James Axler - Vengeance Trail

That was manageable. Lots of great war leaders have been more than a little nervous in the service.

The other problem was more serious. He had no clue how to actually fight.

All his life, it seemed, he had been adept at talking his way out of trouble. As an orphaned runt, small even by Apache standards, he’d had ample opportunity to acquire the gift growing up. When exiled by vengeful tribal fellows on totally false charges of witchcraft, and totally true charges of misappropriation of tribal resources, he had stumbled into the midst of a band of mostly white-eyes coldhearts whose natural first impulse was to kill him in some picturesque and protracted way and he would let his well-tried tongue spin its silver web just to have something to do.

Unfortunately, sometimes that tongue moved faster than his brain. He talked himself into positions not even his cunning and insight could then see any way out of.

So it was with that fast-talk extravaganza out beneath a swollen desert moon. Not only had the outlaws spared him. They had become the nucleus of a whole coldheart army. Bad men had flocked to him, until he had a force of between one and two hundred of the best of worst of the region’s outlaws: the scum de la scum. Men so bad even average, everyday coldhearts had got a bellyful of them.

And he had no clue what to do with them.

The approach of the caravan had been a godsend. As Red Wolf complained, Chato had been reluctant to allow his men to attack any of the villes in the surrounding area, nor even try to pick off any isolated ranches. He did know enough to understand a very little of that would raise the country against them, but his more immediate motivation had been simple fear. Leave aside the fact he had no remote intention of exposing his own hide to puncturing by irate sec men or sharpshooting ranchers. What if something went wrong? He was operating on zero tolerance here. One serious setback and all the smoke he’d spun would evaporate and all his mirrors would shatter—and his boys were just the ones to know how to give him a proper send-off with the sharp-edged shards.

It was a classic politician’s cleft stick. He couldn’t afford to fail, but he couldn’t afford to put off action much longer. So the word his intelligence system brought him of a caravan moving through his territory came as a godsend. Even the report that they’d hooked up with a half-dozen hard-core fighters to enhance their security didn’t bother him unduly, once he’d got a description of those “fighters.” Their leader was a one-eyed mystery man who, granted, anybody in the whole Deathlands above the age of three would make for a stone chiller and no mistake. But the others: an albino boy, a sawed-off runt with glasses, a gaunt old crazie who carried a cane and a couple of bitches. What could they bring to the dance?

So the caravan looked like easy pickings. And because the travelers simply couldn’t afford to carry much that wasn’t extremely valuable, it was rich—relatively. Split among a hundred and a half marauders, though, with the subchiefs naturally taking extra-large bites of the pie, it wouldn’t seem rich for long. Chato, however, hadn’t thought past that point, not because he lacked the mental ability, but because he didn’t dare. Something would come up. Or else.

Unfortunately the train had been such easy pickings that a bunch of damned paramilitary interlopers had gone right ahead and picked them. And “or else” had arrived ahead of schedule.

“So now,” said the dapper outlaw, perhaps the most feared of all, known only as El Abogado, in the mildest of tones, “what do we do? Like any creature, we must feed.”

Trust a coldheart named El Abogado never to lose sight of the son of a bitching bottom line, Chato thought bitterly.

There was only one thing to do.

Chato sucked down a deep breath. By a miracle, he managed not to choke on the smoke.

“I have a plan…” he said.

“WHOA!” J.B. EXCLAIMED, grabbing at his fedora to hold it clamped firmly on his head as the splintery wood floor of the wag whacked him hard in the tailbone and bounced him a good four inches in the air. The wag was jolting along at a good fifty clicks an hour—or not so good, on a road that wasn’t much more than a couple tire tracks in the hardpan, already starting to deepen and widen into arroyos from the erosive force of infrequent but fierce rains. Way too fast for the suspension, one way or another.

Almost all the chosen from the wag caravan had been herded together in the coldhearts’ stakebed wag, including three of the captive companions. Doc was riding in the cab of the lead wag, second in line behind a Baja-buggy scout with its own rollbar-mounted machine gun, squeezed between the captain and his driver. It couldn’t have been too comfortable for him, all crammed up against that unyielding body armor, even leaving aside the company, J.B. reckoned.

At the outset the pair of guards keeping watch on the prisoners in the bigger wag had ordered them to keep their heads bowed and their fingers interlaced behind their necks. That hadn’t lasted. Even free to grab on to what handholds the wag offered and one another when it didn’t it was all the prisoners could do from getting tossed in a big snake-mating-ball of butts and elbows. Their captors, while coldhearted enough, were more than just coldhearts, it was painfully apparent. They were sec men, probably calling themselves soldiers, from the way they dressed in odds and ends of uniforms and gave one another salutes and titles, military-fashion.

And if there was one thing sec men hated it was disorder. It made their jobs harder. So the order about clasping hands went by the dusty way.

The captives rode mostly in shocky silence. Overhead, the glorious blue that had so fatally intoxicated them was being blotted as clouds came racing in, lead-gray. The Armorer saw Mildred looking up at them. To her, their speed was unnatural and still alarming for all the time she’d spent unfrozen and in the present day. To the others, it was the fact that the sky had been almost clear that was disconcerting.

The late Hizzoner’s bodyguards, Amos and Bub, had left women behind, bleeding out in the dust. Lanky rawboned Bub had two kids, a boy and a girl, who now had flies crawling on their eyeballs. He was blubbering about it with his huge slab of ham hands covering his face. At least J.B. reckoned he was mourning his woman and children. It stood to reason not even a would-be sec man would be wasting tears on the once and never mayor of New Tulsa.

Stacked right next to J.B., Bub, the burlier and relatively smarter half of the team, was glaring at the companions with little pig eyes which, if bloodshot, were as dry as the goat track beneath them.

“That bastard Kurtiz was right about one thing,” he said in a voice like a rusty old oil drum rolling down a rocky slope. “You nuke-suckers weren’t shit when it came to being guards.”

Jak, sitting on the Armorer’s left, stiffened and snarled. J.B. touched him lightly on the arm.

“You got one thing right, friend,” J.B. said. “We aren’t shit.”

“Don’t crack wise with me, you sawed-off little—”

The first two fingers of J.B.’s right hand lashed out and snapped the backs of the tips against Bub’s blond-stubbled jowl, as quick as a diamondback strike. They did no damage, but stung. Bub shook his head once and blinked, totally off balance.

Which meant that when J.B. brought his left hand whipping around in a hooking palm-heel strike that mashed Bub’s already generally shapeless nose across his face, the blow slammed the back of the goon’s skull into one of the heavy uprights rising from the periphery of the truckbed. Bub’s moaning subsided, he clutched his face as blood trickled between his fingers and down his spine. It began to diffuse in thin, red spiderweb nets through the sweat coating his thick neck.