Vengeance Trail. James Axler

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