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Jak Lauren, the third member of the group and a unique presence in any environment, sniffed the air as he crept from the mat-trans chamber.
“Smell wrong,” Jak said, shaking his head.
A few inches over five feet tall, Jak was a slim man with the physique of an adolescent.. He was an albino, with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair, and eyes the color of blood. He moved fluidly like a stalking cat, his .357 Magnum Colt Python blaster raised and ready in his hands. Jak was a master of the blade, and had several throwing knives secreted about his clothing.
Behind Jak, the remaining members of Ryan’s team were passing through the chamber doorway and anteroom, then into the redoubt’s control room.
First came Krysty Wroth, a tall, curvaceous woman of stunning beauty whose vivid emerald eyes were mesmerizing. But it was always her long, bright red hair that people noticed first because it seemed to be almost alive. In fact, Krysty’s hair was very much alive—she was a mutie, and her hair responded to her circumstances and moods, twisting or uncurling depending on her state of mind.
“It smells okay to me,” Krysty said with a smile.
The next member of the group laughed at Krysty’s comment. “Jak always thinks something’s wrong,” he said. He was a handsome youth named Ricky Morales, sixteen years old with shiny black hair and dark brown eyes. He held his Webley Mk VI revolver so casually in one hand that it gave the impression that he had been carrying the weapon since birth. Ricky hailed from a small seaport on an island once known as Puerto Rico but was now called Monster Island. An even-tempered youth with a happy-go-lucky attitude, Ricky had traveled with the companions only a short time, but he fit in well. He looked up to Ryan and the others, especially J.B., who reminded him of his uncle, Benito, who had been a weaponsmith too.
Striding behind Ricky, Doc Tanner thrust his ebony sword stick in front of his younger companion to draw his attention. Doc was dressed in a long black frock coat with a dirt-stained white shirt and dark pants beneath. “Watch your tongue, lad,” Doc said. “Jak hass never steered us wrong.”
Ricky began to argue but stopped himself. Doc was right, he knew. These people had worked together without him for a long time, and the fact that they had survived all that time was a testament to their effectiveness as a unit. Gently mocking Jak’s pessimism was one thing; questioning the albino was quite something else.
“Sorry,” Ricky said, turning his head from Doc to Jak. “I was just kidding around.”
“No harm done,” Doc said, lowering his sword stick. He was a tall man, almost scarecrowlike in appearance, with long silver-white hair. Doc looked old but that appearance belied a far more complicated life story. A man of great learning, Doc had been born in the year 1868 and for the first thirty-odd years had enjoyed a relatively ordinary life. However, in 1896, Doc had been the unwilling subject of time trawling technology and had found himself scooped out of his own time period and taken to the twentieth century to be studied by the white-coated scientists of Project Chronos.
However, Doc proved a rather less pacific subject than the whitecoats had hoped, and so in a second twist of cruel fate, he had been flung another hundred into the future, into the Deathlands. The shock of such time travel had left Doc artificially aged, so while his features and body were that of a man of some sixty or more years, his mind still clung to the memory of being far younger. To further compound his difficulties, the time journeys had left Doc’s mind addled, and while he suffered fewer bouts of madness these days, his early days with Ryan’s crew had been marred by heightened stress levels, panic attacks and the general sense of not really knowing who or where he was.
Despite all that, Doc was a valuable asset to the group, not only for his knowledge of the predark world, but also on the far more practical level of his ability with a blaster. Doc’s weapon of choice was a replica LeMat pistol.
The final member of the group was a stocky, African-American woman named Mildred Wyeth, who, like Doc, was born in another era, but who had traveled through time in a rather more conventional manner. She had been born in 1964, and eventually became a physician, specializing in cryogenic research.
While in her mid-thirties, Mildred suffered complications during abdominal surgery. In an attempt to save her life, the decision had been made to cryogenically preserve her—just a few days before the nuclear conflict erupted. She had been freed from her frozen capsule by Ryan’s crew. She had remained with them ever since, forming a romantic bond with J.B. and providing the ongoing field medicine necessary to the group.
“Don’t tease the kid, Doc,” Mildred warned, an undercurrent to her tone. She liked Ricky—in some ways he reminded her of her brother, Josh, when he had been that age.
“I am not teasing,” Doc replied. “I am just setting the lad straight lest he ignore the warnings of his elders.”
Mildred shook her head. “‘Elders.’ I never did like that term.”
Mildred and Doc’s bickering was a constant, but it was good-natured. On this occasion, Doc let the point go—they needed to be alert right now, ready at the drop of a hat to face potential dangers in this new environment.
The companions made their way through the knee-deep foliage that had all but overtaken the interior of the control room.
It was unusual to see a redoubt this close to the surface. Most of them were located deep underground, and all had been designed to repel direct bombardment by weaponry up to and including a nuclear bomb. Whether they could survive a nuke was not certain, but anything short of that would struggle to make a dent. However, what the redoubts had not been built to withstand were the vast tectonic and environmental shifts that had racked the Earth since the nukecaust. What weapons had failed to do, Mother Nature had done with aplomb, mashing the plates of the earth together beneath the redoubt and opening up a great fissure in the foundations. It was this shift that had caused chunks of the redoubt to break open, creating the vast hole in the redoubt’s ceiling.
Doc followed the group past the channel of pouring rain, passing his sword stick through it and taking a moment to examine the results. The sword stick was jet-black with a silver lion’s head handle. Few knew that a sword was hidden within the walking cane.
The rain clung to the sword stick, glistening there with a wisp of vapor. “The lad is correct,” Doc agreed as he sniffed at the rain. “There is a definite tang to this downpour. We must be careful.”
“We always are,” Ryan responded, pushing his way through the room to a sliding door of vanadium steel that would grant them access to the corridor outside. A keypad, stained brown where its metal casing had rusted, was located beside the door set in the concrete wall to the right. Ryan punched in the usual 3-5-2 code which would open the door. He detected a hiss coming from his left, but the metal door refused to move aside.
Standing at Ryan’s side, J.B. eyed the door and sucked thoughtfully at his teeth.
“Jammed tight,” Ryan confirmed. While doors, like the lighting in the redoubt, would have been automatically reengaged with the activation of the mat-trans the dense vegetation or the humidity had obviously infiltrated and corrupted the mechanics.
“Want me to blast it open?” J.B. asked. The Armorer was adept with explosives as well as firearms—it would be little effort for him to obliterate the door.
“No,” Ryan said after a few seconds’ consideration. “We’ll go up instead,” he said, indicating the hole in the ceiling. “It’s the path of least resistance.”
J.B. nodded, and the two men joined the other companions in contemplating the easiest route to the opening above them.
“Jak? Do you reckon you can get up there and drop a line to us?”
Jak grinned, looking somehow sinister in the ghostly light that ebbed through the gap above, and holstered his blaster.
“Just watch out for the acid rain. If it gets worse, you could get burned,” J.B. reminded as Jak scrambled up the sturdy-looking trunk of a creeper and worked his way farther into the canopy.
In a few seconds, Jak was balancing upright as he made his way along a length of thick branch to the hole above. The albino was catlike in his movements, displaying a sense of balance that bordered on superhuman. As he reached the gap in the roof, Jak shrugged the sleeves of his jacket down his arms, using them to cover his hands as much as he could. The mild acid rain wouldn’t chill him, but it would eat away at his skin if it the acid content became stronger. Once the companions were outside, they would have to rig some kind of temporary canopy or umbrella-type system to keep the worst of the downpour off until it abated.
Jak reached up and slipped through the hole in the roof and onto the ground outside the redoubt. Grayish sunlight pushed through the cloud cover from the masked white orb that sat low on the horizon.
Jak looked around, scenting the air. He was in a forest with plants of the tropical variety, lush and green, slick with droplets of rainwater on their waxy leaves. The mild acid rain seemed not to bother them in any way. The ground was soft, sodden with water. The area smelled of soil mingled with the acidic tang of the polluted rainwater.
As Jak looked around, Ryan’s voice echoed from twenty feet below him. “Everything okay up there, Jak?” Ryan asked.
“Look okay,” Jak called, peering around at the thick foliage. As he did, he spotted a face nearly hidden in the tangled vines and other vegetation. It was a human face, dark-skinned and almost camouflaged amid the lush greenery, the top of the man’s head rose about six feet from the ground. But there was something not quite right about it, Jak felt, even as he took a step closer.
He parted a web of overhanging fronds with his left hand, slipping his Colt Python from its holster at his hip with his right and seeing the man fully for the first time. Only it wasn’t a man—not entirely. Beneath the head was a stub of neck that ended in a pair of lungs, caged not by ribs but by a clawlike arrangement branches that surrounded the spongy sacks as they inflated and deflated. There was no body, only branches of pallid green, as thick as a man’s arm and dotted with spiny thorns their full lengths. Automatically, Jak did a swift count of the spiny-covered branches—eight in all—saw that three of them reached above the head, entwining with the taller cover of the looming trees.
This was new, Jak realized. He had seen muties before; the Deathlands was populated by a variety of abominations. But this thing, part man, part plant—it reminded him of a vine master.
Warily, the albino took another step closer, his eyes fixed on the monstrosity before him. He couldn’t work out if the man was a part of the plant, or if he had been partially consumed by it. His skin was dark with a greenish hue, the veins showing thickly along the forehead and neck like fingers under the skin. His eyes were open but glazed, and Jak realized that he had not yet seen the man blink.
“Jak?” Ryan called from the redoubt. “Everything okay?”
Jak turned his head to call back, and as he did so the mutie plant started to writhe, spiny branches undulating as they rose from the ground.
“Am—” Jak began, then turned back as he spotted the thing reaching for him.
Instinctively, Jak ducked as the plant-man reached for him with a writhing tentacle-like branch. The branch struck Jak across his flank, hitting with such force that he tumbled to the ground. Then the writhing limb was dancing in the air above him like a snake. Jak blinked back his momentarily blurred vision, and he heard a popping noise like cracking ice as a fleet of three-inch-long, spiny thorns launched from the branch toward him, racing through the air like bullets.
Chapter Three
The cloud of thorns hurtled toward Jak. He saw them and rolled, moving faster than he could consciously think, pulling up the collar of his jacket even as the thorns thudded against his back. The garment held, the tough fabric repelling most of the spines, a handful embedding up and down its length. Around him, hunks of trees and bushes were obliterated, cut to ribbons by the deadly onslaught.
Jak scrambled forward like a predark sprinter at the starting blocks, launching from the ground back onto his feet. He sprinted back toward the hole in the ground where the redoubt was located.
Behind Jak, the mutie plant’s limbs flailed through the air, sending a second volley of thorns at his retreating figure. Jak peered back over his shoulder just once, saw the way the plant was moving, long, snakelike roots pulling up from the soil and slivering across the ground, propelling itself after him. Amid the green leaves, the man-face was strained, mouth open, eyes wide, watching Jak angrily as the plant trailed across the ground. Jak whipped up his Colt Python pistol and fired a lone .357 Magnum bullet at the face looming in the heart of the monster. He had turned away by the time the bullet struck, but he heard the swish of leaves tearing as the projectile slapped against the plant’s greenery.
* * *
DOWN BELOW, RYAN and his companions heard the shot and went on high alert.
“Triple red, people,” Ryan ordered, bringing his blaster up to cover the hole in the ceiling through which Jak had exited the redoubt. “We don’t know if that was Jak or someone else—”
“It was Jak,” J.B. confirmed. “Sound of a Colt Python, can’t mistake it.”
“What if someone else has the same weapon, John Barrymore?” Doc asked without looking away from the hole, his LeMat trained on the tiny patch of sky that could be seen through it. “Or what if they took it.”
“Point taken,” J.B. said, “though it’d be a bastard coincidence if it was someone else’s.”
Before the companions could discuss the issue further, Jak leaped through the opening above them, moving with the agility of a monkey. Behind and above Jak, the companions saw the thick, trailing cords of the mutie plant as it reached into the hole. In a second, it launched another wave of razor-sharp thorns—straight into the redoubt.
“Gaia!” Krysty cried as Jak came into sight.
“Get back!” Jak screamed as he dropped through the gap in the ceiling.
His six companions stepped back without question, and the clutch of thorns thudded against leaves and the hard surfaces of the walls and floor, striking with rattling beats. Doc took two on his left sleeve, while three more struck J.B.’s fedora—but none of them penetrated its target.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc gasped, brushing the thorns from his coat before they scratched him.
“What the hell is that?” Ricky hissed, stepping forward and raising his Webley Mk VI to target the shadowy mutie plant as it reached through the hole.
“Get back, kid,” J.B. cautioned, reaching forward and shoving Ricky back. The youth was adventurous and courageous, but he had an impetuous streak that could get them all into trouble, J.B. knew, if he didn’t keep his eyes on him.
Jak stood on a branch twelve feet above the floor of the control room. He leaped, tucking and rolling as he landed amid the dense foliage, his blaster clutched close to his chest.
“Friend of yours?” Krysty asked as Jak recovered at her feet.
“Angry plant,” Jak replied, turning to face the gap in the ceiling.
“So I see,” Krysty stated.
Impossibly, the plant lunged into the redoubt, roots trailing behind it, branches flailing ahead like the limbs of an octopus. With the plant blocking the hole in the roof, the control room became suddenly darker, its details lost in shadow. Whatever the plant was, it had a hunting nature and a rudimentary instinct, chasing after the young man who had disturbed its resting place.
The human face in its center eyed the companions in the semidarkness, eyeballs swiveling. It spotted Mildred with her colourful beaded plaits and sent one of its snakelike limbs toward her. The limb was fifteen feet in length and lined with thorns and budding flowers the color of sour milk.
Mildred stepped back and blasted a shot from her ZKR 551 target pistol, the weapon booming in the underground chamber. The bullet struck the limb, carving a line along its surface before embedding halfway down its length. At the same moment, another cluster of thorns spit from its surface, striking her along the left side of her torso and both legs.
Mildred yelled in pain, dropping to the floor.
The limb flailed toward her face, but Doc stepped in to block it, slicing at it with his sword stick. Then he fired his LeMat directly into the crook of the joint where that limb met the trunk. There was no time to check on Mildred’s condition.
Across the room, J.B. and Ryan were busy fencing with another limb.
“Ugly green son of a bitch,” J.B. snarled as he fired a burst of 9 mm bullets at the flailing limb.
The narrow end of the spiny protrusion whipped around and around like a bolo before grabbing J.B.’s blaster arm and yanking him off his feet.
J.B. yelled in agony as he was lifted from the floor and felt the thorns digging into him. Ryan took careful aim, holding his SIG Sauer in a two-handed grip. The one-eyed man squeezed the trigger, sending a 9 mm slug into the limb that clutched his oldest friend. The Swiss bullet drilled into and through the limb, three inches in diameter, pulling a great gout of green bark and fibrous material with it as it emerged from the other side.
There was a sound like splitting wood and suddenly, the fractured plant limb struggled with J.B.’s weight, swaying to and fro as it tried to hang on to its victim. Still in its grip, J.B. brought around the muzzle of his mini-Uzi until it pointed at the core of the plant, where that human torso rested amid the green. Then he fired, holding down the trigger for a short burst as the limb tossed him left and right. The volley of 9 mm bullets punched into the main stem of the plant in a line of dark circles, moving upward toward the human lungs and face in its center. As the bullets reached for the man within, other parts of the plant seemed to lunge forward—thick, waxy leaves swishing across the path of the bullets like a gaudy slut doing an old-style fan dance, each fan shuttering into place.
“The man’s the driver,” J.B. hollered as he swayed six feet off the ground, still snagged in the plant’s grip. “Chill him and we might get out of here with our asses inta—”
J.B.’s statement was cut short as he was slammed headfirst into a wall by the flailing limb, the brim of his fedora snapping back, his throat issuing a croak of pain.
Ryan took another shot, lining up carefully with the figure in the center of the mutie plant. Around him, Ricky, Jak and Krysty were doing the same while Doc thrust and parried a lively limb with his sword cane.
Thorns whizzed from the fast-moving limbs, hammering into the walls and striking the companions as they fought.
Ricky held his hand up to shield his eyes as a wave of thorns rattled against him, ripping threads from his clothes and embedding themselves into his flesh.
The mutie plant loomed through the gap in the ceiling, half in and half out of the control room, but it was large enough to crowd the room itself. A tendril lashed toward Ryan as he loosed another shot from the SIG Sauer, whipping him across the face and knocking him back.
“Fireblast!” Ryan yelled as he toppled backward, slamming against the overgrowth, the leaves and ferns forming a soft bed beneath him. He was momentarily disorientated, the hard impact of the floor cushioned only slightly by the springiness of the flattened leaves. Ryan heard a whisper of sound, felt fléchettes of thorns pepper his chest and face, digging in with vicious precision.
Across the room, Jak found himself tangled with one of the vines, one arm and both legs trapped in the whipcordlike tendril as it snaked around him. Jak grunted as the vine pressed against his chest and legs, lifting him up from the floor. His blaster hand was trapped, the Colt Python useless where it was pressed against his right leg as if he had been tied.
Jak struggled as the mutie plant dragged him over the undergrowth.
“Got me!” Jak shouted, trying to alert his companions. But even as he said it he could see that only Krysty and Doc remained standing and they were both busy with their own battles. The plant, it seemed, could multitask, combating multiple foes at once.
Jak was dragged up high into the room, and he dipped his head as the ceiling came racing toward him.
Crash!
Jak found himself slammed against the ceiling, gasping as pain erupted across his back and his right shoulder began to go numb. Then he felt something squeeze against him where the plant held him, like a boa constrictor ensnaring its prey. Jak felt the press of spines against him, pushing through the protective material of his clothes.
He twisted and turned in place, felt the rain patter against his skin as he was dragged through the hole in the roof. His blaster was useless where it was, but his left arm was still free. In a fraction of second, Jak flipped his wrist in a sharp movement and a throwing knife dropped into his hand from his sleeve. As he was drawn toward the human head amid the monstrous plant, Jak thrust the knife forward, stabbing the man’s face right across the jaw. A gout of flesh and sap went sailing into the air, and the man made a kind of ticking noise from somewhere deep in his throat.
“Let. Go. Me,” Jak snarled, forcing out the words as the pressure of the vines increased on his ribs and lungs.
Still inside the room, Krysty heard Jak’s strained words and looked up. She was fencing with another of those tendrillike vines, this one thick as a person’s leg. The tendril kept trying to cinch around Krysty’s feet and she kept dancing out of its way, using the butt of her blaster to rain hammer blows against it rather than waste precious bullets.
At Jak’s call, Krysty leaped over the swinging tendril as it made another pass for her, grabbing an overhanging branch and pulling herself up from the floor. As she clambered up the branch, she called to Doc, who had drawn his sword from its sheath and was hacking at the writhing tendrils of the plant.
“Doc! Jak needs our help!”
Surrounded by a cloud of debris he had hacked from the living plant, Doc looked up, his pale blue eyes sweeping past Krysty’s hurrying figure and up to where Jak was being drawn toward the human face that waited at the plant’s core.
Krysty began to chant quietly, calling on the goddess of the Earth, Gaia, who had gifted the women of Krysty’s family with an incredible power. Krysty felt a surge of strength rush through her, like a jolt of electricity firing through her muscles, igniting every artery, every vein. With the surge of strength came speed and stamina, turning the titian-haired woman superhuman for just a brief period.
With the power channeling through her, Krysty skipped over a grasping tendril as a wave of thorns launched from its surface. The thorns punctured her jeans and she was spattered with sap, but she felt no pain from the impact, merely kept moving through the vegetation toward the squirming thing that loomed above. Her hair seemed to jut around her in lightning bolts now, great slashes of red encircling her face like blood held frozen in the air.
Behind Krysty, Doc raised his LeMat and rested his finger against the secondary trigger, the one that would unleash a blast from the shotgun barrel.
The mutie plant jabbed at Krysty with its tendrils, but she batted them aside, yanking one so hard that it snapped in a shower of gooey yellow sap. Jak was above her now, his feet dangling inches above Krysty’s head.
Without slowing, Krysty leaped, grabbing the thick vine that had wrapped around her pale-skinned partner and pulling herself up. The vine struggled with the weight of two bodies, and as Krysty rocked it the vine sagged toward the floor, depositing Jak there with a thump. The tendril was still wrapped around the albino, thorns digging into his clothes and the flesh beneath. Krysty took a secure hold of the tendril midway between where it held Jak and where it emerged from the stalk. And then she pulled, yanking both sides apart, twisting and ripping until they split, vomiting a splurge of yellow gunk as they tore.
From across the room, Doc’s voice carried with eminent clarity. “Krysty—get down!”
