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Wretched Earth
James Axler


After the Mega cull, the weak died off, so that a century later, the living have descended from only the toughest stock. Still, it takes more than strength to survive Deathlands.It takes skill, cunning and a warrior's heart. But for Ryan Cawdor, staying alive isn't just about living. In this nuke-transformed America, it helps if somewhere, deep inside, there's hope of finding something better.A virulent strain of a preDark biowep has been unleashed upon the denizens of northern Kansas, turning them into rotting, flesh-eating monsters. Running from the mindless, soulless rottie hordes, Ryan and his companions arrive in the civil-war-torn ville of Sweetwater Junction. They've got one shot at beating the hungry rotties: turn the bloodlust of the ville's warring factions away from each other and toward a common enemy. But that means splitting up and hiring on as sec for both sides and surviving the firefight–before the real hell is unleashed.In Deathlands, time is blood.







INTEGRITY LOST

After the Megacull, the weak died off, so that a century later, the living have descended from only the toughest stock. Still, it takes more than strength to survive Deathlands. It takes skill, cunning and a warrior’s heart. But for Ryan Cawdor, staying alive isn’t just about living. In this nuke-transformed America, it helps if somewhere, deep inside, there’s hope of finding something better.

WALKING DEAD

A virulent strain of a predark biowep has been unleashed upon the denizens of northern Kansas, turning them into rotting, flesh-eating monsters. Running from the mindless, soulless rottie hordes, Ryan and his companions arrive in the civil-war-torn ville of Sweetwater Junction. They’ve got one shot at beating the hungry rotties: turn the bloodlust of the ville’s warring factions away from each other and toward a common enemy. But that means splitting up and hiring on as sec for both sides and surviving the firefight—before the real hell is unleashed.

In Deathlands, time is blood.


The rottie yanked the youth against the wire

Other arms reached out to entangle him, their blackened nails clawing at his flesh. Despite his frenzied thrashing, he couldn’t break free.

Several of the ville folk darted forward to try to help him.

“Don’t get close!” Ryan shouted. “Chop their arms off!”

His friends tried pulling the youth away, but it did no good. Then he screamed, and blood spurted from the side of his head as a rottie bit deep into his ear.

Ryan stepped into a Weaver stance, his left arm crooked to support his blaster hand, and fired a single round. The trapped boy’s head jerked, and he slumped.

His friends stared at Ryan in shock and fury.

“If you’re bit, you’re one of them!” Ryan growled. “Now learn from that stupe and stay back!”


Wretched Earth

Death Lands




James Axler






www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)


There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

—Eugene Ionesco

1909-1994

Rhinoceros


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 (#u7e89e796-f5ef-547d-b752-9a4f125d59c8)

Chapter One (#ud8ca53be-3f2a-523f-8c7a-0e9b398bddf0)

Chapter Two (#u336f8b52-abf4-53dc-a76c-2f292b1cc38d)

Chapter Three (#u5b2a9d28-c58f-5525-a9d4-0a6d39f3808a)

Chapter Four (#ue7d83d0c-5697-5896-926c-1c42c8c34257)

Chapter Five (#ueeaaf9ad-64bc-59ed-bb1f-d7ace5e575e5)

Chapter Six (#u081e7320-742e-5669-ad68-3ca33082a75f)

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)

Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)


Prologue

The four of them stood in the darkened vanadium-steel room in the guts of the shattered redoubt: a tall rangy man in a tattered greatcoat; a well-built woman whose hair showed auburn highlights in the backsplash from their lamps off gleaming metal walls; a youth with a mane of long black hair hanging past his shoulders; another youth only a bit older, wearing a patched bomber jacket and glasses.

The woman played the bluish gleam of her solar-charging flash on the walls of what he took to be a hexagonal chamber. To the kid with glasses the walls looked like glass. What feeble illumination the quartet was able to muster wasn’t enough to let his weak eyes see anything beyond the glass.

“Shit,” the tall man said. “Nothing in this place. No food, no ammo, no meds. It’s been looted out. I feel like smashing those fancy windows.”

“What good’ll that do?” the woman asked.

The tall man shrugged. “Make me feel better.”

“You can’t,” the youth said.

The others looked at him, their eyes glinting faintly. He quailed a little under the pressure of their gaze. His own light, a dingy yellow at best, faded to thirsty-man-piss color as he momentarily forgot to keep pumping the little flywheel generator with the palm of his hand, which ached from the constant squeezing.

The tall man raised a fist as if to backhand him.

“Step back, Drygulch. He may know something,” the woman said.

“Yeah,” the tall man said, sneering. “He knows a lot of crap. It’s all he’s good for.”

The youth in the glasses actually rallied at that. He did know stuff. He was endlessly curious, always seeking to learn more. And he had a memory like a miser’s fist.

“Let him talk,” the woman said. She wore a homemade leather jacket, the collar of which was lined with silver wolf hide. A belt held up her khaki trousers and the flapped holster for her remade .45 handblaster. “He does know stuff.”

“Whatever you say, Lariat,” Drygulch agreed, scratching at his cap of hair, which looked like short, tight curls of silver-frosted copper wire. “What’s on your mind, Hamster?”

“It’s Reno,” he insisted. He didn’t even know how the older man had gotten hold of his hated childhood nickname.

“Whatever,” Drygulch said. He wasn’t a bad type. He didn’t dislike Reno so much as he liked poking at him.

Reno swelled inside with the warmth that came from Lariat’s acknowledgment of his value to them. To her. He held on desperately to the hope that someday the auburn-haired adventuress would realize his real worth, and return the fiercely burning love he harbored for her.

“That’s some kind of armored glass,” he said. “Your wrecking bar’d just bounce off. So would bullets, so forget all about shooting at the walls.”

Drygulch’s badlands face crumpled even more than it had to start with. But he lowered the revolver in his right hand. His left held up a kerosene lantern whose smoke filled the room with an oily smell.

“This is a triple-bust,” the tall man growled. “We’re wastin’ our time.”

“No, my friends,” said the young man who was the party’s fourth member. He wore a long, plaid flannel shirt over holey jeans. The soles of his ancient, pointy-toed cowboy boots were held on by thin pieces of leather, sewed around when wet and allowed to tighten into place as they dried. He carried a well-worn M-1 carbine. “There is treasure down here, I tell you. I have seen it with my own eyes.”

“Then why didn’t you lead us right to it without dicking around?” Drygulch asked.

The black-haired kid’s name was Johnny Hueco. He wasn’t one of them. He was a local who’d fast-talked the trio into hiring him to guide them into the busted-open redoubt, where he claimed he knew where to lay hands on a baron’s ransom in prime scavvie.

“Because we wanted to make sure nothing was going to jump on our backs when we walked all fat, dumb and happy past doors without checking what was behind ’em,” Lariat said. “Also because we wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything worth hauling out of here. So step back off the trigger, Drygulch.”

“We got to hurry,” Johnny Hueco said, shifting his weight uneasily from foot to foot. “Things come out at night. Or in.”

That was why the bunch he’d been with when they’d stumbled onto this place, in what once was western Kansas and was now triple hard core Deathlands, hadn’t stripped the redoubt of its fabulous treasure. So he said. Something had jumped them in the dark. Only Johnny got out alive, and only because he was closest to the door.

And because whatever it was had been too busy eating his friends, his new companions reckoned. Not that they held it against him. Loyalty was as good as jack or ammo in the Deathlands. Because it was so rare.

When muties or monsters attacked, sometimes all you could do was bug out, and stickies take the slow. Like jack or ammo or white lightning, loyalty could run out.

“Lead on, then,” Lariat said.

Johnny led them back out into the broad main corridor. Their footsteps chased each other up and down the bare metal walls like small frightened creatures.

“Shouldn’t there be some kind of padding on the floors?” Reno asked. Their boot soles crunched on drifted dirt leavened with some kind of coarse material that didn’t seem quite like rock.

“Rats ate it,” Johnny said. “Hate rats.”

“I dunno,” Drygulch said. “Roast ’em just right, they can be mighty tasty. If they ain’t been eatin’ too much fresh shit or old chills.”

Reno licked his lips, suddenly remembering how ravenous he was. He hadn’t eaten since they broke camp in the watery, greenish-orange light of dawn.

It wasn’t just his wits and his packrat memory that had sustained him through a brutal childhood. There were the rats, too. Where people were, rats thrived. To the perpetually starving Hamster, the ones that had been feasting off shit and dead people tasted just fine.

“Here, what’s this?” Lariat said. She strode up beside Johnny.

They stopped. Lariat shone her flashlight at the wall, where a large white sign with red lettering had been bolted: Danger—Restricted Area—Authorized Laboratory Personnel Only.

Drygulch read the sign slowly. “Okay, what’s that mean?”

“It means we’re not supposed to be here,” Johnny said.

“I know that, ass face. I’m not stupe. I mean, what’s it mean here?”

“It means there’s valuable stuff inside,” Lariat said.

“What if there’s something living in there?” Reno asked, hustling to catch up. He didn’t think his friends would cut him out on any ace scavvie they found. He just didn’t like to leave too much to chance.

It was cold in here—as above, so below. Topside, the plains were dusted with light dry snow that eddied in the wind. Despite that, Reno’s skin prickled as if sunburned.

He hoped it wasn’t caused by rads from fallout from the old ground-burst crater a few miles west, drifting in through the cracks in the installation’s immensely thick concrete containment shell. They had no way of telling. Unless your skin started getting all mottled and your hair began falling out in clumps. Or you just went straight to the convulsions-and-bloody-shits stage.

With the first you might not die. With the second, you might not die soon enough. He’d seen both.

Drygulch held up his kerosene lantern. Next to the sign was a door that had been jammed partway open.

“Strike,” Lariat said. She poked her head through and shone her own flashlight around. “Looks like some kind of lab, all right.”

“I don’t know,” Drygulch said. “I don’t feel triple-good fucking with whitecoat stuff. Especially not from old days.”

“You think we’re in here scuffling like rats for rations and ammo?” the woman scoffed.

“Well, yeah. That and meds. Mebbe some blasters. Boots. I could use me some new boots.”

“Small-time. Mebbe you’re satisfied with that. Not me.”

Reno caught up. “I don’t think we’ll find much of that kinda stuff, anyway,” he said. “Place has seemed picked pretty clean so far.”

But Johnny Hueco was dancing from one disintegrating boot to another. “This is it!” he said. “It’s what I told you about.”

“No shit?” Drygulch said dubiously.

“Doesn’t look touched in here,” Lariat said, backing out.

“If there really was anything worthwhile in there, wouldn’t somebody have gotten to it by now?” Drygulch asked.

“Mebbe not,” Reno said. “Mebbe the door hasn’t been open long.”

“Why’d it be open now, Reno?” Lariat asked.

“Earthquakes,” he said. “Get a lot of seismic activity in this area. Some big quakes. Mighta shaken it open.”

Lariat studied him a moment longer. Her auburn hair hung to just above the wolf-fur-trimmed collar of her jacket, framing wide cheekbones and dark eyes with a touch of the Orient to them. Mebbe she wasn’t a beauty, Reno thought. Most men found her good-looking. She was queen of Reno’s world.

She’d made it clear early and emphatically that she was too good for the likes of Drygulch and Reno. They might be trail mates and partners, but no touchy-feely stuff.

Lariat nodded now. “Could be it. I’m going in. Who’s with me?”

“Might be bad animals in there, Lariat,” Drygulch said. “Muties even.”

She drew her .45 handblaster, pinching back the slide to confirm she had a round chambered.

“So, might be animals,” she said. “Right. I’m ready. Who wants to live forever?”

“Um, just a sec,” Reno said. The others turned, then followed his flywheel flashlight beam upward. The ceiling, higher in here than in the corridor, had buckled sharply downward. “So, if the concrete’s seriously cracked, the whole fucking thing might cave in on our heads at any minute.”

“It hasn’t fallen yet,” Lariat said blithely, and went in.

Eager as a hound pup, Johnny followed her. Drygulch sent an eye roll Reno’s way before he went on through.

Reno carried a Winchester Model 1897 12-gauge scattergun on a rope sling over his shoulder. A pump model with a hammer and a 5-round tube magazine, it had been old, Reno had read somewhere in an old scavvied magazine, even before the Big Nuke lit the skies with hell’s own light. At some point in the weapon’s long history the barrel had been sawed off a few inches past the end of the mag.

Transferring the flywheel flashlight from his right hand, which had seriously begun to cramp, Reno took the best hold he could on the shotgun’s grip and swung the barrel up. What possible good the weapon could do against a potential cave-in, the young man had no clue. He only knew holding it made him feel better.

“Okay, what’s ‘prions’ mean?” Drygulch was asking suspiciously when Reno entered the lab. He was peering at a cabinet stenciled prominently with that word, plus numerous danger symbols and scary messages. “I never heard of prions.”

There was a smell in there Reno couldn’t name. More than just cold metal and dust. Not like anything that had crept inside recently and died. And he knew that if anybody had died down here during the Big Nuke, in the hundred years and more that had passed, they’d have got their stinking done long since. But still, something made him think of death.

Then again, he reminded himself, that’s an occupational hazard for a scavvie. They were basically all about stealing dead people’s stuff, and trying not to join them in the process.

“Hamster,” Drygulch said, “you’re the one with your rat nose always buried in a book. What’s it mean?”

Reno frowned and scratched his brow. Questions he couldn’t answer tickled. “No idea,” he said.

“Call him Reno,” said Lariat, who didn’t look up from flicking through random debris on a countertop with hands encased in fingerless leather gloves. “Anyway, it means ‘the goods.’ Means we struck black gold.”

“You know this how?” Drygulch asked.

“Whatever prions are,” the woman said with an air of tested patience, “the whitecoats back before Fire Day thought they were worth squirreling away under that million tons of concrete and steel that’s got Reno’s panties in a bunch. And a sealed heavy door inside of that. I’d say that’s valuable whatever the fuck it is, wouldn’t you?”

“Cabinet’s locked,” Drygulch complained.

“Well, open it,” Lariat said. “Use your pry bar. Reno, guard the door.”

Johnny prowled the room. Lariat stood watching as Drygulch drew the four-foot pry bar from its scabbard fastened to his big rucksack. They all carried empty packs. Their possessions were cached a half mile from the installation’s entrance.

The metal cabinet marked Prions wasn’t all that sturdy. A little poking for purchase, a grunt and heave and a squeal of tormented metal, and the door popped open.

Drygulch resheathed the bar, picked up his lantern and hunkered down to peer inside.

“Little vials in here,” he said.

“Load ’em in your pack,” Lariat said.

Their guide walked to a door at the back of the room. It looked as if it opened by sliding sideways into the alloy wall.

“There’s more through here,” he said.

“Can we open it?” Reno asked dubiously. “Looks a little hefty for Drygulch’s bar.”

“It was open when I was here before,” Johnny said. “I swear it.”

As if to prove his point, he began to pull on it, as if hoping to open it using nothing more than the friction of his fingertips.

Amazingly, it worked. The door slid open with only a token squeal of protest.

“Watch it—” Reno began.

He had no idea what made him voice the aborted warning. Before it finished leaving his mouth a dark shape shot from the blackness beyond the door and hit the kneeling Drygulch as he shouldered his pack. The tall man went over with a crunch that horrified Reno, until he realized it was likely some of the small, seemingly sturdy vials Drygulch had just stuffed in his pack breaking, not his bones.

Then Reno had something to be really horrified about, as he swung his flashlight on target. Its feeble shine revealed what looked to be a spiky-furred gray rat the size of a large dog, but with a snoutful of sharp teeth instead of incisors. And an extra set of appendages like a mantis’s clawed forelimbs jutting from just behind its shoulders, three feet long and covered in gleaming black chitin.

Drygulch had somehow got a hand under the mutie’s lower jaw and was fending off its fangs. For the moment. Reno stepped up so his shotgun’s muzzle was about six inches from where thick neck met misshapen torso, and fired.

The noise was like two cast-iron pans being clapped together either side of his head. Muzzle-flame splashed against the creature’s body. The sickening reek of burned hair went right up Reno’s nostrils like barbs. The charge of scavenged number 4 buck tore the fanged head halfway from the body.

Reno kicked it aside, where it lay with its legs twitching, jaws still snapping, and those awful insectile claws scratching futilely at a synthetic-tiled floor.

Another figure darted from the door. Lariat’s .45 bucked and roared and vomited yellow flame three times, fast. The horror squealed and tumbled into a forward roll that carried it into the far wall.

Johnny stood with his back to the doorway. His lean, handsome face stretched to accommodate a mouth that had become a yawning oval of fear. He held his little carbine halfway to his shoulder as if to shoot at the second creature that had come through.

Then his expression grew strangely curious. Reno heard a sound like somebody stepping on a ripe gourd.

A claw like the first mutie’s suddenly burst through Johnny’s chest. Blood fountained out around it, but didn’t hide the fact that it was way bigger than the one the other rat thing sported. The clawed arm lifted Johnny off the floor. He screamed and flailed his limbs mindlessly. The M-1 carbine cracked with deafening shots, sending ricochets howling around the adventurers.

“Time to go!” Lariat yelled, as a tumbling round glanced off Reno’s shoulder.

Drygulch jumped up and ran. Lariat raced after him, firing her handblaster back into the infinite blackness of the inner doorway. Backpedaling into the corridor, Reno started to warn his boss that she might hit their guide.

Then he asked himself why that would be a bad thing.

* * *

“LET ME LOOK AT IT,” Reno said.

Drygulch held his wounded arm away. “No. It’s fine. Leave me ’lone.”

The last of their jackrabbit stew boiled in a cast-iron kettle on a little break-down aluminum tripod over a campfire of driftwood and dried weeds. Some flakes of what Lariat claimed was sage bubbled in the mix.

The stew smelled to Reno like stinkbug ass. He guessed it would taste worse. But after this day a good case of the running shits would only be appropriate. Anyway, he was hungry enough to eat a stinkbug’s ass. A whole pot of stinkbug asses.

But by the sick yellow light of the flames, he made out something disturbing. Reddish inflammation, shot through with nasty dark discoloration, crept up the man’s lanky arm from his bandaged hand.

Lariat pronounced the stew done. Drygulch refused any, which right there showed he was in bad shape. Reno ate his share with relish. It was definitely better than stinkbug ass. If not much else.

When nothing remained that his spoon could catch, Reno licked his bowl. Then he scrubbed it with dirt and a handful of crackly, dry bunchgrass. As he stuffed his hobo tool and bowl in his pack, Lariat motioned him aside.

The night sky was full of stars. An orange moon hung near the western horizon. Wind quested restlessly through sere grass. Most of the light snow that had fallen earlier had melted away.

“So what do you think he’s got?” she asked.

Reno shrugged. “Dunno. Won’t let me look at it.”

“I can hear you,” Drygulch said. “Got no call talking about me in the third person like I was a…a rock or somethin’. Insultin’.”

“Well, if some damn fool hadn’t gone and stuck his hand in his pack and gotten cut to shit on broken glass, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Lariat said.

“I was tryin’ to find out if them prion vials was okay after I landed on ’em!”

“And found out the hard way you’d busted most of them.”

“We got a few intact, Lariat,” Reno said. He hated disputes. He knew how quickly nasty could erupt. When that happened it was usually him who wound up getting the bad end of the ass-wiping stick. “Oughta be able to get something for them, if we find the right whitecoats.”

“I can do that,” she said. Then, taking Reno by the arm, she urged him a little farther outside the circle of faint firelight. And more important, out of the aggrieved Drygulch’s earshot.

“Could it mebbe be gangrene?” she asked.

“Too soon,” Reno said. “Could be blood poisoning, though.”

He glanced uneasily back at the tall man, who had slithered into his bedroll and deliberately lain down with his back to his comrades as well as the fire.

“I wonder if those prions have anything to do with his condition,” Reno said softly.

“Doesn’t much matter if the stupe won’t let us look at it,” Lariat said in a tone that suggested it didn’t much matter to her if he did. “He doesn’t wake up in the morning, we’ll know something was wrong.”

* * *

COMMOTION ROUSED RENO from a wondrous dream of soft sheets and blow jobs.

He sat up. By the vagrant red gleam of the low coals they’d kicked the fire into before bedding down, he saw Drygulch thrashing in his sleeping bag. He moaned like an animal in distress.

“Drygulch?” Reno asked tentatively.

Lariat appeared out of the darkness. She’d been on sentry duty. Johnny Hueco’s M-1 carbine was tipped back over her shoulder.

“Drygulch?” she said.

He uttered a strangled noise somewhere between a cough and a scream, then spasmed so hard his back arched clear off the ground. His fingers raked frozen soil, then he fell back silent and still.

After he stayed that way for a full minute, Lariat said, “That can’t be good.”

Reno skinned out of his sleeping bag and started pulling on jeans encrusted with dirt.

“Lariat, be careful,” he said.

“Why?” she asked. “Poor slagger’s chilled.”

She prodded Drygulch with the toe of a boot.

With an inhuman snarl he sat up. His face was a strange gray in the ember light, cheeks sunken, the lips drawn back from his teeth. A network of dark lines spread across his face as if his veins were right beneath the skin and filled with ink. His eyes burned like coals in black-painted cups.

Lariat jumped back in alarm. “Drygulch?” she whispered.

He thrashed, as if the bedroll were a mutie monster whose clutches he was trying to escape.

“Get back!” Reno shouted. “Get away from him! He isn’t right!”

“Drygulch, you’re scaring me—”

Bursting free at last from the sleeping bag, Drygulch uttered an eerie moan and pounced on Lariat like an angry mountain lion.


Chapter One

“Gig sucks,” Jak Lauren complained.

The crowded barroom of Omar’s Triple-Fine Caravanserai and Gaudy reeked of spilled beer, spilled sweat and the faint tang of spilled blood.

At least, Ryan Cawdor thought, leaning on the hardwood bar with a protective hand on the handle of a mug of beer, I can’t smell puke. Much.

“Reluctant as I am to condone, and thereby encourage, what may be a new nadir of our young associate’s articulation, I fear I most heartily concur with the sentiment,” Dr. Theophilus Tanner said. He had to shout to make himself heard over the din of drunken conversation, riotous laughter and tinkling of a gap-toothed and out-of-tune upright piano.

The piano, inexplicably painted canary-yellow, was played by a girl of about twelve with freckles, pigtails, a homespun dress and at least a little skill. Those who thought her musical talents deficient were well-advised to keep their opinions behind their teeth, if they liked having teeth. The girl, Sary-Anne, was one of the innumerable children claimed by the tavern keeper and his three wives.

Omar kept a hickory cudgel in a leather holster down his leg to bust the heads of the obstreperous, not to mention the teeth of the hypercritical. A similar holster down the other leg carried a sawed-off, double-barrel scattergun for the especially hard to convince.

As gaunt as a crane, Doc Tanner perched next to Ryan on a bar stool of stout raw planks hammered together, with some sawdust-filled burlap for a “cushion.” The tails of his frock coat hung down almost to the loose sawdust that covered the warped wooden floor.

He raised a tumbler of what the bartender sold as “whiskey,” and which Ryan was sure was just shine colored brown with he-didn’t-want-to-know-what. For a moment Doc studied its contents, which would probably have still been murky had the glass been clean and the light better than the glow of a few kerosene lanterns strung strategically around the crowded barroom. Strategically so that none of the patrons could get too good a look at the goods on tap. Then, with a convulsive heave, the ancient-looking man grabbed the heavy glass in both hands and tossed the shot down his throat. Immediately, his body quivered.

“Mother’s milk,” Doc said. His long, silver-white hair seemed to have gotten wilder. His seamed face hitched into a sad smile, and his blue eyes took on a faraway look.

“You know it’s not like we had a choice,” their shorter companion said. The man in the leather jacket and battered fedora adjusted the glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Our point of arrival was picked clean, and we all got a nasty addiction to eating, which we have to tend to.”

“Point of arrival” was J. B. Dix’s way of saying “redoubt” when unfriendly ears might be listening to their conversation. Located in redoubts, deep beneath the earth, was a network of functioning six-sided matter-transfer units with armaglass walls color-coded for identification. These mat-trans units gave potential access to sites dotted not just all over North America, but the rest of the world, as well.

“Can hunt,” Jak said, tossing down his beer. He was a teenager with a mane of long hair as white as snow. The color of his skin matched his hair. He was an albino, and still cranky over the dispute that had met his initial attempt to enter the caravanserai.

The sign over the round arch over the gate through the high mud-brick wall that surrounded the compound read No Muties. Fortunately, Omar himself, eventually summoned by one of his sons, understood that albinism wasn’t a mutie trait, and allowed Jak to enter.

Their employer, Boss Tim Plunkett, had complained loudly at the delay the whole while. There were reasons why Jak said the gig sucked.

“That’s your answer to everything, Jak,” J.B. said, taking off his glasses and wiping them clear of condensation with a shirttail. “We can hunt, yeah. If you don’t mind living on about half an irradiated lizard a week, which is all even you could come up with in this sorry-ass place.”

“We’ve done jobs before,” Ryan said. “Didn’t always care for all of them. But we did them and moved on. Like J.B. says, we have to eat.”

“Could leave,” Jak said stubbornly. He meant go back to the mat-trans and jump out.

A woman as tall as Ryan and skinny as a chicken bone came up, carrying a tray with empty mugs of grimy glass and chipped ceramic. Despite stringy blond hair and a thin face without much to boast of by way of a chin, she wasn’t bad to look at. If he wasn’t deeply in love with a gorgeous redhead who was off somewhere with the other member of their party, predark freezie Mildred Wyeth, Ryan might’ve eyed the blonde with some interest after hard days on the trail. Plenty of the caravanserai customers were doing so—the wag drivers in their leather and weird hairdos, with hard voices and harder eyes, and even the mild-mannered cultists who were traveling west in a green school bus, all wearing scarves over their heads that were tied beneath their chins like bonnets.

As far as Ryan knew, she wasn’t available for that kind of service to anyone but Omar himself. That was because she was one of the caravanserai owner’s wives, known only and unsurprisingly as the Skinny One. Omar’s other wives, the Fat One and the Nuke Red Hot One, were somewhere out of the picture, although Ryan thought he could make out Red’s voice, which had a notable edge to it, carving a new bunghole in one of the kitchen help for spilling stew.

The Skinny One had arrived to see if they needed refills. Doc ordered another shot, which made Ryan’s already thin lips tighten until they almost vanished. Doc sometimes had a tenuous grip on the here and now. The one-eyed man didn’t see that he needed to kill his brain cells with any more rotgut.

But J.B., who was the group’s armorer and Ryan’s oldest friend, flashed an easy grin. “Lighten up and let a man ease his troubles,” he said. Then, as if to pretend he was talking about himself, he ordered another shot, as well.

Ryan studied his own heavy tumbler a moment and decided he didn’t need any more. He wasn’t normally queasy, but the glass had so many thumbprints on it they appeared to be etched in. Between that and the brown shine eating the lining off his stomach walls like hydrochloric acid, he reckoned he’d feel gut-shot if he kept on. He held a hand over the glass to indicate he didn’t need a refill.

The Skinny One bustled off, returning a moment later to fill Doc’s and J.B.’s glasses from a bottle.

“Besides,” J.B. said, as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “we might wind up somewhere worse. It’s happened.”

A commotion started at the door. A tall, stout man with a florid face and sweeping brown mustache strode in, as proud as a baron. Faces turned to stare.

“Boss Plunkett sure loves to make an entrance,” J.B. muttered.

Plunkett was dressed in expensive if tasteless scavenged clothing: a pink shirt, yellow cravat and a matching vest that strained to contain his paunch; overly tight brown flare-bottom trousers; black, pointy-toed boots shiny as lizard eyes. The companions’ employer had a woman on either arm, one blonde, one black-haired, both looking pretty good, not too hard or shopworn. They were named Tina and Angela. He called them his secretaries, but as far as Ryan and his friends could tell they were just sluts, companions hired to look good on his arm and perform whatever other duties were required.

Behind the big man and his women came Loomis, his bodyguard. He was middle height, with a dark face like the blade of an ax, black hair cut close to his narrow skull, a mustache almost as extravagant as Plunkett’s, and a perpetually unshaved jaw. He wore leather pants and a leather vest, but was shirtless, showing off a chest furred like a black bear’s ass. On one side of a silver-studded belt he wore a big survival knife with a saw-back blade. On the other he carried a chromed .44 Magnum Taurus blaster, which looked to be in good condition.

He gave Ryan a quick, hateful stare as soon as he noticed him. He resented the companions’ presence. He seemed to think it reflected a lack of confidence on his employer’s part, which Ryan reckoned showed Plunkett had more sense than most people would give him credit for.

The fat man immediately began to berate the nearest server, a skinny, pigtailed girl, in a loud voice.

“Stupe,” Jak muttered.

“Yeah, well,” Ryan said. “It’ll be over soon. Soon as we deliver the boss and his mysterious trunks to Sweetwater Junction.”

They’d been three days on the road guarding Tim Plunkett’s corpulent body, his two “secretaries” and an assortment of other flunkies including Loomis. The companions spent most of their time split up among a Toyota Tundra pickup truck that served as a sec wag, a former RV that carried extra bodies and bags, and occasionally the Land Cruiser that was the boss’s personal ride. They’d met Plunkett and his motley crew east of Omar’s at a trading post even farther out in the back of beyond, little more than a shack and an outhouse set too close to a watering hole for comfort. Despite Loomis’s swaggering assurance that he and his pair of assistant sec men, who doubled as roustabouts, could handle anything the wasteland could throw at them, Plunkett was clearly nervous. He’d offered the friends jobs as extra sec before even introducing himself.

They’d tried not to act too eager. They really were running on fumes, with barely the jack to buy water from the sketchy well. They’d had a run of poor luck of late.

“‘Beware yon Cassius,’” Doc quoted sonorously, “‘for he has a lean and hungry look.’”

“Plunkett?” J.B. asked in amazement.

“I think he means Loomis,” Ryan said.

“I do indeed, my dear Ryan,” Doc said. “Our esteemed employer more closely resembles a hog in a silk suit. Though I grant he has a hungry look to him as well, especially when he’s tucking into a hearty repast.”

Doc shook his head. “Swine. I hate swine.” Tears brimmed in his blue eyes. “The sows, the sows—whenever I eat a ham sandwich, I feel vindicated. Vindicated!”

“Easy there, Doc,” Ryan said.

Although he looked to be on the hard end of his sixties, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was chronologically only in his thirties. Yet he was enormously old—scary old. He’d been born on Valentine’s Day in 1868, then trawled out of his own time by twentieth-century whitecoats. Doc proved to be a difficult subject, so he was trawled forward in time to the Deathlands. The result, along with premature aging, was that his mind wasn’t clamped down any too hard, and tended to wander at times.

“It was under an evil star that we signed on with Plunkett,” he said now, suddenly focusing.

Ryan scratched his shaggy head. “Not my favorite thing, either,” he admitted. “I don’t know whether it’s something he did, something he’s got in his brain or something he’s got in one of those trunks. But he’s triple-scared somebody’s going to make a play for it, whatever it is.”

“Folks don’t pay like he pays us if they aren’t scared, Ryan,” J.B. said. “You’re right. We’ve done tough jobs before, and always come through ace. Or at least alive, which amounts to the same thing.”

“Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing,” Doc announced. “Eddie Rickenbacker told me that. He was a good lad, if rather on the reckless side.”

Ryan had no idea what Doc was talking about. He decided to let it slide. It wasn’t that he lacked curiosity. But whenever Doc launched into one of his tortured explanations, Ryan’s head hurt.

Just then, with a gust of cold evening air, somebody poked his head through the door and shouted, “Hey, everybody! That big-tit redhead and the black woman are dustin’ it up with a pack of caravaneers!”

Ryan wished he hadn’t passed on that refill. “Time to go.”

* * *

A HARD SHOVE between the breasts sat Mildred Wyeth down hard on her tailbone. The impact sent white sparks shooting up in her brain, and raised tears in her eyes.

How’d I get myself into this? she wondered.

It was a question with several possible answers. In one, she’d been a physician and cryogenics researcher in America at the end of the twentieth century. Complications following routine abdominal surgery had resulted in Mildred being frozen in an experimental cryogenic unit, with the hopes of reviving her in the future.

Then the world ended.

Several years earlier Ryan Cawdor and the others had stumbled across her cryopod and thawed her. She’d been with them since, trapped in a future she definitely hadn’t volunteered for.

But, more immediately…

She and Krysty Wroth had been walking back from where the wags were parked across the compound.

“You know, Krysty,” Mildred said, “it’s weird. Usually these storage places were built in or real near a town of at least some size. So they’d have, like, customers, you know?”

Krysty nodded and smiled absently. Mildred stifled a sigh. Sometimes her companions had little curiosity about the history of their kind and their continent, except insofar as it might lead to plunder or some other more or less tangible advantage. Not even the tall, statuesque woman with the flame-red hair and the emerald green eyes, who had a lively intelligence, imagination and general thirst for knowledge about the world. She, too, was mostly fixed on the present.

Of course, Mildred reminded herself, if you wake up every morning with no way to be sure there’ll be food to eat or water to drink, and that terrible muties aren’t going to kill you or coldhearts rape and enslave you, you might find the concerns of the moment a lot more pressing than some past, so long dead it isn’t even moldy anymore.

“I guess the war or the quakes knocked down whatever town lay nearby, and storms and scavengers took care of the rest,” Mildred said.

Screw it, she thought. Sometimes it feels good to connect to my own past. Krysty was a genuinely generous person as well as a friend. Mildred would just take advantage of her good nature and impose.

“Of course, most of the storage units must’ve gotten wiped out, too,” she continued. “Only a few dozen are left.”

Those were arranged around three sides of a wide square. The fourth was occupied by the three-story, wooden gaudy house itself, along with a combination water- and watchtower, thirty feet high, beside the dirt road to the main gate beyond. The earth around was stamped flat by generations of feet, tires and hooves, but Mildred guessed the open space had once been a paved parking lot. The gaudy probably stood where the office had been. The storage sheds were still being rented, but mostly by the night—or the hour—as cribs and temporary shelters for wayfarers across the desolate, acid-rain-racked wasteland that had once been the Great Plains.

A fair number of wags were parked in the big open space: Plunkett’s RV, big cargo trucks from the trade caravans and the old school bus, its bright green paint job faded the color of asparagus.

A pair of people appeared in front of them. Krysty tensed at Mildred’s side. Strangers moving to intercept wasn’t a comforting nor a welcoming thing in the Deathlands, but these were nondescript people, a man and a woman dressed in the usual postskydark shabby clothing, but with dark green handkerchiefs knotted over their heads.

“Cthulhu wants you,” the woman said, smiling angelically.

Mildred shuddered. “He can’t have me.”

“He’ll have us all someday, friend,” the tall, skinny man said, beaming. “Come to him now and know the peace of his love.”

“Why do you all wear those green scarves?” Krysty asked. She had instantly relaxed upon recognizing the pair from the twenty or thirty cultists overnighting in the caravanserai.

They seemed harmless, but Mildred said, “Don’t talk to them, Krysty! It only encourages them.”

“Why not?” she asked. “I’m interested in the paths people walk to the truth. Anyway, I want to know.”

“Why, sister,” the woman said, “it represents seaweed.”

“Seaweed?” asked Mildred despite herself. “Seaweed?”

“Why, certainly,” the man said, nodding. “The seaweed that covers our lord Cthulhu’s head as he waits, dead and dreaming, in lost R’lyeh!”

“Praise Cthulhu!” the woman declared, raising fervent eyes toward a sky banded with purple, orange, red and indigo. It was just sunset, though, not any kind of terrible storm coming in. “Cthulhu fhtagn!”

“Dead?” Krysty asked, seeming a bit stunned.

“Dead,” they both said, nodding in unison. “Dead to rise someday.”

Declining the offer of a handout, which seemed to consist of woodcuts on God—or Cthulhu—the two women walked on.

“What an odd belief system,” Krysty said.

Mildred shook her head. “Dang. I never realized just how similar the whole Cthulhu thing was to the Christian mythology.”

“You mean the sect existed during your earlier life?”

“Sort of. Only then they were called the science fiction fans.” She rolled her eyes. “My daddy’d go upside my head, he heard me comparing the two.”

Some of Omar’s staff, or children—to the extent there was a difference—were circling the central yard, lighting torches as darkness fell.

“What’s happening over there?” Krysty asked, pointing.

By the flaring orange torchlight that flickered in a chill, rising breeze, Mildred saw a skinny guy being bounced like a pinball among a group of dusty, mean-looking wag drivers. They were hooting derisively as they thrust him from one to the next. He reeled, unable to get his balance.

Mildred scowled. “They hadn’t ought to do that to a little guy. With glasses.”

Squaring her shoulders, she marched toward the fracas. It didn’t even occur to her to wonder whether Krysty would follow or not. Mildred didn’t care. She hated injustice.

As the little guy was pushed from pillar to post, a bald wag driver stuck out a boot. The victim went sprawling, his glasses flying off his face. Desperately, he shoved himself up onto all fours to scuttle after them.

They’d landed near another knot of jeering, laughing wag drivers. One waited until the skinny guy’s fingers almost reached the glasses before he stepped on the specs and crushed them with a vindictive ankle twist.

“Well, now, look what I gone and done,” he said, showing a gap-toothed grin to his buddies. “Ain’t that a shame?”

Evidently deciding his pal was getting too much of the attention, a larger man with a mop of dirty hair took it up a notch. He stepped toward the scrabbling victim, clearly getting ready to put the boot in.

Mildred grabbed his shoulder. “Here, you got no call to do that,” she said, spinning him.

The predark doctor was a sturdily built woman. In her time she’d been an avid hiker, not to mention an Olympic-class pistol shooter. Since reawakening into the Deathlands she hadn’t exactly slacked off at either pursuit.

But the guy was a head taller than she was, and what little wits he had were fuddled by advanced testosterone poisoning. As he turned, he snarled and punched her hard between the breasts. She reeled backward three steps and sat down hard.

So there she was. And the dirty-haired guy was winding up as if to deliver to her the kick she’d stymied.


Chapter Two

The burly wag driver, who turned out to have a rat’s-nest beard to go along with the hair, did a little stutter step to kick the sitting Mildred. She gave him a hard heel thrust in the nuts. He sat down not far away from her, bent over and clutching himself.

Mildred jumped up. The whole rowdy group converged on her, the little dude with the crushed glasses forgotten.

Suddenly Krysty stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her friend. Her prehensile hair swished around her shoulders, betraying her agitation. It also betrayed the fact that, however beautiful she was, Krysty Wroth was a mutie. Given the sign above the gateway, not to mention the temper of the mob closing in on them, Mildred hoped onlookers would think it was just the breeze stirring her scarlet locks.

“Wait!” Krysty said, holding up her hands. “What’s all this about?”

“Thanks, Krysty,” Mildred said from the corner of her mouth. “But you probably should have stood clear.”

Krysty just smiled at her. That wasn’t the way of any of them, to stand by and watch a friend get stomped. Mildred felt sick at what she might have gotten her friend into.

A wag driver with a Mohawk like a dead squirrel atop his head backhanded Krysty. “Clear out, bitch, or you’ll get what we give her.”

The force of the blow snapped Krysty’s head around. She came back with an overhand right that flattened the man’s long nose against his face with a crunch of breaking bone and cartilage, and blood squirting out each nostril. His eyes rolled up in his skull and he folded to the yard.

With a vicious collective snarl, the man pack closed in around the two embattled women.

Hard arms enveloped Krysty from behind. Hot breath washed down her neck and back. It stank like an overflowed shitter.

“Gotcha!” her captor grunted triumphantly as he tried to hoist her off her feet.

He got more than he bargained for. Krysty brought her knees up and drove a double-booted kick to the jaw of a short, wide wag driver with a faded bandanna tied around his head, hurling him into the crowd. Then she slammed her head back into the face of the man who held her.

Krysty’s skull was stronger than his jaw was. She felt something crunch at the impact, and he squalled and let her go. She gripped her hands together and turned into him fast, driving the point of her elbow into the pit of his stomach. The air burst out of him.

As he jackknifed, Krysty was already responding to the men rushing in on her. She whipped herself upright, bringing her elbow under the chin of one of them. His jaws clacked together, then he screamed, revealing red teeth that had bitten deeply into his tongue.

She caught a glimpse of Mildred. Surrounded, the stocky black woman had turned into a whirling dervish of fists, boots and elbows. She was peaceful by nature but could fight when she had to. And years of Deathlands living had taught her to hold nothing back. She was giving her attackers all they wanted and a double load more.

Krysty didn’t regret stepping in to help Mildred. The woman was too softhearted and shouldn’t have intervened. Krysty understood intellectually that Ryan was right about the need to keep out of fights that weren’t theirs, no matter how her own compassionate nature rebelled. But there were times when bad behavior had to be resisted.

Whatever the cost.

Her arms were grabbed from both sides. She sagged toward the closer assailant, who had caught her right arm. Cocking her knee, she turned and fired her left leg back in a powerful kick that caught the man who held her other arm between navel and crotch. It knocked his legs out from under him, and he slammed into the merciless ground face-first.

Krysty swung back around, driving her left knee toward the groin of the man who still held her arm. He twisted his own hips. And her knee drove hard into the big muscle of his thigh. It had to have hurt like rad fire, but he grinned in triumph that she’d missed pulping his balls, and made to grab her with his other hand.

She got her foot down, turned back and, grounding her powerful legs, pistoned a blow against his ribs. Bone cracked like a pistol shot. He gasped and sagged.

Another man was already closing in from behind. Krysty snapped her left leg straight back, then whipped it up and around. Her heel thwacked the new attacker’s left cheek and spun him away.

There were too many of them; she and Mildred could never win. But Krysty put that knowledge from her mind and gave herself totally over to fighting.

* * *

A TALL MAN IN A JACKET with tarnished silver studs and frayed gray patches spun toward Ryan, and away from an ill-considered attack on Krysty, which had earned him a wheel kick in the cheek.

He almost stumbled into Ryan. “I’m gonna teach that bitch,” he said. “Get my back!”

He wheeled to charge the flailing, fighting redhead. Recalling a lesson from Trader, back in the day, Ryan folded his right hand into what the cagey old man had called a “phoenix-eye fist,” with the forefinger knuckle protruding, braced by the thumb. It wasn’t a shot Ryan had had many opportunities to make. He was interested to see how it would pan out.

It panned out ace. Grabbing the wag driver’s shoulder, Ryan dug a brutal uppercut into the man’s right kidney, putting plenty of hip twist and leg drive into the short, sweet, savage stroke. The guy squeaked like a stepped-on deer mouse and slumped to the ground. There he curled up into a knot of pain and lay mewling and drooling into the hardscrabble dirt.

“What seems to be the problem here?” Ryan said, raising his voice.

Nobody paid any attention. Instead, peristaltic waves of mob closed in and over the two women. Setting his jaw, Ryan prepared to wade in.

A colossal boom roared out behind him, and a garish yellow-white flash lit the whole courtyard.

Everybody froze, then pale, surprised faces turned in Ryan’s direction.

But they weren’t gazing at him. He looked around to see Doc standing tall in his frock coat, grinning hugely. Bluish smoke trailed from the shotgun tube fixed beneath the barrel of his enormous LeMat wheel gun.

“Now that I have your attention, boys,” Doc called in a surprisingly hearty voice, “I yield the floor to Ryan Cawdor.”

To Ryan’s left, Jak stood with his .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver aimed at the mob. J.B. had checked his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun at the gaudy door, as Omar’s rules required. But he’d drawn the mini-Uzi from beneath his leather jacket, and held it leveled from his hip.

Several wag drivers yipped in alarm and danced as hot buckshot rained down on them. Doc’s shotgun had enough punch to take off a man’s face or chop up his guts at arm’s length. But fired straight up it didn’t throw the double-0 balls high enough to do more than give a whack when gravity inevitably brought them back down.

Ryan didn’t draw his own SIG-Sauer handblaster. He didn’t want to escalate the situation.

All the wag drivers started talking at once. The LeMat’s volcanic roar had knocked the fight out of them. Now they were all tripping over one another to explain how they were just having themselves some fun with this skinny kid for talking crazy, and then these bitches came and jumped them… .

Krysty moved forward to help Mildred, who in turn was helping the skinny little dude holding a well-crushed pair of specs in one hand. He was the worse for wear.

The wag drivers paid no attention to them. They seemed to have had a bellyful of the two wild women.

“All right,” Ryan snapped. “The fun’s over. Nobody’s chilled yet.”

He swept the crowd with his lone ice-blue eye. “What do you say we keep it that way?”

The wag drivers looked at one another. He could read their thoughts plainly on their faces and in the set of their shoulders, without need of any mutie mind powers, which he surely didn’t possess. This wasn’t fun anymore. He suspected for those who’d come to grips with Mildred and Krysty, it had stopped being fun considerably earlier.

He frowned at Mildred. “This was your doing.”

It wasn’t a question.

Though she was bent over from the exertion and a fair amount of pummeling, she straightened and braced her shoulders. “They were beating up this poor skinny kid for no reason. Kicking him around like a soccer ball.”

Ryan shrugged. “Not our business. Minding other people’s is a good way to wind up staring at the sky.”

“Fine. You didn’t have to back me up, anyway.”

“Yes, we did, Millie,” J.B. said mildly. He still had his Uzi out, in case some of the mag drivers got frisky again. “You know we’ve got to back each other’s plays. That’s why Ryan doesn’t want you jumping into every swollen river to save every stranded calf. You know what I mean.”

“Why, John,” the stocky woman said, her deep brown eyes lighting, “that’s almost poetic!”

Ryan raised a brow and looked at Krysty, who shook back her scarlet hair.

“She did what she thought was right, Ryan. So did I.”

He felt a hand pat his shoulder, and glanced back to see Doc’s prematurely aged face hanging over him.

“Give it over, Ryan,” the old man said. “This is a fight you can only lose. Especially if you win.”

Ryan was about to retort that the statement made no sense, then it hit him that it made total sense.

“All right,” he said. “That bullet’s out of the muzzle of the blaster, anyway. Say goodbye to your stray and let’s head back inside. No point freezing our asses off in this wind when the stove’s hot inside.”

“Can’t he come with us?” Mildred asked.

The kid hung back. His narrow face was puffy and turning color. “Truth is,” he said, “I’m not even supposed to be here. Me and my friends were attacked. Lost everything.”

“That why those slaggers were thundering on you?” J.B. asked.

The kid shook his head. He had a shock of dark hair like an untended garden, and prominent ears. “No. I was trying to warn them.”

“Warn?” Jak asked. “What about?”

The youth shook his head again. “You’ll just start hitting me, too. And anyway, I better go.”

“I say we bring him inside with us,” Mildred said. “I’ll pay for him out of my share of what we got for the job.”

Ryan frowned. As was standard practice, Boss Plunkett had given them half their pay in advance. Nobody was going to do bodyguard work on credit; nobody was going to hire guards and give them all their jack before they’d guarded their share of body. People who did either weren’t even triple-stupe, they were chills. And it was handsome pay. Handsome enough that Ryan and the others came close to taking for granted Plunkett would try to stiff them at trail’s end. But they’d burn that bridge after they crossed it.

It wouldn’t be the first time a boss had tried to stiff them. But if Ryan had anything to say about it, it’d be the last time this particular one tried.

“Millie, you—”

“Don’t ‘Millie’ me, John! It’s my share, and I can do with it what I choose!”

“Three days ago we were almost down to boiling the straps of our packs for sweat soup!”

“That’s about where I find myself now,” the newcomer said. “Sorry. I’m Reno.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said.

“I will kick in,” Doc said. “We are flush for the moment. I for one am willing to pay for the entertainment of a good tale, if nothing else.”

“Pay too,” Jak said. “Want warning.”

“Shouldn’t he be happy enough to take the fact we saved his life as payment?”

“He’s in a hard place,” Mildred said. “We’ve been there ourselves. Recently.”

“I know,” Ryan said. “That’s why we’re working for that fat bastard Plunkett, in case you forgot.”

“Anyway,” she went on, “hasn’t the notion ever occurred to you that if you help a stranger down on his luck, someday when you’re down on your luck a stranger might help you?”

Ryan stared at her. So did J.B. and Jak.

“Drawing a blank here,” the Armorer said after a moment.

“That a stranger might help another out of kindness, or even deferred self-interest,” Doc said gently to the black woman, “is a concept alien to our friends’ experience.”

As a usual thing, the two got along like cats and dogs. But there were times when refugees from their own times stuck together against their thoroughly modern comrades.

“It’s a good practice, Ryan,” Krysty said, “even if it’s hard for you to see.”

“Oh, for shit’s sake,” Ryan said, throwing his hands up in the air. “When did we become a rolling charity? Fuck it. Bring the bastard.”

He turned—and ran into a barrier: yet another skinny girl, this one on the cusp of puberty, in a long shapeless frock, with red pigtails and an excess of freckles.

“My daddy sent me out,” Loretta said. “Ain’t no shooting allowed in the caravanserai.”

“Tell your daddy it was an accident,” Ryan said. “We’re…sorry.”

The girl bobbed her pigtails and vanished inside.

Krysty patted Ryan’s shoulder. “There, now,” she said, smiling. “That didn’t hurt, did it?”

Ryan rubbed his bristly jaw. “Kinda.”

Another figure moved to intercept them by the door. “Cthulhu saves,” said a roly-poly man with a green hankie tied around his head, extending a woodblock leaflet.

“Best step back, son,” J.B. told him in a not unfriendly way. “He’s not on hand to save you.”


Chapter Three

“So let me get this straight,” Doc said across the barroom table. “There is an infestation of these strange creatures that is coming this way. And they eat people.”

“Cannie muties,” Jak said. He was turning one of his throwing knives across the back of a white hand, knuckle to knuckle. “No big.”

The kid Mildred had rescued from the mob shook his head. “Not muties,” he said. “They’re…sick. And you can catch what they got.”

“What do you mean?” J.B. asked.

“They’re not mutants. They’re normal people who have changed. They’ve turned into mindless, soulless monsters who hunger for human meat. For us. There are hundreds, man. And they’re following right behind me!”

He was getting worked up. He stood half out of his chair. “You’ve got to believe me! Somebody’s got to do something!”

Sitting protectively beside him, Mildred took the tattered sleeve of his plaid shirt and tugged him back down. Though she never would’ve admitted it to her friends, she was trying her damnedest not to laugh. The poor crazy kid talked like somebody from a B horror movie.

“So, not muties,” Jak said. “Just cannies. Seen cannies. Killed cannies.”

“You don’t understand,” Reno said. His face worked as if the muscles were trying to pull themselves apart beneath his grayish skin. “They’re worse than any cannies you’ve seen. Worse than you can imagine.”

“We’ve seen some pretty rough ones,” J.B. said.

“And our imaginations are quite expansive,” Doc added, though not unkindly.

He might be half out of his mind some of the time, and lots of his attitudes struck Mildred as more neolithic than Victorian, but overall he was closer to her conception of what a normal human being was like than these born Deathlanders. Krysty showed at least flashes of compassion. But even she, with her unquestionably big heart and spirit, could surprise Mildred.

“They’re triple-hard to kill,” Reno said. “At least as bad as stickies. They don’t feel pain, see. It’s like they’re…dead. Walking chills. They even start to rot. But it doesn’t slow them down. Oh, no. They move like lubed-up lightning, some of ’em.”

Mildred looked at her friends. She could tell they were thinking the caravaneers were right. This was crazy talk. She wasn’t so sure. The young man had clearly seen something that frightened him terribly.

“And here’s the worst part,” the youth went on. “If they bite you, you become one of them. If they chill you, you rise again as one of them. Unless you’re lucky enough they just eat you alive. Once somebody gets bitten, you have to chill them right away. Right now. Because it’s only a matter of time before they change, too!”

The little bubble of silence that surrounded the table after that pronouncement seemed to repel the raucous chatter that filled the saloon. At a breath of cold, relatively fresh air from outside, Mildred turned to look at the door, relieved for the break.

The leader of the Cthulhu cultists, Brother Ha’ahrd, swept in. She was sure the name was really Howard, but that was how the ever-ebullient prophet introduced himself, and how his followers reverently pronounced his name. He was of middle height, a tad taller than J.B. His face had clearly been broad even before age started to turn it shapeless and run it down over his neck. Iron-gray hair hung down the back of his dark green robe. He alone of the believers wore no headcloth.

He smiled and loudly greeted the Nuke Red Hot One, who was seating customers at the moment. She smiled back. The Fat One was bustling to the kitchen with a big galvanized metal tub full of dirty crockery. The Skinny One still worked the bar. Omar himself was nowhere to be seen.

Mildred took advantage of the break to study Ryan for his reaction to all this.

Frowning slightly, he turned to Reno, who was fumbling in a little sorry-ass backpack that, judging by its shape, held mostly nothing. The kid unfolded a fresh pair of eyeglasses, these with bat-wing frames, and fitted them experimentally in front of his watery blue eyes.

“Where’d you get those, Reno?” Mildred asked.

He shrugged. “When I’m scavvying, I always keep my eyes peeled for unbusted pairs that’re close to what I need,” he said, smiling shyly and half-apologetically. “Only way I can see anything.”

“So how do you come to know all this about these…rotties?” Ryan asked.

Reno shook his head. “Don’t know all about them. Sorry. I know way too much. But not all. We were scavvies, like I said. My friends Lariat and Drygulch and I. A few nights ago they hit us where we were camped.”

“So you were the only one who got away?” J.B. asked. Mildred looked at the Armorer narrowly, trying to divine whether he was trying to equate the kid’s survival to cowardice. It was a fine line in the Deathlands. Nobody liked somebody who’d run out on his partners when the shit hit. Yet nobody survived any length of time without being ready to just run when the odds got too bad. She still had little idea where the line lay. She suspected it was pretty subjective.

But Reno shook his head. “No. We all got away. But one of my friends got bit. That night while we were sleeping, Drygulch changed. He jumped on Lariat and bit her. That’s when I ran. And came within a hair of running right into the rest of these—what’d you call them? Rotties?”

He grimaced. Mildred reckoned he was trying to smile. “Good a name as any, I suppose.” She wondered why nicknames for muties in Deathlands all ended with ie.

“Pardon my asking,” Doc said. “But how do they come by these numbers? These are desolate lands, barely inhabited.”

Far away from reality as the old man could wander, he could be as focused as a microscope. Usually he stayed here and now when danger threatened. Or when, as now, his curiosity was aroused.

“It’s a big country, Doctor,” Reno said. “Look around. There’s fifty, sixty people staying here tonight, and mebbe twenty live and work here full-time. If you shake out all the folks who live in a hundred-mile radius you can get a mighty crowd, even in hard core Deathlands like these.”

Ryan’s lips tightened, as if he didn’t like the way the skinny kid’s words tasted. Mildred thought she detected something a little off about the tale herself.

And so what? she asked herself. In the Deathlands, everybody has secrets. We have secrets.

Back in her day they used to talk about how valuable information was. Talk about the information economy replacing the economy of everyday physical things. In the end physical reality had reasserted itself with a bloody vengeance. Yet information or its lack could get you chilled. Like any other resource.

She wanted to remind Ryan of that. She suspected it would only make things worse.

“Sounds crazy,” Jak said. But Mildred could see white around his ruby irises, and his fine nostrils were flared like a winded horse’s. He was spooked by talk about the walking dead. He had been raised in the bayous of the South, steeped in superstition. Except who could say what was superstitious these days when so many fantastic—and horrible—things stalked the land?

“Please,” Reno said hollowly. “You have to believe me. We need to either get ready to defend this place, or get out of here while we still can!”

That seemed to make an impression even on Ryan. Before Mildred could more than catch his eye, a fresh commotion came from the direction of the stairs.

Boss Plunkett and some of his retinue lumbered down from the upper stories, where the luxury accommodations were located, and where the gaudy house part of the caravanserai’s trade was carried out. The boss had changed into a satiny purple dressing gown that looked suspiciously as if it had started life more than a century before as a bedsheet. He had a bottle in one hand, a cigar in the other, and his arms draped like beef boughs over the necks of his “secretaries.” Two of the gaudy sluts accompanied them. Loomis followed close behind, glaring around at the other bar customers as if ready to take a bite out of anyone who got within range. As always, he put Mildred in mind of a Village People wannabe.

Plunkett swept his boiled-ham face around the room. It reddened slightly when he caught sight of Ryan and friends. He turned to mutter something to his personal sec man.

As the Nuke Red Hot One squired Plunkett and his female satellites to a table, which she cleared of caravaneers with one flinty look, Loomis swaggered over to the companions’ table. He was hitching at his tight black leather pants as he came. Mildred didn’t even want to think about what that might imply about what had just been going on in the boss’s private room above.

Loomis stopped a few feet away and thrust his unshaved face at Ryan like a challenging canine. “Boss says he wants to talk to you, Cawdor,” he said. He jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder. “Now.”

Behind the round lenses of his glasses, J.B. narrowed his eyes at the man. For him that was about as good as cussing Loomis out loudly. Mildred squeezed his leg under the table.

“Be back,” Ryan said laconically, rising. He turned and looked at Loomis. The sec man stood glaring up at him for half a minute. Then, realizing he wasn’t going to win any staring contests with the taller man, he turned and led the way back to their boss’s table.

* * *

“WHAT THE HELL are you playing at, Cawdor?” Plunkett bellowed as Ryan came up. “You ain’t gettin’ paid to sit on your asses listenin’ to fairy stories. Get out there and guard my shit, before these convoy scum steal me blind!”

Ryan took his time answering. He and his friends had taken Plunkett’s jack. The one-eyed man felt bound to see a job through once accepted, if it was at all possible without throwing away the lives of his companions. He was tempted to give their current boss a second mouth to bellow through, between, say, chins two and three. But it was bad form, and he didn’t want to do it unless he really had no choice.

Anyway, it wasn’t as though the boss’s abusive bluster was news.

Besides, there was an off chance the fat man would pay the balance owed at the end of the trail, just as he said he would. That in itself was worth keeping him alive. For now.

“Right,” Ryan said. “We’ll do that.” He glanced at Loomis. “Startin’ to smell bad in here, anyway.”

He turned back to his party. He doubted the sec man had the stones to jump him. And if he did, Ryan was certain he’d read it in the faces of his friends, all of which were turned to watch him.

He got back to the table without incident, noticing the caravaneers drinking in the bar seemed to let their eyes slide away from him like oil drops on a hot pan. The cultists, too.

Fine, he thought. It saved complications if they were afraid of him. Omar had a strict rule against anyone who wasn’t Omar chilling anybody inside the adobe outer walls of the compound.

“Let’s go,” Ryan said. “Boss says it’s time to get back to work.”

“Ryan—” Mildred started.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “He can stay with us.”

“Thank you!” Reno said. “You won’t regret this.”

“Don’t get ideas,” Ryan said. “We’ll probably chill you in the morning.”

* * *

RYAN CAME AWAKE all at once, as he usually did.

He was instantly aware of a presence leaning over him in the cold darkness of the cinder-block hut. Something was tickling his upturned face.

It was Krysty’s hair.

“There’s something going on,” she said as soon as his eye opened.

Ryan sat up. He slept in the shed where Plunkett’s sec wag was parked. Krysty would’ve slept alongside, but had her turn on watch. J.B. and Mildred had the shed with the boss’s personal wag. The RV was parked outside the structures. Jak and Doc slept in it.

“What?” Ryan asked as he picked up his 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226 handblaster and his eighteen-inch panga from where he had them laid close to hand. He tucked them away in appropriate places and started to pull his boots on. Apart from them he slept in his clothes.

“Guards have been reporting movement out in the night,” Krysty said. The land lay clear for anywhere from fifty to a hundred yards all around the perimeter wall. Omar’s crew kept it swept of brush or anything else unwelcome visitors could hide behind. Or use as cover from blasterfire. “They think they’re human.”

“Could be starting at shadows,” Ryan said, grunting as he hauled on a boot. “Mebbe they heard your pal Reno’s scary stories.”

The skinny bespectacled guy had pitched his bedroll next door with J.B. and Mildred. If Mildred was going to take in strays, she was going to have to take care of them herself. And J.B. would have to deal; Ryan grinned a little at the thought.

Krysty shook her head. She squatted next to him, ready to spring into action at an eye blink’s notice.

“Don’t think so, lover.”

From outside they heard voices raised. She looked around.

“Now what?” Ryan said.

Krysty shook her head. She straightened, and they both walked out the open bay door into the yard.

The first thing they saw was eight or ten of the wag drivers. They were roaring drunk, standing in a ring passing bottles around. Fortuitously, they were on the far side of the compound from where Boss Plunkett’s wags were parked. They seemed to be engaged in some kind of roughhousing.

From over by the gate they heard voices raised. “But Maw,” a male voice, high and near cracking with adolescence, called in protest. “She was just a little girl, wandering out there all alone in the dark. Leon said weren’t no harm in letting her in.”

The bucktoothed kid was a twig of about thirteen, all nose and Adam’s apple. Omar’s wives had dropped uncountable girl children—at least, Ryan hadn’t been able to count them all. But they seemed to have produced only two boys—this one, Locke, and eight-year-old Paco.

Leon was one of Omar’s guards. The Fat One looked at the big man, who shrugged. “She acted scared,” he said.

“Little girl?” asked J.B., emerging from the neighboring shed. “What’s going on?”

“Probably nothing,” Ryan said.

“Nothing?” Reno echoed, fumbling to adjust his glasses on his nose. “They didn’t let anyone in, did they?”

“Appears that they did.”

“They’re crazy! It could be one of them!”

“Where is this little girl?” Mildred asked, hugging herself tightly beneath her generous breasts and not looking thrilled at being rousted out of a relatively warm bedroll. Her breath came in puffs of condensation.

“Ryan,” Krysty said, “those men again—”

The wag drivers were hooting in rising merriment. Only the fact the Fat One was busy reading Locke the riot act prevented her from jumping on them for making noise at this hour, Ryan reckoned. That was against Omar’s rules, too.

Then the circle opened a bit and Ryan saw that the wag drivers were pushing around a girl with pigtails. For a moment he thought it was one of the host’s daughters. But he quickly dismissed that; if they could stand up, the wag drivers weren’t that drunk. He remembered how Locke claimed he and Leon had admitted a lone little girl.

Now the wag drivers were bouncing her around the way they had Reno earlier in the evening.

“What is it with these assholes?” Ryan asked.

“Ryan,” Krysty said, “we’ve got to do something.”

“No,” he amended, “no, we don’t. We’ve got our hands full now. Let Omar’s people deal with it. What we have to do is get back to sleep. Plunkett’s going to want us hustling tomorrow.”

Jak was frowning. “Girl not look right.”

“What?” Ryan said. He had headed back to bed. Now he turned to look once more.

The sky was clear overhead, but the pitiless stars didn’t cast enough light to see by. Nor did the lantern light seeping through the gaudy house windows. Still, it struck Ryan that the little girl did move strangely, as if she were stiff, somehow. And was it a trick of the light, or did her face appear gray?

“What’s going on out here?” Omar himself, shaved-headed, ferociously mustached, stood in the doorway to the barroom. He wore his inevitable apron and held his sawed-off scattergun in his big blunt hands. He wasn’t shy about raising his voice regardless of the hour.

The wag drivers ignored him. One of them blew kisses at the teetering, silent child, then he leaned toward her, puckering his lips.

“Gimme a kiss, little girl,” he said.

As if shot from a catapult, she sprang at him. Her arms flew around his neck. She pressed her mouth to his in what looked like a kiss.

“Jesus God! That’s plain wrong,” Mildred said. “Get him away from her!”

The wag driver screamed. He reared up, batting frantically at the child, who continued to cling like a pigtailed monkey.

She turned her head to look at Ryan and his companions. Her eyes were sunken pits. A dark stain was smeared all around her mouth, and dark liquid ran freely down her chin.

The wag driver’s lips dangled from her teeth like a limp onion ring.


Chapter Four

Stiff-legged in horror, the wag drivers backed away from their stricken friend. They weren’t quick enough. The little girl jumped on the nearest man’s back and sank her teeth in the side of his neck.

“Shit!” Reno shrieked. “She’s one of them!”

“What the fuck?” Ryan said.

Someone was hollering from the watchtower. “Stand back! Stand away from the gate there or I’ll shoot!”

Wag drivers pried the little girl off their second stricken buddy and dashed her to the ground. Omar was striding toward them, shotgun in his fist. His body language suggested he wasn’t sure who to shoot first.

“Start the wags,” Ryan told his companions. “It’s time to go.”

“What about Plunkett?” J.B. asked.

“I’ll get him,” Ryan said grimly.

He’d scarcely started walking toward the gaudy when Krysty screamed, “Ryan!”

Instinct made him look left, away from where the warning cry had come from. A man lurched toward him from the shadows between sheds.

He moved hunched over, his face thrusting forward, his arms dangling. One cheek had been torn off, exposing teeth on his upper jaw. The wound didn’t bleed. His skin was gray in the faint light, his eyes white marbles.

At Krysty’s cry Ryan had drawn his handblaster. Bracing it with both hands, he fired two quick shots through the center of the man’s chest.

They were good hits. He saw them hit, punching through ragged plaid flannel over the sternum. One or both had to have penetrated the man’s heart. But rather than slowing, he put on a surprising burst of speed.

“Don’t let it bite you!” Reno screamed.

Ryan gave the onrushing thing a front thrust-kick to the sternum. The creature reeled back three steps, then with unwavering determination charged forward again.

As much from habit as anything else, Ryan punched a third bullet through its forehead. The creature folded obediently as a dead man should, and lay still.

“Head shots work!” Ryan shouted as he sprinted toward the main building.

Around him people spilled from the sheds and the gaudy house itself. The yard was filling with bodies, confusion and noise. People screamed. Shots popped.

At the front gate the Fat One didn’t seem to quite grasp what was going on. With Locke and Leon trailing behind, she walked toward the center of the yard, waving her flabby arms and shouting for everyone to cease firing.

The little girl, the lower half her face painted with the blood of her victims, jumped up, apparently unhurt. She darted toward the large woman. The Fat One saw her and dropped to her knees. Holding her arms wide, she cried, “Come to me, child! Run!”

The girl did. When she was ten feet from the kneeling woman her head exploded. The decapitated body flopped forward almost to the horrified woman’s feet.

Stopping by the door to let a knot of panicky people out, Ryan looked back over his shoulder. Mildred was lowering her blocky ZKR 551 target revolver from a one-armed shooting stance. He caught a gleam of torchlight on tears streaming down her cheeks.

The Fat One squalled in outrage and jumped to her feet. “That wasn’t a little girl anymore!” Reno yelled, jumping in front of Mildred as if to shield her from the wrath of Omar’s heftiest wife.

From somewhere came the cry “They’re over the wall!”

More of those creatures, men and women but not men or women, moved with unnatural hitching gaits through the crowd in the yard. Ryan thrust his way into the gaudy house, breasting a stream of half-naked sluts screaming as they raced out.

The first thing that hit him when he entered was an eye-searing stink of smoke. It was more than the potbellied stove could possibly account for unless the chimney had gotten blocked. He took a wild flying guess that wasn’t the case.

Behind the bar the Thin One flailed vigorously at three no-longer-human opponents with an aluminum baseball bat. It made musical thunking sounds as it bounced off bone lightly padded by muscle or skin, off joints and skulls. Family members, employees and patrons wrestled with enemies whose skin, bluish in the lantern light, was cratered with running open sores. Some were missing big chunks from their bodies, even arms.

A wag driver grabbed the arm of an elderly man to try to pull the oldie off a comrade. The arm came off in his hands. He stared at it in comic amazement as the changed oldie sank his few remaining teeth into the second wag driver’s neck.

Plunkett and crew were nowhere in sight. Fleeing sluts, guards and customers were blocking the stairs. Ryan began shoving them bodily out of the way. As strong as he was, their fear was stronger. He didn’t make much progress.

Smoke began rolling along the hollows of the ceiling between the beams. The gaudy house was well and truly on fire.

Loomis tumbled down the wooden stairs, wearing only his shiny, black leather pants. “They’re already changing!” he screamed, catching himself on all fours.

Buck-naked and baby-pink, Boss Tim Plunkett lurched down the stairs behind his sec chief. His hairy, fish-pale belly hung low, obscuring his genitals. Blood gushed from his torn-out throat. His voice box and airway were apparently still intact, or mostly so. As he banged from rail to wall and back, clutching his blood-gouting wound with one hand, he kept croaking, “Help me!”

He toppled, to land on his gut with a massive crash.

* * *

SHUDDERING ORANGE FIRE erupted from the combined watch- and water tower, followed a beat later by a roar of full-auto blasterfire. Pressing the hand that held the pistol grip of his M-4000 scattergun to pin his battered hat against his head, J.B. reached with his free hand to snag the back of the man’s flannel shirt Krysty Wroth wore. He dragged her to the ground.

Bullets cracked right over their heads, where their bodies had been an eye blink earlier. Headlights popped as the burst raked the Tundra’s front.

The burst went on, sweeping the length of the big RV. Metal flexed musically.

“Shit!” Krysty exclaimed. That startled J.B. The redhead normally didn’t use bad language.

Then he smelled gasoline and understood why she cussed. Krysty threw herself over him, grabbing him so they both rolled sideways over the cold, trampled earth, away from the fuel-leaking RV. It also took them out of the dubious cover of the wag’s thin-gauge metal walls.

The burst hammered on. Good way to burn out a barrel fast, the armorer in J.B. noted. Inevitably, the bullets struck a spark. The big wag lit up with a fat pillow of blue fire and a low but loud whump.

J.B. felt a wave of heat wash over him as he came to rest on top of Krysty, looking down into her green eyes. He grinned.

“I better climb off,” he said. “Don’t want any misunderstandings with Ryan.”

“Reckon he’d understand,” she said.

The machine gun lashed back across the crowded yard. J.B. could tell humans were getting hit. They fell and stayed down. The triple-strange creatures—the rotties—kept shambling along despite repeated torso strikes.

“Look out!” Krysty gritted. J.B. tipped his face to the ground as bullets stitched right to left not two feet in front of him. Ricochets whined over him, gouts of dirt tapping the front brim of his hat.

“That stupe in the tower’s gonna chill us before the rotties do,” he said.

He heard the bark of a .38 from his left. The muzzle-flare from the tower was cut off. J.B. looked to where the single gunshot had come from.

Mildred knelt on the dirt, her left elbow braced on one knee, her left hand cradling her handblaster.

“You chill the dude, Millie?” he called.

She shook her head. “Like you said, J.B. He was a bigger danger.”

“Wags fucked,” Jak said, coming out of the shed behind J.B. “Tundra chilled. Other—”

He shook his white-maned head in irritation. The burning cargo wag blocked the third vehicle in the shed. It blazed too vigorously for anyone to try to push the big vehicle clear.

Krysty sat up beside J.B. She suddenly whipped her upper body left and shot twice with her snub-nosed Smith & Wesson. Right toward Mildred.

Spinning around, J.B. saw a man with a black pit where one eye should be reel back from where he’d been about to blindside the sturdy woman. Apparently Krysty had hit him in the body, not the head, and he lunged for Mildred.

“Shit!” J.B. yelped. He rolled fast right, trying to clear his own scattergun for a shot at the rottie. It’d be dangerous with Mildred in the way. But if it was really true that if you got bitten by one of these hoodoos, it turned you into one of them…

There weren’t many things in this world that J. B. Dix shied away from. He’d seen his share of scary shit and then some. But he couldn’t stand to think of that happening to Mildred. To any of his friends.

But he wouldn’t make it in time. Seconds slowed as he watched the rottie close in on Mildred, who was lining up a shot on another target and still unaware of her danger. He shouted a warning he knew would come too late.

With a crunch a thin steel blade poked through the man’s head from right temple to left. The rottie went to his knees.

“Touché,” Doc cried. He put a boot to the side of the slack-skinned, veined face and pushed. The creature flopped to its side and lay unmoving.

J.B. scrambled to his feet. A man with an arm swinging from his elbow like a busted gate loomed in front of him, a vomitous reek of rotting flesh.

Whipping up the M-4000, J.B. jabbed the steel-shod butt into the creature’s face. It lurched back two steps, then its head exploded as J.B. reversed the scattergun and fired, eight inches from the bridge of its nose.

“You guys hold them off,” Krysty shouted, stuffing a speed-loader into her snub-nosed handblaster. It held only five shots, a triple-rough disadvantage in a fight like this. “Mildred, come help me get the packs.”

“What do you plan?” Doc asked. He fended off a short-haired changed woman with his rapier and stabbed her deftly through the eye.

“We’ve got to get out of here, fast!” Krysty said. “That’s my plan!”

She and Mildred ducked into the shed.

* * *

AN EYE BLINK before his boss’s nude, bleeding bulk crashed down on him, Loomis took off like a sprinter, almost knocking down Ryan in his mad desire to get out the door.

Two naked women came down the stairway. By their hair Ryan guessed they were the boss’s “secretaries,” Tina and Angela. Their faces were hard to recognize, gray and distorted with some unimaginable passion behind liberal smears of gore. Bottle-blonde Angela’s belly had been cut or ripped open. Purple lengths of intestine trailed out the red, gaping cavity. They were short, their ends ragged, as if the loops had been bitten through.

Black hair flying, Tina flung herself on her boss’s wide, hairy white back. He thrashed feebly. It amazed Ryan he could move at all, at the rate he was bleeding out. Tina grabbed his head and, despite the thickness of his bull-like neck, began to bang his head against a stout square stair post. Angela, not inconvenienced in the least by her missing viscera, joined right in, gnawing her boss’s head as her partner rhythmically pounded it into the wood.

A hellish light showed through the boards of the ceiling over the barroom. Sparks fell like glowing rain. A bald man stumbled toward Ryan, extending a clawed hand from which the little finger had been bitten. The wound had stopped bleeding. Ryan shot him in the face almost casually, so horribly fascinated was he by what was happening on the stairs.

He felt no strong urge to try to rescue his employer. The big man was a sure chill anyway, with that neck wound. Not to mention that Reno’s crazy talk about victims rising again as one of the changed if the rotties chilled them was looking pretty plausible here.

With a sound like a melon being dropped, Boss Plunkett’s head split open. Amazingly, his naked limbs continued to twitch, and he moaned in dismay. Tina clawed briefly, then peeled back a section of skull with scalp attached.

With a superhuman effort the huge man reared to his knees, reaching a pudgy arm toward Ryan.

“Help me,” he mouthed.

Then he stiffened and his eyes rolled up in his beet-red face. Tina had plunged a long-nailed hand into his opened cranium and scooped up a juicy handful from his until-then-living brain. She mashed it against her wide-open mouth, getting as much blood and dough-colored brains on her face as inside.

Plunkett plopped forward, unmoving.

Chewing, Tina looked at Ryan. Her eyes were as white as milky marbles, yet had a terrifying intensity. Without thinking, he raised his SIG-Sauer, swiftly braced and flash-aimed, and shot her through the forehead.

She slumped. Her partner stayed astride Plunkett’s pale fat back and began to greedily stuff fistfuls of brains into her mouth.

With a roar, the ceiling caved in over the bar.

“Time to go,” Ryan said. He turned and dashed back into the night’s cold but welcoming embrace.


Chapter Five

The caravanserai yard was a hell full of the struggling damned. Bodies thrashed. The doomed screamed as rotties bit great chunks out of living human flesh. Across the yard Ryan saw the former Boss Plunkett’s big RV burning merrily. He made for it at a run, as if it were a beacon.

He shot a woman covered in human blood when she lunged from his right to bite him. A skinny adolescent boy, not Locke or anyone Ryan had seen before, blocked his path. He drew his panga and hacked at the youth’s head. The kid fell. Whether he stayed down or not Ryan never knew. He wasn’t about to hang around to watch.

He reached his friends. J.B. was holding a tall man’s head and shoulders against the side of the burning wag, where yellow flames enveloped them. The man continued to paw at the Armorer as if nothing unusual was happening, his sleeves yellow wings of flame.

Ryan shot the man through the head. He collapsed into a flaming, stinking heap as J.B. leaped clear.

“Quit fucking around, J.B.,” Ryan said. “We got to shake off the dust of this place.”

Krysty had her back to a shed, fending off an attacker with a trenching shovel from a wag’s emergency kit. Ryan hacked the rottie across the back of the neck. He folded.

Doc stuck the tip of his rapier through the eyeball of an approaching rottie. Behind him, Mildred held a baseball bat cocked should anyone get past him. Jak danced around with a big trench knife in his hand, easily evading swipes from a bearlike foe and awaiting an opening to dart past and stab him in the back of the head.

“We need a ride out, and fast,” Ryan said.

“Easier said than done, Ryan,” J.B. answered. “Seeing as how our wags are either in flames or blocked in.”

Krysty ran to Ryan and gave him a quick hug. She had been rooting around inside the wag with the shot-up engine block. The ax handle she held was stained with blood at the tip. He kissed her quickly on the cheek, then pulled free to point back across the yard.

“There’s our ride,” he said. “Right there.”

“That’s those damn Cthulhu cultists’ bus,” Mildred said. “They might have something to say about our hitching a lift.”

Planting the blade of his panga under his right arm, Ryan switched magazines in his SIG. He didn’t much worry about getting gore on his coat. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last.

“Doesn’t mean we got to listen,” he said. “Follow me. Wedge formation.”

Without looking to see if his companions would follow—because he knew from long experience they would—he set off at a trot for the battered, faded-green bus. It had a snowplow blade up front and chicken wire over the windows, most of which lacked glass.

Cultists surrounded the school bus, trying to hold off the moaning horde by pushing at them with their bare hands. They were determined and vigorous enough to manage it for now.

The concentration of warm food drew the changed.

Ryan passed Brother Ha’ahrd, who was surrounded by a phalanx of followers, including a few former wag drivers that seemed to have undergone a last-minute conversion in the face of overwhelming, mind-frying horror. He was loudly preaching a doctrine of love and forbearance and waiting on the will of the Great Old Ones. The rotties didn’t seem to be listening. They were more interested in eating his head.

Which meant most of the shambling freaks were focused on something other than the approach of Ryan and friends from the rear. He heard a couple shots pop off behind him, and the thwack of stout ash wood on a skull, accompanied by a grunt of effort and triumph from Mildred. Apparently a few of the freaks still tracked them.

Ryan didn’t look back. Unless somebody screamed for his help, his job was clearing the way.

He waded into the mob of rotties surging toward the bus door, where three cultists had linked arms to keep them out. Ryan hacked at the backs of necks and skulls as if the changed were a stand of brush he was trying to cut a trail through.

A woman turned a blood mask to snarl at him and he shot her between the eyes. He sensed a presence on his right and whipped the butt of his SIG around to squash a changed man’s nose in a spray of dark fluid. The rottie staggered back. An eye blink later Doc’s slim rapier impaled the creature through both temples like an apple on a skewer.

A burly rottie, obviously a changed wag driver, bare-chested and with a short Mohawk, spun to bare his teeth and spread his arms to seize the one-eyed man. Ryan hammered him between the eyes with the SIG’s butt, then shot him in the forehead as he staggered back.

The rotties pulled down the two women and one man barring the door. As the cultists futilely screamed and thrashed, the rotties homed in on them. Ryan kicked at the flailing tangle until the way was clear, then rushed into the school bus with his friends at his heels.

A stout woman in a robe sewn together from burlap bags barred their way. “Stop! There’s no room in here for anyone but believers!”

Ryan was about to rebut her with a copper-jacketed 9 mm bullet where it would do the most good when Krysty grabbed his arm from behind.

“Wait!” she yelled. “She’s right!”

The cultist was. Ryan looked around the bus to see the seats and aisles jammed with refugees. Not all of them looked as if they belonged to Brother Ha’ahrd’s flock, or at least had started the day that way. Still, the practical puzzle was insoluble: even shooting the reticent wasn’t likely to drive these people out into the blood-smeared rottie mob.

“Up!” he heard Jak call.

“Say what?” Ryan turned to see Jak disappearing up the first window behind the door.

Ryan jumped back outside. After even momentary exposure to the relative warmth inside the bus, generated by close-packed bodies and humid panting breath, the chill hit him like a slap. As did the stench of burning petrocarbons, human flesh and hair, and spilled intestines.

“Follow Jak!” Ryan yelled. He stooped to grab one of Krysty’s calves. J.B. grabbed the other, and the two men boosted the woman high enough to scramble onto the roof after the albino youth.

Stabbing, slashing, shooting only when utterly necessary, Ryan and Doc helped the cultists stave off the rotties while Mildred and J.B. quickly passed the packs up to Krysty and Jak atop the bus. Then Ryan and J.B. gave Mildred a boost, and Doc. Finally, Ryan stood facing out, while J.B. scaled him like a monkey and clambered up.

The changed surged forward. Unfeeling hands reached out for Ryan, blood-spilling mouths gaping wide to consume his flesh.

* * *

MILDRED HAD BARELY got her bearings atop the ice-cold metal roof of the bus when another stout woman wearing the Cthulhu cult’s flowing robes and head scarf came bustling up alongside the baggage that had been strapped onto a rickety roof rack.

“You can’t come up here!” she snapped. “This is for believers only—”

“Gaia forgive me,” Krysty said. She kicked the stout woman off the roof.

Mildred felt her brows climb up her forehead. Krysty looked back at her and shrugged.

“Move your broad butt, woman!” yelled a familiar voice from behind. Mildred turned a furious glare on J.B., whose head popped up over the roof edge like a curious prairie dog’s.

“John,” she said, “you and me are going to talk.”

But she shifted aside to make way for him as a great cry went up from the cultists below.

“Brother Ha’ahrd!” a voice screamed.

Ryan looked past the rotties closing in on him to see the long-haired prophet knocked off his feet by a surge of creatures who had overwhelmed his guards. Cultists stampeded off the bus, bowling over the rotties in their path in their zeal to rescue their guru.

Ryan had caught a break.

Not a man to waste an opportunity, Ryan holstered his panga and handblaster, spun around and jumped as high as he could. Krysty and J.B. caught hold of his outstretched arms and hauled him up on top of the bus as if he were a child.

“After all this trouble we could ride inside now,” Mildred said peevishly. She knelt on the heaped baggage, making fast their own packs. Doc squatted to one side, reloading his revolver as calmly as if he were out for a morning stroll outside his home in nineteenth-century Vermont.

Ryan shook his head emphatically. “Just as glad to ride up here,” he said. “Rotties get inside—”

Screams pealed out the door. “Shit!” J.B. said, leaning out to peer over. “They are!”

“Grab legs!” Jak called. Without waiting to see if anybody responded, he got down on his knees at the front end of the bus roof. While the few cultists and other refugees who had also sought safety up there looked on dumbly, Krysty and Mildred jumped to grab the youth’s ankles as he let himself topple forward.

An instant later Ryan heard the roar of Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python.

* * *

FEELING KRYSTY’S AND Mildred’s grips strong on his ankles, Jak let himself almost smack face-first into the cold windshield of the bus, using his right palm at the last moment to keep from breaking his nose.

Beyond the glass, which remained unfogged due to the icy air streaming in the open door, he saw the look of terror on the driver’s face, rendered more comic by being upside down: the saucer eyes, the mouth a screaming O below a bearded chin.

The driver had good reason to scream. He was trying to hang on to the wheel, probably to keep from getting pulled out of his seat, and batting with his right arm at a rottie who was trying to bite his head. Other rotties had got themselves jammed in the door in their lust for human flesh and hot blood.

Jak pressed the vented muzzle of his blaster against the glass near the first rottie’s head and pulled the trigger. The Magnum blaster kicked itself away from the windshield as the glass collapsed inward. He let his arm straighten to ride out the recoil; he hadn’t been able to brace properly, and expected the reaction.

Inside, the bus driver stared in even greater horror at his attacker. The back of the changed woman’s head had been blown off. The guy was staring through her mouth at the other rotties still struggling to break free and get at him.

The half-headed rottie collapsed. People in the bus were screaming and leaning over at least one person who’d been hit by the 125-grain hollowpoint slug, which hadn’t expended all its energy blowing the rottie’s head apart. Jak took in the fact without emotional reaction. These were no friends of his, nor enemies, either. So why care?

With the window glass gone he had clear shots at the rotties in the door. Grabbing the Python’s grips with both hands, he fired three shots as fast as he could. Two of the creatures went down at once, shot through the forehead. The third reeled back with her lower jaw torn away. Instantly, hands grabbed her from behind and threw her to the ground as furious cultists surged in, bearing their injured leader.

Jak turned to the driver. “Drive,” he said, gesturing with his Python for emphasis.

Eyes all but popping free of his lean, ashen face, the driver put the wag in gear and hit the gas.

* * *

A BLOOD-STREAKED GRAY head appeared over the rear end of the bus roof as the vehicle took off with a jerk. Kneeling on the cool metal, Ryan had unstrapped his Steyr from the top of his backpack and cracked the bolt to make sure the weapon was loaded. He put a hand down briefly to steady himself against the sudden acceleration, then whipped the longblaster’s butt to his shoulder and fired.

The head disappeared. Whether he’d destroyed the brain or not Ryan didn’t know. The 7.62 mm bullet might have caught the creature in the shoulder. It didn’t matter as long as the thing didn’t get up here.

“Everybody all right?” Ryan shouted, hanging on to the jury-built luggage rack as the bus wheeled in as tight an arc as it could toward the compound exit. “Sing out.”

“Yes,” Krysty called.

“I’m here,” J.B. said.

“Capital, Ryan!” Doc declared.

“Ace,” Mildred said sourly, as she and Krysty stood up together, hoisting Jak back up with his white hair swinging wildly. “Jak’s here, too.”

The albino youth jackknifed up between the two women and popped to his feet.

“Holy shit!” Ryan saw Mildred pointing straight ahead.

The caravanserai gate was shut. It was also on fire.


Chapter Six

Yellow flames danced against the backdrop of the snow-dusted prairie beyond.

The bus driver never slowed. “Brace yourselves!” Ryan shouted. He saw Krysty and Mildred turn away from the front of the bus and throw themselves on the mounded baggage. He did likewise.

The snowplow blade hit the gate. Whether more weakly constructed than it appeared, or weakened by the flames, it flew apart, sending flaming planks and posts spiraling away like pinwheels.

The bus took off down the dirt road, which was basically a pair of ever-deepening ruts running northeast to southwest.

“Tie on!” Ryan shouted over his shoulder to his companions. As far as he could see, the six of them now had the roof to themselves. The handful of cultists who had climbed up here, presumably not as keenly honed to a survival edge as the companions, either had been tossed off by the wag’s wild maneuvering, or had bailed voluntarily.

A mob tottered in slow pursuit of the wag, black figures silhouetted against yellow flame. They faded rapidly as the school bus jounced off across the countryside.

Lying on his belly, Ryan used his belt to fasten himself to the steel rail of the roof rack. His companions chimed in with shouts as they finished making themselves fast.

“Weapons out!” he called when Doc called the last acknowledgment.

“The rotties can’t catch us on foot,” Mildred said.

“Do you know there’s not a hundred of ’em waiting out here?”

“Weapon out,” Mildred said.

* * *

THE GREAT PLAINS were never as flat as they appeared, Mildred thought. The dark land scrolling past them mostly looked like the top of a billiard table. Yet she ached in elbows and thighs and breasts from being slammed on the metal roof every time the bus bounced over an unseen obstacle or crashed down onto ground as hard as a baron’s heart, each time threatening destruction to its ancient suspension. Meanwhile the back of her was freezing through from the ice-blast wind of passage, especially her legs, covered only by the thin fabric of her camo pants.

Every bounce also reminded her that the dark country abounded with hiding places for lurking foes. Not just the changed, either. Lethal predators abounded in the Deathlands, animal, mutie and human.

Shadows seemed to flit across the shadowed land. A score of times Mildred opened her mouth to cry an alarm, or slipped her gloved finger into the trigger guard of her Czech-made .38-caliber target revolver. Each time she held herself back from screaming or shooting. And each time no attack came.

She was horribly aware that didn’t mean the threats she thought she saw in the shadows weren’t real.

The bus picked up speed, trading the occasional bone-slamming jolt for a constant rattle that felt as if it might detach Mildred’s retinas. But she gritted her teeth and hung on.

Because one thing she’d learned, more than a century before she’d ever opened her eyes to this terrible new world, was to endure.

* * *

AN HOUR LATER the bus rumbled to a stop in a sandy wash next to a slowly moving stream. Steam rolled from under the hood. The engine hissed and pinged as it cooled.

“What’s happening?” Ryan called.

“Driver says he thinks we’re far enough away to take a break.” Krysty called back. “He says we’ve come about thirty miles.”

“Great,” J.B. said. “I could stand to try to winch my bones straight again. The knots in my muscles’re getting knots in them.”

“All right,” Ryan said. “Everybody cut loose. Keep eyes skinned and blasters ready.”

“Really, friend Ryan,” Doc croaked, “sometimes you belabor the obvious.”

Ryan stood and stretched. He felt about the same way J.B. did—as if some triple-size mutie had grabbed his ankles and tried to bust boulders using Ryan as a hammer.

The door opened and passengers spilled out onto drifted sand. Some fell weakly to hands and knees. Somebody puked noisily.

A woman with a hood pulled up over her head scarf stopped after several paces and turned to look up at Ryan.

“Any of our brothers and sisters up there with you?”

“No,” he said.

She gazed up at him for a spell, then turned and walked off.

“What that about?” Jak asked, walking up to Ryan. He moved with his customary youthful-predator swagger. Ryan shrugged in response. He reckoned Jak didn’t feel much better than anybody else, but had enough resilience to hide it better.

The one-eyed man already knew none of his party was injured. It had been hard to make himself heard above the bus’s clatter, but he’d confirmed that nobody had caught any grief beyond scrapes and bruises.

And, most importantly, no bites.

The companions moved off to the side. The cultists and other refugees showed no interest in mingling with them, and they were just as glad not to have to answer any uncomfortable questions about the manner in which they’d hitched a ride. Not to mention the fates of the cultists who’d been atop the bus with them.

“A fire would be welcome,” Doc said, rubbing his hands together. “Restore warmth to chilled bones.”

In lieu of that they squatted in the lee of the bus. An east wind had risen during their uncomfortable ride. It came whistling beneath the wag’s swaybacked undercarriage, cutting through Ryan’s clothes and skin like a knife.

“What do you plan to burn for fuel, you old coot?” Mildred asked. “Your extra long johns from your pack?”

They had unloaded their backpacks from the luggage rack, just in case they needed to make their own way out of there in a hurry. Or in case some of the cultists unexpectedly drove off.

“What are those rad-blasted creatures?” Ryan said, ignoring the byplay. He stood with his back to the wag and his Steyr slung over his shoulder.

“Triple-pain in the hindquarters, is what,” J.B. said.

“They have me feeling the creepies all over,” Krysty said.

Ryan looked at her. “How come they don’t feel pain? How come a wound that would drop any normal man doesn’t slow them down? How can they even move? And why do they need to eat, anyway? Far as I can tell, they’re chills, or next thing to it. What do they need food for?”

“Why, my dear Ryan,” Doc said, “you seem to have taken an unusually empirical turn of mind.”

“Didn’t think you went in much for abstract curiosity,” Mildred said.

“Nothing abstract about it. ‘Know your enemy like you know yourself,’ Trader always said.”

“I don’t want to know these things,” Krysty said. “They’re not part of Gaia’s nature.”

“Worse than muties?” J.B. asked.

“Yes,” the redhead said emphatically. “There’s a wrongness about them I’ve never felt from the most horrible mutie. Ryan, they’re dead. They really are. Just like those hogs in Canada.”

Ryan nodded. “That’s why I want to know about them, Krysty. How do you fight what’s already dead?”

“Shoot head,” Jak said. “Works.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Why?”

“You really aren’t succumbing to curiosity for its own sake?” Doc asked.

“Fireblast, no. If I know why that chills them, I may be able to find something else that does it, too. At least waste less time and ammo doing stuff that doesn’t faze the bastards.”

“Chopping their heads off should work,” Krysty suggested.

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I hacked one or two through the back of the neck, too. That seemed to drop them, and made them stay down.”

“Their central nervous system appears to retain some function,” Mildred said. She squatted with her arms crossed tightly beneath her breasts. Her big chocolate eyes stared intently at nothing in particular as she wrestled with the questions.

“Or perhaps something else makes use of their nervous system,” Doc said.

“You talking crazy, Doc? Don’t need you losing it, just now,” Ryan said.

But Mildred had raised her head and was looking hard at her customary antagonist. “What are you getting at, old man?”

“Clearly, or at least so far as we can tell, life has fled these poor unfortunates that Ryan dubbed ‘rotties.’ Yet they move. And we saw none of those horrid worms from the north.”

“You channeling Galileo?” Mildred asked. “Eppur si muove.”

Doc laughed, a soundless, head-bobbing motion.

“What are you two rambling on about?” Ryan demanded.

“Ancient history,” Mildred said. “You wouldn’t be interested.”

“Perhaps these unfortunates have been taken over by some kind of organism, not the worms of Canada, which we haven’t seen.”

“Well, we definitely know that’s a possibility,” Ryan said.

“When I was held captive by the vile whitecoats,” Doc said, “my captors often spoke of artificial organisms that they could program to do their bidding. Like living steel, but so small the finest optical microscope could not see them.”

“You talking about nanotechnology, Doc?” Mildred asked.

He blinked. A light snow had begun to fall, swirling on the side of the bus away from the wind. White crystals crusted the long lashes above his intense blue eyes.

“I believe that was the term they used, yes.”

“We’ve heard about that before,” Krysty said. “But how could this nanotechnology be involved here? These are people. Or rather, creatures that were people.”

“Perhaps the nanotechnological machines permeate the bodies of their victims,” Doc said slowly, clearly speaking thoughts as they formed in his mind. “Somehow they animate the limbs and impart some measure of direction to their actions.”

“That almost sounds like demonic possession you’re talking about, old man,” Mildred said.

Doc frowned at her, seeming to chew over the concept mentally rather than take offense.

“Aside from arising from an agency not strictly supernatural,” he said slowly, “how is this possession not aptly described as demonic?”

“So why does shooting their heads chill them?” J.B. asked.

“Obviously, the organisms, or whatever they are, require their victims’ bodies to sustain and reproduce themselves. Like disease germs. Perhaps they also make use of the human nervous system to control their stolen bodies.”

“Ugh.” Krysty shivered.

“Drive us,” Jak said. “Like bus.”

J.B. turned to him, his eyes squinted behind the round lenses of his glasses. “That’s cold-blooded even for you, Jak.”

The albino teen just shrugged.

“If the pathogens are nanoscale robots,” Mildred said, “that might explain why the, uh, the change is infectious.”

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Ryan said. “Or mebbe I should say, something else I don’t understand. From what that skinny kid told us back in the ’serai, it took his friend hours to ‘change’ after he got bitten. But Plunkett’s gaudy sluts were already rotties when he came screaming down the stairs, when I went in to get him. They couldn’t have been bitten more than a few minutes before.”

“That reinforces the idea the change works like a sickness,” Krysty said.

“How would that happen?” Ryan asked.

“Different people show different reactions to disease,” Mildred said. “Some die quickly, some just get sick. Some are even immune.”

Ryan felt his lips peel back from his teeth, which instantly sent spikes of pain up the bones of his face from the cold.

“So they’re plaguers?” he said.

Mildred nodded.

“All right,” he said. “So we know blowing their brains out drops them. So does cutting the spinal cord, at least in the neck. Shooting them anywhere else is pretty much a waste, unless it gets them to back off long enough to get in a head shot. Or bash their skulls in.”

“Cutting off their arms and legs should do it, too,” Mildred said. “Eliminate them as threats, anyway.”

“Long as you’re careful not to get close enough they can bite you,” Dix said.

“Always the charmer, John,” Mildred said. He flashed her a grin.

For a while they squatted, or in Ryan’s case stood, in silence, listening to the wind boom and sigh across the plains.

“I feel kinda bad we lost the body we were supposed to be guarding,” Mildred said. “Plunkett did pay us up front to protect him and his people.”

“It happens,” Ryan said. “Not even the first time it happened to us.”

“We could never be accused of failing to do everything within our power to carry out our charge,” Doc said. “These were circumstances as unforeseeable as they were beyond our control.”

“Boss Plunkett,” Jak said. He spit, carefully aiming downwind of himself and his companions. “Was dick.”

Mildred shrugged. “And there you have it.”

J.B. rubbed the stubble on his chin. “So what now, Ryan?”

“Continue on to Sweetwater Junction, I reckon. We got some jack and supplies from Plunkett up front, but we burned a triple-lot of ammo getting away. Mebbe we can buy more there.”

“And water,” J.B. said. “That ammo will command some serious jack, though.”

“Right.” Though it lay in the midst of some of the worst, most desolate Deathlands, the ville of Sweetwater Junction was relatively large and prosperous, owing to its location on a trade crossroad, as well as the aquifer that gave it its name. “Our canteens’ll be dry as neutron bones by the time we get there. Mebbe we can even find work for a while, stock up.”




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