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Chapter Three (#u3fb4997f-da76-54ca-9f4f-de64b5338251)
Chapter Four (#ud1695b37-22c9-50e0-9132-c8bd95f11dac)
Chapter Five (#u2fd63b62-2dcb-5ece-aced-33e95a6b44c4)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
On through the night they rode, seven people on six horses, the unshod hooves of the animals pounding against the hard-packed sand of the desert.
Streaks of light were starting to brighten the overcast sky as dawn slowly came to the Deathlands. Thunder rumbled in the distance, lightning flashing bright as a gigavolt of electricity slashed into the planet like fire trying to cauterize an open wound.
Suddenly, a ravine yawned wide in the ground before the companions, the edges sparkling with a residue of salt that infused the entire landscape from the crashing ocean tidal wave caused by the nukecaust so very long ago. Digging in their heels, the companions urged the animals to go faster and jumped the pit, landing hard. The horse with two riders went to its knees for a moment, then, struggling erect once more, it continued after the others.
The seven friends were red-eyed and hunched over, exhausted from the race for survival. The bridles of the horses were sopping wet with saliva and flecked with foam. The humans and horses were all drenched in sweat, the chill of the night slowly passing as the fiery sun exploded over the horizon, bathing the world in its fire.
Moving to the steady motion of the powerful stallion he rode, Ryan Cawdor fought his exhaustion and tried to stay in control of the beast. Tiny particles of sand and salt hit his scarred face like invisible sleet, getting underneath the leather patch that covered the ravaged hole of his left eye. His clothes were stiff with dried sweat and caked with blood, thankfully none of it his. Escaping from Rockpoint had been a nightmare of snipers on the walls and savage cougars running wild in the streets. The weapons he had stolen from the local baron’s secret arsenal were long gone, and now Ryan carried only his personal blasters, a 9 mm SIG-Sauer at his hip, and a bolt-action Steyr SSG-70 longblaster strapped across his back. The blasters had been with him a long time, and in his expert hands usually proved more than deadly enough for anything the Deathlands could throw his way. Not everything, but most.
Following a swell in the sandy ground, the group of people slowed as the horses galloped up the sloping side of a large sand dune. As the panting animals crested the top, Ryan saw that the dune stretched hundreds of feet and offered the friends a good panoramic view of the desert in every direction. Perfect. If that damn APC came their way again, its headlights would give away its approach in plenty of time for them to ride off again.
“Give them a rest!” Ryan shouted, his voice a throaty growl from thirst and exhaustion. “We stop for five!”
Pulling back on the reins, the companions allowed their mounts to slow to a canter, then walked them to an easy stop. As the dawn steadily grew brighter in the east, the others could now see that the dune was covered with green plants of some kind. Hungrily, the horses sniffed at the vegetation, then snorted and turned away in disgust. The reek of salt from the mutant weeds was strong enough for the humans to detect. The plants were as inedible as the sand itself.
Sliding off the rear of the mount he shared with a boy, J. B. Dix stretched a few times to work the kinks out of his sore muscles. Dark night, he thought, it had been a mighty cramped ride sharing the horse, and more than once he’d been sure he’d lose his grip on the saddle and go flying off.
Short and wiry, John Barrymore Dix was dressed in a loose shirt and trousers, a leather pilot’s jacket and fingerless gloves. An Uzi machine pistol hung across his chest, and an S&W M-4000 shotgun was slung over his back.
“Just in case I forgot to say it before,” J.B. said, offering a hand to the boy, “thanks for saving my ass back there.”
Still on the horse, Dean Cawdor stopped massaging the neck of the big Appaloosa stallion and looked down at the adult. Appearing many years older than his real age of twelve, Dean had a bloody streak across his face where some hot lead from a sec man’s blaster had just grazed his cheek during the escape. The son of Ryan, the youth was growing rapidly, and there was little doubt that he would be even taller than his father some day.
A veteran of a hundred battles, Dean had a Browning Hi-Power pistol holstered on his hip, and a homemade crossbow and quiver hung across his chest. The bulky weapons had been in the way a lot during the ride, but he needed the room behind to fit J.B. on the horse.
Reaching down, Dean took the offered hand and the two shook before breaking into weary smiles.
“No problem,” the boy replied.
J.B. released his grip and turned to walk to the edge of the dune. Tilting his fedora to block the wash of growing sunlight, the man studied the sprawling landscape to the north, then reached into the canvas bag hanging at his side, rummaging through the fuses and black powder bombs to unearth a brass cylinder about the size and shape of a soup can. With an expert snap, he extended the antique telescope to its full length and swept the distant horizon to the north.
“Looks clear,” J.B. announced, adjusting the focal length of the scope. “I think we lost them.”
“Thank Gaia for that,” Krysty Wroth exhaled, reaching into the backpack tied just behind her saddle. The rawhide lashings were loose from the wild ride, but the pack of food and ammo was thankfully still there.
Sticking up from the gun boot attached to the saddle was the stock of a recently acquired longblaster called a Holland & Holland .475 Nitro Express. It was the biggest weapon the woman had ever seen, and firing it almost wrenched her arm from the socket. But the big-bore rounds did a hell of a lot worse to the sec men they hit, blowing one man clean out of his saddle and beheading another. She was down to only a few more rounds for the monster, after which it would become a liability and not an asset.
Tall and full breasted, with an explosion of fiery red hair and emerald-green eyes, Krysty more looked like a baron’s plaything than a tough survivor, and many fools had died learning the truth of the matter.
“No more than one drink apiece,” a stocky black woman directed, pouring some water from her own canteen into a cupped hand and offering it to her panting horse. “We need to conserve until we reach fresh water again.”
Eagerly, the animal lapped at the fluid, its rough tongue seeking every drop. Dr. Mildred Wyeth was in a red flannel shirt and U.S. Army fatigue pants, her ebony hair fashioned into beaded plaits. A patched satchel hung from her shoulder, and the checkered grip of a Czech ZKR target pistol poked out of her shirt where she had tucked the weapon away for safekeeping. Mildred had almost lost the blaster twice from the rough ride over the irregular salt flats, and had no intention of challenging fate a third time.
Although she rarely spoke of the matter, Mildred considered her personal portion of luck long gone. Back in the twentieth century, she had gone into the hospital for a routine operation on a cyst, but there had been complications and they froze her to save her life. Ryan freed her from cryogenic suspension a hundred years later, a stranger in a new and desperate land.
“We’ll find water,” Krysty said, pulling out a canteen from her backpack. “That pipe under the temple had to come from somewhere. And the Grandee River isn’t that far.”
Then she paused for a moment until the throbbing in her temples subsided. Her hair had been cut by an arrow in the fight at the ville, and the pain still lingered. As she stroked the filaments, they coiled tighter, almost protectively about her hand, and as the dull agony eased somewhat the animated hair relaxed once more into a crimson cascade about her shoulders.
Taking a very small sip from the canteen, Krysty carefully washed out her mouth before taking a long drink. Born and raised in Colorado, she had learned early in life to always cut the dust from your mouth before drinking, or else you remained thirsty and wasted precious water taking a second, unnecessary drink.
Finally lowering the canteen, Krysty wiping her mouth dry on the sleeve of her bearskin coat, and tightly screwed the cap back onto the container. Waste not, die not, as her mother always used to say. Tucking the battered tin canteen safely away, Krysty then fingered her S&W Model 640 revolver to make sure it was still with her after the wild ride. Then kneeling, the redhead checked the knife tucked into one of her cowboy boots.
“Best not ride for a while,” Jak Lauren stated. “Horses rest or die.”
“That’s why I stopped here,” Ryan said, brushing back his wild crop of hair with stiff fingers. Sleep tugged at his eyes like deadweights, and he jerked his head to try to stay awake. This wasn’t the time or place to catch some sleep. Soon, though, they’d find someplace to make camp, and he’d get some rest then.
Grunting in acknowledgment, Jak awkwardly easing himself off the roan mare with his good arm, the other tucked inside his shirt stained dark with blood. He had caught some flying lead in the fight to get out of Rockpoint, but there had been no spurting of blood to show a major artery had been hit. It was only a flesh wound, the small-caliber round having gone clean through his arm without even hitting the bone. Soon it would be just another scar on the albino teen’s body, lost amid the dozens of others.
“My dear Ryan, are you quite all right?” a silver-haired man asked, sitting easily in his saddle as if born there.
Dressed in a frock coat and frilly white shirt with an ebony walking stick thrust through his belt like a sword, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner seemed to be a refugee from the nineteenth century. A WWI web belt encircled his waist, the closed pouches bulging with ammo for the colossal handcannon resting on his hip. The large blaster was a Civil War–era LeMat revolver, a 9-shot .44 that used black powder. Though Doc looked deceptively old, he could wield the LeMat with authority.
Fighting back a yawn, Ryan scowled at the other man, then shrugged. “I could use some coffee,” he admitted in frank honesty. “Got an MRE?”
Doc nodded in understanding. MRE stood for Meal Ready to Eat, and the pack included a main course, snack, gum, cigarettes, candy bar, dessert, coffee, sugar, moist towelette and even toilet tissue for afterward. The companions found the MRE packs regularly in the redoubts, often with the protective Mylar wrapper ripped open, the food inside dried and useless. But they had a few of the precious rations saved away for when they couldn’t hunt for meat or trade for food at a ville.
Against his will, Doc had been an experimental test subject for Operation Chronos, the use of the mat-trans units for time travel. He had been abducted from his quiet university home in Vermont in the late 1880s and thrown rudely into the nuclear wastelands of the Deathlands. For a very long time his mind had been shattered by the event, memories lost and reason gone. But the episodes of madness were less and less frequent these days, which the scholar took to mean that he was slowly becoming adjusted to the present. He found this oddly disturbing. Doc was still grimly determined to find a way to go back in time to his beloved wife, Emily, and his children. They were long dead and buried, in the present, but still alive and well in the past. Someday, somehow, Doc would return to them, and God help anybody who got in his way.
“Indeed I do,” Doc replied, and slid off his mount to rummage in his backpack until he found a foil-wrapped package and tossed it over. “What’s mine is yours, my dear Ryan.”
“Nuke me, but coffee sounds like the best idea I’ve heard in years,” J.B. said, compacting the scope to tuck it back into the canvas bag, nestled between a thick coil of homemade fuse and several jars of grainy black powder.
“Has to be cold,” Ryan said, fumbling with the envelope from the MRE pack. “Still too dark for a fire. Up here, we’d be seen for miles. Might as well shoot off a bastard flare.”
“They go sleep?” Jak asked.
“Makes sense that they’d sleep during the day,” Dean stated, breaking in two a granola bar from another MRE pack and eating one part while giving the other to his horse. “Sunlight on APC, be acing hot by noon.”
The huge animal gobbled down the tiny morsel in less than a second and impatiently shifted its hooves, hoping for more. The others whinnied and nickered for food, hungrily glancing at the weeds again.
“Lethally hot, you mean,” J.B. corrected, straightening his fedora. “I remember traveling with the Trader, we would sometimes find deaders sitting behind the controls of an armored wag, the stink of roasting flesh filling the air inside.”
“How delightful,” Doc said with a frown, revolving the cylinder of his LeMat to inspect the load in each chamber. “Thus the only question is who is in the infernal contraption chasing us, Gaza, or Hawk.”
As carefully as mixing explosives, Ryan poured the hundred-year-old coffee crystals into his partially filled canteen, then screwed the cap on tight and sloshed it about for a minute before taking a sip. It was cold and strong, but he could feel the caffeine wash away the fog from his mind, and after another swallow, Ryan passed the container around to the rest of the companions. Each took a measured swig, and the canteen was passed around twice before it was drained.
“Needed that,” Jak said, shifting his wounded arm inside his shirt, the dried blood making the material as stiff as old canvas.
“I really should look at that wound before it becomes infected,” Mildred said, opening the flap on her satchel and going to the teen.
“No time,” J.B. replied, gazing toward the eastern horizon. “We got to keep going. Too damn visible on top of this dune.”
The pinkish glow of true dawn was expanding across the sky. Soon, night would be over and the heat would really start to increase.
Wiping the crumbs of the granola bar off his face, Dean added, “Sunup will bring out the millipedes and scorpions.”
“We water the horses one last time and then ride,” Ryan ordered, a touch of his old strength back in his voice. Fatigue still weighed down his bones, but he felt good for another couple of miles. More than enough for them to find some shelter from the heat and the bugs. There were supposed to be some ruins to the southwest of there—those would do fine, if they weren’t too far away.
There was hard wisdom in his words, so the weary companions saw to the needs of their mounts with what supplies could be spared. Draining off the last of her canteen, Krysty refilled it from the big leather bag she had grabbed in the corral when they stole the horses. Cupping a hand, she pooled some water in the palm and offered it to the chestnut mare. Eagerly, the horse lapped it off her skin and nudged her for some more. But as she refilled her hand, the animal sharply inhaled, then trembled all over. As the horse suddenly fought for breath, blood began to trickle from its mouth, its eyes rolling upward until only the whites showed.
“Gaia!” Krysty cried in horror, dropping the canteen.
Weaving about as if drunk, the animal unexpectedly dropped limply to the ground and went into violent convulsions before going very still.
“It’s dead,” the woman said softly, then jerked her head to stare at her wet palm as a horrible realization filled her with gut-wrenching dread.
Chapter Two
Rumbling and clanking, the battered APC rolled along the irregular landscape of the Texas desert, its cracked headlights throwing wild columns of splayed light ahead of the war wag as it rose and fell.
Crouched in the driver’s chair, Baron Edgar Gaza stared hatefully through the small rectangular slit of an ob port, his hands clenched hard on the steering yoke of the preDark vehicle. Once there had been periscopes for the driver and gunner to see through without exposing themselves to enemy fire, but those had been broken long ago, and now the only way to see was through small rectangular vents.
In the rear of the war wag, four of his wives were sitting near the gun ports, their pale hands expertly cradling 9 mm Uzi machine pistols. Spare clips were thrust like knives into their belts, and each bore fresh wounds from their recent battles, bloody bandages covering their legs and arms.
Sitting in the middle of the deck, his first wife was clumsily working on a .50-caliber machine gun, trying to figure out how to unlink the ammo belt to make the big-bore blaster feed properly. The turret and gunner’s nest rose directly behind the woman, but those periscopes had also been smashed. The 25 mm cannon had survived intact but had been removed for use in the ville keep, and now they only had a .50-caliber machine gun to mount on the pintel stanchion. It didn’t have the sheer destructive power of the explosive 25 mm shells. On the other hand, it didn’t eat ammo as fast and the brass cartridges could be reloaded.
Gaza glanced at her, more pleased with the amount accomplished than the wealth of skin exposed from her position. Bending over the way she was, her full breasts were nearly coming out her blouse, the dark nipples clearly visible. Returning to the driving, Gaza felt vastly pleased with himself for choosing Allison. Sex was great, but a wife who could fire a blaster was worth a hundred times more than some dumb slut as beautiful as the moon but whose only talent was spreading her legs.
Suddenly, Allison snapped her fingers for his attention.
“What is it?” he demanded gruffly.
The mute woman gestured to the east and flipped over a hand until it was palm up.
Gaza frowned angrily. Dawn was near, eh? Nuking hell, they hadn’t traveled anywhere near the number of miles he had wanted. But the APC had broken down several times, and once during repairs they had been attacked by a swarm of millipedes. Damn mutie insects were harder than hell to chill, and only their rapid-fires had held them off long enough for Gaza to fix the diesel engine and get the APC rolling again. Little bastards still tried to get in through the air vents and had to be shot off with precious ammo. Damn the Core and their pet muties!
“Okay, I’ll find us some shade to rest in during the day,” the baron said, squinting through the ob port. “In the lee of a sand dune, or something.”
From experience he knew that driving the metal vehicle in the desert sun made it hot enough to ace a norm. They would have to drive only after sundown, and sleep during the day. That would put them at a disadvantage, since the headlights would give away their position for miles, but there was nothing he could do about that.
On the other hand, it would make tracking the outlanders a lot easier. His original idea had been to drive north into New Mex and take over some ville as their new baron. But Allison had vetoed that plan and insisted they go to the south, directly on the trail of Ryan and the others. Actually, this pleased Gaza greatly. As much as he wanted to be a baron again, revenge on the outlanders would be even better. Besides, the man knew it was always wise to follow the advice of the doomie.
Soon enough he would find the outlanders. Gaza only hoped that Allison had the machine gun operational by then. He didn’t want Ryan and the others merely dead; he wanted them torn into pieces too small for even the scorpions to eat. Mutilation, rape and bloody torture would have been better, but there was no time for that. Even as he hunted for the people on horseback, the sec men from his former ville might be hunting after him, as well. And they would want to do to Gaza exactly what he wanted to do to Ryan. However, his wives would never allow that to happen.
As if sensing these thoughts, Allison turned away from the gun port she had been watching and nodded at her husband. Gaza felt his skin crawl slightly at the idea that the mutie could be reading his thoughts, and turned to concentrate on the driving. The removal of their tongues had been done simply to protect his secrets, yet it also made each of his wives oddly loyal to him, as faithful as dogs, and he trusted their judgment implicitly.
Spewing great columns of bluish smoke, the APC angled away from the salt flats and into the rolling dunes seeking shelter from the oncoming daylight. Soon enough Gaza would find the others. Horses had to rest, but the APC could drive nonstop all night long. There was no possible escape for the outlanders from his war wag, the deadly machine gun and his doomie wife.
By tomorrow midnight, they should be dead at his feet, and then he could get back to his plan of seizing another ville to rule and continuing his war against the Trader.
AS THE REST of the companions rushed to her side, Krysty bent to sniff at her hand. There was no odor of any kind, but there could be no other logical reason for the horse’s violent death except poison.
“What in hell happened?” Mildred demanded, approaching the corpse with a drawn blaster. If the physician had learned anything living in the Deathlands, it was to approach every situation as if it was a life-or-death battle. All too often it was.
Ryan covered the animal with his 9 mm SIG-Sauer, while J.B. knelt by the animal and checked its neck. There was no pulse.
“It’s dead,” he stated, standing. “But this doesn’t look like exhaustion, and it’s not hot enough for heat stroke.”
Dean glanced upward. “Screamwing get it?”
Instantly, the other companions raised their blasters and scanned the lightening sky for any movement. Screamwings were tiny flying muties that could send a person on the last train west in a split second with their needle-sharp beaks. Small and fast, screamwings were harder than hell to shoot down and died trying to take its victim with them.
“No, it wasn’t a screamer,” Krysty stated, throwing away her canteen. “I think the water is poisoned.”
