The woman threw away her useless blaster

“Macahuitl!” she screamed. “Macahuitl!”

Ryan wondered if it was a prayer or a curse. It was neither. One of the handful of Chichimecs still on their feet tossed her one of the obsidian-edged clubs.

The female marauder fielded the club deftly. She hacked it savagely into the tentacle that gripped her. The volcanic glass, sharper than a surgeon’s scalpel, half severed the leg-thick member.

Holding the SIG-Sauer in both hands, Ryan backed cautiously away from the rail. He looked around quickly, trying to take stock of the tactical situation.

It was, basically, battle over.

Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

Red Holocaust

Neutron Solstice

Crater Lake

Homeward Bound

Pony Soldiers

Dectra Chain

Ice and Fire

Red Equinox

Northstar Rising

Time Nomads

Latitude Zero

Seedling

Dark Carnival

Chill Factor

Moon Fate

Fury’s Pilgrims

Shockscape

Deep Empire

Cold Asylum

Twilight Children

Rider, Reaper

Road Wars

Trader Redux

Genesis Echo

Shadowfall

Ground Zero

Emerald Fire

Bloodlines

Crossways

Keepers of the Sun

Circle Thrice

Eclipse at Noon

Stoneface

Bitter Fruit

Skydark

Demons of Eden

The Mars Arena

Watersleep

Nightmare Passage

Freedom Lost

Way of the Wolf

Dark Emblem

Crucible of Time

Starfall

Encounter:

Collector’s Edition

Gemini Rising

Gaia’s Demise

Dark Reckoning

Shadow World

Pandora’s Redoubt

Rat King

Zero City

Savage Armada

Judas Strike

Shadow Fortress

Sunchild

Breakthrough

Salvation Road

Amazon Gate

Destiny’s Truth

Skydark Spawn

Damnation Road Show

Devil Riders

Bloodfire

Hellbenders

Separation

Death Hunt

Shaking Earth

DEATH LANDS®

James Axler

A conquering army on the border will not be halted by the power of eloquence.

—Otto von Bismarck

1815–1898

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

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Prologue

Away across the night the great paired mountains spewed arcs of orange fire. Their fury could be felt as well as heard, a continual mutter of thunder, punctuated by blasts that pained Raven’s ears. If the fury of the old gods wasn’t soon appeased with the blood and souls of the evildoers, so the priest Howling Wolf said, that pillar would grow to hide the heavens, choke sun and moon and stars, plunging all beneath into gloom. It had happened once before, during the time legend called the Great Skydark.

Only this time, Howling Wolf said, the dark would never end.

Reflected hoops of orange, distorted and wavering, were the only hints that a great lake lay like a discarded obsidian mirror between the fire mountains and the hogsback ridge behind which the horde was camped. Although the eyes of the man named Raven were no longer so keen close up as they had been in his youth, his far vision remained to justify his name. If he didn’t gaze toward the flame fountains for a time, he could just make out tiny fugitive glimmers of light closer at hand, here and there down in the valley, and even in the rotted corpse of the dead city itself, which lay in the lake like a broken giant sprawled facedown in the pond that had drowned him.

Dead no more. Men once more crawled like maggots among the great bones of metal and stone and pale glass.

Screams beat like the buffets of the wind at Raven’s bare bronzed back. In the great encampment captives were being cut and burned in sacrifice to the ancient gods. When the wind blew one way, it stank of sulfur; another way, and it reeked of blood and fear and charred flesh.

At such times Raven chose to walk away from the camp when he could. He was a hunter, a warrior, living in a land devoid of mercy; had he ever shrunk from the most brutal necessity he would never have lived long enough to take a man’s name. It was the necessity of such cruelty he questioned.

His absences from the rituals of offering didn’t please the priest or his acolytes. They had dropped hints that Raven, of all people, should display more piety. He ignored their threats. For he of all people they dared not harm—not the flesh and blood of the very one whom Howling Wolf said the old forgotten gods, so thirsty for blood and pain, had sent to save the people and all the world.

Over the cries of terrible anguish, he could hear the priest’s voice, knew the sense of the words even though he was not close enough to actually hear them: once more the wicked seek to probe the lost evil secrets, to wake the dark powers that once devastated the world. They would revive the city, which forsook the gods and mocked the sky with its haughty towers. If we the chosen do not stop them, the wickedness they unleash this time will destroy the world utterly.

And so it might be, he thought. It was certainly true that the valley in which the lake lay was green and fertile despite the frequent shaking of the earth and the lethal clouds that sometimes flowed over it from the fire mountains. Likewise was it true that the high country where the people had dwelt time out of memory was becoming uninhabitable, racked by alternating drought and terrible storms that blew down from the lands of death to the north, with their strange hissing rains that could melt the skin from a man’s bones. The people and the dwellers in the valley had coexisted, not always in peace: sometimes they traded, as often they raided one another. It didn’t escape Raven that in exterminating the people of the valley for their presumption and wickedness, the true folk could insure their own survival. Indeed, Howling Wolf’s preachings made sure the fact escaped no one.

So this great endeavor, so great that it joined not only true folk and witches but the very beasts of the wasteland, wasn’t just good: it was necessary. But as he leaned on his flintlock, in the night between fires, Raven’s spirit was troubled.

He glanced back at the camp. Not all the shapes dancing black against firelight were fully human. It was strange to see true men and witches together, except linked in deadly combat. But in many ways that was one of the least strange of the changes that had come.

And maybe the strangest of all was the boy.

He had been different from the first: no child of the people had ever been so pale. He was different, and so by ancient immutable tradition he should have been taken into the desert and left beneath the spines of a maguey. There either the coyotes and vultures would take him, or the witches would find him and take him in, raise him as one of their own, for indeed that was where the witches sprang from, the sons and daughters of true men who had been born tainted with difference and so had to be cast out.

But no one could bring himself to do the ancient duty: expose the boy to his fate. For anyone who looked upon him, unnatural though his appearance was, was instantly filled with a vast sense of well-being and love. Those at whom he smiled would sooner hurl themselves into a live lava flow than allow the least harm to befall him. He had such power, though never spoke a word.

As time passed the child grew larger, although his form altered little: he maintained the proportions of an infant. It became obvious that he could somehow control the very feelings of those around him. In time they would learn that this power extended not only to true men but to witches and even wild beasts.

By not exiling him as a newborn the people had in effect judged that his difference wasn’t a taint, wasn’t a mark of evil, as it was with witches. Therefore he had to be holy. He was a gift of the heavens, that much was sure. But to what purpose? None could say.

None until the boy was ten summers old and the tall, gaunt man who covered his head and shoulders in the skin of a great wolf had appeared out of the south. He had taught the people the meaning of the gift. When he spoke in his deep, compelling voice, with the blood of sacrificial victims glistening on his cheeks in the firelight, few could doubt the truth of what he said.

But Raven was among those few.

The boy’s father, Two Whirlwinds, had never recovered from the shock of seeing what he had sired. Despite the people’s judgment that the child was holy, he had felt shamed, tainted himself. He had begun to drink too much maguey wine, and when the child was two summers old had been surprised, dismembered and devoured by a pack of giant javelinas. Raven, elder brother to the boy’s mother, had assumed the role of father. It was a role he welcomed. From the very first, it seemed, there had been a special bond between the two. It took no mystic power to make him love the child as if he were his own.

And so, though he was little given to fruitless questioning, he wondered.

If it were all true, if the boy had been sent by forgotten gods to restore to the people their ancient glory—a glory that not even the eldest of the people had witnessed, nor even heard tales of, but that Howling Wolf assured them was their birthright—why hadn’t Raven, who raised the boy as a father, known of it before the strange priest came?

Chapter One

Long white hair streaming behind him, the young man ran through the woods. On the matlike floor of dead needles his combat moccasin boots made little more sound than morning mist flowing between the straight boles of spruce and fir. He was short and slight of build, and expertly dodged around potentially noisy patches of scrub oak, dry-leaved and prone to rattle in the early spring, nor did he brush against low-hanging tree boughs. Yet the fact he moved so quietly, despite the fact he ran flat-out, and even when he vaulted a low snaggle-toothed arch of dead fallen tree, seemed somehow almost supernatural.

That the skin of his face was as white as his hair did nothing to dispel the ghostly illusion. Nor did his eyes, narrowed with exertion, that gleamed red as shards of ruby. But ectoplasm wouldn’t take scars like the ones that seamed his narrow feral face and pulled the right-hand corner of his mouth upward in a hint of perpetual grin. Nor was there anything the least bit insubstantial about the chrome-plated steel of the .357 Magnum Colt Python blaster he clutched in his right hand.

As swift as a deer he moved and as silent as a thought. But his hunter’s heart, virtual stranger to fear, felt it now. Because as fast as he was, he was whipped by the dread certainty he couldn’t move fast enough to save his friends.

“THE BOY STOOD on the burning deck,” the gaunt old man declaimed in a voice of brass.

“How come,” asked the stocky black woman clad in an olive-drab T-shirt and baggy camou pants, “I’m the one who usually winds up elbow-deep in deer guts whenever we get lucky hunting?”

J. B. Dix, known otherwise as the Armorer, grinned at her around the carcass of the young whitetail buck that had been strung from a sturdy tree limb by its hind legs. Morning sunlight glinted off the round lenses of his steel-framed spectacles. “’Cause you’re the doctor, Millie. You wield a mean scalpel.”

She flipped him a gory bird.

“The boy stood on the burning deck,” the old man said, even more loudly. He had the air of a man trying to jar something loose from memory’s grasp. He was tall, with lank gray-white hair that fell to his shoulders. He wore a calf-length frock coat that had seen better days and cradled a Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun in his twig-skinny arms.

“I was a cryogenics researcher, for God’s sake, John, not a surgeon,” the black woman said. “Much less a veterinary pathologist.”

J.B. smiled. “Well, I reckon you know what you’re doing.”

“You might as well make that crazy old coot you’re trusting with your shotgun there do the gutting, since he’s entitled to call himself ‘doctor,’ too,” the woman said, ignoring the gibe.

J.B. doffed his fedora and scratched at his scalp. “You got training in cutting up folks. You told me so yourself. Everybody in med school did back in the day. Mebbe you just missed your calling.”

Mildred Wyeth, M.D., glared at the little narrow-faced man. “Yeah. Maybe I should have become a cutter instead of a researcher. Then I could have been rich, had a big house in the ’burbs, a nice docile hubby, two-point-five kids, a shiny new Caddy every year.” She looked thoughtful, scratched at her cheek with the very tip of her thumb, as if maybe if she did it gingerly enough she wouldn’t get gore on her cheek. She failed. “And then of course I’d’ve died while at the operating table instead of having a nice experimental cold-sleep pod on hand, to get slipped into for a snug century or so.”

“I’m glad you pulled through, Millie,” J.B. said quietly.

“Yeah, well at times like this I’m almost glad, too, even if I am stuck on shit detail. A little peace and quiet is doing us all a world of good. And bagging some good game without any taint of mutie doesn’t hurt, either. Sometimes it seems we’re in danger of getting too dependent on what we can scavenge from the redoubts or scam out of the villes. Woman does not live by century-old MREs alone. Or at least this woman doesn’t.”

“The boy stood on the burning deck!” the old man almost shouted.

“‘Eating peanuts by the peck,’” Mildred said.

The old man blinked at her.

“That’s the next line, Doc,” she said. “Trust me.”

“Quoth the raven,” Professor Theophilus Algernon Tanner said in a deflating kind of way, “nevermore.”

“And here I thought he was okay these days,” Mildred muttered, shaking her head as she returned to her grisly work.

“Doc,” the Armorer said with gentle firmness, “don’t go wandering off into neverland, now. We need you to keep a sharp lookout. Not had a whiff of anything menacing, two-legged or more, norm or mutie, in three whole days. And that very fact itself makes me uneasy.”

The old man nodded. His eyes seemed to have gained focus. “You are quite correct, John Barrymore. It’s when the illusion of peace and safety seems most perfect that danger draws nigh.”

“Yeah,” Mildred said bitterly. “Any state less than constant screaming terror just isn’t natural.”

J.B. nodded. “They don’t call these the Deathlands for nothing.”

RYAN CAWDOR LAY on the ground, with his bare feet planted in a lush mat of fallen Ponderosa pine needles, long and gracefully curved as sabers, held together at the bases in clusters of three. The freedom afforded by temporary safety, to take his boots off and feel untainted nature beneath his soles, was an almost erotic pleasure.

Krysty Wroth, the most beautiful woman of the Deathlands—and not just in her mate’s single prejudiced eye—lay on the ground beside him. Both were gloriously nude, enjoying a moment of closeness and solitude after an hour of lovemaking.

He marveled in the sight of her, her white skin given a faint golden luster by the sunlight filtering through the trees. He would never tire of her, could never imagine tiring of her beauty, her vitality, her untamable spirit.

Both of them were alert to their surroundings, knew from the soft forest sounds that no immediate danger threatened. Both also knew the interlude could last but moments, that they would need to pick themselves up and square themselves away too soon, because as Mildred had just observed, unheard by them, peace and safety were unnatural states in the Deathlands, unstable as an isotope of plutonium.

All the same, the Deathlands had taught them to make the most of any and all such moments they could tear out of the grim, potentially lethal fabric of their daily lives. He stroked her cheek. They kissed. “Time to go, lover.”

With a sigh of regret the lovers stood.

Ryan picked up his Steyr sniper rifle and stood guard, unself-conscious of being buck-ass naked, while Krysty dressed without either hurrying or dawdling. Then she took temporary possession of the longblaster while he got his clothes on.

When he was ready she handed him back the rifle with a smile. “Better get back to camp, lover,” she said. “Don’t want the others to think we’re ducking the dirty work…”

Her voice trailed off. Ryan had cranked the bolt on reflex on getting the blaster back, pulling it back so as to lay an eyeball on a comforting gleam of brass in the chamber, just a sliver, because he knew from bitter experience that an unexamined blaster was always in the worst possible condition.

Because the forest sounds around them—the squirrel cussing them out from up the tree and the Steller’s jays yammering at each other from the scrub—had gone as still as the grave.

Chapter Two

“Coldhearts!” Jak Lauren yelled as he burst through the scrub oak at the foot of the clearing where Mildred worked and the others watched. “Mebbe thirty, riding hard!”

“Shit!” Mildred said.

Instantly, Doc tossed her J.B.’s Smith & Wesson longblaster and unleathered his cumbersome LeMat percussion pistol.

Mildred’s hands were still encased in gloves of gore when she fielded the M-4000. She winced. J.B. was going have a fit when this was done. She preferred her own target-grade ZKR 551 .38-caliber handblaster, but unlike Doc Tanner, she wasn’t nutty enough to waste time swapping for it when the hammer came down.

Instead she threw the shotgun to her shoulder just as three riders burst out of the patch of mountain oak hard on Jak’s tail. One of them swung a club that looked like a baseball bat with nails driven into it, the heads snipped off at a bias to create a bristle of lethal spikes. The albino youth dived facedown into the tan grass and the horses thundered past him.

“Bastards!” Mildred yelled. She aimed the front sight right for the middle of the fleshy black-bearded face of the man who’d dropped Jak and pulled the trigger. The blaster bucked and roared; the face disappeared in a spray of red blood and white bone chips.

But the physician’s pang of grief was wasted. As canny and feral as a wolf, Jak had gauged the swing and dived to avoid it. He reared up to one knee and blasted off three shots from his Colt Python. A brown-haired coldheart with ochre stripes painted across his hatchet face threw up his arms in a spasm as one of the 158-grain Magnum rounds blew one of his vertebrae into powder, then carried on with the aid of bone-splinter shrapnel to pulp his heart and lights. A remade Mini-14 with a broken stock went spinning away as his horse reared and dumped him over its croup.

The third rider charged straight for J.B., a long black queue of hair with finger bones braided into it flapping like a pennon behind and blazing away with some kind of booming revolver. He had no more luck firing from a galloping horse than most did who tried such a double-stupe stunt. The Armorer coolly reached down, picked up his Uzi and held down the trigger one-handed. Copper-jacketed 9 mm slugs punched holes in the rider at the buckskin-clad thigh, walked their way up his filthy plaid flannel shirt, tore out one side of his jaw and poked a hole through one cheekbone. That rider went down, the horse screaming and veering off into the brush to get away from the terrible flame and noise that had gone off in its face.

Jak pelted upslope, stepping on the still-writhing body of the man he’d shot. “Ryan! Krysty!” he shouted. “Where?”

J.B. and Mildred looked blankly at each other.

RYAN STOOD with his rifle butt against his shoulder but the barrel depressed, seeking targets. The telescopic sight severely restricted the shooter’s field of vision. He didn’t want to be lost in the scope when an attacker appeared from a whole different angle. Krysty was beside him, her .38 Smith & Wesson model 640 in hand. It wasn’t an ideal weapon for a fight in the woods, even with undergrowth cutting down engagement range. Still, it beat a knife to hell.

The clearing they were in was much smaller than the one a hundred paces or so away, not far downslope from the entry to the redoubt where they had left their comrades to butcher the carcass of the deer Ryan had shot that morning. They heard crackling in the brush, glimpsed large shapes between the trees. Horsemen, Krysty mouthed to Ryan.

He nodded. Neither fired. Against a known enemy, ambush was mere good sense. But unless you were a stone coldheart yourself you didn’t shoot at strangers on sight. Enemies were plentiful enough as it was without going out of your way to manufacture more in the persons of vengeful survivors.

From the direction of the camp came shouts, shots, which changed everything. With Krysty ghosting along at his side, Ryan moved fast and crouched, not directly back to where the others were but at an angle down the mountainside. That way they might either take a force attacking their friends in the flank or possibly intercept enemies attempting a flanking maneuver of their own.

The forest had come alive again with sounds of a different sort: yells, the thudding of hooves, the crack of branches breaking. Apparently a substantial band of mounted raiders had stumbled upon their camp. Ryan had time to be thankful his group had camped so near the redoubt entrance. There were too many attackers to stand off and even in these woods a party of six would have had a hard time evading them.

The possibility of negotiation never entered his mind.

A warning cry from Krysty brought his head around. Three horsemen had appeared not twenty yards downhill, heading directly for them, trying to outflank J.B. and the others. One carried a dilapidated lever-action carbine with brass tacks hammered into stock and foregrip for decoration; one, a slab-sided 1911-model .45 autopistol; the third, a steel-headed lance decorated with feathers and what seemed to be scalps. Both riders and mounts were painted in fanciful patterns.

The horsemen faltered in surprise at encountering the pair. The carbine man threw his weapon to his shoulder. Ryan already had his Steyr up, cheek welded to stock. He laid the crosshairs just below the wrist of the coldheart’s left hand, which supported the carbine’s fore end. He squeezed the trigger. The rifle cracked and slammed his shoulder. The 180-grain, boat-tailed bullet, painstakingly loaded into the cartridge a hundred years before at the Rock City Arsenal in Illinois, passed through meat between radius and ulna without slowing, drilled a neat hole through a rib, began to yaw as it tore through his heart, knocking a huge plate of his right scapula out along with a bloody chunk of trapezius muscle as it exited his back. His horse, a buckskin with a blue ring painted around one eye, reared. He toppled right over the rump without firing.

The spearman uttered a blood-curdling scream and kicked his horse into a charge. Krysty crouched, holding her blaster at full reach of both arms, coolly waiting with her hair stirring around her shoulders. When the rider got within ten yards she began squeezing off shots. The rider screamed as a bullet entered his belly. Another smashed his shoulder. He fell and screamed more as his horse, sheering away from the redheaded woman, dragged him off through the trees at a panicky run.

The third rider had hesitated when the man with the carbine was hit. Then he turned his pinto away and booted its sides. He was just about to vanish among the trees when Ryan, having thrown the bolt and brought the Steyr SSG back online as quickly as he could, broke his spine just above the level of his heart with a shot. Ryan had no qualms about blasting an enemy in the back. It was just a way to make sure he didn’t circle around once out of sight to try his luck again, hopefully when your guard was down.

He looked at Krysty. She had the cylinder open, had spilled both empties and whatever unfired cartridges remained into her hand and transferred them to her pocket, and was feeding in reloads quick as she could. She could sort the spent casings from the live rounds later; what counted now was a full handblaster.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded and snapped the cylinder shut. “Let’s go,” she said.

AT THE CAMP J.B., Mildred, Doc and Jak had fanned out and taken cover. They didn’t have long to wait before more coldhearts arrived, eight riders charging them across the thirty-yard-wide clearing.

J.B. sprayed them with one long burst from his Uzi. A 9 mm slug was unlikely to drop a horse, at least right away. But back in the Trader days the Armorer had noticed something about horses: they had minds of their own and they didn’t like getting hurt, and they especially didn’t like the smell of equine blood. Also their legs, skinny by comparison to their big muscular bodies, were relatively fragile. So he deliberately fired low, hoping to cripple or wound as many mounts as possible as fast as possible.

Horses screamed, reared. Two went down, one pinning its rider’s leg. One began bucking uncontrollably, and a fourth simply turned and ran away despite its rider’s cursing and hauling back on the reins.

Like most late-twentieth-century people, at least from Western cultures, Mildred hated seeing animals suffer. She was actually fighting tears when she unloaded a charge of buckshot from J.B.’s M-4000 into the glossy brown chest of a bay. It reared, shrieking in an almost human voice. Its rider calmly aimed a sawed-off double gun at her. She fired at him rapidly and had to have hit him because he fell before his horse did.

Jak blazed away at a rider charging him. Scarlet bloomed against the horse’s white neck but the animal only stumbled, then came on. The rider was returning fire with a handblaster but only throwing up clumps of pine needles near the albino. Jak rolled to the side as the injured horse ran right through the place where he’d lain prone. Its rider reined it in, pivoted in the saddle, trying to turn his blaster to bear on the albino youth.

Then the coldheart dropped the handblaster and clapped his hand to his neck just below his ear. It wasn’t quite enough to stem the violent spray of blood from the carotid artery, severed by the leaf-bladed knife Jak had thrown.

A wiry rider armed with a machete, to which some enterprising postnuke weaponsmith had added a spiked knuckle-duster by way of a handguard, rode a black horse with a white blaze straight for Doc, who was kneeling with his LeMat in one hand and his swordstick in the other. Doc had already fired several shots at other targets, but he emptied the remaining .44 rounds into the horse before the beast collapsed. The rider rolled over his mount’s neck, somersaulted, came up on his feet running right at Doc. He raised his machete over his head for the deathstroke.

Then he looked down at his chest. A slim length of steel had transfixed it, right through the heart. Doc had unsheathed a rapier from his swordstick, and the coldheart’s run had forced him to impale himself. The marauder looked at Doc with an expression of complete surprise and collapsed.

One of the coldhearts whose mount had been downed was kneeling, firing wildly with a .22-caliber Ruger autoloading rifle. Abruptly the right side of his head opened up in a cloud of pink spray. Ryan and Krysty had arrived in some brush at the edge of the clearing. The one-eyed man had popped a 7.62 mm round through the raider’s temple.

There was a rustle and swirl of motion farther down the slope as the other coldhearts withdrew. From the shouting it sounded as if there were plenty of them left.

“Go!” Ryan yelled, breaking from cover. Shots cracked from the trees, knocking out chunks of bark and raising little sprays of fallen needles from the ground. “We’ve gotta clear out while we got the chance. They won’t hold back for long!”

Mildred looked toward the deer carcass she’d been gutting. A bullet cut the rope that suspended it from the branch. It fell into the dirt. Not even she had enough twentieth-century squeamishness left to care much about that—it’d wash off—but the damned thing was simply too heavy to try to pick up and haul off under fire.

“Son of a bitch,” she said. She grabbed her pack and, still clutching J.B.’s shotgun, ran toward the redoubt entrance.

With a running start Ryan reached the entryway first. Instead of ducking behind the granite protrusion that sheltered the entrance from view, he spun, knelt and began firing to cover the others. They came—Doc Tanner first, running with surprising alacrity, his elbows out to the sides and pumping; Jak, hair trailing like a cloud of white smoke; J.B. crab-walking alongside Mildred to make sure she made it while spurting quick bursts from his Uzi toward the unseen foe.

Realizing their quarry was somehow getting away, the coldhearts raised an outcry of cheated fury. Riders burst from the trees and scrub like steel marbles from a Claymore mine, hurtling toward the redoubt entrance.

Ryan dropped them as fast as he could throw the Steyr’s butter-smooth bolt. Krysty was beside him, knowing he’d insist on her getting to safety before he would, but wanting to stand by him as long as she could. “Go!” he told her. She turned to dart inside the entrance they’d left open as he fired the last shot in the SSG’s detachable magazine.

A quick blur of motion, a sound like an ax hitting wood, a gasp, more of surprise than pain. Ryan took his eye from the scope to see Krysty slumped against the granite face with a crossbow bolt protruding from her back, just inward of the left shoulder.

“Krysty!” he shouted. The word seemed torn from him like skin from his back.

The woman came around. With her right hand she raised her blaster. The crossbowman was closing fast, dropping his spent weapon to reach for a Bowie-type knife in a beaded sheath under his arm. With cool deliberation Krysty aimed and shot him through his thick, dirty throat. He roared, the noise drowning in a gurgle of his own blood.

As he fell, Krysty turned at last and stumbled into the redoubt. A rider loomed above Ryan. He was a big man with flying blond braids and an eagle feather at the back of his skull, grinning all over his bearded, painted face as he raised a battered CAR-4, a 9 mm submachinegun version of the venerable M-16. Ryan knew at once he was the coldhearts’ leader.

“You lose, fucker,” the blond man said.

But Ryan had already released the empty rifle with his right hand, still holding it in his left. His panga whispered from its sheath. With a thunk, the heavy blade severed the coldheart’s gunhand right above the wrist.

The raider boss stared in gape-mouthed amazement at his own hand lying on the bare dirt, spinning as random dying neural impulses spasmed the finger on the subgun’s trigger. Blood sprayed from his arm like a hose.

Ryan followed his injured woman into the redoubt, then keyed the blastproof door shut.

Chapter Three

Hardness against his cheek. Pulsing warm—or was he only feeling the heat being drawn out of his face into a floor cold as a baron’s heart?

Ryan lay on his belly. He was unaware of having fallen. The world, slowly, ceased to spin around him.

The groans of his companions made their way through the fog that wrapped his brain. It had been a bad jump, the kind that reached down your gullet and yanked your guts out your mouth.

Krysty!

His eye felt as if it were glued shut. He forced it open. The upper lid came away from the lower with a sick gummy sensation. His empty socket throbbed with scarlet pulses of ache.

Krysty at least had begun the jump on her back, carefully laid down by Mildred and Ryan. She remained pretty much as they had left her, left arm strapped across her sternum to immobilize it. The right, which had been crossed over her stomach, now lay by her side. A thin trickle of blood ran to the floor of the gateway where she had clenched her fist so hard during the jump that her nails had pierced her palm. Her face was unnaturally pale, almost blue, contrasting harshly with her hair, which lay limp around her head like a tangle of red seaweed.

Ryan crawled to her, more lizard than man, feeling as if a mutie the size of a mountain were squatting on his back jeering at his misery. He grabbed her right arm, felt for pulse inside her wrist. It was there and strong.

Now that he knew his woman lived, Ryan allowed himself cautiously to become aware of more of his surroundings. The chamber had walls of orange-red armaglass that passed the dim illumination of the room beyond, which had automatically come on when the gateway powered up to materialize them, like the glow of a fire. There were bad smells, not the bland sterile smell of a long-unused chamber. There were sounds, too: dull distant thumps like giant stone fists being slammed together; pops and cracks like the fire of heavy blasters, the kind needed to be toted with a big war wag; and under everything a deep-note noise that wasn’t quite a moan and wasn’t quite a roar, with a bit of crackle and sort of a seethe. A sound you could hear through your bones if both eardrums were shot.

Ryan braced himself on one elbow and looked around. J.B. had hauled himself to a sitting position and was helping Mildred do likewise. Jak already sat with his knees drawn up and his crimson eyes sunk in his face like blood spots in a sheet. A dribble of puke, semidried, still trailed from the corner of his mouth.

“Shit,” the albino said. “Look like Doc croaked.”

Doc lay on his back, arms outstretched, mouth agape, rheumy eyes staring unblinking at the top of the mat-trans chamber. Seeing him like that made Mildred shift to rise up and tend to him. Then she settled back down on her haunches, gazing sorrowfully at him and shaking her head. There was obviously no point.

“I never thought one of us would go like this,” Mildred said, shaking her head. “Dean, now Doc.”

Ryan’s mouth was a thin line. “Doc looks about as peaceful as he ever gets,” Ryan said. His heart weighed down his rib cage. Seeing Doc lying there stark and dead was like losing another part of his body.

He lifted Krysty’s hand, kissed the back of it, laid it across her other arm. Then he got up, wobbled, fought for and regained his balance, and walked staunchly upright the few steps to where his comrade lay. He knelt, reached down and, with thumb and forefinger of his right hand, started to close the lids of Doc’s eyes.

The old man jerked and blinked. “By the Three Kennedys!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to do, my dear boy? Blind me?”

Ryan recoiled as if the old man had transformed into a coiled diamondback. “Fireblast!”

Doc sat up with an almost audible creak of joints. “Indeed. One might think you had never seen a man in repose.”

“Doc, you was the deadest-looking article I ever hope to see,” the Armorer said with a chuckle. The old man stood, shot his cuffs and dusted off his frock coat.

“Lover.”

Ryan’s head snapped around. Krysty was sitting up. The color had returned to her cheeks. Before he or Mildred, who had at last gained her own feet, could move to assist her, she stood.

BARE FROM THE WAIST UP, Krysty Wroth had sat in the infirmary of the Rocky Mountain redoubt, teeth locked on Ryan’s scuffed old leather belt. Mildred Wyeth had a pair of channel-lock pliers from J.B.’s armorer’s kit clamped on the head of the crossbow quarrel. The coldheart missile had a barbed iron head that reached halfway down the shaft to make it hard for the recipient to tear it out of the wound. However, a crossbow quarrel had enormous penetrating power. The bolt had actually gone all the way through Krysty’s left shoulder to tent out the fabric of her jumpsuit with two inches of gory tip.

“Hold on, Krysty,” Mildred said. She pulled hard. Krysty closed her eyes, her fingers dug deep as talons into Ryan’s hand. She made no sound.

The quarrel came free with a sucking sound. Blood gushed out, flowing down into towels they’d discovered inside an old laundry storage bin and heaped around the redhead’s middle. Mildred had told the others they’d need to let the wound bleed freely for a short time to flush the channel. The benefit would offset the minor additional blood loss.

But even before she nodded to Ryan and J.B. to start pressing gauze compresses over the holes, entrance and exit, Mildred’s broad dark face was wrinkled in a gesture of disgust. Ryan frowned.

“The smell,” Mildred said, holding the grisly trophy away from her. “Not much question what it is.”

“Not gangrene, surely?” Doc Tanner asked.

“Way too soon. No, it’s feces, probably human. Those coldheart mothers didn’t miss a beat.”

“Want to guarantee nobody gets away from them,” J.B. said, sharing a grim look with Ryan. They were well familiar with that particular trick from their time with Trader, years before. Smearing a penetrating weapon, like a missile or a punji stick, with human feces all but guaranteed infection, deep-seated and virulent, in anyone unlucky enough to be punctured by it.

“There’s still alcohol and gauze left in the redoubt stores, and even some packets of antibiotic powder,” Mildred said. “I can make a lick and a promise at cleaning out the filth. I can make a pass at debriding the wound, cutting out the dead and tainted flesh with a scalpel, to minimize the infection. But one thing we don’t have is anesthetics.”

Krysty sat, pallid and swaying, with Ryan’s arm around her. “Do what you need to do, Mildred. I can take it.”

“Do you need to?” Ryan asked. “What about Krysty’s natural ability to heal?”

“It has its limits,” Mildred said, “like everything else. As a doctor and a friend, I can’t in conscience let it go without getting some of that crap out of there. I think we can pass on debriding, since that would add to the existing trauma, and nothing in my power is going to prevent infection totally. On the other hand, cleaning the wound channel will help keep the infection down while doing minimal extra damage. But…it’ll be rough.”

It was. Mildred had borrowed both a segmented screw-together aluminum cleaning rod from J.B.’s kit and the concept of another gun-cleaning implement, the pull-through bore scrubber. She used the rod to poke a string through the wound, back to front, and then used it to pull through some thicker cord braided first with alcohol-soaked gauze patches, then dry ones, and finally patches liberally coated in broad-spectrum antibiotic powder. Krysty had endured all in the same stoic silence with which she had taken Mildred’s pulling out the bolt. But by the end her eyes were tightly shut and Ryan had to hang on to her to prevent her toppling from the steel table as she passed out.

SHE’D STRUCK IT lucky one way, anyway: she’d been out for the jump. Now she was standing unassisted.

“Careful, there,” Ryan began, eyeing Krysty carefully in case she started to sway.

Krysty shook her head, smiling. Her hair continued to stir around her shoulders after the motion was done.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Well, not fine. I’m okay for the moment. The power of Gaia is strong right here and now. Can’t you feel it?”

“I can sure hear it,” Ryan said. The colossal groans and creaks and thuds reverberating in the very marrow of his bones could only originate within the Earth itself, he knew.

“The infection’s working in me,” Krysty said. “Gaia’s power will help me fight it, but I’ll need time.”

“Time, fair lady, is one commodity we might not be vouchsafed,” Doc said. “Judging from the prevalence of mephitic vapors, if we have not actually attained the infernal regions, we may have found ourselves in surroundings scarcely more salubrious.”

“From the smell of sulfur and the sound effects,” J.B. said, looking up and around the mat-trans chamber as if judging how likely it was to hold up, “I reckon we might just have jumped in the belly of a live smoky.” He shrugged. “Out of the frying pan—”

“But these redoubts were built to withstand nuclear explosions,” Mildred protested. “What can a volcanic eruption do to them?”

Doc shook his head, his face set in a look of bloodhound mournfulness. “Much, it is to be feared, dear lady. When I was the involuntary guest of the Totality Concept and Operation Chronos in your own charming time, I read studies to the effect that a single large eruption discharged the force of many, many multimegaton warheads. The illusion of safety afforded by our surroundings may be precisely that.”

“A live volcano? What imbecile would’ve decided to build a redoubt inside a volcano?” Mildred asked.

“It might not’ve been live back before skydark,” Ryan said. “Mebbe they reckoned on it staying dormant.”

“And how much do you trust whitecoat judgment?” J.B. asked. “They did such a swell job with the good Doc here.”

“Talk fills no empty bellies or water bottles,” Ryan said. “We better take a look-see, find out what’s actually going on.”

He glanced around the chamber with its flame-colored walls, now sinister and suggestive. Had the builders intended it as some kind of ironic commentary on their own arrogance in building their shelter in the gut of a volcano? Or was it a sign of their obliviousness?

He didn’t bother to shrug. Only bigger waste of time than reckoning men’s motives, he thought, was trying to reckon dead men’s motives.

“Let’s move,” he said. “Krysty keeps to the rear, with Mildred to guard her.” Ryan stepped forward and opened the door to the chamber.

Mildred nodded, her ZKR already in hand. Krysty, he noted with approval, hadn’t drawn her own weapon. Last thing anybody headed into potential danger—and the unknown was always dangerous—was somebody at his back with a blaster who wasn’t in complete control of himself. Or herself. Normally, Krysty pulled her weight and more without being asked. Now she did her part by keeping out of the way, because Gaia or not, she wasn’t fit to fight, and had sense to know and accept it.

He nodded to J.B., who with scattergun ready moved swiftly out the open door of the mat-trans chamber. He stepped left to clear the doorway. Ryan followed, holding his 9 mm SIG-Sauer in both hands, through the antechamber and right, to hunker down behind a control console. Each scanned half of the large room beyond, all senses stretched to greatest sensitivity, not just vision.

This room was pretty standard, if darker than usual. Black walls and ceiling seemed to soak up the dim white light that had come on automatically when the transfer completed. The room was circular, perhaps ten yards across. The only visible doors were closed.

Except for the groans and bangs of the Earth itself, shivering up through the floor and Ryan’s boots and the bones of his legs, the place gave off a pervasive feel of emptiness, of deadness.

“Clear,” J.B. said.

“Clear,” Ryan echoed.

Jak came out next as if shot from a coldheart crossbow, hitting the far wall with his big Python a dull metallic gleam in both hands, covering the room either side of the mat-trans. Doc came next, LeMat held out at full extent of one arm as if probing like an insect’s feeler.

Jak’s nose was twitching like a wild animal’s and his lip was curled. “Stinks,” he said. “But dead. Nobody here.”

“Reckon you’re right,” Ryan said. “But we make sure. Mildred, you and Krysty stay here and stay sharp. The rest of us will secure the place.”

THE REDOUBT WAS EMPTY, all right. Its automatic life-support systems seemed to function properly. As the four men moved with swift caution through the corridors and up and down stairs the stench of brimstone, which had infiltrated the vast subterranean structure over a century or more, was replaced by cooler, cleaner-smelling air scrubbed by the filters. “Cleaner-smelling” was a relative term; the redoubt was full of a musty smell no HVAC system could exorcise, of dust and mildew and disuse—and, faintly but unmistakably, of death. They found several corpses, shrunk and mummified in the dry sterilized air, bundled in ancient U.S. army uniforms. Unusual.

When the group came back to the gateway control room Ryan was alarmed to find Krysty lying apparently unconscious on a pallet composed of their coats and jackets. “She’s just resting,” Mildred said, moving away and lowering her voice so as not to disturb her patient. “Letting Gaia get a head start on healing her. They and me got a job of work ahead of us.” She studied the four. “Especially if we need to move right away.”

“You called the shot,” J.B. said. “Place is cleaned out pretty good. No food, no weps, no meds. There’s all the water we could want. We can get cleaned up and drink until our skins are swollen out like three-day-old deaders. But that’s all she wrote for resupply.”

Mildred sucked in her lower lip. The mountain retreat had been good to them. The abundance of game and natural food to gather had left them with a few days’ MREs and self-heats in all their packs. But all that really granted them was a little time to forage for more food in whatever terrain lay beyond the redoubt—and the erupting volcano.

“And to think,” Mildred said sourly, “right about now those bastard coldhearts are stuffing their faces with that nice juicy deer I gutted. Well, we can’t stay here, even if the roof doesn’t open up and pour lava on our heads.”

She looked around at the scouting party. “You guys must have some good news,” she said, “’cause you’re bouncing around like schoolkids who got to pee. So spill it. I’m not in a mood for games.”

J.B. looked to Ryan, who shrugged. “Well, we do have to get out of here,” the small man said, “but we don’t have to walk.”

“PRETTY, ISN’T SHE?” J.B. asked, words echoing in the vastness of the underground garage. “She’s a Hummer.”

“I know what a Hummer is, J.B.,” Mildred said. “A Humvee, too. It’s not like it’s the first one we ever found.”

“Got a nuke battery, so we don’t need to worry about fuel,” Ryan said. “It’s all there and good to go.”

“Wonder why they left it,” Mildred said.

Ryan shrugged. “I suspect everyone used the gateway. Who knows?”

Mildred eyed the circular hole in the vehicle’s roof. “Too bad they dismounted whatever the pintle gun was and took it with them.”

“But then, should danger rear its ugly head,” Doc said, “we simply rely on flight rather than fight.”

“We do both,” Ryan said, “if we need to. We can always shoot through the windows. Right now, let’s get cleaned up and get a good sleep. Whatever’s waiting outside, at least we can be rested, strong and squared-away to face it.”

Chapter Four

The giant fans of the redoubt’s HVAC system produced a slight overpressure. Air gusted outward as the great doors began to slide apart noiselessly—or at least with no noise that could be heard over the horrific bomb-blast concerto playing nonstop outside.

Night waited. But no stars. A roof of cloud or maybe smoke, lit by pulsing hell-glows of yellow and orange from below, from within by blue-white lightning novas.

As the doors opened wider, the air from outside eddied back in, stinging hot, bringing a swirl of gray ash soft as the finest fur. Ryan choked and gagged on the stink of sulfur and his eye watered. He staggered back, coughing.

After a moment he got the coughing fit under control and looked around at his friends. They were covering their mouths and noses with their hands to filter out the ash and dabbing at their eyes. “What’s the verdict, Mildred?” Ryan croaked.

“Just smells bad,” came the physician’s muffled voice. “If that was hydrogen sulfide we were breathing, we’d be in our death throes already with our lungs full of sulfuric acid.”

Ryan looked back outside. The brightest and most persistent glow seemed to come from his left. He guessed the main vent was off that way. Relief: they weren’t staring down the hellbore muzzle of the mountain, at any rate.

Then a handful of blazing light balls like giant meteors arced across his vision to spatter the slopes below and to his right with brief pulses of yellow fire, just to keep him from getting cocky. But the doors themselves were clear and the ground outside seemed unobstructed by rockslide or lava flow.

“Looks like we got us a road outta here, anyway,” the Armorer muttered from behind. Ryan nodded.

Doc stretched out an arm, long finger pointing. “By Jove! Look there!”

By the underlighting of the clouds they could tell they were looking out over a bowl-shaped valley many miles wide. Way, way off lay a sheet of something like black glass, with a jagged trail of crimson stretching out across it—a lake, it seemed, reflecting the fire plume of the erupting vent. Out in the middle of that black glass sheet, reflecting in it, was visible a scatter of faint lights.

“A ville,” Ryan said.

“Villes,” Jak said.

“He’s right,” J.B. agreed. There were at least half a dozen other small clumps of lights scattered across the valley, shimmering slightly in the ground effect.

“Pretty dense habitation, comparatively speaking,” Mildred said. She hovered protectively near Krysty, who stood on her own power but seemed at least halfway in a trance, from the infection that had taken root in her shoulder despite Mildred’s best efforts—just as Mildred had predicted—or from the forces of Gaia surging so mightily around them, or both. “There’s food here. And safety.”

“How you reckon that?” J.B. asked.

“Number of villes. Way they’re spread out, rather than all clumped up together in one big defensive perimeter. You wouldn’t get that kind of population in that kind of distribution without at least comparative peace.”

The Armorer grunted noncommittally. “Likely you’re right. But still, mebbe you aren’t. No guarantees in this life.”

“Things change,” Jak said.

“Tell me something new,” Ryan said with a winter smile.

GETTING TO THE CENTERS of habitation proved to be more than difficult.

With the Hummer’s independently suspended tires bouncing over lava rocks head-size or better and his partners, including the sorely injured Krysty, bouncing around in the cab like badly stowed luggage, Ryan wondered if he would even be able to drive them off the fire mountain. It would have been vicious enough going in the dark with nothing but the jagged terrain to cope with.

The mountain was spewing. Away off to their left fountains of fire arced red across the sky. The one thing to be thankful for was that their path, such as it was, led steadily away from the eruption.

A scarlet glow shone on the hood in front of him. He leaned forward, eye straining up, trying to figure out where it came from. Suddenly a fang of rock not thirty yards to their left seemed to explode in a yellow flash. The wag rocked. The cab filled with voices crying out in surprised alarm. Impacts thunked off the Hummer’s steel and Kevlar carapace like hail. J.B., standing upright with his Uzi in lieu of the missing mount-gun, ducked into the cab with a yelp as a handful of glowing yellow embers spattered across the hood.

“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “What the fuck was that?”

“Bomb,” Doc said. Since the coldhearts had chased them off their idyllic mountain camp into the redoubt, he had been totally lucid, showing no sign of the madness that sometimes overtook him. Somewhat to Ryan’s surprise, he remained entirely calm in the face of whatever had just happened.

“You’re kidding, Doc,” Mildred said, hunching down in back, looking up and out, trying to fathom what had happened. “Somebody’s attacking?”

“Only the gods in their wrath,” Doc replied blithely. He rode in the back seat with Jak, who sat clutching one of his leaf-bladed throwing knives like a talisman in both hands. Mildred was in the aft cargo compartment tending to Krysty, who lay on a mat laid on top of their baggage, such as it was. “That was a lava bomb. A bubble, if you will, of molten rock, filled with lethal gas. If one lands too close to us we are undone, to say nothing of what should eventuate were one to strike us directly.”

“Dark night,” J.B. muttered. He straightened reluctantly, poking his head beyond the dubious protection of the cab. Almost at once he yelled, “Right, Ryan! Crank hard right!”

Ryan obeyed. The Hummer heeled over alarmingly to the left as the wag turned sharply. The one-eyed man almost left his teeth in the steering wheel as the front bucked up. And then the engine was straining, whining in anguish as it struggled to push them over a boulder in their path. The wag climbed, almost stalled, then pitched forward. Ryan gritted his teeth as the wag’s belly scraped over the sharp-toothed lava rock. But the rugged vehicle neither dropped its guts nor hung. It ground over the top and down. Mildred cursed as the top of her head hit the ceiling.

Ryan cranked his head around to see a yellow glowing worm of lava force its way over a dam of rock and slop down in a shower of sparks, right where the wag had been before the Armorer had shouted his warning.

A long breath escaped Ryan’s lungs. J.B. shoved his face back down the well of the blaster-mount. “At least we’ve shown we can take the bastard best the mountain has to throw at us!” the Armorer called.

The Hummer rocked to an impact that sank it on its springs. Two curving white blades, spaced a hand span apart, suddenly protruded downward from the Kevlar roof.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. A dark jet suddenly spewed from each curved blade. Jak and Doc cried out in alarm and flattened themselves against the doors.

“What—” Ryan began.

From almost directly overhead came the ripping roar of J.B.’s Uzi, loud even over the ceaseless bellow of the volcano. With a rending, wrenching sound, the curved blades were yanked out of the vehicle’s roof.

“Snake…” the Armorer shouted, a sudden crackle of noise like skyscraper-size firecrackers going off drowned most of his words.

“What?”

“I said, it’s a bastard rattlesnake, the biggest bastard snake I ever saw!”

Ryan stuck his head out the window and craned his neck around. Silhouetted against a demonic sky, a head as wide across as Ryan’s own shoulders reared up ten or a dozen feet above the Hummer on an impossibly thick body. Ryan wondered for an endless interval between one heartbeat and the next whether the creature was actually that huge or whether its size was an illusion produced by the glaring, ever-shifting light.

The head split open into a vast flame-yellow mouth. Its fangs, each as long as one of Ryan’s arms, unfolded like the blades of a lock-back knife. As Ryan slammed the accelerator home, the head darted forward with dizzying speed, fangs thrusting ahead of it like spears.

Mildred screamed in fury more than terror as the fangs stabbed down through the roof, one gleaming ivory scimitar missing her head by inches. Gathering the now semiconscious Krysty into her strong arms, Mildred rolled herself and the redhead to the side of the cargo compartment, away from the reeking, fuming venom that spurted in pulses from the fangs. Then she turned back to hammer at the nearest fang with the heel of her fist. It had no effect.

“A fascinating adaptation,” Doc remarked in as calmly conversational a voice as the others had ever heard him use. “Clearly the serpent soaks up heat from the ambient rocks, allowing it to move and hunt as freely at night as in the daytime.”

“That’s great, Doc,” Ryan said, “but how do we kill the nuke-blasted thing?”

Despite the wag’s wild bucking, J.B. popped back up through the vacant gun mount with his Uzi. He emptied the magazine at the creature in three long ragged bursts as it coiled yet again to strike.

Ryan saw a relatively clear stretch of slope, if steep, and sent the wag bucketing down it amid a baby avalanche of loose rubble. The impacts slammed his lower jaw into the upper and threatened to shake his joints apart.

“We’re getting away!” Mildred shouted.

“We better,” J.B. said, dropping back down into the passenger seat to change mags. “I might as well be pissing at the bastard. I’m not sure any of my rounds even penetrated.”

The monstrous snake launched itself, not in a strike but slithering down the slope parallel to them, flowing sinuously over jagged steaming black rock and gray boulders like a living avalanche. It caught up with them, lunged again, this time as if trying to bring its terrible mass crushing down on the wag. Ryan spun the wheel right. For a terrifying fraction of a second the vehicle slewed sideways in the scree, heeling way over toward the bottom of the slope, threatening to break away at any instant and go rolling down the smoky like a loose boulder, battering itself to pieces and churning its occupants to lumpy red puree. Then the vast cleated run-flat tires bit and thrust the wag forward across the slope, no longer in danger of tipping over but still not clear of the snake.

Ryan heard loud reports from close behind, dared a look over his shoulder. From one window Jak was cranking shots from his Python handblaster, from the other, Doc was booming away with his venerable LeMat. The pistol rounds, like the 9 mm bullets fired by J.B.’s Uzi, were almost certainly as futile as spitting at the rattlesnake, but Ryan had to grin approval of his comrades’ fighting spirit.

The thing was right after them, writhing with incredible speed. On a flat, on anything like a decent surface, the Hummer would’ve left the horror in its dust. On this evil broken slope, the snake had every advantage.

“I can’t even slow the bastard, Ryan,” J.B. yelled, blitzing off another magazine. “Dunno if even your Steyr could hurt it.”

“Nor, it seems, can we outrun it, had we Hermes’s wings to speed our heels,” Doc Tanner murmured.

“Then, like Trader used to say, when all else fails—cheat,” Ryan said grimly.

“I thought that was Samantha the Panther,” J.B. said.

“Whoever.” Ryan spun the wheel left. His companions yelled in alarm as the wag bounced right and cut across the giant snake’s path. The rattler, surprised by its prey apparently turning on it, reared up hissing. It struck. Anticipating the attack, Ryan had cranked the wheel and taken off at a tangent. The Hummer still rocked as the monster’s head glanced off the wag’s rear bumper.

Ryan was hammering the wag right across the mountainside, back toward the spewing vent—back upward toward the river of living fire that had almost trapped them before.

“Ryan,” J.B. said from the gun mount. “Ryan, lava—”

Lava it was, yes, running down the mountain at them in a racing flow of glow, red and fast as water. For his part Ryan was racing to meet the stream. It spurted out over a shelf of rock as if reaching out for the puny skittering thing. The snake raced after them, blunt nose almost prodding their tailgate. The fires of Hell danced in its slit-pupilled eyes.

The liquid rock-stream splashed down behind a boulder in a shower of glowing gobbets. J.B. cried out in pain as a droplet of yellow-glowing lava brushed his cheek. Another burned right through the roof and struck, hissing by Ryan’s right boot as the Hummer jounced across the lava stream’s path with the rattler in mad pursuit.

A vast, fiery wave of lava broke over the boulder and thundered down onto the snake. The monster reared back, emitting a shriek that threatened to rupture the companions’ eardrums. A huge cloud of steam bellowed out as the molten rock flash-boiled the snake’s body fluids. A terrible stench, like burning hair magnified a millionfold, enveloped the wag. Mildred puked noisily in the back.

“Dark night!” J.B. yelled.

The rattler’s head reared out of the lava. The molten rock fell away from it in burning rivulets. For a terrifying moment it seemed as if the monster would continue its hellhound pursuit, shedding the lava like a duck’s wing shedding water.

Then it collapsed, to sink steaming and reeking into the already crusting lava pool.

Chapter Five

The wag sat creaking and popping as it cooled off in the long grass beside a stream. Ryan squatted on a roof blistered and discolored by embers, hot gases and blobs of lava, and torn in several places by the giant snake’s fangs. He cradled his Steyr across his lean-muscled thighs. Between thumb and forefinger of his right hand he absently rolled the stem of a blue-white wildflower he’d picked before climbing to the top of the Hummer. Patches of them and differently hued blossoms dotted the fertile zone they were in now like pigment spills.

He was keeping watch while his comrades cleaned themselves and the wag. Mildred had insisted on the cleanup, and she wasn’t just being predark fastidious.

“We need to clear out every last trace of that venom,” she’d said. “Even assuming its potency and characteristics are those of normal rattlesnake poison, and don’t carry any kind of nasty mutie kicker, if any of it gets into an open wound, even a scratch, you’ll be in a world of hurt. Rattler venom’s primarily a hematotoxin. It makes your red blood cells explode. And we’re fresh out of antivenin.”

So they were taking a pause, down in the surprisingly green and fertile valley that stretched away north from the mountain into whose bowels they had jumped, and a similar volcanic peak a few miles away that didn’t seem to be erupting as enthusiastically. They still seemed to be a good twenty miles from the wide lake. In the bright sunlight they could make out the shapes of skyscrapers rising from the middle of it.

J.B. tucked his minisextant into his kit and glanced at his old map. “Latitude’s right for Mexland,” he announced. “Right about Mex City, truth to tell.”

“I could’ve told you that,” Mildred said. She was redressing Krysty’s shoulder. The giant rattler’s venom had splashed her bandages. Thinking fast, Mildred had clawed them away before the poison could come into contact with Krysty’s wounds.

“Air thin,” Jak said.

“Yeah. Good thing we’ve been up in the mountains getting acclimated for a few days. This whole valley’s pretty high. Don’t remember just how high that is exactly. I came down here for vacation once, couple years before the balloon went up. I recognize those mountains. Big one we popped out of is Popocatépetl. The shorter one’s Iztaccíhuatl.”

“What’s that mean?” J.B. asked, blinking owlishly through his spectacles, which he had just cleaned on his shirttail.

“How should I know? I can’t even spell’em. I don’t even know why it looks as if the ruins of Mexico City are out in the middle of a great big lake.”

“They were lovers,” Doc intoned. He was wringing out his shirt. His thin, shrunken chest was fishbelly pale. In comparison his hands and face looked deeply tanned.

“Say what?” J.B. asked. “You’re not losing your grip again, are you, Doc?”

The old man didn’t deign to respond. “She was the emperor’s daughter. A most beauteous maid. He was a mighty young warrior. They fell in love. Her father disapproved. He sent the young man off to war, then told his daughter he had fallen in battle. Whereupon the girl expired from grief. Then the warrior returned home to find his beloved dead, and he died of grief, as well. The gods, taking pity on them, transformed them into the mountains we have just quit. Iztaccíhuatl means ‘Sleeping Woman.’ Popocatépetl is ‘Smoking Mountain.’”

Jak was squatting by the stream, ignoring the fact his feet were sunk in cold muck. He turned his ruby gaze over his shoulder on Doc.

“Gods turned to mountains?” he asked. “What good that do?”

Doc shrugged delicately. “The ways of gods, the theologians assure us, are not the ways of men. Though in sooth, the gods and goddesses of most of the globe’s mythologies seem to manifest a decidedly puckish sense of humor.”

Ryan checked the rad counter clipped to his coat for maybe the dozenth time. “Anybody getting any kind of a reading?”

“Nope,” J.B. said. “Background’s mebbe a little high. That’s it.”

“So no nukes went off in the vicinity.” Ryan shook his head. “Something did some damage.”

“No kidding,” Mildred said. “In my day this was the most populous city on Earth. We should be in the suburbs now. Something didn’t just damage them, it made them disappear.”

“Mebbe the smokies?” J.B. asked. Ryan shrugged.

J.B. had begun to load the few supplies they’d managed to scavenge from the Popocatépetl redoubt back into the wag. He noticed that Jak was staring out across the little stream again, seemingly morose.

“What’s eating at your innards, Jak?” he asked.

“Snake,” the youth said.

“You’re thinking about that bastard snake?”

Jak shrugged. “Big,” he said. “Caught, eat like kings.”

As if to emphasize his words, he suddenly lunged into the stream in a great splash. He grabbed, then he straightened, holding a squirming leopard frog. He bit off the head, spat it into the weeds, then began to eat the still-kicking amphibian.

Mildred winced. “I hate it when he does stuff like that.”

Ryan gave a last look around. Their immediate surroundings were broken enough with jagged ridges and obvious cooled-lava flows that any ill-intentioned strangers could work their way to well within longblaster range of the party and he’d never see them. He tossed away the flower and jumped to the ground. The soil was black, rich and springy beneath the soles of his boots.

“How’s Krysty?” he asked Mildred, walking to where the woman was laid out by the stream.

“Pretty much out of it. The infection’s taking hold and she’s obviously weakened some since we got away from the eruption, with all that raw Earth energy exploding all over the damn landscape.”

Ryan thought he kept his feelings from his face. He had long years of practice at that. But Mildred said, “Don’t worry. It’s not so bad as it sounds. I think it’s a good sign she’s out. Her body is fighting to repel the infection and start healing. Her mind has shut down so that she can concentrate her resources on the task at hand. At this point, other than trying to avoid any more exciting encounters with the local wildlife, which was something else I didn’t see when I was down here as a turista, it’s most important to make sure she wakes up regularly to eat. Keep her strength up.”

She stood. “Speaking of which, I’m not so concerned about the food thing as I was, for any of us. There’s some real fertile-looking land out here, interspersed with all the lava flows and ash falls. So I don’t think we’ll have to settle for feeding her raw frog. But since it looks as if there’s likely to be better on tap, it’s probably not too soon to start looking out for it.”

“I think there’s a ville a couple miles ahead,” Ryan said. “We’ll make for that.”

THEY CAME AROUND one of the omnipresent saw-toothed hogsbacks and found themselves on the outskirts of a ville. At first glance it appeared almost painfully neat, compared to the devastation and decay they were used to: sturdy, square adobe-brick houses, washed in white and pink and shades of tan and brown, with heavy ceiling beams projecting from the fronts. Not a whole lot different than they’d seen in New Mexico north of the Jornada del Muerte, if better kept-up. But worlds different from the urban sprawl that had occupied this area a hundred years before, according to the recollections of Doc as well as Mildred.

The Hummer had rolled in among the first few houses. The companions realized with a sort of shared shock that they’d allowed the ville’s appearance at a distance of tidiness momentarily to deceive them. Obviously the place had been built with care since skydark and tended with love throughout however many years it had stood.

It had, however, been trashed quite recently, by the looks of things.

Many houses sported windows of glass, flat, clear, manufactured panes, not ripply and murky from being made in some postnuke glassblower’s shop and not purple from a century’s exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, either. Sure signs that the residents traded with scavvies working a big city where warehouses and shops still contained unbroken sheets of glass. They were also sure signs of prosperity, since such salvage didn’t come cheap.

Many of the panes were broken, which was a sign bad trouble had come to the ville. The modern world was no haven of law and order, likely no more so here than in the most nuke-scarred regions of North America, but one thing about it: people who built their homes by hand and kept the trim painted and paid to put in nice, salvaged windows didn’t tolerate casual vandalism. You tagged, they slagged. You busted a window, they busted you. In pieces. That simple.

Doors neatly painted dark red or blue—many hardly faded at all by the intense high-altitude sun—hung askew from their frames. Mismatched curtains of savvied cloth flapped freely over glass fangs in the quickening afternoon breeze. The travelers saw no flames but smelled smoke—and floating on the wind the unmistakable stink of fresh death.

From the gloomy depths of a hut with its front door gone altogether lurched a mound of horror. It had no head. Rather its right shoulder came to a point perhaps seven feet tall, so that it had to squat down on thin bandy legs to clear the doorway. Its left shoulder was a good foot and a half lower. Normal-appearing arms hung from both shoulders. Another arm sprouted halfway down the mutie’s right side. It had a single saucer-size eye in the middle of its lesion-covered torso, that wept constant yellow pus toward a slack-lipped, jag-toothed mouth.

Jak stuck his hand out the window past Ryan’s head and shot the mutie with his Python.

Chapter Six

The 158-grain semijacketed slug hit the mutie in its single eye. A spray of fluid that looked more maroon than norm blood and some clotted pale chunks of what had to have been brains erupted from the creature’s back. Clear ichor gushing from its collapsed ocular, the mutie emitted a whistling shriek from its mouth and collapsed.

Despite his case-hardened constitution, Ryan winced. The .357 Magnum round had maybe the nastiest muzzle-blast of any handblaster he’d encountered, sharper and more painful to the ear than even the louder but lower-pitched report of a .44 Magnum. Primer fragments blasted out between the rear of the cylinder and the frame stung his cheek and spattered like rain on his eyepatch.

He frowned, not just at the ringing in his ears. A hunter born and bred, as much feral predatory animal as human, Jak was hard even by the standards of his time and place. The word mercy was in his vocabulary only because Doc had taught it to him. But the ruby-eyed albino boy had always accepted Ryan’s rules, which were pretty much the same as vanished Trader’s had been. And one of the foremost was: No chilling for chilling’s sake.

Then he saw Mildred, right in front of him, thrust her Czech-made .38 target revolver out her window and fire a solo shot at a figure looming behind the busted-out window next to the door. At the same time the hideous mutie Jak had chilled dropped what it had been holding concealed behind its back with its two right hands: a crude musket or shotgun made out of heavy-gauge pipe and wire.

“Fireblast!” Belatedly, Ryan was becoming aware of movement all around them, seething out of the houses like maggots from so many beast skulls. “Mildred, get us out of here!”

The stocky physician had tucked her blaster away and was doing just that. Both hands death-gripping the wheel, she goosed the beefy wag along the narrow rutted-earth street. The way the Hummer was jouncing over the ruts, Ryan had no chance of acquiring any targets through the variable-powered scope mounted on his SSG. Nor would he have been able to hold on any target long enough to take a half decent shot. Cursing to himself, he hauled out his 9 mm handblaster with the built-in silencer.

The wag was armored, if lightly. The Kevlar and steel of its roof and sides and its Lexan windows should have been more than adequate to keep off the arrows, stones and bullets the suddenly swarming muties showered down on them, especially since the blasters they were loosing off, with hollow booms and big puffs of dirty-white smoke seemed mostly to be crude homemade muzzle-loaders like the one the first mutie had carried, firing big soft blobs of lead or maybe even fistfuls of nails, busted glass and pebbles. But the Hummer wasn’t designed to be an armored personnel carrier, whose occupants were meant to do serious fighting from inside it. It was a utility vehicle, a scout car; the heavy weapon, machine gun or grenade launcher, which had once occupied its pintle mount had been intended to lay down a base of fire from a distance in support of dismounted infantry, and also to give it a sting and enable it to scoot out of any trouble it happened to roll into. It didn’t have fancy firing ports. It had windows that had to be rolled down to allow the passengers to fire out. Which of course let all kinds of missiles in.

Nor were the muties totally limited to rocks and museum-piece projectile weapons. Mildred yet out a yelp of alarm as fire blossomed yellow-orange right in their path. Flames and dense black smoke rolled in a tide up the hood to break against the windshield. Everybody ducked as a dragon’s belch of flame-heated air and choking smoke rushed in at the windows to fill the passenger compartment. Then they were through the flame pond created by the Molotov cocktail.

A crowd of screaming muties had rolled a battered stakebed truck into their path fifty yards ahead. “Hang on, everybody,” Mildred shouted, and cranked the wheel left, toward a gap between houses just large enough to pass the Hummer.

The wag heeled way over to the right as the occupants grabbed for whatever purchase they could. Jak dropped his Python inside the cargo compartment to grab a tie-down with one hand and the out-cold Krysty with the other. Their tires were still spinning off tongues of fire. Then the bow wave of dust they threw up doused the burning mixture.

Almost at once the Hummer went nose-down and tail-up like an angry stinkbug as Mildred hammered down the brakes. A pile of rubble, khaki-colored adobe blocks obstructed the alley. “Crap!” Mildred exclaimed. “Crap, crap, crap!”

“Drive on,” J.B. shouted, holding his fedora on his head with one hand and brandishing his stamped-steel machine pistol with the other. “This baby’ll plow through.”

“Not on your tintype,” Mildred shouted back, throwing the wag into reverse and cranking her head around on her neck. “Can’t even chance getting high-centered with these hoodoos swarming around like yellowjackets.”

The alley behind had filled instantly with ambushers, waving spears and clubs and at least one modern firearm—an M-1 carbine to Ryan’s quick glimpse. They stopped and stared with comical surprise as the wag chunked through a gear change and came hurtling straight back at them like a multiton rocket. Most of them were muties, although none in this clot of a half dozen or so was either as huge or grotesquely malformed as the first creature they had seen. Most were downright small. In fact, the one closest behind the Hummer, whose wide anthracite eyes locked on Ryan’s for a fraction of a second before the Hummer’s rear bumper took him in the thighs and body-slammed him to the ground, looked as human as Ryan himself.

The wag bucked, and screams, along with crunching and squelching sounds, came from beneath the vehicle as the huge cleated tires rolled over several ambushers unfortunate enough not to be able to spin around and clear the alleyway in time. One mutie, a being reminiscent of a stickie in shape but with a dry-looking tan skin covered with reddish-brown camouflage rosettes, clung to the side of the house on Ryan’s side with toe and fingers pads. Instead of knocking him free, the Hummer’s bulk spun him, pinned him and then rotated his body, crushing and grinding simultaneously as it roared backward down the alley. The creature screamed in a shrill but wholly-human voice. A blast of horrid carrion-eater breath blew in the window as the creature rolled by between the brown-stuccoed wall and the wag’s steel flank.

Then the Hummer was back on what passed for the ville’s main street. It had flooded with marauders, half a hundred or more. Mildred just kept the wag grinding in reverse, squashing a couple more of their less-agile ambushers, turning the wheel slightly to angle the Hummer into another alley catty-corner across the way behind them. For a moment they passed between mud houses, with more clearance this time. Then they were out and backing at a brisk clip across another street, right at an opening into darkness.

The structure was larger than most of the houses and had double wooden doors open wide. Muties were issuing from the interior with crates and boxes in their arms: looters. They scattered. A taller than average one who looked normal aside from having a mouth that stretched clear to the back of the jawbone on either side was caught standing right in the middle of the entry, clutching a box of what looked like hand tools. He stared at the onrushing wag as if jacklighted. The rear bumper hit him and bore him screaming back to smash him squalling against a set of wooden shelves.

Five muties cringed against the walls to either side of the wag. J.B. popped up out the top of the vehicle. “Afternoon,” he said, and chopped down the three to the right with two scything back-and-forth bursts from his Uzi.

The one nearer the door on Ryan’s side dropped what he was carrying and ran right out into the sunlit street. The other, who had long tufts of dark hair sprouting at random from face and body, raised a foot-long wrench over his head and lunged screaming at Ryan.

Ryan opened the door into him with a slam. The mutie staggered back gushing blood from a split forehead. The one-eyed man poked his SIG-Sauer through the door’s still-open window, shot him twice in the chest. Then, because he didn’t go down fast enough, he shot him again through the forehead.

The remaining mutie seemed to be making good his escape. But panicked or plain stupid, he failed to dodge to one side or the other, where a few steps would have taken him out of the line of fire. Instead he raced straight away from the door, across the street.

Unhurriedly, Doc opened his door, unfolded himself. Laying his heavy LeMat across his upraised left forearm he aimed, fired through his own open window. The ancient pistol boomed like an immense drum and spit out a four-foot-long tongue of flame, bright pink in the shaded interior. Dust puffed up from the middle of the back of the hide vest the fleeing mutie wore. The creature threw up taloned hands and went facedown on the hardpan.

The doctor lowered his smoking handblaster. He shook his head regretfully. “Ah, well,” he said, “he who turns and runs away, lives to slit our bellies later in the day.”

Jak did a roll over the rear seat of the Hummer, piled out Doc’s door with his Python in his snow-white fist. Ryan was already racing along the wall toward the gaping entryway. He darted out into the sunlight, firing his 9 mm blaster with sounds like explosively exhaled breaths. The bullets made loud cracks as they passed objects; he wasn’t wasting his precious remaining stock of subsonic rounds that made no more noise at any point than a muffled sneeze. Nor was he bothering to aim, merely trying to keep the muties who had fled the Hummer’s charge heading in the right direction long enough for him to grab hold of the open wooden door. Loud cracks from behind him told him the albino youth was doing the same thing.

The doors were heavy and their hinges protested with loud squeals against being moved. But the two men had adrenaline on their side; even the slight Jak was able to get his door into motion. Both halves swung back into place well before the marauders outside could get themselves sorted out enough to interfere. Ryan swung a hefty plank down into waiting brackets to bar the doors shut.

A smaller doorway opened in the wall on the driver’s side. Mildred got out with her ZKR in hand. J.B. eeled out the top of the pintle mount, scrambled across the Hummer’s torn and blistered Kevlar roof to drop down beside her, Uzi in hand. She nodded to him.

“Cover me,” she said, then darted through the door. She had to duck down to get through. J.B. hit the doorjamb with his Uzi up and ready.

From inside the next room two yellow flashes, two echoing cracks. Then a slow, sad, sliding sound.

“Clear,” the others heard Mildred call. “Just one mutie who wasn’t hid near as well as he thought.”

“Damn, Ryan,” J.B. said, taking in their surroundings, “nuke me till I glow and shoot me in the dark, but I think this is a garage.”

Ryan had popped out his partially empty mag from his handblaster, dropped it in a pocket, brought out a fresh magazine from another. He weighed it in his hand, eyeing it ruefully. Not many left.

He jammed it decisively home in the well. “Think mebbe you’re right, J.B.,” he said. “Even got a grease pit dug in the middle of the floor.”

Jak whipped out one of his throwing knives, stuck it in his teeth, dropped to the packed-earth floor and slithered under the rear of the Hummer. “No muties hide,” he reported, voice muffled by the wag’s mass. He slithered back out.

“Ryan, John Barrymore,” Doc said. “Come take a look at this.

“A hatchway to the roof,” he announced when his companions joined him. “It would appear the erstwhile occupants of this ville built with defense in mind.”

Ryan had already noted that the adobe walls were a good half-yard thick, enough to stop even a 7.62 mm round from his Steyr. The windows were potential vulnerabilities, but also served as firing ports. Apparently they constituted a compromise between comfort of living and defensibility. That the residents had enjoyed the luxury of making such a compromise spoke volumes for the relative stability they’d enjoyed.

Until today, anyway. “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Too bad they didn’t stay alert enough.”

“Ville like this is used to trading, Ryan,” J.B. observed. “My bet is they got took by some kind of trick like that Trojan horse Doc told us about.”

“Actually that was me,” the one-eyed man said. “My mother read The Iliad to me when I was young.”

“Whatever. It sounded like the kinda thing that’d come out of Doc’s head, anyway.”

“‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships,’” Doc quoted, “‘and topped the topless towers of Ilium?’” His drawn old face had gone pallid under grime and suntan, and sweat stood out around his hairline. Reaction was setting in. He swayed. “Emily, my Emily, why hast thou forsaken me…” he whispered.

Mildred, who had climbed back into the Hummer to check on Krysty, jumped out with a water bottle in hand. “Here, old man,” she said, holding the bottle to Doc’s lips. He drank greedily, drooling water out the right side of his mouth. “You just sit down here a minute. Rest yourself.”

She led him to a stool by the wall, sat him down.

“Actually, the ville looks deserted to me, not like it was fought over,” Ryan said. “I wonder if the people didn’t just bug when the raiders turned up.”

He accepted a bottle from Mildred, drank. “How’s Krysty?”

Mildred shrugged. “Coming around. Still feverish. I hope she doesn’t try to get up, but—Hey!”

She pointed toward the double doors. The bottom line of sunglare was interrupted at several point by shadows. Feet.

The muties were gathering right outside.

Chapter Seven

Holding up his Uzi with one hand, J.B. strode toward the front of the garage. Muzzle-flash vomited from the stub barrel. The massive walls seemed to bulge from its yammer. Weighing not much less than Ryan’s sniper rifle, the machine pistol was heavy enough to be fired one-handed without climbing uncontrollably. The Armorer walked a long burst from right to left across the double doors. Little points of brightness appeared. Pencils of sunlight stabbed into the gloom like yellow laser beams.

The echo of the shuddering muzzle-blasts seemed to continue for heartbeats after the flame flicker died away, or maybe it was the ringing in the companions’ ears. When they were able to hear anything else again they could hear moaning and thrashing from outside.

“Let them writhe,” the Armorer said, pulling the spent magazine from the Uzi. “Help keep the bastards’ minds right.”

As Ryan had just moments before, he hefted the empty magazine in his hand. “Running low. Can’t be doing that shit much more.”

Jak looked at Mildred. “Any weps? Ammo?”

She shook her head. “No trace. If any were here they were the first thing the muties cleared out.”

J.B. walked around the wag to the sprawled bodies of the looters he’d shot when they first rolled into the garage, knelt to inspect them.

“We’re a little bit lucky,” he said, pulling something gingerly from the waistband of the loincloth one wore. “We got a Colt .45 ACP, Government Model of 1911, or reasonable facsimile, in not too bad a shape, all cocked and locked.”

He held up a hefty blaster with checkered wooden grips pinched between thumb and forefinger. “This chill’s even got a couple spare mags on him.”

He straightened and prodded the corpse with the toe of his boot. “And you know what? He ain’t even a mutie.”

“Seen a couple of what looked like norms,” Mildred said. “That first dude I ran over was one.”

“We’ll sort out the mystery later.” Ryan strode over to Doc, who was sitting slumped, his head lolling to the side. He took a pinch of the old man’s cheek, which hung slack, pulled his head up.

“Doc,” he said. He patted the old man’s other cheek. “Doc, you can’t zone out on us now. We’re already down Krysty. We need everybody else to hold the fort until we can figure a way to get out of here with all our parts.”

The old man moaned. Then he blinked twice, shook himself, and sat upright. “No need to take on so, my dear boy,” he said, standing and shooting his cuffs. “Just resting my eyes.”

Ryan slapped him on the shoulder. “Good enough. Welcome back.”

“We got an exit strategy?” Mildred asked, backing out of the Hummer holding J.B.’s M-4000 shotgun.

“Our best defense is still driving real fast,” J.B. pointed out.

Ryan nodded, rubbing his long chin. “Yeah. Mebbe we can hold them off until dark, thin them out some. Then try to bust out.”

“They strike me as raiders, like the Scythians of yore, albeit lacking horses,” Doc said. “They will naturally incline toward a transient strategy, rather than a persisting one.”

“Which translates as hit-and-run’s their style, rather than sticking around to keep us under siege,” J.B. noted. “Probably even true. Mebbe we get out of this crack after all.”

“If they don’t burn us out,” Mildred muttered.

“Likely a last resort,” Ryan said. “They’ll want our wag and blasters. All the same, we better get set to discourage that sort of behavior. Mildred, is there a back way out?”

She nodded, making her beaded plaits rattle softly. “Rear of the little office. Big water jug in there, too, while I think of it. Seems clean.”

“That’s something, anyway. You and Jak hold in there, watch the front and back doors. J.B. and Doc can hold in here.”

“What about you?” J.B. asked.

“I’ll take the rifle up top, see if I can do a little street-cleaning.”

“I’d better check on Krysty first, real quick,” Mildred said, ducking into the office.

“Make quick,” Jak called from the other room. “Muties coming.”

Ryan entered the Hummer. Krysty lay on her pallet in the cargo compartment with her green eyes open. “Lover,” she whispered in a cracked voice.

Ryan leaned over to extend a water bottle to her. She reached for it. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Just lie back. You need to conserve your strength.”

Reluctantly she let him tilt the bottle to her lips. “Gaia’s with me,” she said more clearly when he pulled the bottle back. “But it’s hard.”

“You just lie back, try to sleep. Let your mind and body concentrate on healing.”

“Outside—?”

He shook his head. “We’ll handle it. If we can’t, having another body on the line too shaky to hold up a blaster wouldn’t do us any good. This is your fight, Krysty. Stay with it.”

He capped the bottle and laid it beside her. Her hand gripped his with feverish strength; he felt the heat of the battle against infection raging inside her body. She pulled the back of his hand to her lips and kissed it. Then she laid her head back down and closed her eyes.

Ryan placed her hand on her chest and made himself let go. There wasn’t any more that he could do for her in the best of circumstances. She was young and strong and healthy, as tough as they came, and she had that Gaia-aided gift of healing. She’d pull through.

He wouldn’t even think of the alternative.

A bang from outside. A hole appeared in one of the doors, knocking a slatlike splinter loose to stick out at a crazy angle from beneath it. J.B. ripped a short burst in response, blind through the wood.

Ryan ducked quickly out of the Hummer, slung his Steyr. J.B. handed him the .45, square butt foremost. “Take this and the extras. Don’t want to burn out that SIG.”

The one-eyed man accepted the heavy handblaster and tucked the two full reloads into his waistband. The SIG-Sauer was a wonderful weapon for stealthy chilling, but the integral suppressor, aside from making the weapon heavier and less wieldy, tended to hold in heat. It had a tendency to lock in a firefight, and too much sustained firing would burn out the barrel. The .45 would spare the SIG for a while, not to mention their dwindling stocks of 9 mm rounds.

A wooden ladder hung on hooks by the wall, so that a person could scramble right up it to the hatch—and pull it up after, an old Indian trick from Pueblo days long before the twentieth century that Doc had told them about. Ryan climbed up to the hatch, carefully slid aside the iron bolt. He sucked in a deep breath, snicked off the big Colt’s safety and slammed open the hatch.

Sunlight fell against his face like scalding water. He thrust the .45 up into it and swarmed after.

To find himself staring along the rounded black top of the weapon into a pair of huge black eyes, shot through with veins and flecks of gold.

The face surrounding those eyes wasn’t norm, being drawn out into a dark snout with nostrils as convoluted as a bat’s. But the surprised expression was unmistakable all the same.

For as long as it took Ryan’s forefinger to exert about three pounds of pressure on the trigger.

The eyes and the top part of the head that held them vanished into a dark haze. The mutie’s body rolled over flopping, black blood spurting from the lower jaw and stub of neck that remained. Ryan sprang upright on the roof. A norm-looking ambusher was frozen, having just crawled over the tall roof parapet behind the mutie whose head Ryan had just blown apart. He clutched a spear tipped with black volcanic glass. Ryan shot him twice. He went backward over the parapet with arms flailing.

Something struck Ryan in the back beneath his left shoulder blade. He whirled into a crouch, brought the heavy handblaster around in a two-fisted combat grip. A bandy-legged norm stood on the roof of the next house, desperately trying to notch a second dart to the end of his throwing stick. Ryan centered his sights on the white stripe conveniently painted down the front of the norm’s ribby chest, pulled the trigger. The 1911 bucked and roared. The man sat, dropping dart and launcher. He felt his chest, looked up reproachfully from the blood on his fingers to Ryan, and fell backward out of sight.

The one-eyed man went flat on his belly. He thumbed on the safety, stuck the .45 inside the waist of his fatigue pants behind his right hip—not an ideal means of carry, but Ryan was seasoned enough to know always to keep his finger out of the trigger guard until the weapon was drawn and pointing downrange, which much diminished his chances of becoming abruptly half-assed.

He reached around to probe at his back. He felt nothing from where he’d been struck, not necessarily a good sign in itself. The impact site was impossible to reach and see, but he didn’t feel any trace of blood. A quick check of the flat roof, covered with a thick and well-packed layer of the same hard earth that made up the street below and here and there sprouting a clump of weeds, showed no sign of leakage. He caught sight of the dart: a simple shaft of some kind of wood, whittled to a point and probably hardened in a fire. It hadn’t been hard thrown enough to penetrate his leather coat, which was one reason he still wore it despite the heat.

He unslung the Steyr, cracked the bolt, turned it and pulled it back enough to glimpse a confirmatory gleam of brass, yellow in the merciless sun. He closed and locked the bolt again. Then he got a knee up to his chest and a boot under him and raised himself cautiously for a look around.

Three houses up the block a couple of manlike figures pointed at the apparition of his head. One of them threw a longblaster to its shoulder. He ducked. The weapon boomed, its report echoing off the flat fronts of houses. Where the shot went, he had no idea; he heard no noise of its passage.

Through the roof Ryan felt a vibration. From down in the street in front of the garage came a dull heavy thump, followed by cheers and shouts in a language he couldn’t make out. He guessed it was Spanish. The muties seemed to have contrived a battering ram and were having a go at the doors. They seemed pretty sturdy, and anyway Ryan was going to have to let his friends below deal with the problem, at least until he got the nearby rooftops clean.

He reared, rolled back into a sitting position, knees up. He brought the Steyr to his shoulder, bracing his elbows against the insides of his knees, snugged the buttplate tight to his shoulder’s hollow, welded his right cheek to the stock and peered through the scope with his single eye.

The blaster man who had shot at him was fumblingly spilling powder from a horn—an actual cowhorn, by the look of it—down the barrel of his musket. He was shaking so much he was pouring most of the black grains on his hand, which was twined about with strange yellow growths or veins. Ryan lined the crosshairs up on the center of his chest and squeezed.

The Steyr kicked back against his shoulder. He worked the bolt with quick, calm efficiency as the barrel rose. Another round, head-stamped 7.62 mm NATO, was chambered and ready to go when the long slim barrel came back down on line.

The musketeer was nowhere in sight. His companion, whose skin hung loose on his small skinny frame in flaps, was staring down with puzzled bloodhound eyes at what was probably him. Belatedly he caught hold of the notion he might be in some danger here. Instead of simply dropping flat, he started to turn to bolt. Ryan shot him through and through, right side to left, and dropped him like a deer.

Ryan felt another shiver of vibration through his tailbone, heard a scrape from right behind. As he spun, a terrific shuddering, crashing sound assailed his ears. He knew full-auto blasterfire when he heard it. He threw himself sideways, clumsily bringing the long rifle around and up, to aim more or less at the Armorer, who stood grinning down at him through his wire-rimmed specs from the shade of his hat brim.

“Scraped off a couple muties coming up the wall,” J.B. said.

“What are you doing up here? You’re supposed to be—”

“You’re welcome for saving your lean ass. Figured you’d need some backup.”

He walked to the front of the garage, leaned out over the parapet and whistled. “Hey, boys,” he called, “up here.”

He fired the Uzi down into the street, three, four, five quick bursts. Ryan heard shouts, screams. J.B. ducked back down as return shots cracked from the street, then rocked back over the parapet and let the rest of his magazine go in a long spray.

He sat, out of sight, to wait out the return fire from the street, waving his stubby machine pistol in the air with its heavy bolt locked back to cool it.

“Down to three mags,” he said. “Way too few to be hosing them blind through the door.”

Ryan nodded. The flash of annoyance he’d felt at his old friend was already forgotten. The companions followed Ryan’s lead. Not his commands. J.B. had spotted a weakness in their deployment and acted promptly on his own initiative to correct it.

It had been a good call. That meant they all got to live a little longer. They were a team, which had always been their mainstay.

For what it was worth now.

Ryan eased his head back above the parapet, looked through 180 degrees, ducked back, duck-walked a few steps left, raised up, checked the other half circle. The rooftops were clear of marauders, or at least any who happened to be on roofs were keeping out of sight.

“This is mebbe not so good, Ryan,” J.B. said quietly. “Street right out in front is clean, but you can bet your last meal the houses around us are swarming with the bastards. And I can see them all over the streets surrounding. There must be a couple hundred of them out there.”

Ryan lay on his back, gazed up toward the sun, knowing enough not to look directly at it. It still rode high in the sky. There was plenty of daylight left.

“Think we’ll make it until sundown?”

J.B. laughed, took a swig from a canteen, recapped it and tossed it toward Ryan, who caught it.

“Nah. Not that it’d make a spit of difference. These bastards are taking it personal. If they didn’t have their black little hearts bent on seeing the color of our insides, they’d have cut stick and pulled out long since from the hurt we’ve laid on them.”

“How about making a run for it?”

The Armorer shrugged. “They blocked us once. They might do it again. Still, it’s probably our one and only shot. Even if it likely doesn’t mean anything but the difference between getting chilled moving and getting chilled standing still.”

He looked at Ryan. “Doc says the muties keep hollering something about a ‘holy child.’ It’s like their war cry. Don’t know what damn good that does us, but there it is. Whoa, what’s that?”

The flat dirt-covered roof had shaken beneath them. The two men stared at each other. It came again, a quick triple shake that evoked unnerving creaks from the roof timbers beneath their feet.

From somewhere distant there came a groan, a rumble, a dull vibration.

“Earthquake,” Ryan said. “That last was a wall coming down, mebbe a whole house.”

“Now we know why such a neat little ville has big piles of rubble lying about the bastard alleys,” the Armorer said. “Damn tremors must come frequent enough to keep the locals rebuilding and repairing, not leave them much time to worry about cleaning up all the wreckage.”

“Former locals.” Ryan had stuck his head up again, looking around. He could see nothing. But he could sense movement around them. He could smell the odors of rank and not all human bodies on the heavy moist breeze, hear the scrabbling like a horde of locusts stripping a cornfield: not loud, but ominous. The muties, he knew, were preparing another onslaught.

Then he frowned. “Hold it,” he said softly. “J.B., you hear something?”

“Other than my pulse going like a scared horse down a flight of stairs?” Then he frowned, too, and tipped his head to the side.

“Dark night, but I think I hear—”

“Motors.” Ryan stood upright, looking off to the northeast. “Wags, mebbe a big bike.

“Coming this way.”

Chapter Eight

A heavy thudding sounded from the distance, like a hammer pounding nails. Big hammer, big nails.

J.B. smiled beatifically. “Browning M-2 .50-caliber machine gun. Sweetest music these ears ever did hear. Called a Ma Deuce predark.”

From around them came, more than a sound, but rather a sensation of stirring, like rats in walls. “Seems like our friends have gotten tired of playing and are takin’ their toys and heading home,” J.B. said.

They heard a cracking sound, not quite a gunshot, too sharp for an explosion. “What was that?” Ryan asked.

“You got me.”

J.B. walked to the open hatch. “Hey, down there,” he shouted. “Looks like our bacon’s saved. Cavalry’s coming.”

“And precisely what—” Mildred’s voice came floating back “—makes you think they’re on our side?”

J.B. looked at Ryan and shrugged. “There’s an old saying, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’” Ryan said helpfully.

“And we know what a steaming load that one is,” J.B. said. “Okay, Millie, you win. But the guys we know want to cut us up and mebbe eat us are going away, which even a pessimistic cuss such as yourself has to admit is a positive development.”

“What was that you called me?” Mildred’s voice came again, dangerously low.

“What? ‘Cuss.’It was distinctly ‘cuss,’ and Ryan will back me up on that.”

Leave me out of this, mouthed the one-eyed man.

“Besides, you know I never stoop to foul, fucking language, Millie.”

“We can always polish our baron’s jester routines later, if we happen to live,” Ryan said. “Now let’s all pipe down, hunker down, get ready to play whatever hand’s dealt us next.”

Ryan and J.B. crouched behind the roof parapet, watching the streets below and surrounding their hideout. They heard the rattle of small-arms fire—a pretty serious volume; whoever these newcomers were, they didn’t seem to have a lot of worries about ammo. The .50 thumped away, growing steadily louder. And intermittently they heard the sharp, loud cracks.

The marauders seemed to have no appetite for hanging around and getting better acquainted with the interlopers. They began streaming openly along the streets away from the approaching gunfire and motor sounds, a ragged, starved-looking band of muties and apparently normal humans mixed together indiscriminately. What might cause the norms and muties to cooperate like this Ryan had no idea. There was nothing impossible about it, of course. It was just that the hostility between norms and muties was usually so bitter and deeply ingrained that it was rare for them to coexist without bloodshed, much less to fight side by side.

He glanced at his old friend. J.B. looked back at him, shook his head, pulling down the corners of his mouth. Neither of them felt a reflex hatred of muties, obviously; Krysty Wroth was a mutie herself, albeit a beautiful one even to norm eyes. But Ryan, having all his life heard the cliché about having an itchy trigger finger, was actually feeling a tingle in that digit here and now, what with a river of potential targets flowing by right under their chins. He could tell the Armorer felt the same way.

But the raiders were headed the right direction—away—and showing no further disposition to bother them. Shooting at them would serve no useful purpose. At best it would waste scarce ammo. At worst it would draw return fire from the retreating raiders. Better to leave well enough alone.

The fugitive flow passed, ended. At the street’s far end a very different procession appeared. Men in tan uniforms advanced steadily, longblasters ready in patrol position. They were dark-skinned, dark-haired, not very tall, resembling the human raiders who accompanied the muties, but better clothed, armed and fed. Behind them cruised a heavy truck with a fabric-covered bed and a welded-together looking mount for the big Browning machine gun behind the cab. And out in front of it rolled an outlandish apparition: a tall, copper-skinned youth, wearing a feathered headdress, a green loincloth, an odd sort of golden harness over his broad chest and shoulders, and armor braces on forearms and lower legs, riding a big, blatting, outlaw-style motorcycle.

“What do you make of that?” J.B. asked. Ryan could only shake his head.

From a house across the street from their perch and a couple of doors toward the well-armed column, a skinny mutie with an outsize asymmetric head bolted. He seemed to have no better plan in mind than to get away as quickly as possible, running balls-out right down the middle of the dirt lane, elbows pumping.

It wasn’t a good enough plan.

The bizarre feathered rider raised his right forearm. A pale red beam snapped from it with an ear-shattering crack. It struck the fleeing mutie between his churning shoulder blades. His back exploded in a gout of steam. He went sprawling forward, dug a furrow in the dust with his face, lay still.

“Shit!” J.B. exclaimed. “A laser! That shit he’s wearing over his shoulders has a power-pack in it, I’ll just bet.”

“Impressive,” Ryan said.

The rider held up his arm. The column halted. The foot soldiers winged out to the building fronts to either side and lay or crouched, covering the street with their weapons.

“Look at that,” J.B. said admiringly. “They got a couple BARs with them. Beautiful.”

“Serious firepower,” Ryan said.

“Let’s hope they’re friendlier than they look.”

“If they’re not,” the one-eyed man said slowly, “I’m not sure what we can do about it.”

Two soldiers came forward, prodding two captives in front of them with the muzzles of their longblasters. The prisoners, a man and a mutie covered all over in curly golden fur, wore only loincloths. Their arms were bound behind them. One of their escorts leaned forward and apparently cut their bonds, because the two immediately brought their hands up in front of them and began massaging their wrists.

The boy in the feathers dropped his kickstand, swung off his bike, stalked up to the prisoners like a leopard. He was carrying a peculiar-looking weapon in his hand, a flat wooden club maybe two feet long that had pieces of obsidian set in either edge, to create a discontinuous double blade of black glass.

He snapped a question. The human captive turned his face away.

The warrior in the feathered headdress lashed out with the obsidian-lined club. The furry mutant’s right arm leaped away from its shoulder in a gush of blood. He screamed and dropped to his knees, ineffectually cutting the great wound, blood spurting between his fingers.

“Dark night,” J.B. said. “These are some hard bastards.”

The human captive said something to the warrior. The warrior danced a couple of steps to the side, struck down with his weapon. The screaming mutie’s head fell away from its neck, bounced twice on the road and came to rest facedown in a rut. A fountain of blood shot out of the neck stump, once, twice, three times, soaking the thirsty earth in red. Then the blood-flow ceased. The headless, one-armed body pitched forward to leak slowly into the dust.

The human captive pointed straight at the garage where the travelers and their vehicle were hidden.

The feathered warrior turned to study the structure. Then he lashed out backhand. The human captive’s head jumped off his shoulders. Without ever looking back, the warrior stalked back to his ride, forked it, kicked it to snarling life.

The cavalcade rumbled into motion again, right for the companions. “I don’t know about you,” J.B. said, “but I got a bad feeling about this.”

“Get into the wag,” Ryan called down the open hatch. “Get ready to roll.”

“Where to?” Mildred called up.

“Away.”

The truck with the big Browning stayed where it was to provide a fire base, Ryan noted glumly. Its thumb-thick bullets would punch through the Hummer like handblaster slugs through wet paper. The foot soldiers came trotting down the street and took up positions across from the garage, covering the double doors with their longblasters. A BAR-man was winged out to either side on his belly with his weapon’s bipod down.

J.B. whistled. “Them suckers’re toting FN FALs and M-1 Garands. And they pack a punch.”

“Then there’s that wrist laser,” Ryan muttered.

The strapping young warrior in the feathered headdress had been holding back, waiting for his minions to get into position. Then he gunned his V-twin engine with a blat like a submachine gun burst, streaked forward down the street, threw the bike into a dust-raising sidewise skid that brought it to a perfect halt facing the garage doors. He gazed up with a haughty expression on his aquiline features and barked something.

“What’s he say?” Ryan asked.

“Beats me,” J.B. said. “Sure sounds like he means it, though.”

“I say, Ryan,” Doc’s voice wafted up from below, “but yonder fine young bravo has just called upon us to—”

“Throw out your weapons,” the warrior called, “and give up at once!”

“English?” Ryan asked. The Armorer shrugged.

Ryan let his Steyr sling-strap slide off his shoulder, laid the rifle carefully on the rooftop. Then he stood. Two dozen rifle barrels tracked him.

“We’re peaceful travelers,” he called. “Traders. We’re not looking for trouble. We just got caught here by the raiders.”

“If you wish no trouble,” the warrior said, “then surrender now before I lose patience.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Two Arrow of the Eagle Knights. I serve Don Hector, ruler of the valley of the Anáhuac.”

“Sec men,” J.B. muttered bitterly. “Fancy drag, fancy blasters. Just lousy sec men.”

“Why do you wish to make us prisoners?” Ryan called. “All we want to do is trade. Or barring that, be on our way.”

“You travel these lands without permission. How do we know you are who you say? Now, throw your weapons out quickly. Or we will come and take them!”

Ryan held up his hand. “I have to talk to my people. Just give me a moment, please.”

Before the warrior in the gaudy headdress could refuse, Ryan hunkered out of sight. “What do you say, J.B.?”