Vengeance Trail. James Axler

These people fought for us.”

      “That’s what we’re trying to tell the man,” Mildred called. The three had stopped on the edge of the brush. The chance offered by the captain’s intercession seemed better than that of bolting. And anyway, the Armorer counted fast.

      “Regulations, sir,” Banner said.

      “That’s absurd!”

      “One,” J.B. said under his breath.

      “General order number twenty-three,” Banner said. “Prisoners caught in possession of weapons are to be executed immediately. No appeal, no exceptions. General’s a real stickler about that. You know that, sir.”

      “Two.”

      Helton’s face fell. “Well, if that’s the way it’s got to be…”

      J.B. flexed his legs slightly and opened his mouth to say “three.”

      Somebody new sang out, “Captain Helton, Sergeant Banner! Orders from the General.”

      “Don’t leave us in suspense, Corporal McKie,” Helton said.

      “General wants to see these three prisoners in his office at once, sir.”

      RYAN CAWDOR OPENED his eye.

      Blackness. Hintless of stars. Was he blind?

      If he was, it would be the capstone misery of a mighty pyramid of them. His whole body was a pulse of pain timed to the pounding of his heart. His head hurt as if it had been recently used as an anvil. He felt the mixed sensations of clammy heat, nausea, and being somehow unmoored from the world that indicated a fever raged in his body. And beneath it all there lay a vast aching void, a sense—a knowledge—of loss.

      He realized, then, that dim light was seeping into the lower edge of his field of vision. He expelled a long breath in relief and rolled his eye down. Dust-colored light, as if it were shining in through a tunnel mouth just out of sight around a curve. He lay on his back with his head propped on something yielding. His body was swaddled in what he guessed for blankets.

      He suddenly remembered. Wags appearing out of nowhere. Uniformed coldhearts with blasters. A great flickering muzzle-flash, pale yellow in the sun. A blow like a sledgehammer to the upper chest.

      Falling.

      “Krysty,” he croaked. His voice was like a gate that hadn’t been opened in a hundred years.

      A strange high-pitched chittering sounded in the darkness right by his head, causing him to start. After the fact he realized it had said, “What’s the matter with his eye? He can’t seem to see us.”

      “You forget, Light Sleeper,” said a second voice, lower-pitched enough that Ryan understood it in real time. “Real humans don’t see in the dark as we do. Their eyes are so small.”

      Real humans. That could mean only one thing—he’d been captured by muties. He remembered his previous brief flirtation with consciousness, as he lay broken on a rock, half-hanging over the maw of the Big Ditch. The small, furtive figures sidling toward him in the twilight, the misshapen hand reaching out for him…