed his head.
“What can the three of us do if they’re sneaking up from that direction?” Mildred asked.
“Mebbe keep ‘em from getting onto the rail wag. Mebbe get somebody’s attention, draw us some help. At least keep from getting back-shot, sure.”
“I’ll buy that.” For a moment it looked as if she might say more. After all, the Armorer was talking about helping the people who had murdered Ryan and a lot of helpless women and children, and carried them all off as slaves.
But the MAGOG soldiers held at least some constraints on their behavior, some code of something at least a bit like decency, which was more than the attackers had.
She popped the mag from her M-16, made sure it was loaded, then drove it home with the heel of her hand. “Let’s do it.”
EL ABOGADO’S creepy-crawling artists had been sent, indeed, to creepy-crawl the train. With the major assault attracting everyone’s attention everywhere except to the north, it was hoped that would give them some opening to slip inside the train proper. And once within that impregnable metal shell, who knew what they might be able to accomplish?
Fearing, correctly, that the great rail wag had automatic sensors that might detect their approach whether or not any human was looking for them, the would-be infiltrators had been ultracautious. It worked, in that they approached within sprinting distance of the train without detection. It didn’t, because their approach had taken longer than planned. The main assault had already petered out, allowing defenders to think about something other than immediate survival.
J.B., Mildred and Jak had spread out and crawled forward on their bellies just far enough to bring their blasters to bear on the scrub north of the track. The Armorer and Mildred both had M-16s. J.B. had passed Jak the Uzi. Since Jak was an indifferent shot, it made sense for him to have the least accurate blaster.
Marksman or not, Jak’s predator’s eyes spotted movement behind a creosote bush. He splashed 9 mm bullets at it from the Uzi. He missed. The wiry little outlaw reared up and fired back with a decrepit bolt action .22 rifle. He didn’t come any closer to his mark than Jak had, but Mildred planted a bullet unerringly between his eyes.
Detected, the infiltrators went to ground and opened a brisk but wild fire at the trio. The friends fired back, killing two and tagging at least three more.
Then shots cracked out to the left and right of them along the north side of the train. Soldiers were crawling beneath the train and shooting from inside the cars through windows and firing ports. Grens thrown from the top of the train began to burst in the scrub.
By this time, the shooting from the train had almost stopped for lack of targets. The attackers on that side were dead, fled, or hiding. El Abogado’s posse weren’t hang-and-bang fighters by skill or temperament. Sensing that all chance of success was blown, they melted back into the scrub.
A squad of sec men began a fire-and-movement advance into the scrub in pursuit. Several wounded coldhearts were dispatched with bullets behind the ear. The sec men kept moving forward by cover-to-cover rushes, but without much chance of catching any more.
A new voice began barking out orders in a voice not much softer than the crack of a .308. The soldiers at the train redeployed into a semicircle facing the three companions.
Pointing their longblasters at them.
ANOTHER PARTY profoundly impressed by the volume of fire laid down by MAGOG was Chato. The sudden stunning coruscation of really big muzzle-flashes had made his decision for him on a preconscious level. He turned and gave the boot to his pony, and was already below line of sight heading away when the thunderous roar rolled over the hill.
He hadn’t gone half a mile before he rode into a broad shallow wash with a bottom of fine, almost-white sand. At the far side sat a solitary rider: El Abogado in his immaculate frock coat and Panama hat, astride his cream-colored mule with black-tipped ears.
“Where are you going in such a hurry, my friend?” the coldheart asked the fleeing warlord in Spanish.
His life suddenly become a misery, Chato answered truthfully, “Away from this fiasco.”
“Indeed. I believe I shall accompany you.”
“But what of your followers? Do you not seek to avenge them?”
“They’re dicks.”
“Well, do you…do you intend to drag me back in disgrace so that you can take my place?”
El Abogado laughed. “As what? Leader of an even bigger bunch of dicks? Ah, no, my friend. In all the Deathlands, there is no commodity so plentiful as violent fools. It’s as well to be unburdened of this lot, don’t you think?”
Dumbly, Chato found himself nodding.
“What do you want of me?” he asked, still incapable of believing anything but disaster—bloody, painful disaster—impended.
“You are an exemplary sociopath, Chato.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you have yourself a new partner. Such gifts as yours are useful. Shall we ride on? The brighter of our former followers will be fleeing the debacle behind us by now. It would hardly do for them to overtake us, now, would it?”
And so they rode away south together, Chato on his paint pony, El Abogado on his fine mule. As they did, it seemed the weight of the whole world dropped away from Chato’s skinny shoulders.
Chato’s coldheart army was a monster. Sooner or later it would devour him. He had known that from the start. But now—
Now he was free.
He began to smile.
It had been a good plan after all.
Chapter Seven
J.B. carefully laid his black longblaster on the cinders and rose, hands spread and raised. “All right, boys. Everything’s easy. Just stay back off the trigger.”
His two companions did likewise. It wasn’t as if they had much choice.
“I hope we just did the right thing, John,” Mildred murmured from the side of her mouth. Any chance they had of slipping away in the confusion had evaporated.
“All right, you three,” Banner commanded. “Down the embankment. Hands behinds your heads.”
Half crouching, Jak shot the Armorer a questioning glance, as did Mildred. He shrugged, then slowly complied. The other two followed.
“Walk over there by the brush,” Banner said. “Don’t turn around.”
“Now, let’s not get way ahead of ourselves, here, Banner,”J.B. said over his shoulder. “We’re on your side.”
“Penalty for civilians carrying blasters is death.”
“But we fought the coldhearts for you,” Mildred said.
“No exceptions.” The wind blew through an endless pause. “Sorry.”
“Yeah, that makes everything just fine.”
“Won’t die this way,” Jak snarled as they approached the scrub, barely bothering to keep his voice down.
“Me, neither,” the Armorer said. “Slim chance is better’n none. When I count three, scatter like quail, children.”
“Sergeant Banner!” It was another familiar voice. “What’s going on here?”
“Firing party, Captain Helton, sir.” The sergeant sounded disgusted. Whether with the handsome young officer, with himself, or with the situation, J.B. couldn’t tell.
“What are you talking about? These people fought for us.”
“That’s what we’re trying to tell the man,” Mildred called. The three had stopped on the edge of the brush. The chance offered by the captain’s intercession seemed better than that of bolting. And anyway, the Armorer counted fast.
“Regulations, sir,” Banner said.
“That’s absurd!”
“One,” J.B. said under his breath.
“General order number twenty-three,” Banner said. “Prisoners caught in possession of weapons are to be executed immediately. No appeal, no exceptions. General’s a real stickler about that. You know that, sir.”
“Two.”
Helton’s face fell. “Well, if that’s the way it’s got to be…”
J.B. flexed his legs slightly and opened his mouth to say “three.”
Somebody new sang out, “Captain Helton, Sergeant Banner! Orders from the General.”
“Don’t leave us in suspense, Corporal McKie,” Helton said.
“General wants to see these three prisoners in his office at once, sir.”
RYAN CAWDOR OPENED his eye.
Blackness. Hintless of stars. Was he blind?
If he was, it would be the capstone misery of a mighty pyramid of them. His whole body was a pulse of pain timed to the pounding of his heart. His head hurt as if it had been recently used as an anvil. He felt the mixed sensations of clammy heat, nausea, and being somehow unmoored from the world that indicated a fever raged in his body. And beneath it all there lay a vast aching void, a sense—a knowledge—of loss.
He realized, then, that dim light was seeping into the lower edge of his field of vision. He expelled a long breath in relief and rolled his eye down. Dust-colored light, as if it were shining in through a tunnel mouth just out of sight around a curve. He lay on his back with his head propped on something yielding. His body was swaddled in what he guessed for blankets.
He suddenly remembered. Wags appearing out of nowhere. Uniformed coldhearts with blasters. A great flickering muzzle-flash, pale yellow in the sun. A blow like a sledgehammer to the upper chest.
Falling.
“Krysty,” he croaked. His voice was like a gate that hadn’t been opened in a hundred years.
A strange high-pitched chittering sounded in the darkness right by his head, causing him to start. After the fact he realized it had said, “What’s the matter with his eye? He can’t seem to see us.”
“You forget, Light Sleeper,” said a second voice, lower-pitched enough that Ryan understood it in real time. “Real humans don’t see in the dark as we do. Their eyes are so small.”
Real humans. That could mean only one thing—he’d been captured by muties. He remembered his previous brief flirtation with consciousness, as he lay broken on a rock, half-hanging over the maw of the Big Ditch. The small, furtive figures sidling toward him in the twilight, the misshapen hand reaching out for him…
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James Axler
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: As megalomaniac barons and savage anarchy compete to lay claim to post-nuclear America, perseverance and a will to live are what keep Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists roving through the worst and best of a new world. Armed with secrets of pre-Dark tech, they possess what few in Deathlands can imagine: hope for a better tomorrow.Ryan Cawdor is gunned down and left for dead by the new provisional U.S. Army, commanded by a brilliant general with a propensity for casual mass murder and a vision to rebuild America. Waging war from his pre-Dark, fusion-powered armoured locomotive, he′s poised to unlock the secrets of the Gateways–as the rest of Ryan′s group stand powerless. All except one. Hope may be lost for Krysty Wroth. But revenge is enough. In the Deathlands, vengeance is the only justice.