Czytaj książkę: «Vengeance Trail»

Chapter One

J. B. Dix chewed a dust-dry blade of buffalo grass and leaned back against the wag, its sun-heated metal pinging as it cooled in the breeze. Beneath the low-tipped brim of his fedora, he watched a little girl named Sallee, scabbed legs splayed in the dust by the track, as she played with a flop-eared, vaguely humanoid bundle of rags.

“What do you reckon that thing is, anyway, Jak?” he asked his companion, who perched on the wag’s hood walking a short leaf-bladed throwing knife along the backs of his bone-white fingers. “Rabbit or mutie?”

Jak Lauren flicked his keen ruby toward the rags and laughed. He was scarcely more than a child himself, despite a veteran’s scars. His skin was chalk white, and his long hair, wind-whipped around his shoulders, was the color of fresh-fallen snow.

“Mutie,” he said.

The sky’s blue skin was bare of clouds. The layers of earth defining the walls and pinnacles of the Big Ditch, the old Grand Canyon, glowed as though lit from within the Earth itself in bands of colors—yellow, red, burnt-orange—muted but so rich they seemed to vibrate. The sun that brought out all that glory shone down on the desert above the great canyon like a laser beam, and struck those below with the impact of heat of molten steel. But the tall, statuesque redheaded woman in the jumpsuit and blue cowboy boots didn’t mind. It was the sort of day that Krysty Wroth loved most. The kind of day where you didn’t have to be an initiate of Gaia, as she was, to find the beauty hidden in the devastation that was the Deathlands.

She let her green eyes slide from her two friends, to the caravan of a dozen battered wags parked by the edge of the Big Ditch with their engines cooling, while several people labored to change a flat tire, on to Doc Tanner, standing by offering unsolicited advice to Mildred Wyeth as she checked the dressings on the stump of a woman’s shin. A diamondback had bitten her on the ankle three days before, just outside the ville of Ten Mile, and her own husband had chopped off her leg with an ax to keep the venom from spreading.

Nothing was dampening the travelers’ spirits, though. They were bound from the fringes of the Deathlands proper, away to the east across the Rocks, to the fledgling ville of New Tulsa, where some of their kin had already begun to carve a living out of the land. The land wasn’t much less desolate than what surrounded them, although better watered by rain. But that very land, sere tan land dotted with cactus and hardly less unfriendly scrub, looked like Paradise to a folk accustomed to rains of acid and skies of murk.

And that sky of pure, open blue, with only a few clouds as white and innocent as baby lambs, affected them like some kind of happy drug: jolt without the edge. They laughed and chattered like kids and even sang. Some just wandered aimlessly, gazing around themselves in wonder.

“I’m going into the bushes for a bit,” Krysty called to her friends, “to answer the call.”

Ryan Cawdor, her lover, acknowledged her with a wave of his hand. He stood with his back to her on the rim of the precipice, the wind ruffling his shaggy black curls and gazed out and down into the giant cut in the earth’s flesh with his lone eye. A single dark shape wheeled out over that emptiness and the strange land forms striped with muted colors—ochre, orange, buff—at the level of the small party of humans and their machines perched perilously on the rim. From the fingerlike tips on the wings, Krysty was satisfied it was an eagle, not a screamwing.

No threat. Having duly notified her companions, she went off into the scrub to tend to her affairs. For all the utter naturalness of such functions, Krysty had been raised to be modest.

She didn’t hear the raiders until they were right upon them. No one did. The wind’s unceasing whistle and mutter masked the sound of engines coming fast from the east until the wags they propelled were braking to a stop alongside the halted caravan in a swirl of dust.

Suddenly men were leaping off half a dozen wags, longblasters in their hands. Krysty caught a flashing impression they all wore olive or camouflage, military-style.

Several travelers cried out in fear. Kids squealed and ran to parents frozen by shock. By reflex, Ryan spun, bringing his Steyr sniper rifle to his cheek.

Two of the intruders’ wags were pickups with M-249 machine guns mounted on welded-together pintles behind the cabs. One MG snarled a burst. Krysty saw dust spout off Ryan’s coat.

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.

Yet.

The children wailed and sobbed and clutched their mothers’ skirts. The mothers, Deathlands women, tousled their children’s hair, bit back their own tears and murmured reassurances they knew were lies. One little girl was trying to break from the line, screaming and crying and tugging at her mother’s hand. The sec chief frowned. He followed the direction her free hand was stretching in. He walked to where the small rag rabbit—or mutie—lay at the bash of a clump of salt-bush; picked it up, brought it to the little girl, knelt and handed it gravely to her. She took it, suddenly quiet, her grimy cheeks scoured by her tears. He smoothed the dark hair on her head, stood, pivoted on his heel and walked back to his wag.

As he passed Banner, he nodded once.

The sergeant barked a command. The machine gun that had killed Ryan and its mate on a second raider wag snarled. The bullets raked the line of rejects carefully between two and three feet off the ground, to take adults in legs or bellies and kids in heads and chests, anchoring all neatly in place. Most screaming and thrashing in agony, a fortunate few lifeless-limp, the unarmed travelers went down in the dust.

The firing stopped. Arcs of flying brass empties flashed in the sunlight to fall with an almost musical tinkle to the hardpan. The moaning of the wind was joined by the shrieks of the injured.

Banner spoke again. Again the machine guns ripped the bodies, those that stirred and those that didn’t. It seemed the marauders had bullets to burn. Finally the sergeant walked along the line of now-motionless travelers, firing a handful of single shots from his longblaster. Then he turned and joined his comrades in the wags.

One of the raiders who had come in the stakebed truck that now contained the caravan’s survivors took a frag gren from his web gear, pulled the pin and let the safety lever fly free, then tossed the bomb under the broken-down wag that had caused the caravan to halt. He turned and walked away without waiting to watch the result. The gren went off with a crack muffled by the wag’s bulk.

The sec man who’d thrown the gren joined his comrades who were crammed into the two travelers’ wags they had emptied. Engines growled. The convoy rolled off along the bare-earth track, to the west, raising roostertails of khaki dust.

The derelict wag’s gasoline tank, ruptured by the blast, caught fire with a whump and billow of yellow flames. The vehicle began to burn ferociously, puking black smoke into a sky that was already beginning to mask its clean blue face with clouds.

Krysty emerged from her hiding place. Her joints ached from maintaining the unnatural position she’d been forced to endure. Red ants had crawled up her legs inside her jumpsuit and bitten her shin and thigh. Their venom made the tiny wounds pang like stabs. She ignored all.

She walked with the deliberation of a drunk to the edge of the precipice, where Ryan had stood, where last she had seen her lover. Her beautiful high-cheekboned face was set like stone. She looked down, half fearing what she would see.

There was nothing. The slope angled sharply down for perhaps forty yards, pitched over a cluster of granite boulders, which resisted erosion better than the prevalent sandstone, and straight down in a sheer fall to the floor a mile below. Ryan’s body wasn’t in sight. Presumably it was way down at the bottom, hidden by sheer height.

She turned away, looking over the bodies of their former traveling companions: Kurtiz, Elane, Natty and the rest. The little girl Sallee lay facedown, with her toy inches from her outflung fingers, its grime glistening with her blood.

Moving as if through water and all her limbs were lead, Krysty picked through the items the coldhearts had so contemptuously pitched into heaps on the ground. She needed what supplies she could carry: food, water, meds. Even something extra for barter.

She wouldn’t just lie down and die. She would follow the men who had murdered Ryan and the travelers and kidnapped her friends. She would kill them all, and free her friends.

Of course, she was but one woman, alone in the wasteland, afoot in pursuit of wags. And all the supplies she could lift, as strong as she was, would be quickly exhausted in this waste. Particularly water.

It meant nothing to her. Nothing at all. She would follow her vengeance trail to the end, whatever it would take.

She set out along the track the wags had taken. She had no hope, but hate was enough. Concern for herself was no part of the picture.

She was dead already. Inside.

SOMEWHERE AT THE BOTTOM of a deep well of darkness and misery, Ryan stirred.

It felt to him as if the skin of his chest was a big bag wrapped around forty pounds of busted glass. With every laboring breath he drew, it felt as if a thousand jagged points stabbed and rasped at his raw nerve endings.

Worse, as he became aware again, was that he could hear his breathing. Not just the ragged in and out of exhalation that was always with you whether you paid it mind or not, but a nasty wet slurping noise combined with a hiss. And it was hard to breathe—bastard hard.

Sucking chest wound, he realized. So-called, one of his father’s healers had told him back home in Front Royal long ago, because it really sucked if you got one.

And unless you got pretty quick attention, so did your chances of living.

Krysty! The name went off like ten pounds of smokeless powder off a blasting cap in his mind. She and the companions hadn’t come to his aid, which meant they weren’t able to.

For a moment, in the damp, dark misery of his mind and body, he fought the clammy jaws of panic. He was hurt bad and alone.

He tried one of the deep-breathing exercises Krysty had taught him to calm himself and banish the terror that threatened to rob him of the last remnants of his selfhood, his manhood, and whatever he might laughingly call hope, sucking the air way down with his abdominal muscles.

It worked, too. Not because supercharging his system with oxygen had its usual soothing effect on the system. But because it felt as if some giant mutie bastard had plunged a twenty-inch saw into his flat belly and was sawing for all he was worth.

Whatever else you could say about it, it took his mind off feeling sorry for himself.

His eye opened. It was resisted by some kind of thick gumminess, but the jolt of white-hot agony that racked his being, as he breathed in, did the trick.

The first thing he saw was lots of nothing much: blue dimness as far as his eye could see. After a moment he noticed it deepened in the direction the not-so-gentle pull of gravity was telling him was downward, was banded in various shades and hues, was molded into cone and curtain shapes.

He was lying on the very lip of the Big Ditch itself, with his outflung right hand, fingers tingling as though with crawling fire as circulation restored by some unnoticed movement returned feeling to them, hanging over a mile of space.

He rolled his eye down. The right side of his face was pressed to a rough rock surface. The tarry looking pool spread around it tended to confirm his suspicion that what had glued his eyelid shut was his own blood, spilled in a copious quantity.

He rolled the eye up. A granite outcrop, almost black in the dusk, hunched over him like a leering gargoyle. He could only guess that after being shot—a remembered flash of pain in his chest, of spinning dizzily into blackness vaster by far than the Grand Canyon—he had tumbled down the steep, but not sheer, slope and bounced over that last humpback boulder to come flopping to a stop on a hard ledge of rock.

Needless to say, it had busted hell out of him. Needless to say, it was nothing compared to what would have happened had he actually gone over.

But it wasn’t going to matter a bent, spent shell case if he couldn’t do something for himself and fast. He’d suffocate if the wound wasn’t tended to. He knew what had to be done: apply what Mildred called an “occlusive dressing,” a sort of valve that would flap shut and seal the hole when he inhaled, but relax and expel air when he breathed out. It wasn’t all that complex an operation, and anything reasonably airtight would do for a patch. Nuke it, he even had the proper material for the job tucked away in one of his pockets.