Vengeance Trail. James Axler

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.