Vengeance Trail

J.B. grinned at Mildred and gave her the thumbs-up. She grinned and bobbed her head back. He dropped the empty mag out of the Beretta’s well, stuffed in one of the extras he’d gotten from the corporal, then shoved the weapon down inside the back of his waistband. He scuttled around Moredock and the bike that had almost run him over, to snag the machine pistol its rider had no further use for. J.B. had a particularly soft spot for that particular piece of Israeli ironwork, overly heavy as it was and shit-for-blowback besides. It was reliable, and it got the job done; he frequently carried one. He was pleased to find three full—he hoped; no time to count rounds now—magazines stuffed in the pockets of the coldheart’s vest.

“Jak,” he shouted, looking around through the smoke and dust that hung in the air. There was a breeze, as always, but the embankment and the train caused it to eddy right here and do a piss-poor job of clearing the air. “Jak, are you all right?”

“Fine.” The Armorer saw the youth staggering toward him through the smoke, holding a trench knife with a spiked knuckle-duster handguard in one hand and a baseball bat studded with cut-off nails in the other. He looked as if he’d bathed in blood, then rolled around in the dust to dry it off. Which was probably about what happened. It made him look even more menacingly unearthly than usual.

“Find a blaster and follow me,” J.B. called. “You, too, Millie.”

“Got him covered, John. Catch, Jak.” She tossed him a Marlin lever-action carbine with brass brads pounded decoratively into it, outlining the stock and foregrip. He dropped the bat and caught it deftly.

He led them up the railway embankment, which, while steep, was climbable. Bullets kicked up little spouts of dust near them, none near enough to pay attention to.

Once at the top he went to his belly and rolled right under the train. Mildred and Jak goggled. They looked at each other, shrugged and followed his example.

ROCKING IN HIS PLUSH CHAIR out of fear for his friends he couldn’t quite suppress, Doc watched the battle unfold on a bank of monitors mounted in the command center in the car just behind MAGOG’s engine. Escorted by a pair of guards armed with MP-5 machine pistols in pristine condition, the General had led him forward through a flexible armored gangway that connected his personal car to the headquarters wag. They had then sat in climate-conditioned comfort, sipped sherry and watched the ultimate in reality TV.

Guilt panged him at sitting there in safety while his friends risked their lives. He wasn’t the greatest asset in a fight, he knew, but he held his own and longed at least to share their peril. But there was nothing he could do.

As with the General’s quarters, the soundproofing was almost perfect. He could hear nothing of the shooting outside, much less the shouts of rage and screams of mortal anguish. He could sense the vibrations of the heavy guns firing outward from the train, weird harmonics weaving subsonic melodies he felt in his bones rather than heard. One sound unnervingly not blocked out was the irregular thunk, thinkthunk, like hail on a rooftop, of bullets striking the armored shell right by their heads and bodies.

“Don’t worry,” the General had said, when Doc’s head had jerked away reflexively from the sound of an early impact. “Nothing’ll get through this baby. And the walls won’t spall, even from point-blank hits from a 30 mm chain gun.” Doc wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded duly impressive.

Doc had been far more impressed by the volcanic outpouring of fire from the train. He was also impressed by how surprisingly ineffective it was, comparatively speaking. To be sure, he could see scores of bodies, or sizable chunks of them, strewed across acres of desert. But that kind of outgoing firepower should’ve scoured the land, not just of all life, but everything, right down to bedrock. Or so it seemed to him.

Still, the carnage had been quite exemplary. He had to admit that. He hoped he hadn’t turned too green.

Something beyond worry and incipient nausea began to bother him as the volume of fire began to diminish.

“If I may be so bold as to speak, General—”

“Go ahead.”

“I notice that all our attention is being drawn to the south side of the train.”

The General nodded crisply. “I was just noticing the same thing. You’ve an acute military eye along with your other accomplishments, Professor.”

He uttered orders. His words broke off crisply and decisively without being barked or snapped, and men obeyed them, it seemed, because it never occurred to them that they might not. Whatever else one could say about the man, he had a gift of command, which Doc couldn’t help but admire.

The techs pressed keys and the views on the monitors rearranged themselves, so that the largest ones showed what the hardpoint-mounted cameras on the train’s north side showed. Even as they did so, the hailstorm thumping suddenly began to sound from that side of the train.

The monitors showed muzzle-flashes sparking from the brush hard by that side. Doc could make out forms prone or crouching in concealment. He realized they were too close for the train’s mounted weapons to touch them.

The General grunted. “I should’ve ordered that brush cleared back at least two hundred yards,” he said. “I’m getting lazy in my old age. Still, we can’t clean up the whole Deathlands.”

He smiled. “At least, not until we find the Great Redoubt. Then what won’t we be able to accomplish? It’ll be a great day, Professor, eh? What’s that?”

Apparently some of the cameras were dirigible. An operator had swept one back to look along the side of the train, then panned back out again. He swung the remotely operated camera inward once more to reveal the heads and shoulders of three people, lying on their stomachs firing outward at the coldhearts attacking from north of the line.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “Those are my friends!”

“ESCAPIN’?” Jak asked J.B. as they crouched beneath an armor-shelled wag.

“Not without Doc,” Mildred said quickly.

“Like Millie said,” J.B. agreed.

“Then what?”

“Fighting. Don’t you think it’s a little funny that all the excitement’s been happening on one side of the train?”

Jak looked surprised, bobbed his head.

“What can the three of us do if they’re sneaking up from that direction?” Mildred asked.

“Mebbe keep ‘em from getting onto the rail wag. Mebbe get somebody’s attention, draw us some help. At least keep from getting back-shot, sure.”

“I’ll buy that.” For a moment it looked as if she might say more. After all, the Armorer was talking about helping the people who had murdered Ryan and a lot of helpless women and children, and carried them all off as slaves.

But the MAGOG soldiers held at least some constraints on their behavior, some code of something at least a bit like decency, which was more than the attackers had.

She popped the mag from her M-16, made sure it was loaded, then drove it home with the heel of her hand. “Let’s do it.”

EL ABOGADO’S creepy-crawling artists had been sent, indeed, to creepy-crawl the train. With the major assault attracting everyone’s attention everywhere except to the north, it was hoped that would give them some opening to slip inside the train proper. And once within that impregnable metal shell, who knew what they might be able to accomplish?

Fearing, correctly, that the great rail wag had automatic sensors that might detect their approach whether or not any human was looking for them, the would-be infiltrators had been ultracautious. It worked, in that they approached within sprinting distance of the train without detection. It didn’t, because their approach had taken longer than planned. The main assault had already petered out, allowing defenders to think about something other than immediate survival.

J.B., Mildred and Jak had spread out and crawled forward on their bellies just far enough to bring their blasters to bear on the scrub north of the track. The Armorer and Mildred both had M-16s. J.B. had passed Jak the Uzi. Since Jak was an indifferent shot, it made sense for him to have the least accurate blaster.

Marksman or not, Jak’s predator’s eyes spotted movement behind a creosote bush. He splashed 9 mm bullets at it from the Uzi. He missed. The wiry little outlaw reared up and fired back with a decrepit bolt action .22 rifle. He didn’t come any closer to his mark than Jak had, but Mildred planted a bullet unerringly between his eyes.

Detected, the infiltrators went to ground and opened a brisk but wild fire at the trio. The friends fired back, killing two and tagging at least three more.

Then shots cracked out to the left and right of them along the north side of the train. Soldiers were crawling beneath the train and shooting from inside the cars through windows and firing ports. Grens thrown from the top of the train began to burst in the scrub.

By this time, the shooting from the train had almost stopped for lack of targets. The attackers on that side were dead, fled, or hiding. El Abogado’s posse weren’t hang-and-bang fighters by skill or temperament. Sensing that all chance of success was blown, they melted back into the scrub.

A squad of sec men began a fire-and-movement advance into the scrub in pursuit. Several wounded coldhearts were dispatched with bullets behind the ear. The sec men kept moving forward by cover-to-cover rushes, but without much chance of catching any more.

A new voice began barking out orders in a voice not much softer than the crack of a .308. The soldiers at the train redeployed into a semicircle facing the three companions.

Pointing their longblasters at them.

ANOTHER PARTY profoundly impressed by the volume of fire laid down by MAGOG was Chato. The sudden stunning coruscation of really big muzzle-flashes had made his decision for him on a preconscious level. He turned and gave the boot to his pony, and was already below line of sight heading away when the thunderous roar rolled over the hill.

He hadn’t gone half a mile before he rode into a broad shallow wash with a bottom of fine, almost-white sand. At the far side sat a solitary rider: El Abogado in his immaculate frock coat and Panama hat, astride his cream-colored mule with black-tipped ears.

“Where are you going in such a hurry, my friend?” the coldheart asked the fleeing warlord in Spanish.

His life suddenly become a misery, Chato answered truthfully, “Away from this fiasco.”