Vengeance Trail. James Axler

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