Vengeance Trail

He fell from sight, straight into the Big Ditch.

A woman broke shrieking toward the brush with a toddler in her arms. Several longblasters cracked, including at least one on full-auto. Mother and child fell kicking in a whirl of dust and bloodied rags. Their cries subsided into bubbling sobs. Another burst stilled them.

Hidden behind scrub and a rise in the earth around the roots of a mesquite bush, Krysty felt as if she had been frozen into a block of amber like a mosquito Ryan had once shown her in some half-destroyed museum. Her hair, possessed of its own mobility and nerve-endings, flattened to her skull and neck.

Her companions still in the open—J.B., Mildred, Jak and Doc—stood just as still, hands raised. She felt a flash of rage that they hadn’t fought as Ryan had tried to do, but she stifled the thought in the sure knowledge that had they done so they, too, would be staring at the sky right now.

A coldheart stepped down from the cab of wag whose gunner had downed Ryan. Though he wore no insignia he was clearly the man in charge. He was tall, broad-shouldered, long-limbed, slim waisted. His clean-shaved face was as beautiful as a statue’s, smooth and unscarred, the rich warm brown of a light-skinned black man’s. His hair, curly bronzed brown, was cut short on top, though not buzzed. In back it was caught into a long braid at the nape and thrown forward over the right shoulder of the steel breastplate he wore over his camouflage blouse. A well-maintained 9 mm Heckler & Koch blaster rode in a combat holster at his right hip. Command presence radiated from his face and posture, the way the light and heat of the sun radiated from his mirror-polished armor.

He shook his head and sighed. “All right. Let’s get this done. Line them up for inspection.”

The surviving travelers, Krysty’s companions among them, had their hands on their heads, except for mothers with children too small to know what was going on. These kept one hand on the head while the other clasped the youngsters to their skirts. The coldhearts herded them into a line at the edge of the clearing in the scrub near the rim, well away from the canyon itself. It seemed the raiders wanted no part of that long drop.

Other raiders had clambered onto a couple of the travelers’ wags and began pitching out their possessions. These were few and mostly valuable. Some of the travelers had taken a piece or two of furniture with them, but these were the exception. There was plenty of nonperishable stuff left over from the megacull, lots more than there were people to use it. Bulky items like chairs and chests of drawers weren’t worth dragging across the Deathlands unless they had powerful sentimental value. Otherwise the travelers’ wags contained tools, clothes, meds, food, water, even some weapons. All stuff needed for survival in their new homes and, for that matter, on the long and perilous journey to get there. All, with the possible exception of clothing, commanding good value in trade.

The coldhearts didn’t seem to care. They just pitched whatever was on the wags they selected into the dust.

“Some guards you turned out to be,” spit Kurtiz, a young man with shaggy light brown hair and beard prematurely shot with gray, whose front two incisors were missing. It gave his voice a sort of lisp. He was straw boss of the travelers’ train, the man who actually got things done. He was able at his job and generally quiet—until now.

J. B. shrugged. A sec man had already relieved him of his M-4000 shotgun and was searching him for weapons.

“Friend,” the Armorer said, “you can’t argue with a leveled blaster.”

“Can argue,” Jak said with a bitter snarl as a coldheart took his .357 Magnum Colt Python and a collection of throwing knives. “Not win.”

J.B. had sounded casual, but Krysty saw the way a muscle twitched at the hinge of his jaw. She knew then as if she felt it herself the terrible void he had to be feeling, and what it was costing him not to so much as look at the place from which his friend had dropped off the earth. He had been best friend and comrade in arms to Ryan Cawdor for years before either man ever met Krysty Wroth.And even though Krysty was Ryan’s mate and soulbond, it was only because she herself had shared mortal danger and hardship with him that their own kindredship was as close as that between the two blood brothers.

Beside him, Jak vibrated with fury, lips skinned back from his teeth. But he kept his hands knotted in the snow-colored hair at his nape. Doc gazed into nothingness. Mildred was as impassive as a stone statue, but her eyes were bloodshot. Krysty knew that meant she was in the grip of fury every scrap as hard to control as Jak’s.

“The next one who gets chilled,” rasped a short, wide white man wearing a Kevlar coals coop helmet with sergeant’s chevrons painted on the front. His face looked as if it had been cut out of granite with a none-too-deftly wielded geologist’s pick.

The tall handsome sec chief stalked along the line of quaking backs. As he passed some he tapped lightly on shoulders. Those so indicated were yanked from the line by the coldhearts and ramrodded toward a stakebed truck that had earlier been full of raiders. When Kurtiz was chosen, he suddenly shook off the soldiers holding his arms, as if the awful implication of the process had suddenly struck home.

“Nukeblast it, you can’t—” he began.

The crack of a longblaster put a premature period to his exclamation. He dropped as if the long shabby coat he wore were suddenly untenanted. The hole the 5.56 mm bullet had made in his homespun shirt on its way to drill clean through the heart wasn’t visible from where Krysty crouched.

The short sergeant kept his M-16 leveled from his waist. “Next one gives any shit gets bursted in the belly,” he said. His voice was as rough as lava rock, and as hard and cutting.

When he came to the companions, the sec chief selected J. B. and Jak without hesitation, paused at Doc, then passed him by to select Mildred. Mildred seemed to hang back as soldiers grabbed her arms. J.B. caught her eye and shook his head all but imperceptibly.

She bowed her head and went where they took her. In the Deathlands, survival wasn’t optional. The time to go down fighting had passed. There was no fool like a dead one, as Trader used to say.

The ones chosen were fit-looking men and women without children, a few teenaged boys and girls, twenty-two or -three in all. Many still stood shivering despite the warmth of the sun, waiting with their hands on their heads.

As the implication of their being left unselected sank in, they began to cry and plead despite the example made of their trail boss. Then again, it now made little difference, and they knew it.

A stout figure whose repetitively chinned face was flanked by great winging gray side-whiskers stepped forward from the ranks of those not chosen. Sweat poured down in streams from the brim of his battered leather top hat. This was Elliot, called Hizzoner, by himself anyway, self-proclaimed mayor of the travelers’ settlement-to-be. As to what his precise contribution was to the welfare of the train to justify his claims of leadership, his two knuckle-dragging bodyguards, Amos and Bub, discouraged the others from asking impertinent questions.

“Now, just a minute here, boys,” he said, “let’s not be too hasty here. Happens I’m the leader of this here little procession across the wasteland.”

Banner, the sergeant, who happened to be nearby, backhanded him across the face with casually brutal force. The plump self-proclaimed mayor measured his none-too-considerable length in the dust.

“Triple-stupe,” a sec man muttered, prodding the selected captives into the bed of a wag. “Ain’t figgered out what he was don’t mean shit to a tree, now.”

With surprising agility, Elliot rolled to his knees, clasped his hands prayerfully and commenced to plead. “No, you can’t do this! I can help your baron. I’m a man who unnerstands the way of the world!”

The raiders wordlessly began to line up behind the weeping, imploring rejects.

Elliot reached back and grabbed a nine-year-old girl by a bony grubby wrist, dragging her forward. She was clad in a torn smock that was all over stains in shades of yellow and brown.

“Take my little girl—do with her what you will,” he blubbered. “She’ll please you up right. Trained her proper, myself!”

One of the mothers of the other children spoke up. “They’re gonna take what they want anyway, Elliot, you damn fool,” she said bitterly. “They got the blasters. Now stop your sniveling and die like a man!”

“Wait! Amos, Bub! Help me! Ya gotta!”

His two heavyweight henchmen evaded his eyes as they took their places in the wags. Banner cuffed the politician on the side of his head. “Back in line, asshole. Make this messy for us, we shoot you in the belly and just leave you.”

“‘’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves…’” Doc began to recite loudly as the weeping would-be mayor crawled back into line. His eyes, aged beyond his years as much by the horrors of being snatched from his family and hurled through time as by the desperate sights they had witnessed in the Deathlands, had lost all hint of focus.

The commanding coldheart halted with one boot up in the cab of his wag. His men had already secured the travelers’ wags and begun firing up their engines. He turned his head and stared at Doc.

“What did you say?”

“‘All mimsy were the borogroves—’”

“‘And the mome raths outgrabe,’” the coldheart officer finished, striding back to him. “You know something of the classics, then, old man. Can you read?”

“Read, yes,” Doc responded, as though replaying to a voice from beyond the moon. “Read, breed, if you prick me do I not bleed?”

“Nuke-sucking oldie’s mad as Fire Day,” the sergeant said. “Do him with the others.”

“No, Sergeant Banner,” the sec chief said. “The General will want this one.”

The sergeant scowled. “It’s strong hands and backs we need to fix the track—”

The sec chief tossed him a single look. His eyes were pale brown and as clear as new glass.

“Yes, Captain Helton, sir,” the blocky sec man said briskly. He seized Doc’s arm and yanked him out of line. “Come on, then, you crazy old shit. General’s got his little hobbies.”

For a moment no one breathed. The coldhearts were clearly not used to anything but instant obedience to their commands, nor slow to let their blasters enforce them. Surely if Doc continued raving; the youthful captain would lose patience and allow Banner to ice him with the others who’d been deemed useless.

But since it no longer required the shelter of lunacy from the imminence of certain death, Doc’s rational mind reasserted itself. He lowered his hands—Banner’s finger never so much as twitched on the trigger—and shot his frayed cuffs. “Lead on, my good fellow,” he said to the sergeant.

As the old man was dragged toward the wags, Krysty felt tension flow out of her muscles. The future was a void a million times greater than all the Big Ditch and then some. But on some level below thought she wouldn’t watch another of her companions—the only family she had left to her—die before her eyes. Even if it meant her own death.

Of course, her future was empty without Ryan. But she had duties: as a friend, as mate to the companion’s fallen leader, she couldn’t allow herself to die.