James Axler - Vengeance Trail

The second serious problem with Chato’s plan now appeared: the expectation that the slaves would either flee in panic, disrupting the defenders, or better still actually begin to fight with their guards. But few of the captives had grown up in what anybody would call sheltered circumstances; life really was tough all over. As for regarding the attackers as liberators, trust of scruffy wild-acting guys with blasters wasn’t deeply engrained in the contemporary psyche. After all, however badly the soldiers had treated and were treating their slaves, it was the coldhearts who were shooting at them.

Of course, there are always a few who don’t get the message. Ten or fifteen captives did try bolting and got ripped to wet red rags, some with fingertips scraped bloody from trying to claw their way up the steep railway embankment. Most of the slaves had too much sense to try to outrun the bullets cracking past their ears, and instead just dropped flat against the ground.

Doomed, but not entirely futile. The attackers boiling out of the arroyo had appeared suddenly and were fairly close at hand. A lot of the slower ones got minced and mulched by the horizontal lead storm. Others went to their bellies and opened vigorous, if not particularly accurate, fire.

The rest quickly got under the heavy weapons’ arcs of fire, so close the blasters mounted atop the train couldn’t depress any farther to track them. It was one of the few true cracks in mighty MAGOG’s defenses. And eighty or ninety armed and angry coldhearts were pouring through it.

Crawling with less alacrity than J.B., Mildred had reached the body of a soldier downed in the first ragged volley of sniper fire. With MAGOG’s blasters thundering overhead and shutting out the screams of the injured, she pulled free his M-16. She assumed a classic prone firing position, her body at forty-five degrees to the target, behind the stiff, using him as cover and a rest. She was a devoted pistol shooter—an Olympic competitor, in fact—but she could shoot a longblaster with a high degree of accuracy.

Clicking the selector to single shot, she began to take out targets. She aimed at the coldhearts she deemed most threatening—the ones who seemed to be shooting most effectively themselves. At almost every shot, a bandit dropped.

J.B. had taken cover behind the late Corporal Moredock and was firing aimed singles from the Beretta with a two-handed grip. Thirty yards away from his friends, Jak had scooped up two M-16s from downed guards, one gazing sightlessly at the sky, the other rolling around shrieking and clutching a shattered shin, out of the fight. Not a great marksman, he was firing both at once.

From the hip.

Normally there was no craftier fighter than the albino youth from the bayou. Not now. All the fury that had been building within him since he had watched his friend and revered leader fall into the Grand Canyon the day before boiled up within him and out his mouth in an unending scream of fury, and out the muzzles of the M-16s in uninterrupted streams of lead.

One of Red Wolf’s hawk-faced Plains chillers, riding a buckskin, charged Jak with a feathered lance. Jak stood his ground and blasted the mount with both rifles. The horse screamed in mortal agony as it reared, fountaining blood from a dozen holes, and fell over backward, trapping its rider’s leg and crushing his pelvis and the lowest three vertebrae of his spine. As he howled in his own death agony, a second Plains rider charged, raising a war club with a cast-iron ball for a head. He was already too close to take down with the M-16s’ lightweight bullets.

Having spent some time on his own ranch in New Mexico, Jak knew a thing or two about horses. Specifically, that a horse wouldn’t run over anything it thought could trip it. He knelt and ducked his head, making an X of the two longblasters before his face. The horse, disregarding its rider’s intentions, launched himself and jumped clean over the white-haired boy, who was dropping and rolling to his right even as the great shadow passed over him. From his back he emptied both magazines into the bare back of the rider. Uninjured, the horse ran on, eyes rolling, foam flecks flying from its nostrils.

A biker roared toward J.B., firing an Uzi over his T-bar handlebars. He didn’t hit anything, the way his ride was jouncing all over the place. More concerned with the imprint the front tire would make on his forehead, J.B. recoiled by reflex to a sitting position, firing the Beretta as fast as it would cycle. He wasn’t just spraying and praying. The biker went over the back of his postage-stamp-sized seat with the Uzi still blazing.

For another heart-stopping instant the heavy bike charged on. J.B.’s eyes got wide behind his glasses and he cocked himself for a wild spring to the side. The outlaw sled wobbled, toppled and slid toward him broadside, raising a big bow-wave of khaki earth and dried weeds. J.B. held his hands up before his face.

The bike stopped with its tires spinning inches short of Moredock’s corpse.

J.B. heard a familiar voice cry out. Reflexively he looked toward it—to see Mildred, in a perfect kneeling position, aiming her M-16 right between his eyes.

Leading four of his bros, Hogan rode his bike back along the road toward the rear of the train. He realized the machine guns couldn’t reach them here. Laughing and shouting in triumph, he was firing away into the passenger cars, their metal skins too thin to stop the bullets from his Ruger Mini-14. He couldn’t tell if he was actually hitting anybody, but it didn’t matter. He was laying some hurt on the monster. It wasn’t invincible after all.

But neither was MAGOG helpless.

The bikers came to an armored wag. Fearing shooters firing out blasters, Hogan stopped busting caps himself, leaned low between his high curved bars and accelerated rapidly.

As a result, he was past the killing zone when a strip of four Claymore mines mounted along the side of the armored car were initiated remotely from within. They went off with a rippling, ear-busting crack that spewed the roadway with about ten thousand steel marbles. The four riders behind Hogan simply disintegrated in shreds of flesh and steel, blood and gasoline, that all instantly began cooking in a hell-stew on the road as the gasoline lit off.

That was enough for Hogan. He was braver than most, man or mutie, but he knew when his match had been met. He kept the throttle cranked and went rocketing along the rest of the train, past the armored wags at its tail, relying on speed and surprise to keep him untouched by the sprays of bullets and 40 mm grenades that hosed out after him, until he vanished safely through the smoke from two downed wags, all blazing away on the road barbecuing their occupants who hadn’t been lucky enough to bail, some of whom were still bitching about the fact with wild screams.

Of course, the bullets weren’t stopped by the smoke. And MAGOG’s gunners, who had a whole freight car full of them, didn’t stop shooting them blind. But as soon as he was well within the smokescreen—steering around the furnace wrecks by sheer road-weasel instinct—he cranked the bike ride and lit out cross-country, passing quickly between a low rise and getting clean away.

J.B.’S EYES WIDENED again as flame blossomed in four yellow petals from the flash suppressor of Mildred’s M-16. A vicious crack left his left ear hearing nothing but a loud ringing. Hot air stung his cheek like a red ant’s bite.

He turned. A squat man in a filthy grayish sweatshirt and baggy sweat pants loomed over him with a fire ax raised over his head in both hands. He had a weird bowl-shaped haircut and was looking cross-eyed at a small, neat blue hole right through the bridge of his nose. He collapsed at the tip of the Armorer’s boot, the back of his head missing.