James Axler - Vengeance Trail

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.

The problem was, could he even get to it, or use it if he could?

Then he heard, above the mocking whistle of the wind and the thin shrill cry of a redtailed hawk on the hunt, the tiniest scrape of something moving on stone. And he realized that the injuries he already had might turn out to be the least of his problems.

He wasn’t alone.

Having another living being find you helpless in the Deathlands was an almost automatic death sentence. Even if that being walked on two legs like a human being. Mebbe worst if it was a human being. Ryan had known plenty humans, no few of them barons or their sec men, who gave away nothing to stickies when it came to rapacious cruelty.

He took stock of his resources. He still had all the weapons he could want. He could feel the familiar weight of the Steyr lying across his left leg, the big broad-bladed panga in its sheath on his hip. Even his SIG-Sauer with the built-in suppresser—he reckoned that was the hard object prodding a busted-end rib around in him every time he fought down a breath. He had feeling back in his right hand, even if it was feeling like it was being held in a fire, and could move his fingers.

But his left wasn’t responding. A node of unusually savage ache in the giant throb of pain that was his being suggested he might have a busted clavicle on that side. Which meant he could count that arm completely out. No force of his will would get the limb to so much as move. It just mechanically couldn’t happen, any more than the toughest man could walk with a broken pelvis.

He looked around, hoping his stalker would miss the motion of his eyeball in the gloom. Stalkers. That was the first thing he saw. Shapes, strangely hunched, gathered around him. He could make out no detail in the gloom. They were small, no more than three feet high, max. Not that it mattered. A three-legged coyote pup could put him on the last train west in his current condition.

A shape loomed over him. He could make out the glint of moisture on big staring nightmare eyes, big teeth gleaming pale behind animal lips. He tried to roll away. His body refused to obey. He tried to bring his right arm up to ward off the monster. It didn’t work. All he could do was turn his head frantically from side to side on his neck and make animal sounds, half-panic, half-defiant fury, deep in this throat.