Vengeance Trail

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.