Doc’s madness-inflected tones cut through the howling wind

“Unhand me! I shall not go softly and gently. Unhand me, I say!” The sounds of scuffling increased. There was a shout of pain, and Doc’s voice, raging incoherently, retreated into the distance, buried by the wailing wind.

Jak looked to Ryan. In the dim light, the one-eyed man could see the tension in the albino teen’s face. He nodded.

“Who’s next, love?” Krysty asked as Jak opened the wag door a sliver and squeezed through. “You or me?” She couldn’t believe that they seemed to be breaking all their rules.

“Mebbe both—whatever it takes. Sometimes we’ve just gotta stand or fall as one.”

Prophecy

Death Lands®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

—Erich Fromm

1900–1980

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

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 One

The sky was a dark blue bleeding into an umbra of purple. It lurched, turned, then spun through 180 degrees. Sickening pain jarred in Jak’s elbow, making him bite back the curse that welled up in his throat as bile sought to join it. The Colt Python .357, never a light blaster at the best of times, felt like a deadweight in a hand momentarily numbed. He spit out a lump of bitter phlegm and turned his head.

“Fuck’s sake, Ryan, can’t fire like this.”

The one-eyed man grunted by way of reply as he pulled hard on the wheel of the wag, seeking to avoid another rut in the dry, hard-packed surface. There was no time for words.

Jak cursed again as he slid across the seat in the back of the wag, careening into Mildred, jolting her arm as she took aim at their pursuers.

“Damn it,” she snapped as the shot from her revolver sailed high and wide of its intended target.

As soon as they had left the blacktop, each of the companions had known that any attempt at a perfect aim was little more than a hope; but none of them had realized quite how deceptive the surface they had chosen would prove to be.

And their pursuers were more familiar with the territory.

“EASY, BOY. WON’T BE long ’fore we have ’em exactly where we want them.”

Jase Demetriou, the driver of the pursuing wag, chuckled. High, with a keening edge, it was the sound of someone who had a high regard for pain and suffering, and who would enjoy inflicting it before the merciful release of a chilling.

“Less laughing and more driving,” the speaker cautioned.

Jase nodded with a manic precision. Unhinged he may have been, but Jase was the finest wag driver to come out of Brisbane ville. He looked like he’d barely hit adolescence, but was pushing twenty-five. The sweet, boyish looks that made him a hit with all the gaudies were betrayed by the glint in his eyes. Corden had covered for him many a time. The sights he had seen sickened him, but without Jase his band of coldhearts could never catch their prey.

Like they were doing right now. The stupes were trying to fire on Corden’s boys, but the graying brigand knew the land around well enough to feel assured that they would never find their target. The plains that spread between what had once been northern Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska were still—in many ways—the same as they had been since thousands of years before skydark. The only difference was that after the nukecaust the crust of the earth had seemed to ripple along this flat expanse. Just a little. Just enough to be invisible to the naked eye, but like a never-ending corrugation when you hit it with a wag. Especially a wag in which you were putting pedal to metal. Speed and poor suspension would jolt you, bounce you around the inside of the wag like a pea in a can.

Jase knew the land like it was a part of him. He’d driven it since he was tall enough to get in a seat and have his foot touch the pedal. It was still rough, but he could ride it. And Corden’s men knew better than to waste ammo while the wags were in motion.

It was real easy: wait until the stupe driver of the wag they were chasing tipped himself over, then go and pick at the carcass like vultures. There was little real danger. Anyone who put up resistance was usually too dazed by the crash to shoot straight. It was simple to pick them off.

Corden smiled slow as Jase skirted another ripple in the earth. This was one easy way to make jack.

In the rear of the old four-by-four they used, the other two coldhearts who rode with Corden waited their call to action. Thornton yawned and scratched at the ginger stubble on his sharp chin. Nothing excited him until the moment he was called upon to act. Chambers ran a hand over his shaved skull repeatedly, a nervous action. Unlike the others, the dark-skinned coldheart always felt a gnawing in the pit of his stomach until the moment of action. Only then could he really relax.

“We ain’t gonna catch ’em in time,” he murmured.

“We will,” Corden drawled. “Jase ain’t let no fucker get away yet.”

“Always a first time,” Thornton muttered. “Just not today, Jase, just not today.”

Corden’s smile broadened. “You got some more gambling debts to pay?”

“Win some, lose some.” Thornton shrugged.

“Lose some, lose some.” Chambers added. “This guy’s good. Knew this ’un would be hard.”

“Nothing beats Jase for pace,” Corden chuckled.

“Never has, never will,” the wag driver said softly.

RYAN COULDN’T SEE the ruts before he was on them. The land ahead looked smooth; that was why he had opted to leave the blacktop behind to try to outrun the wag on their tail. Outrun enough to circle and take the offensive. Except it wasn’t quite working out as he had hoped. It was all he could do to keep the wag from tipping. The scrub—dark browns with a glimmer of green and some purple and blue to echo the sky—went by them in a blur, both near and in the distance. Over to the horizon, depending on which way he spun the wheel to try to ride another rut, there were the low outlines of hills leading to a plateau. Good cover, but too far away.

They were exposed. Ryan couldn’t see behind him, but from the terse epithets dripping from the lips of his companions, he was in no uncertain mind that their pursuers were gaining, with little hope of effective fire to push them back.

Their wag was powerful, with a tuned engine that was only now beginning to whine at the strain he was putting on it; a solid body with roll bars; no windows—bar the windshield—to either obstruct firing out, or to injure with flying glass from incoming fire; no roof; not armored, but a good, thickly steeled body and a four-wheel drive system. So, it was a wag made for endurance and a driver who knew how to pilot the vehicle. Ryan had escaped from too many similar situations to be caught easily. By the same token, he also knew that his pursuer was a wag jockey who was far, far superior. More importantly, he knew the territory too well.

“Gaining,” J.B. said shortly. “Mebbe a few more minutes, then they’re on us.”

“Can’t get a decent shot at them,” Krysty gasped, her breath coming short after a swerve had flung her against the wag’s central column.

“I would venture that perhaps these coldhearts are so per…sistent because they know what we carry,” Doc stammered between jolts, his frame flung around the interior of the wag.

“That’s not rocket science,” Mildred breathed. “I’d just like to get my hands on the bastard who talked.”

IF ONLY SHE KNEW IT, Mildred Wyeth would have been too late to extract revenge on their betrayer. Tilson was chilled, his sightless eyes staring into the sky as his corpse lay behind the bar he had, until a few short hours before, tended, the bar where he kept his eyes and ears open for any information he could sell.

Ling and Smith had been the inadvertent source of his tale. The two sec men for Big Bal Hearne, baron of Brisbane, had been admiring of the people they had so recently worked alongside. Too admiring, and too mired in brew.

“Still don’t see why Bal didn’t trust us with the job,” Smith had muttered.

“Specialist job needs specialist worker,” Ling slurred. “Look at it like this. We know these people. Mebbe Bal figured we were too close to things, couldn’t see what was going on under our own noses.”

“Fuck off. We’re good sec. Best there is. Wouldn’t keep jobs otherwise.”

Ling shook his head so hard he nearly fell off his stool. “Shit,” he muttered, grabbing the bar for support and looking around before he said anything else. He beckoned Smith nearer. Neither of them noticed Tilson. No one did. That was the secret of being a good bartender. And the secret of learning secrets.

“Doesn’t matter what we are. Mebbe Bal was right. How would we know? Point is that he got to be the baron he is by being careful. Eyes in his ass. Eyes on everything. Suspects every fucker. Trusts none of ’em, either. That includes us.”

“So why does he trust them?” Smith asked, his brow furrowing as he tried to make sense of Ling’s words through the fog of alcohol.

“Reputation. Word spreads by trader. Traders live or get chilled by how they run their convoys. Coldheart cheating bastards don’t last long. These guys rode too many convoys. Simple.” He shrugged and nearly fell off his stool. Righting himself again, he added, “Besides, they got it right, didn’t they? I wouldn’t have thought Alex had it in him to sell us out like that. Too stupe, for a start. ’Cept we were the stupes not to see what he was doing.”

Smith sighed heavily. “Sure could have done with that jack as bonus.”

Ling barked a short laugh that turned to a cough. He hawked, then said, “That ain’t all. Good wag and supplies for the six of them, too.”

“Fuck’s sake, why they get that?” Smith questioned, his eyes wide.

Ling shrugged. “Dunno. Guess it’s ’cause they missed the convoy out of town. Figure Bal would want them to go rather than wait for the next one.” He grinned when he saw the puzzled look on Smith’s face. “Know too much. Know Bal’s weak spot. Know the whole story. We don’t. Would you want them still around, knowing what they do?”

Smith’s puzzled frown grew more intent. “That’s a fuckload of knowing,” he muttered.

One thing Tilson knew: neither man would remember what they knew come the morning. Neither would, in all likelihood, remember a word of what they had discussed this night. The pair had drunk far too much. Tilson knew them well: not as men, but as customers. He knew their limits, had added shine to their brew when he realized their tongues were loosening. Knowledge was power. That was what “knowing” really meant.

It was late. The bar was quiet now. Only a few solitary drinkers and the two sec men remained. Tilson cast an eye over the dingy interior. He could slip out for a few moments and not be missed. Big Bal Hearne made his people work hard, in return for which they had a reasonably secure life. There was little else in this territory. Few people stayed out late when they had backbreaking work come sunrise.

Tilson left the drinkers and made his way to a rooming house down the sidewalk. It was a pretty fair bet he wouldn’t be seen, but he still maintained a level of caution.

The main door to the rooming house was unlocked. The hall was dark, but he knew his way along it by feel. His boots greeted each sagging floorboard and splintered crack like an old friend. On the steps, he knew which ones were liable to creak, and which ones he could tread securely.

Second floor. Third door on the left. As he reached it, he could hear the low murmur of voice within. Softly, he tapped on the door. Two quick, pause, two slow. The door opened a crack, the face in shadow from the dim glow of the oil lamp within. But the high-pitched giggle was unmistakable.

DEMETRIOU GIGGLED again. “On ’em soon enough.”

Corden looked over his shoulder and into the rear of the four-by-four. Chambers was wide-eyed, intense concentration on his face. He was cradling a blaster in one arm, the hand of the other unconsciously stroking the barrel. Thornton looked almost asleep, heavy-lidded eyes masking his expression. A remade Glock and an old PPK .38 were lying loosely in his lap, his hands barely touching them.

Corden’s weathered skin creased as he looked from one to the other. ‘Get ready, boys. Showtime.’

Thornton sat forward, his eyes barely opening any farther. “’Bout time. I’ve got a hot date with some craps, and this is taking way too long.”

Chambers shook his head. “Man, you’re gonna lose that before it’s even dented your pocket. Might not get a payday like this for some time to come. You should be more careful.”

“Like you, eh?” Thornton murmured with a sly grin. Chambers looked uncomfortable. He thought that his little jolt habit was a secret. He should have realized that a person couldn’t keep such secrets in a small ville like Brisbane.

Corden, seeing his expression, barked a harsh, loud laugh and reached across, clapping Chambers on the shoulder.

“Who gives a fuck, as long as you do the job. Just keep that in mind, boy.” With which, he turned back to the plain unfolding in front of them. There was less distance between the wags than before. With each turn the vehicle ahead made, it lost a little. With each spin of the wheel Demetriou made, they gained a little more.

It wouldn’t be long now. And while the four coldhearts rode every bump and dip in the plain, knowing from long experience where Demetriou’s driving could not avoid disturbance, Corden knew that the six people in the wag ahead would be bounced like a pig in a barrel, until their heads were ringing and they couldn’t see straight.

Easy meat.

“GAINING,” JAK SAID simply.

“How much?” Ryan snapped over his shoulder.

“Too much,” Krysty replied. She was in the front, next to Ryan, and had wedged herself—as much as was possible—between the seat and the dash. Her head was against the roof at an angle. She risked her neck, but at least she had some stability and her bastard ribs didn’t hurt so much. It also gave her a view that was the equal of the others, and another pair of eyes for the driver, who could not risk a backward glance.

“No way we’re gonna outrun them, lover. This is their land. We’re gonna have to stand and fight.”

“Always assuming, my dear, that we can work out which of them we should fire upon,” Doc said softly. “I fear that I will be seeing double, at the very least.”

“If we didn’t jump so much on this bastard surface, then at least we could get off some fire at them,” J.B. muttered as much to himself as to anyone else.

He knew what Mildred was about to say before the words came out of her mouth. It was the natural repost: “They know we can’t. That’s why they were so keen to follow us out here.”

Ryan’s mind whirred. That was the key: their pursuers’ knowledge of the territory had allowed them to bide their time. Just keep driving, and the land wasn’t going to get any flatter. Sooner or later someone would get injured—already had, if he was any judge of how Krysty had positioned herself—and if it was him then the wag crashed. They were making it easy for the coldheart bastards.

So give them something they wouldn’t expect.

“Stay frosty. This is gonna hurt,” the one-eyed man yelled as he threw the wag into a spin.

TILSON HAD NO INTIMATION of what would happen to him when Demetriou admitted him to the darkened room. He had some good information. Corden paid him well. In the wake of a convoy there was always someone who wanted to get out of the ville. They headed off, and no one knew if they ever reached their destination. No one cared. It was that simple. This time, there was more jack involved than usual. He should get paid well.

Not that this was the only kind of information he peddled. You fade into the background, keep alert and you hear all sorts of shit. Tilson knew that Corden would do anything to rake in the jack. And there were always things going down that Big Bal Hearne wouldn’t like, things that could be kept secret at a cost.

“So what brings you here when you should be tending bar?” Corden asked from where he sat on the room’s only chair. “Something good, I hope.”

Tilson told him as concisely as possible. He knew he had to get back to the bar.

Corden nodded, then shrugged. “Sounds good. We’ll keep an eye for them. The usual arrangement, right?” Tilson nodded. “Okay. Fuck off.”

Tilson had hurried out, closing the door behind him.

DEMETRIOU YELLED incoherently, throwing the wag into a spin and throwing Chambers and Thornton into each other, their blasters clattering to the floor of the vehicle, the noise mingling with their shouts of incomprehension and fury.

Corden, on the other hand, just smiled. Softly he said, “Well, well, they got balls, I’ll give ’em that. Even the bitches.”

Demetriou slewed the vehicle counter to the grain of the land, bucking as he hit a rise that he would otherwise have avoided. Corden braced himself, looked over his shoulder at the coldhearts in the rear.

“Ready to rumble, boys. Looks like they want some action.”

JUST AS CHAMBERS and Thornton had been taken by surprise, so, too, had the companions in the wag ahead. It was only the fact that there were four of them squeezed tighter in the rear of the vehicle that saved a greater injury.

“Ryan, what—”

“I get it. Take the fight to them.” J.B. grinned. “Why not?”

Ryan’s jaw was set tight in concentration, but still the ghost of a smile flickered across his lips. “Attack is the best form of defense.”

He was headed straight for the wag that had been pursuing them. For the first time, he got a clear look at his opponents. Two in front, two in back. The wag jockey had an intense, focused look about him. The man next to him—older, more battle-scarred—had a little more insouciance. A veteran. He didn’t get a clear look at the two in the back before the wag slewed to one side, trying to flank them. With their knowledge of the territory, he couldn’t let them do that. Ignoring the jolting, bone-rattling impact of each rut in the plain, he altered his own course so that he could stay head-on.

Krysty had maneuvered herself around so that she was facing front. Impact on one rut lifted her from her seat and slammed her against the dash, eliciting a yelp as her ribs felt like they were turning in and spearing her, driving the breath from her body.

Dust clouds from the two wags as they crossed paths and tried to circle back rose in swathes around the vehicles. The choking blanket obscured vision and trapped in throats and noses as it billowed into the glassless windows. Even in an attempt to counter the attack, Ryan might have miscalculated his play. The other wag had glass to keep the dust clouds at bay. They might not be able to see, but at least they weren’t choking.

Ryan tried to guide the wag over the treacherous terrain, but now even his visual guide was gone. In the yellow-ochre dust cloud he could see little more than a yard or two ahead.

Over the whine of their own engine, he could hear a keening note, growing louder, as the coldhearts’ wag bore down on them.

But from where?

TILSON DIDN’T EVEN KNOW what had hit him until it was too late. He’d made it back to the bar, where Ling and Smith were still deep in incoherent discussion, still half badmouthing their baron, and half holding back lest they be overheard and reported. The other drinkers stayed apart and kept their heads down, lost in their own private hells.

Tilson didn’t have to serve another drink between getting back and closing up. These guys didn’t really want to drink anymore, they just didn’t want to go home because of what awaited them, either awake or sleeping.

As he locked up, Tilson was kind of scared about what waited for him when he closed his eyes. Visions of Corden and Demetriou. Maybe of what they might do to him, which made him think a little more of how he felt about the two men: the way they had greeted his information, the way he had been dismissed…. It was not like usual. He couldn’t exactly say what it was that got under his skin, crawling like a roach up and down his spine, making him want to piss with fear. Just a feeling.

It should have made him careful. It should have made him look over his shoulder. But it didn’t. It just wrapped itself around him, making him look inward rather than out. The slightest noise should have made him start.

He didn’t notice Demetriou, waiting in the shadows for him. The young man was going to step out and take him before he had a chance to yell. Seeing how distracted he was, grinning to himself all the while, Demetriou decided to let him pass. Would Tilson spot him? Would he realize? That would make it more fun, like chasing rabbits.

Tilson was oblivious. Demetriou slipped out of the shadow, fell into step behind him. Nothing. He wasn’t even going to jump, turn around in fright, give Demetriou a chance to show how quick he was by cutting him before he could yell. This was boring. He needed to get it done with.

Demetriou quickened his pace and was on Tilson in three steps. One hand snaked around to cover his mouth. The other, holding a sharp blade, slipped up under the ribs at the back, piercing and twisting.

Tilson’s eyes bugged as the pain hit. Any sound was deadened by Demetriou’s hand and the blood that welled in his throat, filling his lungs. Already dark, the night slipped away to black.

Demetriou let Tilson fall back against him. Twisting the blade to break the vacuum of suction, the young man eased it out. He let Tilson slump, his face up, and looked into his eyes. Demetriou laughed softly before he melted back into the shadows, leaving the corpse alone in the alley, barely aware before its chilling that life had been snuffed like a candle.

Chapter Two

Ryan didn’t even get a chance to curse his shock as they were broadsided by the four-wheel-drive wag. Sky that was visible through the thinning clouds of dust as they rose now became perpendicular to the ground, the lurch of the vehicle as it reached its optimum tilt making their guts spin and churn.

The dust raised by the pursuit had served their opponents well. It had allowed them to flank and corner, to take their prey sideways-on and attempt to halt their progress by simply tipping them over.

But the dust also hindered Ryan’s aim.

Inside the wildly shuddering wag, Mildred and J.B. were thrown against each other and into Jak, who felt his ribs creak at the impact. Sandwiched between the two older companions and the side door of the wag, the albino teen felt breath squeezed from his body, saw flashing lights and stars in his head as he cracked it on the metal of the wag.

Doc was flung over the seats at an obtuse angle, his spine twisting in a way that he wouldn’t have thought possible. The back of his skull cracked on Krysty’s knee, and for a moment all went black before the rising bile in his gullet brought him back to wakefulness. He retched the thin strings over Krysty’s boots, and over the LeMat he had dropped in the shock of impact.

Ryan gripped the wheel. He could do nothing to right the vehicle, but an instinct—perhaps a finely tuned sense of balance—told him that the vehicle could not tip onto its side. There was something about the way in which it slowed and came to a halt, if only momentarily, that told him there was not enough momentum to tip them.

If they landed upright, there was still a chance. He tried to speak, to yell, to tell the others to ready their blasters. But with no breath in his body, and dust choking his lungs, all that emerged was a strangled, hoarse croaking.

The wag engine died. Outside, he could hear the engine of the other wag, purring and ticking over. It was still. Why?

Inside his wag, Ryan could hear the others painfully rasping and coughing as they sucked in breath and dust, trying to break past the pain caused by the collision. He forced himself to move, even though every muscle seemed to have lost its strength and solidity. He felt as if he was moving through quicksand, the dust in the air echoing the effect by his seemingly breathing the same way.

At the back of his mind he felt the urge to give in to the blackness that wanted to enfold him.

He knew he couldn’t do it, even though it seemed so inviting.

“WOO! JASE, what the fuck are you—”

Thornton, raised from his torpor by the impact, yelled at the driver of the coldhearts’ wag, slapping him on the back of the head. Demetriou turned in his seat and glared at Thornton, his eyes dead and cold, looking through his very being as they sized up how he could chill him, slowly and agonizingly. Chambers, eyebrow raised, watched Thornton shrink back.

Corden put a hand on Demetriou’s shoulder, turning him back to the wheel.

“Not now, Jase. He can keep, if you want. We got more important hunting.”

He spoke softly, and with no apparent urgency, even though he felt a quickening pulse in his chest. He knew from experience the way to deal with the young hothead. Jase was the best wag jockey he’d ever known. He was also a stone chiller, with no thought for any consequence. Fearless. Thornton was lucky not to have had his throat slit already.

They were wasting precious seconds while this continued. Corden looked out of the windshield. The dust raised by the close pursuit and stalk was now beginning to settle. Both wags had stopped moving. Closed windows let in little of the dust, but outside it was like looking at a wall. The purple-and-ochre-tinged blue of the sky was forming a larger slice of the picture framed by the windshield, but at ground level it was a wall of swirling brown hues.

Demetriou wasn’t sure of the other wag’s location. Then there was a break in the wall, the chance to hit the wag when they couldn’t see from where the strike would come. Corden didn’t have to tell the wag jockey what to do. Demetriou acted on instinct. He knew that the constant circling was losing his orientation, and thus his advantage. He knew that it evened the odds. And that was something none of them wanted. So he took his chance.

Only thing was, he didn’t bother to tell anyone of his plan. Corden had a split second of warning as the wag appeared from the swirling dust. Chambers was always braced for any dangers. His natural caution and nervousness served him well in this instance. Only Thornton had been blindsided.

And now they stared at the wag in front of them as the dust settled. Now, without the churning of the wags to stir it up, the dust fell rapidly to the ground.

“Shit, thought I’d put ’em on their side,” Demetriou whispered.

“Figured you had, too,” Corden agreed. “Still, gotta work with what we’ve got. Tell you something, that was one hell of a hit they took. Must’ve scrambled their brains a little.”

“Sure hope so,” Chambers murmured.

“Only one way to find out,” Thornton added. His hand had reached for the wag door before Corden had a chance to speak. Corden’s jaw tightened. He was supposed to be the chief here. He couldn’t have Thornton getting uppity and above himself.

“Wait, Sean,” Corden said mildly. The fact that he was so mild was a threat in itself. Thornton and Chambers had run with Corden long enough to know that he was at his quietest before he struck.

Thornton’s hand froze. Corden looked from Thornton to the windshield, taking in what was happening in front of them. As the dust began to lay flat back to the earth, he could see that the figures in the other wag were hardly stirring.

“Yeah. Let’s go, then. But take it slow. We know they’re good. Just a matter of how fucked up Jase got ’em.”

Demetriou giggled. “Fuck ’em up some more.”

KRYSTY GROPED for her blaster where it had fallen beneath the dash, then pulled herself upright. She hawked out a glob of dust-heavy phlegm and blinked heavily. Her eyes were running with tears, and her sight was blurry, but at least the grit was shifting. A wag stood about fifty yards from them. Four doors were opening, and a man was getting out of each, blaster in hand.

She could hear Ryan’s raw, painful breath behind her shoulder. She could sense when he was in trouble, when he was struggling. Now was such a time. Even though Krysty’s ribs felt like knives, her head was clear, and she could feel that he was struggling to clear his own.

She knew without looking in back that the others were beginning to stir. Jak, Mildred, J.B.—they were all moving, but they were slow. As fogged as Ryan.

Doc was an easier proposition. He was at her feet, coughing up the last of the bile jolted from him by impact. With a final spit, he picked up the LeMat and dusted it off with the tail of his frock coat, rising steadily to her level. Clear eyes on the wag a short distance away, he spoke without looking at her.

“My dear, when one’s mind is as apt to wander as mine, it is surprising what concussion can do to focus and center oneself.”

“Glad one of us is,” she murmured.

“Two, I think,” he replied. “We need time. Can we purchase such a commodity?”

“Only one way to find out,” she said, raising her blaster.

“Admirable,” Doc whispered, raising his own.

“THEY MAY BE POSSUM.” Corden gestured to his own blaster. “Shoot first.”

“Takes the fun out of it,” Demetriou snarled with a vulpine grin.

“Ain’t s’posed to be fun. S’posed to be business,” Chambers said from behind.

“Mix ’em up,” Thornton said with a snigger.

“Easy now,” Corden muttered as he stepped forward from the cover of the wag door. It was as much to himself as to any of the others. As soon as the coldheart broke cover, a shot from the wag ahead kicked up dust at his feet.

He fired a volley in reply as he stumbled back to the cover of the wag door. It whined as it hit metal and ricocheted into the blue sky.

“Possum it is,” Chambers said. “Gren?”

“Right, and whoever throws it is an open target, even with covering fire. ’Sides which, we blast that fucker and we lose what we’ve come out for in the first place.”

“So what do we do, then?” Thornton asked.

Demetriou smiled slyly.

“HOW WE DOING?” Krysty rasped as soon as she had snapped off a round.

“Fucked, but not chilled yet,” Jak replied. He had disentangled himself from Mildred and J.B., who were still struggling to clear concussed heads. Like Ryan, whose soft moans bespoke of his attempts to break through the concussive fog, they were temporarily out of action. It was down to the three who had clear enough minds.

“We can keep them at bay, but that’s about it for now,” Krysty said. “Reckon Ryan can get this wag going again?”

“Not likely,” Jak said shortly.

“So we can’t move, but they can,” Krysty whispered. “Big advantage.”

“A predictable one,” Doc countered, “as, I think, we are about to see.”

Sure enough, even as he spoke, the engine of the wag facing them sprang to life.

“YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS,” Chambers breathed.

“Why not?” Corden countered. “We don’t want them, we just want what they’re carrying.”

“But what if the wag goes up?”

“Won’t hit near the tanks,” Demetriou told him. “Side-on, near the tail. Spin ’em and scramble ’em. They ain’t got the firepower to stop us. Play with ’em a little.”

Chambers sat back, sighing softly. Crazies. Demetriou and Corden. Running with these stupes was doing nothing for his nerves. He felt his stomach lurch in agreement. Stealing and chilling was something he wanted to do because it was easier than breaking your back for Big Bal. Doing it with Corden’s crew wasn’t easier—no way.

Demetriou gunned the wag engine until it roared, put the wag into gear and released the brake.

Chambers closed his eyes as the wag shot forward.

“STUPE CRAZY bastards,” Krysty cursed. There was every chance that the idiots coming for them could total their own wag as much as they could overturn the wag—now a seemingly too flimsy shelter—in which she and her companions were clustered. It was as if these coldhearts didn’t care. Maybe their wag was the stronger. Maybe the front bars on the wag had been put to a test like this before.

It didn’t much matter. They had some firepower, but would it be enough to stop the oncoming wag, or at least to deflect it from its course?

“I think this may be one for me,” Doc said in her ear. He was whispering, but it still sounded loud and clear. Using the frame of the glassless window as a rest for the barrel of the LeMat, Doc took aim for the windshield of the oncoming wag.

If the coldhearts were crazies, then maybe they had met their match in Doc. The prematurely aged Tanner grinned, his strong white teeth reflective of the mad glint in his eye. This was a challenge he could relish. Only a fool would accept it. Doc was that fool. When you had seen all that he had seen, experienced three different eras and still been left alive, isolated and marooned, there was little else left but to accept the insane as the sane, and to rise to any challenge presented.

If the windshield was shatterproof, then the fire would harmlessly strike and be deflected. If the grille on the front of the wag was open enough to allow the inclusion of fire…

Squeeze that trigger soon enough, and maybe you could hit both targets.

All of that swept through the tangled and darkened skeins of Doc’s mind in the few moments it took him to rest the LeMat and squeeze. He didn’t worry too much about aim. Keep it straight, and the onrushing target would be hard to miss.

The impact of the shot charge held within the percussion pistol sounded loud and deafening in the confines of the wag. A cone of silence followed it as traumatized eardrums adjusted to the sudden concussion.

A single moment stretched to infinity and back as the grape shot of the pistol spread in the molten air, close enough to take all impact, distant enough to allow it to spread across the windshield and fender. By accident or design, Doc had picked the optimum moment.

The wag slewed away from its stationary adversary, throwing up a cloud of choking dust that obscured its path.

DEMETRIOU DIDN’T FEEL the shot and the glass shards that rained over his chest, face and thorax. All were hit head-on. Nervous jerks of a traumatized system made him spin the wheel, taking them off a collision course.

Corden had seen the raised and steadied barrel, had thrown himself down, yelling a blurted and incoherent warning, a noise that made no sense in syllables but said everything in tone. It was enough to make Chambers and Thornton dive to the ground.

Corden screamed in pain as he felt shards score his back. His head connected with the edge of door frame and dash, blurring those lines of pain. For a moment he almost lost the light, but his survival instinct kicked in. If this was going wrong and they had to fight back, then he needed to stay alert to stay alive.

Demetriou’s life snuffed as he fell heavily on the wheel. His foot hit the accelerator and the wag shot across the uneven plain. The jolting made it hard for the other three coldhearts to regain any kind of control, but that very lack of guidance saved them. One rut too many, and Demetriou’s corpse shifted in his seat, his foot sliding from the pedal.

The wag slowed.

THE DUST CLOUD SETTLED and Doc could see that his volley had met with some success.

“Even playing field, I think,” he murmured. “Level, the term might be.”

“Shut up, Doc,” Krysty replied. “Let’s see what they do next. How are we doing?” she questioned a little louder.

“Okay,” Jak stated.

“Not okay,” Ryan breathed in her ear. “Seeing bastard double. Stupe thing with one eye.”

“Watch our tails, then, lover,” she said gently. “No way are you going front line until that’s fixed. Mildred? J.B.?”

“Feel like a mule kicked me, but at least I can see straight,” the Armorer said wryly.

“Second that,” Mildred added. She looked beyond the confines of the wag to where their enemy had come to rest. “Real question is, how are they doing?”

“Badly, I hope.” Krysty looked over her battered but unbowed friends. “At least,” she added, “a lot worse than us. Because it’s going to get up close and personal, if I’m not mistaken.”

Chapter Three

Thornton and Chambers wasted no time with words. Before the dust settled, Thornton kicked open the door on his side of the wag, which faced away from their now revitalized opponents. He scuttled out onto the dusty, hard-packed earth, scrambling to the front wing of the vehicle. Chambers followed in his wake, opting to cover the rear end. It would leave him a little more exposed when he chose to take a shot, but safer in the meantime. Chambers was a believer in caution.

Corden, meanwhile, had opened the door against which his bloodied shoulder was wedged and slid out, face-first. He rolled over, grimacing as the dust and grit from the ground bit into the exposed flesh. Tears of pain ran down his face. Eyes up to the sky, he could see that the blue, bending to purple and ochre, remained unchanged. For him, though, things were far from the same. Now, he was driven by more than just greed. The need to take from them what they had taken from him—a life—was a burning desire.

“Wayne, you with us?” Thornton queried, concerned at Corden’s expression, the like of which he had never seen.

“Yeah…oh, yeah…” Galvanized into action, Corden pulled himself to his feet and joined Thornton in his long-range recce over the cover of the wag’s hood. “They can’t move, and if we go to them, then we expose ourselves. Right?”

Thornton agreed. Corden glanced down the length of the wag at Chambers, who nodded.

“Right. Then we need to take ourselves to them. I’ll replace Jase. Just get as much firepower as you can and start blasting when we get in range.”

“What if we—”

Corden’s hard-eyed, ice-cold stare choked Thornton’s query in his throat. Corden’s voice was low, deep in his own throat, and had an edge that would brook no argument. “We chill those fuckers. I don’t care if it’s quick or slow. Slow’s better. But they buy the farm. If we get Hearne’s jack, then even better. But that don’t really matter now. They got one of ours. That’s what matters.”

With that, Corden pulled open the door of the wag and climbed in, keeping his head low. Thornton looked back at Chambers. The dark coldheart shrugged, gesturing helplessly. There was little they could do except go along with it. Corden was boss, and they were used to following without question.

Inside the wag, Corden gently closed Demetriou’s eyes. The young coldheart had slumped so that his torso had fallen into the well between the seats. Corden cradled his head.

“They won’t get away with this,” he whispered to the chilled man. Heaving the deadweight body upright, he reached across the bloodied lap and flicked the catch on the driver’s door. Pushing it open, he heaved the body so that it fell toward the gap, pitching off the seat and into a heap on the ground.

The engine was still ticking over, the gear preventing it from moving. Corden closed the driver’s door, then called to Chambers and Thornton.

Chambers entered the rear of the wag once more, while Thornton took Corden’s old post. Now he was riding shotgun, and would have a clear arc of fire through the shattered windshield.

“You know what we should do,” Corden said in a toneless, dead voice. “I’ll set her rolling, and then we just start blasting. Don’t give them a chance to fire back.”

“Wait—”

Corden looked back at Chambers. “Lost your nerve? If you have, then I’ll—”

“No need for us to do anything, Wayne,” Chambers interrupted him. “Stop a second…Can’t you feel it?”

Corden frowned. What was Chambers talking about? But wait…His grim visage cracked into a grin wreathed in malice.

“Yeah, I can, now. Looks like we won’t have to worry about anything. The spirits are gonna take care of ’em, right?”

Chambers nodded. “Spirits, nuke shit, call it what you want, Wayne. But it’s coming. And they ain’t been around these parts long enough to know anything about it. They won’t survive it.”

“Neither will we. Not if we don’t get the fuck out of here soon,” Thornton added, looking through the blasted windshield and up at the skies. There was no sign above them, but the air around was charged, like static electricity. The previously airless plains had the slightest of breezes, carrying that charge across the empty expanse.

Corden looked out of the wag, down at Demetriou’s corpse. Maybe a proper burial would have been good. Stop the mutie critters getting him, using him for carrion. But what the hell. Jase was gone. That piece of chilled flesh wasn’t him. Not anymore.

Corden smiled as he looked across at the wag that held their erstwhile opponents. “They’ll be expecting us to attack. Won’t know what the fuck to think when we hightail it outta here. Makes it kinda sweeter, doesn’t it?”

“Guess it does, Wayne,” Chambers agreed. He would have agreed to anything at that moment, as long as it got Corden turning the wag and headed back toward Brisbane.

Corden put the wag into gear and spun it almost 360, so that they headed away from the stranded wag and back toward the blacktop they had seemingly left so long ago.

“WHAT—” MILDRED FOLLOWED the progress of their one-time pursuers with a rising sense of bewilderment.

“That no way attack. Something wrong,” Jak commented tersely.

“Sure as shit is,” J.B. muttered. “Why come all this way, push it this far, and then…”

“Unless, my dear John Barrymore, there is a greater danger in the offing than perhaps they would wish to deal with?” Doc mused.

Krysty scanned the land around. There was nothing visible except the receding dust trail of the retreating wag. “Can’t see a thing. But…” She was aware of how tightly her hair was clinging to her neck, snaking down her back as though searching for cover.

“But?” Mildred queried.

“Feel it,” Jak whispered. “Not coldheart trouble. Something worse.”

A distant hum in the air, like the thrumming of a taut wire, was all the indication they had of anything amiss. There seemed to be no account for the coldhearts’ sudden withdrawal. Yet still that gnawing at the pit of the companions’ stomachs said that there was something very bad on the way.

Without a word, both Jak and Krysty got out of the wag, stiff, sore limbs protesting at the movement. Krysty winced as she could feel her ribs creak and tighten with every breath. Both she and Jak stood still and silent on the plain, looking slowly around. The air was moving more than previously. There was no reason why there shouldn’t be a breeze, so why did it feel uncomfortable and unnerving? It took both of them only a few minutes to realize that there seemed to be no direction from which the air moved. One second it seemed to be westerly, the next it was from the east. Or else it seemed to come from the north, only to switch south when confirmation was sought. Even more so, there was no pattern to these changes. They seemed to be either random or in such an extended sequence that it was difficult to follow the pattern.

Jak and Krysty exchanged puzzled looks. The albino teen’s normally impassive face was twisted into a questioning look.

Before either could say anything, sounds from behind them indicated that the others had come out into the open. Krysty turned to see Doc stretching, black-clad limbs twisted against the empty backdrop of the sky. J.B. stared, puzzled, at the sun as the breezes plucked at the folds of material on the backpack that held his ordnance stash. Mildred was making Ryan lean forward so that she could check his good eye for any signs of concussion.

“How you feeling, lover?” Krysty asked.

Ryan grunted. “Like shit.”

“But not concussed shit,” Mildred added dryly. “You’ll be okay. What’s with the coldhearts?” she added, indicating the direction in which their attackers had fled.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Krysty murmured. “Doesn’t feel like it’s good, though.” She looked around, aware that even as she spoke, the winds had begun to pick up. There were no clouds in the sky, yet the air was becoming charged with the kind of energy that preceded a storm.

“We find cover, quick,” Jak said matter-of-factly. Ryan looked around. Apart from the battered wag, there was precious little else that could provide cover. The black-and-green dappled hills of the plains were distant. The scrub within a radius of about five hundred yards was sparse. A few clusters of rock dotted the spaces between, but these were low to the ground and of little substance.

The wag had a windshield, but no other glass to provide protection from the elements. But they had tarps covering the supplies. Just maybe…If it was an electrical storm, the frame should conduct any lightning hits. If it was strong enough to blow the wag across the plains, well, it could do that, and it could buffet them wherever else they sought shelter out here.

Even as those thoughts raced rapidly through his mind, he was aware that tracers and eddies of dust were beginning to swirl around his feet, reaching up past his ankles.

Looking up, he could see that J.B. had reached the same conclusion and was already heading back to the wag. Ryan indicated that the others should follow suit. It was only when he saw that Doc had stopped that he turned to face where the old man stared.

“Fireblast,” the one-eyed man whistled softly.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc murmured.

In the distance, a column of dust had risen into the air. As they watched, it grew in height and width from a zephyr to a tornado, then shrank again before rising once more. It seemed to pulse, as though with a life of its own. It was moving toward them at speed. The dust eddies around their ankles had now risen almost to their knees. The breezes that had raised the dust plucked at their calves.

The others were already in the wag. The window openings facing the oncoming storm had already been blocked out by the heavy, dark tarp. J.B. was covering the rear opening. Krysty looked at Ryan and Doc.

“Come on—what are you waiting for?” she yelled.

Ryan was shaken from his reverie and moved toward the wag. The dust eddies were now bigger, stronger. He blinked and coughed as dust began to clog his nose and throat.

Then it hit him. Rain he would have expected, perhaps a rock or stone picked up in the force of the zephyrs that crossed and recrossed to make the approaching maelstrom. But while the object was not as hard or as sharp, it still dealt a heavy blow to his shoulder, but not enough to cause pain. Another of the objects hit him on the side of the head, thrown sideways and kept aloft by the counterflows of the air currents. As it slapped against his head, Ryan was shocked to hear it make a noise.

He stumbled forward, hit time and again by these objects, sure that at times they made deep noises that seemed familiar. Ryan felt soft squelching underfoot, the hard-packed surface of the plain now a shifting, uneasy and uneven mass that seemed to move, give, then be uneven again. As he reached the wag, the one-eyed man looked down, and through the murk of the dust motes, he was sure he saw…

Frogs?

Momentarily he faltered, unsure if that blow on the head had affected his senses in some way. Then he heard Krysty and Mildred calling to him through the thickening swirls of dust, and he pressed forward. Already, any sense of depth or distance was rendered a matter more of luck than judgment, and he almost ran into the wag before he saw it. Hands clutched at him, pulling him into the wag’s quieter, less dust-riddled interior, as the heavy rain of frogs splattered around him. Inside, they sounded loud and booming on the roof, a constant tattoo against which it was almost impossible to make yourself heard.

J.B. and Jak had secured every window opening except that on the door through which he had been dragged. Tendrils of dust snaked around the barely secured tarp, which the two men now held over the opening while Mildred helped Ryan into the rear of the wag. It was possible to breathe in the wag’s interior, and he took several deep breaths, his head swimming. It was dark, as J.B. had secured a tarp over the windshield, too, as a precaution against the storm shattering it and showering them with glass. But even in the gloom, Ryan could see Mildred’s amused expression, her eyes torn between trepidation and amusement.

“I know. It’s raining of frogs. Go figure. They used to have myths about that when I was a kid, but I didn’t think I’d have to wait until I’d been frozen, defrosted and seen the future before I’d witness it. Now I really have seen everything.”

“But how—”

“I don’t know. Maybe the crosswinds have whipped them up from some river running across the plains. Let’s face it, it’s so weird out there it could have brought them from anywhere.” She shrugged.

Ryan looked around. “Doc?”

“Stupe bastard still out there,” Jak said shortly. “Quick recce.”

J.B. nodded, and the two men let the tarp drop for a second before slamming it back into place as frogs and dirt slewed through the gap.

As the darkness came down once more, they were all left with one image searing their collective retinas. Through a swirl of dust and dirt that made him seem as though he were painted on parchment, Doc was whirling in the winds, moving with the currents, laughing maniacally as he was bombarded by frogs. It seemed as though he didn’t even notice the impact.

“Crazy old buzzard’s going to get himself killed,” Mildred muttered. “I’m going after him—”

“If anyone does it, it should be me,” Ryan said, preparing to move out before being stayed by a hand from the Armorer.

“I’ll go with Millie,” he said. “You’re still not up to speed, and it’ll take two of us to get that mad bastard in here.”

Before Ryan had a chance to protest, J.B. had flung open the wag door, and both he and Mildred were swallowed up by the maelstrom. Jak struggled to pull it shut, needing Krysty’s assistance to secure the tarp once more, and let the dust and frogs that had blown in settle on the floor of the vehicle. The frogs that had survived the buffeting of the storm croaked contentedly in their new haven, at odds with the emotions of the three humans with whom they shared shelter.

Time seemed to slow to a drip as they waited for a signal that J.B. and Mildred were returning with the errant Doc. There was nothing.

“Have to risk another look,” Ryan said.

Jak agreed, and indicated to Krysty that she be ready to let the tarp fall for a second. When it had been returned, and they had coughed up the dust that had swirled in, they were also aware of a new problem: insects buzzing around the interior of the wag. Slapping them down, Ryan could see that they were locusts.

If these scavengers had been added to the swirl outside, then there was no knowing what they could do to Doc, or Mildred and J.B. They could eat anything in their path, living or chilled: they had all seen evidence of this in the past.

“They not back soon, go after,” Jak said. He looked at Ryan in a way that forbade any argument. Ryan simply nodded. He understood.

And yet, for a moment, it seemed that this wouldn’t be necessary. Cutting through the howling winds were the sounds of approaching footsteps and Doc’s keening, madness-inflected tones.

“I tell you…You know your scriptures better than any of us here in this place forsaken by the good Lord, my good doctor. You know what they foretell—plagues that will rain down upon those who are the unjust and the unrighteous. Locusts that will sweep through the land, stripping it back to the bare, glistening bones so that the way is paved for the fresh and the good to rise from the remains. This is what it is. At last, this could be the salvation for which I have so often prayed. This nightmare could at last be ending.”

There was the mumble of J.B.’s voice.

“Unhand me! I shall not go softly and gently. Unhand me, I say.”

The scuffling increased, there was a yell of pain, and Doc’s voice, raging incoherently, retreated into the distance, buried by the wailing of the winds. It was followed by the shouts of Mildred and J.B. as they followed.

Jak looked to Ryan. In the dim light, the one-eyed man could see the tension written in Jak’s scarred and weathered visage. He nodded, almost imperceptibly.

The albino youth needed no second bidding. Before Krysty had a chance to realize what was going on, Jak had opened the wag door a sliver and squeezed through. Ryan reached out and closed it behind him.

“Who’s next, you or me, lover?” she questioned, her voice dripping disbelief at the way in which they seemed to be breaking all their own rules.

“Whatever it takes. Sometimes we’ve just gotta stand or fall as one.”

Chapter Four

“Doc, Doc…” Mildred’s tone was half imprecation, half resignation. Her words were choked and strangled by the dust that swirled around her, frogs battering her head and shoulders, locusts buzzing and swarming around her, singing in her ears as she batted them away. She could feel the occasional plucking of a locust as it came close to her, experimentally prodding and poking to see if she should be a good source of food.

Why the hell had she and J.B. left the shelter of the wag to come out here after the crazy old buzzard? If he wanted to act like some fire-and-brimstone preacher and wander into the wilderness to meet his maker, then what business was it of theirs? Too many times he had endangered the group; too many times he had—

Even as the angry thoughts passed through her mind she knew that she already had the answer. Doc was like her: cast adrift on the choppy currents of time and fate, with no options as to when and where he would finally hit land. Hell, there were times when she had envied him his insanity. Sometimes it seemed a much more pleasant place to live than where they had actually come to rest. Like all of the people she traveled with, Doc was an outcast who had sought some sort of sanctuary among those who also sought survival with some kind of moral boundary.

When was the last time she had consciously thought of morality? She guessed that it was something that had informed her actions in the time since she had awoken, but to stop and consider would be madness. She became all too aware that these thoughts were a symptom of the terrible weariness that now swept over her, enveloping her like a blanket. It was warm, fuzzy, and she wanted to lie in the sand…

It felt soft and yielding beneath her, like something that rippled pleasantly. She remembered a water bed that Ed Stasium had. She was at college then, so that had to have been the late 1980s? She wondered what Ed was doing now. Yeah, he’d be chilled. Like everyone she knew….

Mildred realized that her mind was beginning to wander, and at the very back of her brain a survival instinct was screaming at her to get the hell up, shake her head clear and find shelter. Or Doc. Preferably both. But her body didn’t want to obey.

Why the hell did the plains feel like a water bed? Through her clogged nostrils there was a dank, earthy smell. Then one of the frogs croaked, loud and sonorous as it lay near her ear.

Mildred cursed and, still feeling like she was in a strange dreamworld, tried to scramble herself to her feet. The frogs were slippery, moving under the grip of her boots. The palms of her hands felt the cold skins slip and slide as those frogs that survived the fall from the sky sought to move from under the weight of her hands. Every time she thought she had purchase, she found herself slipping and falling once more to the ground.

And then she felt a hand grip her upper arm, an iron band around her biceps that squeezed tight as it pulled her up. She winced at the pain but appreciated the assistance. She had a scarf wrapped around her face, as much as was possible, so that she could keep out the worst of the flying grit. Still she had to squint. Was that Doc?

No, it couldn’t be. The grip was too firm, the momentum of the lift too strong. She could see J.B. standing beside her. His glasses were almost entirely obscured by dirt, although areas of his face had remained clean, protected by the brim of his battered fedora. In that way the dazed and confused had of putting inconsequence before all else, she wondered how it was that he had managed to keep the hat secured to his head. She opened her mouth to ask and somehow—by bizarre chance—a locust managed to penetrate the mask of her scarf and fly into her mouth. She choked and bit down hard. The buzzing, which she had felt amplified in the cavern of her jaws, ceased suddenly as she clamped down and bit the insect in two. A foul, bitter taste filled her mouth, and she spit it out. Part of the insect became trapped in the scarf, and she pawed frantically to pry it loose.

J.B. pulled the scarf away, shaking the partial insect remains loose, and then he slapped her sharply across the face.

Instinct told her to hit him back, yet as she made to raise her arm another part of her kicked in—that which had remained alert and yet trapped at the back of her mind, screaming, now burst through the barriers.

“Doc,” she said simply.

J.B. shrugged and indicated in the direction from which she assumed he had appeared.

“Gone,” he said simply. “Too much shit. Shelter.”

She nodded. It had been misguided to try to find Doc, no matter what their motives. All they could do now was to try to find somewhere to sit out the rest of the storm. To try to work out direction right now would be pointless. In this world of dust, frogs and locusts there was little indication of what was up or down, let alone east, west, north and south. Doc could be anywhere. So, for that matter, could be the wag in which the others were waiting for them.

The only thing they could really hope for right now was that this bastard storm would soon abate.

Still clinging to J.B., her own limbs jellied and refusing to respond to her command, Mildred moved through the whipping storm. It occurred to some part of her that the locusts were nowhere near as destructive as she would have expected. She recalled stories from her predark days of fields stripped within minutes. From more recent times, she could remember animals and people stripped to the bone by postskydark mutie locusts. If these, too, were muties, then thank God that the mutation had made them seemingly less vicious and harmful. Although it did seem so contrary to the way of the world as to be remarkable.

The frogs still rained down on them, enough to form a slithering cover across the ground, yet not enough to drive Mildred and J.B. down with sheer weight of numbers. Still, the battering was enough to make shoulders and necks sore, to hit with such force as to occasionally make them stumble. Balance was also disrupted by attempts to swat away the locusts that still buzzed in and out. And there was the dust and dirt, still moving in crosscurrents. That was another puzzle: surely the weight of dust that clogged nostrils and throats should have suffocated them by now? Yet still they were able to breathe, labored though it was.

By now, they had no idea of direction. J.B. was leading her blindly, she realized, just hoping that, by sheer blind instinct—and maybe luck—they could find something or somewhere in which they could find shelter.

They almost stumbled over it. The swirling, dark brown to black atmosphere made it impossible to see more than a yard or two in front of them, if that. Distance was something for which they now had no yardstick. Under their feet, the carpet of amphibians ceased, replaced by a ledge of something hard and jagged.

Remembering what she had observed shortly before the storm came down on them, she realized that if they had reached the scant cover of small rock outcrops, then they had to have strayed some distance from the wag. Could they have really trudged that far, in this kind of storm?

Guided by J.B.’s hand, hardly able to even see him as the winds howled around them and the dust whipped and scoured at their skin, Mildred found herself being laid down in the shallow shelter of the outcropping. Even lying flat, feeling the jagged edges of rock bite through her clothing, she was barely below the parapet formed by the uppermost points of the rock. She felt J.B. lay down beside her, pulling some kind of sheet over them. Following the lead of his touch, she tucked the edges of the material under her body, as some kind of attempt at anchoring it in place. She felt the material go taut as he did the same.

Like a tightened drum skin, the material reverberated as frogs bounced off it. Beneath, although it was dark and hot in the enclosed space, it was a little easier to breathe. The absence of dust and dirt in the air was a welcome respite. Mildred felt her chest ease, and her raw throat found some relief. She still had the sour taste of the locust in her mouth. Right now, she would give anything for water. Her canteen was pinned beneath her; she could feel it pressing beneath her ribs. To try to get at it, to pry it free and find the room to move her arms and drink from it, would demand that their shelter be moved. There was the risk that it would be whipped away by the wind.

Mildred could wait.

Her right arm was raised, her hand by her face. Numbness spread through it as the blood supply was staunched by her own body weight. To try to keep it alive, to stop the pins and needles that began to irritate under the skin, she prodded experimentally at her face.

She was shocked. Even with the scarf, there had been enough of the swirling dust and dirt to scour away the top layer of her skin. Numb from the cold of the winds, she had figured that this was why her face did not pain her. And yet, to her surprise, the skin still felt smooth and unblemished. No warm, wet blood. No grazing or roughness. No sudden, sharp tingling of pain when the exposed flesh was touched.

There was something here that made no sense, that indicated a strangeness that she would have to master to ensure survival. Whatever it was, she knew that it was vital she keep it at the forefront of her mind.

But it was so hard. Weariness crept over her, the numbness in her arm spreading throughout her body, sleep beckoning to her.

She could feel J.B.’s body heat against her, and it lulled her weary mind all the more. Fighting it became harder and harder.

Consciousness slipped away.

“REVELATIONS. THE time of the beast is upon us, and we shall face up to the consequence of all the actions that have led us to this point. The plagues have been sent to teach us the error of our ways and we shall atone. We shall be forced to face up to that which we have perpetrated.

“And why not, I ask of you? By the Three Kennedys, mankind shall speak to Mother Earth and be forced to account for the way in which she has been raped and violated. She has struck back, at the behest of her—and our—Father, and we shall perish in the flames of her wrath.”

Doc’s ranting voice, already lost to all hearing in the maelstrom around him, tailed off into a cackle of manic laughter that degenerated into a hawking, coughing fit as dust and locusts clogged his nose and throat. He retched and spit phlegm onto the ground, spattering a frog that strayed too close to his range.

Rubbing his eyes and looking down, Doc saw the frogs that moved around the toes of his boots, obscuring the ground in a carpet of crawling, leathery skin. Remembering, somewhere in the fevered depths of his imaginings, something he had once read about the hallucinogenic properties of the mucus that oiled the backs of a particular species of frog or toad—he could not recall which, and did not at that moment care to differentiate—he bent to the winds that holed around him and picked up an amphibian from the floor of the plains.

He lifted the creature and turned it to face him, so that the impassive, dark eyes of the frog met his own.

“So, my friend,” he said softly, “we find ourselves, both, little more than pawns at the mercy of an unseeing, unfeeling hand. Our destinies are preordained for us as, at this moment, we are witnesses to the greater powers seeking to flex their metaphysical muscles. But why am I bothering to explain this to you, little friend, as you are nothing more than a frog. I wonder what I shall see if I lick your back…by God, it is some time since I was able to say that to anybody, let alone to anything.”

With which, Doc turned the frog and raised it to his lips. Flicking his tongue out in a manner that was, in itself, reptilian, he licked the back of the creature. It tasted foul. He grimaced, threw the frog to the ground and spit the resulting sputum from his mouth with haste.

“So much for that,” he muttered. Then he laughed once more and threw his arms wide, beginning to spin in a circle. He threw his head back and began to cackle wildly as he spun, trying to catch the insects, dirt and frogs in his mouth. He wished to drown in the excrescence of the storm. It had come to them as a punishment, so let it punish him. He wished to be claimed by the elements, to be negated and wiped from the earth. If the end times were here, then let him welcome them with these open arms.

And yet the insects that buzzed around him did not attack, did not fly into his gaping maw. The frogs missed, hitting him on the shoulders and outstretched arms, yet not in the face. The dirt that swirled in the crosscurrents of the storm whipped across his skin, yet did not block his air passages nor settle on his tongue. He wished to be claimed, yet the elements refused.

Tears of frustration replaced the manic laughter. They coursed down his cheeks, making runnels in the dirt that covered his face. The constant whirling began to make him dizzy, the ground uncertain beneath his feet as his inner ear became confused and his balance became unsteady. The circles he proscribed on the floor of the plain became wider, more elliptic and erratic. He stumbled sideways, felt the ground seemingly move beneath his feet. His outstretched arms windmilled wildly as he tried to keep his balance.

But it was of little use. One eccentric circle too far, and he found the ground shift beneath his boots just a little too much for him to compensate. Momentum pulled him over, and he found himself falling to the ground, his head still spinning as though he were whirling. Nausea pitched in the pit of his stomach, and he thought that he might vomit.

It was his last thought before his head cracked against the hard ground, squashing unsuspecting amphibians beneath him, their flimsy skeletons providing no cushion against the hard-packed earth.

Doc, like Mildred in another place, also lost consciousness.

JAK WAS LOST—physically, and also inside his head. The former was nothing: a temporary loss of bearings had happened many times before, and all it took was time, and the chance to stop and take bearings. In a situation like this, where it was now impossible to see anything—up, down, forward, backward—because of the clouds of dirt that swirled around in the crosscurrents, it was a matter of shelter, rest and wait until such time as it was clear. Even the frogs and the locusts didn’t bother him. The way they buzzed and bounced around him was irritating, sure, but Jak had experienced a whole lot worse over his life. This was nothing. Find shelter, hunker down, wait.

No, it wasn’t any of that that caused him to feel the dark clouds of fear edging into his consciousness. It was something else. Something that was, for the most part, alien to him. A feeling that he had only rarely experienced, and then only in the relative safety of dreams.

Dark doubts began to assail him. He had left the shelter of the wag to find J.B. and Mildred; and, in turn, to help them get Doc to safety. But now he was wandering in a storm, with no sign of shelter and no sign of those he had set out to find. Tracking, hunting, finding people and animals: that was Jak. He was a hunter. A good one. Without that he was nothing.

And he was failing. Had failed. He was alone.

Failure.

Jak stopped walking. He stood simply, with no defensive or offensive posture. There was no point. He could sense no danger: in truth, he could sense nothing. The hearing, smell and sight that served him so well had been reduced to nothing. He was nothing.

Looking slowly around, trying to focus those senses that had served him so well, he became aware that he had no notion of anything living that was near to him. He had no idea of where his friends might be, where the shelter of the wag may be, or even if they were alive or chilled.

He had no idea of where he was. It was as though the storm had formed a cocoon of dust and dirt around him. He was contained within it, and had no idea of what may exist outside the immediate area that was all he could see, hear or feel. Even the locusts that buzzed around him, and the frogs that fell at his feet, seemed to have no real substance. His awareness of them had become reduced so that they were little more than the vaguest of distractions. He could no longer smell the earthy scent of the amphibians, nor feel the flutterings of the insects as they passed his face, ears and eyes.

Such a complete negation of his being made Jak feel empty and alone. Alone was not such a new feeling: Jak had never been a person who was close to anyone—at least, not for so long—but this was more than that. This was a complete desolation.

And if there was nothing—not even himself—then what was the point of continuing to exist?

Jak sank to his knees. For what was possibly the only time in his life, Jak paid no heed to anything around him. There was no need to keep triple red. No need to be aware of any dangers. No need for anything other than to just give in to the darkness that was beginning to envelop him.

Without any resistance, Jak allowed it to take him.

“ANY SIGN?” Ryan asked as he rubbed the aching area over his good eye. Zigzag lines in white crossed his vision, each line accompanied by a searing pain in his skull.

Krysty risked another look beyond the tarp at the swirls of dirt that now seemed to constitute the very air.

“Nothing. Can’t see or hear a thing. Sweet Gaia, I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”

She was finding it hard to think. Those few locusts that had penetrated the tarps were buzzing annoyingly around the inside of the wag. Each time she smacked one down, it seemed that there were two more to take its place. The rain of frogs beat an insistent and arrhythmic tattoo on the roof and hood of the wag. And always, in the back of everything, there was the moaning of the winds that drove dust and dirt at them.

In the midst of all that, how the hell did Ryan expect her to hear the cries of Jak, J.B., Mildred and Doc? Maybe they had found one another. Maybe they were all wandering around, close to one another yet unable to see or hear in the confusion. Maybe they’d all bought the farm…This latter she did not wish to consider, yet it still prodded at her consciousness.

Why had it happened this way? Not the storm: that was just one of those things, the kind of hazard that they encountered almost every day of their lives. No, what she wondered was why, when Doc had wandered off, Mildred and J.B. had been so quick to get after him. Why Jak had followed seemingly without any thought or consideration. Why Ryan had let them. Why she had let them, come to that.

Ryan was concussed, not thinking clearly. Confused at the very least. As she looked at him, she could almost see the struggle manifest itself physically as he moved uneasily, rubbing his head and grimacing in pain.

None of them had acted totally as themselves—even herself—and it was getting worse. Both Ryan and she were trapped in this wag as surely as if it had been a locked room. Unable to move, caught in an agony of indecision.

They would sit it out until the storm abated. Not because that was the best course of action, but because they could think of nothing else to do. While, outside, their friends may be facing the farm on their own.

Krysty tried to move. Nothing. Her limbs were heavy, almost paralyzed. Yet it was a paralysis in which there was still feeling. A heavy torpor washed over her. She had no strength

It was such an alien feeling that it should have terrified her. Yet even this capacity was now beyond her grasp.

She felt all awareness begin to recede into an infinite distance.

Chapter Five

Mildred was aware, first, of the tingling ache in her arm. It stirred her, deep in her slumber, and she moaned softly as she tried to move her arm, to relieve the symptom. But it refused to budge. Penetrating deep into her subconscious, it made her slip from the warm blanket of unconscious and into the cold of the conscious.

And hell, was it cold. As she rose to the surface, she felt the cold that had seeped into her limbs. It was only then that she realized that her arm was beneath her, hand still raised to her face. Not that she could feel it.

She shuffled in the tight constraint of the sheet that covered both herself and J.B. The Armorer was quiet beside her and did not immediately stir as she moved against him. For a moment she wondered if he was alive, but his steady breathing reassured her. For such a small, wiry man he was proving to be one hell of a deadweight.

Heaving, Mildred managed to move him enough to free her arm. She gasped as the tingling fled, a weakness spreading through the limb as she tried to flex it. She paused, counted to twenty, then tried again. This time, it felt more like normal.

She took a chance at sitting up, moving the edges of the sheet from where it was tucked beneath her body. A wan light penetrated the thin material, and there was silence beyond the veil it provided.

One good thing—the storm had ceased. As the sheet slid down her body, she propped herself up on her elbows and looked around.

The sun was on the rise. It had to be morning, she thought. The sky was as it had been the afternoon before, clear, yet tinged with strange coloring. There was no sign that a storm had swept across them.

More importantly, there was no sign of the wag or their fellow travelers.

Mildred got to her feet. Cramp ached and bit into her calves, but she stamped it out. The sound of her feet roused J.B., who mumbled and grumbled his way to the surface of waking while she looked around.

“I’ll tell you something, John. We’re well and truly screwed.”

“I’ve always liked your positive outlook,’ the Armorer husked wryly as he, too, rose to his feet and joined her.

The land that spread in a vista around them was empty and impassive. Flat plainlands spread to all corners of the horizon, broken only by the distant plateaus of hill and mountain ranges, spread unevenly. In between these distant markers and the place where they stood was little except the occasional patch of scrub and rock, and those ridges in the earth that were invisible to the naked eye.

“How the hell did we manage to come so far that we’ve lost sight of the others?” Mildred whispered.

J.B. didn’t answer for a moment. He scanned the horizon, turning a full 360 degrees.

“It shouldn’t be possible,” he said finally.

“Yeah, well, I don’t see anyone else. And what happened to us yesterday shouldn’t have happened, either. But it did. The question now is how we’re going to find them again. Or anything, come to that.”

J.B. was lost in thought, gathering in the sheet that had served them so well. Replacing it in his backpack, he pulled out his minisextant.

“I’ll see if I can work out how much we’ve moved,’ he murmured as he took a reading and ran calculations in his head. Then, after a short pause, he added, “It doesn’t add up. According to my calculations, we must have walked about four miles. And we should still be able to see the wag.”

Mildred stared at him. J.B. was rarely mistaken on such matters.

“How can we have come that far? There wasn’t enough time…at least, it didn’t seem like it was that long.” The more she thought about it, the less sense the previous day was beginning to make. “So where’s Doc? Where the hell can that wag have been hidden?”

J.B. just shook his head. He was as baffled as Mildred. The only thing he could think of was to take action. Experience taught him that action usually started a chain of events.

“I dunno about Doc. Mebbe we’ll find him, mebbe the old bastard really has got himself lost this time. But if we start to go that way—” he indicated a south-southeast direction “—and keep on going, we should hit where the wag is supposed to be. Mebbe Ryan got it going again, and they’ve headed off in the wrong direction trying to find us. If so, then mebbe we’ll find some tracks to follow.’

Mildred shrugged. As a plan, it wasn’t the best she’d ever heard. But right now, she couldn’t come up with anything better.

Stopping only to eat from some self-heats that they carried as emergency rations, and sipping sparingly from their canteens, they began the long trek back in the direction that J.B. had determined had been their point of departure.

With every yard that they covered, Mildred expected to see a dust-covered bump on the ground that would turn out to be Doc, alive or having gone to face the judgment of which he had been ranting when last seen. She scanned the land around with every step, but there was no sign. Perhaps the old buzzard had managed to survive yet again.

They trudged across the hard-packed plain, small zephyrs of dust raised by the steady, rhythmic marching of their feet. The sun rose inexorably, and the temperature rose sharply, unimpeded by the clear skies. J.B. had his fedora to shade him from the worst of the heat, while Mildred improvised a covering for her plaits, using a little of her precious water to dampen the cloth before tying it around her head.

They had been walking for several hours when there was the first intimation of any life on the plain other than their own.

Silence had been the norm, to preserve energy and avoid the need to moisten their tongues as much as the lack of anything to say. But now, J.B. broke that long silence.

“What is that? Two o’clock,” he added, indicating an area where there was a cloud of dust raised near the horizon.

“Where’s it coming from?” Mildred asked. It was still some way off, but had seemingly sprung from nowhere. Maybe they just hadn’t noticed it before, too absorbed by the effort of moving one foot in front of the other. That was a sobering thought: losing their edge, their ability to stay frosty and triple red. It was symptomatic of what had happened the previous day. Something was beginning to make sense at the back of her mind….

“Moving quick,” J.B. said sharply, breaking her reverie. She followed his arm, which was still raised. It was true. Whatever was raising the dust cloud was advancing rapidly. Immediately, her coalescing thoughts were driven from her mind by the need for action.

Looking around, she could see that there was little cover afforded to them by the terrain.

“Hostile?” she asked, knowing what J.B.’s answer would be.

“Assume it.”

Even as he spoke, the Armorer was unslinging his mini-Uzi, running checks without even thinking, and scanning the area. The only thing within any kind of distance was a small patch of brown-and-green scrub, with a few patches of purple flowers. How that survived in this climate was a mystery for another time. But not as great a mystery as how they could turn this into some kind of cover.

J.B. gestured that they should make their way toward it. Mildred, checking to make sure her ZKR was ready for combat, nodded. They traveled the five hundred yards to the scant cover. When they had made the best of the brush, JB finally spoke.

“They must have seen us moving. They’re heading right toward us.”

“Well, let’s just hope that we can get a bead on them before they can on us,” Mildred countered. “Depends on what sort of weapons they’re carrying,” she added, knowing that their fate was on the line.

They settled in and waited for the dust cloud to reach them.

As the cloud became more defined, and they could see the center of disturbance that was stirring up the dust, neither of them was sure that they could believe their eyes.

For approaching them, calm in the eye of the cloud, were a dozen men mounted on horses. Piebald and chestnut creatures whose manes swirled with the dust, they seemed almost to glide across the ground. Seated atop them were men whose impassive faces were matched by the stately grandeur with which they rode the rolling plain. Like marble statues, they seemed immobile astride their steeds, man and horse as one living entity on an endless journey.

No less impressive was the manner in which they were attired—furs and skins, woven into breeches and moccasins, with jerkins that left their scarred and pierced chests open to the air. From their bare skin hung bones decorated with different varieties and colors of feather. Their hair was long, worn either loose and flowing in the momentum of their relentless progress, or else plaited and held to the side of their head by a snakeskin headband.

They were armed, but not in the manner that either J.B. or Mildred would have expected. Quivers filled with arrows hung from the saddlebags of their mounts and bows were secured across their backs. J.B. couldn’t see a blaster on any of them.

Part of his mind wondered how they managed to survive without the use of blasters, bow and arrow being—like a blade—an instrument with less range and destructive power, effective only if wielded with precision. Another part of his mind figured that Mildred’s sure eye and the sweep of his SMG could cut a swathe through these coldhearts…if that was what they proved to be.

For the moment, that was less than certain. As the party of riders advanced, they had a confidence about them. There was no sign that they would raise a hand in anger, yet they seemed to fear no attack.

Mildred and J.B. exchanged glances. This was no normal situation. The Armorer shrugged and rose to his feet, stepping out from cover. Mildred followed. Both had their blasters at ease, yet their body language spoke of the ability to change to the offensive if necessary.

As the mounted men drew nearer, they began to slow. J.B. studied them. It had been a long time since he’d seen anyone who was dressed and ornamented in a similar manner.

As one, the mounted men came to a halt. They were within ten yards of the companions. As their horses snorted and moved their hooves, the dust settling around them, the warriors—for there was no doubt that this was what they were—sat impassive and silent. It was as though each was taking time to assess the people in front of them.

“You gonna say something, or we just gonna stand here and roast in this heat?” J.B. murmured laconically as the still and silence got to him.

“You and the woman are not attacking us,” the Native American at the head of the posse stated.

“We’d defend ourselves, but you show no sign of wanting to attack us,” Mildred countered.

The flicker of a smile crossed the man’s weather-beaten face. “We have no desire to attack you. Why should we? We have been waiting for you.”

J.B.’s brow furrowed. “Waiting?”

He was answered by a brief nod.

“How did you know we would be here? We didn’t know it ourselves,” Mildred said sharply.

The smile grew broader. “You know, even though you don’t know.” The smile turned into a deep-throated chuckle as he caught the bafflement on their faces. “Come with us, and you will soon understand.”

“Mebbe we don’t want to come with you,” J.B. said guardedly.

The Native American looked up at the empty, burning sky. “You’d rather stay out here?”

“It’s a good point, John,” Mildred said quietly, without taking her eyes from the men in front of them. “It doesn’t seem to be much of a choice for us right now.”

J.B. sighed. “Guess so. We’ll take you up on it,” he said to the mounted man, adding, “For now.”

Two of the mounted men moved forward from the group, indicating without speech that J.B. and Mildred should mount up behind each of them. Stowing their blasters, both raised themselves into the saddle, settling behind the impassive and silent warriors.

It was only when they began to move off, and Mildred had the chance to survey the territory without the incessant march of her own feet that she realized at least one of the things that had been bugging her since they had first set out that morning.

The dust and dirt floor of the plain was clear.

What had happened to the locusts? Where were the frogs that had bombarded them? The ground should be littered with amphibians. If the live ones had sought shelter, then at the very least the ones who had bought the farm should be starting to stink up in the heat.

But there was nothing.

So where had they gone?

DIM LIGHT SUFFUSED the interior of the wag, heat from the rising sun stifling the atmosphere, making it hard to breathe. The stench of their own bodies filled the wag, the secured tarps keeping in the sweat and heat that had suffused them through the night. The closeness of the air, the lack of anything fresh, gave Krysty a headache that pounded at her skull. She awoke to a feeling like a jackhammer thumping incessantly. Her mouth, too, felt like she’d been gargling from a cesspool.

A blue aura, from the light defracted by the tarps, made it hard to see into the shadows of the wag, and it took her a few seconds of fuzzed confusion to recall where they were.

And how few of them were left.

“Ryan,” she whispered, shaking the one-eyed man’s arm. He lay across the bench seat in the rear of the wag, one arm raised across his face. She had been in front, slumped at an angle that had left her with a shooting pain in her neck. Yet she knew that she had to cast that aside. Rubbing at the soreness with one hand, she continued to shake Ryan, repeating his name.

Ryan grunted, his good eye opening beneath the cover of his arm. The lid was sticky and the eye sore. For a second he couldn’t focus, and all was dark. It was only then that he realized that he was blocking the light with his own arm. He shook his head to clear it as he raised himself, rubbing at the eye to try to remove the grit that clogged and obscured his vision.

As his vision cleared and adjusted to the low-level light inside the wag, he could see Krysty looking at him. Casting his eye around, he could see that they were alone.

“So it wasn’t just the bang on the head,” he said, “we really did let them go out there.”

Krysty nodded, regretting it as a sharp pain seared her skull. “Some weird shit going on, lover. Now there’s just the two of us, and I don’t know where the hell the rest of—”

Ryan stayed her with a gesture. “No reason to beat shit out of ourselves for it. Just have to try to find them. Figure it’s safe out there?”

Krysty paused, listening to the silence that existed outside the womb of the wag’s interior. “Doesn’t sound like there’s anything—anything at all—going on out there,” she said softly.

“Then let’s recce and see what we can do about it,” Ryan said simply.

They both moved with some hesitation. Their limbs ached and their heads felt fragile. As they took the tarps down from the glassless windows, and from the windshield, they both winced at the light that streamed in. It was airless out there. The stillness of the plains slowed the flow of cooler, fresher air into the wag. Thankfully, the windshield glass had escaped destruction in the storm, so if they could get the engine working again, driving across the plain would not be impeded by a faceful of grit.

The desolation of nothing but flat dirt and scrub, with only distant hills to break the monotony, hit them hard. They exchanged glances that spoke volumes. They could see what appeared to be a mile or so in each direction, and there was nothing to relieve the emptiness. No sign of Doc, Jak, Mildred or J.B. It was as though their companions had been wiped from the surface of the Earth.

“What direction?” Krysty asked, as much to herself as to Ryan. “How do we decide?”

Ryan screwed his face into a mask of indecision, wiped a hand across as if to drywash it from him. “Could be any.” He looked up at the sky. The sun was low, not long risen by the looks of it.

Getting out of the wag, feeling the ground beneath his feet and for the first time in what seemed like days, Ryan looked around, circling slowly. There was no way of telling if any of their companions were still living out there. No way of telling in which direction they had wandered.

Lifting the hood of the wag, Ryan asked Krysty to try the ignition. As she pumped the engine, and it tried to pitifully cough to life, Ryan studied it. Although it wasn’t firing, and he was no expert, the one-eyed man was sure he could fix it enough to get them going. The question was, what direction should they take? He pondered that while he tinkered with the engine, getting Krysty to turn it over until he had fixed the problem.

If it had been himself stranded out there in the storm, and he’d managed to find shelter, then as soon as he was able he would have tried to either find his way back to the wag, or else to head back toward the nearest ville. Population. Water. Food. He knew that they all carried survival rations, but they would only last so long.

As Krysty got the engine started, Ryan shut the hood and took a look around him. The wag would be visible for a great distance. If they began to head back toward Brisbane, then—

The thought was stopped dead in his mind. Coming toward them was a cloud of dust in the distance. He had no idea where it had sprung from, as it hadn’t seemed to be there a moment before. Now it was approaching at a steady rate, and it was impossible to see what lay at the heart of it.

He slid into the seat next to Krysty.

“Meet them head-on?” she queried.

“Yeah. Not too fast. Let them come to us, but be ready to hit them.”

Krysty put the wag in gear and steered it toward the direction of the cloud. Ryan checked his SIG-Sauer and Steyr.

It was only as they got within five hundred yards that they could see what lay at the heart of the cloud. “Gaia.” Krysty whistled, while Ryan breathed in heavily. Both, without discussion, had expected another wag—like, or perhaps even, the coldhearts who had driven them this far onto the plain—but neither had expected the party of mounted Native Americans.

Krysty brought the wag to a halt. Both she and Ryan got out of the wag, using the open doors as cover, and stood waiting for the approaching party. Neither of them moved. The mounted warriors rode without fear or without threat.

When they were less than a hundred yards away, the party came to a halt, and the leading rider dismounted. He walked toward the wag, one hand raised in a gesture of peace.

Ryan stepped out from the cover of the door, holding the Steyr to one side as an indication of his own desire to avoid hostility.

“We won’t fire on you unless you make the first move,” he said slowly, “but we will fire. Make no mistake.”

The man standing in front of him, clothed in skins, and with his own skin covered in tattoos and paint, shrugged.

“You fire, then you got the wrong idea. We’ve got nothing but welcome for you both. We’ve been waiting long enough for you to turn up.”

JAK LOOKED UP at the sky. The first rays of a rising sun had spread warmth on a body that was almost frozen. He felt groggy, his limbs heavy and torpid. He was aware that he had become dangerously cold—that thing that Mildred called hypothermia—and that he had to force himself to move, to eat and drink, to get up from the hard ground.

Every movement had to be wrenched from his body. Muscles groaned and protested, refused to act on command, and teetered on the brink of collapse. It was only by the greatest act of will that, after what seemed like hours of effort, he managed to pull himself up, and to his knees. He had to stop there, blowing hard as though he had been chasing prey for hours, feeling sweat run down his forehead, matting his hair. He could feel a cooling puddle form in the hollow at the base of his spine. Grimly, he consoled himself with the thought that he had at least pushed his body temperature up a little.

Moving into a sitting position, he reached into his patched camou jacket, past some of the many hiding places for his knives, and to the place where he kept his water. He took a long drink, then forced himself to chew on some jerky, even though he felt anything but hungry. He knew he had to build up some reserves of energy, give his body something on which to feed. All the while he kept his senses keen—or at least, as keen as they could be while he recovered. Yet the instinct honed by years of being hunter and hunted, at different times, told him that there was little danger around.

The feeling of dread that had swept over him before he blacked out had now gone. He had no wish to dwell on it, but still it puzzled him as to what had triggered emotions that were usually so alien.

Massaging feeling back into limbs that had started to cramp, Jak rose unsteadily to his feet and took a good look around. He looked up at the sky, studied the position of the rising sun. From this he looked to the plateaus that marked the farthest points of vision.

He realized something that Mildred and J.B. would fail to pick up on—from the position of the distant ranges, misty in the early morning, and the place in the sky of the rising sun, Jak knew that he had traveled a vast distance for the duration of the storm, the kind of distance where he must have been walking for more than twenty-four hours.

It seemed impossible. Thinking back, the span of time did not seem that great. It had seemed only like an hour or two that he had been in the swirling seas of dirt, insects and frogs. Yet there was no sign of the latter around him. Neither would a simple hour or two of walking, even with the protracted period of cold and inaction, account for the weariness he felt in his limbs. Had he been out of it for most of the time that he had walked? Or had something happened to alter his sense of time?

Jak didn’t know how the storm could have done this, but he could think of no other reason to account for this. If nothing else, it might explain the strange emotions that had overwhelmed him just before the blackout. In truth, it did not matter now. All he could do was accept it and try to find his way back to where he believed the others would be waiting.

No. Just Ryan and Krysty. It was strange that memory was so hard. Vague impressions came to him: Doc, ranting in the storm, talking crap like usual, with J.B. and Mildred trying to rein him in, bring him to shelter. Then Doc breaking away, losing sight of them all in the solid fog that the plain had thrown up around them.

Why had he done something so stupe as to leave shelter and try to aid them, especially when he knew in his gut that there was little chance, and he would only add to the confusion? And why had Ryan and Krysty let him? The weird shit storm. It had to be that. The frogs and insects were weird on the outside, and the way they had acted was weird on the inside.

Jak just accepted that. There was little point in worrying about it. Now that it had happened, and it could be used to account for why he had ended up where he was, all that mattered was whether it was still affecting him. If it was, then there was no guarantee that he could rely on his instincts and senses to find his friends.

Jak sniffed the air. It was dry and arid, with little scent and only the lingering moisture of the cold night air. He felt it fill his lungs, and listened to the faint sounds of the air currents as they hummed around him, barely there, but discernible if you were attuned.

There was nothing in him that felt wrong, or even unusual. Whatever the storm had brought with it, so it had also taken with its passing.

Jak figured that the best he could do would be to try to head back toward the area where he thought he had left the wag. He couldn’t be exact, but reasoned that in this kind of wide-open expanse, a vehicle like the one he was seeking would soon stand out against the vastness of the plain. He thought back, tried to recall the outlines of the land as he had seen it before the storm ascended. It wasn’t easy. The wag chase across the plain had made the landscape move with a rapidity that hindered recall. There had been other things to take his attention, after all. But despite this, he was sure of a rough bearing that he could take.

Steeling himself for the long march ahead, he shook himself down, then began to walk, one foot in front of another. Failure was not an option.

After about an hour, he could hear a change in the movement of the air. It was something almost out of the range of hearing, but it was there: a note that changed slightly in pitch—a wag engine, moving away from him. He cursed. No point in hurrying after it. There was too much distance, and already it had moved before the sound reached him.

Shaking his head, he changed course slightly to follow the direction of the distant sound.

This new course took him, within an hour, to the shelter of a rock outcrop that stretched some fifteen feet into the air, with an overhang that offered shade in the increasing heat of the day. He looked up at the clear sky, at the burning orb of the sun, which was still some way from the center of the sky. It was going to get a whole heap warmer. The receding wag noise told him that there was little need to hurry. Perhaps a brief rest would be beneficial.

It was only as he turned to move toward a now welcoming shelter that he became aware of something else.

How could he have missed it? Jak cursed himself. Obviously he was not as triple red as he thought. There were still some aftereffects from his recent ordeal, and his focusing on the wag noise had been at the expense of any other possible dangers.

For now he was aware of other people, about eight or ten, barely moving, not talking. Perhaps resting, or in some way conserving energy? There was the faint scent of a dead fire on the air, embers and remnants of smoke. Not just people, either; horses. Unnaturally quiet, or so it seemed. Jak was shaken by his own inability to pick up on this sooner, but dismissed the feeling. There was no time for this.

He hastened his approach, and also became more stealthy. He scanned the outcropping, wondering how he could make a recce without making his presence known. The rock was about ten yards across, and rose at a steep angle. The portion facing him was smooth, with little in the way of handholds. A few cracks in the rock, with barely existing and ragged foliage drooping miserably, were all that presented themselves.

Looking up, he could see that the ridge at the top of the crop was narrow, only a yard or two that angled upward, and seemed to offer nothing but a sheer drop and no cover.

Taking this as his only option, Jak reached the rock wall and began to climb, keeping as silent as was possible. With each hand- and foothold he paused, holding his breath as though that would prevent any disturbance.

As he reached the apex of the climb, he could feel the effect. Muscles ached and trembled, sweat poured off him. When he was on the ridge that formed a shelter, he paused momentarily, hungrily gulping in air while still being cautious.

Feeling more like his old self, he edged forward and carefully looked over the lip of the rock ledge.

What he saw almost made him exclaim in surprise.

Beneath, sheltered in the shadow of the outcropping, stood a small ville of tepees. The dyed and patterned cloth shelters, supported on constructs of wood, numbered nine. An equal number of horses was tethered a short distance away. The tepees were circled around the remains of a fire: it was this that had scented to Jak, along with the horses. Six men sat around the now dead fire, each with his head bent and perfectly still, as though in meditation. Perhaps they were.

That left three men missing.

Jak slowly rolled over so that he could see behind where he lay. The missing three men were behind him. Two had their long black hair in plaits that they wore loose. The other had his hair, unplaited, held back by a bandanna. All three wore vests of a tanned leather, festooned with feather and clay decorations. Their pants were of the same tanned leather, but were not decorated, except by colored thread in the stitching. Their moccasins were battered and hardy.

They carried no weapons, and they stood in a loose, easy manner that showed no obvious threat. But each man was stocky and heavily muscled. Their faces were impassive, so it was impossible to judge their intent.

Jak knew that he had been unforgivably slack in his approach to the crop, the lack of attention he had paid to his own back trail. Whatever happened now, he had to accept that he was responsible for his own position. Studying them, he could see that the one with the bandanna was closest. He would have to be the first point of attack. He could palm a knife, which would even the odds a little. Nonetheless, at such close quarters, to be outnumbered three-to-one were less than great odds. Especially as he was prone, and they were looming over him.

Jak tensed himself. Would they expect him to attack? Surprise might be all he had…

But it was Jak who was to be taken by surprise.

Chapter Six

“White man…whiter than white man,” the Native American with the bandanna chuckled. “Legend never told us it would be like this.”

Jak had been poised to spring to his feet and take his chances. But the tone of the man’s voice disarmed him. There was no malice in there; no hint of any hostility. If anything, he seemed to take the view that Jak was friend rather than foe.

Instinct would not let Jak completely let down his guard. Nonetheless, he relaxed slightly, the tension slackening in his muscles.

“We don’t mean you harm,” one of the others said, “but we couldn’t risk you attacking.”

Jak nodded. If he was in their position, he would act defensively. And he had to give it to them; they were good. It was a more than evenly matched standoff, and they knew it.

“What do with me now?” he asked, aware that while he was still prone he was at their mercy.

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