Breakthrough
Breakthrough
James Axler
More than a century after a multi-warhead nuclear strike wiped out nearly all of earth's population, humanity's feral instinct to survive has spawned a savage new America. Here, the brutality of man and nature conspire against hope. Yet despite its chaos and bloody turmoil, Deathlands is a second chance for the human race…and for a group of warrior survivalists led by a man called Ryan Cawdor.Deathlands is a living hell, but there is someplace worse: a parallel Earth where the atomic mega-cull never happened. Now this Otherworld Earth is in its final death throes. Yet for an elite few, the reality portal offers a new frontier of raw energy, expendable slaves–a bastion of power for Dredda Otis Trask. Her invasion force of genetically engineered warrior women has turned the ruins of Salt Lake City into the deadly mining grounds of a grotesque new order–one that lies in wait for Ryan and his companions.In the Deathlands, danger lurks beyond the imagination.
Ryan looked at his old friend. “You know what to do, J.B.”
His hands up, the Armorer stepped into the line of fire. “Now, take it easy,” he said to the tall, backlit figures just inside the cave entrance. “You know we can’t hurt you. You don’t have to prove anything more to us. We’re giving up. See?”
Black figures approached with their laser rifles pointed at his head. One of them came within ten feet of him before it stopped. “Where are the others?” it asked.
“Yahhh!” J.B. bellowed at the top of his lungs.
Ryan echoed the yell as he swung out from behind the rock. The others yelled, too, as hard as they could, to keep from being deafened as the Smith & Wesson pump gun roared in the enclosed space. Orange flame from the muzzle blast licked the ceiling. Ryan racked and fired, racked and fired as fast as he could. On the third blast, there was a mighty groan from above, then in a cloud of dust, the ceiling of the entry chamber came crashing down.
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Pilgrimage to Hell
Red Holocaust
Neutron Solstice
Crater Lake
Homeward Bound
Pony Soldiers
Dectra Chain
Ice and Fire
Red Equinox
Northstar Rising
Time Nomads
Latitude Zero
Seedling
Dark Carnival
Chill Factor
Moon Fate
Fury’s Pilgrims
Shockscape
Deep Empire
Cold Asylum
Twilight Children
Rider, Reaper
Road Wars
Trader Redux
Genesis Echo
Shadowfall
Ground Zero
Emerald Fire
Bloodlines
Crossways
Keepers of the Sun
Circle Thrice
Eclipse at Noon
Stoneface
Bitter Fruit
Skydark
Demons of Eden
The Mars Arena
Watersleep
Nightmare Passage
Freedom Lost
Way of the Wolf
Dark Emblem
Crucible of Time
Starfall
Encounter: Collector’s Edition
Gemini Rising
Gaia’s Demise
Dark Reckoning
Shadow World
Pandora’s Redoubt
Rat King
Zero City
Savage Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
DEATH LANDS®
James Axler
We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.
—Lydia Maria Child
1802–1880
THE DEATHLANDS SAGA
This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.
There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.
But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.
Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.
Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.
J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.
Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.
Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.
Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.
In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….
Contents
Prologue (#u0552e4b3-310f-5482-bb3c-28f25f9020f5)
Chapter One (#u468e4af5-ef78-58e3-8b57-a30810dac53b)
Chapter Two (#uda43c4c7-d0c0-59d5-bd2a-00c7713e350c)
Chapter Three (#u73e287d6-b3f7-5cba-b9d9-40a0eb7cebc1)
Chapter Four (#uef19b027-d1ef-51a1-ad09-4250c724b1c6)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
A chunk of burning plastic the size of a softball sailed past Dr. Huth’s lowered head. Smaller objects, bits of concrete, shards of metal and rock, pelted his arms and legs as he struggled down the middle of the street under the terrible weight that lay upon his shoulders, a weight that bent his back to the breaking point and made his thighs tremble.
Seven levels below the surface of the planet, in the swirling smoke of open trash fires, a mob packed the crumbling sidewalks and spilled onto the potholed roadway. Their angry chant of “Die, whitecoat, die! Die, whitecoat, die!” echoed off the two-story-high, gridwork concrete ceiling and the wall-to-wall buildings that lined the gritty street. Like an earthquake, it rattled the No Response Zone’s few surviving windowpanes.
This was Gloomtown, so named because neither the light of day nor the dark of night penetrated here. Mercury-vapor lamps caged in the soot-stained ceiling cast a perpetual sulfurous pall over its squalor and suffering. In Gloomtown there were no police. No emergency services. And there was no way out, alive or dead.
As Dr. Huth advanced along the mob’s gauntlet, grinding out one shaky step after another, tears flowed down his cheeks. Everything he had ever done in his remarkable scientific career, he had done for them. Not for “them” individually, of course, or even for “them” as a social class, but “them” as in, for the survival of humanity.
The survival of Huth’s species had become an issue shortly after the turn of the second millennium A.D., when the long-sputtering population bomb had finally gone thermonuclear. Now, less than a century later, the planet was supporting one hundred billion people, and the rationing of food to the multitudes had become the all-consuming task of science and the one-world government known as FIVE. Because of the shortage of available calories, economic, social and political control teetered on the verge of global collapse. Dr. Huth and the other top scientists of FIVE were like whitecoated little Dutch boys sticking their fingers in a massively leaking dike. Their desperate measures had produced unforeseen and disastrous consequences.
Several structural levels down, a few hundred yards directly below Dr. Huth’s feet, was the border of the Slime Zone, a vast area of the megalopolis made uninhabitable by an invasion of agricultural bacteria, the result of a failed attempt to solve the food problem. In computer simulation, the genetically altered cyanobacteria had looked like a perfect answer to the crisis. They were fast breeding, required no maintenance and were an inexhaustible source of easily digestible protein. Outside FIVE’s biotech laboratories, they had proved themselves all of that, and more.
Once actual cultivation began, despite the protective measures put in place, the tailored bacteria quickly escaped the confines of the deep-level slime farms and began to swallow up the lower sections of the megacity, block by block. All efforts to turn them back, and to reclaim lost territory, had failed. And the irony was, the protein-rich bacteria were no longer even harvested for fear of spreading the contamination.
Because of Gloomtown’s proximity to the Slime Zone, its residents lived under constant threat of suffocation. When the bacterial spores were inhaled, they bloomed in the lungs, rapidly filling them with their wet weight. Only the condensation layer of the atmosphere, a band of land fog at Level Eight, kept the slime at bay. If the climate fluctuated so much as a few degrees, Gloomtown would be enveloped by floor-to-ceiling drapes of smothering green slunk.
The cyanobacteria weren’t the only lethal whitecoat-created hazard Gloomtowners faced on a daily basis. Equally deadly was the carniphage, an escaped biotech mil weapon. When inhaled, it ate a person from the inside out, stripping flesh from bone. The carniphages remained dormant in rivers and lakes for most of their life cycle, but during their reproductive phase, clouds of them were carried on the wind, eating and killing every animal in their path.
When the megacity’s warning sirens announced an impending bloom of carniphages, the people of Gloomtown packed themselves into windowless rooms and closets, and sealed the doors with rags and dirt. Those caught outside were found after the all-clear, their bones picked clean, plastic bags or trash cans pulled over their heads. On the upper levels of the city, for the convenience of FIVE’s CEOs, its whitecoats, and its white-collar support staffs, there were ample, roomy, phage-proof shelters.
How the carniphages had gotten loose in the environment was still a mystery. Some claimed FIVE’s Population Control Service had released them on purpose, to slow the growth of the unemployable class.
“FIVE” stood for the five global conglomerates who, after the big shakedowns of the nineties, had by treaty divided up the rights to exploit the remaining resources of the earth. Those four capital letters were stitched in crimson above the breast pocket of Dr. Huth’s lab coat.
In the boardrooms of the globals, Huth was a very important man, considered a genius comparable to, if not surpassing, Newton, Einstein and Watson and Crick. As director of the Totality Concept, he had shifted the focus of its most advanced research program from time trawling—the dragging of objects or persons from the past or future to the present—to the creation of a passageway between parallel universes. Using Operation Chronos technology as a foundation, he had succeeded in establishing a corridor between nearly identical alternate existences, between his Earth and another, which had come to be known as Shadow World.
After sending robot drones, then a human exploration team through the passage, Dr. Huth had discovered that the event horizons of the twinned Earths had permanently diverged on January 20, 2001, when an all-out nuclear exchange had devastated Shadow World. Though its human population had been nearly wiped out, the catastrophe had left many of its natural resources intact. Which presented a simple, elegant solution to his own Earth’s problems: colonize Shadow World, relieve the population pressure by moving selected, qualified people to the new resources. It was nothing less than a second chance for the human race.
Unappreciated in some quarters.
Under a hail of rocks and burning trash, the tall, lanky scientist strained to keep moving forward with his burden. Perhaps the Gloomtowners had correctly concluded that they wouldn’t be invited to partake of Shadow World’s salvation. Perhaps that was the reason for this horrible mistreatment. If so, it was typically selfish and shortsighted of them.
Then Huth caught a glimpse of a grimy video billboard suspended from the ceiling, and the live picture of himself that was being projected to the crowds. When he saw what he was towing through the streets, he froze in disbelief.
It was a guided missile more than one hundred feet long.
The startling image reminded him of a vid he’d seen as a graduate student. It had shown a single ant struggling to carry an impossibly huge beetle carcass back to the nest. That vid had to have been at least twenty-five years old when he’d viewed it; the last ant and beetle had long since departed this reality.
As Dr. Huth stood there immobilized, gasping for breath, some of the mob dipped into the latrine buckets they’d brought along and splattered him with handfuls of bloody excrement—evidence of yet another failure of science to solve the global food crisis.
The ingenious whitecoats of FIVE had genetically tailored a bacterium whose internal processes could turn igneous rock into something edible. But when the pseudo-fast-food product was consumed regularly, its mineral components built up in the human body, giving rise to a range of alarming physical symptoms, including bloody stools and psychopathic behavior. Despite the known side effects, FIVE dispensed Beefie Cheesies and Tater Cheesies by the truckload to placate the Gloomtowners. The discarded plastifoil wrappers swirled ankle deep around the feet of the mob.
A fresh hail of stones cut Dr. Huth’s cheeks, forehead, and neck. He knew he had to keep moving or be stoned to death. His long legs quaking from the effort, he broke the missile’s inertia, but managed just a few more steps before collapsing under the weight of the nose cone, which pinned him to the street, crushing the air from his lungs and making him pass out.
Merciful oblivion lasted only a heartbeat.
Dr. Huth awoke with a gasp, his burden gone. He flew upward in a metal mesh cage, his wrists shackled together with two feet of chain. Looking up from his manacles, he realized he hadn’t completely escaped the missile. It now stood upright, its riveted skin gliding past him in a white blur as the elevator rose.
He also sensed he wasn’t alone in the cage.
Dr. Huth whipped around, and in so doing came face-to-face with the human from the parallel world, the man he had ordered brought back to Earth for examination and interrogation. This was the same tall, rangy savage who had somehow managed to escape not just FIVE’s custody, but its reality, as well, and in so doing had created untold havoc and destruction.
The one-eyed man stared back at him with malice. A scar from a knife slash, like a crudely drawn lightning bolt, divided his left brow and cheek above and below the black eye patch he wore. Black curling hair fell almost to his shoulders. A leather sheath strapped above his left boot carried a huge knife. In his right hand he held an equally massive chromed wrench.
Though he called himself Ryan Cawdor, FIVE’s media consultants had renamed him “Shadow Man,” and turned him into a symbol of hope for the starving masses. His birthplace on the parallel Earth was Deathlands, the heavily nuked, former United States of America.
“Why have you come back here?” Dr. Huth said. Behind Cawdor, a half-dozen children—filthy, hollow eyed, swollen bellied—clung like monkeys to the outside of the rising elevator cage. Huth ignored their bony little outstretched hands and demanded, “Where are you taking me?”
Shadow Man didn’t answer either question. He held something inside his mouth, a round shape that bulged against the dark stubble of his cheek.
When the gantry elevator stopped, once again Dr. Huth faced the tip of the missile. He was relieved to see that there was no door in the side of the nose cone, and therefore no possible way he could be placed inside.
Shadow Man spun him, and with a forearm crushing against the front of his throat, pinned his back to the nose cone. Cawdor then grabbed the manacle chain and jerked it up, forcing Huth’s arms above his head. Though the scientist struggled, the one-eyed man easily controlled him. Cawdor fitted a bolt through a chain link, threaded it into a matching hole in the nose cone and, using the chromed spanner, quickly torqued it down.
As Cawdor retreated a step, Dr. Huth bawled, “Why are you doing this to me?”
Shadow Man smiled and curled back his lips. Between his front teeth he held a human eyeball with a sky-blue iris. Its color and size perfectly matched his good right eye, as well it should have. Dr. Huth had had the eye genetically reconfigured to fit him, a replacement for the one Cawdor had lost to a knife slash years ago. The gift had been intended as an awe-inspiring demonstration of the biotechnological power of this reality, and of how cooperation with FIVE was rewarded.
When the scientist started to speak, Cawdor lunged forward, slamming a forearm back across his windpipe. Shadow Man took the severed eyeball from his own mouth and shoved it between Dr. Huth’s teeth. His lips clamped shut by a callused palm, Huth could do nothing but whimper as the savage wound turns of duct tape around his head, sealing the eyeball inside.
While the scientist tried not to strangle on the mouthful, the monkey children rattled the cage’s mesh, mocking his predicament by inflating their cheeks with air and bulging and crossing their eyes.
From the foot of the gantry, the rhythmic chanting of the Gloomtowners resumed. Shaking and pushing the structure, the mob rolled the gantry away from the missile. Huth’s feet slipped off the edge of the platform’s floor, and his full weight dropped onto his upraised wrists. His muffled shriek of pain was followed by a raucous cheer from below. As he dangled from the nose cone, as the gantry continued to retreat from the launch pad, the elevator started its rapid descent. Ryan Cawdor and the monkey children dropped from view, abandoning the scientist to his fate.
Which he now realized was a twenty-second-century version of crucifixion.
He was being punished for his contributions to a better way of life, to freedom from hunger and illness, the eternal banes of humankind. He had offered his world the salvation of science and in return…
A terrible rumbling came from below.
It grew louder and louder, and as it did, the vibration set his guts shimmying and made the trapped eyeball quiver between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. With a blast of flesh-melting heat, and the deafening bellow of wide-open rocket motors, the missile leaped upward. The jolt of liftoff caused the eye to slip back into his throat, blocking his airway. Huth had no choice; he gulped it down whole.
As the missile climbed and climbed, engines roaring, his body buffeted against the missile, his arms felt as if they were about to tear free of his shoulder sockets and the swallowed eye rolled around in the pit of his belly like a cannonball.
DR. HUTH AWAKENED on his hands and knees, retching. The violent spasms seemed to start from the soles of his feet, rippling through all the muscles of his body, building a terrible momentum that peaked as they reached his throat. He dry-heaved, over and over. Long strands of bile trailed from his lips into the powdery red dirt beneath his face.
When the convulsions finally subsided, he slumped onto his side. Disoriented and confused, Huth clung like a drowning man to his only clear memory. Moments ago, he had been in the Totality Concept’s trans-reality laboratory. He had been there when the missile he had already sent across to Shadow World, a missile meant to put a recon satellite in orbit, had nosed instead back to his Earth, back through the shimmering lips of the passageway, its gigantic rocket motors thundering.
How that singular horror had come to pass, he had no way of knowing, but certainly the goal of firing the missile back through the corridor had been to destroy the connection between parallel worlds. Given the fuel capacity of the missile, and the fuel’s volatility, there was every reason to expect the strategy had worked.
Huth had a much less distinct recollection of being sucked through the reality portal in the backwash from the rocket’s exhaust, like a dry leaf caught in a whirlwind. That memory was jumbled with a nightmare of horrible punishment and death. Thinking about it made his mind wheel violently, so he forced himself to stop and pushed up on an elbow.
He was surrounded by an open space that stretched unbroken to the horizon in all directions. The sudden absence of physical boundaries, of human-scale walls and ceilings, filled him with heart-pounding panic, but he resisted the urge to bury his head under his arms.
Above him, the dome of the cloudless sky was still tinged with the rose-pink of dawn. The sparkling air felt strangely light in his lungs, and so dry it tickled inside his nostrils. He sat near the edge of a broad, flat table of rock the color of dried blood, elevated above the surrounding plain by several hundred feet.
The mobile missile gantry was nowhere in sight. Also missing were the five explorers who had preceded him through the passage. If this was Deathlands, and he had no reason to doubt that it wasn’t, he had been deposited in a different spot, perhaps near the original landing site, perhaps not. Huth could only surmise that either the missile’s full-power reentry into the passage or its subsequent explosion at the heart of the Totality Concept complex had distorted the shape of the reality corridor, shifting its terminus at this end.
Huth rose stiffly to his feet and took stock of himself. The left sleeve of his lab coat was fire-blackened from cuff to elbow, but he wasn’t bleeding anywhere and he had no apparent broken bones. He patted his pocket and was relieved to find the instruments he’d slipped into it moments before the disaster. Both the microcomputer, which was the size of a playing card, and an equally small electron microscope seemed to have made the journey intact. The other scientific tool he’d brought along he carried locked away in his brain, and that was the Twenty-five Theories, which linked all human knowledge. With just these three artifacts, he was confident that he could reconstruct most of the advanced technology of his Earth.
Though the timing of the crossing had been accidental, Huth had been on the verge of departing his reality, with or without FIVE’s approval. The most recent computer projections gave nine-to-one odds that the predicted mass die-off of humanity would occur within the next three months. Based on past experience with the CEOs, he couldn’t be one hundred percent certain that they would let him use his own invention to escape. That decision had been taken out of FIVE’s hands, and thanks to what he carried in his pocket and brain, Huth was in a position to become the most powerful man in the history of either Earth—as he saw it, a combination of Leonardo da Vinci, John D. Rockefeller and Joseph Stalin.
Huth stepped to the edge of the deeply rilled, red rock mesa. There were more mesas in the distance on the other side of a wide desert plain, and far behind those table rocks loomed a range of snowcapped mountains. Bisecting the plain were remnants of a prenukecaust highway, a ribbon-straight ghost of four-lane interstate. Lying across the old highway at odd intervals were great, tilted slabs—the fractured remains of fallen overpasses. At the horizon line to the northwest, the sun glared off something shiny. A body of water, perhaps. If the passageway’s terminus hadn’t shifted very far, it occurred to him that it might even be the remains of the Great Salt Lake.
As he continued to scan the landscape below, Huth saw white smoke rising in a thin column in the dead still air, indicating a human presence, if not a settlement of some sort, not more than ten miles away.
The scientist let out a whoop and celebrated his good fortune by dancing an ungainly jig. Then he carefully boulder hopped down a steep chute that led to the foot of the mesa, and once there, immediately headed across the plain for the ancient roadway.
Up close there wasn’t much left of it.
Caustic rains had reduced the asphalt to sand, and had badly pocked the concrete layer beneath. Small, delicate white flowers with bright yellow centers grew here and there along the edge of the highway, sprouting from depressions where water and nutrients accumulated.
Huth picked one of the little daisies and gingerly nibbled at the white petals. Their explosive bitterness made him gasp. He spit them out with a curse, then groaned as the vile taste set him to dry-heaving again.
Pale and shaken, he trudged on toward the distant smoke plume. The only sounds were the scrape of his shoe soles on the asphalt sand and the wheeze of his breathing. The day’s building heat made sweat ooze from his forehead. In the flat, shimmering distance lay the first of the dropped overpasses; he made slow but steady progress toward the jumble of concrete slabs.
When Huth first caught wind of the rank, feral odor, he didn’t know what to make of it, except that it wasn’t coming from him. As he continued walking, the smell got worse. Much worse. Only when the pack of robbers started popping up on either side of the ruined road did he understand the meaning of the noxious stench, and by then it was too late to run.
The dirt-caked, tangle-bearded bandits had been lying in wait in shallow hides they’d hacked into the desert hardpan. Their clothes consisted of countless layers of greasy rags; their boots were repaired with overlapping windings of strips cut from plastic bags. They carried battered black-powder shotguns and revolvers, rusting machetes and nail-studded wooden clubs.
As the robbers encircled him and closed in, the huge man who appeared to be the leader confronted him, toe to toe. He bore spiral-shaped brands on his cheeks and forehead. The angry welts of scar tissue looked like the tracks of some parasitic worm burrowing just under the skin. Below a mustache matted with dried saliva, Huth saw the snaggle stumps of yellow-brown teeth. The tip of the man’s wide nose bore a sparse tuft of black bristle, half an inch long.
“Good morning to you,” the scientist said, trying not to show his terror, and failing miserably. “I just arrived here from—”
Without warning, someone booted Huth in the buttocks so hard that his feet left the ground, so hard that his legs went numb and his knees buckled under him when he crash-landed. The bristle-nosed robber reached down and grabbed him by the collar, hauled him upright, then punched him straight in the face, breaking his nose and knocking him unconscious.
Huth came to with a moan as the big man kicked him in the ribs.
“What are these?” Bristle-nose demanded, holding a pair of small, flat objects in front of the scientist’s bloodied face.
“No, please,” Huth gasped, “those are my scientific instruments. Give them back. You can’t operate them. They are of absolutely no use to you.”
“He’s bossin’ me,” Bristle-nose said to the others as he cocked back his massive fist. “This dimmie bastard’s bossin’ me….”
Huth saw another short, straight punch coming at him, but there was nothing he could do about it. At the impact, as his head snapped back, something cracked. A lance of white-hot pain shot through his upper jaw, and his mouth was suddenly littered with sharp shards. In a gob of fresh blood, he spit out the remains of his two upper front teeth.
While Huth thrashed and bled, Bristle-nose showed off his booty. “Looks like predark gear to me,” he said. “Got to be worth a spoon or two of jolt over in Byram ville.”
With that, the big robber turned and started off in the direction of the smoke. The other bandits quickly stripped off the unprotesting scientist’s shoes and pants, leaving their victim his blood-sprayed and scorched lab coat and his tattered, gray-tinged underwear and socks.
Huth waited a long time before he risked uncoiling from a fetal position in the dirt. And he didn’t start walking again until the sun was high overhead. Hobbling slowly toward the shade of the nearest fallen highway overpass, he looked like the survivor of a train wreck. Blood had dried purple black all down the front of his lab coat. He couldn’t breathe through his swollen nose, and every time he sucked air through his mouth, electric needles of pain stabbed into the exposed nerves of his emptied tooth sockets.
As he stumbled along, he wept over the loss of his irreplaceable instruments, his permanent disfigurement and the unspeakable cruelty of fate. He was still sobbing when he reached the collapsed overpass. What he saw there put his suffering—and his predicament—in a new perspective.
At the foot of the largest block of concrete sat a line of sun-bleached human skeletons. He counted fourteen of them, all identically posed, their backs leaning against the block, elbows resting on raised kneecaps. Some were adults, some were small children, some still had isolated patches of hair on their massively caved-in skulls. A couple of feet above the row of drop-jaw grins, someone had chiseled three tall, spindly words into the eroded concrete.
Welkum Too Deflanz.
Chapter One
Fifteen days after a massive explosion destroyed the upper floors of the Totality Concept complex, Dredda Otis Trask stood naked and alone in a windowless stainless-steel room. The small, unfurnished chamber had two doors, both heavily gasketed and airtight. A warm wetness trickled down the insides of her thighs. Not blood, but the remnants of a clear surgical lubricant, melted by her body heat. The CEO of Omnico, one of the most powerful people on the planet, had just had her womb stripped of all its eggs.
In itself, there was nothing unusual about the procedure. On her world, the in-vitro-fertilized eggs of the executive class were routinely carried to term by surrogate mothers conscripted from the ranks of the white collars.
Nor was it strange that Dredda Otis Trask had chosen to have the extraction performed in the secure, private facilities of her own global conglomerate. But Omnico’s CEO hadn’t surrendered all her potential offspring to a test tube merely for the sake of convenience. Given the nature of the dangerous experimental treatment she was about to undertake, it was a necessary precaution.
Above Dredda’s head on a wall bracket was a vidcam, its op light glowing ruby red. A team of faceless, nameless strangers was observing her through the fish-eye lens.
“Please stand beneath the ceiling nozzles,” said a voice through the vidcam’s speaker.
When Dredda stepped over the center-sloping floor’s single drain, the shower spray commenced. The hot water that enveloped her was followed by foaming, pea-green jets of bactericide. After she had rinsed off the foam, vents along the base of the walls blasted her with heated air, drying her to the point of itchiness in a matter of seconds. As she raked her static-charged, auburn hair back behind her ears, an electronic lock snicked and the exit door popped outward a foot.
Through the tiny speaker, the voice said, “Please proceed to Level Three containment.”
Dredda immediately moved into the well-lit, polished metal hallway, which was also windowless. She could have touched the ceiling with a raised hand, and the corridor was so narrow it wouldn’t permit the full spread of her arms. The air hung heavy with a mist of disinfectant that stung the back of her throat. Auto-tracking vidcams mounted at intervals along the ceiling followed her barefoot progress to the next chamber, which was even smaller.
The bioengineering facility’s hazard-containment system consisted of a series of concentric, hermetically sealed, metal enclosures. The more dangerous the biological materials, the smaller the enclosure in which they were stored. Level One’s barrier, which took up an entire subfloor of the Omnico skyscraper, encompassed containment Levels Two through Four, Level Two encompassed Three and Four, and so on. Each of the interiors was reverse-pressurized so that if a seal failure occurred, external air would rush in, keeping contaminants from escaping to the next level.
When she entered the tiny room, the airtight door closed behind her. Sheets of tempered glass covered the walls, ceiling and floor; behind the glass were banks of five-foot-long light tubes. Yet another automated surveillance camera stood watch over her.
“Please put on the goggles hanging on the hook in front of you,” the voice told her.
After Dredda donned the red-lensed eye protectors, there was a loud thunk, and the surrounding lights all came on at once. The intense ultraviolet bombardment lasted fifteen minutes, during which she was directed by the voice to assume various awkward positions that allowed the germ-killing radiation to reach otherwise hidden surfaces. When the bank of lights finally thunked off, she was told to pull on the pair of plastifoil slippers that waited for her by the exit door.
“You may now proceed to Level Four,” the voice said.
The straight steel corridor leading to Level Four had a narrow, bunker-slit window along one wall. Through the three layers of thick glass, Dredda could see dozens of biotech workers in lemon-yellow hazard suits with oxygen canisters strapped to their backs. Because of the glare of the overhead lights off the hoods’ visor plates, she couldn’t see the workers’ faces. And they seemed too preoccupied with their cluttered lab tables and banks of electronic machinery to notice her passing. The corridor ended in a circular bulkhead door, which stood slightly ajar.
The brightly lit Level Four operating suite was the tiniest of the nested defensive boxes—the most deadly and contagious microbial environment on the planet. The hollow steel cylinder was so narrow that the single bed it contained nearly spanned its diameter. On the walls opposite the sides and head of the bed were rows of triple-laminated glass portholes. Directly below the ob ports, from similar heavily gasketed circular openings, rubberized, liver-colored gauntlets hung down in pairs. Shelves packed with medical supplies and equipment ringed all but the foot of the bed.
At the sight of the cramped enclosure, Dredda experienced sudden difficulty in breathing. The observers noted her distress.
“Your anxiety is only natural,” the voice said in a reassuring tone. “But it is best to continue without delay. Please climb onto the bed, and we will make you more comfortable as quickly as possible.”
Dredda forced herself to crawl forward. The door automatically shut and sealed behind her. As she lay back on the bed, she saw movement through all of the portholes. Technicians in biohazard suits took up positions along the outside of the cylinder and proceeded to thrust their arms into the gauntlets, which allowed them to reach over the bed, more than halfway across her body. All those moving arms made the chamber seem even smaller. And no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to fill more than the top third of her lungs.
To try to calm herself, the CEO focused on her own reflection in the curve of the ceiling. She strained to make out the details of her face, but the brushed metal turned her features into an unrecognizable blur—as if who and what she had been for her twenty-six years had already been erased.
Meanwhile, the pairs of gauntleted hands worked with practiced precision, strapping her down at the chest, waist and knees. Once she was tightly secured to the mattress, the anonymous fingers crawled over her, jabbing the needles for intravenous lines into her arms and inserting a catheter into her bladder. They applied a liquid adhesive to her skin and attached life-signs sensors and neuromuscular stimulators. Finally, gloved hands at the head of the chamber slipped an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth.
Dredda gulped at the hiss of oxygen, which was mixed with a quick-acting sedative gas. It also carried a massive dose of bioengineered virus. After that first deep breath, there was no question of going back. She gladly surrendered to the calm that settled over her.
You are a very brave girl.
Dredda felt hot blood rush to her face and neck. She recognized her father’s voice. It hadn’t come through the operating suite’s intercom speaker; it didn’t exist anywhere outside her mind. Regis Otis Trask, the former CEO of Omnico, had been dead for four years.
Whenever her father had said those words to her, and he’d had the opportunity to say them often, what he’d meant was that she was very brave for a girl. Brave considering that because of her sex, she possessed relatively limited physical and mental strength and endurance. Though she had long understood the reasons for her father’s patronizing attitude, that had never made it any less painful or infuriating.
Dredda’s personal abilities and achievements had very little to do with the power she currently wielded over the lives of tens of billions of human beings. She had inherited her father’s position at the top of the conglomerate’s executive hierarchy, and she had an army of highly capable, highly motivated defenders dedicated to keeping her there. For as long as she could remember, everyone she encountered had looked past her, or through her, and had seen only her father’s awesome legacy.
But Dredda was very much the daughter of Regis Otis Trask. She shared his thirst for conquest and empire, and the need to burn her name deep into the pages of history, desires she could never satisfy as caretaker of a bureaucratic monolith on a dying planet.
For months, preparations had been under way for her unannounced, permanent departure to Shadow World. In secret, Omnico’s top scientists had duplicated the Totality Concept’s reality-jumping technology, and had managed to vastly improve upon it. The transfer of soldiers and matériel only awaited the successful completion of her Level Four treatment, which for security reasons had been postponed until the last possible moment.
Dredda had committed herself to the irreversible genetic procedure shortly after the CEOs’ joint interrogation of the prisoner from Shadow World. The man called Ryan Cawdor had described his Earth as a place of chaos, of perpetual bloody turmoil. Social control did exist, but only in confined areas called baronies, and it was maintained by brute power.
Male power.
To cross over to Shadow World unprepared for that fact would have meant the surrender of everything Dredda had, of everything she had ever dreamed of.
Could Alexander the Great have succeeded if he had been a woman? Could Cortez? Or Napoleon? Her own Earth’s history said no. In times of internal strife, during periods of conquest, males only respected other males, only feared other males. These were the lessons of Shadow World, as well. If Dredda failed to instill absolute terror in her adversaries on the parallel Earth, she knew her relatively small expeditionary force could not prevail.
And she not only had Shadow World males to contend with, but those in her own support units, as well. In a different reality, the old urges of one sex to dominate the other would surely resurface. The selective subordination and subjugation of females was bound to follow. Such an outcome was unacceptable to Dredda Otis Trask.
As her father had so often said, “Chains are meant for other people.”
It might well have been the Trask family motto.
Dredda became aware of a ringing in her ears, the first sign of the spread of the genetically modified virus. Almost immediately, her body temperature began to rise, and as it climbed, the sedation was increased. Long before the infection’s peak, she slipped quietly into a drug-induced coma. She didn’t feel the plastic tube slide down her airway or hear the rhythmic hiss of the respirator begin.
The tailored virus carried a limited set of genetic instructions, which as it replicated, it transmitted to all her cells. These instructions permanently altered the chemistry of her body, reinitiating long dormant physical processes, reactivating the growth plates in the bones of her hips, legs, back, shoulders and arms. Under their new instructions, the targeted cells began rapid, controlled division. As her bones enlarged, cell layer by cell layer, they ached as if they had been shattered by sledgehammers; as they enlarged, the attached sinews, muscles and cartilage stretched to the splitting point. Nerve cells began multiplying in specific locations, as well, which only magnified the intensity of the skeletal pain. The transformation process was so agonizing that it required anesthetic narcosis—early test subjects who were fully conscious had died from the pain within a matter of hours.
Safe in a deep coma, Dredda felt nothing. She drifted in darkness while her body metamorphosed in its stainless-steel cocoon.
Inside and outside the chamber, the atmosphere was anything but tranquil. Biotech teams in three shifts saw to her considerable life-support needs around the clock. Her normal daily calorie intake was quadrupled, and she received constant electrical stimulation of new nerves and growing muscles.
Early on the morning of the ninth day, sedation was terminated. By 10:00 a.m. Dredda was breathing without a respirator. At 1:00 p.m. she opened her eyes. She was still securely strapped to the bed. Empty gauntlets hung flaccidly from the walls.
“How are you feeling?” said the voice through the intercom.
“I hurt,” she said, her throat hoarse from the respirator tube. “I hurt everywhere.”
“That is entirely normal, I assure you. We’re going to release the restraints now. You need to start moving your arms and legs.”
Technicians slipped into gauntlets on both sides of the chamber. Their gloved hands unfastened the straps, which slithered off her. When she sat up, she nearly bumped her head on the chamber’s low ceiling.
“Please be careful,” the voice warned. “You have grown four inches. You are now five feet eleven inches tall. You have gained sixty-three pounds.”
Dredda looked down at herself. Even though she had known more or less what to expect from computer-morphed projections, she recoiled. Her breasts were still there, and the same size and shape, but they looked smaller, flatter because of the expansion of her chest in bone and muscle. The new muscle mass was smooth, quick, not corded or bulked up. Like her breasts, her hips had remained the same size, but they now looked narrow relative to the increased span of her shoulders.
She ran her fingertips over her lips and chin and was relieved to find no sprouting of coarse facial hair. Although her jaw seemed a little heavier, as did her cheekbones and brow, there was no other apparent external masculinization. She had changed into a very tall, very athletic looking female, the tallest, most athletic female the limitations of her existing genetics could produce. Of course, that was just the tip of the iceberg as far as the changes went.
Dredda flexed her right bicep and, despite a twinge of pain in her elbow, was momentarily transfixed by its unfamiliar bulge.
“Based on the previous experiments,” the voice told her, “your lean-muscle mass should continue to increase slightly for a more few days. The new neural connections are already complete, as is bone growth. You aren’t going to get any taller.
“As you know, some experimental subjects, post-transformation, have displayed outbursts of extreme violence. We have only had combat simulations to work from, but it appears that spending long periods of time in a battlesuit under stress aggravates the problem. If you notice any loss of emotional control, you must start injecting yourself with antipsychotic drugs from the battlesuit medikits at once.”
“What are their side effects?”
“Reduced reaction time and increased fatigue.”
“But that would completely defeat the purpose of the procedure!” Dredda exploded.
The voice didn’t respond.
“If I start dosing myself with these drugs, will I have to take them permanently?”
“I’m sorry, but that is impossible to predict,” the whitecoat told her. “No one knows the long-term consequences of the genetic treatment you have been subjected to.”
The slowly simmering anger that had always been part of Dredda’s consciousness was now paired with an entirely different level of agitation, tangible like a hairy-legged insect buzzing, bouncing off the insides of her internal organs. Everything was taking way too long.
“Unseal the door,” she said.
The airlock remained shut, and the faceless whitecoat talked faster. As he spoke, his gauntleted hands made emphatic gestures above her head. “The viral agent we’ve used is extremely infectious and prone to rapid mutation and genetic recombination with other, potentially lethal life-forms. Understandably, we are very concerned about its containment. We strongly recommend that you spend another three days in Level Four quarantine to make sure it has all passed out of your system.”
The other conglomerates that made up FIVE knew nothing of this lab’s existence, nor were they aware of the genetic-engineering project that Dredda had made herself part of. All research connected to trans-reality and bioweapon technology was subject to the terms of FIVE’s founding treaty—only to be pursued as a joint venture. If the alliance got wind of what she was up to, they would turn on Omnico and subject it to a combined military attack that would make her escape to Shadow World impossible.
Moving in a blur, Dredda grabbed one of the whitecoat’s gloved wrists. He tried to pull back, but she held him fast, and as she did, she applied pressure to the slender bones on the back of his hand with her thumb. “Delay of any kind is unacceptable,” she told him.
“I understand your impatience—just do not rip the glove. You must not break the Level Four containment. If you relax for a moment, everything will be fine.”
The other gauntlets rapidly emptied as biotech workers moved out of her reach.
“Let me out of here now.”
“Please, listen to reason….”
There was no reason but hers, no need but hers. Under the ball of her thumb, the small bones snapped like dry twigs. A piercing scream burst through the intercom.
“Open the door!” she shouted. Her booming voice made the walls of the steel chamber vibrate.
Seconds later, the airlock door popped open and she was free.
Chapter Two
Ryan Cawdor stepped over an exposed tree root, slick, dark and as big as a human corpse sprawled across his path. A profusion of bare roots laced the winding trail and made the footing treacherous. The dim light didn’t help matters, either. Though it was high noon, everything was cloaked in shadow, thanks to the dense canopy overhead and the seemingly endless groves of black-barked trees.
In all his travels, he had never seen this type of rad-mutated oak before. Its wood was like iron; hand axes bounced off of it, hardly making a dent. The bark and leaves were chem-rain resistant, as were the parasitic strangler vines that spiraled up trunks and limbs to reach the sunlight.
The forest’s canopy had protected Ryan and his companions from the searing downpours they had endured since their last mat-trans jump, several days earlier. The intense storm activity of the past forty-eight hours had forced them to take shelter in a cave. From the safety of its entrance, they had winced at sizzling nearby lightning strikes and watched methane ice hail, as blue as robin’s eggs and just as big, pound the earth. In scattered heaps, the chem ice had steamed for hours before it finally melted away.
If the local trees and vines had somehow adapted to survive the caustic rains, other types of foliage had not. There was no ground cover to speak of around the trunks, just slippery piles of fallen, blade-shaped leaves that rustled underfoot.
The passing storm front had left the air extremely hot and punishingly humid—it felt equatorial to Ryan. The weather was the only clue where he and the companions had materialized. The cloud cover and forest canopy had made it impossible for them to orient using the stars.
As he rounded a tight bend, he saw the group’s pointman frozen like a bird dog fifty feet ahead. Ryan swung to hip height the scoped Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle he carried. Jak Lauren, his pale skin and lank white hair almost luminous in the forest’s half-light, held up a hand, indicating caution. Jak was a man of few words. Fiercely loyal, without an ounce of guile or deceit, he was a true wild child of Deathlands. Jak’s weapon, a battle-scarred .357 Magnum Colt Python, remained in its holster. Whatever he’d found, there was no immediate danger.
“Cook fire,” Jak said softly as Ryan stepped up, his albino eyes as red as rubies. He raised a hand to point downslope. “There…”
Ryan caught the faintest smell of woodsmoke, filtering up the winding trail through the forest. It was the first sign of another human presence since the mat-trans jump.
It smelled delicious.
For three days Ryan and his companions had been on starvation rations of mutie rattlesnake jerky and tepid water. The forest’s lack of undergrowth meant there was no ground-dwelling large or small game for them to hunt. During the day, they had caught a few glimpses of little creatures darting about high in the branches, but the dense canopy made shooting at them a waste of ammo. And at night it was so black they couldn’t see their own feet.
Though all their bellies rumbled, no one had complained.
A tall, skinny man, dressed in a dusty frock coat and tall boots, moved up the trail and closed ranks with Ryan and Jak.
Leaning on his silver-handled walking stick, Doc Tanner sniffed at the air, and said, “Dear friends, it would seem that Providence has seen fit to smile upon us once more.” He inhaled again, savoring the aroma. “Somewhere below, the groaning board is piled high. Broiled flesh of some sort, I would venture.”
Though Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner appeared to be a well-preserved sixty, chronologically he was four times that old. The Harvard-and-Oxford-educated man was the first human time traveler, albeit an unwilling one. He had been ripped from the loving embrace of his family in 1896, and drawn one hundred years into the future by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. The twentieth-century scientists quickly tired of Tanner’s ingratitude, truculence and general unpleasantness. Shortly before skydark, to rid themselves of the troublemaker, they had hurled him forward in time. In so doing, they had inadvertently saved him from the nukecaust that scoured away their civilization. Though Doc sometimes rambled in speech and broke into tears for no apparent reason, a consequence of his life’s overload of trauma and tragedy, this day he was as sharp as the point of the steel blade hidden in his ebony stick.
A stocky black woman dressed in baggy camo BDU pants and a sleeveless gray T-shirt stepped up behind Tanner. Her hair hung down in beaded plaits. “Smells like somebody’s had themselves a hearty breakfast,” she said.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth had also time-traveled, but in a much different fashion than her Victorian colleague. After a life-threatening reaction to anesthetic, she had been cryogenically preserved just prior to the all-out U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange of January 20, 2001. She had slept in the land of the dead for a century, until revived by Ryan and the companions. Mildred’s weapon of choice was a Czech ZKR 551 target pistol, the same gun she’d used to win a silver medal in the last-ever Olympic Games.
“Whatever it is, it’s making my mouth water,” said the boy following close on Mildred’s heels. At age twelve, Ryan’s son, Dean, was already growing tall and straight like his father.
“Dear child, the human nose is by no means an infallible instrument,” Doc cautioned as the last two members of the group—a tall, red-haired woman, and the rear guard, a short, bespectacled man in a fedora—moved up the trail to join them. “What we Homo sapiens take for sweet succulence might well be the effluvium of some wayfarer not unlike ourselves. Someone whose grim misfortune was to be caught out in last night’s chain lightning. That hell-struck sir or madam could be down there somewhere, quietly smoldering.”
Dean made a disgusted face.
“Or it could be a trap,” offered the leggy, green-eyed redhead. Because of the sweltering heat, Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s lover and soul mate, had taken off her long fur coat and tied the arms around her slender waist. The only visible effect of the radiation-induced mutations that skydark had inserted into Krysty’s family tree was the prehensile ability of her long hair, which reacted to stress like a barometer. Her hair now hung in loose coils, indicating concern but not apprehension.
“Cook smoke could be the bait,” agreed John Barrymore Dix, aka the Armorer. Ryan and J.B. shared a bond of blood that went back many years, to their wild and woolly days with the Trader, the legendary Deathlands entrepreneur and road warrior. J.B. rested the barrel of his well-worn Smith & Wesson M-4000 12-gauge pump gun on his shoulder and tipped his sweat-stained hat back on his head. “In a place like this,” he said, pausing to thumb his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose, “with no game to shoot, nothing growing to eat, a scent trail could draw victims from a long ways off.”
Though Ryan respected J.B.’s and Krysty’s trail savvy, he didn’t consider an ambush likely. There had been no sign of stickies or cannies. No grisly heaps of red bones and bloody rags strewed about. Stickies and cannies, Deathlands most murderous, subhuman residents, hunted in packs, like wolves, seeking out norms—nonmutated humans—and muties alike, and failing that, they would prey on the weakest of their own kind. The condition of the path told Ryan there wasn’t much foot traffic, certainly not enough to support the appetite of a large predator, or group of predators.
“Trap or no trap,” he told the companions, “we’ve got to follow the cook smoke, or we’re going to starve in this bastard forest.” He slung the Steyr and unholstered his SIG-Sauer P-226 pistol. “Triple red, everybody,” he said. “Dean, middle of the file.”
The boy didn’t protest his position in the column, but watched with undisguised envy as Doc drew a massive revolver from the front of his frock coat. The gold-engraved LeMat was a Civil War relic. It fired nine .44-caliber lead balls through a six-and-one-half-inch top barrel. A second, shorter, big-bore barrel hung beneath the first, chambered for a single scattergun load of “blue whistlers”—odd bits of scrap metal and glass that added up to close-range mayhem. Dean left his own weapon, a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power, buckled down in its holster. He was under standing orders from his father not to draw the weapon unless they came under direct attack, and not to shoot unless he had a clear lane of fire.
With Ryan in the lead, the companions headed downslope. If anything, as they descended the winding trail, the canopy became more dense, and the air more humid. As Ryan rounded a turn, harsh sunlight backlit the groves of oaks ahead. Through the trees came the sounds of high-pitched, chattering speech and the rustle of movement. The one-eyed man dropped the blaster’s safety and pushed on.
No command to the rear was necessary.
The companions reacted as one, spacing out along the path as they continued to advance. They dropped to their bellies and crawled the last few feet to the edge of the forest.
The clearing before them bordered on a sluggishly moving green river fifty yards wide. The activity was down by the water’s edge. A group of three dozen people, men, women and children, all with straight black hair and skin the color of cinnamon bark, were tending thick, hand-braided ropes that stretched back from the river almost to the trees. The children were naked; the men and women wore short kilts.
Inbreeding was common in Deathlands’s isolated, primitive communities. Noting the uniform distribution of low foreheads and underslung jaws, Ryan decided that these folks had been at it for a very long time.
Back from the river’s muddy bank, nestled in the protection of the ironwood canopy, stood a ragged row of translucent yellow shacks made of tanned hide or skin that was stretched and tied over curving supports that looked like gigantic rib bones. Cooking pits lined with red hot coals had been dug in the soft earth. Whatever food had been roasted over them earlier had already been polished off.
Jak tersely summed up the cinnamon people’s armament. “No blasters, just knives.”
Ryan nodded. Their weaponry consisted of bows and arrows, spears, knives and short swords. And the edged weapons weren’t made of metal, or even flint. To Ryan the blades looked like bone. Serrated bone. Given the twentieth-century firepower he and the companions carried, the villagers presented no real threat.
The breeze shifted suddenly, swirling along the bank. Cook fire odors were overpowered by a terrific stench.
“Smells like dead fish,” Dean choked. “Tons of dead fish.”
“Ugh, I just lost my appetite,” Mildred said.
“Don’t trouble yourself over that, my dear,” Doc stated pleasantly. “If past is prologue, it will return to you shortly, and tenfold…”
At one time, Ryan would have expected the black woman to go ballistic over the snide remark. Not because she was the least bit sensitive about her weight, which was appropriate for her body type, but because of the outrageous presumption that being a woman, she should have been sensitive about her weight. Mildred had learned to fight fire with fire when it came to dealing with the bony old codger’s needling.
“And how’s the tapeworm doing today, Doc?” Mildred asked back sweetly.
Ryan pushed to his feet. “Come on, let’s introduce ourselves,” he said. “Stay alert. Watch the flanks.”
The companions emerged from the forest, fanning out with weapons up and ready. The river people were startled at first, but they said nothing. None of them made a move to approach or to retreat from the armed intruders. After a moment or two of standoff, the villagers surprised Ryan and the others by pointedly turning their backs on them, and refocusing their attention on the murky river and their braided ropes, each of which was strong enough to tow a war wagon.
When Ryan advanced and opened his mouth to speak, a man wearing a translucent fish-skin vest held up a hand for silence. There was a warning in his extremely close-set black eyes. He pointed at the river, which silt and algae had turned the color of pea soup. Stretched across its width were floats made of clusters of blue plastic antifreeze jugs, tied together by their handles. The villagers had a fishing net out.
Dean stepped over to the bank for a better look. As quick as a cat, the boy jumped back from the river’s edge.
Ryan swung up his 9 mm blaster in a two-handed grip. Over its sights, twenty feet from shore, he saw a swirl, like water sheeting over a great boulder just under surface. Then a five-foot-long bone blade, like a dirty yellow, two-handed broadsword, slashed up through the surface. It gleamed for an instant, then disappeared beneath the murky flow. Ryan held his fire, as did J.B., who had his scattergun hip-braced and ready to roar.
“Fireblast!” the Armorer sputtered. “What the hell was that?”
“Shades of King Arthur and the Lady in the Lake!” Doc exclaimed.
“King who?” J.B. said.
Ignoring the question, Doc went on, “In this case, Excalibur appears sadly the worse for wear.”
Before the companions could unpuzzle Tanner’s remarks, the strings of blue net floats jerked violently, then skittered across the water like a flock of leg-snared waterfowl. One by one, the clusters of antifreeze jugs glugged under the surface…and stayed there, trembling in the current.
Whatever it was, it was caught fast.
The villagers leaped to their ropes and pulled them taut, their bare feet sliding in the mud. Only when the creature swam up to the surface and began to thrash midriver, rolling and wrapping itself in the fishnet, did Ryan realize how big it was. The brown-backed fish was easily thirty feet long. Its great tail slapped at the water as it momentarily turned belly up.
Before the river beast could get its bearings, the villagers began to draw in the net. Men, women and children hauled for all they were worth, their legs and backs straining. As they retreated from the waterline with the net in tow, they made the great fish roll over and over, further entangling itself.
The gargantuan mutated catfish flopped onto its belly on the edge of the bank, showering mud in all directions. Its mouth gaped. The gigantic lips looked plump and rubbery and almost human, as did the pale tongue. Its eyes, which were set far apart on a broad, flat skull wider than a man was tall, radiated a terrible fury. The ventral and dorsal fins were extended through the mesh, as were their cruel serrated spines. The cruelest of all stood atop its back like a hellship’s mast.
Unable to pull the fish any farther onto shore, the villagers secured the free ends of their ropes around the tree trunks at the edge of the clearing. One of the men cautiously approached the animal. He walked stiffly, his head lowered, shoulders slumped, obviously very much afraid. Behind him, a pair of village women began to wail and cry and tear at their own hair.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” J.B. said out of the corner of his mouth. “Why don’t they stop that guy? What the blazes is going on?”
“A chillin’,” Jak said.
Ryan sensed it, too. Not just danger, but death.
The ropes groaned as the great fish lunged against the net. With a crack like a pistol shot, the line at its head parted in the middle, one end sailing high into the trees. Before the man standing beside the beast could retreat, it had him. Whipping its head sideways, the fish sank the point of a ventral spine into his chest, then it rolled on top of him. With impacts that shook the ground, it flopped, using its tremendous weight to pound the man and the impaling spine into the soft mud.
The screaming villagers grabbed the loose end of rope and drew it tight, then they angled the other lines until the fish was once again pinned flat on its belly.
Too late.
Skewered on the spine was a muddy, bloody rag doll, the head lolling backward on a broken neck. Three men carefully slid the body off the bone broad sword and laid it down gently on the bank a safe distance away. A handful of villagers, including the wailing women, knelt beside the corpse, sobbing. With cupped hands they dripped river water on the body, tenderly washing the mud and blood from the face and chest.
“Ugly way to croak,” Jak spit.
“Let’s make sure nobody else gets nailed by that rad blasted thing,” Ryan said.
The companions quickly formed a firing squad beside the fish’s head. But before they could shoot, the man in the fish-skin vest jumped in front of the raised muzzles, waving his hands. “No, no!” he shouted at them. “No lead! The metal will put a curse on the meat.”
With that, the village leader scrambled onto the fish’s head, using the net’s mesh for hand and footholds. He was joined by another man who carried an ironwood club and a three-foot-long bone sword. The leader took the sword and knelt down, feeling around on the fish’s forehead with his fingertips.
“What’s he doing?” Dean asked.
“He’s looking for the seam in the skull,” Ryan replied. “A weak spot in the bone.”
The village leader found what he was searching for. He positioned the sword point against the skull, dropped his hands below the skin-wrapped grip and nodded to the second man, who raised the club and struck the pommel of the sword a mighty blow. The impact echoed sharply off the riverbank’s trees, and the serrated blade sank in a foot.
The great fish didn’t seem to notice.
But when the man dealt it a second blow, driving the sword in another foot, the animal went berserk, humping up and heaving its body against the net, its long, fleshy whiskers curling and cracking like bullwhips. The man struck again with the club before the fish could throw them off. On the third whack, the blade slipped in to the hilt, the mutie catfish’s eyes went dead, and its entire length began to quiver.
The villagers sent up a cheer and began preparations for the butchering. After untangling the net, several of the strongest men pried open its jaws, propping them wide apart with an ironwood stake sharpened at both ends. One of the men crawled inside the yawning mouth. Using the tip of his knife, he cut the lining of the throat away from the surrounding bone and muscle, and then disappeared into the dark cavity of its body. After a few minutes passed, he stepped out of the mouth, covered in blood and pulling the free end of the throat lining behind him.
The other villagers joined in and they began draging the guts out of the catfish, five feet at a time. As they gave the empty, pale gray tube of muscle the heave-ho, it stretched down to the size of a man’s arm. On the third pull, the tube caught on the far side of the stake. Redoubling their efforts, the villagers managed to free it.
The cause of the hang-up popped out onto the mud.
Inside the opaque gut lining was a blue-dark bulge easily as long as a man.
“Is it a person?” Dean asked, awed. “It looks like a person!”
The village leader immediately stopped the proceedings and using a borrowed sword, hacked through the gut tube in a single swipe. Covered in slime, a hairless, earless, mottled blue head peeped out. Its gaping jaws were lined with rows of needlelike teeth, its beady eyes had been turned the color of milk by the fish’s corrosive digestive juices.
“Mutie eel,” Jak pronounced, matter-of-factly. “Big un.”
The eel’s jaws snapped shut like a bear trap.
It was blind, but it sure wasn’t dead.
The headman could have easily lopped off its head, but he just stared at it, sword at his side. The eel, sensing freedom, shot out of the fish’s gut, frantically sidewinding for the defenseless women and children clustered on the bank. The women and children could have scattered to safety, but they didn’t. They stood there. Waiting.
Whether the eel intended them harm or just wanted back in the river, Krysty reacted at once. Stepping between the onrushing animal and the innocents, she raised and fired her Model 640 Smith & Wesson. The .38-caliber slug hit the eel square in the head, knocking it down, but not out. It writhed in the mud, toothy jaws snapping. Krysty gingerly pinned the thick neck to the ground with her boot heel, leaving the tail end free to slap and churn. Kneeling down, she held the muzzle of the revolver against the side of its head and snapped the cap. The coup de grâce cratered the eel’s skull and sent a plume of blood, brains and bone fragments splashing into the river.
As Krysty straightened, the women and children encircled her, making cooing noises as they stroked the arms and hem of her fur coat.
“It’s okay, really, it’s okay,” she told them, carefully holding the blaster out of their reach. They wouldn’t be put off. They continued stroking the furry coat sleeves and cooing at her.
When things finally settled down, Ryan and the others retired to the shade of the forest’s edge to watch the rest of the butchering. The village men skinned back the hide at the tail and started hacking out great, foot-thick slabs of pale pink flesh. These were passed to the women, who skewered them on ironwood sticks and began char-roasting them over the open fires. The sweet aroma of blackened catfish set the companions’ empty bellies to gurgling.
After a few minutes, the headman walked over to where they sat. He carried an uncapped antifreeze jug, which he handed to Ryan. The one-eyed man sniffed the spout. “Whew!” he said. “That’s powerful stuff.”
“It’s brewed from the fruit of the strangler vine,” the village leader told him. “Drink and enjoy your-selves. After she has been served, the feast will begin.”
“Who’s ‘she’?” Krysty asked.
“Sirena,” the leader said. “She told us of your coming, of the great fish, of Chambo’s death on its spine and the eel alive in its gut. Sirena sees all, and knows all.”
“A doomie!” Dean exclaimed.
None of the others said a word. Ryan knew they were all thinking the same thing.
Bullshit.
Though doomies actually existed in Deathlands, the genuine article was as rare as a thirteen-year-old virgin. Real doomies were a unique race of humans, possibly mutated, possibly not. Each individual was gifted to a varying degree with the second sight, the ability to see past and future events. Usually, however, the folks claiming to have the doomie sight turned out to be con artists or coldheart chillers.
The companions watched as a floppy-breasted young woman carried a smoking hunk of fish past them on a carved bone platter. Escorted by the village leader, she disappeared into a hut at the end of the line.
Doc took the antifreeze jug from Ryan and tried a long swallow.
“By the Three Kennedys!” he croaked, wiping his streaming eyes and nose. “A ferment drawn straight from Satan’s piss pot!”
“That good, huh?” J.B. said, accepting the jug.
“Go easy,” Ryan warned.
After a single gasp-and-shiver-producing gulp, J.B. handed the joy juice to Krysty, who whiffed it, made a face and passed it on to Jak without tasting.
In contrast to the companions’ restraint, the male villagers hit their blue jugs hard, and the effects were immediate. Joined by their headman, they started singing, waving their arms and stamping their feet in the mud. Their tuneless song was as repetitive as it was nerve grating. And they directed it, and the accompanying rhythmic hip gyrations, toward their guests.
“We are rulers of the forest and the river,” they howled. “We chill the great beasts with their own bones. Our powerful and manly seed will live forever.”
“Now there’s a comforting thought,” Mildred muttered to herself.
At that point, another woman stepped forward and laid down a heaping platter of cooked fish before them. The companions used their bare hands to tear into the char-crusted and still scorching-hot meat.
“Tastes like free-range snake,” J.B. remarked around a full mouth. He paused to extract a thin fibrous strand from between his teeth. “A hell of a lot more parasites, though,” he said, flicking the three-inch serpentine of unchewable tissue into the forest.
The dinner bell ended the village men’s caterwauling. They took seats in the shade across from the companions and started to eat. The women and children sat behind them.
Partway through the feast, one of the men gave the leader a nudge, indicating the young woman waving at him from the doorway of the far hut. The headman, who had washed down the fish course with numerous gulps of strangler wine, rose unsteadily to his feet, and said, “Sirena has been fed. You will pay your respects to her, now.”
Ryan nodded. “It would be our pleasure.”
The village leader ushered them into the tiny hut that was occupied by a withered old woman. She sat in an inverted catfish skull, a rocking chair hollowed out and packed with an excelsior of dried vine fibers. Over her skinny shoulders, she wore a fish skin cape with a tall, spiky fishbone collar. In her hand she held a long bone pipe, which gave off the pungently sweet smell of herbal tobacco. Even in the dim light filtering through the translucent yellow walls and the haze of smoke, Ryan could see that Sirena’s pupils and irises were the color of milk. Like the eel’s.
Dean was struck by this, as well, and whispered to his father, “Was she swallowed by a fish, or was she born blind?”
“If you’ve got a question, young man,” Sirena said in a gravelly voice, “best ask me direct.”
“Okay,” Dean said. “You get eaten by a fish?”
A hoarse, cackling laugh burst from the old woman’s throat. “Eaten and spit right back on the bank,” she said. “See these beauty marks it gave me?” Skeletal fingers traced down both sides of her face, pointing out the stripes of pink-white discoloration where the flesh had been etched away. Her scalp had hairless patches of the same color. “Right off, folks around here took my coming out of that fish alive as a sign and a wonderment. And it was a bigger wonderment than anyone dreamed. Inside that fish’s belly I lost normal sight, but I gained the doomie sight. Or mebbe I had it all along, and never knew until my eyes got melted away.”
The blind woman sniffed at the air like a rabbit, homing in on the exact location of Ryan’s son.
“I’ve had visions about you, young man,” Sirena said to Dean. “You and your six fine friends. Come sit here, and I’ll tell you all about them….” She spread her thin legs and patted her sagging lap.
Dean wrinkled his nose. “Not bastard likely,” he said, crossing his arms over his still narrow boy’s chest.
“If you’ve got something to say to us,” Ryan told her, “let’s hear it.”
“There’s doubt in your voice,” she said. “Looking for proof, are we? Well, how about I tell you something you already know? Your names? Your mothers’ names? Their mothers’ names?”
“Madam,” Doc said, “if you could, as you suggest, pronounce the names of all our maternal grandmothers, it would certainly be evidence in your favor.”
The old woman dismissed her own idea with a wave of her hand. “Nah, the back sight is too easy,” she said. “And it proves nothing. There’s other ways I could’ve found out the names. I didn’t, but that’s beside the point. It’s the foresight, the telling of what’s to come, that’s the real test of doomie power. How about this for proof? There’s a new kind of human being prowling the Deathlands. Not mutie spawned. These folks come from elsewhen.”
“You mean elsewhere?” Ryan said.
Sirena turned her head, following the sound of his voice. “No, Master Cawdor, I mean what I said, else when. Another stretch of time in another place altogether. Our time and place and this other one started out identical, as alike a pair of fish eggs, but oh how different they grew. Nightmare different. These new people are a cross between us and a cockroach.”
Expressions of surprise flickered over the companions’ faces.
“My, my, it’s gotten mighty quiet all of a sudden,” Sirena said, returning to her pipe.
In the hut’s golden gloom, Ryan watched her rock and blow smoke for a minute, then said, “That’s the past, dead and buried. You said you were going to tell us the future.”
The old woman chuckled. “It is the future. Your future, Master Half-Blind. I don’t create it. I can’t change it. I only see it with these….” With the tip of the pipe stem, she indicated the pale, hard-cooked eggs that were her eyes.
“Evidence, madam,” Doc interjected, emphasizing the point by rapping the hut’s dirt floor with his walking stick. “We require substantial and convincing evidence of your claims.”
“Oh, I’ll give you all the evidence you need,” Sirena replied. “There’s a brand-new star in the sky. Hasn’t been a new star like that in more than a hundred years.”
Ryan didn’t get her drift, right off. He wasn’t alone. The companions exchanged impatient looks. “We wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said. “We haven’t seen the night sky for almost two weeks now.”
“Well, you’ll all see it tonight, over the river,” the blind woman told him. “It’s not a proper star, mind you. It doesn’t twinkle like it should. And it sails from one side of the horizon to the other in the span of twenty heartbeats. This star was planted in the heavens by a roaring, flaming spear taller than the tallest tree in the forest.”
Mildred leaned close to Ryan and whispered, “She means a goddamn guided missile. It’s not a star she’s talking about. It’s a recon satellite!”
The one-eyed man had already figured that out. If what the old woman said was true, then he and the companions had failed to permanently close the passageway between realities.
“Master Cawdor,” the doomie said, “the cockroaches are already here, they are many, and there will be hell to pay.”
“If you really can see into the future,” Ryan said, leaning close to her, “then explain it to us in detail.”
Sirena shook her head. “Even if I went over it minute by minute, it wouldn’t help you. Preparations are a waste of precious time. I’ve lived with the doomie sight since I was your boy’s age, and I know this for a certain fact—no one can change the course of what will be. My advice to all of you is to enjoy each passing moment as if it were your last.”
“In other words,” Mildred said, “we’re going to suffer and die, but be sure and have a nice day. That’s all she’s going to tell us? Why are we listening to this hogwash?”
“I heartily agree,” Doc said. “Might I suggest that our ‘passing moments’ might be more enjoyably spent away from the confines of this cramped and stinking hovel.”
“You got that right, Doc,” J.B. agreed.
As they began filing from the hut, Sirena called out, “Wait, young Cawdor! Before you go, I have a gift for you.”
From under the translucent cape, she produced a slim six-inch bone dagger in a skin sheath.
Dean immediately glanced at his father, who indicated his permission with a curt nod of his head. The boy approached the old woman and took the dagger from her. There was no cross guard or pommel. The handle was wrapped with strips of scratchy fish skin. Unsheathing the blade, he carefully tested its serrated edge on the back of his thumbnail. “Demon sharp!” he said.
“It’s made from the tip of a catfish dorsal spine,” Sirena said. “It will fit nicely into the top of your right boot.”
Dean tried it. The blade and sheath disappeared completely. “I can hardly feel it’s there,” he said. “Thanks.”
Sirena reached out and seized his wrist in a grip that was amazingly strong. “I could have told you your future,” she said, “and your children’s future, too, if you’d just sat on my lap.”
“Mebbe you could,” the boy said, jerking his hand away. “And mebbe I don’t want to know that bad.”
As Ryan and Dean left the hut, waves of the doomie’s shrill, hoarse laughter crashed against their backs.
IT WAS NEARLY midnight when Ryan saw it, in the tree break over the dark river. The single point of bright light appeared in the west, above the blackness of the canopy, and swept across the starry field of sky. He and the others watched the satellite arc overhead and vanish in the east.
“Fireblast!” Ryan’s curse echoed off the surrounding forest.
“Couldn’t it be something else?” Dean asked him. “Something real old…from before skydark?”
“It isn’t old, son. All the space junk fell to earth and burned up a long time ago. It has to be new. The fish hag spoke the truth. People from the other Earth had to have put it up there. No one else could have done it.”
“We should’ve chilled those four bastards,” J.B. said. “Should’ve buried them along with all their fancy chilling gear.”
Ryan grimaced. J.B. was talking about the turncoats, the members of the first scouting expedition to cross over from the parallel Earth. With success within their grasp, the warrior-whitecoats had decided not just to abandon, but to sabotage their primary mission, which was to lay the groundwork for the invasion and conquest of Deathlands by the armies of FIVE. Instead of firing the guided missile they had trucked with them into the sky, they launched it through the reality portal in the hope of sealing the gateway forever. That done, the alternate world conquistadors went native. They stripped off the segmented black battlesuits that made them immune to blasterfire, and they dumped the tribarreled laser rifles that cut through plate steel like so much tissue paper. Ryan and the others helped them dismantle their gyroplane and they buried it deep in a sandy arroyo along with the rest of their gear.
“Colonel Gabhart and the others might not have had anything to do with this,” Mildred said.
“They could’ve changed their minds about bringing the armies across, too,” J.B. countered. “Mebbe they had blood relatives starving to death on the other side. Blood being thicker than water, they decided to reopen the passageway and save them.”
“However it happened,” Krysty said, “they’re here. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
All eyes turned to Ryan.
He was the only one who had seen the other world. And though he’d tried to describe its bleakness and horror to his friends, mere words couldn’t do it justice. They stuck in his throat like slivers of glass.
The nukecaust that had laid waste to Deathlands was an accident, an instantaneous, one-time event, but the alternate end to history that Ryan had witnessed was the final outcome of a civilization that had attacked nature as if it were a sworn enemy. There was nothing left on the parallel Earth but human beings and the avalanche of disasters their science had brought to life. They were indeed like two-legged cockroaches: indomitable breeders, surviving at all costs, consuming and destroying every living thing and every resource within their reach.
In his mind, Ryan could see gleaming, hard-shelled black armies pouring through the parted lips of the reality corridor. Armies carrying weapons and technology that nothing in Deathlands could match. Armies so vast that even without advanced weapons they could defeat any force the people of Deathlands could field against them.
Running away only postponed the inevitable. With an eye in the sky endlessly circling and searching their world, there was no safe place to hide. Fate had left Ryan and his companions one choice, and it was bad.
“We’ve got to go back to Moonboy ville,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to find a way to fight the bastards and drive them out for good.”
There was silence along the riverbank.
To enter battle with a slight possibility of victory was one thing; to walk willingly into the spinning blades of a meatgrinder was another. Ryan thought about the village man who had death-marched himself to meet the catfish’s impaling spine. Sirena had told the poor bastard his fate, and he had surrendered to it. Just as they were about to do. There was an important difference, of course.
Ryan listened to the gurgle of the life-giving river and felt the embrace of the dense forest that loomed on all sides. Overhead, the blanket of stars twinkled as his world slowly turned.
The difference was, they wouldn’t die for nothing.
And they wouldn’t die alone.
Chapter Three
A rag securely tied over his nose and mouth, Dr. Huth stopped hacking at the hardpan with the blade of his shovel. The sound of a distant car horn faded in and out, intermittently muffled by the gusts of hot wind that scoured the desert plain.
Abandoning the shovel, Huth climbed the side of Byram ville’s defensive berm for a look. As he scaled the mound of dirt, his feet slipped around inside the oversize jogging shoes he wore despite the plastic bags he’d wadded up in their toe boxes. His polyester pants were as stiff as cardboard. Not because they were new—their rigidity came from the black blood that starched the lap, thighs and shins. The pants were cinched tight around his waist with a length of frayed electrical cord.
To earn a dead man’s trousers and shoes, Huth had dug latrines barefoot and in his underpants for three days.
He was still digging latrines.
A mile away, a wag emerged from the dust devils that spun across the ruined interstate. It continued to honk as it approached the lone opening in the ville’s mounded perimeter wall. The vehicle, originally a small school bus, was painted in garish pink, green, yellow, red, a chaos of spray-can squiggles and overlayed abstract shapes. Even the sides of the tires and wheels were painted.
Belching black smoke from its exhaust, the wag stopped at the security checkpoint, which consisted of a breach in the berm that was partially blocked by a heap of junked vehicles. The all-volunteer sec force emerged from behind that rusting barrier, shouting instructions as they aimed their handful of centerfire blasters at the driver. The bus’s side door opened at once, and the sec men climbed inside to make sure it didn’t conceal armed killers trying to loot the compound. The ville’s sec men never robbed or extorted wayfarers themselves. Robbery and extortion were left to the twenty-four-hour gaudy house and the seven-days-a-week swap meet.
The hellpit of Byram ville, whose smoke plume Huth had first seen from atop the red mesa, had grown up around a predark truck stop. At the center of the enclosure were the remains of a service station, restaurant and minimart. The great steel awnings that had once shielded the rows of junked fuel pumps from the sun had been torn off by skydark’s two-hundred-mile-per-hour shock wave. The original roof of the one-story structure had likewise vanished, the plate-glass windows turned to twinkling fairy dust. Roof and windows had been crudely repaired with sheets of metal stripped from the abandoned and overturned semitrailers that littered the huge parking area. These aging artifacts of long-dead interstate commerce were the very heart and soul of the place. Byram ville’s upper crust lived inside the trailers and conducted their businesses out of them. The poorer residents kept house in the rusting hulks of passenger cars. The lowest of the low—Huth, included—slept curled up on the ground like mongrel dogs, in the lee of their economic betters.
Unless someone had died during the night, there were forty-five full-time residents of Byram ville. The locals survived by trading with travelers, taking whatever the newcomers had of value in exchange for jolt or juice or sex, or food or drinking water, or temporary protection from what lay outside the defensive perimeter. Though Interstate 15 was primarily a walking road, occasionally a wag would pass through, bearing trade goods and news from other parts of Deathlands.
After clearing the entry checkpoint, the bus driver parked alongside the ville’s central structure and leaned on his horn for a good thirty seconds. Heads poked out of semis and car bodies and the ruined restaurant and minimart. Seeing what had arrived, people came running.
Carrying his shovel, Huth joined the crowd that surrounded the strangely decorated wag. The driver stood in the bus’s doorway, grinning. He was a big man, easily 350 pounds and six foot two. He wore a squashed canvas fedora, which sat like a pancake on the back of his huge head, and faded bib-front denim jeans. “Come one, come all!” he yelled. “Gather ’round, everybody!”
As the crowd closed in, the driver used the metal ladder bolted to the bus’s side to climb to the roof. Once there, he did a sort of flamenco dance, his arms curved gracefully over his head, his laceless logger boots hammering on the sheet steel.
Huth noticed the way the sun gleamed off his right hand, which was the color of old ivory and obviously artificial.
“Come on and bring your cups!” the driver shouted. “I got free joy juice for everybody! I got free slip and slide, too!”
He stamped on the roof of the bus. “Wake up, you lazy sluts!” he bellowed. “Get up here and show your stuff!”
A frowzy female head appeared in one of the bus’s rear windows, hair like a great lopsided wad of pink cotton wool. A second woman popped up beside the first, her face powdered white and her cheeks rouged a feverish red. The third occupant was male. Dense black facial stubble had grown through his many layers of Pan-Cake makeup.
This unwholesome trio exited the bus and started up the ladder to the roof. They were dressed in matching outfits: a white string T-shirt and stiletto-heeled leather boots. None of them wore anything below the waist. Their well-worn genitalia had the ruddy brown color of smoked meat; their buttocks and thighs were badly bruised. The pink-haired slut carried a battery-powered boom box, which she passed up to the driver.
The big man propped the boom box on his shoulder and hit the power switch. Predark music blared from the speakers at ear-blistering volume. There were lyrics to the song, hard to catch at first, something about partying like it was the year 1999.
The three whores began dancing, and the driver did a few turns himself before setting the boom box on the roof.
“Got your cups?” he called to the crowd over the rhythmic racket. “Well, goddammit, go get ’em!”
As most of the folks rushed off, the driver descended the ladder and ducked inside the bus’s doorway. When he reappeared, he had a gray insulated plastic mug in his good, left hand.
Huth was standing close enough to get a look at the prosthesis at the end of his other arm. It wasn’t carved of ivory, or any other natural material. Every finely sculpted finger had two articulated joints, the thumb had one, plus the knuckles, and there was a small knurled knob on the back of the wrist. As he watched, the big man tightened down the knob, which made the fingers and thumb contract in a deathgrip around the mug’s handle.
Mug in fist, the driver danced some more; he was very light on his feet for a man of his size. After a minute or two, he stopped and pulled the end of a length of plastic hose out a side window. When he opened the metal clamp on its tip, a clear fluid sprayed into his waiting tankard.
“We are gonna have so damned much fun!” he shouted to the cloudless sky.
Then he called up to the whores, “Dance, you sexy devils! Show these good folks what you can do!”
The trio began bucking their pelvises and rotating their hips with more enthusiasm.
“For those of you who don’t know me,” he told the crowd, “I’m Big Mike. Also known as Mike the Drunkard.” He tipped back the mug and began to swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He didn’t stop until he’d emptied it.
“Ya-hoooie!” he said. “Everybody belly up! Come on, now, don’t be shy. It’s fill-’em-up time!”
Huth, who had no cup, was shoved, elbowed and punched out of the way by those who did.
The boom box on the roof stopped playing for a second, then the same song started over again automatically.
Mike the Drunkard used his real hand to backslap and goose the spectators as he topped off their containers. And the whole while he jabbered at them. “Ooh, are we going to par-tay!” he said. “Get this bus a-rocking in no time.” He made a lewd crotch thrust at his own drained mug before refilling it.
In short order, Big Mike had everybody around the bus drinking, dancing and laughing. Everybody but Huth, who stood at the edge of the crowd, leaning dejectedly on the handle of his shovel.
When Mike scrambled back up to the roof of the bus, he turned down the volume on the boom box. The song started over for the fifth time. By now, all the people knew the words of the chorus and shouted along. To them, 1999 meant predark. Happy days. Times of plenty, of relative order and safety. A golden age.
“Right about now,” Big Mike said to them, “you’re probably asking yourselves, where does this big old sexy magic man come from? And where did he get all the chiller joy juice he’s giving away?”
“Tell us!” someone yelled back.
“Yeah,” another person chimed in, “tell us!”
“The answer to both questions is Slake City,” Mike said.
It took a few seconds for this information to sink in. Gradually, the residents of Byram ville stopped dancing. They stood like statues beside the bus, glaring at the big man.
Mike raised his good hand. “Now, I know you’ve heard it’s a wasteland over there. But that’s a rumor started by some of the people who are already there. They’re greedy bastards. They want to keep all the sweet stuff for themselves.”
“That’s Baron Jolt’s turf,” said a man standing up front, “and as far as I’m concerned, that raping, chilling bastard can have it.”
“Everybody knows Slake City’s nothing but a nuke slag heap!” another man said. “The background radiation turns you into a pile of pus and sores inside of a month.”
“Nah-nah,” Mike said, shaking his head. “That’s how it used to be. Not anymore. The place is all cleaned up. It’s safe as mother’s milk. And Baron Jolt is long gone. We got real jobs there, now. It’s fat, I’m telling you, just like before skydark. People are eating regular, getting drunk regular, living out of the chem rains in clean shacks with good shithouses. Slake City is starting over again, and the folks who get in on the ground floor are going to have the edge. Have a chance to get baron-rich. That’s why I’m here. Slake City needs folks like you. Enterprising, right-thinking folks who know an opportunity when they see one.”
While the crowd considered this, Mike the Drunkard clambered from the roof and quickly refilled all the empty cups.
It was then that Huth took note of the massive bracelet around the bus driver’s left wrist. Dull silver in color, its surface was filigreed with solid-state circuitry. The sight of the ornament made Huth’s mouth drop. Pulse pounding, he fought to get a closer look, though it meant absorbing numerous blows to his head, back and arms.
“How did you lose your right hand?” Huth called out.
“Got it caught up the wrong ass,” Mike said.
Everybody laughed. Everybody but Huth.
The former chief whitecoat of FIVE, now latrine engineer, used the handle of his shovel like a lance, clearing a path to the front of the crowd. He held up the pocket of his lab coat to the big man. “Do you know what this means?” he asked.
Big Mike squinted down at the four letters stitched in red. “Can’t read too good,” he confessed.
Huth reached out and tapped the metallic wristband. “I came from the same place as that.”
Big Mike stared at Huth’s gap teeth, his dirt-caked face, his unspeakable pants and dismissed him with a “Yeah, right…”
“I know what it’s used for,” Huth went on, frantic to get his point across. “You’ve got bands just like it around your ankles, too, don’t you?”
The big man’s eyes narrowed. “So…?”
“Did it hurt much when they lopped off your hand?”
Mike the Drunkard seized Huth by the collar and dragged him and his shovel up the steps into the bus. Inside, it smelled like a cross between a distillery and a bear pit. The rear seats had been removed to make room on the floor for a pile of badly stained mattresses. A half-dozen fifty-five-gallon metal drums of joy juice were securely strapped to the floor. The drums were all stenciled with Baron Jolt.
Huth endured a brutal shaking, then the big man held him close and growled into his face, “How do you know about my hand? Who the fuck are you?”
“I crossed over ahead of the people who did that to you,” Huth said. “My coming to this world was an accident. I was lost in the wilderness and then I ended up in this place, in very sorry circumstances. My name is Dr. Huth. I am somewhat famous where I come from. Maybe the others talked about me? Or mentioned my name in passing?”
“Nope,” Mike said.
“One thing’s for certain,” Huth continued, “you have become their puppet. Those laser cuffs can turn you into a victim in a hurry. Without hands and feet you’d be a big lump of warm, helpless meat that anyone could play nasty with. How much chain did they give you? Fifty miles? A hundred miles? Go one step farther, break the transmitter’s signal, and zap! All fall down.”
“You better not queer my pitch here,” Mike warned, poking Huth hard in the chest with a huge finger. “I got a quota to make.”
“Take me back with you. Take me back to my people.”
Mike gave him a dubious look.
“That’s all I want. Really.”
The big man’s eyes glittered. “No problem,” he said. “You can ride with me all the way to Slake City.”
Overjoyed, Huth started to throw his shovel out a window.
“No, keep that,” Mike told him. “It’ll come in handy later. I got to go outside now. I got to make my closing pitch before these triple stupes start to sober up.” He dug under a seat and removed a big yellow plastic tub. He patted the tight-fitting lid and said, “The deal clincher.”
Huth remained inside the bus while Big Mike stepped out and addressed the crowd. “I’m looking for a few good folks who aren’t a-scared of rumors,” he said. “And I’m willing to sweeten the pie a little. I know you’ve all got a taste for what’s in here.” He opened the tub and showed them the heap of white crystalline powder it contained. “This is the real thing, people. One hundred percent pure jolt. It’ll make you feel ten feet tall. And you’ll screw my pretty sluts like a pack of slag heap weasels. Don’t push, now. One at a time, now. Come and get it.”
Using a battered teaspoon, he laid a heaping dose of powder on every outstretched palm. Though some people licked it, most of them snorted it. The powerful drug took hold quickly, with alarming effect. It made eyes bug out and sweaty faces grimace spastically. To quench their suddenly raging thirsts, the revelers guzzled more free joy juice, and they all fell into a slow-spinning, half-speed dance.
At a signal from Mike, the music abruptly stopped and the three whores climbed down from the roof with the boom box. They entered the bus and walked past Huth, heading straight for the pile of mattresses in the back.
“Come on, people,” Mike urged, gesturing toward the bus’s entrance. “The real fun is starting. Slip and slide. Slip…and…slide.”
As stoned as they were, most of the Byram ville folks didn’t fall for his spiel, but they were in no shape to try to stop the few who did. Four men between the ages of twenty and thirty, and a heavyset, thirtyish woman mounted the bus’s steps. As the woman passed Huth and turned down the aisle for the rear, she jerked her black sleeveless T-shirt over her head and tossed it aside. Her huge soft breasts swayed pendulously as she struggled with the zipper on the front of her dusty BDU pants.
“Hey, it’s okay if you don’t want to come with me now,” Mike assured the rest of the crowd. “I’ll be back by here in a week or two. Give you all some time to think it over. Maybe I’ll even bring back your friends for a visit. You can hear firsthand what you’re missing.”
With that, he climbed back in the bus, started it up and U-turned for the checkpoint. Huth took a seat up front, right behind the driver, as far away from the goings-on in the back as he could get.
After they had cleared the gate, Mike double-clutched and shifted the bus into high gear. “How about some driving music?” he said over his shoulder. He poked the boom box, which sat perched on the dash. The 1999 song started up again at top volume, canceling out the grunting, whimpering racket from the rear.
Big Mike, clearly feeling the effects of all the joy juice he’d drunk, threw back his head and falsetto-screeched along with the vocalist.
For his part, Huth was content to bob his head and tap out the now-familiar beat with the toe of his size-13 jogging shoe. He watched the flat, parched landscape roll past the grimy window, toothlessly grinning while tears streamed down his face.
Chapter Four
Dredda Otis Trask deepened the tint of her helmet visor to shield her eyes against Slake City’s blinding, panoramic glare. From the history of her own Earth, she knew that there had once been a vast body of water in this place, the last remnant of an ancient inland sea. In Shadow World’s reality, on a late January day more than a century past, Great Salt Lake had been vaporized by a multiwarhead nuclear strike. And a fraction of an instant later, the sands of the exposed lake bed and the shattered metropolis of Salt Lake City were melted together, fused into a boiling, hundred-square-mile sea of thermoglass. As the infernal heat was sucked up into the atmosphere, towering waves of glass solidified in a nightmare snapshot, their peaks capped with a foam of rusting, fire-blackened litter. Massive, shock-blast-tossed fragments—skyscraper I-beams, sections of railroad track and metal utility poles—stuck up from the wave troughs like the masts of a drowned navy.
It was a place long dead, but it was neither silent nor still.
Between howling gusts of wind, the external microphones of Dredda’s battlesuit picked up what sounded like the scattered, desperate cries of abandoned infants. There were no lost babies out there. The phenomenon had to do with the nukeglass’s structural weaknesses, which were caused by mineral impurities, and by the pulverized debris and air bubbles it contained. Extreme changes in day-night temperatures caused hairline cracks to appear in the matrix, and as the splits spread and ran, they made the shrill, disturbing sounds.
Occasionally, there were much louder noises. As the fine cracks branched out, they became networks of fissures that eventually crashed down the roofs of hidden hollow spots. Some of these collapsed air pockets were the size of amphitheaters.
Dredda focused her attention on a distant column of human figures moving away from her, over the gray-green surface. The group of freshly captured slaves walked a road that ended at Ground Zero, some eight miles away from Slake City. A pair of huge black vehicles dogged the rear of the file, herding the work crew replacements.
Building a road across the nukeglass that could support heavy vehicle traffic had been dangerous work. Even with side-scanning sonar to point out the larger crevasses and voids, sudden cave-ins were frequent and nearly always fatal to the natives. The broken chunks had razor sharp edges and often weighed hundreds of pounds. Trying to pull trapped slaves from the cave-ins had turned out to be wasted effort: the shifting sections of thermoglass either sliced them to rags, or chopped them into pieces.
In the week that it had taken to complete road construction, Dredda had sacrificed half of the Shadow World work force she had pressed into service. Most of the slaves were young men who had been mining their meager living from the dead city. They used crude hand tools to hack holes in the surface and crawled into the hollow places in search of undamaged, pre-Armageddon odds and ends, which they then traded. As a rule, these independent scroungers only worked the outer edges of the nukeglass, where the lingering radiation was the weakest. Even so, after a few years of digging, most had developed angry sores and large, visible tumors.
At Ground Zero, tissue destruction proceeded much more briskly. After a few days in that high-dose radioactive environment, weeping blisters appeared on unshielded hands, faces and feet. Based on the rad exposure alone, the working life span of a slave was no more than two weeks. Because of other dangers related to large-scale mining in thermoglass, actual survival time was half of that. From Dredda’s point of view, this wasn’t entirely a negative: there was no need to feed slaves who were only going to live a week.
Her own survival, and ultimately the conquest of Shadow World, depended on the exploitation of local energy sources. The recon satellite’s first mission, postlaunch, had been to pinpoint the nearest, hottest nuke zone, a place that could provide the suitable raw material for her reprocessing units. The energy reprocessors utilized strains of genetically engineered bacteria that feasted on irradiated inorganic matter and secreted useable nuclear fuel. Every critical component of Dredda’s invasion force, from gyroplanes to battlesuits, was powered by this recycled material.
The skirmish Dredda had planned for this day would easily gobble up one-third of the precious little fuel that had been harvested from Slake City so far, but she had no choice in the matter. To stabilize the energy stockpile in the short term, she had to expand her mining operation, and to do that, given the life expectancy of her workers, she needed a much larger labor pool.
Behind her, eight huge landships waited, their nuke turbines humming at idle. Gleaming black and windowless, with smooth, aerodynamic contours, the 6×6s were the core of her ground force, able to traverse at high speed the most difficult terrain thanks to their seven-foot-diameter wheels, each with its own independent drive train and suspension.
As Dredda turned for her flagship, its right front door rose up like the wing of a great bird. Sunlight washed over the high-backed copilot seat, over a ceiling tangled with exposed conduit, wiring harnesses and gray Kevlar pipe. A fine film of desert dust coated the gangway’s steps.
Sitting in the other cockpit’s other chair, behind the steering yoke, was Mero. Her pale blue eyes gleamed through her battlesuit’s transparent visor; her close-cropped blond curls were partially hidden by a red skullcap. Like all the officers of Dredda’s invasion force, Mero was the product of Level Four genetic engineering. The experimental procedure had made her face less round, and her chin more square and prominent. The look of supreme confidence in her eyes, an expression that four tours with the dreaded Population Control Service hadn’t dimmed, was now reinforced by additional bone structure and dense layers of muscle.
Dredda understood exactly what Mero was feeling at that moment. Excitement. Impatience. And an intense curiosity about the future. The two women, indeed all the Level Four females, shared a bond that went deeper than their rank or sex, or the war upon Shadow World they were about to wage. They were all sister changelings, birthed in the same stainless-steel womb, explorers of a new universe without, and an equally mysterious and promising one within.
This visceral connection, this transgenic sisterhood was something Dredda hadn’t expected to feel so deeply, and it caught her unprepared. As much as the sense of belonging pleased her, it also unsettled her. She had never experienced anything quite like it before. Not even with her own father.
Looking between the cockpit seats to the rear of the vehicle, Dredda checked the rest of her crew. The male troops were strapped cross chest into twelve shock-mounted jump seats set between I-beams along the walls of the cargo bay. From the uniformly smug expressions behind their visors, they no longer had any fear of the enemy. During the slave raids on Slake City scrounger camps, they had absorbed barrages of fire from a variety of primitive combustion-powered rifles, shotguns and pistols. Their battlesuits had deflected every projectile with ease. Their own battle gear, tribarreled laser rifles and phage-foam back tanks, was netted, rattle proofed and lashed down to the middle of the cargo deck.
When Dredda sat down in the copilot seat, it immediately adjusted itself, inflating and deflating to match the curves and overlapping plates of her battlesuit. The windshield in front of her was dead black. When the wing door hissed down and locked shut, the only available light came from the instrument panel. It bathed the wag’s interior in hellish red.
Dredda coupled her battlesuit to the dashboard umbilical and opaqued her visor. Immediately, the instrument lights and blacked-out windows vanished, as did the entire outer skin of the vehicle. Suddenly, Dredda was sitting alone, in the open air, five feet above the ground. Each crew member found him-or herself likewise isolated from the others and suspended in space. This illusion was produced by the hull’s optical scanning system, which filtered out unnecessary detail and projected a three-dimensional image of the external environment directly onto the interior surface of the helmet visors.
Keying her battlesuit com link to the driver, Dredda said, “Start the mission clock.”
Mero throttled up the turbines. As the hum grew louder, the chair in which Dredda sat began to move. It accelerated rapidly, until it was flying over the ground. To her right, the details of the Slake City massif stretched and blurred. G-force drove her deep into the contour seat, but there was no accompanying sensation of air pressure—it was the only flaw in the elaborate computer simulation. If she had really been strapped unprotected to a rocket-powered chair, the wind would have been a tangible, buffeting force against the front of her body.
Ahead, she could make out the lake-bed landing zone, and the six black gyroplanes on standby there. Dredda keyed the com link again and gave the order, “Airborne units proceed to the staging area.”
The VTO/L attack aircraft immediately lifted off and swung toward the mountains to the southwest, strung out in a quarter-mile skirmish line.
Dredda and her chair continued due west, rushing across the flat plane of pale dirt, leaving Slake City behind. The other wags ran on either side of her in loose, flying-V formation. Their speed over ground was 140 miles per hour. Dredda felt some vibration in the pit of her stomach and her feet, but it was disconnected from the images inside her visor, which moved only when she turned her head.
The formation slowed to make the turn south at old Iosepa Road. The undivided pavement had vanished long ago, but the roadbed was still there, covered by drifts of sand, salt and dust. It ran straight as a laser pulse for twenty miles.
As they approached the slight bend in the road where the predark hamlet of Iosepa had been, Dredda ordered the vehicles cloaked. This was accomplished by reducing the side-to-side distance between the wags to a few feet and then electrostatically charging the hulls, which redirected most of the dust cloud they were raising aft, and made it jet forward from under their front bumpers, creating a roiling, onrushing wall of dirt that preceded and entirely enveloped them.
Inside her visor, Dredda could see nothing but swirling beige.
Mero and the other sisters were driving blind at identical high speeds, maintaining tight formation over broken ground using battlesuit-sat link intel and helmet simulacra for steering. Dredda switched her visor screen to monitor what they were viewing.
Along the sides of the green-on-green field were a dozen inset windows with numbers rapidly scrolling up or down. There were complex nuke-turbine function and tank-temperature indicators. Other windows displayed the vehicle’s true course over ground, in latitude and longitude, and its true speed over ground. There were flashing proximity warnings about the vehicles on either side, in feet. The distance to the target was shown in yards, and falling rapidly. In the center of the screen were eight wag-shaped, lime-green blips in a sideways row. Beneath the shifting blips, a shades-of-green, satellite-generated contour map of the terrain unrolled wildly.
Only one of the blips on Mero’s screen ran inside a set of parallel lines—these boundaries indicated her vehicle’s computer-assigned course. The paired lines were constantly moving as the computer adjusted for the deflection of the irregular terrain, and driver error and deflection in the seven other vehicles. As Mero kept the blip within the course boundaries, her decision time was measured in fractions of a second. Allowable, real-world error before catastrophe was measured in inches.
Dredda switched screens again, calling up the biometric readouts of her wag squad. Her heart rate and Mero’s were holding steady at forty-five beats per minute; the men’s were four times that, and their blood pressures were spiking. She quickly scanned each trooper’s current video input. None of them was observing the driver’s screen; they were either beigedout or off-line, presumably staring at the red gloom of the cargo bay. Dredda tried to imagine how Mero’s screen would look to them.
Pure chaos.
An information and threat overload.
A helter-skelter fright ride, their lives in the hands of a gene-spliced maniac.
Dredda couldn’t see their eyes, but it amused her to think they were all shut tight.
The Level Four procedure that she and her officers had endured had changed more than their external physiques, their fat metabolism and resting heart rates. It had expanded and fine-tuned their biological systems to match the extreme limits of the battlesuit’s cyber-capabilities; something the male physiology, gene-doctored or not, could never achieve. Their increased numbers of neurons allowed them to intake and process information a hundred times faster than the men.
As Dredda understood the science, there were built-in bioengineering limits to each of the sexes, based on the amount of body space and chemistry devoted to their differing reproductive functions. In the case of the females, much more of their capacity—hormonally, metabolically, neurologically—was taken up by these duties. If the biochemical obligations of motherhood were removed, there was room for the system to change and grow. On the other hand, men’s reproductive functions took up very little of their bodies’ overall capacity, so removing it had no effect on potential growth. Evolutionarily speaking, the male of the species was already maxed out.
When Dredda uplinked her visor to the infrared image of the target compound, she saw human forms running. Now that the dust cloud was visible to them, the Shadow Worlders were taking up defensive positions inside the fenced perimeter. On their part, it had to be a precaution. They didn’t know what the approaching cloud meant, and they weren’t taking any chances. The important thing was, they weren’t abandoning the compound in droves. Because they controlled the high ground from well-positioned defensive hardsites, with lots of conventional weapons, they believed they were invulnerable. The function of the dust cloak was to maintain this illusion as long as possible—slaves were more profitable caught in large bunches.
Dredda panned back for a broader infrared view of the kill zone. The exhaust ports of the heavily armed gyroplanes registered as six bright spots sweeping around the western flank of Mount Deseret, closing on the compound from the north. It was time for the ground units to uncloak, and she snapped out the order.
As the wags burst through the face of the electrostatic dust cloud, the compound’s twelve-foot-high, wire perimeter fence appeared out of nothing, directly in front of them. Beyond it was the broad parking lot, and on the other side of it, the main complex that snuggled up against the foot of the mountain. The eight landships hit the fence at the same instant, flattening it and twisting it under their huge wheels. As they roared onto the parking lot, a fusillade of hostile fire zinged at them from all sides. The clatter of the gunshots and the ping-whine of bullets deflecting off her wag’s EM shield was so loud it forced Dredda to turn down the audio in her battlesuit.
When she activated the wag’s weapons pods, which were located on either side of the roof, two joysticks popped out of dashboard in front of her. As her gauntleted hands closed on the no-slip grips, a ring and crosshair sight appeared in the center of her helmet visor. Her targets, human-shaped figures in lime green, scattered to either side as the wag continued to rumble up the slope. Dredda flipped off the grip safeties with her thumbs.
Each of the joysticks operated its own cannon pod. As she moved her hands apart, the lone crosshair ring blurred, divided and became two. She simultaneously tracked a pair of men running in opposite directions. One was scrambling out of a foxhole hacked in the asphalt on her left; the other high-kicked to the right as he abandoned a sandbagged, burned-out hulk of a vehicle. When the computer target locks engaged, the sprinting figures turned red, and she jiggled the firing buttons.
Green lances of light stabbed through both runners. Neither completed another step.
Foxhole Man fell in four pieces, sliced cleanly through the chest and both arms above the elbow by a single burst of pure energy. His transected parts landed in a jumbled heap. The other man took the laser slash at waist height. The emerald light separated his torso from everything below his hips. It was a grievous mortal wound, but not immediately so. Though the man had been chopped in half, there was no blood—the laser sliced and cauterized at the same time. Rearing up from the pavement with undamaged arms, he seemed to recognize the severed legs under his chin as his own. His mouth opened wide in a scream that Dredda couldn’t hear. Frantically clawing, he tried to drag himself away.
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James Axler
More than a century after a multi-warhead nuclear strike wiped out nearly all of earth's population, humanity's feral instinct to survive has spawned a savage new America. Here, the brutality of man and nature conspire against hope. Yet despite its chaos and bloody turmoil, Deathlands is a second chance for the human race…and for a group of warrior survivalists led by a man called Ryan Cawdor.Deathlands is a living hell, but there is someplace worse: a parallel Earth where the atomic mega-cull never happened. Now this Otherworld Earth is in its final death throes. Yet for an elite few, the reality portal offers a new frontier of raw energy, expendable slaves–a bastion of power for Dredda Otis Trask. Her invasion force of genetically engineered warrior women has turned the ruins of Salt Lake City into the deadly mining grounds of a grotesque new order–one that lies in wait for Ryan and his companions.In the Deathlands, danger lurks beyond the imagination.
Ryan looked at his old friend. “You know what to do, J.B.”
His hands up, the Armorer stepped into the line of fire. “Now, take it easy,” he said to the tall, backlit figures just inside the cave entrance. “You know we can’t hurt you. You don’t have to prove anything more to us. We’re giving up. See?”
Black figures approached with their laser rifles pointed at his head. One of them came within ten feet of him before it stopped. “Where are the others?” it asked.
“Yahhh!” J.B. bellowed at the top of his lungs.
Ryan echoed the yell as he swung out from behind the rock. The others yelled, too, as hard as they could, to keep from being deafened as the Smith & Wesson pump gun roared in the enclosed space. Orange flame from the muzzle blast licked the ceiling. Ryan racked and fired, racked and fired as fast as he could. On the third blast, there was a mighty groan from above, then in a cloud of dust, the ceiling of the entry chamber came crashing down.
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Pilgrimage to Hell
Red Holocaust
Neutron Solstice
Crater Lake
Homeward Bound
Pony Soldiers
Dectra Chain
Ice and Fire
Red Equinox
Northstar Rising
Time Nomads
Latitude Zero
Seedling
Dark Carnival
Chill Factor
Moon Fate
Fury’s Pilgrims
Shockscape
Deep Empire
Cold Asylum
Twilight Children
Rider, Reaper
Road Wars
Trader Redux
Genesis Echo
Shadowfall
Ground Zero
Emerald Fire
Bloodlines
Crossways
Keepers of the Sun
Circle Thrice
Eclipse at Noon
Stoneface
Bitter Fruit
Skydark
Demons of Eden
The Mars Arena
Watersleep
Nightmare Passage
Freedom Lost
Way of the Wolf
Dark Emblem
Crucible of Time
Starfall
Encounter: Collector’s Edition
Gemini Rising
Gaia’s Demise
Dark Reckoning
Shadow World
Pandora’s Redoubt
Rat King
Zero City
Savage Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
DEATH LANDS®
James Axler
We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.
—Lydia Maria Child
1802–1880
THE DEATHLANDS SAGA
This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.
There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.
But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.
Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.
Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.
J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.
Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.
Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.
Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.
In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….
Contents
Prologue (#u0552e4b3-310f-5482-bb3c-28f25f9020f5)
Chapter One (#u468e4af5-ef78-58e3-8b57-a30810dac53b)
Chapter Two (#uda43c4c7-d0c0-59d5-bd2a-00c7713e350c)
Chapter Three (#u73e287d6-b3f7-5cba-b9d9-40a0eb7cebc1)
Chapter Four (#uef19b027-d1ef-51a1-ad09-4250c724b1c6)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
A chunk of burning plastic the size of a softball sailed past Dr. Huth’s lowered head. Smaller objects, bits of concrete, shards of metal and rock, pelted his arms and legs as he struggled down the middle of the street under the terrible weight that lay upon his shoulders, a weight that bent his back to the breaking point and made his thighs tremble.
Seven levels below the surface of the planet, in the swirling smoke of open trash fires, a mob packed the crumbling sidewalks and spilled onto the potholed roadway. Their angry chant of “Die, whitecoat, die! Die, whitecoat, die!” echoed off the two-story-high, gridwork concrete ceiling and the wall-to-wall buildings that lined the gritty street. Like an earthquake, it rattled the No Response Zone’s few surviving windowpanes.
This was Gloomtown, so named because neither the light of day nor the dark of night penetrated here. Mercury-vapor lamps caged in the soot-stained ceiling cast a perpetual sulfurous pall over its squalor and suffering. In Gloomtown there were no police. No emergency services. And there was no way out, alive or dead.
As Dr. Huth advanced along the mob’s gauntlet, grinding out one shaky step after another, tears flowed down his cheeks. Everything he had ever done in his remarkable scientific career, he had done for them. Not for “them” individually, of course, or even for “them” as a social class, but “them” as in, for the survival of humanity.
The survival of Huth’s species had become an issue shortly after the turn of the second millennium A.D., when the long-sputtering population bomb had finally gone thermonuclear. Now, less than a century later, the planet was supporting one hundred billion people, and the rationing of food to the multitudes had become the all-consuming task of science and the one-world government known as FIVE. Because of the shortage of available calories, economic, social and political control teetered on the verge of global collapse. Dr. Huth and the other top scientists of FIVE were like whitecoated little Dutch boys sticking their fingers in a massively leaking dike. Their desperate measures had produced unforeseen and disastrous consequences.
Several structural levels down, a few hundred yards directly below Dr. Huth’s feet, was the border of the Slime Zone, a vast area of the megalopolis made uninhabitable by an invasion of agricultural bacteria, the result of a failed attempt to solve the food problem. In computer simulation, the genetically altered cyanobacteria had looked like a perfect answer to the crisis. They were fast breeding, required no maintenance and were an inexhaustible source of easily digestible protein. Outside FIVE’s biotech laboratories, they had proved themselves all of that, and more.
Once actual cultivation began, despite the protective measures put in place, the tailored bacteria quickly escaped the confines of the deep-level slime farms and began to swallow up the lower sections of the megacity, block by block. All efforts to turn them back, and to reclaim lost territory, had failed. And the irony was, the protein-rich bacteria were no longer even harvested for fear of spreading the contamination.
Because of Gloomtown’s proximity to the Slime Zone, its residents lived under constant threat of suffocation. When the bacterial spores were inhaled, they bloomed in the lungs, rapidly filling them with their wet weight. Only the condensation layer of the atmosphere, a band of land fog at Level Eight, kept the slime at bay. If the climate fluctuated so much as a few degrees, Gloomtown would be enveloped by floor-to-ceiling drapes of smothering green slunk.
The cyanobacteria weren’t the only lethal whitecoat-created hazard Gloomtowners faced on a daily basis. Equally deadly was the carniphage, an escaped biotech mil weapon. When inhaled, it ate a person from the inside out, stripping flesh from bone. The carniphages remained dormant in rivers and lakes for most of their life cycle, but during their reproductive phase, clouds of them were carried on the wind, eating and killing every animal in their path.
When the megacity’s warning sirens announced an impending bloom of carniphages, the people of Gloomtown packed themselves into windowless rooms and closets, and sealed the doors with rags and dirt. Those caught outside were found after the all-clear, their bones picked clean, plastic bags or trash cans pulled over their heads. On the upper levels of the city, for the convenience of FIVE’s CEOs, its whitecoats, and its white-collar support staffs, there were ample, roomy, phage-proof shelters.
How the carniphages had gotten loose in the environment was still a mystery. Some claimed FIVE’s Population Control Service had released them on purpose, to slow the growth of the unemployable class.
“FIVE” stood for the five global conglomerates who, after the big shakedowns of the nineties, had by treaty divided up the rights to exploit the remaining resources of the earth. Those four capital letters were stitched in crimson above the breast pocket of Dr. Huth’s lab coat.
In the boardrooms of the globals, Huth was a very important man, considered a genius comparable to, if not surpassing, Newton, Einstein and Watson and Crick. As director of the Totality Concept, he had shifted the focus of its most advanced research program from time trawling—the dragging of objects or persons from the past or future to the present—to the creation of a passageway between parallel universes. Using Operation Chronos technology as a foundation, he had succeeded in establishing a corridor between nearly identical alternate existences, between his Earth and another, which had come to be known as Shadow World.
After sending robot drones, then a human exploration team through the passage, Dr. Huth had discovered that the event horizons of the twinned Earths had permanently diverged on January 20, 2001, when an all-out nuclear exchange had devastated Shadow World. Though its human population had been nearly wiped out, the catastrophe had left many of its natural resources intact. Which presented a simple, elegant solution to his own Earth’s problems: colonize Shadow World, relieve the population pressure by moving selected, qualified people to the new resources. It was nothing less than a second chance for the human race.
Unappreciated in some quarters.
Under a hail of rocks and burning trash, the tall, lanky scientist strained to keep moving forward with his burden. Perhaps the Gloomtowners had correctly concluded that they wouldn’t be invited to partake of Shadow World’s salvation. Perhaps that was the reason for this horrible mistreatment. If so, it was typically selfish and shortsighted of them.
Then Huth caught a glimpse of a grimy video billboard suspended from the ceiling, and the live picture of himself that was being projected to the crowds. When he saw what he was towing through the streets, he froze in disbelief.
It was a guided missile more than one hundred feet long.
The startling image reminded him of a vid he’d seen as a graduate student. It had shown a single ant struggling to carry an impossibly huge beetle carcass back to the nest. That vid had to have been at least twenty-five years old when he’d viewed it; the last ant and beetle had long since departed this reality.
As Dr. Huth stood there immobilized, gasping for breath, some of the mob dipped into the latrine buckets they’d brought along and splattered him with handfuls of bloody excrement—evidence of yet another failure of science to solve the global food crisis.
The ingenious whitecoats of FIVE had genetically tailored a bacterium whose internal processes could turn igneous rock into something edible. But when the pseudo-fast-food product was consumed regularly, its mineral components built up in the human body, giving rise to a range of alarming physical symptoms, including bloody stools and psychopathic behavior. Despite the known side effects, FIVE dispensed Beefie Cheesies and Tater Cheesies by the truckload to placate the Gloomtowners. The discarded plastifoil wrappers swirled ankle deep around the feet of the mob.
A fresh hail of stones cut Dr. Huth’s cheeks, forehead, and neck. He knew he had to keep moving or be stoned to death. His long legs quaking from the effort, he broke the missile’s inertia, but managed just a few more steps before collapsing under the weight of the nose cone, which pinned him to the street, crushing the air from his lungs and making him pass out.
Merciful oblivion lasted only a heartbeat.
Dr. Huth awoke with a gasp, his burden gone. He flew upward in a metal mesh cage, his wrists shackled together with two feet of chain. Looking up from his manacles, he realized he hadn’t completely escaped the missile. It now stood upright, its riveted skin gliding past him in a white blur as the elevator rose.
He also sensed he wasn’t alone in the cage.
Dr. Huth whipped around, and in so doing came face-to-face with the human from the parallel world, the man he had ordered brought back to Earth for examination and interrogation. This was the same tall, rangy savage who had somehow managed to escape not just FIVE’s custody, but its reality, as well, and in so doing had created untold havoc and destruction.
The one-eyed man stared back at him with malice. A scar from a knife slash, like a crudely drawn lightning bolt, divided his left brow and cheek above and below the black eye patch he wore. Black curling hair fell almost to his shoulders. A leather sheath strapped above his left boot carried a huge knife. In his right hand he held an equally massive chromed wrench.
Though he called himself Ryan Cawdor, FIVE’s media consultants had renamed him “Shadow Man,” and turned him into a symbol of hope for the starving masses. His birthplace on the parallel Earth was Deathlands, the heavily nuked, former United States of America.
“Why have you come back here?” Dr. Huth said. Behind Cawdor, a half-dozen children—filthy, hollow eyed, swollen bellied—clung like monkeys to the outside of the rising elevator cage. Huth ignored their bony little outstretched hands and demanded, “Where are you taking me?”
Shadow Man didn’t answer either question. He held something inside his mouth, a round shape that bulged against the dark stubble of his cheek.
When the gantry elevator stopped, once again Dr. Huth faced the tip of the missile. He was relieved to see that there was no door in the side of the nose cone, and therefore no possible way he could be placed inside.
Shadow Man spun him, and with a forearm crushing against the front of his throat, pinned his back to the nose cone. Cawdor then grabbed the manacle chain and jerked it up, forcing Huth’s arms above his head. Though the scientist struggled, the one-eyed man easily controlled him. Cawdor fitted a bolt through a chain link, threaded it into a matching hole in the nose cone and, using the chromed spanner, quickly torqued it down.
As Cawdor retreated a step, Dr. Huth bawled, “Why are you doing this to me?”
Shadow Man smiled and curled back his lips. Between his front teeth he held a human eyeball with a sky-blue iris. Its color and size perfectly matched his good right eye, as well it should have. Dr. Huth had had the eye genetically reconfigured to fit him, a replacement for the one Cawdor had lost to a knife slash years ago. The gift had been intended as an awe-inspiring demonstration of the biotechnological power of this reality, and of how cooperation with FIVE was rewarded.
When the scientist started to speak, Cawdor lunged forward, slamming a forearm back across his windpipe. Shadow Man took the severed eyeball from his own mouth and shoved it between Dr. Huth’s teeth. His lips clamped shut by a callused palm, Huth could do nothing but whimper as the savage wound turns of duct tape around his head, sealing the eyeball inside.
While the scientist tried not to strangle on the mouthful, the monkey children rattled the cage’s mesh, mocking his predicament by inflating their cheeks with air and bulging and crossing their eyes.
From the foot of the gantry, the rhythmic chanting of the Gloomtowners resumed. Shaking and pushing the structure, the mob rolled the gantry away from the missile. Huth’s feet slipped off the edge of the platform’s floor, and his full weight dropped onto his upraised wrists. His muffled shriek of pain was followed by a raucous cheer from below. As he dangled from the nose cone, as the gantry continued to retreat from the launch pad, the elevator started its rapid descent. Ryan Cawdor and the monkey children dropped from view, abandoning the scientist to his fate.
Which he now realized was a twenty-second-century version of crucifixion.
He was being punished for his contributions to a better way of life, to freedom from hunger and illness, the eternal banes of humankind. He had offered his world the salvation of science and in return…
A terrible rumbling came from below.
It grew louder and louder, and as it did, the vibration set his guts shimmying and made the trapped eyeball quiver between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. With a blast of flesh-melting heat, and the deafening bellow of wide-open rocket motors, the missile leaped upward. The jolt of liftoff caused the eye to slip back into his throat, blocking his airway. Huth had no choice; he gulped it down whole.
As the missile climbed and climbed, engines roaring, his body buffeted against the missile, his arms felt as if they were about to tear free of his shoulder sockets and the swallowed eye rolled around in the pit of his belly like a cannonball.
DR. HUTH AWAKENED on his hands and knees, retching. The violent spasms seemed to start from the soles of his feet, rippling through all the muscles of his body, building a terrible momentum that peaked as they reached his throat. He dry-heaved, over and over. Long strands of bile trailed from his lips into the powdery red dirt beneath his face.
When the convulsions finally subsided, he slumped onto his side. Disoriented and confused, Huth clung like a drowning man to his only clear memory. Moments ago, he had been in the Totality Concept’s trans-reality laboratory. He had been there when the missile he had already sent across to Shadow World, a missile meant to put a recon satellite in orbit, had nosed instead back to his Earth, back through the shimmering lips of the passageway, its gigantic rocket motors thundering.
How that singular horror had come to pass, he had no way of knowing, but certainly the goal of firing the missile back through the corridor had been to destroy the connection between parallel worlds. Given the fuel capacity of the missile, and the fuel’s volatility, there was every reason to expect the strategy had worked.
Huth had a much less distinct recollection of being sucked through the reality portal in the backwash from the rocket’s exhaust, like a dry leaf caught in a whirlwind. That memory was jumbled with a nightmare of horrible punishment and death. Thinking about it made his mind wheel violently, so he forced himself to stop and pushed up on an elbow.
He was surrounded by an open space that stretched unbroken to the horizon in all directions. The sudden absence of physical boundaries, of human-scale walls and ceilings, filled him with heart-pounding panic, but he resisted the urge to bury his head under his arms.
Above him, the dome of the cloudless sky was still tinged with the rose-pink of dawn. The sparkling air felt strangely light in his lungs, and so dry it tickled inside his nostrils. He sat near the edge of a broad, flat table of rock the color of dried blood, elevated above the surrounding plain by several hundred feet.
The mobile missile gantry was nowhere in sight. Also missing were the five explorers who had preceded him through the passage. If this was Deathlands, and he had no reason to doubt that it wasn’t, he had been deposited in a different spot, perhaps near the original landing site, perhaps not. Huth could only surmise that either the missile’s full-power reentry into the passage or its subsequent explosion at the heart of the Totality Concept complex had distorted the shape of the reality corridor, shifting its terminus at this end.
Huth rose stiffly to his feet and took stock of himself. The left sleeve of his lab coat was fire-blackened from cuff to elbow, but he wasn’t bleeding anywhere and he had no apparent broken bones. He patted his pocket and was relieved to find the instruments he’d slipped into it moments before the disaster. Both the microcomputer, which was the size of a playing card, and an equally small electron microscope seemed to have made the journey intact. The other scientific tool he’d brought along he carried locked away in his brain, and that was the Twenty-five Theories, which linked all human knowledge. With just these three artifacts, he was confident that he could reconstruct most of the advanced technology of his Earth.
Though the timing of the crossing had been accidental, Huth had been on the verge of departing his reality, with or without FIVE’s approval. The most recent computer projections gave nine-to-one odds that the predicted mass die-off of humanity would occur within the next three months. Based on past experience with the CEOs, he couldn’t be one hundred percent certain that they would let him use his own invention to escape. That decision had been taken out of FIVE’s hands, and thanks to what he carried in his pocket and brain, Huth was in a position to become the most powerful man in the history of either Earth—as he saw it, a combination of Leonardo da Vinci, John D. Rockefeller and Joseph Stalin.
Huth stepped to the edge of the deeply rilled, red rock mesa. There were more mesas in the distance on the other side of a wide desert plain, and far behind those table rocks loomed a range of snowcapped mountains. Bisecting the plain were remnants of a prenukecaust highway, a ribbon-straight ghost of four-lane interstate. Lying across the old highway at odd intervals were great, tilted slabs—the fractured remains of fallen overpasses. At the horizon line to the northwest, the sun glared off something shiny. A body of water, perhaps. If the passageway’s terminus hadn’t shifted very far, it occurred to him that it might even be the remains of the Great Salt Lake.
As he continued to scan the landscape below, Huth saw white smoke rising in a thin column in the dead still air, indicating a human presence, if not a settlement of some sort, not more than ten miles away.
The scientist let out a whoop and celebrated his good fortune by dancing an ungainly jig. Then he carefully boulder hopped down a steep chute that led to the foot of the mesa, and once there, immediately headed across the plain for the ancient roadway.
Up close there wasn’t much left of it.
Caustic rains had reduced the asphalt to sand, and had badly pocked the concrete layer beneath. Small, delicate white flowers with bright yellow centers grew here and there along the edge of the highway, sprouting from depressions where water and nutrients accumulated.
Huth picked one of the little daisies and gingerly nibbled at the white petals. Their explosive bitterness made him gasp. He spit them out with a curse, then groaned as the vile taste set him to dry-heaving again.
Pale and shaken, he trudged on toward the distant smoke plume. The only sounds were the scrape of his shoe soles on the asphalt sand and the wheeze of his breathing. The day’s building heat made sweat ooze from his forehead. In the flat, shimmering distance lay the first of the dropped overpasses; he made slow but steady progress toward the jumble of concrete slabs.
When Huth first caught wind of the rank, feral odor, he didn’t know what to make of it, except that it wasn’t coming from him. As he continued walking, the smell got worse. Much worse. Only when the pack of robbers started popping up on either side of the ruined road did he understand the meaning of the noxious stench, and by then it was too late to run.
The dirt-caked, tangle-bearded bandits had been lying in wait in shallow hides they’d hacked into the desert hardpan. Their clothes consisted of countless layers of greasy rags; their boots were repaired with overlapping windings of strips cut from plastic bags. They carried battered black-powder shotguns and revolvers, rusting machetes and nail-studded wooden clubs.
As the robbers encircled him and closed in, the huge man who appeared to be the leader confronted him, toe to toe. He bore spiral-shaped brands on his cheeks and forehead. The angry welts of scar tissue looked like the tracks of some parasitic worm burrowing just under the skin. Below a mustache matted with dried saliva, Huth saw the snaggle stumps of yellow-brown teeth. The tip of the man’s wide nose bore a sparse tuft of black bristle, half an inch long.
“Good morning to you,” the scientist said, trying not to show his terror, and failing miserably. “I just arrived here from—”
Without warning, someone booted Huth in the buttocks so hard that his feet left the ground, so hard that his legs went numb and his knees buckled under him when he crash-landed. The bristle-nosed robber reached down and grabbed him by the collar, hauled him upright, then punched him straight in the face, breaking his nose and knocking him unconscious.
Huth came to with a moan as the big man kicked him in the ribs.
“What are these?” Bristle-nose demanded, holding a pair of small, flat objects in front of the scientist’s bloodied face.
“No, please,” Huth gasped, “those are my scientific instruments. Give them back. You can’t operate them. They are of absolutely no use to you.”
“He’s bossin’ me,” Bristle-nose said to the others as he cocked back his massive fist. “This dimmie bastard’s bossin’ me….”
Huth saw another short, straight punch coming at him, but there was nothing he could do about it. At the impact, as his head snapped back, something cracked. A lance of white-hot pain shot through his upper jaw, and his mouth was suddenly littered with sharp shards. In a gob of fresh blood, he spit out the remains of his two upper front teeth.
While Huth thrashed and bled, Bristle-nose showed off his booty. “Looks like predark gear to me,” he said. “Got to be worth a spoon or two of jolt over in Byram ville.”
With that, the big robber turned and started off in the direction of the smoke. The other bandits quickly stripped off the unprotesting scientist’s shoes and pants, leaving their victim his blood-sprayed and scorched lab coat and his tattered, gray-tinged underwear and socks.
Huth waited a long time before he risked uncoiling from a fetal position in the dirt. And he didn’t start walking again until the sun was high overhead. Hobbling slowly toward the shade of the nearest fallen highway overpass, he looked like the survivor of a train wreck. Blood had dried purple black all down the front of his lab coat. He couldn’t breathe through his swollen nose, and every time he sucked air through his mouth, electric needles of pain stabbed into the exposed nerves of his emptied tooth sockets.
As he stumbled along, he wept over the loss of his irreplaceable instruments, his permanent disfigurement and the unspeakable cruelty of fate. He was still sobbing when he reached the collapsed overpass. What he saw there put his suffering—and his predicament—in a new perspective.
At the foot of the largest block of concrete sat a line of sun-bleached human skeletons. He counted fourteen of them, all identically posed, their backs leaning against the block, elbows resting on raised kneecaps. Some were adults, some were small children, some still had isolated patches of hair on their massively caved-in skulls. A couple of feet above the row of drop-jaw grins, someone had chiseled three tall, spindly words into the eroded concrete.
Welkum Too Deflanz.
Chapter One
Fifteen days after a massive explosion destroyed the upper floors of the Totality Concept complex, Dredda Otis Trask stood naked and alone in a windowless stainless-steel room. The small, unfurnished chamber had two doors, both heavily gasketed and airtight. A warm wetness trickled down the insides of her thighs. Not blood, but the remnants of a clear surgical lubricant, melted by her body heat. The CEO of Omnico, one of the most powerful people on the planet, had just had her womb stripped of all its eggs.
In itself, there was nothing unusual about the procedure. On her world, the in-vitro-fertilized eggs of the executive class were routinely carried to term by surrogate mothers conscripted from the ranks of the white collars.
Nor was it strange that Dredda Otis Trask had chosen to have the extraction performed in the secure, private facilities of her own global conglomerate. But Omnico’s CEO hadn’t surrendered all her potential offspring to a test tube merely for the sake of convenience. Given the nature of the dangerous experimental treatment she was about to undertake, it was a necessary precaution.
Above Dredda’s head on a wall bracket was a vidcam, its op light glowing ruby red. A team of faceless, nameless strangers was observing her through the fish-eye lens.
“Please stand beneath the ceiling nozzles,” said a voice through the vidcam’s speaker.
When Dredda stepped over the center-sloping floor’s single drain, the shower spray commenced. The hot water that enveloped her was followed by foaming, pea-green jets of bactericide. After she had rinsed off the foam, vents along the base of the walls blasted her with heated air, drying her to the point of itchiness in a matter of seconds. As she raked her static-charged, auburn hair back behind her ears, an electronic lock snicked and the exit door popped outward a foot.
Through the tiny speaker, the voice said, “Please proceed to Level Three containment.”
Dredda immediately moved into the well-lit, polished metal hallway, which was also windowless. She could have touched the ceiling with a raised hand, and the corridor was so narrow it wouldn’t permit the full spread of her arms. The air hung heavy with a mist of disinfectant that stung the back of her throat. Auto-tracking vidcams mounted at intervals along the ceiling followed her barefoot progress to the next chamber, which was even smaller.
The bioengineering facility’s hazard-containment system consisted of a series of concentric, hermetically sealed, metal enclosures. The more dangerous the biological materials, the smaller the enclosure in which they were stored. Level One’s barrier, which took up an entire subfloor of the Omnico skyscraper, encompassed containment Levels Two through Four, Level Two encompassed Three and Four, and so on. Each of the interiors was reverse-pressurized so that if a seal failure occurred, external air would rush in, keeping contaminants from escaping to the next level.
When she entered the tiny room, the airtight door closed behind her. Sheets of tempered glass covered the walls, ceiling and floor; behind the glass were banks of five-foot-long light tubes. Yet another automated surveillance camera stood watch over her.
“Please put on the goggles hanging on the hook in front of you,” the voice told her.
After Dredda donned the red-lensed eye protectors, there was a loud thunk, and the surrounding lights all came on at once. The intense ultraviolet bombardment lasted fifteen minutes, during which she was directed by the voice to assume various awkward positions that allowed the germ-killing radiation to reach otherwise hidden surfaces. When the bank of lights finally thunked off, she was told to pull on the pair of plastifoil slippers that waited for her by the exit door.
“You may now proceed to Level Four,” the voice said.
The straight steel corridor leading to Level Four had a narrow, bunker-slit window along one wall. Through the three layers of thick glass, Dredda could see dozens of biotech workers in lemon-yellow hazard suits with oxygen canisters strapped to their backs. Because of the glare of the overhead lights off the hoods’ visor plates, she couldn’t see the workers’ faces. And they seemed too preoccupied with their cluttered lab tables and banks of electronic machinery to notice her passing. The corridor ended in a circular bulkhead door, which stood slightly ajar.
The brightly lit Level Four operating suite was the tiniest of the nested defensive boxes—the most deadly and contagious microbial environment on the planet. The hollow steel cylinder was so narrow that the single bed it contained nearly spanned its diameter. On the walls opposite the sides and head of the bed were rows of triple-laminated glass portholes. Directly below the ob ports, from similar heavily gasketed circular openings, rubberized, liver-colored gauntlets hung down in pairs. Shelves packed with medical supplies and equipment ringed all but the foot of the bed.
At the sight of the cramped enclosure, Dredda experienced sudden difficulty in breathing. The observers noted her distress.
“Your anxiety is only natural,” the voice said in a reassuring tone. “But it is best to continue without delay. Please climb onto the bed, and we will make you more comfortable as quickly as possible.”
Dredda forced herself to crawl forward. The door automatically shut and sealed behind her. As she lay back on the bed, she saw movement through all of the portholes. Technicians in biohazard suits took up positions along the outside of the cylinder and proceeded to thrust their arms into the gauntlets, which allowed them to reach over the bed, more than halfway across her body. All those moving arms made the chamber seem even smaller. And no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to fill more than the top third of her lungs.
To try to calm herself, the CEO focused on her own reflection in the curve of the ceiling. She strained to make out the details of her face, but the brushed metal turned her features into an unrecognizable blur—as if who and what she had been for her twenty-six years had already been erased.
Meanwhile, the pairs of gauntleted hands worked with practiced precision, strapping her down at the chest, waist and knees. Once she was tightly secured to the mattress, the anonymous fingers crawled over her, jabbing the needles for intravenous lines into her arms and inserting a catheter into her bladder. They applied a liquid adhesive to her skin and attached life-signs sensors and neuromuscular stimulators. Finally, gloved hands at the head of the chamber slipped an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth.
Dredda gulped at the hiss of oxygen, which was mixed with a quick-acting sedative gas. It also carried a massive dose of bioengineered virus. After that first deep breath, there was no question of going back. She gladly surrendered to the calm that settled over her.
You are a very brave girl.
Dredda felt hot blood rush to her face and neck. She recognized her father’s voice. It hadn’t come through the operating suite’s intercom speaker; it didn’t exist anywhere outside her mind. Regis Otis Trask, the former CEO of Omnico, had been dead for four years.
Whenever her father had said those words to her, and he’d had the opportunity to say them often, what he’d meant was that she was very brave for a girl. Brave considering that because of her sex, she possessed relatively limited physical and mental strength and endurance. Though she had long understood the reasons for her father’s patronizing attitude, that had never made it any less painful or infuriating.
Dredda’s personal abilities and achievements had very little to do with the power she currently wielded over the lives of tens of billions of human beings. She had inherited her father’s position at the top of the conglomerate’s executive hierarchy, and she had an army of highly capable, highly motivated defenders dedicated to keeping her there. For as long as she could remember, everyone she encountered had looked past her, or through her, and had seen only her father’s awesome legacy.
But Dredda was very much the daughter of Regis Otis Trask. She shared his thirst for conquest and empire, and the need to burn her name deep into the pages of history, desires she could never satisfy as caretaker of a bureaucratic monolith on a dying planet.
For months, preparations had been under way for her unannounced, permanent departure to Shadow World. In secret, Omnico’s top scientists had duplicated the Totality Concept’s reality-jumping technology, and had managed to vastly improve upon it. The transfer of soldiers and matériel only awaited the successful completion of her Level Four treatment, which for security reasons had been postponed until the last possible moment.
Dredda had committed herself to the irreversible genetic procedure shortly after the CEOs’ joint interrogation of the prisoner from Shadow World. The man called Ryan Cawdor had described his Earth as a place of chaos, of perpetual bloody turmoil. Social control did exist, but only in confined areas called baronies, and it was maintained by brute power.
Male power.
To cross over to Shadow World unprepared for that fact would have meant the surrender of everything Dredda had, of everything she had ever dreamed of.
Could Alexander the Great have succeeded if he had been a woman? Could Cortez? Or Napoleon? Her own Earth’s history said no. In times of internal strife, during periods of conquest, males only respected other males, only feared other males. These were the lessons of Shadow World, as well. If Dredda failed to instill absolute terror in her adversaries on the parallel Earth, she knew her relatively small expeditionary force could not prevail.
And she not only had Shadow World males to contend with, but those in her own support units, as well. In a different reality, the old urges of one sex to dominate the other would surely resurface. The selective subordination and subjugation of females was bound to follow. Such an outcome was unacceptable to Dredda Otis Trask.
As her father had so often said, “Chains are meant for other people.”
It might well have been the Trask family motto.
Dredda became aware of a ringing in her ears, the first sign of the spread of the genetically modified virus. Almost immediately, her body temperature began to rise, and as it climbed, the sedation was increased. Long before the infection’s peak, she slipped quietly into a drug-induced coma. She didn’t feel the plastic tube slide down her airway or hear the rhythmic hiss of the respirator begin.
The tailored virus carried a limited set of genetic instructions, which as it replicated, it transmitted to all her cells. These instructions permanently altered the chemistry of her body, reinitiating long dormant physical processes, reactivating the growth plates in the bones of her hips, legs, back, shoulders and arms. Under their new instructions, the targeted cells began rapid, controlled division. As her bones enlarged, cell layer by cell layer, they ached as if they had been shattered by sledgehammers; as they enlarged, the attached sinews, muscles and cartilage stretched to the splitting point. Nerve cells began multiplying in specific locations, as well, which only magnified the intensity of the skeletal pain. The transformation process was so agonizing that it required anesthetic narcosis—early test subjects who were fully conscious had died from the pain within a matter of hours.
Safe in a deep coma, Dredda felt nothing. She drifted in darkness while her body metamorphosed in its stainless-steel cocoon.
Inside and outside the chamber, the atmosphere was anything but tranquil. Biotech teams in three shifts saw to her considerable life-support needs around the clock. Her normal daily calorie intake was quadrupled, and she received constant electrical stimulation of new nerves and growing muscles.
Early on the morning of the ninth day, sedation was terminated. By 10:00 a.m. Dredda was breathing without a respirator. At 1:00 p.m. she opened her eyes. She was still securely strapped to the bed. Empty gauntlets hung flaccidly from the walls.
“How are you feeling?” said the voice through the intercom.
“I hurt,” she said, her throat hoarse from the respirator tube. “I hurt everywhere.”
“That is entirely normal, I assure you. We’re going to release the restraints now. You need to start moving your arms and legs.”
Technicians slipped into gauntlets on both sides of the chamber. Their gloved hands unfastened the straps, which slithered off her. When she sat up, she nearly bumped her head on the chamber’s low ceiling.
“Please be careful,” the voice warned. “You have grown four inches. You are now five feet eleven inches tall. You have gained sixty-three pounds.”
Dredda looked down at herself. Even though she had known more or less what to expect from computer-morphed projections, she recoiled. Her breasts were still there, and the same size and shape, but they looked smaller, flatter because of the expansion of her chest in bone and muscle. The new muscle mass was smooth, quick, not corded or bulked up. Like her breasts, her hips had remained the same size, but they now looked narrow relative to the increased span of her shoulders.
She ran her fingertips over her lips and chin and was relieved to find no sprouting of coarse facial hair. Although her jaw seemed a little heavier, as did her cheekbones and brow, there was no other apparent external masculinization. She had changed into a very tall, very athletic looking female, the tallest, most athletic female the limitations of her existing genetics could produce. Of course, that was just the tip of the iceberg as far as the changes went.
Dredda flexed her right bicep and, despite a twinge of pain in her elbow, was momentarily transfixed by its unfamiliar bulge.
“Based on the previous experiments,” the voice told her, “your lean-muscle mass should continue to increase slightly for a more few days. The new neural connections are already complete, as is bone growth. You aren’t going to get any taller.
“As you know, some experimental subjects, post-transformation, have displayed outbursts of extreme violence. We have only had combat simulations to work from, but it appears that spending long periods of time in a battlesuit under stress aggravates the problem. If you notice any loss of emotional control, you must start injecting yourself with antipsychotic drugs from the battlesuit medikits at once.”
“What are their side effects?”
“Reduced reaction time and increased fatigue.”
“But that would completely defeat the purpose of the procedure!” Dredda exploded.
The voice didn’t respond.
“If I start dosing myself with these drugs, will I have to take them permanently?”
“I’m sorry, but that is impossible to predict,” the whitecoat told her. “No one knows the long-term consequences of the genetic treatment you have been subjected to.”
The slowly simmering anger that had always been part of Dredda’s consciousness was now paired with an entirely different level of agitation, tangible like a hairy-legged insect buzzing, bouncing off the insides of her internal organs. Everything was taking way too long.
“Unseal the door,” she said.
The airlock remained shut, and the faceless whitecoat talked faster. As he spoke, his gauntleted hands made emphatic gestures above her head. “The viral agent we’ve used is extremely infectious and prone to rapid mutation and genetic recombination with other, potentially lethal life-forms. Understandably, we are very concerned about its containment. We strongly recommend that you spend another three days in Level Four quarantine to make sure it has all passed out of your system.”
The other conglomerates that made up FIVE knew nothing of this lab’s existence, nor were they aware of the genetic-engineering project that Dredda had made herself part of. All research connected to trans-reality and bioweapon technology was subject to the terms of FIVE’s founding treaty—only to be pursued as a joint venture. If the alliance got wind of what she was up to, they would turn on Omnico and subject it to a combined military attack that would make her escape to Shadow World impossible.
Moving in a blur, Dredda grabbed one of the whitecoat’s gloved wrists. He tried to pull back, but she held him fast, and as she did, she applied pressure to the slender bones on the back of his hand with her thumb. “Delay of any kind is unacceptable,” she told him.
“I understand your impatience—just do not rip the glove. You must not break the Level Four containment. If you relax for a moment, everything will be fine.”
The other gauntlets rapidly emptied as biotech workers moved out of her reach.
“Let me out of here now.”
“Please, listen to reason….”
There was no reason but hers, no need but hers. Under the ball of her thumb, the small bones snapped like dry twigs. A piercing scream burst through the intercom.
“Open the door!” she shouted. Her booming voice made the walls of the steel chamber vibrate.
Seconds later, the airlock door popped open and she was free.
Chapter Two
Ryan Cawdor stepped over an exposed tree root, slick, dark and as big as a human corpse sprawled across his path. A profusion of bare roots laced the winding trail and made the footing treacherous. The dim light didn’t help matters, either. Though it was high noon, everything was cloaked in shadow, thanks to the dense canopy overhead and the seemingly endless groves of black-barked trees.
In all his travels, he had never seen this type of rad-mutated oak before. Its wood was like iron; hand axes bounced off of it, hardly making a dent. The bark and leaves were chem-rain resistant, as were the parasitic strangler vines that spiraled up trunks and limbs to reach the sunlight.
The forest’s canopy had protected Ryan and his companions from the searing downpours they had endured since their last mat-trans jump, several days earlier. The intense storm activity of the past forty-eight hours had forced them to take shelter in a cave. From the safety of its entrance, they had winced at sizzling nearby lightning strikes and watched methane ice hail, as blue as robin’s eggs and just as big, pound the earth. In scattered heaps, the chem ice had steamed for hours before it finally melted away.
If the local trees and vines had somehow adapted to survive the caustic rains, other types of foliage had not. There was no ground cover to speak of around the trunks, just slippery piles of fallen, blade-shaped leaves that rustled underfoot.
The passing storm front had left the air extremely hot and punishingly humid—it felt equatorial to Ryan. The weather was the only clue where he and the companions had materialized. The cloud cover and forest canopy had made it impossible for them to orient using the stars.
As he rounded a tight bend, he saw the group’s pointman frozen like a bird dog fifty feet ahead. Ryan swung to hip height the scoped Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle he carried. Jak Lauren, his pale skin and lank white hair almost luminous in the forest’s half-light, held up a hand, indicating caution. Jak was a man of few words. Fiercely loyal, without an ounce of guile or deceit, he was a true wild child of Deathlands. Jak’s weapon, a battle-scarred .357 Magnum Colt Python, remained in its holster. Whatever he’d found, there was no immediate danger.
“Cook fire,” Jak said softly as Ryan stepped up, his albino eyes as red as rubies. He raised a hand to point downslope. “There…”
Ryan caught the faintest smell of woodsmoke, filtering up the winding trail through the forest. It was the first sign of another human presence since the mat-trans jump.
It smelled delicious.
For three days Ryan and his companions had been on starvation rations of mutie rattlesnake jerky and tepid water. The forest’s lack of undergrowth meant there was no ground-dwelling large or small game for them to hunt. During the day, they had caught a few glimpses of little creatures darting about high in the branches, but the dense canopy made shooting at them a waste of ammo. And at night it was so black they couldn’t see their own feet.
Though all their bellies rumbled, no one had complained.
A tall, skinny man, dressed in a dusty frock coat and tall boots, moved up the trail and closed ranks with Ryan and Jak.
Leaning on his silver-handled walking stick, Doc Tanner sniffed at the air, and said, “Dear friends, it would seem that Providence has seen fit to smile upon us once more.” He inhaled again, savoring the aroma. “Somewhere below, the groaning board is piled high. Broiled flesh of some sort, I would venture.”
Though Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner appeared to be a well-preserved sixty, chronologically he was four times that old. The Harvard-and-Oxford-educated man was the first human time traveler, albeit an unwilling one. He had been ripped from the loving embrace of his family in 1896, and drawn one hundred years into the future by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. The twentieth-century scientists quickly tired of Tanner’s ingratitude, truculence and general unpleasantness. Shortly before skydark, to rid themselves of the troublemaker, they had hurled him forward in time. In so doing, they had inadvertently saved him from the nukecaust that scoured away their civilization. Though Doc sometimes rambled in speech and broke into tears for no apparent reason, a consequence of his life’s overload of trauma and tragedy, this day he was as sharp as the point of the steel blade hidden in his ebony stick.
A stocky black woman dressed in baggy camo BDU pants and a sleeveless gray T-shirt stepped up behind Tanner. Her hair hung down in beaded plaits. “Smells like somebody’s had themselves a hearty breakfast,” she said.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth had also time-traveled, but in a much different fashion than her Victorian colleague. After a life-threatening reaction to anesthetic, she had been cryogenically preserved just prior to the all-out U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange of January 20, 2001. She had slept in the land of the dead for a century, until revived by Ryan and the companions. Mildred’s weapon of choice was a Czech ZKR 551 target pistol, the same gun she’d used to win a silver medal in the last-ever Olympic Games.
“Whatever it is, it’s making my mouth water,” said the boy following close on Mildred’s heels. At age twelve, Ryan’s son, Dean, was already growing tall and straight like his father.
“Dear child, the human nose is by no means an infallible instrument,” Doc cautioned as the last two members of the group—a tall, red-haired woman, and the rear guard, a short, bespectacled man in a fedora—moved up the trail to join them. “What we Homo sapiens take for sweet succulence might well be the effluvium of some wayfarer not unlike ourselves. Someone whose grim misfortune was to be caught out in last night’s chain lightning. That hell-struck sir or madam could be down there somewhere, quietly smoldering.”
Dean made a disgusted face.
“Or it could be a trap,” offered the leggy, green-eyed redhead. Because of the sweltering heat, Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s lover and soul mate, had taken off her long fur coat and tied the arms around her slender waist. The only visible effect of the radiation-induced mutations that skydark had inserted into Krysty’s family tree was the prehensile ability of her long hair, which reacted to stress like a barometer. Her hair now hung in loose coils, indicating concern but not apprehension.
“Cook smoke could be the bait,” agreed John Barrymore Dix, aka the Armorer. Ryan and J.B. shared a bond of blood that went back many years, to their wild and woolly days with the Trader, the legendary Deathlands entrepreneur and road warrior. J.B. rested the barrel of his well-worn Smith & Wesson M-4000 12-gauge pump gun on his shoulder and tipped his sweat-stained hat back on his head. “In a place like this,” he said, pausing to thumb his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose, “with no game to shoot, nothing growing to eat, a scent trail could draw victims from a long ways off.”
Though Ryan respected J.B.’s and Krysty’s trail savvy, he didn’t consider an ambush likely. There had been no sign of stickies or cannies. No grisly heaps of red bones and bloody rags strewed about. Stickies and cannies, Deathlands most murderous, subhuman residents, hunted in packs, like wolves, seeking out norms—nonmutated humans—and muties alike, and failing that, they would prey on the weakest of their own kind. The condition of the path told Ryan there wasn’t much foot traffic, certainly not enough to support the appetite of a large predator, or group of predators.
“Trap or no trap,” he told the companions, “we’ve got to follow the cook smoke, or we’re going to starve in this bastard forest.” He slung the Steyr and unholstered his SIG-Sauer P-226 pistol. “Triple red, everybody,” he said. “Dean, middle of the file.”
The boy didn’t protest his position in the column, but watched with undisguised envy as Doc drew a massive revolver from the front of his frock coat. The gold-engraved LeMat was a Civil War relic. It fired nine .44-caliber lead balls through a six-and-one-half-inch top barrel. A second, shorter, big-bore barrel hung beneath the first, chambered for a single scattergun load of “blue whistlers”—odd bits of scrap metal and glass that added up to close-range mayhem. Dean left his own weapon, a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power, buckled down in its holster. He was under standing orders from his father not to draw the weapon unless they came under direct attack, and not to shoot unless he had a clear lane of fire.
With Ryan in the lead, the companions headed downslope. If anything, as they descended the winding trail, the canopy became more dense, and the air more humid. As Ryan rounded a turn, harsh sunlight backlit the groves of oaks ahead. Through the trees came the sounds of high-pitched, chattering speech and the rustle of movement. The one-eyed man dropped the blaster’s safety and pushed on.
No command to the rear was necessary.
The companions reacted as one, spacing out along the path as they continued to advance. They dropped to their bellies and crawled the last few feet to the edge of the forest.
The clearing before them bordered on a sluggishly moving green river fifty yards wide. The activity was down by the water’s edge. A group of three dozen people, men, women and children, all with straight black hair and skin the color of cinnamon bark, were tending thick, hand-braided ropes that stretched back from the river almost to the trees. The children were naked; the men and women wore short kilts.
Inbreeding was common in Deathlands’s isolated, primitive communities. Noting the uniform distribution of low foreheads and underslung jaws, Ryan decided that these folks had been at it for a very long time.
Back from the river’s muddy bank, nestled in the protection of the ironwood canopy, stood a ragged row of translucent yellow shacks made of tanned hide or skin that was stretched and tied over curving supports that looked like gigantic rib bones. Cooking pits lined with red hot coals had been dug in the soft earth. Whatever food had been roasted over them earlier had already been polished off.
Jak tersely summed up the cinnamon people’s armament. “No blasters, just knives.”
Ryan nodded. Their weaponry consisted of bows and arrows, spears, knives and short swords. And the edged weapons weren’t made of metal, or even flint. To Ryan the blades looked like bone. Serrated bone. Given the twentieth-century firepower he and the companions carried, the villagers presented no real threat.
The breeze shifted suddenly, swirling along the bank. Cook fire odors were overpowered by a terrific stench.
“Smells like dead fish,” Dean choked. “Tons of dead fish.”
“Ugh, I just lost my appetite,” Mildred said.
“Don’t trouble yourself over that, my dear,” Doc stated pleasantly. “If past is prologue, it will return to you shortly, and tenfold…”
At one time, Ryan would have expected the black woman to go ballistic over the snide remark. Not because she was the least bit sensitive about her weight, which was appropriate for her body type, but because of the outrageous presumption that being a woman, she should have been sensitive about her weight. Mildred had learned to fight fire with fire when it came to dealing with the bony old codger’s needling.
“And how’s the tapeworm doing today, Doc?” Mildred asked back sweetly.
Ryan pushed to his feet. “Come on, let’s introduce ourselves,” he said. “Stay alert. Watch the flanks.”
The companions emerged from the forest, fanning out with weapons up and ready. The river people were startled at first, but they said nothing. None of them made a move to approach or to retreat from the armed intruders. After a moment or two of standoff, the villagers surprised Ryan and the others by pointedly turning their backs on them, and refocusing their attention on the murky river and their braided ropes, each of which was strong enough to tow a war wagon.
When Ryan advanced and opened his mouth to speak, a man wearing a translucent fish-skin vest held up a hand for silence. There was a warning in his extremely close-set black eyes. He pointed at the river, which silt and algae had turned the color of pea soup. Stretched across its width were floats made of clusters of blue plastic antifreeze jugs, tied together by their handles. The villagers had a fishing net out.
Dean stepped over to the bank for a better look. As quick as a cat, the boy jumped back from the river’s edge.
Ryan swung up his 9 mm blaster in a two-handed grip. Over its sights, twenty feet from shore, he saw a swirl, like water sheeting over a great boulder just under surface. Then a five-foot-long bone blade, like a dirty yellow, two-handed broadsword, slashed up through the surface. It gleamed for an instant, then disappeared beneath the murky flow. Ryan held his fire, as did J.B., who had his scattergun hip-braced and ready to roar.
“Fireblast!” the Armorer sputtered. “What the hell was that?”
“Shades of King Arthur and the Lady in the Lake!” Doc exclaimed.
“King who?” J.B. said.
Ignoring the question, Doc went on, “In this case, Excalibur appears sadly the worse for wear.”
Before the companions could unpuzzle Tanner’s remarks, the strings of blue net floats jerked violently, then skittered across the water like a flock of leg-snared waterfowl. One by one, the clusters of antifreeze jugs glugged under the surface…and stayed there, trembling in the current.
Whatever it was, it was caught fast.
The villagers leaped to their ropes and pulled them taut, their bare feet sliding in the mud. Only when the creature swam up to the surface and began to thrash midriver, rolling and wrapping itself in the fishnet, did Ryan realize how big it was. The brown-backed fish was easily thirty feet long. Its great tail slapped at the water as it momentarily turned belly up.
Before the river beast could get its bearings, the villagers began to draw in the net. Men, women and children hauled for all they were worth, their legs and backs straining. As they retreated from the waterline with the net in tow, they made the great fish roll over and over, further entangling itself.
The gargantuan mutated catfish flopped onto its belly on the edge of the bank, showering mud in all directions. Its mouth gaped. The gigantic lips looked plump and rubbery and almost human, as did the pale tongue. Its eyes, which were set far apart on a broad, flat skull wider than a man was tall, radiated a terrible fury. The ventral and dorsal fins were extended through the mesh, as were their cruel serrated spines. The cruelest of all stood atop its back like a hellship’s mast.
Unable to pull the fish any farther onto shore, the villagers secured the free ends of their ropes around the tree trunks at the edge of the clearing. One of the men cautiously approached the animal. He walked stiffly, his head lowered, shoulders slumped, obviously very much afraid. Behind him, a pair of village women began to wail and cry and tear at their own hair.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” J.B. said out of the corner of his mouth. “Why don’t they stop that guy? What the blazes is going on?”
“A chillin’,” Jak said.
Ryan sensed it, too. Not just danger, but death.
The ropes groaned as the great fish lunged against the net. With a crack like a pistol shot, the line at its head parted in the middle, one end sailing high into the trees. Before the man standing beside the beast could retreat, it had him. Whipping its head sideways, the fish sank the point of a ventral spine into his chest, then it rolled on top of him. With impacts that shook the ground, it flopped, using its tremendous weight to pound the man and the impaling spine into the soft mud.
The screaming villagers grabbed the loose end of rope and drew it tight, then they angled the other lines until the fish was once again pinned flat on its belly.
Too late.
Skewered on the spine was a muddy, bloody rag doll, the head lolling backward on a broken neck. Three men carefully slid the body off the bone broad sword and laid it down gently on the bank a safe distance away. A handful of villagers, including the wailing women, knelt beside the corpse, sobbing. With cupped hands they dripped river water on the body, tenderly washing the mud and blood from the face and chest.
“Ugly way to croak,” Jak spit.
“Let’s make sure nobody else gets nailed by that rad blasted thing,” Ryan said.
The companions quickly formed a firing squad beside the fish’s head. But before they could shoot, the man in the fish-skin vest jumped in front of the raised muzzles, waving his hands. “No, no!” he shouted at them. “No lead! The metal will put a curse on the meat.”
With that, the village leader scrambled onto the fish’s head, using the net’s mesh for hand and footholds. He was joined by another man who carried an ironwood club and a three-foot-long bone sword. The leader took the sword and knelt down, feeling around on the fish’s forehead with his fingertips.
“What’s he doing?” Dean asked.
“He’s looking for the seam in the skull,” Ryan replied. “A weak spot in the bone.”
The village leader found what he was searching for. He positioned the sword point against the skull, dropped his hands below the skin-wrapped grip and nodded to the second man, who raised the club and struck the pommel of the sword a mighty blow. The impact echoed sharply off the riverbank’s trees, and the serrated blade sank in a foot.
The great fish didn’t seem to notice.
But when the man dealt it a second blow, driving the sword in another foot, the animal went berserk, humping up and heaving its body against the net, its long, fleshy whiskers curling and cracking like bullwhips. The man struck again with the club before the fish could throw them off. On the third whack, the blade slipped in to the hilt, the mutie catfish’s eyes went dead, and its entire length began to quiver.
The villagers sent up a cheer and began preparations for the butchering. After untangling the net, several of the strongest men pried open its jaws, propping them wide apart with an ironwood stake sharpened at both ends. One of the men crawled inside the yawning mouth. Using the tip of his knife, he cut the lining of the throat away from the surrounding bone and muscle, and then disappeared into the dark cavity of its body. After a few minutes passed, he stepped out of the mouth, covered in blood and pulling the free end of the throat lining behind him.
The other villagers joined in and they began draging the guts out of the catfish, five feet at a time. As they gave the empty, pale gray tube of muscle the heave-ho, it stretched down to the size of a man’s arm. On the third pull, the tube caught on the far side of the stake. Redoubling their efforts, the villagers managed to free it.
The cause of the hang-up popped out onto the mud.
Inside the opaque gut lining was a blue-dark bulge easily as long as a man.
“Is it a person?” Dean asked, awed. “It looks like a person!”
The village leader immediately stopped the proceedings and using a borrowed sword, hacked through the gut tube in a single swipe. Covered in slime, a hairless, earless, mottled blue head peeped out. Its gaping jaws were lined with rows of needlelike teeth, its beady eyes had been turned the color of milk by the fish’s corrosive digestive juices.
“Mutie eel,” Jak pronounced, matter-of-factly. “Big un.”
The eel’s jaws snapped shut like a bear trap.
It was blind, but it sure wasn’t dead.
The headman could have easily lopped off its head, but he just stared at it, sword at his side. The eel, sensing freedom, shot out of the fish’s gut, frantically sidewinding for the defenseless women and children clustered on the bank. The women and children could have scattered to safety, but they didn’t. They stood there. Waiting.
Whether the eel intended them harm or just wanted back in the river, Krysty reacted at once. Stepping between the onrushing animal and the innocents, she raised and fired her Model 640 Smith & Wesson. The .38-caliber slug hit the eel square in the head, knocking it down, but not out. It writhed in the mud, toothy jaws snapping. Krysty gingerly pinned the thick neck to the ground with her boot heel, leaving the tail end free to slap and churn. Kneeling down, she held the muzzle of the revolver against the side of its head and snapped the cap. The coup de grâce cratered the eel’s skull and sent a plume of blood, brains and bone fragments splashing into the river.
As Krysty straightened, the women and children encircled her, making cooing noises as they stroked the arms and hem of her fur coat.
“It’s okay, really, it’s okay,” she told them, carefully holding the blaster out of their reach. They wouldn’t be put off. They continued stroking the furry coat sleeves and cooing at her.
When things finally settled down, Ryan and the others retired to the shade of the forest’s edge to watch the rest of the butchering. The village men skinned back the hide at the tail and started hacking out great, foot-thick slabs of pale pink flesh. These were passed to the women, who skewered them on ironwood sticks and began char-roasting them over the open fires. The sweet aroma of blackened catfish set the companions’ empty bellies to gurgling.
After a few minutes, the headman walked over to where they sat. He carried an uncapped antifreeze jug, which he handed to Ryan. The one-eyed man sniffed the spout. “Whew!” he said. “That’s powerful stuff.”
“It’s brewed from the fruit of the strangler vine,” the village leader told him. “Drink and enjoy your-selves. After she has been served, the feast will begin.”
“Who’s ‘she’?” Krysty asked.
“Sirena,” the leader said. “She told us of your coming, of the great fish, of Chambo’s death on its spine and the eel alive in its gut. Sirena sees all, and knows all.”
“A doomie!” Dean exclaimed.
None of the others said a word. Ryan knew they were all thinking the same thing.
Bullshit.
Though doomies actually existed in Deathlands, the genuine article was as rare as a thirteen-year-old virgin. Real doomies were a unique race of humans, possibly mutated, possibly not. Each individual was gifted to a varying degree with the second sight, the ability to see past and future events. Usually, however, the folks claiming to have the doomie sight turned out to be con artists or coldheart chillers.
The companions watched as a floppy-breasted young woman carried a smoking hunk of fish past them on a carved bone platter. Escorted by the village leader, she disappeared into a hut at the end of the line.
Doc took the antifreeze jug from Ryan and tried a long swallow.
“By the Three Kennedys!” he croaked, wiping his streaming eyes and nose. “A ferment drawn straight from Satan’s piss pot!”
“That good, huh?” J.B. said, accepting the jug.
“Go easy,” Ryan warned.
After a single gasp-and-shiver-producing gulp, J.B. handed the joy juice to Krysty, who whiffed it, made a face and passed it on to Jak without tasting.
In contrast to the companions’ restraint, the male villagers hit their blue jugs hard, and the effects were immediate. Joined by their headman, they started singing, waving their arms and stamping their feet in the mud. Their tuneless song was as repetitive as it was nerve grating. And they directed it, and the accompanying rhythmic hip gyrations, toward their guests.
“We are rulers of the forest and the river,” they howled. “We chill the great beasts with their own bones. Our powerful and manly seed will live forever.”
“Now there’s a comforting thought,” Mildred muttered to herself.
At that point, another woman stepped forward and laid down a heaping platter of cooked fish before them. The companions used their bare hands to tear into the char-crusted and still scorching-hot meat.
“Tastes like free-range snake,” J.B. remarked around a full mouth. He paused to extract a thin fibrous strand from between his teeth. “A hell of a lot more parasites, though,” he said, flicking the three-inch serpentine of unchewable tissue into the forest.
The dinner bell ended the village men’s caterwauling. They took seats in the shade across from the companions and started to eat. The women and children sat behind them.
Partway through the feast, one of the men gave the leader a nudge, indicating the young woman waving at him from the doorway of the far hut. The headman, who had washed down the fish course with numerous gulps of strangler wine, rose unsteadily to his feet, and said, “Sirena has been fed. You will pay your respects to her, now.”
Ryan nodded. “It would be our pleasure.”
The village leader ushered them into the tiny hut that was occupied by a withered old woman. She sat in an inverted catfish skull, a rocking chair hollowed out and packed with an excelsior of dried vine fibers. Over her skinny shoulders, she wore a fish skin cape with a tall, spiky fishbone collar. In her hand she held a long bone pipe, which gave off the pungently sweet smell of herbal tobacco. Even in the dim light filtering through the translucent yellow walls and the haze of smoke, Ryan could see that Sirena’s pupils and irises were the color of milk. Like the eel’s.
Dean was struck by this, as well, and whispered to his father, “Was she swallowed by a fish, or was she born blind?”
“If you’ve got a question, young man,” Sirena said in a gravelly voice, “best ask me direct.”
“Okay,” Dean said. “You get eaten by a fish?”
A hoarse, cackling laugh burst from the old woman’s throat. “Eaten and spit right back on the bank,” she said. “See these beauty marks it gave me?” Skeletal fingers traced down both sides of her face, pointing out the stripes of pink-white discoloration where the flesh had been etched away. Her scalp had hairless patches of the same color. “Right off, folks around here took my coming out of that fish alive as a sign and a wonderment. And it was a bigger wonderment than anyone dreamed. Inside that fish’s belly I lost normal sight, but I gained the doomie sight. Or mebbe I had it all along, and never knew until my eyes got melted away.”
The blind woman sniffed at the air like a rabbit, homing in on the exact location of Ryan’s son.
“I’ve had visions about you, young man,” Sirena said to Dean. “You and your six fine friends. Come sit here, and I’ll tell you all about them….” She spread her thin legs and patted her sagging lap.
Dean wrinkled his nose. “Not bastard likely,” he said, crossing his arms over his still narrow boy’s chest.
“If you’ve got something to say to us,” Ryan told her, “let’s hear it.”
“There’s doubt in your voice,” she said. “Looking for proof, are we? Well, how about I tell you something you already know? Your names? Your mothers’ names? Their mothers’ names?”
“Madam,” Doc said, “if you could, as you suggest, pronounce the names of all our maternal grandmothers, it would certainly be evidence in your favor.”
The old woman dismissed her own idea with a wave of her hand. “Nah, the back sight is too easy,” she said. “And it proves nothing. There’s other ways I could’ve found out the names. I didn’t, but that’s beside the point. It’s the foresight, the telling of what’s to come, that’s the real test of doomie power. How about this for proof? There’s a new kind of human being prowling the Deathlands. Not mutie spawned. These folks come from elsewhen.”
“You mean elsewhere?” Ryan said.
Sirena turned her head, following the sound of his voice. “No, Master Cawdor, I mean what I said, else when. Another stretch of time in another place altogether. Our time and place and this other one started out identical, as alike a pair of fish eggs, but oh how different they grew. Nightmare different. These new people are a cross between us and a cockroach.”
Expressions of surprise flickered over the companions’ faces.
“My, my, it’s gotten mighty quiet all of a sudden,” Sirena said, returning to her pipe.
In the hut’s golden gloom, Ryan watched her rock and blow smoke for a minute, then said, “That’s the past, dead and buried. You said you were going to tell us the future.”
The old woman chuckled. “It is the future. Your future, Master Half-Blind. I don’t create it. I can’t change it. I only see it with these….” With the tip of the pipe stem, she indicated the pale, hard-cooked eggs that were her eyes.
“Evidence, madam,” Doc interjected, emphasizing the point by rapping the hut’s dirt floor with his walking stick. “We require substantial and convincing evidence of your claims.”
“Oh, I’ll give you all the evidence you need,” Sirena replied. “There’s a brand-new star in the sky. Hasn’t been a new star like that in more than a hundred years.”
Ryan didn’t get her drift, right off. He wasn’t alone. The companions exchanged impatient looks. “We wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said. “We haven’t seen the night sky for almost two weeks now.”
“Well, you’ll all see it tonight, over the river,” the blind woman told him. “It’s not a proper star, mind you. It doesn’t twinkle like it should. And it sails from one side of the horizon to the other in the span of twenty heartbeats. This star was planted in the heavens by a roaring, flaming spear taller than the tallest tree in the forest.”
Mildred leaned close to Ryan and whispered, “She means a goddamn guided missile. It’s not a star she’s talking about. It’s a recon satellite!”
The one-eyed man had already figured that out. If what the old woman said was true, then he and the companions had failed to permanently close the passageway between realities.
“Master Cawdor,” the doomie said, “the cockroaches are already here, they are many, and there will be hell to pay.”
“If you really can see into the future,” Ryan said, leaning close to her, “then explain it to us in detail.”
Sirena shook her head. “Even if I went over it minute by minute, it wouldn’t help you. Preparations are a waste of precious time. I’ve lived with the doomie sight since I was your boy’s age, and I know this for a certain fact—no one can change the course of what will be. My advice to all of you is to enjoy each passing moment as if it were your last.”
“In other words,” Mildred said, “we’re going to suffer and die, but be sure and have a nice day. That’s all she’s going to tell us? Why are we listening to this hogwash?”
“I heartily agree,” Doc said. “Might I suggest that our ‘passing moments’ might be more enjoyably spent away from the confines of this cramped and stinking hovel.”
“You got that right, Doc,” J.B. agreed.
As they began filing from the hut, Sirena called out, “Wait, young Cawdor! Before you go, I have a gift for you.”
From under the translucent cape, she produced a slim six-inch bone dagger in a skin sheath.
Dean immediately glanced at his father, who indicated his permission with a curt nod of his head. The boy approached the old woman and took the dagger from her. There was no cross guard or pommel. The handle was wrapped with strips of scratchy fish skin. Unsheathing the blade, he carefully tested its serrated edge on the back of his thumbnail. “Demon sharp!” he said.
“It’s made from the tip of a catfish dorsal spine,” Sirena said. “It will fit nicely into the top of your right boot.”
Dean tried it. The blade and sheath disappeared completely. “I can hardly feel it’s there,” he said. “Thanks.”
Sirena reached out and seized his wrist in a grip that was amazingly strong. “I could have told you your future,” she said, “and your children’s future, too, if you’d just sat on my lap.”
“Mebbe you could,” the boy said, jerking his hand away. “And mebbe I don’t want to know that bad.”
As Ryan and Dean left the hut, waves of the doomie’s shrill, hoarse laughter crashed against their backs.
IT WAS NEARLY midnight when Ryan saw it, in the tree break over the dark river. The single point of bright light appeared in the west, above the blackness of the canopy, and swept across the starry field of sky. He and the others watched the satellite arc overhead and vanish in the east.
“Fireblast!” Ryan’s curse echoed off the surrounding forest.
“Couldn’t it be something else?” Dean asked him. “Something real old…from before skydark?”
“It isn’t old, son. All the space junk fell to earth and burned up a long time ago. It has to be new. The fish hag spoke the truth. People from the other Earth had to have put it up there. No one else could have done it.”
“We should’ve chilled those four bastards,” J.B. said. “Should’ve buried them along with all their fancy chilling gear.”
Ryan grimaced. J.B. was talking about the turncoats, the members of the first scouting expedition to cross over from the parallel Earth. With success within their grasp, the warrior-whitecoats had decided not just to abandon, but to sabotage their primary mission, which was to lay the groundwork for the invasion and conquest of Deathlands by the armies of FIVE. Instead of firing the guided missile they had trucked with them into the sky, they launched it through the reality portal in the hope of sealing the gateway forever. That done, the alternate world conquistadors went native. They stripped off the segmented black battlesuits that made them immune to blasterfire, and they dumped the tribarreled laser rifles that cut through plate steel like so much tissue paper. Ryan and the others helped them dismantle their gyroplane and they buried it deep in a sandy arroyo along with the rest of their gear.
“Colonel Gabhart and the others might not have had anything to do with this,” Mildred said.
“They could’ve changed their minds about bringing the armies across, too,” J.B. countered. “Mebbe they had blood relatives starving to death on the other side. Blood being thicker than water, they decided to reopen the passageway and save them.”
“However it happened,” Krysty said, “they’re here. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
All eyes turned to Ryan.
He was the only one who had seen the other world. And though he’d tried to describe its bleakness and horror to his friends, mere words couldn’t do it justice. They stuck in his throat like slivers of glass.
The nukecaust that had laid waste to Deathlands was an accident, an instantaneous, one-time event, but the alternate end to history that Ryan had witnessed was the final outcome of a civilization that had attacked nature as if it were a sworn enemy. There was nothing left on the parallel Earth but human beings and the avalanche of disasters their science had brought to life. They were indeed like two-legged cockroaches: indomitable breeders, surviving at all costs, consuming and destroying every living thing and every resource within their reach.
In his mind, Ryan could see gleaming, hard-shelled black armies pouring through the parted lips of the reality corridor. Armies carrying weapons and technology that nothing in Deathlands could match. Armies so vast that even without advanced weapons they could defeat any force the people of Deathlands could field against them.
Running away only postponed the inevitable. With an eye in the sky endlessly circling and searching their world, there was no safe place to hide. Fate had left Ryan and his companions one choice, and it was bad.
“We’ve got to go back to Moonboy ville,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to find a way to fight the bastards and drive them out for good.”
There was silence along the riverbank.
To enter battle with a slight possibility of victory was one thing; to walk willingly into the spinning blades of a meatgrinder was another. Ryan thought about the village man who had death-marched himself to meet the catfish’s impaling spine. Sirena had told the poor bastard his fate, and he had surrendered to it. Just as they were about to do. There was an important difference, of course.
Ryan listened to the gurgle of the life-giving river and felt the embrace of the dense forest that loomed on all sides. Overhead, the blanket of stars twinkled as his world slowly turned.
The difference was, they wouldn’t die for nothing.
And they wouldn’t die alone.
Chapter Three
A rag securely tied over his nose and mouth, Dr. Huth stopped hacking at the hardpan with the blade of his shovel. The sound of a distant car horn faded in and out, intermittently muffled by the gusts of hot wind that scoured the desert plain.
Abandoning the shovel, Huth climbed the side of Byram ville’s defensive berm for a look. As he scaled the mound of dirt, his feet slipped around inside the oversize jogging shoes he wore despite the plastic bags he’d wadded up in their toe boxes. His polyester pants were as stiff as cardboard. Not because they were new—their rigidity came from the black blood that starched the lap, thighs and shins. The pants were cinched tight around his waist with a length of frayed electrical cord.
To earn a dead man’s trousers and shoes, Huth had dug latrines barefoot and in his underpants for three days.
He was still digging latrines.
A mile away, a wag emerged from the dust devils that spun across the ruined interstate. It continued to honk as it approached the lone opening in the ville’s mounded perimeter wall. The vehicle, originally a small school bus, was painted in garish pink, green, yellow, red, a chaos of spray-can squiggles and overlayed abstract shapes. Even the sides of the tires and wheels were painted.
Belching black smoke from its exhaust, the wag stopped at the security checkpoint, which consisted of a breach in the berm that was partially blocked by a heap of junked vehicles. The all-volunteer sec force emerged from behind that rusting barrier, shouting instructions as they aimed their handful of centerfire blasters at the driver. The bus’s side door opened at once, and the sec men climbed inside to make sure it didn’t conceal armed killers trying to loot the compound. The ville’s sec men never robbed or extorted wayfarers themselves. Robbery and extortion were left to the twenty-four-hour gaudy house and the seven-days-a-week swap meet.
The hellpit of Byram ville, whose smoke plume Huth had first seen from atop the red mesa, had grown up around a predark truck stop. At the center of the enclosure were the remains of a service station, restaurant and minimart. The great steel awnings that had once shielded the rows of junked fuel pumps from the sun had been torn off by skydark’s two-hundred-mile-per-hour shock wave. The original roof of the one-story structure had likewise vanished, the plate-glass windows turned to twinkling fairy dust. Roof and windows had been crudely repaired with sheets of metal stripped from the abandoned and overturned semitrailers that littered the huge parking area. These aging artifacts of long-dead interstate commerce were the very heart and soul of the place. Byram ville’s upper crust lived inside the trailers and conducted their businesses out of them. The poorer residents kept house in the rusting hulks of passenger cars. The lowest of the low—Huth, included—slept curled up on the ground like mongrel dogs, in the lee of their economic betters.
Unless someone had died during the night, there were forty-five full-time residents of Byram ville. The locals survived by trading with travelers, taking whatever the newcomers had of value in exchange for jolt or juice or sex, or food or drinking water, or temporary protection from what lay outside the defensive perimeter. Though Interstate 15 was primarily a walking road, occasionally a wag would pass through, bearing trade goods and news from other parts of Deathlands.
After clearing the entry checkpoint, the bus driver parked alongside the ville’s central structure and leaned on his horn for a good thirty seconds. Heads poked out of semis and car bodies and the ruined restaurant and minimart. Seeing what had arrived, people came running.
Carrying his shovel, Huth joined the crowd that surrounded the strangely decorated wag. The driver stood in the bus’s doorway, grinning. He was a big man, easily 350 pounds and six foot two. He wore a squashed canvas fedora, which sat like a pancake on the back of his huge head, and faded bib-front denim jeans. “Come one, come all!” he yelled. “Gather ’round, everybody!”
As the crowd closed in, the driver used the metal ladder bolted to the bus’s side to climb to the roof. Once there, he did a sort of flamenco dance, his arms curved gracefully over his head, his laceless logger boots hammering on the sheet steel.
Huth noticed the way the sun gleamed off his right hand, which was the color of old ivory and obviously artificial.
“Come on and bring your cups!” the driver shouted. “I got free joy juice for everybody! I got free slip and slide, too!”
He stamped on the roof of the bus. “Wake up, you lazy sluts!” he bellowed. “Get up here and show your stuff!”
A frowzy female head appeared in one of the bus’s rear windows, hair like a great lopsided wad of pink cotton wool. A second woman popped up beside the first, her face powdered white and her cheeks rouged a feverish red. The third occupant was male. Dense black facial stubble had grown through his many layers of Pan-Cake makeup.
This unwholesome trio exited the bus and started up the ladder to the roof. They were dressed in matching outfits: a white string T-shirt and stiletto-heeled leather boots. None of them wore anything below the waist. Their well-worn genitalia had the ruddy brown color of smoked meat; their buttocks and thighs were badly bruised. The pink-haired slut carried a battery-powered boom box, which she passed up to the driver.
The big man propped the boom box on his shoulder and hit the power switch. Predark music blared from the speakers at ear-blistering volume. There were lyrics to the song, hard to catch at first, something about partying like it was the year 1999.
The three whores began dancing, and the driver did a few turns himself before setting the boom box on the roof.
“Got your cups?” he called to the crowd over the rhythmic racket. “Well, goddammit, go get ’em!”
As most of the folks rushed off, the driver descended the ladder and ducked inside the bus’s doorway. When he reappeared, he had a gray insulated plastic mug in his good, left hand.
Huth was standing close enough to get a look at the prosthesis at the end of his other arm. It wasn’t carved of ivory, or any other natural material. Every finely sculpted finger had two articulated joints, the thumb had one, plus the knuckles, and there was a small knurled knob on the back of the wrist. As he watched, the big man tightened down the knob, which made the fingers and thumb contract in a deathgrip around the mug’s handle.
Mug in fist, the driver danced some more; he was very light on his feet for a man of his size. After a minute or two, he stopped and pulled the end of a length of plastic hose out a side window. When he opened the metal clamp on its tip, a clear fluid sprayed into his waiting tankard.
“We are gonna have so damned much fun!” he shouted to the cloudless sky.
Then he called up to the whores, “Dance, you sexy devils! Show these good folks what you can do!”
The trio began bucking their pelvises and rotating their hips with more enthusiasm.
“For those of you who don’t know me,” he told the crowd, “I’m Big Mike. Also known as Mike the Drunkard.” He tipped back the mug and began to swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He didn’t stop until he’d emptied it.
“Ya-hoooie!” he said. “Everybody belly up! Come on, now, don’t be shy. It’s fill-’em-up time!”
Huth, who had no cup, was shoved, elbowed and punched out of the way by those who did.
The boom box on the roof stopped playing for a second, then the same song started over again automatically.
Mike the Drunkard used his real hand to backslap and goose the spectators as he topped off their containers. And the whole while he jabbered at them. “Ooh, are we going to par-tay!” he said. “Get this bus a-rocking in no time.” He made a lewd crotch thrust at his own drained mug before refilling it.
In short order, Big Mike had everybody around the bus drinking, dancing and laughing. Everybody but Huth, who stood at the edge of the crowd, leaning dejectedly on the handle of his shovel.
When Mike scrambled back up to the roof of the bus, he turned down the volume on the boom box. The song started over for the fifth time. By now, all the people knew the words of the chorus and shouted along. To them, 1999 meant predark. Happy days. Times of plenty, of relative order and safety. A golden age.
“Right about now,” Big Mike said to them, “you’re probably asking yourselves, where does this big old sexy magic man come from? And where did he get all the chiller joy juice he’s giving away?”
“Tell us!” someone yelled back.
“Yeah,” another person chimed in, “tell us!”
“The answer to both questions is Slake City,” Mike said.
It took a few seconds for this information to sink in. Gradually, the residents of Byram ville stopped dancing. They stood like statues beside the bus, glaring at the big man.
Mike raised his good hand. “Now, I know you’ve heard it’s a wasteland over there. But that’s a rumor started by some of the people who are already there. They’re greedy bastards. They want to keep all the sweet stuff for themselves.”
“That’s Baron Jolt’s turf,” said a man standing up front, “and as far as I’m concerned, that raping, chilling bastard can have it.”
“Everybody knows Slake City’s nothing but a nuke slag heap!” another man said. “The background radiation turns you into a pile of pus and sores inside of a month.”
“Nah-nah,” Mike said, shaking his head. “That’s how it used to be. Not anymore. The place is all cleaned up. It’s safe as mother’s milk. And Baron Jolt is long gone. We got real jobs there, now. It’s fat, I’m telling you, just like before skydark. People are eating regular, getting drunk regular, living out of the chem rains in clean shacks with good shithouses. Slake City is starting over again, and the folks who get in on the ground floor are going to have the edge. Have a chance to get baron-rich. That’s why I’m here. Slake City needs folks like you. Enterprising, right-thinking folks who know an opportunity when they see one.”
While the crowd considered this, Mike the Drunkard clambered from the roof and quickly refilled all the empty cups.
It was then that Huth took note of the massive bracelet around the bus driver’s left wrist. Dull silver in color, its surface was filigreed with solid-state circuitry. The sight of the ornament made Huth’s mouth drop. Pulse pounding, he fought to get a closer look, though it meant absorbing numerous blows to his head, back and arms.
“How did you lose your right hand?” Huth called out.
“Got it caught up the wrong ass,” Mike said.
Everybody laughed. Everybody but Huth.
The former chief whitecoat of FIVE, now latrine engineer, used the handle of his shovel like a lance, clearing a path to the front of the crowd. He held up the pocket of his lab coat to the big man. “Do you know what this means?” he asked.
Big Mike squinted down at the four letters stitched in red. “Can’t read too good,” he confessed.
Huth reached out and tapped the metallic wristband. “I came from the same place as that.”
Big Mike stared at Huth’s gap teeth, his dirt-caked face, his unspeakable pants and dismissed him with a “Yeah, right…”
“I know what it’s used for,” Huth went on, frantic to get his point across. “You’ve got bands just like it around your ankles, too, don’t you?”
The big man’s eyes narrowed. “So…?”
“Did it hurt much when they lopped off your hand?”
Mike the Drunkard seized Huth by the collar and dragged him and his shovel up the steps into the bus. Inside, it smelled like a cross between a distillery and a bear pit. The rear seats had been removed to make room on the floor for a pile of badly stained mattresses. A half-dozen fifty-five-gallon metal drums of joy juice were securely strapped to the floor. The drums were all stenciled with Baron Jolt.
Huth endured a brutal shaking, then the big man held him close and growled into his face, “How do you know about my hand? Who the fuck are you?”
“I crossed over ahead of the people who did that to you,” Huth said. “My coming to this world was an accident. I was lost in the wilderness and then I ended up in this place, in very sorry circumstances. My name is Dr. Huth. I am somewhat famous where I come from. Maybe the others talked about me? Or mentioned my name in passing?”
“Nope,” Mike said.
“One thing’s for certain,” Huth continued, “you have become their puppet. Those laser cuffs can turn you into a victim in a hurry. Without hands and feet you’d be a big lump of warm, helpless meat that anyone could play nasty with. How much chain did they give you? Fifty miles? A hundred miles? Go one step farther, break the transmitter’s signal, and zap! All fall down.”
“You better not queer my pitch here,” Mike warned, poking Huth hard in the chest with a huge finger. “I got a quota to make.”
“Take me back with you. Take me back to my people.”
Mike gave him a dubious look.
“That’s all I want. Really.”
The big man’s eyes glittered. “No problem,” he said. “You can ride with me all the way to Slake City.”
Overjoyed, Huth started to throw his shovel out a window.
“No, keep that,” Mike told him. “It’ll come in handy later. I got to go outside now. I got to make my closing pitch before these triple stupes start to sober up.” He dug under a seat and removed a big yellow plastic tub. He patted the tight-fitting lid and said, “The deal clincher.”
Huth remained inside the bus while Big Mike stepped out and addressed the crowd. “I’m looking for a few good folks who aren’t a-scared of rumors,” he said. “And I’m willing to sweeten the pie a little. I know you’ve all got a taste for what’s in here.” He opened the tub and showed them the heap of white crystalline powder it contained. “This is the real thing, people. One hundred percent pure jolt. It’ll make you feel ten feet tall. And you’ll screw my pretty sluts like a pack of slag heap weasels. Don’t push, now. One at a time, now. Come and get it.”
Using a battered teaspoon, he laid a heaping dose of powder on every outstretched palm. Though some people licked it, most of them snorted it. The powerful drug took hold quickly, with alarming effect. It made eyes bug out and sweaty faces grimace spastically. To quench their suddenly raging thirsts, the revelers guzzled more free joy juice, and they all fell into a slow-spinning, half-speed dance.
At a signal from Mike, the music abruptly stopped and the three whores climbed down from the roof with the boom box. They entered the bus and walked past Huth, heading straight for the pile of mattresses in the back.
“Come on, people,” Mike urged, gesturing toward the bus’s entrance. “The real fun is starting. Slip and slide. Slip…and…slide.”
As stoned as they were, most of the Byram ville folks didn’t fall for his spiel, but they were in no shape to try to stop the few who did. Four men between the ages of twenty and thirty, and a heavyset, thirtyish woman mounted the bus’s steps. As the woman passed Huth and turned down the aisle for the rear, she jerked her black sleeveless T-shirt over her head and tossed it aside. Her huge soft breasts swayed pendulously as she struggled with the zipper on the front of her dusty BDU pants.
“Hey, it’s okay if you don’t want to come with me now,” Mike assured the rest of the crowd. “I’ll be back by here in a week or two. Give you all some time to think it over. Maybe I’ll even bring back your friends for a visit. You can hear firsthand what you’re missing.”
With that, he climbed back in the bus, started it up and U-turned for the checkpoint. Huth took a seat up front, right behind the driver, as far away from the goings-on in the back as he could get.
After they had cleared the gate, Mike double-clutched and shifted the bus into high gear. “How about some driving music?” he said over his shoulder. He poked the boom box, which sat perched on the dash. The 1999 song started up again at top volume, canceling out the grunting, whimpering racket from the rear.
Big Mike, clearly feeling the effects of all the joy juice he’d drunk, threw back his head and falsetto-screeched along with the vocalist.
For his part, Huth was content to bob his head and tap out the now-familiar beat with the toe of his size-13 jogging shoe. He watched the flat, parched landscape roll past the grimy window, toothlessly grinning while tears streamed down his face.
Chapter Four
Dredda Otis Trask deepened the tint of her helmet visor to shield her eyes against Slake City’s blinding, panoramic glare. From the history of her own Earth, she knew that there had once been a vast body of water in this place, the last remnant of an ancient inland sea. In Shadow World’s reality, on a late January day more than a century past, Great Salt Lake had been vaporized by a multiwarhead nuclear strike. And a fraction of an instant later, the sands of the exposed lake bed and the shattered metropolis of Salt Lake City were melted together, fused into a boiling, hundred-square-mile sea of thermoglass. As the infernal heat was sucked up into the atmosphere, towering waves of glass solidified in a nightmare snapshot, their peaks capped with a foam of rusting, fire-blackened litter. Massive, shock-blast-tossed fragments—skyscraper I-beams, sections of railroad track and metal utility poles—stuck up from the wave troughs like the masts of a drowned navy.
It was a place long dead, but it was neither silent nor still.
Between howling gusts of wind, the external microphones of Dredda’s battlesuit picked up what sounded like the scattered, desperate cries of abandoned infants. There were no lost babies out there. The phenomenon had to do with the nukeglass’s structural weaknesses, which were caused by mineral impurities, and by the pulverized debris and air bubbles it contained. Extreme changes in day-night temperatures caused hairline cracks to appear in the matrix, and as the splits spread and ran, they made the shrill, disturbing sounds.
Occasionally, there were much louder noises. As the fine cracks branched out, they became networks of fissures that eventually crashed down the roofs of hidden hollow spots. Some of these collapsed air pockets were the size of amphitheaters.
Dredda focused her attention on a distant column of human figures moving away from her, over the gray-green surface. The group of freshly captured slaves walked a road that ended at Ground Zero, some eight miles away from Slake City. A pair of huge black vehicles dogged the rear of the file, herding the work crew replacements.
Building a road across the nukeglass that could support heavy vehicle traffic had been dangerous work. Even with side-scanning sonar to point out the larger crevasses and voids, sudden cave-ins were frequent and nearly always fatal to the natives. The broken chunks had razor sharp edges and often weighed hundreds of pounds. Trying to pull trapped slaves from the cave-ins had turned out to be wasted effort: the shifting sections of thermoglass either sliced them to rags, or chopped them into pieces.
In the week that it had taken to complete road construction, Dredda had sacrificed half of the Shadow World work force she had pressed into service. Most of the slaves were young men who had been mining their meager living from the dead city. They used crude hand tools to hack holes in the surface and crawled into the hollow places in search of undamaged, pre-Armageddon odds and ends, which they then traded. As a rule, these independent scroungers only worked the outer edges of the nukeglass, where the lingering radiation was the weakest. Even so, after a few years of digging, most had developed angry sores and large, visible tumors.
At Ground Zero, tissue destruction proceeded much more briskly. After a few days in that high-dose radioactive environment, weeping blisters appeared on unshielded hands, faces and feet. Based on the rad exposure alone, the working life span of a slave was no more than two weeks. Because of other dangers related to large-scale mining in thermoglass, actual survival time was half of that. From Dredda’s point of view, this wasn’t entirely a negative: there was no need to feed slaves who were only going to live a week.
Her own survival, and ultimately the conquest of Shadow World, depended on the exploitation of local energy sources. The recon satellite’s first mission, postlaunch, had been to pinpoint the nearest, hottest nuke zone, a place that could provide the suitable raw material for her reprocessing units. The energy reprocessors utilized strains of genetically engineered bacteria that feasted on irradiated inorganic matter and secreted useable nuclear fuel. Every critical component of Dredda’s invasion force, from gyroplanes to battlesuits, was powered by this recycled material.
The skirmish Dredda had planned for this day would easily gobble up one-third of the precious little fuel that had been harvested from Slake City so far, but she had no choice in the matter. To stabilize the energy stockpile in the short term, she had to expand her mining operation, and to do that, given the life expectancy of her workers, she needed a much larger labor pool.
Behind her, eight huge landships waited, their nuke turbines humming at idle. Gleaming black and windowless, with smooth, aerodynamic contours, the 6×6s were the core of her ground force, able to traverse at high speed the most difficult terrain thanks to their seven-foot-diameter wheels, each with its own independent drive train and suspension.
As Dredda turned for her flagship, its right front door rose up like the wing of a great bird. Sunlight washed over the high-backed copilot seat, over a ceiling tangled with exposed conduit, wiring harnesses and gray Kevlar pipe. A fine film of desert dust coated the gangway’s steps.
Sitting in the other cockpit’s other chair, behind the steering yoke, was Mero. Her pale blue eyes gleamed through her battlesuit’s transparent visor; her close-cropped blond curls were partially hidden by a red skullcap. Like all the officers of Dredda’s invasion force, Mero was the product of Level Four genetic engineering. The experimental procedure had made her face less round, and her chin more square and prominent. The look of supreme confidence in her eyes, an expression that four tours with the dreaded Population Control Service hadn’t dimmed, was now reinforced by additional bone structure and dense layers of muscle.
Dredda understood exactly what Mero was feeling at that moment. Excitement. Impatience. And an intense curiosity about the future. The two women, indeed all the Level Four females, shared a bond that went deeper than their rank or sex, or the war upon Shadow World they were about to wage. They were all sister changelings, birthed in the same stainless-steel womb, explorers of a new universe without, and an equally mysterious and promising one within.
This visceral connection, this transgenic sisterhood was something Dredda hadn’t expected to feel so deeply, and it caught her unprepared. As much as the sense of belonging pleased her, it also unsettled her. She had never experienced anything quite like it before. Not even with her own father.
Looking between the cockpit seats to the rear of the vehicle, Dredda checked the rest of her crew. The male troops were strapped cross chest into twelve shock-mounted jump seats set between I-beams along the walls of the cargo bay. From the uniformly smug expressions behind their visors, they no longer had any fear of the enemy. During the slave raids on Slake City scrounger camps, they had absorbed barrages of fire from a variety of primitive combustion-powered rifles, shotguns and pistols. Their battlesuits had deflected every projectile with ease. Their own battle gear, tribarreled laser rifles and phage-foam back tanks, was netted, rattle proofed and lashed down to the middle of the cargo deck.
When Dredda sat down in the copilot seat, it immediately adjusted itself, inflating and deflating to match the curves and overlapping plates of her battlesuit. The windshield in front of her was dead black. When the wing door hissed down and locked shut, the only available light came from the instrument panel. It bathed the wag’s interior in hellish red.
Dredda coupled her battlesuit to the dashboard umbilical and opaqued her visor. Immediately, the instrument lights and blacked-out windows vanished, as did the entire outer skin of the vehicle. Suddenly, Dredda was sitting alone, in the open air, five feet above the ground. Each crew member found him-or herself likewise isolated from the others and suspended in space. This illusion was produced by the hull’s optical scanning system, which filtered out unnecessary detail and projected a three-dimensional image of the external environment directly onto the interior surface of the helmet visors.
Keying her battlesuit com link to the driver, Dredda said, “Start the mission clock.”
Mero throttled up the turbines. As the hum grew louder, the chair in which Dredda sat began to move. It accelerated rapidly, until it was flying over the ground. To her right, the details of the Slake City massif stretched and blurred. G-force drove her deep into the contour seat, but there was no accompanying sensation of air pressure—it was the only flaw in the elaborate computer simulation. If she had really been strapped unprotected to a rocket-powered chair, the wind would have been a tangible, buffeting force against the front of her body.
Ahead, she could make out the lake-bed landing zone, and the six black gyroplanes on standby there. Dredda keyed the com link again and gave the order, “Airborne units proceed to the staging area.”
The VTO/L attack aircraft immediately lifted off and swung toward the mountains to the southwest, strung out in a quarter-mile skirmish line.
Dredda and her chair continued due west, rushing across the flat plane of pale dirt, leaving Slake City behind. The other wags ran on either side of her in loose, flying-V formation. Their speed over ground was 140 miles per hour. Dredda felt some vibration in the pit of her stomach and her feet, but it was disconnected from the images inside her visor, which moved only when she turned her head.
The formation slowed to make the turn south at old Iosepa Road. The undivided pavement had vanished long ago, but the roadbed was still there, covered by drifts of sand, salt and dust. It ran straight as a laser pulse for twenty miles.
As they approached the slight bend in the road where the predark hamlet of Iosepa had been, Dredda ordered the vehicles cloaked. This was accomplished by reducing the side-to-side distance between the wags to a few feet and then electrostatically charging the hulls, which redirected most of the dust cloud they were raising aft, and made it jet forward from under their front bumpers, creating a roiling, onrushing wall of dirt that preceded and entirely enveloped them.
Inside her visor, Dredda could see nothing but swirling beige.
Mero and the other sisters were driving blind at identical high speeds, maintaining tight formation over broken ground using battlesuit-sat link intel and helmet simulacra for steering. Dredda switched her visor screen to monitor what they were viewing.
Along the sides of the green-on-green field were a dozen inset windows with numbers rapidly scrolling up or down. There were complex nuke-turbine function and tank-temperature indicators. Other windows displayed the vehicle’s true course over ground, in latitude and longitude, and its true speed over ground. There were flashing proximity warnings about the vehicles on either side, in feet. The distance to the target was shown in yards, and falling rapidly. In the center of the screen were eight wag-shaped, lime-green blips in a sideways row. Beneath the shifting blips, a shades-of-green, satellite-generated contour map of the terrain unrolled wildly.
Only one of the blips on Mero’s screen ran inside a set of parallel lines—these boundaries indicated her vehicle’s computer-assigned course. The paired lines were constantly moving as the computer adjusted for the deflection of the irregular terrain, and driver error and deflection in the seven other vehicles. As Mero kept the blip within the course boundaries, her decision time was measured in fractions of a second. Allowable, real-world error before catastrophe was measured in inches.
Dredda switched screens again, calling up the biometric readouts of her wag squad. Her heart rate and Mero’s were holding steady at forty-five beats per minute; the men’s were four times that, and their blood pressures were spiking. She quickly scanned each trooper’s current video input. None of them was observing the driver’s screen; they were either beigedout or off-line, presumably staring at the red gloom of the cargo bay. Dredda tried to imagine how Mero’s screen would look to them.
Pure chaos.
An information and threat overload.
A helter-skelter fright ride, their lives in the hands of a gene-spliced maniac.
Dredda couldn’t see their eyes, but it amused her to think they were all shut tight.
The Level Four procedure that she and her officers had endured had changed more than their external physiques, their fat metabolism and resting heart rates. It had expanded and fine-tuned their biological systems to match the extreme limits of the battlesuit’s cyber-capabilities; something the male physiology, gene-doctored or not, could never achieve. Their increased numbers of neurons allowed them to intake and process information a hundred times faster than the men.
As Dredda understood the science, there were built-in bioengineering limits to each of the sexes, based on the amount of body space and chemistry devoted to their differing reproductive functions. In the case of the females, much more of their capacity—hormonally, metabolically, neurologically—was taken up by these duties. If the biochemical obligations of motherhood were removed, there was room for the system to change and grow. On the other hand, men’s reproductive functions took up very little of their bodies’ overall capacity, so removing it had no effect on potential growth. Evolutionarily speaking, the male of the species was already maxed out.
When Dredda uplinked her visor to the infrared image of the target compound, she saw human forms running. Now that the dust cloud was visible to them, the Shadow Worlders were taking up defensive positions inside the fenced perimeter. On their part, it had to be a precaution. They didn’t know what the approaching cloud meant, and they weren’t taking any chances. The important thing was, they weren’t abandoning the compound in droves. Because they controlled the high ground from well-positioned defensive hardsites, with lots of conventional weapons, they believed they were invulnerable. The function of the dust cloak was to maintain this illusion as long as possible—slaves were more profitable caught in large bunches.
Dredda panned back for a broader infrared view of the kill zone. The exhaust ports of the heavily armed gyroplanes registered as six bright spots sweeping around the western flank of Mount Deseret, closing on the compound from the north. It was time for the ground units to uncloak, and she snapped out the order.
As the wags burst through the face of the electrostatic dust cloud, the compound’s twelve-foot-high, wire perimeter fence appeared out of nothing, directly in front of them. Beyond it was the broad parking lot, and on the other side of it, the main complex that snuggled up against the foot of the mountain. The eight landships hit the fence at the same instant, flattening it and twisting it under their huge wheels. As they roared onto the parking lot, a fusillade of hostile fire zinged at them from all sides. The clatter of the gunshots and the ping-whine of bullets deflecting off her wag’s EM shield was so loud it forced Dredda to turn down the audio in her battlesuit.
When she activated the wag’s weapons pods, which were located on either side of the roof, two joysticks popped out of dashboard in front of her. As her gauntleted hands closed on the no-slip grips, a ring and crosshair sight appeared in the center of her helmet visor. Her targets, human-shaped figures in lime green, scattered to either side as the wag continued to rumble up the slope. Dredda flipped off the grip safeties with her thumbs.
Each of the joysticks operated its own cannon pod. As she moved her hands apart, the lone crosshair ring blurred, divided and became two. She simultaneously tracked a pair of men running in opposite directions. One was scrambling out of a foxhole hacked in the asphalt on her left; the other high-kicked to the right as he abandoned a sandbagged, burned-out hulk of a vehicle. When the computer target locks engaged, the sprinting figures turned red, and she jiggled the firing buttons.
Green lances of light stabbed through both runners. Neither completed another step.
Foxhole Man fell in four pieces, sliced cleanly through the chest and both arms above the elbow by a single burst of pure energy. His transected parts landed in a jumbled heap. The other man took the laser slash at waist height. The emerald light separated his torso from everything below his hips. It was a grievous mortal wound, but not immediately so. Though the man had been chopped in half, there was no blood—the laser sliced and cauterized at the same time. Rearing up from the pavement with undamaged arms, he seemed to recognize the severed legs under his chin as his own. His mouth opened wide in a scream that Dredda couldn’t hear. Frantically clawing, he tried to drag himself away.
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James Axler
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: More than a century after a multi-warhead nuclear strike wiped out nearly all of earth′s population, humanity′s feral instinct to survive has spawned a savage new America. Here, the brutality of man and nature conspire against hope. Yet despite its chaos and bloody turmoil, Deathlands is a second chance for the human race…and for a group of warrior survivalists led by a man called Ryan Cawdor.Deathlands is a living hell, but there is someplace worse: a parallel Earth where the atomic mega-cull never happened. Now this Otherworld Earth is in its final death throes. Yet for an elite few, the reality portal offers a new frontier of raw energy, expendable slaves–a bastion of power for Dredda Otis Trask. Her invasion force of genetically engineered warrior women has turned the ruins of Salt Lake City into the deadly mining grounds of a grotesque new order–one that lies in wait for Ryan and his companions.In the Deathlands, danger lurks beyond the imagination.