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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
Slithering through the jungle brush, the huge cobra reared its head and hissed loudly at the sight of the approaching humans.
Both of his hands splayed wide to force a path through the tangled vines, Ryan Cawdor didn’t pause at the sight of the reptile, but instantly stomped down with his combat boot, pinning it. Struggling furiously, the cobra uprooted small plants as the man pulled a panga from its sheath on his belt and sliced downward with all of his strength. The blade neatly severed the head, pale blood spraying from the neck stump as the long body thrashed madly about in the leaves.
But as the snake head hit the ground, its eyes flared wide and the mutie spit out a long stream of greenish fluid. Ryan bent out of the way and the poison hit a tree, the bark turning white almost instantly. Stomping harder on the reptile, the one-eyed warrior felt bones crack, but the creature still struggled to get free. Muttering a curse, Ryan kept his boot in place and drew his 9 mm SIG-Sauer blaster from the holster at his hip. Racking the slide to chamber a round under the hammer, he lifted his boot and fired twice, the soft chugs of the sound-suppressed weapon lost in the rustle of the trees overhead from the ocean breeze. The soft-nosed slugs punched through both of the cobra’s eyes, blowing its head apart, bones and brains splashing across the stubby grass under the papaya plants.
Three feet away, the hanging cluster of flowery vines burst apart and out stepped a short wiry man with a pump-action shotgun in his callused hands. The newcomer was wearing a fedora hat and wire-rimmed glasses. An Uzi machine pistol was slung across a shoulder, and a bulging canvas bag hung at his side. His leather bomber jacket was stained with sweat, and his clothes were discolored with quicksand and dried blood.
“Centipede?” John Barrymore Dix asked, the maw of his S&W M-4000 blaster sweeping the area for possible targets.
“Just a snake this time,” Ryan grunted in reply, stabbing the panga into the moist soil to clean away any possible trace of the venom. “Nothing serious.”
On the ground, the headless body of the mutie reptile still wiggled about as if unwilling to accept its unexpected demise. Ryan kicked it aside.
“Well, anything’s better than those triple-damn leeches,” J.B. said with a scowl, easing his stance.
Holstering his blaster, Ryan grunted in agreement, then ripped a leaf from a breadfruit tree to wipe the soft dirt off the steel before sheathing his blade.
Ryan towered over J.B. Long curly black hair framed a humorless face covered with a network of scars, an old leather patch masking the puckered ruin of his left eye. A 7.62 mm bolt-action Steyr sniper rifle was slung over a powerful shoulder, and a heavy canvas pack rode easily on his back. A coat lined with ratty fur was tied around his waist from the stifling jungle heat, his shirt was unbuttoned halfway, exposing a muscular chest with more knife scars and the dead-white dots of old bullet wounds.
Taking a small drink of water from his canteen, J.B. then offered the container to Ryan, who gratefully took a sip, sloshing the precious fluid about in his mouth before swallowing. Fresh water was merely one of the many things the companions were drastically running low on. This gamble to reach the crashed plane had better payoff, or they might find themselves in chains before Lord Baron Kinnison, a lunatic infamous for giving prisoners his terrible rotting disease before torturing them. That way, even if somebody escaped, he or she still died in screaming torment. It was a serious threat that few dared to risk.
“Which way?” Ryan asked, brushing back his wild crop of hair.
Reaching into a pocket, J.B. checked the compass in his hand and watched until the needle trembled only slightly. “Left.”
Nodding in agreement, Ryan headed in that direction, using his bare hands to push aside the thick vines and broad banana leaves. The weight of the panga was a tempting reminder of how easy it would be to cut a path through the bushes. But that also left behind a trail so clean any feeb could follow. And on this nameless island, being discovered meant death.
Swatting a buzzing skeeter, J.B. let the tall man get a few yards ahead, then followed in his wake, trying to put his boots in the other man’s prints to minimize the trail. Close behind the wiry Armorer came a ragged line of five more people, each moving quietly through the dense foliage: a tall redhead armed with a Smith & Wesson revolver, an albino teenager hobbling along on a homemade crutch, a stocky black woman with beaded hair who was hugging a predark med kit, a young grim-faced boy brandishing a sleek Browning semiautomatic pistol and, lastly, a thin old man with silver hair, sporting a huge revolver and an ebony walking stick with a silver lion’s head on top. The group stayed three yards apart, the old man judiciously scratching the ground in their wake with his ebony stick to rearrange the leaves and try to hide their passage.
Slow miles passed, and Ryan checked with J.B. twice more on their direction as the group penetrated deeper into the heart of the island jungle. Soon the moss-coated trees were growing so close together that walking between the trunks was becoming difficult, and the branches overhead crisscrossed each other, effectively blocking out the sun. Midnight ruled the forest, but the travelers dared not light their sole oil lantern. The fish oil smelled awful, and they were much too close to the enemy ville of Cascade. The slightest mistake now, and it was all over.
Finally, Ryan reached a grove of massive banyan trees, the hanging vines so thick with leaves and orchids that the group could see nothing in the branches above. The only illumination came from a peppering of sunlight streaming in through a hundred tiny breaks in the foliage. It was like a rain of sunbeams.
As his vision adjusted to the dim lighting, Ryan gestured at J.B. The short man checked his compass, counting to twenty until he saw the needle quiver again, but it no longer seemed to be pulling to the left or right.
“This looks like the spot,” the Armorer stated, tucking the predark device into his munitions bag. “We must be right underneath the plane.”
“Can’t tell a thing from down here,” Ryan stated, studying the overhang of leaves and flowers. “We need Mildred’s flashlight. I’ll call in the others.”
Stepping backward, J.B. put his back to a tree and leveled the shotgun. “Got you covered,” he said, snicking off the safety.
Cupping both hands around his mouth, the man trilled a soft whistle three times. The signal was repeated so low Ryan almost couldn’t hear it, but he answered with one short whistle. A few moments later, familiar faces started easing from the bushes on every side with loaded weapons in their hands.
“Hey, lover,” Krysty Wroth whispered, her animated red hair splaying outward in anxiety. To those who knew the woman well, the movements of her hair betrayed her every emotion.
The tall woman was wearing a khaki jumpsuit with the front partly unzipped to expose a wealth of tan cleavage. Instead of combat boots, Krysty wore blue cowboy boots with steel-tipped toes and a spread-wing-falcon design emblazoned on the sides. Her bearskin coat was tied around her hips to keep the garment out of the way. An old police gun belt with ammo loops circled her shapely hips to support the open holster for the S&W .38 revolver. A sloshing canteen and U.S. Ranger knife were clipped to her regular belt, a bulky backpack riding high on her firm shoulders.
Glancing at Krysty for a moment, Ryan once again realized just how truly beautiful she was. Sometimes it was as if he were seeing her for the first time: the high cheekbones, emerald-green eyes and animated red hair that flowed past her shoulders. Krysty was the most beautiful woman Ryan had ever seen.
Ryan felt the usual rush of blood to his loins and forced his attention back to counting the shadows emerging from the jungle. He had to make sure it was just his crew, and that nobody was trying to sneak among them under cover of the shadows. When he was satisfied there was nobody else in the small clearing but the companions, he reached out and gave Krysty’s slim hand a brief squeeze. She squeezed back with surprising strength almost equal to his own.
“Any trouble?” Ryan asked. He knew Krysty had some mutie blood, which gave her an ability to sense danger. More than once, it had saved their lives.
Leaning against a banyan tree, the woman breathed in the strange perfumes of the exotic flowers. “All clear,” Krysty answered. “Not a sound of folks for miles.”
For the first time in a day, the Deathlands warrior allowed himself to relax the tiniest bit. “Good. You’re on guard. Let me know if anything starts coming our way.”
Stepping away from the tree, Krysty nodded.
“So this is the location of our aerial El Dorado, eh?” Dr. Theophilus Tanner rumbled in a deep voice. The silver-haired man placed his walking stick on a tree root so it wouldn’t sink into the soft earth, and leaned heavily on its lion head ferrule. “Well, we are indeed pilgrims in the valley of the shadows. Most appropriate.”
Although only thirty-eight years old, Doc appeared to be more than sixty, with his heavily lined face and a wild shock of silvery hair. The alteration of his features was merely one of the side effects Doc had suffered at the hands of the ruthless scientists from Operation Chronos.
Ripped from the bosom of his family in the late 1880s, Doc was trawled forward in time to the late 1990s as a test subject. However, Doc proved to be an unruly and uncooperative specimen and was sent forward in time to what had become the Deathlands. Unfortunately, the trawling scrambled some portions of his mind, and Doc sometimes drifted away, reliving prior events or just dreaming aloud while wide-awake. But in a fight, the gentle scholar from Vermont became a deadly fighter and was a valuable member of the group.
Refusing to relinquish any hold on his past, Doc wore clothes of his day, including pin-striped pants and matching vest, a frilly white shirt with a string bow tie and a long frock coat, now with several bullet holes in the twilled fabric. A U.S. Army backpack was carried effortlessly on his shoulders, and around his waist was a cracked leather belt lined with ammo pouches for his gigantic .44 Civil War blaster.
“Pipe down, you old coot,” Mildred Wyeth muttered, using handfuls of grass to try to wipe the residue of quicksand from her clothes. Once it dried, the stuff came off easily. It was only the high viscosity and depth that made the bog dangerous.
Short and stocky, the physician wore loose Air Force fatigues, with a Czech-made ZKR target pistol holstered on her left side for the cross draw she favored. Before skydark Mildred had gone into a hospital for a simple operation, but there had been complications, and a hundred years later she awoke in a cryogenic freezer, a new Gulliver trapped in a frightening world forged from atomic nightmares.
“Might as well set off a gren if you’re going to talk that loud,” Mildred stated, tossing away the filthy grass.
“My humble apologies,” Doc muttered in a wry apology, then continued in the same volume.
“So where is our arboreal harbor located, John Barrymore?”
“Straight up,” J.B. said, jerking a thumb at the impenetrable ceiling of the jungle. “From here, we climb.”
“Indeed,” Doc said, studying the dense weaving of vines and creepers. “How antediluvian for us.”
Standing her post, Krysty ignored the conversation, forcing herself to listen to the distant sounds of the forest, the chattering of a distant monkey, a flowing stream, birds in flight and the constant hum of the insects all around them. There were a lot of bugs in this jungle.
“I’ll take the lead and cut us a path,” Ryan stated, tightening the straps on his backpack. “Just remember to put any loose branches or leaves in your pockets. Don’t let anything fall to the ground and mark the spot.”
“Easy,” Jak Lauren grunted, wincing slightly as he accidentally put some weight on his sprained ankle.
The bus crash at the quagmire had almost chilled the lot of them, and it was just chance that a barrel of shine had fallen on his leg. Thankfully, it was empty and he only received a sprain, not a break. Mildred was a good doctor, but there wasn’t really much a person could do for a broken leg.
A true albino, Jak wore his snowy hair long, and often leaned forward so it fell across his scarred face to mask his pale red eyes from enemies and preventing them from detecting which way he was going to charge. Deception was the Cajun’s favorite weapon.
In spite of the humidity and heat, Jak was still wearing his camouflage jacket, the lapels and collar decorated with bits of razors, special hidden surprises for anybody foolish enough to grab him by the jacket. At least a dozen leaf-bladed throwing knives were hidden on his person, and a big .357 Magnum Colt Python pistol was tucked into his belt.
“How are you doing?” Mildred asked, coming closer. “Feeling okay?”
In the gloom, Jak scowled. “Fine,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “Nothing but pain.”
“Crap,” Mildred replied, and rummaged about in her med kit until unearthing a plastic film container. Snapping the top, she poured out three aspirins and gave the teenager two.
“Take them,” the physician ordered in a no-nonsense tone of voice. “If we’re going to be climbing trees, you’ll need these.”
Although hating to ever appear weak, Jak was no stupe and took the pills with a swig from his canteen. “Thanks,” he said, wiping his mouth on a sleeve.
“No problem,” Mildred replied, tucking away her meager medical supplies.
Boots softly crunching on the carpeting of leaves as he walked through the crowd of adults, a boy strode to the biggest banyan tree and briefly inspected the trunk. The branches were low and thick, vines everywhere for easy climbing. To anybody but the wounded, it was an easy climb.
“Want me to do a recce?” Dean Cawdor asked, holstering his blaster to free both hands.
Almost twelve years old, Dean was already the spitting image of his father.
“I’ll go this time,” Ryan stated, and reached up to grab a branch.
Suddenly, Krysty snapped her head to the left and raised a clenched fist. Instantly, the group froze, hands poised on their assorted weapons. Long minutes passed before the sound of engines could be dimly heard, then the voices of angry men. The noises came closer, the voices soon loud enough to hear clearly over the struggling engines of several vehicles. The companions tensed as the volume grew, then in ragged stages, the sounds of the wags and sec men began fading into the distance.
“Are they gone?” Mildred whispered tersely.
“No. There are more wags to the north and east,” Krysty said, her green eyes half-closed to concentrate on the task of listening. “There’s an army combing the jungle looking for something.”
“Us,” Ryan stated, holstering his piece. Mitchum wanted them aced; Glassman wanted to capture them alive. He wasn’t about to let either event happen.
“No sounds of plants being crushed under tires,” Mildred said thoughtfully as the tiny beams of sunlight streaming across the clearing flickered from the passing of a cloud overhead. “Must be a road close by.”
“Too close,” Jak stated, keeping his .357 Magnum blaster pointed at the greenery. He was down to four rounds, and was going to make each one count before he took the last train west.
“Think it was Mitchum?” Dean asked anxiously, his young face tense and serious. They had befriended the sec man, saving him from the stew pot of cannies, but somehow that had gotten turned around and now the sec man was hell-bent for revenge.
“I do not believe so, lad,” Doc rumbled. “To the best of our knowledge, the good colonel did not have access to any motorized transport. Horses were his sole venue.”
Carefully, Doc set the selector pin on his huge hand cannon from the shotgun barrel to the .44 cylinder. The LeMat was a Civil War antique, but in the old man’s steady hands the LeMat struck like the wrath of God.
“Must be his new associate, Glassman,” Ryan said, pulling the panga from its sheath and sliding it into his belt for easier access.
“Here fast,” Jak said slowly.
“Those steam-powered PT boats of his are mighty quick,” J.B. agreed, tilting back his fedora. “He must have swung around the island and gotten fresh troops from Cascade ville, trying to catch us between him and Mitchum.”
A distant rattle of a machine gun shook the jungle, the animals going quiet, the birds screaming loudly and rustling the trees as they launched for the sky.
Frowning deeply, Krysty turned in a circle. “Gaia save us, there are Hummers everywhere.”
“Trying to flush us out,” Jak said, awkwardly shifting his stance on the crutches.
Reaching high, Ryan grabbed a branch and pulled himself off the ground. “Wait for my signal to follow,” he said from the blackness above. “Don’t do anything until I come back. If I get aced, head for the mountains. We passed a cave there you can use to hide in until things cool down.”
“Get going and find that plane,” J.B. growled irritably, balancing the shotgun in his grip.
Digging in his boots, Ryan started shimmying up the tree and soon disappeared from sight in the thick foliage. A few minutes later, a brass cartridge fell to the ground, bouncing off the branches until it hit the ground. Dean scooped it up and saw the cartridge was intact, and not a spent round ejected from his father’s blaster.
“Live,” he reported. “Dad found it.”
“Get moving,” J.B. said, and started up the tree himself, moving slower than Ryan because of the Uzi on his back. The little branches kept sticking into the weapon and slowing him.
Grabbing a vine, the Armorer tried climbing that instead of the tree and made much faster progress. The vine was thicker than a gren, and the wide leaves provided good bracing for his boots. As the vine ended, he shimmied along the branch until reaching the trunk. He stabbed a knife into the wood, drawing himself up as he kicked footholds in the rough bark with his boots.
The higher he climbed, the cooler it got and the brighter the sunlight. Soon J.B. emerged from the canopy of leaves to find himself blinking in direct sunlight. Ryan stood nearby with a boot resting in the fork of two branches, looking through the curtain of vines.
“There she is,” he said, indicating the direction with his chin.
Pulling himself onto the stout branch, J.B. could only marvel at the titanic machine sprawled in the treetops before them. It was gigantic.
More than a hundred feet long, the incredible aircraft supported two huge engines with six propellers on each wing. Vines and creepers covered the plane, only the glass of the cockpit and the tail rudder clearly visible amid the flowering creepers. It was a wonder Dean had spotted it from a mile away.
“That’s a Hercules,” Ryan said, swaying to the wind. It was a lot stronger up there and carried a strong taste of salt from the nearby ocean. “Saw a picture of one in a redoubt, pinned to the wall like a girlie poster.”
“Yeah, I know,” J.B. replied. “I spent a month living in a crashed wreck once. Good planes.”
Carefully, Ryan glanced downward. “Any chance the sec men could see us up here?”
“No way in hell,” Krysty replied, crawling into view. Then the woman paused at the sight of the huge plane. “That flew?”
