Vengeance Trail. James Axler

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ