Vengeance Trail

“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 of the wag had gotten agitated. “So that’s just it?” she demanded. “We just let them shoot down our friends and loved ones and scarf us up as slaves, and that’s it? End of story?”

“You got a better idea, Maisy?” asked a heavy black-bearded man in coveralls patched in variety of colors.

The woman gazed wildly around at her fellow captives.

“They got the drop on us,” J.B. said, loudly but very controlled. “And that’s all there is to it. Spilled blood can’t go back in the body.”

The woman at Maisy’s side took her arm and whispered urgently in her ear. The hard-bitten guard tipped up his scattergun until its foreshortened muzzle pointed at the nowovercast skies. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even change expression. But the implication was clear.

There would be no more conversation out of the captives. Not because of any silly rules, but because they were getting themselves all stirred up, talking. If they got too stirred up, it would make more work for him.

That wouldn’t happen. And even though the shot-column didn’t spread out any too quick even from a barrel that short, the odds were pretty good that whoever the coldheart picked as designated troublemaker wouldn’t be the only one to cop some .33-caliber double-aught balls.

The captives clammed up. But J.B. thought he heard Jak mutter, deep down in his throat, “Ryan not dead.”

HEAD DOWN, back bowed beneath the weight of the pack she carried, Krysty trudged toward the lowering sun.

She had begun to feel, not hope—never hope, never again—but a kind of lessened futility. Lessened immediate futility anyway.

It wasn’t her nature to analyze. Her conscious mind had been nothing but a bright blur for the past several hours. But she was far from stupe, and her subconscious kept working.

The raiders were well organized and even smart by sec men standards, let alone coldheart ones. The massacre hadn’t been sadistic butchery. It hadn’t even been casual. It had been businesslike. Whoever the murderers were, they were professional about it.

Their behavior was at the other end of the world from the wild irrationality most coldhearts displayed. Calculating.

They had been happy enough to take what loot the caravan wags offered, but they dumped the contents of the two wags they needed to transport their own people in without hesitation or question, including provisions they themselves used every day—food, water and ammo. It wasn’t so much that they spurned those items as that they didn’t even trouble to look for them, even though all were present and all reasonably expected to be. The only cargo they kept was spare fuel stored in the vehicles, and that the wags themselves obviously required.

Far from worrying about their own resupply, they had taken on two dozen extra mouths. Krysty knew why even without the sergeant having grumbled to his superior: the raiders needed slave workers. To do what, she wasn’t sure—something about a track—and didn’t particularly care. What was potentially useful to know was that the raiders hadn’t been concerned even though those same consumables were necessary to keep the captives alive so they could do the work the raiders needed done. Gaia, even ammo, if some of the captives needed extra persuading. And it was through neither inexperience nor the shit-for-brains slavery to the impulse of the moment that controlled most coldhearts, and mutie marauders too, for that matter.

This bunch knew exactly what they were doing. Every step along the path.

If they didn’t need to worry about food and water, they weren’t far from replenishing the same. It followed as inevitably as night was about to follow the desert day.

Granted, a wag could cover ground a shitload faster than a woman afoot, even one as strong and driven as Krysty Wroth. But another thing her subconscious worked out, and allowed to seep osmotically into the white void of her conscious mind, was that a job that took a lot of hands generally took a fair stretch of time to do as well. Wherever the marauders delivered their captives, they probably wouldn’t be moving on for a spell.

The knowledge, slowly assimilated, added energy to her step. It might take a few hours or many days, but she had at least some solid ground of reason on which to base a belief that she would find her friends and Ryan’s killers.

A scrub jay yammered abuse at Krysty from a bush. The sound brought the woman back to the here-and-now with a jolt of alarm. She had been in zombie mode, total whiteout.

She was lucky. In the Deathlands, if you zoned that far out, you usually came out of it about the time a stickie was pulling your face off.

She raised her head and took stock of her surroundings. The sun was falling toward a shoal of mesas with wind-scooped faces, tawny and rose. There was no sign of the raiders, and the marks their tires had left in sand were lost to the eternally restless wind. But there was something, a squat blockiness ahead at the bottom of a broad valley. Buildings. Studying her surroundings, Krysty could make out patches of dark pavement showing through drifted sand, the remnants of a flanking ditch. There had been a hard-top road here. Mebbe even a highway.

Bad news, in that if the raiders turned off along it, they’d make at least somewhat better time than along the unimproved dirt track they, like the caravan, had been following. It remained unlikely the raiders were going farther than she could walk in a matter of days.

Meantime, the buildings offered possible shelter for the night. This wasn’t the seething gut of the Deathlands, with monstrous beasts, humanoid muties and acid rain storms ready to destroy the traveler caught in the open. But there were still plenty of nasty things that came out at night. To hunt.

She began walking toward the structures.