Sunspot

Death Lands®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

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 Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter One

Ryan Cawdor stood out of the line of fire, his back pressed against a mud-brick wall. The ground was partially frozen underfoot, the early morning sky streaked with scudding low clouds. Gusts of wind shrieked through the ramshackle hilltop maze of Redbone ville, drowning out the screams of the dying.

A makeshift barricade of rocks and dirt and tree limbs stood less than one hundred feet from Ryan’s position. It blocked the entrance to a narrow path that was the ville’s only remaining escape route. The blue-less sights and muzzles of three AK-47s poked out through firing ports, gaps in the layers of piled debris.

From the opposite direction, near the center of the pesthole ville, a frantic flurry of gunshots rang out. With black powder revolvers and remade single-shot 12-gauges, Redbone’s trapped residents fought off a superior force. The resistance was answered by short, efficient bursts of heavy-caliber autofire.

Time was running out, for all concerned.

Ryan stepped from cover, his scoped Steyr SSG-70 longblaster slung over his shoulder, a SIG-Sauer P226 semiautomatic blaster securely holstered under his left armpit. With empty hands in plain view, he advanced up the rutted path, past a rude stock pen on his right, toward the waist-high, twelve-foot-long barricade. A blast of wind scoured the frosty earth, whipping up the stench of pig manure. The pigs themselves were nowhere to be seen, but mounds of loose droppings lay scattered over the track.

The worn AK sights held steady on his chest as he closed the distance, walking straight into the maw of a firing squad. Fifty feet. Forty feet. The adrenaline coursing through his veins made his fingertips tingle and his scalp crawl. The empty socket of his left eye began to itch like a rad bastard under its black patch. The sensation spread along the jagged welt of scar that split his brow and cheek. Ryan didn’t scratch. He kept his hands in sight, well away from his body.

“Stop there!” someone shouted from behind the barrier.

Ryan kept walking, spreading his arms wide, displaying open palms in a gesture of surrender.

“Stop or you’re dead!”

Ryan was betting they wouldn’t shoot unless he made a move for his blasters. Baron Malosh paid his press gangs by the head. The live head. This crew’s job was to capture or to turn back any ville folk trying to escape conscription into the baron’s army. To Malosh even a one-eyed man had value, if only as cannon fodder.

“Stop!”

“I give up,” Ryan said as he continued forward. “You win. Take my weapons…”

“Get on your belly! Now!”

“No way am I going to lie facedown in pig shit,” Ryan shouted back. Though his words and tone were defiant, as he advanced he raised his hands even higher. “I said you could take my blasters.”

Ryan was five yards from the barricade when the baron’s men realized they had a problem. The man was tall and broad across the shoulders, and the closer he came to the narrow path entrance with arms spread, the more he blocked their view—and their ability to control the entire kill zone. To see around him, to see what was coming directly behind him, they had to move to the side and stand from cover. This they did more or less in unison.

As the men jumped up, Ryan dived to the dirt in front of the barrier, leaving them exposed to incoming fire.

At once, tightly clustered blaster shots and the canvas-ripping clatter of an Uzi rang out from behind him. The volley of slugs whined a yard above his head, thudding into wood, ricocheting off rock and smacking flesh.

The burst of blasterfire lasted no more than three seconds. Ryan pushed up from the ground and, drawing his SIG from shoulder leather, vaulted the barricade, leaping into the tight, shanty-lined lane.

All three of Malosh’s men were down.

Over the sights of his SIG, Ryan quickly checked the fallen for signs of life. Overlapping layers of worn duct tape held the soles and tops of their boots together. They wore no insignia or badge of rank. Their bearded faces and gloveless hands were encrusted with layers of grime. Only one was moving, his legs mule-kicking spastically. His skull had been cratered by multiple bullet hits, front and side; gobs of steaming brain matter clung to the coarse mud wall.

No follow-up shots required.

Ryan raised his weapon in a two-handed grip and surveyed the alley. The tight passage was like a wind tunnel; he squinted his good right eye as grit peppered his face. On either side of the dirt lane, a dozen one-room shanties shared common earthen walls and corrugated metal roofs. The crooked, doorless entryways faced one another, raising the possibility of a nasty, close-range cross fire. Two-thirds of the way down the path, a huge dead hog lay on its side in a pool of blood. Through the gap at the far end of the alley, Ryan saw distant blue mountains bathed in bright sunlight, beyond the edge of the coming storm. Because of the elevation and the angle of view, he couldn’t see the cultivated fields around the hilltop’s base, or the border where they gave way to desert scrubland. For generations, the area’s farmers had retreated to higher ground for their common defense. The fortified ville had easily held off bands of predatory muties and coldheart robbers. Against a large, well-trained and equipped military force, however, Redbone was a sitting duck.

Ryan took a quick glance over his shoulder to check on his companions, who were charging toward him.

Jak Lauren ran in front in long, loping strides, his .357 Magnum Colt Python in his fist. Jak’s face was bloodlessly white, his long, lank, platinum hair streamed back from his head. As the albino ran, his ruby-red eyes scanned the doorways and rooftops of the wall-to-wall huts for enemy snipers. Following hard on his heels, puffing from the effort, was John Barrymore Dix. The bespectacled Armorer gripped his Uzi machine pistol in both hands, his shoulder-slung, Smith & Wesson M-4000 12-gauge pump slapped wildly against his back. His prized fedora was screwed down on his head to keep it from blowing off.

Behind J.B. were two women with revolvers drawn, running shoulder-to-shoulder. In a shaggy fur coat and Western-style boots was tall, red-haired Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s longtime lover and soul mate. By her side, the short black woman in a patched, milspec parka was Dr. Mildred Wyeth, whom Ryan and the others had awakened from a hundred-year cryosleep. Both women carried .38-caliber weapons. Krysty’s blaster of choice was a Smith & Wesson 640. Mildred’s was a Czech-made ZKR 551, the same make and model of firearm she had used to take a silver medal in the last-ever summer Olympic Games.

The world of big-time international sport had ended along with everything else more than a century before, on January 20, 2001. The true causes of Armageddon were lost in the seething, global hellfire of the all-out Soviet-U.S. nuclear exchanges that had occurred on that fateful day. On January 21, 2001 there was no one left to spin the blame for the ultimate catastrophe, to fume and sputter over whose half-trillion dollars’ worth of missile defense equipment had malfunctioned first, over who was the aggressor and who the victim. A handful of scattered human survivors had inherited a ruined earth, a disrupted and lethal ecology, an utterly destroyed civilization. With no political entity left to blame for their tragic circumstances, they turned on science, itself. Those who had once proudly worn the uniform of that discipline, the whitecoats, were the target of their deepest and most abiding hatred.

Bringing up the rear of the formation, the tails of his waistcoat flapping as he sprinted in cracked knee boots, was Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner. Of the six companions, the tall, scarecrow-like Tanner had the most cause to despise the scientists. Whitecoats from ultrasecret Operation Chronos had trawled him forward from the year 1896 to 1998, ripping him from his life in Omaha, Nebraska, from his wife Emily and his children, Rachel and little Jolyon. In isolated laboratories, researchers had experimented on him for long months, and then they had hurled him blindly into the future; this to rid themselves of his truculent Victorian carcass and as payback for his lack of cooperation. That the hurling had happened only weeks before nukeday was just more of Doc’s bad luck. Instead of dying in the conflagration of January 20th, and reuniting with his loved ones in heaven, he had been transported ninety-some years forward in time.

To hell.

In his left hand Doc carried a silver-handled, ebony swordstick, which counterbalanced the considerable mass and weight of the firearm he held in his other hand. The black powder LeMat was a relic. Its short, .63-caliber underbarrel was designed for “blue whistler” scattershot and close-range mayhem—the Civil War’s version of a “room broom.” The LeMat’s five-and-a-half-inch top barrel fired .44-caliber lead balls from its revolver cylinder.

Behind Doc, Ryan saw black smoke begin to pour from the roofs of the jumble of low buildings at the center of the ville. The baron’s press gangs were burning out Redbone ville’s draft resisters.

As he turned back to the alley, a short man leaned out of a doorway on the right, AK shouldered and ready to rip. Ryan didn’t pause to verify allegiance or intent. He opened fire first, punching four 9 mm slugs into the chest and neck of the would-be shooter. The man groaned and fell back through the doorway, dropping the AK across the threshold as he went down. His boots stuck out over the threshold, their silver-tape-wrapped toes pointing skyward.

“Help! Please!” someone called from the shanty.

Others inside took up the desperate cry. “Help! Help us!”

Ryan stood his ground, covering the lane until his companions had jumped the barrier and joined him. On his signal, they advanced quickly and quietly, leapfrogging and clearing the doors on either side as they went. The closer they got to the shanty where the dead man lay, the louder and more frantic the shouting became.

Ryan signaled for Jak, Krysty and Doc to continue sweeping the alley for more of Malosh’s crew. Then he stepped over the body and entered the hut, with J.B. and Mildred behind him. The low-ceilinged gloom reeked of fear-sweat and pig muck. Five people sat on the earthen floor, their hands tied behind their backs, their knees drawn up, ankles bound together. Two of the men and the sole female were in their late teens or early twenties, dressed in homespun cloth. One of the men had a crusted-over, bloody head wound; the other had a badly bruised left eye. There was straw and dried dung in the woman’s long, coarse blond hair, and her lower lip was split and swollen.

The other two male captives were trussed back to back. Their clothes were layers of filthy rags. One was in his late fifties with a deeply weather-seamed and pitted face, and wild salt-and-pepper hair and whiskers. The man tied to him was less than half his age and half again his size, bootless, barrel-chested, his pattern-bald hair shaved to stubble, with an oddly smooth and doughy baby face.

“Cut us free,” the woman said to Ryan. When he made no immediate move to do so, she shrilled at him, “We’re Redbone folk, born and bred. We’re on the same side as you. Otherwise we wouldn’t be tied up like this.”

“If you don’t let us go,” the man with the bruised eye pitched in, “Baron Malosh will force us to fight his stinking wars. Free us and we’ll fight against him, here and now.”

“We’ll take back our ville,” the woman declared.

Ryan gave her a dubious look, but unsheathed his panga and with deft strokes severed all their bonds.

“You know you can’t possibly win,” Mildred told the quintet as they rose to their feet. “Come with us, away from here.”

“We won’t abandon our land,” the man with the head wound said. “Our kin have been here since nukeday.”

“We don’t have time to argue with you,” Ryan said. “You can do as you please.”

The young woman snatched up the AK from the threshold. “If you fight alongside us,” she said, “we have a chance.”

J.B. succinctly stated the companions’ position on the matter. “Not our ville,” he told her.

“There are three more AKs outside,” Ryan said. “You can hold off the baron’s gang from behind the barricade. Wait until they get close before you open fire…”

Ryan spoke the last words to the trio’s backs as they rushed out the door.

“What about you two?” Mildred asked the remaining men. “Are you staying to fight?”

“The fight’s already lost,” the older one said. “If we stay, the baron’s men will catch us. We’ll take our chances with you.”

“What are your names?” Mildred asked.

“He’s Young Crad and I’m called Bezoar.”

“This is going to be a foot race,” Ryan warned them. “No telling how far we’re going to have to run to get clear of Malosh. If you can’t keep up with us, you’ll get left behind. We won’t let you slow us down, and we won’t risk our lives to save yours. Do you understand?”

Bezoar nodded, grimacing at the news. Young Crad stared back. Not sullen. Not fearful. Not shell-shocked. If anything, he seemed mildly tickled by Ryan’s little speech. The grizzle-bearded man pushed his large friend out into the alley, ahead of Ryan and the others.

When Young Crad saw the dead black-and-white hog lying in the lane, he broke free of the smaller man’s grip. He raced to the side of the gutshot animal, dropped to his knees and unleashed a piercing cry of anguish.

Bezoar ran to catch him, limping hard on a right leg that didn’t bend at all at the knee. “She’s gone, boy,” he said. “It’s a nukin’ pity and a rad-blasted waste but there’s nothing more we can do for the old girl. Buck up, now, we’ve got to go…”

“Move!” J.B. growled.

Young Crad looked up, his eyes streaming tears. “Piggie dear, piggie dear,” he moaned. His chin quivered uncontrollably as he stroked the bullet-riddled hide.

Bezoar grabbed his friend by the shoulders and gently but firmly dragged him from the corpse and pulled him up the lane.

“A gimp and a triple-stupe droolie,” J.B. said, shaking his head. “They aren’t gonna last half a mile, Ryan.”

Such was the harsh reality of Deathlands. It was a place where the bloody bones of the weak nourished the strong. That these swineherds had lived as long as they had was a minor miracle.

Soon to end.

“I reckon it’s their choice where they want to die,” Cawdor said.

Jak, Krysty and Doc waited at the far end of the lane. The Redbone folk they’d rescued were already manning the barricade, covering their rear with the captured predark assault rifles.

The other hovels were deserted. Mebbe the residents had made it out. Mebbe not. Just beyond the last of the tumbledown dwellings, the alley ended abruptly at the edge of a nearly sheer, three-hundred-foot cliff. Redbone ville was laid out like a medieval castle town. The ville’s buildings clung to and jutted up from the hilltop, extensions of the vertical bedrock. From the alley’s terminus, a rough zigzag path led down the cliff face to the gridwork of cultivated fields below—beyond them a bleak desert panorama stretched to the blue mountains on the horizon. There was no sign of a rear guard on the plain. Malosh had apparently committed his entire force to a surprise attack.

Krysty took in the unarmed swineherds, then looked at Ryan with concern. Her prehensile mutie hair had already drawn into tight curls, an automatic response to the mortal danger they faced.

He anticipated her question. “They know they’re excess baggage,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Jak jumped onto the trail and led the rapid descent. As the companions skidded single file to the bottom, thunder rumbled in the distance. Bolts of lightning shot through the northwestern sky that had turned black as night. It was at least twenty degrees warmer down on the plain, and the wind had acquired a strange, unpleasantly humid edge.

“Could be a chem storm,” Krysty said. “A bad one.”

“It’s going to come down on us hard,” Mildred said.

“And shortly, it would appear…” Doc added. “Perhaps we should consider seeking shelter until it passes?”

“No time for that, now,” Ryan said. “We have to get out of longblaster range before the baron’s men spot us and pin us down. You take the point, Jak. Cut through the fields, then follow cover to the southeast, away from the storm front. Double-time it. No stops.”

With the albino wild child in the lead, they broke from the base of the hill and ran into the rows of Cradding cabbages and knee-high potato plants. There were no farmers’ bodies lying about. Malosh’s army had closed in during the night and had attacked at first light.

As they neared the edge of the fields, autofire roared from the hilltop behind them. The mad clattering sawed back and forth. It sounded as though the folks manning the barrier were giving as good as they were getting.

The companions were about seven hundred yards from the base of the hill when they heard a string of sharp booms—multiple gren detonations, not thunderclaps. As the echoes of the explosions faded, blasterfire ceased.

The barricaded alley had fallen, and with it, Redbone ville.

Jak picked up the pace and Ryan and the others matched it. The desert hardpan was much easier to run on than soft, cultivated earth. A warm tailwind, now driving and steady, pushed against their backs.

The albino led them down into a shallow gully and they followed it, running as low to the ground as they could. The ditch wasn’t deep enough to completely conceal them, but the chaparral and scrub along its lip broke up and blurred their silhouettes. They drew no sniper fire from the ville, either because they hadn’t been seen or because they were already out of range.

The discomforts of the forced march were all too familiar to them—the bonfires burning in lungs and legs, the jarring impacts on hip joints and knees, the rhythmic rasp of breath in the ears. The two swineherds had managed to keep up so far. Bezoar hip-hopped along, red-faced, his hair matted with sweat, arms flailing for balance. Barefooted Young Crad moved easily beside him with a powerful, lumbering gait.

Fourteen hours ago, on the previous evening, the companions had arrived in Redbone after a long trek south. They had planned on trading part of their stock of centerfire bullets for food and water this morning; instead they had had to expend them making their escape. The breakout was nothing Ryan and the others were ashamed of. Hard-bitten realists, they knew there were things they could fight and things they could not.

None of them had any firsthand knowledge of Baron Malosh. What little information they possessed came from tales they’d heard in gaudy houses and around communal campfires along their route. In Deathlands, stories of barbarism and savagery were taken in along with mother’s milk, this to prepare the young for the inescapable facts of life. Exaggerations, misconceptions, distortions and outright lies were expected—even honored—in a dark, misbegotten place where ignorance and chaos ruled. If a tenth of the gossip the companions had heard about Malosh was true, he was an utterly ruthless marauder, and a formidable adversary.

It was said that he had carved a kingdom out of nothing. His own homeland was shit poor, with little water and fertile soil, barely able to support its population. He made up the difference with hit-and-run campaigns against the unprotected borders of richer neighboring barons. Malosh kept his ragtag army in constant motion, resupplying it through looting and pillage, replacing dead fighters with conscripts—norms and muties, male and female. He enforced military discipline with an iron hand. The only way a person left Malosh’s service was on the last train west. When he conquered a ville like Redbone, he took away most of the food and most of the able-bodied residents. According to the campfire tales, he always left behind a little to eat and a few breeders; and of course, the old folk and very young children useless in battle. He left sufficient living souls and resources for the ville to eventually recover, albeit with terrible hardship, this so he could prey on it again when the need arose.

The gully widened as it emptied into a much broader channel. The dry riverbed was cut with deep rills and dotted with scrub-covered islands. Jak took them along the near bank, an undercut bluff six feet high.

Ryan brought up the rear, running in grim silence, conserving his energy. Sweat peeled in a steady trickle down the middle of his back. He could sense the storm front rapidly overtaking them. The static charge in the air made the hair on his arms and neck stand erect, the smell of ozone grew thicker and thicker. They were about a mile from the ville when he shouted to Jak, calling a halt to the column’s advance.

The company stopped, but Bezoar was the only one to actually sit down, and he did so hard, on top of a boulder.

“Time for a quick recce to check for pursuit,” Ryan said. He waved for J.B. to follow, then started to climb up the side of the bluff, using exposed roots and embedded rocks as hand-and footholds.

“Mebbe they won’t come after us?” Bezoar suggested.

“If they saw us running away, they’re coming,” Krysty told him. “Eight live recruits are worth plenty to Malosh. Not to mention him wanting payback for the men we chilled.”

As Ryan and J.B. topped the bluff, puffs of dust started kicking up around them. Not from incoming longblaster bullets. From a spitting, widely spaced rain. The drops falling on Ryan’s face and hands felt tepid and slightly greasy, but they didn’t burn like holy nukefire. It wasn’t the caustic, flesh-melting variety of chem rain.

J.B. pulled out a battered pair of compact binocs and looked back toward Redbone. “Men on horseback, coming down the cliff trail,” he said. “Pack of dogs running with them.”

“Let me have a look-see,” Ryan said, taking the binocs.

“I counted a half-dozen horsemen,” the Armorer told the others.

“There’s twice that many dogs,” Ryan said. “Damned big ones.”

“By the Three Kennedys, it’s a foxhunt!” Doc exclaimed. “The dogs will pick up our scent and the horses will run us to ground in no time.”

Ryan turned the binocs to the northwest horizon, where chain lightning flashed again and again through a curtain of black. Below the cloud bank, a torrential downpour obscured his view of the plain.

“Bastard heavy rain is bearing down,” he said. “It’ll cover our footprints and wash away our scent.”

“Baron’s men can see that, too,” Krysty said. “They’re going to come at a dead gallop.”

“We’re in a flood plain here,” Mildred reminded everyone. “We need to find ourselves some higher ground.”

As Ryan and J.B. scrambled from the bluff, Jak waved the others after him and headed down-channel.

Bezoar was the only one who didn’t move to follow. The old swineherd sat slumped on the rock, his bad leg sticking out straight, his face still beet-red. Young Crad turned back to help him get to his feet.

“It’s no use, boy,” Bezoar said, impatiently waving him off. “This old gimp can’t run anymore. You go on without me, boy. Save yourself.”

Young Crad wouldn’t hear of it. “I go, you go,” he said. He bent and picked up his comrade, piggyback. Then, as if the added burden was nothing, he broke into a trot, chasing after Jak.

“That one’s something special,” Mildred commented as she, too, started to jog.

“Short on words and brains mebbe, but long on heart,” Krysty said.

“Droolie sure can run,” J.B. admitted.

“Better catch them,” Ryan said, again bringing up the rear.

As the companions tightened ranks, winding past a maze of dry channel braids, the raindrops got bigger and closer together. The wind whipped the branches of the scrub brush and sent chest-high tumbleweeds bounding and rolling down the riverbed past them. No matter how hard the rain came down, Ryan knew they couldn’t stop to wait out the storm, even if the trail they left behind was obscured. The only thing that was going to save them from the pursuit was distance. Only if the dogs and horses couldn’t recover the lost trail were they home free.

In a couple of minutes Ryan’s clothes were completely soaked through. Falling raindrops hit the earth with such force that they jumped two feet in the air. Daylight began to fade. He looked over his shoulder, squinting into the wind and the looming darkness. In a strobe flash of lightning he saw the approaching squall line, like a vast waterfall stretching across the plain from edge to edge. Amid the wind’s howl and the thunder’s boom, he could hear dogs baying, not far behind.

As the storm closed on them, it rained even harder. So hard it came down in rattling roar. So hard that it hurt as it hammered upon unprotected heads and shoulders. So hard it was difficult to breathe with all the water vapor in the air. The parched desert earth couldn’t soak it up. The ground turned to cooked oatmeal underfoot, boot prints filled with water as fast as they were made. A section of saturated bluff to their right collapsed, sliding partway across the channel. Ryan veered and jumped the barrier, splashing down knee-deep in a muddy, coffee-and-cream-colored pool. The runoff was funneling from high ground to low. Ahead, shallow stream channels filled and overflowed, coalescing into broad stretches of shin-high rapids.

The muffled baying grew suddenly louder. When Ryan looked back again, through the shifting downpour, he saw the dogs—drop-jawed, with lolling tongues, legs driving, splashing through the stream. Behind the hellhounds, torrents of water sheeted over the backs of charging horses and riders.

“Up!” he bellowed at Jak through a cupped hand.

The albino was already doing just that. Because the crumbling bank on the right would never have held the companions’ weight, he led them in the opposite direction, to the crest of a teardrop-shaped, scrub-covered island, high ground where they could make a stand.

As Ryan high-stepped through the boot-sucking muck of the island’s beach, he heard a growing rumble like an earthquake and half turned. Surging up behind the dogs and horses was a foaming wall of milky-brown water ten feet high.

“Hang on to something!” Krysty cried out to him.

As Ryan grabbed hold of the branches of a low bush, the flash flood slammed into the mounted pursuit. The force of the wave and its load of debris bowled over the horses and riders. It swept away the dogs in an instant. For a split second Ryan glimpsed the head of a horse as it bobbed up, rushing past, its eyes wild with fear, then it disappeared under the churning surface.

The one-eyed man used the scrub limbs to pull himself to higher ground where his companions stood braced, their legs sinking deep into the soggy soil, their miserable, streaming faces lit by lightning. Ryan jammed his boots against the roots of the brush to help hold his position.

“What happened to the pursuit?” Krysty asked.

“Long gone,” Ryan told her.

“The water level is still rising,” Doc said. “It appears we’ve departed the frying pan only to land squarely in the fire.”

There was no doubt about that. Their little mound of safety was growing smaller and smaller by the minute; the river flowed around their knees. Ryan could feel the ground eroding from underfoot.

“What are we going to do?” Mildred said.

Krysty looked across the mocha-colored river. “Too strong a current to swim through,” she said. “We’d never make it to the bank.”

“Only thing we can do is wait it out,” Ryan said. “Hang on and hope we don’t get washed loose before the river starts to fall.”

After a while the torrential rain stopped, but the river continued to come up; soon it even submerged most of the brush on the island’s crest. Clustered together, the companions grasped the ends of the branches, half swimming at times, their legs dangling back in the flow.

It was looking worse and worse.

When Jak shouted a warning, Ryan looked up to see a row of weak yellow lights bobbing toward them along the bank.

“Surrender or be swept away!” someone shouted over the roar of the torrent.

There was little question who had come to their rescue.

And under the circumstances, the companions couldn’t reach for or raise their weapons.

“We could let the current take us downstream,” Krysty said. “Mebbe get past them.”

“The odds of running those rapids and surviving to tell the tale are slim at best, my dear,” Doc said.

“Too many downed trees in the flow,” Ryan said. “We’d get snagged and never come up.”

“Drowning doesn’t suit me,” J.B. said.

“J.B., you’re half drowned already,” Mildred said.

“That’s how I know.”

“We can die now, without firing a shot,” Ryan said, “or we can try to live long enough to fight at a time and place of our choosing.”

“Proposed in that way, it is an easy decision to make,” Doc said. “There is only one acceptable course of action.”

Ryan looked from face to face. “Are we all agreed, then? Is anyone opposed?”

But for the sounds of the river, there was silence.

“We give up!” Ryan bellowed, though this genuine surrender stuck mightily in his craw.

“We’ll throw you a rope,” someone shouted back. “Make it fast at your end.”

J.B. managed to trap and tie off the line, lashing it around the submerged trunk of a stunted but sturdily rooted tree. One by one the companions used the rope to pull themselves, hand over hand, through the chest-high current to the light of the lanterns.

Ryan was the last to ford the swollen river. As he climbed out of the water, a horseman approached. Black-gloved hands held the reins of the towering chestnut stallion. The rider was dressed in a gleaming black rain cape. Covering the lower half of his face, nose to chin, cheek to cheek, was a matching leather mask. An oval of metal mesh in front of his mouth allowed him to speak unmuffled. There were angry boils and sores on his high, pale forehead. The eyes above the mask were black and wide-set; his shoulder-length, wavy black hair lay plastered to his head by the rain.

There was no mistaking who it was.

Malosh the Impaler.

Chapter Two

A tall, broad figure in an olive-drab trench coat and size-14 patched tennis shoes climbed the steep, barren approach to the base of the Rabbit Ear Spires. The gusting wind beat his BDU pants hard against his legs. His head was shaved except for a fringe of dirty blond hair that fell from the back of his neck to between his shoulder blades. A wide, black-tattooed garland encircled his deeply suntanned skull.

The permanent crown symbolized his authority.

Kendrick Haldane had been declared baron-for-life by a grateful populace.

At a switchback halfway up the trail of loose volcanic scree, Haldane paused to catch his breath. In the valley far below, the Grandee glistened in the slanting sun like a fat green snake. The world-shattering, nuclear exchange of 2001 had freed the great river. Shock waves from ground-burst missile strikes had ruptured the Elephant Butte Reservoir dam some fifty miles upstream, spilling three hundred billion gallons of water and a vast, scouring sediment load into the ancient riverbed. Like falling dominoes, the Caballo, Percha and Leasburg dams had given way under the power of the unleashed torrent.

The once again wild Grandee was the lifeline of Haldane’s small, prosperous fiefdom; and not just because of the water it supplied for agriculture and livestock. Old Interstate Highway 25, which paralleled the river and connected the cities of Albuquerque and El Paso, was also a casualty of Armageddon. Most of its overpasses and bridges had collapsed, many of its roadbeds either washed away by nukeday’s flood or eroded to sand by decades of chem rain. With the highway mostly gone, the river had become the prime north-south trade route. It was also a defensive barrier to attack from the west.

Between the still-lethal ground zeros of Albuquerque and El Paso, a narrow habitable strip along the Grandee supported a dozen thriving villes. Baron Haldane controlled nearly one hundred miles of riverbank with watchtowers and small fortifications set on cliffs above the stream, and from bankside caves. Based in these strategic squeeze points, his sec men intercepted and dispatched coldheart robbers and bands of marauding muties. In return for a guarantee of safety, every farmer, every traveler, every trader paid the baron a fair toll, either in jack or in a percentage of goods.

Haldane’s seat of baronial power lay beside the river in the valley below him. It had been built on the ruins of the city of Las Cruces, north and west of the El Paso–Fort Bliss nukeglass crater, about forty miles north of what once was the New Mexico–Chihuahua-Mexico border. Earth-shaker warheads had rubbleized the predark town; cataclysmic dam failures had swept away most of the debris. Its university, museums, shopping centers and the grid work of residential streets were gone. On the outskirts of the redrawn flood plain, a few of the original industrial sites and warehouses still stood, but they were skeletal relics, with sagging roofs and breached walls. Nueva Las Cruces, or Nuevaville for short, had been constructed well back from the Grandee’s new shoreline. Amid groves of trees and green cultivated fields were clusters of immobile mobile homes, dilapidated RVs propped on cinder blocks, and tractor trailers with crude windows cut in their sheet-metal sides. Scattered among the predark-vintage structures were one-story huts and longhouses built with recycled materials, walls made of piled chunks of broken concrete, and of dried river mud reinforced with mats of willow sticks.

Two-thirds of the barony’s population tilled the land, processed surplus food for storage and sale, or worked on a fleet of transport barges. The rest of Haldane’s subjects were full-time men-at-arms. From the towering height of the Rabbit Ear Plateau, his capital looked bucolic and peaceful, as if time had been reversed. As if Armageddon had never happened.

It was an illusion, he knew.

In the hellscape, safety and stability were the products of a bloody endless fight. Deathland’s hardship and brutality reduced everything to the lowest common denominator: simple survival.

Us versus them.

Played out over and over again.

A war of attrition, until there was no “us” or “them” left, and the last, faint hope of humanity’s rising from the ashes of Armageddon winked out forever.

As Haldane resumed the climb, struggling up a slope that constantly shifted underfoot, he leaned into the wind. From the belly of a line of black clouds to the northwest, lightning licked down at distant mountaintops. Thunder rumbled. In perhaps two hours, three at most, the storm would be hard upon them, turning Nuevaville’s dirt roads to mire and spilling the river over its banks.

Looming above him were the snaggle-tooth pinnacles of the Organ Mountains. With the wind to his back, he followed a well-worn path along the base of the spires. It led to a broad cave in the bedrock, about ten feet high at its tallest, and five times that wide across. Inside the low opening were crude structures built of mud-and-straw bricks. From glassless windows and doorless doorways, rows of faces peered out at him, luminously pale, as round as full moons. He smelled burning excrement, which the cave dwellers dried and used as fuel for heat and for cooking. The filthy hands of three generations of inbred doomies directed him toward the stone hut that stood a few hundred feet down-slope.

As was the custom, Baron Haldane left his blaster outside the rude sanctuary. He unslung his Remington Model 1100 12-gauge autoloader. Its barrel and magazine were chopped down to the end of the forestock, its rearstock cut off behind the pistol grip. After he carefully set the truncated, hellacious scattergun on the ground, he pushed aside the brown polyester blanket that covered the hut’s doorway, ducking his head to enter. As he did, he was greeted by an explosion of snorting laughter.

Dim light streamed into the structure through uncountable cracks in the walls. There was no fire laid on the floor, nor candles lit for fear of igniting the dizzyingly sweet, flammable vapors concentrated therein. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, over the wind sighing through holes in the masonry, the baron heard a gurgling sound. It was from the spring that welled up from a deep fissure in the bedrock.

On a tripod chair positioned directly over the stone vent, enveloped in lighter-than-air petrochemical perfume, sat the oracle. The eighty-five-pound doomie’s sole garment was a diaper made of a once-white T-shirt. He sat with eyes tightly closed, a halo of wispy white hair crowned his knobby skull. Pale skin like parchment hung in folds from under chin and arms. Drooped down his belly were flapjack mammalia, circlets of white hair sprouted around the wrinkled aureolas. The doomie’s chest heaved as he sucked in and held lungfuls of the strange gases, dosing himself for the foretelling.

There was no seat for visitors in the close confines of the hut. Haldane stood slightly bent over to keep the top of his head from bumping into the crust of chemical deposits on the wooden rafters.

“You know why I have come?” the baron asked.

The doomie stifled a giggle by clamping a hand hard over his mouth. He snorted and honked as he tried to control himself. The battle lasted only a second or two. Unable to maintain his composure, he fell into a fit of laughter that set his pendulous dugs flip-flopping.

When the soothsayer opened his eyes, they were alarmingly bloodshot. “A dark deed looms,” he said merrily.

“Yes, it does,” Haldane said.

“The darkest of dark-dark deeds,” the oracle stated. “The noble baron’s hands will drip with the blood of slaughtered innocents.”

Haldane nodded at the grinning doomie.

“You want to know if there’s a less brutal way to accomplish the end you desire,” the soothsayer said. “Some other possible strategy, some sequence of events you may have overlooked.”

“That’s what I want you to tell me,” Haldane said. “Do I have to use the terrible weapon I’ve been offered?”

The doomie shut his eyes and screwed up his face, huffing in and out to force down more of the fumes.

Though all members of the doomie race had the power to see into the future, the rock spring’s sweet gas greatly stimulated and focused their mutie supersense. It also made them very, very happy. Too much perfume and they swallowed their own tongues and strangled to death.

Most of Haldane’s norm subjects believed that the Creator spoke to them through the oracles of the hut. They believed that true future sight, unknown before nukeday, was a kind of compensatory gift, God’s way of saying “I’m sorry for rogering your world so soundly.” Ironically, these chosen vessels of the Supreme Being were judged unfit to reside in Nuevaville proper. When not engaged in unraveling the mysteries of the future, they were seen as filthy, moronic creatures of unspeakable habits. They were kept apart from those they served so tirelessly, in what amounted to a mountaintop doomie zoo.

The soothsayer huffed until his scrunched-up face turned dark and his limbs began to jerk spasmodically. After many minutes passed he opened his eyes and said, “I have looked into your future, Baron. I have seen the struggles ahead. For you there is no other path.”

It was not the answer Haldane wanted to hear.

No baron of the hellscape could be shy about chilling, about ordering others to do it, or doing the deed personally, if it came to that. In Haldane’s case, chilling had always been in the service of freedom or the dispensation of justice. The bands of coldhearts and muties that threatened his people and their livelihood deserved and received the ultimate punishment. Haldane had always seen himself—and had been seen by his subjects—as a defender and a shepherd, both wise and fair.

The course of action that lay before him was wise, but hardly fair.

In target, in scale and scope, in moral consequences, this chilling was different. Even by Deathlands’s standards it was the act of a depraved, unfeeling butcher.

“There will be so much death,” he said.

“You alone have the power to put an end to the cycle of terror,” the oracle countered. “You can prevent the deaths of those you hold dear, for decades to come.”

“I am not a mass chiller,” Haldane said. “I am not a monster. I am a protector. I fight monsters.”

“I have been shown what will be, Baron. You have no choice in the matter. You will put your beliefs aside to advance the greater good. You will become what you hate to achieve lasting peace and security for your people. And after you do this vile deed, I guarantee that history will understand, and forgive you for the excess. History is written by the survivors, and rewritten by their offspring. They will call you a military genius and hail you as the glorious saviour of your lands. A leader with the courage and the vision to decisively act, and thereby change the fate of this barony forever.”

When the baron said nothing in reply, the oracle twisted the metaphysical dagger he held, the dagger of premonition. “If you do not act, Baron Haldane, be assured that Malosh will,” he said. “What you so dread doing to others will be done to you and yours. Nuevaville will become a graveyard. This barony will be turned to dust and scattered to the winds.”

With those awful words ringing in his ears, Haldane staggered out of the hut. Though fumble-fingered from the fumes he’d inhaled, he managed to scoop up the Remington 1100. He caught himself as he reached out to push aside the holed-out blanket. At that moment he wanted nothing more than to blow the oracle apart with high-brass buckshot. But in his heart he knew that chilling the messenger wouldn’t do any good.

An oracle had predicted the fall of his predecessor, Baron Clagg, who had responded to the bad news by dragging the helpless doomie to the nearest cliff and throwing him off, headfirst. Clagg had then tried to change his fate by all means possible, but everything he had done only served to speed the grisly end that had been described to him. Old Clagg had been a typical Deathlands baron: shortsighted, cruel, despotic. His insatiable greed had started the conflict with Malosh, setting the stage for this most regrettable day.

Haldane slung the Remington sawed-off and, bracing himself against the wind, started to retrace his steps down the mountain. Knowing that the evil he was about to unleash was preordained and couldn’t be avoided did nothing to lighten the weight that lay upon his heart.

Chapter Three

While Ryan stood dripping on the edge of the riverbank, Malosh the Impaler leaned over in the saddle to give his prisoner a closer inspection. On either side of the masked baron, a dozen swampies dug in their heels, fighting to restrain more of the massive, growling dogs by their choke chains. Fanned out behind the stumpy muties were normal-size sec men carrying lanterns and predark Combloc autorifles. Pristine predark weapons were often unearthed from stockpiles and were traded across the Deathlands. Usually the wealthiest barons bought them.

Ryan knew just how quickly he could clear his SIG P226 from shoulder leather. If its action and barrel weren’t clogged with muck, he knew he could get off a shot or two before the swampies released the dog pack and the men opened fire. But the one-eyed man wasn’t a big fan of suicide, even if there was a bit of justifiable homicide thrown in the mix. His thought, first and foremost, was getting his companions and himself out of this predicament alive. To have any hope of success against such long odds, they had to wait for their chance and work as a team.

At that moment it was unclear whether Malosh was going to let the companions live long enough to do that; after all, they had taken out a number of his valuable fighters. Slaughtering the guilty parties where they stood would have certainly evened the score. Ryan decided to play a hunch. He figured the baron wasn’t just looking for cannon fodder. To win battles he needed hard-nosed, seasoned warriors. Courage in the face of death was the only hole card Ryan held.

“Didn’t your mama teach you it’s rude to stare?” he demanded of the baron.

Malosh glared down at him and said nothing.

For a second Ryan thought he had made the big mistake that was going to get them all chilled. He prepared himself to quick draw the SIG, determined to angle the first two rounds up through the baron’s chin and out the top of his head. Sensing the sudden increase in tension, the dogs’ hackles bristled, and they started snapping and snarling, scrabbling in the mud with all fours, dragging their struggling handlers forward.

“My mama was a gaudy house slut,” Malosh told Ryan, his black eyes glittering above the leather mask. “To my knowledge she never refused service to man or woman, norm or mutie. She took on her customers three at a time and gave every one his or her money’s worth. The only thing my sainted whore of a mother ever taught me was to get the jack up front.”

“Sound advice,” Ryan said.

Malosh leaned over in the saddle again, gloved hands resting on the pommel. “You know, I was just about to let my hunting dogs tear you limb from limb,” he said, “but now I see they’d choke on those brass balls of yours. A man like you will serve me much better in one piece.”

The baron waved his sec men forward. “Take them all back to the ville,” he said, then he wheeled his horse and spurred it in the direction of Redbone.

As the lanterns closed in, Ryan got a better look at the fighters’ faces. They were an odd collection of humanity and near-humanity. The norm men and women were wolf-lean, mostly in their late teens to late twenties. The swampies weren’t the only nuke-spawned horrors in the crowd, but the other muties weren’t from distinct subhuman species. Some carried prominent, angry tumorous growths on their heads and necks. Some had withered and clawlike extra appendages sprouting from their shoulders. Ryan saw no stickies among the ranks, but that was no surprise. Stickies didn’t do well in a military setting. Unlike swampies, they were creatures of uncontrollable urges. They had their own hardwired, homicidal agenda.

Sandwiched between norms, muties and dogs, the companions and the pair of swineherds trudged back along the high bank. It was soggy going; at times they struggled through knee-deep mud. By the time they crossed the farm fields and started back up the zigzag trail, the rain had stopped and the sky had lightened considerably. The sec men put out their lanterns and hung them from their belts.

As the companions reentered the ville, shafts of warm sunlight speared through gaps in the churning gray clouds overhead. They were marched down the same narrow alley they had exited, past the dead pig, past the human corpse in the doorway. There was no sign of the trio they had left at the barricade. The makeshift barrier had been breached in the middle, its rocks and tree limbs dragged aside, and there were scorch marks from gren blasts on the bracketing mud walls.

Ryan had carefully measured their escorts over the course of the return trip. Malosh’s sec men were professionals. He saw no evidence of wandering attention despite the long slog, and the fact that they outnumbered their captives a comfortable ten-to-one. Even though they could have, no one slacked off. Their weapons came up at the right moments, without the need of shouted commands. They anticipated the potential for trouble well in advance, and efficiently closed the door on it.

That didn’t bode well for a future escape.

The sec men led them to the ville’s puddled central square where the air hung heavy with the sour smell of drowned woodsmoke and the sweet scent of burned flesh.

All of Redbone’s shell-shocked survivors had been assembled there at blasterpoint. About sixty men and women and twenty children stood before three, fifteen-foot-high posts that had been raised in front of the ville’s stone-rimmed well. Threaded onto the tops of each of the debarked, peckerpole tree trunks were two naked men and a naked woman.

All dead.

Ryan recognized them as the defenders of the fallen barricade. They were slumped over at the waist, with chins resting on their chests, their legs and feet smeared with blood. The sharpened stakes had been rammed up their backsides, then they had been hoisted into a vertical position. The weight of their own bodies and their desperate struggles had driven the shaved poles deep into their torsos.

“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed, tipping back his fedora. “That’s a nasty way to go.”

“Barbarous,” Doc agreed, his long, seamed face twisting into a scowl of disgust. “It would appear that we have been tossed back into the Dark Ages.”

“What makes you think we ever left them?” Mildred said.

Baron Malosh paced his chestnut horse back and forth in front of the displayed corpses. When the last of his men had entered the square, he reined in the stallion. Reaching down behind his knee, he unscabbarded a Kalashnikov assault rifle, aimed it at the sky and fired off a full-auto burst. A handful of Redbone’s survivors looked up at the baron with desperate dread, the rest looked only at their boot tops.

“I’m offering you Redbone folk a choice,” Malosh shouted. “Join my army and fight beside me. It’s a hard and dangerous life, but it’s profitable, too. There’s booty to be had and plenty of food to eat.” He pointed the autorifle at a heap of skinny, sharpened poles on the ground behind him. “Join me willingly and share in the spoils of war, or I will keep stretching buttholes until I run out of stakes.”

An easy decision for the defeated, a bullet or a saber thrust at some future date being preferable to imminent skewering.

“Form a line, then!” the baron cried. “Do it now!” As his mercies jabbed and shoved the outnumbered captives into a ragged column, he dismounted, handing the reins to a swampie.

The companions closed ranks with Krysty and Jak in front, the swineherds next, then Doc, J.B., Mildred and Ryan. The one-eyed man stepped to the side so he could watch what was going on at the head of the line. Malosh took only a moment to size up the first person before impatiently waving him to the right, where soldiers waited. The fit-looking young man moved off, presumably to join the fighters.

Zombielike, the line of volunteers advanced. Malosh made quick selections, sending the able-bodied young to the right, the middle-aged but still mobile to the left along with the older children. The elderly and the children under the age of seven he waved back to the doorways of the ramshackle huts. Thus mothers and their breastfeeding babies were separated, the former bound for war, the latter to starve.

This way and that the gloved hand motioned, dividing warriors from cannon fodder, and cannon fodder from those he deemed unfit to even serve as human shields.

As the companions approached Malosh, it became clear that he had yet another pigeonhole. A genetic one. The baron started to wave Krysty to the right, toward the norm warriors, but caught himself. He bent closer and examined the springy coils of her red hair. When he reached out, the prehensile tendrils wriggled away from his touch.

“You hide your rad-tainted blood well,” Malosh said. “You almost passed for norm. Of course, almost doesn’t count.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the swampies clustered behind the well. “Join your fellow muties,” he told her.

Krysty didn’t argue with the baron. She wasn’t ashamed of her heritage. She walked by him with her head held high.

Malosh took one look at Jak’s dead-white skin and ruby-red eyes and said, “You, too, mutie.”

“Not mutie!” Jak snarled at the man in the leather mask.

“And my mother wasn’t a two-bit whore,” Malosh said amiably.

“I purebred albino!”

Jak’s explosive protest cracked up the sec men of Malosh, both norm and mutie. Even some of the Redbone folk managed to grin.

The baron wasn’t interested in a genealogical debate; he was the sole arbiter of genetic purity. He gestured with his thumb again. “That way, mutie boy, or you croak on the spike.”

Jak didn’t budge a millimeter. In the Deathlands, being branded a “mutie” was the worst insult imaginable.

“Pride goeth before a fall,” Doc quoted.

“Misplaced pride in this case,” Mildred said cryptically.

“Dark night, what’s Jak doing?” J.B. said. “He’s not careful, he’s gonna get himself chilled.”

“Come on, Jak,” Krysty urged from beside the well. “Come over here. Don’t do this. Don’t die for nothing.”

“Better listen to your long-legged friend there,” Malosh said. “She’s trying to save you a big pain in the ass.”

It wasn’t the first time a dire strategic situation had demanded personal sacrifice from Jak Lauren. As distasteful as this particular sacrifice was, he turned without another word and started walking toward Krysty and the squad of genetic misfits.

The norm fighters didn’t let him off that easy. They laughed, catcalled and mimicked the albino in a whining, singsong chant.

“Not mutie!”

“Not mutie!”

“Not mutie!”

Why Malosh was isolating the mutie element was obvious to any resident of the hellscape over the age of three. Norms wouldn’t fight alongside muties because they distrusted and feared them. For the same reasons, muties didn’t like taking their marching orders from norms. Based on past bloodbaths, both sides were justified in these beliefs.

As it turned out, Young Crad and Bezoar didn’t pass Malosh’s muster, either. They were too slow of brain and foot, respectively. The baron ordered the pair over with the cannon fodder.

When Doc stepped up next, ebony walking stick in hand, Malosh immediately pointed him in the opposite direction. “Go back to the huts,” he said.

“The huts?” Tanner said incredulously. “You have made a grave error, sir.”

“No mistake, old man. You belong with the other diaper-wearers, the doddering geezers and the babies.”

Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was a courageous man and totally devoted to his friends. No way would he stay behind while they faced death.

“I assure you, sir, I am not ready for a rocking chair,” Doc said, unsheathing the rapier blade of his swordstick and with its razor point cutting a wicked S in the air an inch from the baron’s face.

Before he could retract it, in a blur almost too fast to follow, Malosh grabbed hold of the blade, trapping it in his fist.

Doc threw his full weight against the baron’s grip but couldn’t pull the rapier free or make its edge slice through the man’s hand.

“Kevlar glove,” Mildred said to Ryan over her shoulder.

When Malosh suddenly let go, Doc fell off balance and landed hard on his bony backside.

“Follow the dimmie and the gimp,” the baron said, motioning him toward the ranks of the human shields. “You just signed your own death warrant, old man.”

Ryan watched stoically as the baron consigned Mildred and J.B. to the norm fighters, but deep down his guts were churning. With the companions split up among the three separate units, their chances of success looked even more bleak.

As Ryan stepped forward, Malosh looked him straight in the eye, then said, “From the way you stare back at me with that blue peeper of yours, I’d say you’re a coldheart, chill-for-pay man. A mercie by trade. If you serve me well, mercie, I guarantee you will prosper. If you betray me, I will hunt you down and chill you triple ugly.”

Ryan shrugged.

“I’m wasting my breath,” the baron said. “Dying hard doesn’t scare a man like you, does it?”

“Fear only moves folks so far,” Ryan replied. “And it can push from more than one direction. Once you get this kidnapped crew into battle, you lose your monopoly on death threats. What makes you think you can count on me or any of the others when the lead starts flying?”

“The joy of doing unto others as was done to you,” Malosh said. “It’s what makes the world go around.”

Chapter Four

Under the gruesome banner of its hoisted dead, Redbone ville was sacked to the bare walls. Malosh’s army mainly supervised the work. Under its blasters, the ville folk were forced to loot their own homes. Some sobbed brokenly as they sorted and piled their worldly goods in the square—ammunition, blasters, cookware and trade items—but most moved in a trance of disbelief. The hilltop town’s food caches were also plundered, yielding up bags of grain, beans, potatoes; smoked joints of meat and barrels of sweet water. This booty was packed onto carts drawn by liberated horses and mules.

As always, the mutie contingent got the brown end of the stick.

Krysty, Jak, the betumored, the extra-limbed and the swampies were given the task of searching the knot of still-smoldering huts where Redbone fighters had made their last stand and removing anything of value that remained. The swampies attacked the job with great enthusiasm. Like a pack of tailless rats, the swampies rooted through the collapsed structures, pulling aside charred rafters, crawling on hands and knees into small, extremely hot spaces. For them, it was a treasure hunt.

As the tall redhead watched, the crew of stumpy little bastards, dusted head to toe with wet black ash, uncovered another half-cooked norm body in the rubble. After rolling it onto its back and robbing it of anything that would fit into their pockets, the leader of the swampies stood and shouted at Krysty and Jak, “Over here!”

As the swampies moved on to the next hut, Krysty and Jak carefully climbed through the burned-out ruin to where the body lay. She knelt and started to pull off the man’s boots. There were no laces. They came off easily. There were no socks underneath.

Jak pulled up the hem of the rough shirt, exposing a pasty, flabby belly. He whispered urgently to Krysty, “Still alive.”

Indeed, before her eyes the pale chest rose and fell ever so slightly.

Then the man opened his eyelids. His eyes bulged from a face blackened by soot, the whites by contrast shockingly brilliant. The burn victim wheezed softly, then broke into fit of coughing and choking. He spewed pink foam and bits of ash through blistered lips. The inside of his mouth and his tongue were bloodred.

“Don’t get up,” Krysty warned him. “Lie still. For Gaia’s sake, play dead.”

But breathing with scorched lungs was so difficult that he couldn’t oblige her. He convulsed, arching up from the ground. The swampies in the neighboring ruin turned at the commotion.

Jak leaned on the man’s shoulders with both hands, trying to pin him down and hold him still.

“Look out!” Krysty cried.

As a short, heavy blade flashed down, the albino reacted, twisting out of the way.

With a meaty thunk the predark hatchet smashed the burned man in the middle of the forehead; the wedge-shaped tool split his skull wide open. Krysty just managed to get a hand up in front of her face to block the flying brains and blood. When she looked down, the man’s limbs were quivering violently.

And for the last time.

“He don’t have to play at nothing now,” said the hatchet-wielding chief swampie, who sported an ash-stained, red-knit stocking cap. He put a boot on the man’s lifeless face, and wrenching the short handle back and forth, levered the ax head free from the bone. Gore welled up from the inch-wide fissure, crimson rivulets oozed through the coating of soot on his cheeks and ears.

The boss swampie called himself Meconium. Like other members of his kind, he had masses of tiny wrinkles around his eyes and a broad, flat nose. His coarse hands and feet were huge relative to his height. Even though he was only about four-foot-six, he weighed close to 175 pounds. Meconium looked like he was built from a short stack of cinder blocks.

He grinned at Jak as he hefted the bloody hatchet. “Nearly whacked your doodle, Not Mutie,” he said.

Sensing some big fun in the offing, the other swampies stopped raking through the debris and circled around. None of them carried blasters. The baron didn’t trust them with anything more lethal than edged weapons, nail-studded wooden clubs, and of course, the hellhounds, which were now chained in the square.

With Jak standing just out of reach of his hatchet, and a rapt audience gathered, Meconium prodded, “You ever take a look in a mirror, Snowball? Only a blind man could think you were norm.”

The albino stiffened, but he didn’t respond.

“Tell the truth,” Meconium urged him. “How did you come to be so white all over with those nasty red eyes? Did some scab-assed mutie plow your ma’s honeypot? Or did she come naturally with six teats and a chin beard?”

“Not mutie,” Jak repeated firmly.

Acting like he had purer blood than the swampies was a very bad move, in Krysty’s opinion. But that was Jak all over. He was hardheaded. And she could understand why he was so damned adamant about his genetics. The mutie brand had ugly consequences. Mutated species were at the bottom of hellscape’s pecking order, hunted down and chilled for sport by norms, or turned into slaves by them and routinely worked to death.

As a rule, Deathlands’s norms were shit-poor and butt-ignorant. Oppressing the visibly different and vulnerable made them feel in command of something. Since they no longer had a great nation or a historic flag to rally round, the only thing norms had to be proud of was their supposedly untainted DNA. Krysty had always felt that, deep down, norms believed that the muties had earned their malformities. They believed that for its own inscrutable reasons, the nukecaust had selected its victims, and had cast plagues upon their houses for generations to come. Muties were tangible evidence of that catastrophe, of the most hated and feared thing that had ever happened to the human race. They were evidence that the disaster wasn’t over. That perhaps it would never be over.

Jak hawked and spit a stringy green gob on the mutie’s lapel.

Meconium immediately flicked away the boutonniere of mucus. Advancing with the hatchet raised, he said, “You’re dead meat, Snowball.”

Jak braced himself for a fight.

“Step back,” Krysty told the swampie, her hand dropping to the grip of her Smith & Wesson.

From the lane behind them a voice growled, “Enough squabbling, get back to work.”

Unlike the swampies, this normal-size mutie carried firearms. A long-barreled, center-fire revolver hung in a pancake holster on his hip and he held a battle-worn 12-gauge pump braced at waist height, the barrel squarely leveled at Meconium’s bristling chin. Below his sweat-stained Bud Light ball cap was a tumorous growth the color and size of a ripe eggplant. It stretched the skin on the right side of his face balloon-tight and balloon-shiny. The growth completely hid his right ear. Korb was Malosh’s appointed captain of the entire mutie crew—no one in their right mind would turn that authority over to a swampie. Unlike the swampies, this tumor-head captain seemed to take no delight in the job at hand, and he regarded the stumpy bastards he commanded with grave suspicion.

The swampies followed his orders and sullenly retreated. They resumed rummaging through the ash pit next door.

“Better steer clear of them ball biters, boy,” Korb told Jak. “They pack fight, like dogs. They’ll gang up on you first chance they get.”

From previous experience, Krysty and Jak had learned a good deal about the nature of the swampie race. They were sour, vicious, greedy, vindictive. And above all, cunning.

Apparently, Korb didn’t hold a grudge against Jak for three times denying a mutie birthright. He pointed at the distorted side of his face and said, “You know I cut this blasted thing off me once with a red-hot knife blade. After it was gone I figured it’d leave a triple-mean scar, but mebbe I could pass for a wounded norm. Well, I almost bled to death from sawing it off, and then the rad bastard grew back twice as big in a month.”

If the tumor head was trying to get Jak to fess up and admit he had rad-tainted blood, he quickly realized he was wasting his time. As Korb walked away, Krysty and Jak began stripping the dead man. After making a pile of the recyclable clothes, they carried his naked corpse by hands and feet to the cliff and tossed him over the edge like a sack of garbage.

When they returned to the section of burned-out huts, the swampies started making fun of Jak again, speculating further on his origins and the bizarre sexual preferences of his mother.

“They’re just trying to draw you out,” Krysty said. “To get you to do something stupe.”

“Yeah,” Jak replied.

“Don’t let them.”

“Yeah.”

They advanced deeper into the jumble of collapsed structures where the swampies rooted about.

“Over here, Snowball,” Meconium called. “We got another prize for you.”

As the swampies moved to the adjoining hut, Krysty and Jak climbed over a tumbled-down wall. The dwelling’s opposite wall stood more or less intact; it supported a shaky latticework of burned and broken roof beams that jutted overhead. They couldn’t miss the still form in the middle of the hut floor. It was surrounded by a doughnut of displaced ash and debris. The pockets of the dead fighter’s coat and pants were turned inside out.

Jak walked to the far side of the body. As Krysty followed, with a crack and crash, a long, dark shadow dropped from above. There was no avoiding it, no time for Krysty to even look up. The section of scorched beam caught her full across the shoulders, driving her to the ground. Even as the beam’s weight slammed her face-first into the ash, a swampie jumped down on top of it. Her arms pinned under her body, Krysty couldn’t reach her blaster. She could barely draw breath with 175 pounds of mutie sitting on the rafter on her back. He held a machete to the side of her throat; its edge bit into her skin. Trapped there, Krysty realized the sneaky swampie bastards had set up the deadfall while she and Jak were disposing of the last corpse. In a matter of seconds, she had been taken out of the fight.

As Jak came to her aid, drawing his .357 Magnum from its holster, Meconium hit him from behind with a charred piece of wood that shattered against the back of his head. If the makeshift club hadn’t been burned through, the blow would have killed him stone-dead. But Meconium didn’t want him to die quickly; he wanted his crew to get in their licks first. Even though the blunt instrument failed, the force of the blow drove Jak to his knees and sent the Colt Python flying out of his hand and into the mound of wet ash beside the body.

Jak sprang up and faced his attackers

The five swampies, three males and two females, had their clubs and blades out. Even the women outweighed Jak by eighty or ninety pounds; he towered over all of them.

“We’re gonna bust you up good,” one of the swampie females promised, taking a practice swing with her knobby cudgel.

“Then we’re gonna hack you into bite-size pieces,” said one of the males, waving a predark, made-in-India Bowie knife.

“Don’t yell for help, Snowball,” Meconium advised.

“You, neither,” Jak said.

Krysty expected leaf-bladed knives to start dropping out of his sleeves and fly through the air. At close range, Jak was a dead chilling shot with blades. But no razor-sharp steel appeared in his palms. The albino had unconditionally accepted the terms of the fight. As much as the swampies wanted to hurt him, Jak wanted to hurt them. Like the swampies, he intended to teach a final, agonizing lesson before he dispatched his enemies to the last train west.

Jak feinted right, then darted left, punctuating a 360-spin move with a blur of a back fist. The full power strike caught the nearest swampie in the middle of the face. He could feel cartilage crunch under his knuckles, but even though blood gushed from the broken nose and the eyelids momentarily fluttered shut, the blocklike head didn’t move.

That’s how strong her neck was.

As the others closed in for the chill, Jak scampered, as light as a spider, over a jumble of scorched and overturned wooden furniture, to the back of a fallen beam. The rafter lay at a thirty-degree angle, with one end on the dirt floor, the other resting atop the far wall. Like an Olympic gymnast, Jak balanced effortlessly on the six-inch-wide beam.

Hopping to avoid the sideways slash of a short sword, he snap-kicked the stumpy swordsman under the chin. It had as much effect as kicking a boulder. Jak reached up with both hands, caught the end of a loose overhead beam and hauled on it with his entire weight, making it pivot and swing down. As the swordsman lunged with his point, the crossmember landed with a solid thunk between his eyes, driving him backward onto his ass.

Determined to help her companion, Krysty tried to push up from the floor. As she did, the edge of the machete scraped deeper into her neck. The swampie put his boot sole on top of her head and firmly shoved her face back into the ash. At that moment Krysty could have closed her eyes and summoned her Gaia power, the mutie connection with the Earth spirit that gave her superhuman strength for brief periods of time. She could have used the Gaia energy to throw off both the beam and the swampie, but the aftermath of that psychic connection would have left her too drained to be of any use in a fight.

When she looked up again, Jak was running full-tilt along the top of the tumbledown wall. This while the swampies threw themselves at him, lunging with their weapons, trying to cut his legs out from under him. The higher Jak climbed along the wall, the less effective the swampies were. They couldn’t jump for beans.

Jak could have easily gotten away by dashing across the tops of the exposed rafters, but escape wasn’t on his agenda. Instead, he leaped from the wall, over the swampies’ heads, landing behind them. A development that astonished them. Before they could recover, Jak lashed out with a sidekick. It caught the swampie in front of him below the left ear, bouncing his forehead off the mud wall. Then the others attacked all at once.

While Jak danced and dervished, a white whirlwind in their midst, the swampies seemed to be moving in slow motion. He ducked and dodged their rain of blows, they absorbed his like stumpy punching bags. With fists and feet Jak pulped their faces, splitting their brows, closing their eyes, breaking out their yellow teeth. His knuckles and boots were smeared with blood and ash, but they kept on coming.

“Help us get the bastard!” Meconium shouted at the seated swampie.

The crushing weight on Krysty’s back suddenly eased as the mutie jumped up and threw himself and his machete into the melee.

Krysty crawled out from under the beam with difficulty, but without using her Gaia power. As she drew her blaster, the battle spilled out of the hut and rolled down the alley in the direction of the square.

When the skirmish burst into view, Mildred was helping J.B. and Ryan strap water barrels onto a wooden wheeled mule cart. Five swampies chased Jak out of the alley, screaming and waving their blades and clubs. The sec men raised their autorifles, aiming not at the newcomers but at the edges of the crowd, this to keep a wider battle from breaking out. With an AK pointed at her chest Mildred couldn’t draw and fire her ZKR 551. Likewise, Ryan and J.B. were forced to stand and watch.

Not that Jak needed any help.

He turned and attacked the swampies, splitting the pack in two. His feet and fists found their targets over and over again, smashing into already bruised and bloodied faces. Mildred had never seen him fight with such savage frenzy. She doubted that Jak even heard the crowd cheering him on.

The systematic beating and the victims’ inability to return any punishment took its toll. The sword and club strikes began to miss Jak not by inches but by feet; that’s how slowly they came. As the muties weakened, Jak isolated one of their number for special treatment. Pivoting as the swampie swung his hatchet, Jak slipped behind the bastard and clapped a forearm across his throat, seizing hold of his left shoulder. He yanked off the swampie’s red stocking cap, snatched a handful of coarse brown hair and, straining hard, bent back his head until his scraggly chin beard pointed skyward.

“No, Jak!” Ryan shouted from Mildred’s side. “You’ll never break that neck!”

But that wasn’t what Jak had in mind.

He shook a leaf-bladed knife from the sleeve of the arm that pinned the mutie’s chest, then jabbed one of the razor-sharp edges against the base of the hairy throat.

The swampie growled and curled back his lips, showing bloody fractured teeth as he struggled in vain to free himself.

“Time to die,” Jak said.

Over the cries of approval someone bellowed, “Korb!”

A tumor-head mutie in a bill cap stepped behind Jak and shouldered a pump shotgun, taking aim at the back of his skull.

The crowd parted on the far side of the square and Baron Malosh stormed over to Jak. “If you chill that swampie,” he said, “Korb will blow your head off. This is my army. You follow my orders. You fight who I tell you to and when I tell you to. Until then you stand down, mutie!”

“Not mutie!”

The edge of the knife drew a fine red line across the exposed throat. It was a shallow wound and only a couple of inches long, but it made blood spill over the swampie’s madly bobbing Adam’s apple. Jak pressed the blade below the hinge of the swampie’s jaw, poised to cut much, much deeper and from ear to ear.

“Nukin’ hell!” J.B. groaned.

At that moment the expression on the swampie’s face changed from incoherent fury to abject terror. He was certain he was going to die in the next few seconds. Then terror suddenly turned to horror as something fell out of his baggy pant leg and draped across his boot.

He had dropped a turd on his own left foot.

“Let go of the swampie,” the masked baron said.

When Jak didn’t immediately comply, Malosh moved out of the line of fire and the arc of splatter. “I’m going to count to three,” he said. “One…two…”

With a snarl of contempt, Jak shoved the befouled swampie away from him.

“Thank God,” Mildred said, allowing herself to breathe again.

“That was close,” J.B. added.

“Too damned close,” Ryan said.

The baron whirled on the tumor head holding the shotgun. “If you let trouble like this break out again, Korb,” he said, “you’re the one who’s gonna suffer.”

Mildred, J.B. and Ryan watched Krysty step from the crowd and hand Jak his Colt Python. Then the two companions were ushered back down the alley at blasterpoint. Jak walked with his back straight and his head high, having defended the purity of his genetics.

It was unclear from Mildred’s conversations with Jak whether he had ever actually seen another albino, but she knew it was highly unlikely that he had. Before Armageddon, the U.S. had a population of only about eighteen thousand albinos. Back in the glory days of civilization, their life expectancy was normal. In a cruel and brutal new world, however, the physical deficits that accompanied their condition greatly lessened the chances of survival.

If Jak Lauren had no idea how much he differed from a prenukecaust albino, a late twentieth-century medical doctor and whitecoat like Mildred Wyeth knew exactly. The research of her peers had shown that albinism in humans was the result of defective genes on one or more of the six chromosomes that controlled production of the pigment melanin, which was key to normal development of eyes, skin and eye-brain nerve pathways. Aside from pale skin and hair, the genetic condition caused very poor eyesight and extreme skin sensitivity to sun. Human albino eyes were either blue-gray or light brown in color. Any reddish or pinkish cast was temporary, caused by light striking the iris at a certain angle, like the “red eye” effect in a flash photograph.

Mildred had never seen Jak wear corrective lenses; his vision was perfect near and far. He had never worn a hat or special clothing to protect his white skin from sunburn, which he never seemed to get. His eyes were ruby-red all the time, like a lab rat.

Jak could proclaim himself “Not mutie!” until the hellscape froze over, but he didn’t know anything about genetics, or metabolic pathways, or conventional albinism. In point of fact, Mildred was confident that no creature like him had existed before nukeday.

In a world where albinos were virtually unknown, where any sort of physical oddity was ascribed to the curse of mutated genes, it wasn’t surprising that Jak was saddled with the mutie label at almost every turn.

She had never told him—or any of the others—how well the label fit. Passing on that information served no good purpose in her view. Besides, Mildred found the whole concept of “pure norm genes” ridiculous. Science and reason told her that post-apocalypse, everyone and everything was a little bit mutie, thanks to cumulative exposure to the increased background radiation. Her own DNA had undoubtedly suffered permanent damage during the companions’ imprisonment at ground zero on the Slake City nukeglass massif. That didn’t worry her much, either. A century ago, when she was still a medical student, she’d read the statistics on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A-bomb victims with far higher radiation doses than hers lived for many decades before fatal cancers finally appeared. Based on the level of violence and hardship in the hellscape, the chances were good that she wasn’t going to live long enough to die of cancer, anyway.

After all the wags were loaded, Malosh had his troops line up the Redbone conscripts. The masked baron then walked down the row and quickly selected three healthy young men and three healthy young women, apparently at random.

“You six will stay behind,” he informed them. “I have left you and the others enough food and water to survive. As you rebuild your ville, remember my mercy.”

While the lucky half dozen hurried to join the very old and very young at the doorways of the empty huts, the baron mounted his horse and led the mass exit from Redbone.

Only Malosh’s officers rode, either on horseback or in the carts. Everyone else walked down the zigzag path to the fields below. The column of nearly three hundred was a large force by Deathlands standards, and it was segregated by genetics and military function.

“Where the rad blazes are we headed?” J.B. asked the gaunt fighter walking beside him.

“Sunspot ville,” the man said. “It’s a long march due south. At least two, mebbe three days.”

“What happens when we get there?” Mildred asked, hoping against hope for some good news.

There was none.

“We take the ville,” the soldier said, “or die trying.”

Chapter Five

As Baron Kendrick Haldane crossed the fields en route to his riverside compound, his subjects, old and young, tipped their hats and smiled up at him. They knew nothing of the deal about to be struck. Though Haldane had been made baron by popular acclaim, his fiefdom wasn’t a democracy. The good people of Nuevaville didn’t want participatory government; they wanted a leader, a father figure, someone in charge who was stronger and more intelligent than they were. Success or failure, survival or extinction was the baron-for-life’s sole responsibility.

Parked in the lane in front of the side-by-side, double-wide trailers that housed his residence and administrative offices was a convoy of armored predark wags. Hummers. Winnebago Braves. Military six-by-sixes. One of the vehicles, a veritable landship with a skin of gunmetal-gray steel plate, dwarfed all the others. The metal windshield had two wide rows of louvred view slits for the driver and navigator. There were also view slits above each of the firing ports that ringed its perimeter at four-foot intervals. Bulletproof skirts protected the three sets of wheels; amidships and rear, the wheels were doubled. A full-length steel skidplate protected the undercarriage from improvised road mines and satchel charges. On the roof, fore and aft, heavy, swivel-mounted machine guns controlled 360 degrees of terrain.

The wags’ crews and sec men lounged around cable spool tables set out under a pair of oak trees.

Small children peeked at the convoy and its personnel from behind the outcrops that bordered the lane. From their delighted expressions, they thought the carny had come to town. When Haldane angrily waved them off, they scattered, out of harm’s way.

The baron had positioned his ville defense force in the surrounding buildings, ditches and fields. From these hiding places, they aimed two old RPGs that had been acquired by the old baron at the parked vehicles and the seated men, ensuring that any attempt at a double cross would end as quickly as it started, a grenade attack turning wags into burning hulks—and men into dismembered corpses—in a matter of seconds.

Haldane could hear the big wag’s power generators droning as he approached the crew members and sec teams. There was as much Nuevaville rabbit stew on their beards and forearms as there was on their plates. Those not eating were busy drinking green beer from recycled antifreeze jugs and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and cheroots. Their predark milspec weapons were prominently displayed. The 9 mm Heckler & Koch MP-5 A-3 submachine guns showed no wear, no scratches in their blueing. They looked brand-new, right out of the Cosmoline.

The visitors didn’t rise in deference or salute as Haldane passed. Some ignored him, most stared with unconcealed contempt. The baron had come face to face with plenty of road and river trash in his day, but this gang was different. And not just because of the quality and condition of their blasters. They had no fear of him.

Or perhaps they had a far greater fear of their employer.

The sec men and drivers were uniformly large—tall, well fed and muscular. They all sported an excess of the scarifications and brandings that passed for body decoration in the hellscape. Angry red tears perpetually dripped down cheeks. Mouths were widened at the corners and turned up into obscene, permanent grins. Spiral brands formed symbolic third eyes in the middle of foreheads. Inch-wide, half-round welts, snakes of scars, wound around bare arms from wrist to shoulder. Ground-in dirt caked their hands and faces and the sides of their heavy black boots.

Haldane entered the big wag via a porthole door amidships. The light inside the narrow metal corridor was dim and filled with the most horrible smell, a combination of slaughterhouse in July and deathbed, blood and pus and bodily wastes. It took his breath away. To the right, down the access way, a sec man with shoulder-length, blond dreadlocks motioned impatiently for him to approach.

“Did you talk to your god?” the guard asked, holding the muzzle of his H&K pointed at the baron’s bowels, his finger resting lightly on the trigger.

“No,” Haldane replied, “my god talked to me, through his chosen oracle.”

“Ain’t but one true god in Deathlands, Baron, and he’s waiting for you back there.” The sec man hooked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the wag’s rear salon.

As Haldane started to walk past, the sentry put out his free hand and said, “Gimme that blaster.”

The baron let him take the Remington, then started down the hall. On his right were evenly spaced firing ports and view slits. On his left were riveted metal walls and closed metal doors.

He was fifteen feet from the entrance to the rear stateroom when he heard a shrill, whimpering sound over the generators’ steady throb. The sound was instantly recognizable. It made his heart thud in his ears and his blood run cold. He sprinted for the door and without knocking, threw it back and burst into the salon.

Inside everything was in disarray. The lamplit workbenches and tables that choked the middle of the room were cluttered with surgical tools, rusting cans and piles of rags. Under the tables were buckets of what looked like dirty transmission fluid. Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves overflowed with electronic and computer parts. In front of a double ceramic sink streaked with blood was a fifty-five-gallon plastic barrel in which floated human body parts. The concentrated reek of abattoir made his eyes water and his gorge rise.

In the gloom on the far side of the jumble of tables, something moved on the broad, rear bench seat. Haldane caught a glimpse of a face, of sorts. In a full moon of festering flesh sat eyes like chromed hens’ eggs.

An ancient, unblinking evil.

That wouldn’t let itself die.

When Haldane moved closer, he saw the small blond-haired child sitting ever so still on the creature’s lap. It was his son, Thorne. The boy’s blue eyes wore an expression he had never seen before. And never wanted to see again. Thorne was paralyzed with terror. A half metal, half human claw rested easily on the back of the boy’s slender neck.

“You have a very inquisitive child here, Baron,” the Magus said. “He asked me for a guided tour of my war wag. I think I have satisfied his curiosity.”

Thorne Haldane looked up at his father, desperate to be away, but afraid to move a muscle.

As adrenaline flooded the baron’s veins, a mechanized hand slipped down to cover the center of the child’s chest.

“He has such a strong little heart,” Magus said.

The clanking laugh than emanated from the spiderlike torso jolted Haldane to the core, as did the implied threat.

Magus wasn’t a child molester.

He was something infinitely worse.

“Come here, son,” Haldane said.

Steel Eyes held the boy fast on his lap, and the baron sensed the creature’s insane jealousy, his envy of the budding young life.

Haldane had a nine-inch killing dirk concealed up his sleeve. A weapon designed to open a wound that would never close. But where to stab, which of the rat’s nest of plastic tubes and colorful wires to cut? And failing a one-strike, instant chill, those metal fingers would crush his child’s head like a piece of ripe fruit.

The dirk remained in its forearm sheath.

“Son, come to me. You have no business here.”

Magus didn’t try to stop the boy as he cautiously slipped off his lap. Thorne hurried between the tables to hide behind his father’s stout legs. The six-year-old clung to the back of his BDU pants.

From the bench seat came a faint, high-pitched whirring sound as the pupils in Magus’s metal eyes dilated. Then he opened his mouth and licked his lips with an all too human tongue. When he closed his jaws, the supporting guy wires slid into the grommets set in titanium cheek braces.

It was said, and widely believed, that this monstrous, suppurating creature experimented with the organs of other people in order to find ways to improve his own ability to function. It was said that Magus was so removed from his human origins that he performed operations on himself. He could turn off his pain centers and yank out and replace his own innards, like components of a wag motor.

There would be no experiments on Haldane’s only son. Not while the baron still drew breath. Without a word, he picked up the boy and carried him down the hall, past the grinning sec man, to the porthole door.

“They grabbed me and brought me in here, Daddy,” Thorne told him. “I didn’t wanna see this place.”

“I know you didn’t. It’s okay, now,” Haldane said as he put the child down. He opened the door and whispered in his son’s ear, “Run, Thorne. Run!”

The boy jumped to the ground and took off down the lane like a shot, through the first spattering of rain. Lightning arced across the northern sky, and a moment later thunder rumbled.

As Haldane turned back for the salon, his hands began to tremble and shake. His mouth tasted like he’d been sucking on a bullet. This was how Magus took and maintained control of even the strongest, the bravest of men; this was how he corrupted them. He showed them their most terrible fear, and that he had the power to make it come to pass.

Steel Eyes dealt in weapons of mass destruction, the deadliest instruments that civilization had ever produced. No one knew for certain how he got access to the predark technology, whether he stole it from the secret redoubts scattered around the nuked-out world, or whether, as was rumored, he traveled back in time to rob it from the past. Either way, Magus was much more than a trader in rare and dangerous goods. Although he didn’t seek to acquire territory or to amass armies, his spies were said to be everywhere. He didn’t aspire to baronhood, but he pulled strings behind the scenes like a puppet master, applying pressure here, pressure there, for motives that were unfathomable.

The baron reentered the salon and stepped right up to Magus. Close enough to see the inflamed joins of live flesh and polished metal. Through the rear window’s view slits, in down-slanting shafts of light, fat flies buzzed and zigzagged.

“You shouldn’t have touched my son,” Haldane said.

“I did him no harm,” Magus countered. “I am not contagious. It was an educational experience for him. He saw the greatest miracle of whitecoat science at close range.”

With Thorne’s life out of the mix, an instant chill strike wasn’t necessary. The baron could have taken his time with the killing dirk, absorbing whatever punishment the mechanized hands dished out, stabbing and slashing until the creature finally died. He would have done so with relish, but he needed Magus to save his barony.

“Before we proceed,” Haldane said, “I want assurances that the loss of life will be confined.”

“I never give guarantees,” Magus said. “The weapons systems I have brought you are indiscriminate by design. My sources tell me that even as we speak, the Impaler is advancing on Sunspot with a large military force. He will rout your small detachment of fighters, take over the ville and reestablish his staging point for another hit-and-run attack on Nuevaville. Yes or no, Haldane. I need your decision now.”

The puppet master understood the trap in which Haldane and his arch enemy were caught. Both controlled minor fiefdoms with small populations and large, mostly uninhabitable territories. Malosh wanted the natural resources of Haldane’s barony, Haldane wanted to protect them. Haldane couldn’t defeat Malosh’s mobile army, Malosh couldn’t defeat his hardened defenses. Neither had alliances of mutual defense with baronies on their other borders.

For the past five years Haldane and his western neighbor had battled across an ill-defined boundary, losing blood and treasure in a steady flow, and the key to staging or holding off successful attacks was Sunspot. The remote ville had the misfortune of standing roughly halfway between the barons’ respective capitals, on the most direct overland route. For military purposes, it was a strategic lynchpin, a place for an army recover after the long desert trek, a place to store supplies and gather reinforcements. For years, control of Sunspot had swung back and forth between the adversaries, with the ville folk caught in the middle.

Haldane saw the fighting and the loss of life as a waste of precious resources and time. The constant conflict kept him from developing economic relationships with the wealthy eastern baronies, from building new trade routes, from bringing more prosperity to his people. It kept him from giving them a future.

Magus had appeared on his doorstep with a long-term solution to the problem. The only way to end the stalemate was to obliterate Sunspot ville and make it useless to either side.

For some to live, others had to die.

The price of peace was mass murder.

Haldane knew if Magus offered Malosh the same opportunity, he would jump at it. Not to use against Sunspot. To use against the defenses of Nuevaville. Not to end to the conflict at a gentlemen’s draw, but to win a one-sided victory.

The storm had closed in. Thunder boomed directly overhead. A hard rain rattled the landship’s roof.

“Show me what you’ve brought,” the baron said.

Magus lurched from the bench seat with speed and agility that surprised Haldane. He whipped aside a tarp on the floor, exposing a pair of lidless crates. They were painted olive-drab and bore the mark of the hammer and sickle. Inside one, in neat rows, were point-nosed artillery projectiles. The second crate held cased propellant charges. Like the wag crews’ H & Ks, it all looked straight-from-the-armory, brand-spanking-new.

“The chem weapon warheads are fired by the Soviet Lyagusha D-30 122 mm howitzer,” Magus said. “Its maximum range is a little more than nine miles.”

“And you have this gun?”

“Of course.”

“Where is it?”

“Safely hidden between here and the proposed target.”

Haldane examined the munitions with care. “There are two kinds of shells in the crate,” he remarked.

“That’s right. You have a choice to make, Baron. Would you prefer nerve or blister gas?”

Chapter Six

Doc Tanner marched with his eyes narrowed to slits and a scarf securely wrapped over his mouth and nose. The cannon fodder contingent to which he had been assigned formed the tail of a 350-yard-long column. In front of the human shields were the muties and the leashed dogs, then came the horse-and mule-drawn supply carts, the norm fighters, with the cavalry taking the lead.

Doc couldn’t see the other companions for the shifting clouds of dust and all the intervening bodies. Grit crunched between his back teeth, and when he lifted the bottom edge of his scarf to clear his throat, he spit brown. Beside him, the elder swineherd, Bezoar, walked under his own power, limping on a crudely fashioned, willow-fork crutch. Young Crad kept a wary eye on his mentor, ready to come to his aid in case he faltered.

Like Doc, the others were coated head to foot with beige dirt; like him, most had strips of rag tied over their faces. They looked like an army of the disinterred, children between the ages of seven and thirteen, and men and women with healed, horrendous wounds and missing limbs. Some of the fodder resembled the young swineherd—in Deathlands evocative parlance: triple-stupe droolies.

So far, all those who had tried to escape from Malosh’s army had failed. The dust and arid terrain offered little or no cover to conscriptees who broke ranks and sprinted off in the opposite direction. When this happened, the swampies leisurely unchained the dogs, who scrambled after the prey, baying. The deserters got off one, mebbe two shots, then came desperate screams for help amid wild snarling. Screams that were quickly silenced. After the same scenario had played out a few times, there were no more deserters.

Even if successful escape had been possible, Doc would never have left his battle mates.

High above the loose, three-abreast formation, buzzards circled, riding the thermals, waiting for hapless souls to weaken and fall behind. No bullwhips, no threats were required to keep the column of conscripts moving onward. To fall behind was to be abandoned in the desert, and that meant a slow, awful death by heat and dehydration, it meant lying helpless while the carrion birds plucked out your eyes and tongue.

Idle chatter among the ranks had dried up hours ago, along with the rain-soaked soil. The rapid pace of the advance was difficult to maintain, first because of soggy earth, and now because of all the dust the boots, the wheels and the animals were raising. Talking parched the throat and the refreshment stops on the march were few and far between.

Even when wind gusts blew aside the swirling beige dust, there was little of interest to look at. The army trudged down the vast river plain, creeping toward low blue blips on the horizon. The troops and wags and dogs at the front of the column scared off any wild animals.

As Doc put one foot in front of the other, his mind began to wander, inexorably turning inward. This was the first army in which he had served. During his months of captivity before nukeday, he had read about the terrible wars of the twentieth century. Except for the smattering of automatic weapons among the ranks, this army could have come straight from the fifteenth century—or even earlier. It had no mass overland transit. No aircraft. No communications systems. No motor-powered wags.

It was a legion of barbarians, of shabbily clad ground pounders who pillaged the hellscape like locusts.

AS AFTERNOON EDGED into evening, Malosh’s column climbed out of the river valley into the low, rolling desert hills polka-dotted with clumps of brush. Sunset tinged the mountains to the east, turning the up-tilted layers of folded bedrock into alternating bands of pink and orange. In a notch between the hilltops, they made camp for the night, unharnessing the horses and mules, lighting cook fires, setting up the tents for the men in charge. Everyone else ate and slept in the open in groups segregated by function and the relative purity of their genetics.

While waiting in line with the rest of the cannon fodder for his supper, Doc saw Jak and Krysty standing over by the dog pack. He tried to get their attention, but in the failing light they didn’t see him.

Ferdinando, the commander of the human shields, supervised the distribution of their evening meal. His right arm ended in a khaki sock-covered stump just above the elbow. His left hand was badly mangled as was the right side of his throat and face. A thick brown beard covered his cheeks, everywhere but that angry, waxy patch of scar.

Dinner consisted of a single, fire-roasted jacket potato and a dipper of water.

“This is what the baron means by ‘plenty to eat’?” Doc said, holding up the charred, stunted spud he’d been given.

“Fighters march faster on empty stomachs,” Ferdinando said. “Dogs are more eager for the hunt. Don’t worry, there will be feasting enough after we retake Sunspot ville.”

“You had control of it and lost it?” Doc queried.

“Our forces were driven out by Baron Haldane’s troops. The battle cost me my arm.”

“A terrible wound, indeed,” Doc commiserated.

“Gren went off under a horse I was walking past. Shrap tore me up bad, and then the horse fell on top of me. Lost this wing altogether, and it crushed my left hand so I can’t fire a blaster no more. To tell the truth, I can hardly pick up a spoon to feed myself.”

“Malosh’s army did that to you?”

“No, no. The gren came from Haldane’s men.”

“But you were a conscript?”

“No, I volunteered.”

“Why in God’s name would you do something like that?” Doc asked.

“Because I come from the heartland of Malosh’s barony,” Ferdinando said. “To the west of here there’s nothing but desert, unfarmable hardscrabble for hundreds of miles in every direction. It’s a place so worthless nobody has ever bothered trying to invade it. Before Malosh took power in the territory, the people in my ville were always just one day away from starvation. We had to watch our children die of hunger and disease. Malosh freed us from our fate. He realized that even though we could never win total victory over the neighboring barons because of our limited numbers, we could raid their territory on a regular basis and send the food back to our people. He forged us into a quick-strike fighting force. We survive by our wits, our courage and our speed of foot. If we stop moving, we die.”

“Surely you could pack up and move somewhere else. To greener, more hospitable pastures.”

“And fall under the bootheel of another baron?” Ferdinando said. “Never. The hard land where we were born has made us who we are. And we are proud of it.”

“And in the name of that pride you swear allegiance to the Impaler?”

“Call him whatever you like. He’s a hero to his people.”

“Perhaps so, but what about the poor souls he has forced to fight and die for him, whose villes he has ransacked?”

“Wait until you see the baron in battle. Wait until you see the effect he has on every person in this army. Malosh has no equal in valor or in daring. His example as a warrior raises everyone up.”

“I’ve seen how he raises people up,” Doc said. “He has no equal in brutality, either.”

“That is a means to an end,” Ferdinando said. “Three die and fifty join us.”

“You are saying he takes no pleasure from those ghastly public spectacles?”

“I have fought under Malosh for two years. Because of that mask he wears I’ve never seen him smile. I don’t know what gives him pleasure. I only know I will die for him because of what he has done for his people, for my kin.”

“No matter what he has done to everyone else.”

Ferdinando smiled. “Mark my words, when the time comes you will die for him, too. And gladly.”

“I will die,” Doc said, “but not for the likes of him.”

Clutching his miserable meal, Doc found Bezoar and Young Crad huddled close to one of the campfires. The elder swineherd comforted the younger, who sobbed bitterly into his palms.

“She’s in a much better place,” Bezoar assured his friend. After a minute he limped over to Doc.

“Poor boy’s brokenhearted,” Bezoar said.

“If you ask me, his attachment to that dead beast seems inordinate,” Doc remarked.

“The feeling was mutual,” Bezoar said. “That black-and-white hog followed him everywhere he went. They ate cheek to cheek, nose to nose at the same trough. She sat at his feet. She slept beside him in the straw. This is their first night apart since the day she was weaned.”

A phrase from Victorian times popped into Tanner’s mind. “The love that dare not speak its name.”

A florid euphemism that originally referred to another sort of socially—and Biblically—condemned behavior. Perhaps he was overreacting.

Bezoar slammed the door on that happy possibility.

Shaking his grizzled head, the crippled swineherd shared the boy’s sad secret. “When it come to getting some of the biscuit,” he said, “Young Crad was shit out of luck. None of the norm women in Redbone ville would take him between their legs. And he never earned enough jack to rent out a gaudy slut. Even the ville’s female triple-stupe droolies turned up their noses at him. His piggie dear wasn’t nearly so picky.”

Doc Tanner shuddered as deeply suppressed, horrific memories swept over him. Shortly after he’d first arrived in the hellscape, he’d been captured by Baron Jordan Teague and tortured by Cort Strasser, the baron’s head sec man. Strasser, of the skull-like face and skin like tightly stretched parchment, had driven Doc into the baron’s pig sties, and at blasterpoint, before an audience of hooting sec men, forced him to have sexual congress with the sows. The ordeal severely tested Doc’s staying power; Strasser wouldn’t let him leave the pens until he had serviced every single pig. And whenever the mood struck him, Strasser sent Doc back for more.

In the process, the Oxford-educated doctor of philosophy and science, a man of elevated sensibilities, of moral values, had been brought lower than low. A hundred times he had considered suicide. He had already survived kidnap and torture by the whitecoats, the loss of his family; his brain had been scrambled by consecutive temporal leaps. Despite all he’d suffered, his will to live was indomitable. He was only thankful that his beloved Emily and his dear children couldn’t witness his utter degradation.

Even years later, the sight of a curly tail made his skin crawl.

The idea that Young Crad might have willingly engaged in similar activity made Doc’s head reel. Dropping his dinner to the dirt, he turned away from the fire, clapping his hands over his ears to muffle the swineherd’s cries of anguish.

Chapter Seven

Baron Haldane sat in one of the sunken rear seats of one of Magus’s Humvees with his Remington sawed-off resting across his lap. It was slow going on what was left of the main predark east-west road, old Interstate 10. Haldane reckoned he would have made better time on horseback. The ancient roadbed was split and heaved up in places, and missing altogether in others, which made it impassable for the larger wags. The nimble Humvees scouted out a safe route for the heavier vehicles, sometimes on the highway, sometimes off. The convoy made wide detours around the soft spots, the deep craters and the boulders. Even so, Magus’s vast landship got stuck. Time and again, it had to be towed out of hole of its own making.

Despite all the stoppages and delays, Steel Eyes hadn’t showed his face once.

The baron’s three companions in the Humvee were the lowest form of Deathlands road trash. They stank of rancid body oils, spilled beer and diesel fuel. The driver wore a pair of yellow-tinted goggles, the other two wore cracked, wraparound dark sunglasses. All three sported greasy do-rags. The driver’s brown hair was braided into a long ponytail.

To break the monotony of the snail’s pace journey and to satisfy his own curiosity about the mysteries of Magus, Haldane asked them how they had been recruited into his service.

The front-seat passenger turned to glare at the baron. “None of your fucking business,” he sibilated through the two-inch gap of his absent, top front teeth.

The man in the seat beside Haldane wasn’t so touchy about his privacy. His teeth were intact, but mossy-green; the skin of his face was peppered with hundreds of deep pockmarks packed with grime. “I passed out dead drunk in a Siana gaudy,” he said, “and I woke up the next day in the back of a six-by-six with some other hungover coldhearts. Truck crew never said nothing about Magus. They fed us good and we did what we was told to the people we was told to do it to. Had nice new blasters to use on them, too. I didn’t know it all belonged to Magus until a week later when he showed up. By that time, I didn’t care.”

“Old Steel Eyes saved my skin,” the driver said over his shoulder. “I was all set to be hanged from a lamp post. That’s how they do the deed over in Kanscity. See, I got caught chillin’ this dirt farmer and his family. I didn’t plan no blood bath, I was just tryin’ to get my leg over on the little daughter. Dumb farmer heard her yellin’ for help after I got in the groove, then it all went to shit in a hurry. Him shooting at me, me shooting back at him. The other kin came a runnin’. By the time it was over, I’d done all five of them. I didn’t get far before the neighbors ran me down. Ville folk sold my life to Magus for ten gallons of prime joy juice.”

“Do you get a good wage?” Haldane asked.

“Let’s say he don’t pay in cash, as such,” the driver said.

“What does he pay you in, as such?”

“Why are you talking to him?” the front seat guy said. “He don’t need to know any of this shit.”

The driver waved off the protest. “It depends,” he answered. “We get a share of whatever’s on the table. Sometimes it’s ammo, sometimes it’s jolt, sometimes it’s something tender and warm.”

“Apple pie,” said the road trash next to Haldane.

From the salacious look that twisted his filthy mug he wasn’t referring to a home-baked dessert.

“Only pie on this job is gonna be miles away and stone dead by the time we’re done,” the front passenger grumbled.

“A waste of recreational opportunities,” the driver said.

“The women of Sunspot don’t know what they’re missing,” the toothless scum whistled.

Actually, they did know.

When Baron Haldane had control of the ville he kept the raping of the population by his troops to a bare minimum. He punished offenders severely, with public lashings. But when Malosh ruled Sunspot, it was another story. And it wasn’t only the women who got reamed.

“How many fighters has Magus got?” he asked.

“Who knows?” the driver said “He’s got some here, some there, from what I hear. All doing different things for different reasons.”

“Where’s his seat of power?”

“More like, does he even have one,” the pockmarked man said.

“If you’re looking for a stationary target,” the driver said, “in case things go sour on this deal, you’re shit out of luck. Magus is mighty tight-lipped about such things.”

“Jaws like a steel trap,” the toothless man said.

A remark that made the road scum laugh out loud.

“Only thing the Magus ever let us grunts in on is his retirement plan,” the driver said.

“Yeah,” the front passenger chimed in. “Early retirement for coldhearts who talk too much.”

“Or ask too many fucking questions,” the man next to Haldane said.

Threat taken, the baron looked out the dusty side window. He hadn’t come on the road trip unescorted. He had brought ten members of the Nuevaville defense force with him. Fully armed, they rode in the back of one of the six-by-sixes. They weren’t along just for his personal protection. Before he initiated an all-out chemical attack on Sunspot, he planned to send some of them ahead to warn the garrison stationed there. His troops had to pull back from the ville and be miles away from ground zero before the gas assault commenced. Baron Haldane was determined to do everything he could to prevent the chilling of his own people.

The baron-for-life was at a disadvantage in the deal with Magus. He didn’t know how to load, aim or fire the Soviet-made artillery piece. No one else in his barony did, either. In point of fact, no one had ever even seen a cannon that powerful. According to Magus, it took eight trained men to operate the gun.

So, in exchange for payment, Steel Eyes was to provide the weapon, the chemical warheads and the expertise to lay the rounds on target.

Nuevaville had an ample treasury of precious metals, predark relics, stored food, joy juice, weapons, ammunition and wag parts. All collected as tolls or in trade for other goods and services.

The price Magus had demanded of him was steep. The precious metal gold was a common currency in many parts of Deathlands. He wanted half the gold and a quarter of everything else. But Haldane knew it was worth the cost to end the stalemate. He didn’t ask his people to approve spending of their treasure. He didn’t have to.

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