The ceremony was over

“I don’t know what it is we’ve stumbled into, but I’m thinking it looks mighty big, J.B.,” Ryan said.

“Agreed,” J.B. said, quickly glancing behind them.

The Armorer pointed to the open door ahead and Ryan took the lead, jumping onto the raised step and ducking through the door and into the car. J.B. followed, trotting up the step and out of the sunlight.

The interior smelled of incense, heavy and cloying, and thick drapes hung over the windows, blocking out the dawn light.

A lone figure sat at the table—a woman wearing a hood. She looked up as they entered, lit by the candle before her, and Ryan saw the deep lines of age crisscrossing her face.

“Come in, gentlemen.”

Ryan glanced behind him, checking to see if the sec men had followed them into the car, but no one was there.

As they stepped closer to the elderly woman, Ryan saw what it was that sparkled on her cheeks—twin tears of blood. And then he felt the world drop from beneath his feet.

Alpha Wave
James Axler
Death Lands ®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Hitherto every form of society has been based…on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence.

—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The Communist Manifesto,

1848

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter One

Krysty’s head throbbed. The pain had been getting steadily worse for the past three hours, ever since they had left the redoubt.

She gazed up as the sun poked through the angry clouds scudding across the violet sky, trying to keep her mind off the pain. As she did so, Krysty could hear the concern in Doc’s voice as he spoke with Ryan and J.B. a few paces ahead.

“Look at her, Ryan,” Doc said, gesturing over his shoulder at Krysty. “That’s not a normal reaction. Something is clearly having a negative effect on our usually effervescent Krysty.”

J. B. Dix, the armorer for the group, glanced briefly at his lapel pin rad counter, his walking pace, much like his expression, unchanging.

“Anything?” Ryan asked, though he already knew the answer. J.B. was a man of shrewd logic, and wouldn’t even waste the intake of breath to confirm it unless the situation had changed. Ryan’s single eye stared out across the empty landscape, before he turned back to address Doc. “Radiation’s at normal, and there’s nothing here we haven’t faced a hundred times before. Dust and muties, mebbe, but nothing new.”

“Sand,” Doc corrected. “Not dust, Ryan—sand.”

Doc was right. All around them, as far as he could see, horizon to horizon, was nothing but sand. Sand and sand-colored rocks and sand-colored pebbles, gradually getting smaller and smaller until the pebbles were just grains of sand and the cycle started over again. It had been like that ever since the companions had stepped out of the redoubt eight miles behind them.

Ryan Cawdor marched ahead of the others with long powerful strides, his dark hair catching in the wind, the SSG-70 Steyr blaster swinging against his shoulders as he set the relentless pace across the wasteland.

Next to Ryan, dressed in a battered, brown fedora and a leather jacket far too heavy for the temperature, trekked J. B. Dix. Where Ryan marched, J.B. simply walked, light-footed and watchful of his surroundings, his movements economical and appreciably silent.

Then there was Krysty Wroth, the red-haired beauty who was Ryan’s lover. She was a reliable whirlwind of energy and joy around which they all revolved. Strong, emotional, Krysty was a strange contradiction of facets. She had some mutie abilities—bursts of supernatural strength drawn from the well of the Earth Mother, Gaia; occasional prescience; and her mane of red hair, strangely alive and responsive to her emotional state. When Krysty was happy her hair shone like a beacon, when she was angry it crackled, curling like a vine around her head. Right now, her hair sat disheveled, drooping over her shoulders listlessly.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth walked with Krysty. Healer and caregiver, Mildred had never adopted the bleak outlook of the others. But she could still kill when the situation required it, and kill quickly.

Not as quickly as the albino Jak Lauren, the teenage survivor of unspeakable tragedy in New Orleans. Jak marched to his own beat. Even now he was off somewhere, scouting ahead or checking behind them, out of sight, using the area’s natural hiding places to camouflage himself from possible predators. Ryan was a deadly killer, but at least he was stable. Trying to tame Jak was like trying to bottle a forest fire.

And then there was Doc himself, with his ornate walking stick and his centuries’ old frock coat, his archaic turn of phrase. Theophilus Algernon “Doc” Tanner was an anachronism from a simpler age when wars were still fought face-to-face, man-to-man, not by the push of a button and the snuffing of ten thousand lives at a time.

“Doc, we go on,” Ryan told him, snatching the man from his reverie. “You know what I’d give for her,” he added quietly, glancing toward Krysty with his good right eye before looking back at Doc. “Whatever’s affected her hasn’t done spit to the rest of us, far as we can tell. Could just be a bad reaction to the jump. Catches all of us sometimes, you know that.”

Doc nodded his agreement. Ryan was right. Nine times in a row you could step through that gateway, blast your atoms halfway across the old United States, and come out the other side as right as rain, just like waking up. Yet the tenth time could bring dizziness and nausea and a person might think he or she would never be able to stand again. Krysty just got trip number ten this time around. It would pass.

He looked back at Krysty and smiled reassuringly. It would pass.

J AK SPRINTED across the plain, clouds of sand kicking up in his wake.

He chanced a look back over his shoulder in an unconscious survival instinct, making sure that nothing was following. The razor blades and jagged glass sewn into the fabric of his camou jacket glinted in the sun until another angry, toxin-heavy cloud passed overhead, cutting off the light.

Somewhere off to his right—the north—he could see a storm in full fury, attacking the Earth like a cat playing with a wounded bird. Streaks of bloodred lightning flashed down, repeatedly punching at the ground. The storm was traveling away from him, farther into the north. Caught up in its fury, a full-grown man could lose a limb to those potent bolts of electricity, or have the flesh washed from his bones by the acidic content of the rain. But Jak knew something about weather patterns, however unpredictable others might think them; he could tell this one wouldn’t be bothering them anytime soon.

He took a half step, skipping over the train tracks that ran across his path in the sand. Some tracks saw use here and there. When was the last time these saw use? he wondered. Like so much in the Deathlands, most train tracks were just another obsolete transportation system from a more complicated time. A time when the everyday had consisted of more than simply surviving another twenty-four hours.

What he had found out here, away from his friends, was worth further investigation. He couldn’t quite tell what the thing was, but he knew that Ryan, J.B. and the others would be intrigued. So he ran, fists pumping, across the sandy plain to rejoin his companions.

“I THINK SHE’S GETTING WORSE ,” Mildred announced. Doc slowed his pace and looked back. Mildred and Krysty were fifteen feet behind the group now. Mildred was walking beside Krysty, an encouraging hand on her companion’s elbow. Krysty had paled significantly, the blood drained from her face, and though she stood under her own strength, she did so with a hunch to her shoulders, as though suffering stomach cramps.

Doc raised his cane, went to tap Ryan on the shoulder before thinking better of it. You never quite knew with Ryan—his instincts were so sharp that he might just chill a man before acknowledging who the assailant was. Doc settled on a less invasive attention grabber. “Gentlemen,” he called, “we have trouble.”

Trouble. That was the watchword. That was the heart stopper. Tell Ryan that they had company, tell him that they had no food, tell him that they had radiation poisoning from the nukecaust, and Ryan would shrug and continue marching forward. But trouble was different.

Ryan stepped back to talk to Doc before the pair walked over to join Mildred and Krysty. J.B. remained at the front of the expedition, scouring the horizon in silence.

“What is it, Mildred?” Ryan asked.

“I think Krysty’s getting worse,” she told him.

Ryan looked at Krysty. Her muscles were bunched up, and she leaned her weight against the doctor. “You think, or she is?” he asked. It wasn’t Ryan being rude; that wasn’t his nature. Mildred knew that. There was just something in him, the way his brain was wired, that demanded absolutes. There could be no room for error, no room for questions or shades of gray.

“She’s worse,” Mildred stated firmly. “Without a full examination, I can’t tell how much worse, Ryan, but she’s definitely in worse condition now than when we left the redoubt.”

Ryan turned to Doc, as though for a second opinion. Doc wasn’t a medical doctor, his nickname stemmed from the Ph.D. degree he’d received from Oxford University, but he had wisdom and experience, and Ryan had always appreciated that.

Doc looked at Krysty for a moment, then turned to Ryan. “Her health is deteriorating,” he decided.

“Open your eyes, Krysty, can you do that for me?” Doc asked the flame-haired woman.

Slowly, as though it caused her pain, Krysty widened her eyes from the slits that they had unconsciously become. Doc leaned in closer to look, and Mildred followed once he had stepped aside. The whites of Krysty’s eyes had turned dark pink, bloodshot, as though irritated by smoke. Krysty blinked, her eyelids fluttering like a weathervane in high winds. Mildred told her that it was okay, she could stop now.

“Am I dying?” Krysty mumbled through dry lips.

“No,” Ryan replied firmly, automatically, his single eye holding her gaze.

There was a long moment of silence until Mildred finally spoke. “It could be an infection. Food poisoning. Rad sickness—” she ticked them off on her fingers “—muscle aches, cramps, weariness. It could just be influenza. Right now I can’t tell you. She needs a proper examination, which means you need to stop while I do that. It wouldn’t take long, Ryan.”

Ryan looked around, across the flat expanse of sand that surrounded them. “We can’t stop here, Mildred,” he told her. “This is a hopeless position if we need to defend it. There are probably burrowers here, and there’s also—”

“Stop it, Ryan,” Doc muttered. “Krysty’s one of us, she needs…”

But Mildred butted in. “He’s right, Doc. None of us will be any use to her if we’re chilled,” she stated. “Let’s get to a campsite, a cave, a ville. I’ll examine her when there’s time.

“She’ll be fine,” Mildred added, turning to their companion. “Won’t you, girl?”

Krysty nodded heavily, the hair falling over her face.

J.B. called back to them, keeping his voice low. “Jak’s here,” he said.

They all looked in the direction J.B. pointed and saw the little trail of sand kicking up in the wind as Jak approached.

The albino stopped in front of J.B., his breath ragged for a moment until he got it under control. Ryan and the others joined them, as Jak began to enthusiastically tell of his findings, gesturing repeatedly toward the northeast.

“Tall. Big tall,” Jak began, the words stringing together into his own version of speech. “Towers into sky, like old Libberlady.”

“What is it?” Ryan asked. “What did you see?”

“A tower, like skeleton, the air. Near it a ville.”

Mildred sucked in her breath suddenly, so loud that the other companions turned to look at her. “A ville, Ryan,” she said. “It is just what we need. I can examine Krysty there, it’s ideal.” No one spoke, and Mildred saw the doubt on Ryan’s features. “We can all bed down there, maybe get more supplies,” she added, a gambler trying to sweeten the pot.

“Could be trouble, Ryan,” J.B. stated flatly.

Ryan looked in the direction that Jak had been pointing, weighing the options in his mind. Doc wondered if he should say something, like some old-time counsel for the defense, pleading with Ryan for the lenience of the court. Krysty needed to stop; in fact, all of them would benefit from it. But the Armorer was right, too—sometimes a new ville was nothing but chilling waiting to happen, and most villes didn’t take kindly to outlanders, especially a bunch of well-armed nomads with nothing much to offer.

Ryan started to march to the northeast, the direction that Jak had come from. “Let’s go look at this tower,” he stated.

The others followed, with Doc and Mildred taking a position on either side of the sick Krysty.

I T TOOK FORTY MINUTES to reach Jak’s tower with Ryan setting a brisk pace. As they got closer, they could see it resting on the horizon, its thin struts seeming to waver in the heat haze.

When they were fifty paces away, Doc stated his opinion. “It is just a pylon,” he asserted.

J.B. didn’t bother to turn back as he addressed the older man. “Then where are the lines?”

Shifting his grip around Krysty’s back, Doc leaned his cane against his leg and held his free hand up to shield his eyes, staring at the towering structure. J.B. was right—there were no power lines, not even the trace of where they might have once attached.

Mildred’s voice, urgent and quiet, broke into his thoughts. “Doc.”

The old man turned to look at her across their suffering colleague. “What is—?” He stopped as the shiny red droplet twinkled in the sunlight, catching his eye. Krysty’s nose was bleeding, a trickle of blood running from her left nostril, working its way to her deathly pale lips.

Doc started to call for Ryan and the others, but Mildred suddenly stumbled and Krysty lurched out of their grip, falling to the ground, making a muffled thump as her body compacted the sand.

Doc knelt, gently turning Krysty’s head, pulling up her face. She spluttered, choking on a mouthful of sand. Mildred regained her balance and crouched beside them. “How is she?” she asked.

“She’s breathing. Are you okay?” he asked Mildred.

Mildred brushed sand from her fatigue pants, little heaps of it sailing from the covers on the bulbous pockets. “I’m fine, I’m good. She just suddenly…I don’t know, did you feel it?”

“She became deadweight,” Doc responded, and immediately wished he had used a less resonant term.

Pulling an otoscope from her bag of meager possessions, Mildred held it to Krysty’s eyes. Doc unfolded his kerchief, with its blue-swallow-eye pattern, and offered it to Krysty.

“I think I’m okay,” Krysty told them both after a moment. “Just went weak for a second. Can you hear that? The noise?”

Mildred looked around her, then back to her patient. “There’s no noise, sweetie. Just the wind.”

Krysty looked confused, as though she would burst into tears at any second. “But it’s so loud.” She whimpered.

Doc looked at Krysty, a woman he had known for more adventures than any man should have in a single lifetime, and his heart broke. Krysty Wroth: capable and beautiful. No, not beautiful—stunning. The stunning, utterly capable woman he had trusted his life to on more occasions than he could count on the fingers of both hands, was sitting in front of him, confused and helpless. He never thought he would see her like this. Slowly, being as gentle as they could, Doc and Mildred helped Krysty off the ground. They didn’t bother to brush her down, as there didn’t seem to be any point. They just needed to get her moving, before she stopped moving for good. Together, they half carried, half dragged her toward the tower where the others waited.

“B IG, ISN’T IT ?” Ryan said to no one in particular as the six companions stood at the base of the tower.

“Yeah, sure is,” J.B. agreed, using the hem of his shirt to clean the lenses of his spectacles before perching them back on his nose. He took a step forward and stretched a hand toward the metal structure. He held it there, beside the tower, for a few seconds before announcing that there was no power emanating from it that he could feel. It was a quick test, hardly scientific, but it sufficed in the situation.

The tower rose forty feet into the sky. Built from struts of metal, like scaffolding, it looked somewhat like a power pylon, just as Doc had guessed. It was not a pylon, though. Up close, that was evident. There were no attachments, nothing feeding to it or from it. It was a free-standing, skeletal tower, roughly pyramidal in shape, albeit very thin. The base was only twelve feet square, and it closed to its tip very gradually.

A large metal canister, something like a prenukecaust oil drum, rested in the center of its base, half-buried in the sand.

The structure was utterly silent and displayed no moving parts, a surrealist statue on the plain.

Finally, Mildred spoke up, asking the question on everyone’s lips. “Well, what is it?”

“Nuked if I know,” Ryan replied.

Chapter Two

The companions watched as Jak clambered up the side of the structure, his hands clutching at the metal struts.

“Our Jak’s quite the climber,” Doc said in admiration when the youth reached the peak in a handful of seconds.

Both J.B. and Ryan had already run their lapel rad counters over the structure, making sure that it wasn’t hot. Then they had tested the metal legs as best as they could, for electric current and magnetic attraction, as well as eyeballing for fractures or rust. It looked stable and had hardly been touched by the elements. The obvious conclusion was that it was newly built, but by whom and why, they couldn’t tell.

“You see anything?” Ryan called to Jak at the top of the tower.

“Same,” Jak yelled back. “All over same.”

Mildred sighed, looking at the tower as Jak spidered down. “Ryan, we really need to get to that ville.” She waited, looking at Ryan as he gazed at the structure. “Ryan?”

He nodded before looking at her. “Just seems wrong, leaving this tower here. Has to be here for a purpose, Mildred,” he told her.

Mildred shrugged. “Maybe they tie their horses to it,” she suggested, looking over at the tiny ville they could all see about two hundred and fifty yards away.

“Mebbe tie prisoners,” Jak chipped in.

Doc’s cheery voice cut through them, intentionally loud, like a wake-up call. “Perhaps we could just ask them,” he suggested. The group turned to look at him. He was busy hefting Krysty to her feet once more, getting his arm beneath hers so that she could lean against him as she walked.

Krysty looked in no condition to walk. Dried blood married her face around her nose. The skin around her eyes was puffy and had darkened almost to black, and the whites of her eyes remained bloodshot red. Her flame-colored hair was a mass of tangles, twirling this way and that like the stems of a climbing plant. From the way that Doc carried her, it appeared that she had added weight somehow, her muscles no longer strong enough to support her.

Aware that he had everyone’s attention, Doc pronounced, “Miss Wroth and I are going to make our way to yonder ville and ask some questions in the hopes of enlightenment.” He struggled two steps with Krysty, and it was clear that he was taking all of her weight now.

J.B. had scrambled across to Krysty’s other side. “Let me give you a hand, Doc,” he told the older man, but he left it open, as though it were a request.

In the end, Ryan and J.B. shared Krysty’s weight, relieving the older man as the group trekked down the incline to the ville. She had mercifully fallen into a slumber, and they carried her by shoulders and feet to make the journey easier. Mildred sidled up to Doc and gave him a wink. “You sly old coot.” She laughed.

Doc shrugged. If it had been left up to J.B., they would still be studying the mysterious tower a month from now with Ryan deluding himself about Krysty’s health. Krysty’s problems, Doc had reasoned, were somewhat more pressing just now.

Head held low to his shoulders, Jak ran ahead once more, kicking up little puffs of sand as he edged sideways down the incline toward the buildings.

T HE VILLE WAS SUNKEN slightly, located in a natural dip in the surrounding plains. It was made up of almost two dozen ramshackle buildings, constructed from scrounged wood and metal. The majority of the buildings were single-story, with only four in the center going to two stories along with a circular barn at the far edge of town. A high wall surrounded the whole settlement, and the companions could hear dogs barking furiously as they got closer.

The sun was setting when they reached the ville’s high gates, turning the skies a burning red as it sauntered under the horizon in the west behind them. The sturdy gates were constructed of strips of rough wood tied together with old rope and held in place with rusty hinges. Twice as tall as a man, the gates were set within a similarly high wall constructed from a patchwork of materials. Opened together, the gates could let a wide wagon pass through into the ville, but they would be kept closed for most of the time to discourage possible looters.

Two sentries patrolled the top of the wall, and they came over to the edge of the gates when Ryan and his companions approached. “You want somethin’, outlanders?” the sentry to the left called out, casually brandishing a large-bore shotgun over the rim of the wall. He was a heavy man, wearing a tattered, checked shirt and two days’ worth of beard. Across from him, on the other side of the gates, a sallow young man dressed in similar clothing trained a wooden crossbow on the companions. Ryan judged that its range was insufficient to reach them as far from the gates as they were, and certainly not with any appreciable accuracy.

Ryan let Krysty’s feet drop gently to the ground and waved his companions back, instructing them to wait as he went to speak with the sentry.

“We’re not here looking for trouble,” he began, holding his hands at shoulder height to show he held no weapon. The longblaster was clearly visible on his back, of course, and he had a blaster at his hip, but this was the Deathlands. The sentries would have been more suspicious of an apparently unarmed man than one who came at them blasters blazing.

The sentry on the left raised the muzzle of his weapon a little, encouraging Ryan to continue.

“My friend back there is ill,” Ryan said, his gaze never leaving the man’s eyes. “We come seeking somewhere to bed down, mebbe look her over.”

The sentry with the crossbow shook his head, looking over at his comrade. “We don’t got no healin’ to give to outlanders,” Shotgun stated bluntly, and his companion made a show of raising his crossbow higher, pointing it at Ryan’s forehead.

“You best be on your way, One-Eye.” The crossbow-wielding man chuckled.

Ryan didn’t flinch, he just continued to look at the man with the shotgun. He bore these two no malice. They were just doing their job. Just protecting their own.

“We’ve got our own healer,” Ryan assured them. The trace of a smile crossed his lips as he saw both the sentries look across to his companions, squinting against the setting sun as they tried to guess which of the ragtag group might have valuable medical skills. “Be willing to let the healer take a look at your people, too,” Ryan suggested, “if you need that. Free of charge, if you can give us somewhere to examine our own.”

The sentries looked at each another, muttered a few words that Ryan didn’t catch. But he detected the change in atmosphere immediately, and leaped to one side as the buckshot exploded toward him with a loud crack.

The sentry with the shotgun bragged loudly as he targeted the barrel at the fleeing Ryan, preparing a second shot from the homemade weapon. “Think we’ll just chill you and take your healer for our own, if it’s okay with you, One-Eye!” He laughed.

Ryan had already loosed his 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster from its holster. Straight-armed, he reeled off a single shot. The sentry staggered back, dropping the shotgun as it exploded in his hand, taking the full force of the Sauer’s bullet.

Ryan targeted the second sentry, the one with the crossbow, but there was no need. J.B. had the man dead center in the sights of his mini-Uzi, Doc had his LeMat revolver aimed at the man, and Mildred and Jak had crouched around Krysty, poised with their own weapons—a ZKR 551 target revolver in Mildred’s right hand, a .357 Magnum Colt Python in Jak’s—to offer her necessary protection. Slowly, carefully, the younger sentry placed his crossbow on the ridge of the wall at his feet before raising his hands.

The sentry to the right, the one who had been holding the shotgun, cursed as he clutched at his bleeding right hand. But there was admiration in that curse as much as anger. “Black dust, but that is some good shooting, friend,” he pronounced incredulously.

“For a one-eye,” Ryan called back, keeping his blaster trained on the sentries, whipping it between the two.

The sentry laughed, the blood dripping from his hand where the homemade shotgun had been a few moments before. “Well, besides some dead-on shooting and a healer, you got anything worth my opening these gates for? Or should I go call me some reinforcements and see if we can’t negotiate with you some more?”

Ryan looked at him, never lowering his blaster as he spoke. “Reinforcements won’t be necessary,” he told the sentry. “Like I said, we’re not here looking for trouble. Just a hole to sleep in for me and my people. We’re willing to pay for it, with ammo if you’ll take it. Or we can walk away right now, and you’ve learned a little lesson in trying to take what isn’t yours.” Ryan’s expression remained fixed as he watched the sentry.

The sentry smirked, nodding to himself. “You got ammo? Why didn’t you say so earlier, One-Eye?” he asked. “We got the best nuking dog fights here, if you’re a betting man, might even double or triple your wager if you bet as well as you shoot.”

Ryan nodded, warily lowering his blaster. After a moment J.B. and Doc followed his lead, carefully relaxing, but keeping their weapons in hand in case things turned nasty again. “Triple at least, I reckon,” he told the older sentry.

“Hell, yeah.” The sentry laughed. “Now, my boy here is gonna open the gates, and everybody is going to just play nice. Sound okay with you and your people, outlander?”

Ryan glanced across at J.B. and Doc to see if either would object. Then he answered by holstering his SIG-Sauer P-226. “You want my healer to look at that hand?” he asked as the younger man disappeared from sight.

The old sentry nodded. “I would be much obliged,” he agreed.

J.B. AND D OC CARRIED Krysty through the open gates and into the tiny ville. She seemed heavy, a felled doe from a hunting expedition, as her feet dragged on the sandy ground. Mildred had suggested it would be easier to carry her by shoulders and feet, as Ryan and J.B. had when they’d brought her here from the tower, but Doc wouldn’t hear of it. “Mayhap she cannot go in walking,” he had told them, “but she will at least go in looking like she can walk.”

J.B. agreed. Psychologically, it made sense to keep Krysty upright. That way she would appear hurt to the citizens of the ville and not dead.

The older sentry met them as they walked through the gates, his younger companion working the mechanism to open them—the gates worked on some kind of weighted cantilever system. J.B. made a mental note to examine it in more detail when the sun was higher in the sky. The old sentry had wrapped a makeshift bandage around his right hand, torn from the bottom of his checkered shirt. He smiled as he greeted Ryan and the companions.

“You sure gave my hand a walloping there,” he told Ryan. “That was some nuke-hot shooting you did.”

Ryan shrugged, not wanting to dwell on it, aware that the old sentry may yet be itching for payback.

“My name’s Tom,” the sentry went on, before indicating his younger partner beside the gate. “And this is my boy, Davey.”

The younger sentry, Davey, brushed a hand through his hair and slowly eyed Mildred from the chest up. “Pleased to meet you,” he finally said, oblivious to the others.

“Flattered,” she responded with a fixed grin.

Tom carried on, pointing down the single street of the walled-in ville. “This here is Fairburn. Don’t look like much, I guess, but we still call it home.”

“It looks very homely,” Ryan said. “I’m Ryan, and these are my traveling companions,” he said by way of introduction, not bothering with anyone else’s name. He would sooner they keep a low profile for now, at least as much as strangers in a walled ville could. “You said something about maybe having somewhere we could stay?”

Tom pointed to the center of the small ville, where the four twin-storied buildings stood. “There’s an eatery over there. Can’t miss it. Just follow your noses to the stink. Jemmy there will sort you out a room. Just ask at the counter.”

As the companions made their way down the dusty thoroughfare, two dogs rushed over, yapping and snarling playfully, their thick, saliva-smeared tongues hanging from their mouths. They were mongrels, stupid and friendly, their tails wagging as they looked at the well-armed strangers. Jak issued a low growl from deep within his throat, and he narrowed his pure red eyes as he looked at the mutts. As one, the dogs turned tail and ran, seeking more willing playmates.

Doc looked at the sentry’s bloodied hand as he passed, hefting Krysty. “I do not imagine you have much call for renting out rooms here.”

“Probably depends a little on who’s on the gate,” Tom agreed.

“Come over when you’re ready,” Ryan called back, “and our healer will take a look at that hand.”

The companions headed into the center of the ville, with Krysty still lolling between Doc and J.B.

Chapter Three

A huge chandelier hung from the ceiling of Jemmy’s by a thick, golden chain, its crystal droplets casting a flotilla of sunlight specks across the walls of the room where they rippled and bounced as if living things. The impressive chandelier was utterly incongruous, at odds with the simple, rustic design of the barnlike barroom.

Crude tables and chairs were scattered around the room, some simply upended wooden crates, seats ripped from old automobiles. A few men sat around, playing with stacks of dominoes or just jawing and drinking, mostly armed with remade revolvers, a couple of shotguns resting on the tables. Two women were propped at the bar, heavily made-up over expressions of utter disinterest. The wide room smelled of rotgut.

Doc and J.B. helped Krysty to the bar, which Ryan was leaning over, looking into the back room, trying to locate whoever was serving.

The two women propping up the bar looked at Ryan, then the older one—all of nineteen, perhaps—turned her head and shouted toward the back, her husky voice crackling like fire. “Jem, you got some new customers.”

A moment later a woman came out of the back room, taking in the companions in a quick sweep of her hazel eyes before turning a bright, flawless smile on Ryan. She was dressed in a man’s shirt, too large for her, with sleeves rolled up past her elbows, her dark hair tied back. Ryan guessed that she was in her early thirties, skin tanned and hands calloused from a tough, outdoor life. She tossed aside the towel she had been wiping her hands with and asked what she could do for everyone.

“We’re looking to stop over in your fine ville,” Ryan told her. “Could do with rooms if you have them.”

“Here for the dogs?” the woman asked conversationally.

Ryan nodded. Behind him, J.B. had stepped away from the bar and was looking around the room, scanning for possible exits. Through the kitchen area behind the bar—where the woman had appeared from—he could see an open door leading to the backyard, the ground nothing more than sand. There was a well out there, really just a hole in the ground with a roped bucket beside it, framed by the open door. Off to the right of the bar, wooden stairs at the back of the room led up, and a second-floor balcony surrounded the room on three sides, with several doors leading off—most likely the lodging rooms for the establishment, transaction rooms for the two gaudy sluts working the bar. A door beneath the staircase proclaimed that it led to toilet facilities, though J.B. guessed it was probably nothing more than a fenced-in part of the backyard.

“You know how long you’re here for?” Jemmy asked Ryan as he placed a few rounds of spare ammo on the bar. The ammo was useless to the companions, none of it fitting their blasters, but spare ammo served as the gold standard for the Deathlands.

Ryan looked around the room as though surveying the whole ville. “Nice place,” he said. “Who knows? Mebbe a few nights. That be a problem for you?”

Jemmy was examining one of the bullets, turning it slowly in her hand to check for cracks or signs of tampering. “These new or reloads?” she asked him.

Ryan smiled, nodding. “Military issue,” he assured her. “Predark.”

“Two rooms, three nights,” Jemmy told him, looking at the others. “After that, you come find me and we renegotiate. You’ll have to share beds, ’cause that’s all the rooms I got just now.”

Ryan dipped his head. “We are much obliged.”

Jemmy instructed one of the gaudies to watch the bar as she stepped from behind it and led Ryan and his companions to their rooms. Ryan took Krysty in his arms—armpits and knees—lifting her weight with ease as he followed the landlady up the creaking, wood staircase.

Jemmy’s glance drifted to Krysty’s Western boots with their elaborate Falcon wing designs up the sides, the silver toe caps smothered with dusty sand from the trek across the wastelands. “I like your friend’s boots,” she told Ryan as she led the way up the stairs. “If she’s got no more use for them, I might be able to find you rooms for a whole month by way of trade.”

Mildred held the woman’s gaze for a second. “She’s just tired,” she told her firmly, then immediately regretted snapping, fearing it might make the woman suspicious.

J.B. nodded to Doc, gesturing to the open front door, before following Ryan and Mildred.

Taking his cue, Doc held out a hand to Jak at the bottom of the stairs. “What say you and I get us some refreshment, lad?” he announced in a loud voice.

The trace of a smile crossed the albino youth’s pale lips. “Been long walk,” he said, nodding, then placed his back to the bar and watched the door while the teenage gaudy slut poured them two mugs of some locally brewed beer.

Doc was aware that the younger woman at the bar was watching him as he found a .22 round in his pocket for payment. “I trust this should be more than enough for our beverage, good lady, and I expect some local jack in compensation, as well.” She checked the ammo suspiciously, then handed him several coins. Beneath the heavy makeup, he would guess she was no more than seventeen.

“You like what you see?” she asked, puffing out her chest and tilting her head to offer a well-practiced, coquettish smile, her long brown hair falling across her face and bare shoulders.

Doc nodded, sipping at the brew. “I like the chandelier. It’s a nice touch.”

The gaudy’s expression dropped for a moment, as though unsure whether this old fool had understood her question.

Inwardly, Doc chuckled. It was desperately sad to see a girl this young forced into prostitution, and a part of him wished that things were different. But there was nothing he could do here; this was her life and the chances were slim to none that she would ever know any better.

“My friends call me Doc,” he told her after a moment. “What’s your name?”

“They call me Lois L’amore,” she said, smiling. “That means ‘love,’ if you didn’t know,” she added.

Doc scratched his chin, as though deep in thought. “I did not know that,” he told her. “How very unusual.”

“Can I show you how I came by such an unusual name?” she asked him.

Doc looked her up and down, pity in his eyes. “Why don’t we just leave that to my imagination?” he suggested before turning away. He heard the girl huff a sigh through clenched teeth.

Sniggering at the performance, Jak led Doc to an empty table set against one of the wooden walls from which they could watch the main door, the bar and the entrance beneath the stairwell.

J EMMY CLOSED THE DOOR to the upstairs room and left the companions alone. The bedsprings groaned as Ryan carefully placed Krysty on the rusting double bed, and Mildred sat beside her, placing a hand on the sleeping woman’s forehead.

There were two doors in the room, one of which led to the second room that they had rented while the other led into a corridor that, in turn, led back to the balcony above the barroom.

J.B. poked his head through the door to the adjoining room, briefly giving it a once-over. It was much the same as the room where Mildred tended Krysty—a double bed, door to the corridor, a small basin sink that could be filled from the well as required, and a large window of sand-streaked glass. In the same spot over Krysty’s bed there was an old road map showing the streets of Fargo, North Dakota, heavy white lines running on verticals and horizontals where the map had once been folded for ease of reference.

J.B. walked to the far door, turned the key in the lock then tested it, pulling and turning the handle three times before returning to Ryan and Mildred. The frame shook and spewed sawdust with each pull on the handle. “These locks won’t hold,” he warned them. “If a gnat gets caught short, it could piss both doors open.”

Mildred querulously looked up from the bed. “Are we expecting visitors?”

“Whether we expect them or not, won’t make much difference if they come,” J.B. insisted.

Mildred shook her head. “You’re being paranoid. No one’s looking for us out here.”

“Paranoid’s last to die,” he reminded her, looking through the window across the main street of Fairburn. Out there, over the ridge of the wall, he could make out the tower in the dwindling sunlight.

Ryan spoke up, addressing Mildred. “Sentry Tom might yet decide he owes me a gutful of buckshot, Mildred.”

Mildred started to reply, then checked herself. They were all tense, worried about their colleague. The best thing she could do would be to give Krysty a thorough checkup, see if she could pinpoint what had laid the normally healthy woman low. Mildred picked up her backpack, then searched through the contents of her med kit for a pocket thermometer and her otoscope.

J.B. looked across, an apology tightly held behind his eyes. “You need help?” he asked.

Mildred shook her head. “Maybe get her boots off, try to make her comfortable.” J.B. and Ryan knelt at the end of the bed and stripped off Krysty’s boots.

I T WAS THE SCREAMING that finally woke Krysty.

Her eyes opened as tiny slits, and she warily scanned her surroundings. It was a well-honed survival instinct—she couldn’t remember what had happened or where she had fallen asleep.

She was in a simple room, the planks that formed its walls visible in the flickering candlelight, never having been painted or even varnished. She could see two figures across the room. One was a huge bear of a man, his back to her, rippling muscles well-defined where his vest top left his arms bare. He was looking out the window of the room at the night sky, stargazing.

The other man was sitting at the end of the bed, stripping and oiling a revolver. Krysty shifted her head slightly, trying not to attract her captors’ attention. Her head felt muzzy as she did so, like moving through water. The blaster was a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson 640. Her blaster. These psychos planned to chill her with her own blaster!

She struggled to move, but it felt like she had been drugged. Her limbs felt so heavy she could barely shift them. And the screaming—the screaming was getting louder. She could hear it, penetrating the very core of her being, like something in her womb, waiting to be born. What was going on? Were there other women like her, trapped, drugged, helpless, waiting for these stupes to hurt them, to chill them? Why else would they be screaming? She needed to get out of there, right now.

She tried clenching the fingers of her right hand, willing the muscles to move, and felt nothing more than a twitch. A twitch and a wealth of pain, as though the muscles of her arm had been dipped in acid, burning through the nerve endings, a ripple of agony. She bit her lip, holding back the scream.

Then a door to her right opened, a brighter light from outside bleeding through for a moment, and another figure was framed in the doorway. She couldn’t make out the backlit features, but the silhouette was plainly that of a woman, short and muscular. She held a large bowl of something, and from the way she carried it, it was likely full of liquid. More of the acid, perhaps, to drench her muscles in, to keep up the agony.

The woman put the bowl down; Krysty heard it being placed on the cabinet beside her ear, heard the liquid sloshing within. And then the woman reappeared in her line of sight, reaching for her face, a rag of cloth in her hand, dripping from a dunking in the bowl. Gaia, no! The woman planned to burn her face with the acid. What kind of monsters…?

In her mind, Krysty begged Gaia to help her, calling on all her strength to try to push herself off the bed, attack the woman with the acid cloth, stop the madness. Stop the bastard madness.

M ILDRED REACHED DOWN, placing the damp cloth on Krysty’s forehead. She’d obtained a bowlful of cold water from Jemmy, wishing she could add the simple, twentieth-century luxury of ice.

Nothing had changed in the three minutes that she’d been gone. J.B. continued stripping and cleaning Krysty’s weapons, greasing each segment from the container of oil he habitually carried in one of his voluminous pockets. That was his way of showing he cared, she knew. No point getting her through this only to have her blaster jam up, he had told her.

Ryan, meanwhile, stood looking out the window, watching as the street filled with people. It was about 8:00 p.m., and they’d been advised that the dogfights would kick off at 8:30 p.m. sharp. It was obviously a big slice of local action. A barker poised at the entrance to the open-topped circular barn at the end of the street was enticing passing trade to place early bets. The bar downstairs had got busier, too.

Stupe really. If they had arrived a couple of hours later than they did, the whole face-off with the sentries could have been avoided. Seemed the ville of Fairburn opened the gates at night.

Mildred stopped woolgathering as she felt something cross her hand where it mopped the cool water across Krysty’s brow. She looked at her hand and saw the streaks of red crisscrossing it—Krysty’s mutie hair was wrapping around Mildred’s hand like a creeping vine, surrounding and trapping it, its silken threads exerting considerable force. “Ryan, look,” Mildred whispered.

Ryan turned, and J.B. was already out of his seat, standing beside Mildred, a protective arm reaching for her.

“What is it?” Ryan asked. “How is she…?”

“I think she’s waking up,” Mildred told them softly, carefully excising her hand from the tangle of hair that had smothered it. “Come on, Krysty,” she said in a louder voice, “wake up now. It’s okay. Time to wake up now. Time to wake up.”

Krysty’s green eyes blazed open, full of fire and pain, and she sat up in the bed in a great spasm of her muscles, choking and coughing all at once. Mildred sat beside her, watching as the statuesque woman coughed and spluttered some more before taking gasping lungfuls of air as though she had nearly drowned. Krysty stayed like that for almost three minutes, doubled over herself, taking great, heaving breaths, unable to speak or to even acknowledge their presence. Finally she looked at Mildred, her face flushed, her shoulders hunched as she tried to breathe.

“Take it slowly, Krysty,” Mildred told her calmly, “there’s no need to rush. We’re safe here. It’s just us.”

Krysty looked around the room, seeing J.B., Ryan, returning to look at Mildred. “Wh-what,” she began, her voice a pained whisper, “what happened to me?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Mildred admitted. “Bad trip through the gateway maybe. You were pretty out of it for a while there.”

Krysty nodded, hugging her knees to her chest. “I thought I was going to be chilled,” she told them, genuine fear crossing her features at the memory of the hallucination.

“No,” Ryan assured her. “No chilling today.”

Krysty nodded slowly, her movements birdlike, twitchy.

“Here,” Mildred said, handing her a glass of water, “you should drink something. It’ll make you feel better.”

Krysty took the glass in both hands and it almost slipped from her grip, but she managed to clench it and raise it to her lips. Mildred, Ryan and J.B. watched as she sipped at the water, tentatively at first, before finally taking a long swallow. She greedily finished the glass, letting out a satisfied exhalation afterward, before handing the empty glass back to Mildred. “So much better,” she told them, a smile forming on her lips.

Grinning, Ryan leaned across and put an arm around Krysty. She returned the gesture, and they sat there, silently hugging for almost a minute while Mildred and J.B. looked uncomfortably away.

Finally, Krysty spoke up, still holding Ryan close to her. “We’re safe here, aren’t we?”

Ryan assured her that they were. “Jak and Doc are just downstairs, keeping an eye on comings and the goings, just to be triple sure.”

Ryan felt Krysty’s head nodding against his shoulder, relieved by his words. Then she spoke again, quietly, her voice so confused she sounded like a little girl. “Then why is everyone screaming?” she asked him.

Chapter Four

Jak and Doc had spent much of the past three hours watching the passing trade at Jemmy’s bar and, despite the small size of Fairburn ville, they had both been surprised at the surge in customers as the day stretched into evening. Doc had made some efforts to talk with the locals, joining in with a couple of hands of dominoes with some of the older men, and losing with good grace.

Jak had silently watched the room while the older man went about his business. The youth could scout for a man across two hundred miles with no more clues than a snapped twig and some churned-up mud once in a while, but he would never be one to put people at their ease. Part of that, Doc reasoned, came down to the lad’s appearance—whip thin, with alabaster skin, a mane of chalk-pale hair and those burning, ruby-red eyes. Doc was no domino expert, but he knew a lot about people. Gleefully losing a little jack to Sunday gamers was a sure way for an old man to ingratiate himself.

Doc had asked his questions in a roundabout way, just another chatty wrinklie passing through the ville. But he’d deftly turned the conversation to the subject of the strange tower outside the ville, and he’d met with what he could only describe as a polite silence. He hadn’t pressed the issue. Instead he’d set about buying drinks for his new friends and losing a couple more rounds of dominoes.

Jak had watched the whole performance with amusement. When Doc finally returned to his table, loudly bemoaning that the domino game was getting too rich for his blood, he and the teen had ordered a plate of food and discussed Doc’s conclusions while they waited for news on Krysty’s condition.

“The truth of it is,” Doc began, “I do not think anyone hereabouts actually knows what the dickens that towering doohickey is for.”

I N THE UPSTAIRS ROOMS, Mildred and J.B. were looking at each other while Ryan gently eased Krysty away from him so that he could see her face.

“What did you say?” Ryan asked as though he disbelieved his own ears.

“I just want to know why everyone is screaming,” Krysty said quietly.

Mildred spoke up, her question holding no challenge, no judgment. “Who’s screaming, Krysty? Are we screaming?”

“No.” Krysty breathed the word, shaking her head. “Not you. Out there. Outside. Can’t you…Can’t you hear them? The screams?”

J.B. addressed the room. “Krysty’s always had real sensitive hearing, ” he stated. But Krysty was shaking her head, her vibrant hair falling over her eyes.

“What, Krysty?” Mildred asked. “What is it?”

“It’s not far away,” Krysty told them, unconsciously biting at her bottom lip, tugging a piece of skin away. “It’s right here, all around us. You must be able…you must be able to hear it. Tell me you can hear it. Tell me.”

No one answered, and the room remained in silence for a long moment, the only sounds coming from revelers downstairs. Krysty’s breathing was hard, ragged, and it was clear that she was trying to hold back her frustrated anger.

Finally, Mildred reached across for her, and Ryan moved out of the way, stepping from the bed. “You’re okay,” Mildred assured Krysty. “It’s nothing, I’m sure. It’s nothing, Krysty, I promise you.”

Quietly, J.B. led Ryan into the adjoining room and pushed the door between them closed. “This ain’t nothing,” the Armorer told Ryan flatly in the darkness.

Ryan half nodded, half shook his head, the leather patch over his left eye catching the moonlight from the window. “What do we do now, old friend?” he asked quietly.

“She’s not one of us and no more crazy right now than that old coot downstairs,” J.B. said, the trace of a smile on his lips. “We’ve carried Doc when he’s been ranting and raving and vision questing all over time and space. You know we have. We’ll take care of Krysty.”

J.B. turned to the window of the darkened room, looking out at the street. There was a party atmosphere out there now, maybe fifty or sixty people milling around. Street vendors had appeared, selling roasted nuts from open barrels of fire, hunks of meat on sticks.

Ryan joined J.B. at the window, taking in the scene. “Quite the party ville we’ve found ourselves in,” he said, not especially addressing the comment to the Armorer.

J.B. nodded. “I wonder how much of it is connected with that,” he said, and his index finger tapped at the glass, pointing to the towering scaffold in the distance.

Ryan turned to look at him, concern furrowing his brow. “You think that tower thing could be connected to Krysty?”

“It’s all connected, Ryan,” J.B. assured him, as he continued to point at the unmoving tower outside the ville walls. “You just gotta connect enough of the dots.”

D OC, R YAN AND J.B. jostled through the crowds as they made their way along Fairburn’s main street. Night had long since fallen, and with it the temperature, turning their sweaty afternoon trek into a distant memory. Though the sky was dark, the street was well-lit by oil lamps and naked flames atop haphazard lampposts.

More than seventy people milled around, and tense excitement was in the air as they waited for the dogfights to begin. People were still arriving, out-of-towners on horses that they weaved through the crowd toward a corral set up at the end of the dusty street.

“You know,” Doc pronounced as the companions joined the forming line outside the large, circular shack at the end of the street, “I am starting to conclude that this is not such a bad place.” Ryan and J.B. looked at him quizzically, until he continued. “The people seem friendly and well-nourished, they have food and they’re making a go of entertaining folk, too. Mayhap a nice place to settle, build a shack.” He shrugged.

Ryan’s expression remained stern. “And the price is Krysty?”

Doc sighed. “She’s getting better, Ryan. She’s going to be fine, I’m sure.”

Ryan nodded.

J.B. spoke up as the line finally started to shuffle through the entrance to the circular barn. “Just keep alert, see what you can find out about the thing out there,” he reminded them, referring to the towering scaffold.

The group had had a hasty meeting after Krysty had woken. They had been in Fairburn for three hours, and the purpose of the tower had nagged at J.B. the whole time, rattling in the back of his brain like an itch he couldn’t scratch. Doc’s findings, or lack thereof, had only served to worsen that feeling in the Armorer. Mildred had determined that Krysty would be fine; other than the auditory hallucinations—acousma, Mildred had called it—Krysty seemed normal now, just exhausted. The latter was probably down to dehydration, and, Mildred argued, that may even be causing her acousma.

“A dose of bed rest and you’ll feel much better,” Mildred had assured Krysty, though she had insisted on staying at the woman’s side, just in case. Jak had agreed to stay with the women while the other three went off to speak with the locals.

“Roll up, roll up,” the barker at the entrance called as Ryan’s group reached the front of the line. He held out a rubber stamp glistening with dark ink and asked them for the minimal entry fee. Doc paid with some of the jack he had received at the bar.

The atmosphere inside the circular building was stuffy, despite an open skylight at the center of the roof. In the middle of the room was a round pit, twelve feet in diameter with a floor covered in straw and sawdust. Two mastiff dogs were held in cages at opposite sides of this arena, and they growled at each other meanly through the metal grilles of their holding pens. A low wooden fence surrounded the pit, thin struts acting as bars to prevent the animals from getting out once uncaged. The rest of the room was built with a regular incline, raising the floor from the pit to the outer walls, providing the standing crowd a good view of the action without obscuring the people behind them. Two men worked through the crowd, money and stubs exchanging hands.

“Which one do you like?” J.B. asked Doc and Ryan.

Doc craned his neck, trying to get a better look at the vicious-looking mastiffs. One of the dogs had an ugly scar across its flank, and a streak of white fur covered its left eye, while the other had a dark, dappled coat of fur, browns and grays and blacks, like it had been rolled in ash. “I am no expert in such matters,” he admitted, “but it seems that the one on the left is the spitting image of our esteemed leader.”

Noticing the white patch of fur across its eye and the scarring on its body, Ryan laughed in agreement. “That’s the one we should bet on,” he agreed, clapping Doc on the back.

J.B. went to speak with one of the bookies while Doc and Ryan split off into the crowd.

“Ladies and gen’lemen!” a man’s voice called from the center of the pit, and the crowd hushed, with just a few conversations continuing as whispers. Doc looked at the man. He was dark skinned with a stubble of hair upon his head, dyed scarlet with food coloring. He had dressed in a patchwork of bright clothes, a long jacket with metallic buttons that twinkled as they caught the flaming lights of the room, striped trousers and bright shined shoes. He held a cane similar to Doc’s own, and used it to gesture around the room as he went into his pitch, addressing specific members of the audience as his cane singled them out. This man acted as the ringmaster, working up the excited crowd to fever pitch before the dogs were released.

“We got us two magnificent brutes to start things off tonight,” the ringmaster announced. “Killers, the both of them, let me assure you.” He flicked the cane toward the caged mastiff with the white stripe across his eye, running the cane along the bars of the cage, antagonizing the beast. “The Streak here, he’s eighty-eight pounds o’ pure muscle. Those jaws chomp down on your arm, your leg, let me assure you, you would need some serious medical attention, my friends.” The man moved across, glaring at the other dog, banging his cane on the top of its cage before launching into similar patter about that hound.

Doc stopped listening, checking the room to try to work out where the ringmaster had appeared from and, thus, would likely disappear to. He spotted a curtained-off area across the circle from the entrance, and pushed and excuse-me’d his way toward it while the ringmaster continued his lecture.

Finally the ringmaster finished his spiel and bared his teeth at the caged animals one last time before reaching for the fence surrounding the arena. Two dog handlers, thick gloves on their hands, leaned into the arena and prepared to unlock the respective cage doors. “Unleash the hounds!” the ringmaster hollered, ending with a wolflike howl before leaping over the fence. The crowd held its collective breath as the cage doors were raised and two short-haired bundles of rage and fury leaped into the arena, scrabbling for purchase on the sawdust as they snarled at each other.

The ringmaster ducked his head low and made his way to the curtained area at the edge of the room, never once bothering to look back. Doc stood there, leaning both hands on his cane, its silver lion’s-head handle glinting in the light.

“Hot diggety, but that is one nice cane you’ve got there, sir,” Doc announced as the ringmaster walked past him, pulling the curtain aside.

The ringmaster stopped, turning a querulous face in Doc’s direction. Doc weaved his cane back and forth where it stood on its point, making the lion’s-head catch the light. “Well, thank you,” the ringmaster said as he looked at Doc, then down at the head of Doc’s ebony cane. “You not here for the fight?”

Doc shrugged. “I decided to save my money for a later duel. I figure that the odds may become more agreeable as the evening wears thinner.”

The ringmaster nodded. “It’s a sound plan. Lot of people just come for the spectacle. They’re out of jack by the time the real action kicks off.”

A cheer surged from the crowd as one of the dogs attached its jaws to the neck of the other, tossing the wounded animal around the circle. The ringmaster pulled back the curtain and gestured inside. “You wanna talk a little out of people’s way?” he suggested.

“Much obliged.” Doc followed the ringmaster through and found himself in a small dressing area in a corridor, a mirror propped up against a crate. Farther along the corridor were four cages, holding two pit bulls, a ridgeback and what looked like some kind of cross-breed Alsatian-cum-wolf.

Doc had handed the ringmaster his swordstick and he waited patiently while the man examined the lion’s head atop it. “This is some fine workmanship,” the ringmaster admired. “Are you in the market to sell this?”

Doc tried to look noncommittal. “A man has to eat, my friend.”

The ringmaster smiled. “That he does. What do you want for it?”

Doc pointed a thumb back to the curtain. “Mayhap nothing if my strategy pans out. Who knows when Lady Luck will smile?”

The ringmaster reluctantly handed the cane back to Doc. “Lady Luck, she can be an unfaithful mistress. If you do find you want to sell it, I would be very interested.”

“That’s mighty kind,” Doc said, nodding to himself as he strode back toward the arena. As he reached a hand up to part to curtain he stopped and, as though in afterthought, turned back to the ringmaster. “I guess I’ll know when you’re here by the beacon.”

The ringmaster looked at him. “The beacon?” he asked, puffing at the cheroot.

“You know,” Doc said, “the tower. I did not see it myself, got here early, but you light that when it is fight day, am I right?”

The ringmaster laughed. “That ain’t nothin’ to do with me, man. Nothin’ to do with anyone, far as I can tell.”

Doc scratched his head, further messing his already unruly white hair. “Then what’s it there for?”

“You know, I don’t think anyone in this whole ville knows the answer to that. When it first appeared some of the good men of Fairburn tried pulling the thing down. Succeeded, actually. Then the outlanders come and shot six men—” he snapped his fingers “—like that. Chilled ’em, stone cold. Told us we were not to touch the towers again.”

“Towers?” Doc asked, emphasizing the plural.

“I hear they’re dotted all over,” the ringmaster told him. “Near the tracks. That’s how they travel, you see? By the tracks.”

Doc was mystified, trying to recall if he had seen any tracks while the companions made their way to Fairburn. “I am surprised they can find them,” he said after a couple of seconds’ thought, not really sure what he was referring to but hoping it would entice the other man to tell him more.

“Oh, they worked damn hard gettin’ those tracks in serviceable condition,” the ringmaster assured him. “’Round here wasn’t so bad. The tracks were just a little buried by the dust storms, I think. But some places they must’ve had to rebuild them pretty much from scratch.”

Realization dawned on Doc then. “You mean, the railroad tracks.”

“Too right I do.” The ringmaster spit. “Couldn’t travel around in that monstrosity otherwise, could they?”

Doc shook his head in agreement before turning back to the curtain. “I shall get back to you about the sale,” he told the ringmaster, “if my bets do not pan out the way I would surely like them to.”

“Good luck,” the ringmaster told him, and Doc was touched—it sounded like he meant it.

Out in the main room, the crowd was whooping and cheering. Doc scanned them, looking for Ryan or J.B. among the sea of heads. He spotted Ryan almost immediately, the tall man towering over the crowd around him. He seemed to be talking with a pretty blond woman, but when Doc got closer he realized that his friend was trying to extract himself from the conversation.

“Excuse me, madam,” Doc said loudly as he interposed between the lady and his friend.

Ryan scanned Doc’s face. “What news, Doc? Any success?”

“A little. Let’s find J.B. and I’ll explain it to you both at the same time.”

K RYSTY SUDDENLY SAT UP in bed, tilting her head as though to catch a faraway sound.

Mildred put down the book she had been reading. “What is it?”

“Something,” Krysty began slowly. “Something’s out there.” She looked at the window, and Mildred’s gaze followed.

Half dozing in a seat in the corner of the room, Jak shook himself and was suddenly wide awake. “What?” he asked the women simply.

“I can hear it,” Krysty told them both. “Coming closer now. Screams all around it, like a blanket. A blanket of agony.”

Mildred looked at Krysty, wondering what it was that she thought she could hear. Her companion looked disheveled, black rings still heavy around her eyes, her rose-petal lips so much paler than normal. “There aren’t any screams,” Mildred assured her. “It’s just your mind playing tricks. Try to forget about it now. Try to keep calm.”

Krysty slowly sank back onto the bed, calming her breathing with an effort. “But they sound so close,” she mumbled.

“I know, Krysty,” Mildred told her, taking one of her hands in her own. “Just try to rest, recover your strength. And in the morning it will all be over. No more screams, I promise.”

Jak was standing by the window, his nose pressed to the glass and a white hand pushed against it over his brow, trying to block out his own pale reflection. He craned farther, turning his head sideways to see a greater distance. Then he said a single word. “Screams.”

Mildred turned, shocked. “What? What did you say?” she asked him.

The albino teenager didn’t move from the window. “Screams. Coming.”

Mildred stood beside him, peering over his shoulder. She knew that Jak had incredible eyesight, almost superhuman, which was decidedly odd for an albino. That very ability had saved her life more than once, an early-warning system for all of the companions. She tried to follow where he was looking, squinting to discern whatever he had seen. “What is it?” she asked.

“There,” he said, jabbing his finger toward the skeletal tower that loomed over the ville wall. Mildred followed as Jak traced his finger along the glass. “See it?”

“What am I looking for?” she asked, unable to identify anything unusual in the darkened landscape beyond the wall.

Jak turned from the window, glancing at Mildred before marching to the door. “Lights,” he told her.

“Wait, you can’t just…” Mildred began.

“Have to,” Jak told her. “Find out. Tell Ryan.” He left the room, quietly pulling the door closed behind him.

Mildred turned back to the window, pushing the side of her face against the cold glass as she tried to locate whatever it was that Jak was investigating. Almost a minute passed, her breath clouding against the glass before she spotted it—a tiny flicker of crimson light, there and then gone, out in the far distance. She watched for it in the darkness, her heart fluttering anxiously in her chest, until it suddenly reappeared, larger and presumably closer. It wasn’t just one light. Now she could make out there were three separate light sources, infernal red and traveling side by side. “What the hell is that?” she muttered to herself.

J AK’S HANDS WERE STRAIGHT , held like blades to cut through the air as he ran across the street and into the shadows between the buildings beyond, taking the most direct route to the wall and the lights beyond it.

When the high wall came into view, Jak assessed it, mentally calculating where the ridges, the natural hand-and footholds in the wood were. Wiry and thin, it was easy to mistake Jak Lauren for a younger boy, but in reality his body was a powerful tool, not an inch of fat on the whole frame; he was built sleek, like a jungle cat.

With three quick steps Jak was up and over the wall, the soles of his boots barely glancing off the wooden surface as he sprang up it, just quiet tapping sounds to mark his passing. He dropped to the other side, landing in a crouch, his weight distributed evenly. Then, without a second’s hesitation, he was running again, his flowing mane of hair a snow-white streak cutting through the darkness.

He focused on the lights approaching across the dusty plain, flaming red and satanic. When he turned his head he could just barely make out the sounds, as well, carrying uncertainly across the flatland with nothing to amplify their echo to his ears. Most of all, however, he felt its approach, heavy on his booted soles, a tremor through the dirt, rumbling across the land.

“A TRAIN ?” J.B. repeated.

Doc looked around the crowded room, wondering how much of this they wanted to announce to the strangers around them. He stood with J.B. and Ryan near the back of the crowd, close to the lone entry and exit door. “That is what the man told me,” he explained, gesturing with his hand that they keep the volume of their conversation low.

“It’s not the first time we’ve come across one,” Ryan reminded him.

“Yeah, I know, but you’ve got to build tracks and grease points, there’s a shed-load of maintenance with just the physical upkeep of those tracks, let alone finding or building an engine to run on them.” He whistled softly. “It takes some doing.” The companions had seen trains operating before, but they were rare in the fractured landscape of the Deathlands.

The three men stood in silence, each turning over the prospect in his mind. Finally, Doc spoke. “What if they are using the old tracks, prenukecaust. Could that be done?”

J.B. adjusted the spectacles on his nose, wiping away the sweat that had pooled under the nose clips. “It’s possible, Doc. Usually it was the transport links that were the first to go, targeted by the Reds.”

“When we got here,” Ryan stated, “you said that this place had avoided much of the bloodshed and bombing.”

J.B. nodded. “Never been here myself, but I heard that North Dakota got mostly passed over. Too far north, I guess, and nowhere near the big conurbs. Weather got scragged, of course, but that’s all over Deathlands. That’s global.”

Suddenly the crowd surged, clapping and cheering, and the three men turned to watch the action in the sunken arena. The darker-coated dog had just sunk its huge teeth into the neck of the dog with the white blaze. White blaze made a whimpering noise, a nasty choking sound coming from his throat as specks of blood amassed around his opponent’s fangs. He tried to pull away, but the other’s jaws were locked tight, unwilling to release him. The dark furred dog pushed the sharp claws of its left forelimb into the other’s chest, tipping him over, still clinging to his neck with powerful jaws.

J.B. turned away from the action, leading the way to the door. “Looks like you lost your bet, Ryan,” he said.

T HROUGH THE WINDOW, Mildred watched the red lights getting larger as they closed in on the ville. There were more of them now, and she could see that they made up some kind of pattern across the front of a large, dark shadow, low to the ground, with numerous wispy lights trailing behind. The shadow was moving steadily toward the ville, not especially fast, just steady, relentless.

A moving speck caught her eye, lightly colored against the night-dark sand. Jak. He was running an intercept path across the plain, torso held low to make him less visible, a smaller target. He ran with considerable speed toward the red lights.

The flames of hell danced in those lights, Mildred was sure of it.

T HE GROUND ALL around Jak was vibrating now, shuddering as the monstrosity lumbered toward the ville. He narrowed his eyes as he ran toward it, trying to see past the bright glowing spots that covered its leading face. A vast shadow plowed relentlessly onward behind those crimson spots, the grim reaper stalking the Deathlands.

Fifty feet away, Jak suddenly threw himself to the ground, hunkering down, working his elbows into the sand to create a ridge in front of him. He reached to his belt, pulled the Colt Python, reassured by the weight in his hands.

The shadow trudged closer, belching smoke and fog into the night sky. Jak watched the glowing slits approach, like multiple eyes in the front of the creature. And behind, the metal carapace, some terrible insect grown vast.

It was a train like Jak had never seen. Painted black, sulphurous eyes glowing like embers across its engine, dragging its bulbous cars like pregnant women being pulled by their hair, stretching back along the tracks farther than Jak could see. And on the front, perversely, was a mutie woman carved of wood, her bare breasts pushed forward to lead the way, her torso morphing into reptilian scale as she disappeared into the engine housing, lit only by the reddish-orange glow from those hellfire slits. The woman’s face was a picture of agony, mouth taut in silent, never-ending scream, bloodred tears painted from her straining eyes.

As Jak watched from his meager hiding place, he realized that the train was slowing and that people were being disgorged from its bloated cars.

Chapter Five

Jak lay perfectly still, the Colt Python resting in his right hand, watching the hideous train pull to a halt beside the skeletal tower. A dozen men had leaped from the first two cars as the train slowed, all of them armed and several brandishing their blasters in readiness, as though they expected an attack. The men spread out across the area, checking, Jak realized, for people who might be hiding, checking for people like him. He hunkered down lower, wishing for better cover in the open plains. For the moment, the armed men remained close to the tower, which was two whole car lengths away from Jak’s current position. Despite leaving it open to the elements and to attack through the day, they had arrived to protect it now—and Jak’s curiosity was piqued.

The train lurched to a halt and a huge cloud of steam burst from the funnel atop its insectlike engine. For a moment Jak watched it through the cloud, like trying to make out faces in the fog, until the steam disbursed, filling the atmosphere all around with a malodorous mist that irritated his nose and throat. Burning—the train smelled of burning.

Instructions were being shouted now, and more people were stepping from the train. The first group had been fighters, sec-men types, well-armed and well-muscled, men of action. But the second group was made up of more general body types.

Two shirtless men were struggling with a cylinder less than three feet in length. Jak guessed that it wouldn’t reach to his waist if it was stood on its end. But seemed to be heavy—the men struggled with it, walking in irregular spurts as they carried it to the tower, quick discussions preceding each movement. A sec man followed them, casually holding a short-handled club, shouting instructions.

Three others followed, two men and a woman, looking nervously around as they left the security of the train. One of the men looked quite a bit older than the others, wispy gray hair blowing around on his balding head, glasses perched on his nose. The other two were younger, midthirties perhaps—about Ryan’s age. All three looked uncomfortable as they walked warily to the tower, taking care not to slip on the dry, sandy ground.

While they made their way to the structure, Jak turned to examine the train. It stretched off down the tracks for a seemingly impossible length. Its details lost to darkness, Jak could see faint lights burning in the cars as it waited down the length of railroad. He held a thumb up to his eye, trying to estimate the length of this beast of chrome and steel, but there were no landmarks to adequately judge it by. A quarter mile, perhaps a little less—that would be his guess. Helluva train.

None of it matched. Though too dark to make out the detail, even with Jak’s unearthly vision, he could clearly see that the cars were constructed ad hoc, random pieces of junk transformed into containers to travel the metal tracks. Some were straight conversions, old train cars pulled out of the enforced retirement of the Long Winter. Others looked like they had been constructed by a blind man dancing a jig in a junkyard, choosing pieces wherever he tripped, bulbous or holed or both, only their wheels fitting the gauge of the tracks.

Noise came from some of the lighted cars, laughing and shrieking, people having fun, their voices and the sound of clinking glasses carrying to Jak over the empty plain now that the shuddering train had ceased generating its arthritic cacophony of movement.

The three people had reached the tower beside the nose end of the train, and they called out and pointed at the ground around the base of the tower. The younger man was setting up a small tripod, unfolding a large sheet of paper that he held out to the width of his arm span and consulted diligently—a map, Jak realized. The woman joined him, jabbing at the map, then pointing at the sky above them, and the man nodded his agreement. Then he crouched slightly, and put his eye to a small metallic box that rested atop the tripod. His right hand fiddled with a knob sticking from the side of the box, and Jak realized that this was some kind of seeing device that he was lining up to check on his whereabouts or the whereabouts of something important to the man and his team.

Meanwhile, two burly thugs worked at the oil drum canister that rested at the base of the scaffold tower. At first Jak thought they were trying to move the half-buried can, but then he saw them remove the large metal plate that formed its lid.

One of the men at the tower put his fingers to his lips and loudly whistled. The cry went out. “More light!”

There was movement to Jak’s left, farther down the train, and two men wheeled a cart from the fourth car down an unfolding ramp and across the dirt. As they passed Jak, barely eight feet in front of his hiding position, he could clearly see the cart. Set on a rig on top of it were three, heavy, round spotlights of the type found in theaters, and a petroleum generator rested on the cart’s base. When they reached the site of the tower, the genny was switched on and it began to chug loudly, spluttering as it started converting fuel to power, filling the air with the rotting fruit stench of petroleum. The spotlights came on in a blaze, dimming a moment, then reaching full intensity. The cart was positioned so that the spots pointed at the open canister at the tower’s base. People milled around, blocking Jak’s line of sight.

The albino teen looked around, conscious of the guards patrolling the surrounding area. They seemed fairly lax, as if they weren’t really expecting trouble, and Jak reasoned that they had had trouble in the past and had dealt with it in a definite manner, the way that scared interested spectators away from future excursions. Whatever, he needed to get closer to the tower, to see for himself exactly what these train people were doing here. If he could see what they were up to, he might have the answer to what the tower actually was, its purpose.

With a swift check over his shoulder, Jak pushed himself off the ground and scrambled across the plain toward the tower, keeping clear of the glowing red lights cast by the holes in the train’s carapace.

He was just forty paces from the tower, then thirty, twenty, and suddenly he had almost run slap-bang into one of the huge sec man dressed in muted colors and holding an a longblaster. Jak dropped silently to the ground, and was reassured that the sec man showed no reaction. Swiftly, Jak clambered away on elbows and knees, the noise of his movement masked by the vibrating gasoline generator.

Jak watched as the three nervous types instructed the others. The woman dipped a thin line of metal into the buried canister, and when she pulled it out it glistened with liquid. She looked at the dipstick for a moment, and the older man with the wispy gray hair spoke to her, writing the reading into a book he had produced from his jacket pocket. He showed her the page and the pair consulted for a half minute. Then the older man pointed to the two shirtless men who had hefted the heavy, three-foot-high cylinder over and instructed them to bring it to him.

Their companion continued to check through his tripod’s eyepiece, occasionally pulling away and using his fingers to count off some calculation, his lips moving.

The two shirtless men had brought the cylinder to the area beneath the tower, and wedged it into the dirt as they stood waiting for further instructions. The older man leaned down, clutching at a muscle in his back and wincing before he adjusted the glasses on his nose to read off something from the side of the cylindrical tank. Satisfied, he nodded and consulted with the woman and the tripod man. There was a hasty discussion, with a lot of arm waving, but Jak couldn’t hear what they were saying over the noise of the genny running the spotlights.

After a while, one of the burly sec men stepped over, his face angry, and jabbed at the older man with a meaty paw. The older man checked his wrist chron and nodded in supplication.

Jak watched as the shirtless men tipped the cylinder toward the open barrel in the ground. The younger man who had set up the tripod shouted a single word, loud enough that it carried to Jak’s ears. “Careful!” Jak shook his head, brushing his white hair from his face unconsciously as he tried to discern what it was that the group was doing. They had unscrewed a cap at the top of the smaller cylinder and were carefully tipping it until a thick drool of liquid poured from it into the barrel beneath the tower. The liquid didn’t pour easily—it had lumps in it and it trickled from the cylinder spout in fits and starts. The gunk was a grayish color, glistening in the harsh spotlights.

Suddenly the operation was called to a halt, the older man, the younger man and the woman all calling for a stop at the same time, shouting over one another. The shirtless men stopped pouring the liquid from the cylinder, tipping it backward until it rested upright again on its base, denting into the sand. One of the shirtless men leaned down, screwing the black cap back on, while the woman tried her dipstick in the liquid of the barrel once again. Satisfied with her findings, she nodded and gave a thumbs-up.

The older man and the woman turned, walking slowly back to the train, deep in conversation. The other man was busy folding the legs of his tripod back together and inserting it into a plastic carry case. An instruction was given by the thug who had pressured the group—a foreman of some kind, Jak reasoned—and the genny was shut down. The lights dimmed and went out, and the generator shuddered a few times before finally sitting still on the cart.

The whole mysterious group was making its way back to the train and it was time for Jak to make his way back, too, to tell Ryan and the others all that he had witnessed. He couldn’t begin to fathom what it all meant, but he trusted that Ryan and the others would make sense of it given enough information and time. The barrel of liquid seemed vital to the operation—was that somehow connected to the tower, beneath the sands, where they couldn’t see?

Jak eased himself backward, crab-walking, his belly touching the ground as he pulled away from the train and the tower, back toward the ville wall. The crew was getting on the train, and he could hear the engine being stoked with coal, building up a head of steam to get it moving once more along the metal tracks. And then he heard another sound: the familiar click as a blaster was cocked behind his ear.

“Don’t move, Whitey.” It was a man’s voice, impatient, anger barely held in check.

Jak spun, flipping onto his back and unleashing a blast from his Colt Python without even stopping to think about it. One of the sec men was standing there, right behind him, surprise on what remained of his face as the large-bore bullet drilled through his head. The boom of Jak’s blaster echoed across the plain, and he dropped all pretence of stealth, leaping up and running toward the gates of Fairburn.

The sec men from the train reacted swiftly, a half dozen of them chasing the fleeing teenager across the sand, shouting to one another as they zeroed in on him.

Jak looked over his shoulder, dodging as a well-muscled man in a torn T-shirt made a grab for him from over his right shoulder. The man missed, his hand clutching at Jak’s leather jacket. He pulled his hand back with a shriek, blood pouring from the lacerations where his fingers had gripped around the razor blades and sharp edges of glass and metal that Jak had meticulously sewn into the fabric.

The wounded man reached for the blaster in his hip holster, but the foreman was beside him now, barking instructions. “Keep him alive,” he called loudly, so that all of his crew could hear. “One like that, be a lot of use to us.”

Jak tossed his arms back, the Magnum blaster still in his right hand, keeping his balance as he skirted down the slope that led to the walled ville in front of him. Two more of the train sec men appeared from the shadows to his left, and one of them tossed something in Jak’s direction. Roughly the length of a man’s forearm, the thing looked like some kind of nightstick in the light cast over the wall. Jak ducked his head, swerving to avoid it as it hurtled at him. The nightstick clattered to the ground, missing him by inches, and Jak continued to run.

The gates were closed. There wouldn’t be time to negotiate with the sentries now, so Jak would have to use his speed to clamber up them, the same way he’d negotiated the wall to get out here in the first place. He was scanning the gates, looking for potential handholds, when something hit him in the left shoulder. The other sec man had to have had a nightstick, too.

Jak staggered back, raising the blaster and targeting the two men who charged him. His first shot slapped the lead man off his feet, creating a vast hole in his chest as he fell to the sand. But by then the second was on him, and the handblaster was useless. Jak swung his left fist at the sec man, the man’s stubbled face leering at him as he lunged at the teen with a dagger. The fist connected, caving in the man’s nose. The sec man staggered backward, clutching at his bloody nose, but Jak could feel a nasty throbbing in his left arm. The hit with the nightstick had caught his shoulder, and the surge of adrenaline was already passing, leaving numbness in its wake.

More guards were arriving, appearing from the shadows all around, eight of them, then ten, with blasters and knives.

Jak stepped backward, Fairburn’s gates looming over him, his hands at his sides. He dropped his Colt Python to the sand, then raised his right hand, open and empty. His left arm sagged, unmoving.

Chapter Six

“My sweet Lord,” Mildred murmured as she watched from the window. She stood immobile as the train pulled away and watched it slowly ease along the tracks, away from Fairburn.

Finally she turned and looked at Krysty, who was hunched on the bed, her knees pulled up to her chest in fetal position, her hands over her ears. “Come on, Krysty, time to go,” Mildred said firmly.

Krysty sleepily opened one eye, mumbled something incoherent.

Mildred crouched at the side of the bed, running her hand over Krysty’s fevered brow. “I’m sorry, Krysty, but we have to go. I have to find Ryan and I think it’s best if you stay with me. You understand that, don’t you?”

Krysty slurred her answer, still struggling to shake off her sleep. “O’ course,” she said around her thick tongue. After a moment she opened both eyes and pulled herself up, swinging her legs and feet over the side of the bed. “What happened?” she asked as Mildred passed the woman her cowboy boots.

“They took Jak,” Mildred stated bluntly.

“So,” Doc ASKED THE OTHERS as the three of them walked back toward Jemmy’s bar and hostelry, “what did you two find out?”

J.B. shrugged. “Nothing we didn’t already know.”

As they crossed the street—now empty but for a lone, hopeful street vendor, still roasting nuts over an open barrel—they saw Mildred burst from Jemmy’s, followed by a tired Krysty. J.B. ran the last few steps to meet them, and Ryan and Doc increased their pace behind him.

“What’s going on?” J.B. asked Mildred.

“Jak’s gone,” she told her audience. “He jumped the wall, to get a closer look at that monstrous thing that—”

Doc interrupted her. “What ‘monstrous thing’?” he asked.

“The train,” Mildred said breathlessly. “Didn’t you see it? Didn’t you hear it, at least? It shook the ground, Doc.”

“We were in the arena, the dog fight,” Doc explained. “’Twas mighty noisy in there, the crowd all excited and the hounds going at each other hammer and tongs. Quite the experience.”

“Which way did he go, Mildred?” he asked, all business again.

Mildred hefted the backpack on her shoulder, pointing in the direction of the tower. “The train stopped beside the tower, and I think they did something to it, I’m not sure what. It was all very quick, like they had done this before. The whole operation took no more than four minutes. Jak was out there the whole time, he’d sneaked up really close so he could observe and report back, figured it was something worth knowing about.” She stopped, calming her breath. “But they took him, Ryan. They took him and then they left.” She pointed in the direction that the rails led.

“Fireblast!” Ryan cursed, taking brisk strides toward the gate.

J.B. called after him. “What are you planning on doing? Chasing after him on foot?”

Ryan stopped, turning back to J.B. and the others. “Well, what would you suggest?”

J.B. smiled as he indicated the corral behind him with his outstretched thumb. “I would suggest that we travel in style.”

Ryan was already sprinting down the street, heading for the corral at the far end, and J.B. kept pace with him. Mildred looked torn, her head flicking to watch Ryan.

“Go,” Doc told her quietly. “I shall take care of Krysty.” She looked at him, an unspoken question on her lips, and he shook his head. “Now that she is on her feet again, I think we can just about take on the world between us. She will probably be carrying my weary bones by the time we catch up to you.”

“Thank you,” Mildred called as she sprinted down the street after Ryan and J.B.

While their companions raced to the corral, Doc led Krysty in the opposite direction, telling her that they needed to reach the gates. She rushed along in his wake, struggling to keep up.

At the gates, Doc studied the cantilevered system for a few moments. One of the sentries atop the gates—a strong-looking farmhand, twenty-one and toughened up by a life of manual labor—noticed him and made his way down the wood stairs, calling to the old man. “Hey, hey, what do you think you’re doing? Do I even know you?” he asked.

In a single movement, Doc snapped his cane open, revealing the sword blade hidden within, and had it pointed at the young man’s throat. “I will be requiring these gates to be opened instantly,” he explained.

His mouth agog, the young sentry glanced at the blade that was poised at his neck, then collapsed in a dead faint.

From the other end of the street Doc could hear the fast beating hooves of horses. As if to clarify what he already knew, Krysty alerted him. “Here comes Ryan.”

Doc squinted at the lock, trying to fathom how the system of pulleys that opened the heavy gate worked, then he shook his head and pulled his shining Le Mat revolver from its holster. “Rope A, fulcrum, point B…” He shrugged and blasted a hole through the middle of the rope with a single load from the weapon’s shotgun barrel.

There was a second sentry, an old man dozing atop the sill beside the top of the gates. He was startled awake by the thunderous sound of Doc’s percussion weapon, and the first thing he saw was the gate swinging toward him, the taut rope that held it in place gone slack. The sentry backed up, forgetting where he was, and fell from the top of the wall, the full nine feet to the hard ground. He landed with a thump, rolling on the ground in pain. And then three horses galloped past him, their hooves bare inches from his skull, as the riders left the ville.

The gate open, Doc was rushing back down the street with Krysty at his heels. “We need to get transport of our own, Krysty,” he called to her as he led the way to the corral that Ryan and the others had just raided.

The surge of action seemed to be doing Krysty good. Her cheeks were flushed, and she seemed more alive now than she had in the past nine hours.

“Do you feel up to riding a horse?” he asked her.

“I feel as if I am flying,” she replied, “floating on a vast lake. It’s all so unreal.”

At the gates to the corral, Doc looked around at the tied horses. “I would be inclined to take that as a ‘no,’ my dear,” he decided, “but please feel at ease to disabuse me of that notion if you so wish.”

She screwed her eyes closed, trying to feel whatever it was that was inside her. “I can still hear the sounds, Doc,” Krysty said. “The screaming.”

Doc spied a pony and trap in one corner of the corral and began to walk toward it. “In which case we shall be a little more sedate in our pursuit,” he told Krysty, untying the pony’s reins. He looked around the corral, wondering if he had missed anything. Slumped on the ground by a sack of feed was the stable boy, a large jug resting on his stomach. The boy was perhaps thirteen years old, and he stank of pear cider.

“Hyah! Hyah!” Doc shouted as he whipped at the pony. He and Krysty were on their way, speeding down the street and through the gates.

Doc gave one last look over his shoulder as they rushed out of Fairburn. He had liked the ville, as it had something of his home-town values about it. Sadly, they probably looked down on horse thieves, he reasoned as he urged the pony and trap past the gates and up the incline in the direction of the tracks.

As they bumped up the incline, Krysty called loudly for him to stop and Doc turned to her. He was hesitant to call a halt to their chase so soon, but he also worried about the young woman’s health. She looked okay, tired but otherwise well, but Krysty called again for him to stop, shouting to be heard over the racing hoofbeats.

Doc pulled back on the reins, until the pony staggered to a stop. “What is it, Krysty? Are you…?” Doc began, but the woman was already out of her seat, running back toward the ville. Doc admired Krysty as she ran; there was something of her lithe grace returning to her muscles, though she seemed a little unsteady as she wended toward the open gates of Fairburn. She was twelve feet behind him when Doc saw her bend and take something large and shiny from the ground. Then she turned, ran back, and Doc saw that she clutched Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python blaster.

“Jak would never forgive us,” Krysty told Doc as she climbed into the seat beside him. She didn’t need to finish the sentence; Doc agreed one hundred percent.

He urged the pony toward the horizon. The train was nowhere in sight and neither were their companions. They had a long ride ahead.

R YAN, J.B. AND Mildred rode side by side, urging the stolen horses beneath them with kicks and slaps. To their left, the train tracks continued in a slight curve across the sandy landscape, barely visible in the moonlight.

J.B. was trying to get the facts in order in his head. “You say they took Jak with them?” he asked Mildred, raising his voice to be heard over the loud hoofbeats on the packed ground.

She turned to him, her beaded plaits whipping across her face. “Definitely. I saw a half dozen of the crew lead him back to one of the cars, then push him inside.”

“And he was still alive? They hadn’t chilled him?”

“They took him alive,” she assured J.B., “but I don’t know how long they’ll keep him that way.”

Ryan continued to look to the horizon as he chipped in on the conversation. “Why would they want him, Mildred?”

“I wasn’t close enough to hear what they said,” Mildred reminded him. “I could barely make out what was going on once they flicked the spotlights off. All I know is that Jak ran to the gates and a group of men followed him. I heard two shots and then the men reappeared, marching Jak to the train.”

“J.B.?” Ryan called for the Armorer’s opinion.

“Who knows why anyone would want Jak,” J.B. answered.

“If he’s still alive,” Ryan stated, “we’ll find him. And if he’s dead, then we are going to chill every last sec man on that train.”

T HE SEC MEN HAD MARCHED Jak beyond the locomotive engine and the first ten, wheeled units that it pulled before one of them opened a door and shoved him into a car. Jak had kept his head low, hands weaved behind his neck, left arm burning with pain, and tried to keep track of everything he saw.

The engine had been painted a matte black so as not to pick up reflections. It shrugged off the moonlight, a shadow looming large against the indigo sky. Holes had been molded into its casing through which burning coals glowed reddish-orange. It was almost forty feet, tip to tail, and the majority of that space was dedicated to burning the fuel that powered it. An open plate at the end showed where the engineer worked the controls. Above the engine, near the strange figurehead that jutted from the front, a wide chimney belched puffs of steam while the vehicle stood at rest. Once it got moving again, that smokestack would blast a dense fog into the air around the train, just as Jak had seen on its approach, creating a misty cloud through which it seemed to battle to its destination.

Behind the engine stood a chrome container unit and Jak guessed that this held the fuel that powered the beast. It was a long unit, almost as long as the engine itself, and Jak could see putrid yellow symbols indicating radioactive material within as well as the coal.

Cars followed. The first was a flatbed, open to the elements with a large cannon affixed to its surface. If necessary, Jak guessed, this would be the first line of defense should any unwelcomes approach the steel behemoth.

After that, a series of boxes on wheels, glass windowpanes catching the moonlight. Jak guessed that these held equipment since one of these cars was where the spotlight trolley had appeared from.

The next two cars looked similar to each other, like large wooden crates with narrow horizontal slits where the planks met, and a set of steps at each end leading up to an open doorway. Inside the first doorway, Jak saw a sec man watching the group that passed with the prisoner. The man held a large-bore shotgun in his hands and trained it on Jak as he passed.

Jak stumbled up the steps as he was pushed roughly into the second car, though he felt grim satisfaction when he heard his assailant’s wail as he cut himself on his deadly jacket.

Inside, the interior was intensely dark, and Jak blinked his eyes several times in an effort to adjust. Out in the open had been dark enough, but the inside was pitch black.

Then a man behind him lit an oil lamp and followed Jak up the steps. “Come on,” he growled, “git in there.”

Jak looked around the narrow car. Floor-to-ceiling grillwork stood immediately in front of him with a bolted gate in its center. The grille acted as a cage, closing off four-fifths of the car. Through the grille, Jak could see eyes staring at him—scared, timid eyes, wet with tears.

As his guard jostled him forward, the oil lamp picked up more of the room and Jak saw that the eyes belonged to about eight or nine children, dressed in dirty rags and cowering as far from the mesh gate as they could. The room stank of their own feces and urine, and Jak could see cockroaches and other small creatures moving around the stained floor of the cage. As he watched, one of the filthy children reached out, trapping a roach in his fingers before devouring its squirming body.

“Welcome to your new home, sonny.” The guard with the oil lamp laughed behind him, his breath rancid as it spewed over Jak’s shoulder.

Another sec man had joined them, and he unbolted the gate, brandishing a remade Beretta blaster at the children in the cage. “These here are your new friends,” he told Jak, pulling back his hand to push the albino inside. He looked at Jak’s coat with its decoration of sharp edges and obviously thought better of it, choosing to wave the blaster in Jak’s face instead. “You get inside.” he told Jak.

Jak looked at the blaster’s muzzle, then up at the sec man’s eyes, and a snarl crossed his lips. The sec man backhanded him across the face, and Jak stumbled backward into the caged room, twirling around before slumping down hard on his rear. The guard pointed the Beretta at him, arm outstretched, aiming it at Jak’s forehead.

The albino teen sat still, watching the man’s eyes, waiting for that flash of determination that meant he was going to pull the trigger. Nothing. Just a bluff. A wicked smile crept across Jak’s face and the man growled, lowering the blaster.

And then Jak saw the twitch in the eyes, the defining moment, and the man pulled the trigger after all, burying a slug deep in his chest.

Chapter Seven

The horse’s hooves thundered against the ground beneath her as Mildred and her steed tried to keep pace with Ryan’s horse. J.B. and his own horse had deliberately dropped back behind the group, and the Armorer had his mini-Uzi hidden in his lap, covering his companions in case things got bloody.

They could see the train ahead now, a little below them where the ground sunk. The companions charged downhill, following the tracks as they endeavored to catch up.

Mildred could hear the noise of the train over the frantic hoofbeats of her mount, rattling the metal tracks with a regular clacking sound. As she closed with it, the racket became louder. Close by, the train stretched onward as far as Mildred could see; it was only when they were on the higher ground that she had had any inkling as to the length of the metallic beast.

Ryan leaned in low to his steed’s neck, letting the wind from the train’s slipstream pass over him. There were three horse lengths between him and the rear of the moving train, and he urged his horse on with a kick of his heels in its flanks.

A man crouched atop the train, holding a longblaster pointing into the air. Rearguard, obviously, but a pretty stupe one in Ryan’s opinion. The man was paying no attention to the track behind the train, and the noise of the train’s passing masked the galloping approach of the horses across the sandy plain; enough at least that the man didn’t bother to check. Ryan knew the type—he was lazy because he was bored by the routine.

The one-eyed man was in reach of the train now, though the horse kept shrugging away as Ryan guided it toward the moving vehicle. He patted the horse’s neck, trying to calm the animal, as he pulled the reins to the left, guiding the horse closer to the back of the train. There were no doors here, no way in from the rearmost car, but he could see bars of metal stretch up the side—a ladder.

Ryan reached out for the nearest of the horizontal bars as the wind whipped all around him, slapping him in the face and pushing his reaching arm backward. The one-eyed man urged his mount on with another jab of his heels. He needed to get up that ladder and kill the sentry before the sec man knew what was happening, otherwise the whole crew might be alerted. Ryan reached again for one of the metal rungs and felt his little finger whisper against it. He stretched his arm a little farther, teeth gritted as he strained his muscles for the extra reach, and suddenly snatched the rung in a firm grip.

Taking all of his weight on his left arm, he kicked the horse away beneath him. Suddenly he was dangling by one arm, watching his mount run off into the wilderness, the ground hurtling three inches beneath the toes of his combat boots. The instant stretched for an eternity, and he swore that he heard Mildred gasp behind him, despite the relentless noise of the tracks and the howling wind shrieking in his ears. Then he had swung his other arm around and he was climbing the ladder, pulling himself up as his feet swung over empty space.

The muscles in Ryan’s shoulders and across his chest burned as he pulled himself up the ladder, looking down to ensure that his feet found the lowest rungs. As soon as his feet were planted, Ryan relaxed a little, his pulse pounding in his ears.

He powered up the ladder, hurled himself over the rim of the car and onto the roof. The sec man with the longblaster rifle turned as he heard or felt Ryan’s boots slap down on the roof. He made to cry out, but Ryan’s fist pounded into the man’s windpipe before he could even stand.

The man fell backward, dropping his blaster over the side of the hurtling train. He scrabbled, arms flailing, spluttering where his throat had been bruised, but he regained his balance and pulled himself to a crouch at the edge of the narrow rooftop. His eyes fell on Ryan, assessing the stranger, and he tried to speak. The words came out as a croak, their meaning lost, and the man began to gag, looking at the roof like a drunk who had lost his bearings.

When the man looked up again, he saw his one-eyed assailant was on top of him, casting a low punch into his belly. The breath whooshed out of the man, and he felt something burn where the blow had connected.

Ryan stepped back, yanking the blade of his panga from the sec man’s gut. A dark flower blossomed on the man’s shirt where the blade had pieced his flesh, and Ryan watched it expand in the dull moonlight. The sec man reached for his stomach, looking at Ryan with fear in his eyes, then he keeled over, collapsing to the roof.

The wind streaming in his dark hair, Ryan walked across the car roof, placed his boot against the man’s thorax and shoved the heel into the man’s body, tipping the guard over the side of the train. He watched as the man bounced along the tracks two, three times, before finally coming to rest as the train sped away. J.B. and Mildred were trailing along the left edge, urging their mounts to keep pace with the train. Ryan’s boarding, start to finish, had taken three seconds.

Ryan crouched and looked down the length of the roof and along the consecutive rooftops that traveled up the line ahead of him. There were a few sec men on the nearby rooftops, but none close enough to cause the companions any problems. Ryan scrambled across the roof and, lying flat on his belly, dipped his head over the edge and checked each side in turn. They were the same, a simple ladder arrangement built into the metal sides about two-thirds of the way along the car. In the dark it was hard to be certain, but the car appeared to be made of molded steel, cold to the touch.

Halfway along the roof was a lumpy square, and Ryan crawled swiftly along to examine it: some kind of drop-down hatch. He put his ear to the entryway and listened for any echoes coming from within. Ryan failed to discern anything, but the train was loud on the tracks, the wind loud in his ears, and the whole thing was shaking worse than a gaudy slut with an armful of jolt on payday; he couldn’t be certain.

He quickly worked his way back to the ladder on his left, the right-hand side of the car, and looked over the side. Mildred’s horse was keeping pace, and she was looking up at Ryan, waiting for his signal. He held his open hand out to the side, fingers splayed where Mildred could see them against the inconstant moon, then bunched it into a fist and pumped the fist down as though pulling an overhead cord: come on.

Clutching her horse’s neck, Mildred shrugged the bag from her back and held it up against the side of the car. She traveled as light as she could, but there was important medical equipment in it that she’d gathered here and there during her travels.

Ryan leaned down and grabbed for one of the backpack’s straps, yanking it onto the roof. He rested it there as quietly as he could, trusting its weight to keep it secure for the few seconds it would take to get Mildred aboard. Then he reached back over, his chest flush against the rooftop, and stretched his left arm as far down the ladder as he could, securing himself to the roof with his free hand.

It took two tries, but Mildred’s reaching hand finally locked on to one of the low rungs of steel and she pulled her body, still atop the horse, closer to the train. Her mount shook its head back and forth, trying to keep away from the rapidly moving train as Mildred took her right foot out of the stirrup and shifted her balance in the saddle. Her right arm darted out and she clutched at Ryan’s forearm. His hand gripped her own forearm, their wrists touching, and he held her steady as she leaped across the gap between horse and train, the ground hurtling beneath her.

Mildred swung awkwardly for a moment, scrabbling to find the rungs of the ladder with her feet, but Ryan’s grip held firm and she realized that she had ample time to find proper purchase and make her way up to the roof. Ryan held her arm the whole time, as solid as an oak, his grip never faltering, and Mildred finally swung onto the ladder and held it firmly.

When she let Ryan’s forearm go, he continued to clutch her until he was sure that she wouldn’t drop, then his grip loosened and she pulled her right arm to the rungs of the ladder and yanked herself up. Ryan smiled at her from where he lay atop the roof and she breathed a word of thanks as she pulled herself over the edge to join him.

“Easy pie,” he assured her as she pulled her backpack back over her shoulders and tightened the straps.

J.B. was next, passing up Ryan’s SSG-70 Steyr blaster before he clambered up the ladder. Before long the three of them sat together on the roof establishing their next move in a series of rapid hand gestures.

Ryan indicated the roof hatch, and they moved toward it in walking crouches. The three of them surrounded the hatchway, each assuming his or her role for the next part of the operation. Mildred unholstered her ZKR 551 Czech-built .38 caliber target revolver, pointing it so that it would be aimed directly into the space below once the hatch was removed. J.B. set his Uzi on the surface of the roof, close to hand, and placed both hands ready to unfasten twin catches on the hatch.

Ryan had resheathed his panga and now held his SIG-Sauer. The blaster had a built-in baffle silencer that worked sporadically, and it would prove necessary if they were to execute their plan quietly. Mildred and J.B. were there for backup, but if Ryan could take out any guards with a passable degree of silence they would be better placed to continue their operations unnoticed.

Ryan held his left hand above the hatch, silently counting down from three on his outstretched fingers. On one, J.B. flipped the latches, and on zero he had the hatch pulled back toward him, opening the doorway in the roof.

Feet first, Ryan dropped through the opening, quietly landing in a crouch and steadying his blaster hand with his left, swiftly rotating on his heel to take in the confined space of the car. The room was dark, the only light coming from the night sky through the open hatch directly above him. He could sense objects all around him. A few glints of metal caught his eye, but he couldn’t see anyone else in the car. He held his breath and listened, blaster still in the ready position. Nothing. He was alone.

He called to the others, his voice a low growl, confirming the all clear and instructing them to join him. Mildred dropped down first, her target revolver still in hand, and J.B. followed, Uzi at the ready.

“Dark as a blacksmith’s rag in here,” J.B. muttered as he pulled the roof hatch back in place. He fiddled in one of his jacket pockets for a moment and produced a glow stick with an audible snap. The glow stick emanated a dull, green iridescence, filling the car with long shadows.

Ryan scurried to the front end of the car and stood next to the metal door that had appeared with the increase in light. He put a hand on the doorknob, slowly increased the pressure on it and felt the door give, opening a bare inch. He pulled the door closed again and examined it for a locking device of some kind, but couldn’t find any bolts or turnkeys. “Door’s unlocked,” he told the others bleakly.

“One of us needs to watch that at all times,” J.B. decided. “Can’t be entertaining uninvited company.”

Mildred sat cross-legged on the metal plate floor four feet in front of the door and held her ZKR 551 loosely in her hand, her eyes focused on the door handle. “Got it,” she said. “You boys look around, see if there are any toys to play with.”

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