Vengeance Trail. James Axler

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