Vengeance Trail. James Axler

      Chapter Five

      It wasn’t a good plan.

      Chato might not know anything about strategy and tactics, but he was glumly convinced his plan sucked anyway.

      The plan was not to try creepy-crawling the giant rail wag in the dark. Oh, no. It was bristling with weapons: machine guns in turrets, gren launchers, rockets—who knew what? And it had sensors, sirens and searchlights.

      Chato may have been clueless when it came to strategy and tactics, but he did know the basics of breaking and entering. He and all his coldhearts had zilch for a chance of sneaking in undetected and making off with any worthwhile loot.

      What he had sold the others on, if not himself, was this: it was by night that the soldiers expected to be attacked. By night they hunkered down inside their giant invincible armored wail wag and just waited for somebody to be stupe enough to try them on. Even the captives in their compound—and whoever was stuck in the majority of the train’s cars that weren’t armor-plated—were protected by the monster’s sensor envelope and its truly stupendous firepower. Chato’s bandits could fire up the tents and the soft-skinned wags, but that wouldn’t bring them jack. What would be the point?

      No. The coldhearts were intent on stealing shit. Torture, murder, rape—who didn’t like that? But it was merely sugar. Plunder paid.

      And while the lost travelers’ caravan had represented a pretty piddly haul, all things taken with all, the armored train held treasure beyond the coldhearts’ wildest dreams.

      So the coldhearts would attack by high, wide daylight. That was when the greatest number of sec men would be outside their protective metal shell, spread out and vulnerable. The heavy weapons mounted on the train would be reluctant to fire and risk killing their own, or even the slaves they needed to fix their steel highway. And mebbe the slaves would take the attackers for liberators, and rise up against their captors. Or at least bolt in panic, and one way or another cause a hell of a mess. Under cover of which the raiders could get in at the train, overpower the defenders, and give themselves over to the customary orgy of rape, slaughter and, of course, pillaging.

      Chato’s followers had bought it, anyway. Especially when it was presented with all the power of his magic gift for talking people into things. Which was what got him into this mess in the first place. But he had no choice now. It was go forward or die.

      They’d catch him if he ran.

      ONE OF IRONHEAD JOHNSON’S mountain men fired the opening round, the one that chilled Moredock, from a scoped and heavy barreled Remington 700. He lay on his belly on a low hogsback five hundred yards south of the train, and used his possibles bag for a rest. Johnson’s men were probably the most formidable fighters, man for man, of all the coldheart army. Johnson himself had disposed of the three-man observation post dug in on the rise, using his trademark foot-and-a-half-long, double-edged Arkansas toothpick.

      At this point the track ran east and west straight as a laser beam. A road, its pavement still largely intact, but serving now mainly as a super-durable bed for layers of drifted sun-baked mud, ran along the south side of the embankment. The compound where the slave-laborers were sheltered under canvas was south of the road and the giant, gleaming, fusion-powered engine, to allow trucks to trundle back and forth carrying supplies from freight cars well back in the train.

      From the east appeared a small fleet of dune buggies and wags, filled with young men waving longblasters. These were the Wild Boys, a local crew of coldhearts commanded by Wild Wess Wilhelm.

      An arroyo cut from six to ten feet deep, with steep walls that had fallen in places because of rare but intensely savage downpours, ran at a diagonal south of the road, passing about two hundred yards from the slave stockade. From it now erupted most of the rest of Chato’s misfit army: El Gancho’s pistoleros from northern Mex, mounted on horseback.

      Hogan’s contingent of fifteen outlaw bikers on lowslung, snarling sleds. No dirt bikes, to say the least, the heavy motorcycles had been wheeled by hand along the soft sand of the arroyo bottom, to a place where a cave-in provided a natural ramp. Small in numbers, his band was unsurpassed in cruelty.

      Most of Red Wolf’s band of Plains Indian cutthroats had ridden off in a huff after their leader’s demise. However, staunch individualists that they were, seven or eight had remained and now joined the charge on their painted ponies.

      And finally, twenty or so random chillers, who had drifted into the army at large, but not yet into any kind of affinity group. These loose ends had been sent off with the main body under the command of Bug Eye Mueller, who was suspected by many of being a mutie because of his unfortunately protuberant eyeballs, but who was so mean nobody ever so much as mentioned it.

      The throat and purse-slitters of El Abogado, snoop and poop specialists all, formed no part of the attack. They had their own assignment.

      And finally, Chato himself sat nervously on his paint pony atop a hill well to the south, leading from the rear where he could keep a good eye on the proceedings as was appropriate to a coldheart warlord of his stature. Or so he’d told his faithful followers.

      No, it wasn’t a good plan. But it was shitloads better than admitting he’d drawn a blank, and having his coldheart followers decide to see what his insides looked like, preparatory to picking out a new leader.

      “DOWN! Everybody get down!”

      J.B. had already followed his own advice, and was speed-crawling toward the fallen corporal on leather-jacket clad elbows. Mildred, as seasoned a combat veteran as any, had also hit the dirt before the shot finished echoing.

      Pretty much everybody else, guards and captives alike, was standing around, completely clueless to what was going down—even as two more guards were nailed by snipers.

      However, not even the slowest or most stunned of wits could long mistake about 150 coldhearts, armed to the eyeballs and howling for blood, charging at them on horses, outlandishly modified motorcycles, and their own hind legs. The soldiers on guard, well-trained by Deathlands standards—meaning they had some—unslung their blasters, took up firing positions and started shooting.

      So did the crews manning the heavy weapons mounted in casements and pop-up turrets on the armored wags of the train. MAGOG was like a weird monster millipede: its first ten or so segments were armor-plated, as were the very last two wags, a second engine and a gun-bristling caboose. Other armored wags were spaced at intervals among the more conventional freight and passenger wags. As he pulled Moredocks’s Beretta from its flap-covered field holster, the Armorer heard the snarl of 5.56 mm machine guns, the throaty growl of 7.62 mm M-60s and, sweetest of all, the Thor’s-hammer pounding of the .50-caliber Browning M-2. He could feel the muzzle-blasts, beating on the back of his jacket and stinging the exposed back of his neck.

      Looking up, he saw the nearest attackers were still 150 yards off. He rifled the stiff for spare mags.

      AS PLANS WENT, Chato’s wasn’t really all that