The companions really didn’t have a choice

“Are we all agreed, then?” Ryan asked, looking from face to shadowy face. “We fight them?”

The answer was unanimous and in the affirmative.

“When we last met, the she-hes took us by surprise,” Ryan said. “That’s why we ended up at Ground Zero in laser manacles. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen again. They still have their tribarrels and EM armor, but from what Big Mike said, they don’t have near as many wags as they did before. And mebbe only the single attack aircraft for backup.

“It’s not going to be easy, no way around that, but we know where they are, and they don’t know we’re coming. We can’t let any of them slip away. We’ve got to chill them all.”

After a moment of silence, Mildred said, “They were gone from this universe for a long time. I can’t help wondering where they went after they left.”

“Wherever it was,” Ryan assured her, “we’re gonna make them wish they’d stayed there.”

Doom Helix

Death Lands®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

But I can tell you what your folly and injustice will compel us to do. It will compel us to be free from your domination, and more self-reliant than we have been.

—John H. Reagan

1881–1905

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Epilogue

Prologue

Dr. Huth strained to see past the force-field barrier, which his helmet visor’s infrared sensor had turned a ghastly, translucent lime green. Outside the shimmering containment dome, backdropped by the megalopolis’s skyline, jumbled shadows dashed, darted and swooped. Discharging automatic weapons winked at him like strobe lights, grenades flashed a blinding chartreuse, but the only sound inside the battlesuit was the violent thudding of his own heart.

Dr. Huth had long since shut off the armored suit’s external microphone. The force field didn’t completely block the passage of sonic waves, and the sounds that filtered through—the screams, the wild volleys of gunshot, the explosions and the tearing, bursting, bone-snapping sounds—made it impossible for him to think.

From the frantic movement at or near ground level, slaughter continued apace, and in 360-degree-surround.

Blood and death.

On a scale that was almost incomprehensible.

Through the soles of his boots, Dr. Huth felt the rumble of the jump engine’s power-up. The familiar vibration knotted his stomach with dread. A lifetime of intellectual effort, of unparalleled accomplishments, of sacrifice in the name of Science had all come down to this: there was either enough nuke energy left in the storage cells to leap universes one more time, or he was going to be stranded in hell’s darkest pit. Stranded with less than two hours of force-field power supply remaining; after that, his only protection would be the battlesuit.

Whose power in turn would fail.

And when that happened, the armor would become his coffin.

A female voice crackled through the battlesuit-to-battlesuit com link. “Commander, the jump perimeter will be enabled in three minutes. Repeat, we’ll be jump-ready in three minutes.”

“There’s no point holding anything back, Mero,” said another voice, also female. “Divert the force-field batteries to the jump. Make sure you drain them dry.”

Com link static hissed in Huth’s ears as the consequences of the leader’s order sank home.

All or nothing.

A split second before they leaped realities, the containment domes would collapse. If this universe wasn’t slipped on the first attempt, there’d be no temporary respite; they would be left exposed, unshielded in the middle of the city’s vast main square, in the middle of the mayhem.

Dr. Huth knew it was the logical decision, the only decision from a strategic point of view, but it made the knot in his guts cinch tighter.

After a pause Mero responded, “Roger that, Commander. We will be jump-ready in an estimated seven, repeat seven minutes.”

Dr. Huth lowered his head and set off across the force-field enclosure in short, deliberate steps, beelining for the sterilization chamber. Moving quickly in the battlesuit was difficult for him. Nothing fit properly: his arms, legs, torso and head banged around inside it. The intelligent armor fit the others like a second skin, but they were Level Four, genetically enhanced females, the ultimate warriors of his native Earth. As a relatively uncoordinated Homo sapien male, Dr. Huth could only utilize a few of the battlesuit’s basic functions. And it wasn’t just a matter of body size and strength differential; his unmodified nerves and synapses couldn’t fully interface with the suit’s controls or handle the speed and volume of data transfer.

The sterilization unit was a ten-foot-long section of corrugated cylinder laying on its side, tall enough and wide enough to admit a single warrior dressed in full battle gear. Decontamination had been part of their pre-jump regimen ever since Shadow World, the first parallel Earth targeted for conquest.

Unlike their own exhausted and dying home, Shadow World had had bountiful, untapped natural resources on land and sea, and a relatively tiny, technologically stagnant human population that was easily subdued. But before the invaders could gain a foothold, infection by an indigenous lethal microbe forced them to make a hasty exit to another parallel Earth. Dr. Huth had solved the immediate crisis by killing the bacteria with bursts of X-ray radiation, but the replica Earth on which they had rematerialized was long dead and worthless to them. So, they had had no choice but to jump again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

World after human-occupied world they found either already destroyed and uninhabitable, or in the midst of annihilation. The Apocalyptic scenario that had driven Dr. Huth and the warriors from their home Earth replayed over and over in parallel dimensions—the same horrendous outcome, only with different chains of causation. For one reason or another, in every version of reality that they visited, humankind and its birth planet were doomed.

Then, finally, on the tenth replica of Earth had come a glint of hope.

Like their native world, it had a vast human population, but ninety per cent of it was well past reproductive age and rapidly approaching maximum lifespan, with accompanying mental and physical diminution. The machinery of its global society still functioned, extracting and transporting still-plentiful resources, but just barely. It was a wrinkled, limping planet. An overripe plum ready to pluck.

Dr. Huth had been confident that they would be the ones doing the plucking.

But he was wrong.

The scourge had appeared a few weeks after their arrival, after they had seized the reins of power, but long before their advanced genetic and weapons technologies could give them full control over a weakened and stunned populace. It was unlike anything the planet had ever endured, unlike anything the whitecoat Dr. Huth had even dreamed possible. And as it spread unchecked, crossing oceans, continents, ice caps with stunning speed, the evidence that he and the other reality-jumpers had brought it with them steadily mounted—until it was indisputable.

As fate would have it, the seed of the Apocalypse lay scattered not only upon the seemingly infinite copies of Earth, but also across the True Void, the transitional Nothingness, the Null space between universes. And Dr. Huth and his fellow invaders, the would-be conquerors of a hundred parallel worlds, had inadvertently picked up and transported those seeds, that unspeakable contamination, to the first planet that could have sustained them, and which would have served as a launching pad for all their ambitions.

Once the scourge took hold on the tenth Earth, the only defense against it had been force field and battlesuit. There was nowhere else safe to run, nowhere safe to hide, and no way to fight back. Weapons of war intended for intrareality combat—even the warriors’ tribarreled laser rifles—had done nothing to slow the mass extermination of the planet’s most complex organisms. It wasn’t just humans who died—no higher animals were spared, cold- or warm-blooded, large or small. Dr. Huth’s mathematical models had forecast a bleak future: When the cycle of slaughter finally ended, only the planet’s multicellular plant species and the prokaryotes would be left alive.

The evolutionary clock was running backward.

To escape the global disaster they had set in motion, the reality-travelers had jumped again.

Dr. Huth reached out a black-gauntleted hand and threw back the door flap of the sterilization chamber. He braced himself on the plast-steel frames that held the banks of X-ray generators and stepped onto the low, gridwork target pedestal. The beams were angled to cover every square inch of the suit, even the soles of his boots. He had ramped up the X-ray intensity, hoping that the application of maximum available power would resolve their predicament.

Toeing the marker on the pedestal, he hit the power switch, raised his arms over his head and spread his gauntleted fingers. The battlesuit visor reacted infinitely faster than eyes and brain. Before the latter could even begin to register the blast of energy, the helmet’s autosensors opaqued the lens to petroleum-black.

The X-ray pulse lasted one minute, and in theory at least, blasted the suit’s external surfaces clean of all living matter. If it worked, they would depart this replica Earth without scourge stowaways.

After his visor cleared, Dr. Huth exited the tunnel’s rear and passed through to a second force field—the smaller dome-within-a-dome that enclosed the jump zone. Before him, similarly clad in segmented, gleaming black battlesuits, a dozen surviving warriors set the stage for departure. They were triaging out the most vital gear—weapons, food and medical stores, and scientific apparatus. Behind them stood the mobile, nuke-ore processor, three transport vehicles and a single gyroplane. The rest of their matériel had to be abandoned; the smaller the payload, the less power the jump required.

Beyond the nested containment fields, a pitched, one-sided battle raged. Without the battlesuits’ optical enhancements, the seemingly endless legions of attackers were invisible. All that could be seen of them with the naked eye were the corkscrewing aerial wakes they left when passing through smoke or fog or rain—and perhaps that was a blessing in disguise. In his helmet’s viewscreen they flew, they floated, they slithered, they massed in thin air like the glowing ghosts of six-foot-long slime eels. The specterlike entities seemed unaffected by planetary gravity, a phenomenon that sorely baffled Dr. Huth. It appeared that although they existed in the current dimension, wreaking havoc as they swarmed and killed, they were somehow not fully of it.

Great luminous blotches of color splashed high on the flanks of the outermost containment dome. Liquid dripped down the impenetrable curtain in rivulets of brilliant lime green.

Hot blood, as seen in infrared.

The gouts of gore splattered the surface of the force field, hung there for an instant, then were gone, vaporized as the barrier shrugged off the insult.

Similar slaughter was raining down upon the planet’s entire surface, upon living creatures even less prepared to defend themselves.

Megadeath.

It had followed their leap from the tenth Earth to the eleventh, and now from the eleventh to the twelfth, seemingly homing on the chemistry of their blood and marrow, using them not only for transport, but also as guides to suitable targets, to like-worlds prime for annihilation.

Working frantically in the 18-to-21-day windows of calm between rematerialization and all hell breaking loose, Dr. Huth had gathered a scant handful of facts. It appeared that the creatures first entered the bodies of their hosts as microscopic entities, drawn into the lungs with breath, into the stomach with food and water, and into the soft tissue through breaks in the skin. Like bacterial endospores, their incredibly tough, shell-like outer covering protected them from the hazards of deep space and presumably, those of the True Void. Like endospores, these entities had a lethality threshold.

Under strictly controlled laboratory conditions, he had destroyed them with direct heat in excess of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and with maximum-power X-ray exposure. The direct heat method was not applicable in the real world; those temperatures would have flash-cooked the warriors in their battlesuits. Whether the X-ray radiation level and coverage in the sterilization chamber was sufficient to cleanse them of all microscopic contamination was an open question.

Even more unsettling, he hadn’t discovered a way to kill fully matured entities after they burst out of their living hosts. It seemed that once they attained quasi-spectral form, they were immune to the effects of radiation, laser, gun shot, explosive, fire and poison. They were as untouchable, and as insubstantial, as they were insatiable for living victims. Dr. Huth needed additional time to unravel the mystery, and once again time had run out.

He glanced down the visor screen’s right-hand display, pausing for a second at the function tab he wanted to initiate. The software’s Graphic Retinal Interface—GRI—automatically shifted the view mode from infrared to “normal.”

The commander’s voice crackled through the com link. “Status report.”

“All systems online,” Mero replied. “We are ready to initiate jump on your order.”

“Close ranks.”

At the center of the jump zone Dr. Huth and the black-helmeted warriors formed up in a tight circle facing one another, battlesuits shoulder-to-shoulder.

On the ring’s side opposite him, a visor decloaked. Dr. Huth gazed upon milk-white skin, cascading black curls, a full-lipped mouth, strong chin and, even through the visor’s polarizing tint, eyes the color of blue ice.

For a split second the whitecoat felt a chill of recognition. Under extreme stress, in his most vulnerable moments, those eyes, that uncanny resemblance, had the power to transport him to the land of recurring nightmares, of savage punishments. And for the thousandth time Dr. Huth came face-to-face with the possibility that a grievous, fundamental error had been made.

An indelible mistake.

The being that stood opposite him had been assembled, egg and sperm, in a petri dish, grown in the belly of an unwilling slave surrogate mother, genetically enhanced and artificially matured on worlds pulled apart at their seams. Auriel Otis Trask had known eight different versions of Earth in her short lifetime, all of them endgame catastrophes. The combination of that unique experience and her altered DNA had made Auriel harder than vanadium steel, harder than either of her gene donors.

Auriel’s female component had been harvested from Dredda Otis Trask, the former CEO of Omnico, board member of FIVE, the ruling conglomerate of Dr. Huth’s overpopulated, overexploited Earth. Ever the visionary, when Dredda had realized that human life was on its last legs, that there was no hope for her world, she had used Level Four bioengineering technology to remake herself and create a cadre of genetically enhanced warriors, creatures fit to jump universes and conquer entire planets, starting with Shadow World. After Dredda’s horrible demise on the eleventh Earth, Auriel Otis Trask had inherited command of the expedition—and the responsibility of leading it out of its desperate plight.

Her plan was to jump back to where the odyssey had begun, back to Shadow World. This in order to gain time, to repower their nuke batteries and recover the gear left at Slake City; and if the specters still followed, to find a way to kill them or leave them behind, once and for all.

Dr. Huth ran the tip of his tongue over the empty sockets formerly occupied by his front teeth. Deathlands was a place he had hoped never to see again. Within hours of his initial arrival there, he had been set upon, robbed of all his possessions, beaten and mutilated. Though the memory of that traumatic event remained fresh, its irony was lost on him.

In a long and storied scientific career he had never once worried about the consequences of his own actions on the powerless. As a young whitecoat, then as director of the Totality Concept’s trans-reality program, he had always looked for the Big Picture. The fate of the tens of billions left to starve on his native Earth after it had been scraped clean of sustenance hadn’t troubled him. He had seen firsthand what the scourge could do, but he wasn’t concerned about the fate of the Shadow Worlders, either. In his experience, other people’s suffering was the price of knowledge.

And at that price it was always a bargain.

“Initiate the sequence,” Auriel said.

“Counting down from thirty,” Mero said. “Prepare for jump.”

As Dr. Huth watched the red digits fall on the lower edge of his visor’s faceplate, all he could think about were the consequences of failure. If there wasn’t enough power for the jump, he was going to slowly suffocate inside the ill-fitting armor. The horror and the unfairness of that fate unmanned him: his lower lip began to quiver and his eyes welled up with scalding tears. There were so many things yet to do, so many discoveries yet to be made, accolades that would be denied him.

When the scrolling numbers hit zero, the double force fields imploded with a jarring whoosh, and the suddenly expanded perspective seared an image deep into the recesses of his brain.

Specters zipped through the air, crisscrossing like flying javelins, streaks of luminous green moving faster than the eye could follow; tightly packed masses of them writhed ecstatically above the mounds of ruptured corpses that clogged the city’s plaza. Except for the specters, everything that he could see, for as far as he could see, was dead.

Then the jump machinery engaged and the air overhead began to shimmer, then spin. It morphed into a vortex, flecked with glittering points of light. As the tornado whirled faster, the light from within grew brighter and brighter. Staggered by the blasting wind, Dr. Huth looked across the ring and realized the commander was staring at him. On the cusp of their destruction, Auriel Otis Trask was smiling.

With a thunderclap that rattled his every molecule the towering cyclone vanished; it was the sound of the universe cracking open. A narrow seam, a fissure without bottom, divided the center of their warrior circle, gaping wider and wider like a hungry maw.

Once the passage between realities was established, all struggle was futile; the forces unleashed wouldn’t be denied. The ground beneath Dr. Huth’s boots dematerialized and he somersaulted into the Nothingness on the heels of Ryan Cawdor’s daughter.

Chapter One

“There it is again, lover. And it sure as hell isn’t the wind.”

Ryan Cawdor glanced over at Krysty Wroth, backhanding the sweat from his brow before it could trickle into his one good eye. Her beautiful face was flushed from the heat and exertion, her prehensile hair had curled up in tight ringlets of alarm—shoulder-length, bonfirered, mutant hair that seemed to have a collective mind of its own, and always erred on the side of caution.

The eye-patched warrior, his long-legged paramour and their four companions crouched in a frozen skirmish line along the ruined, two-lane highway, their ears cocked. Under an enormous bowl of blue sky, streaked with high, wispy clouds, on the desolate and doom-hammered landscape, they were the tiniest of tiny specks.

The devastation that lay before them wasn’t a result of the all-out nukewar that had erased civilization more than a century earlier, in late January 2001; this Apocalypse was vastly older than that. It had come many millions of years in the past, long before the first human beings walked the earth.

Shouldering his Steyr SSG-70 longblaster, Ryan looked over rather than through its telescopic sight, taking in the panorama of destruction, searching for something to zero the optics in on. A volcanic plain stretched all the way to the southern horizon. Countless miles of baking black rock—angled, slick, razor-sharp, unyielding and treacherous underfoot. Eroded cinder cones, like towering molehills, dotted the plain, shimmering in the rising waves of heat. The only vegetation he could see was the occasional twisted, stunted, leafless tree, and clumps of equally stunted sagebrush.

When they had first glimpsed the sprawling badlands, Doc Tanner had remarked that they looked like “the top of a gargantuan pecan pie burned to a how-do-you-do.”

After trekking through the waste for a day and a half, the Victorian time traveler’s quip no longer brought a smile to Ryan’s face.

There it was again, the barely audible sound that had stopped them in their tracks.

Shrill and intermittent, not a whistle, but a piercing, short blast of scream. As the breeze rustled the sagebrush, spreading its sweet perfume, it distorted the distant noise, making its source impossible to pinpoint. And Ryan’s predark scope, sharp as it was, couldn’t see around the cinder cones or into the innumerable craters, cracks and caverns. Straining, he thought he could make out a second set of sounds, much lower pitched, throbbing, like a convoy of wags revving their engines.

No wags here.

The faint ghost of a predark highway, eroded by chem rain and crosscut in places by five-foot-deep washouts, was only fit for foot or horse traffic.

Ryan turned toward Jak Lauren, who squatted on his left. The albino’s white hair fell in lank strands around his shoulders, his eyelids narrowed to slits as he faced into the hot wind. Jak’s short stature and slim build made him look younger than his years. Those who mistook him for a mere teenager and underestimated his fighting skills, only did so once. The ruby-eyed youth was a stone chiller, Deathlands born and bred. From ten feet away Ryan could almost feel the intensity of Jak’s focus, which was pushing every sense to the limit in order to read the faint sign.

“What do you say, Jak?” Ryan asked. “What is it?”

The albino’s reply was delivered without emotion, a death sentence. “Something’s cornered,” he said. “’Bout to get et.”

“Let’s give whatever it is a wide berth,” J. B. Dix, the group’s armorer, said. He swept off his fedora and mopped the beads of sweat from his face with a frayed and stained shirtcuff. “It isn’t our problem. Got to keep moving. Don’t want to have to spend an extra night out on this rad-blasted rock.”

Mildred Wyeth lowered the plastic water bottle from her lips. The freezie, a twentieth century medical doctor and researcher, had taken advantage of the pause in the march to slip out of her pack and stretch her back. Her sleeveless T-shirt was soaked through with perspiration, her brown arms glistened and the tips of the beaded plaits of her hair steadily dripped. “But maybe we can be the ones doing the eating,” she countered.

Ryan had already considered that possibility. Their food cache was down to a few strips of venison jerky each.

Two days earlier they had made their way out of an underground redoubt hidden among the 11,000-foot peaks of the mountains of southern Idaho. The deserted complex’s armory turned out to be a bonanza: unfired cartridge cases in a variety of calibers, gunpowder, primers and bullets, all kept separate, all hermetically vacuum-sealed, in a temperature and humidity-controlled chamber.

After J.B. and Ryan had loaded and test-fired some sample rounds, they began loading cartridges, assembly-line fashion. They loaded as much ammo in 9 mm, .357 Magnum, .38, 12-gauge and 7.62 mm as the companions could carry. Reliable center-fire ammunition was as good as gold, worth top jack and top trade anywhere in the Deathlands. Unfortunately, the redoubt’s food cache had turned out to be unusable. Decades earlier, all the ready-to-eat packets and the canned goods had ballooned up and burst. Foot-high tendrils of dead, gray mold carpeted the contents and floor of the storage room. The seals on the bottled water were intact, though, and it seemed safe to drink.

From the readings on the site’s remote radiation counters, the area had taken a near hit on nukeday. It could have been the result of a targeting error on the part of the Soviets, an MIRV inflight guidance malfunction, or a failed attempt to take out the redoubt. Whatever the cause, it meant traveling northwest wasn’t an option for the companions. Given the food situation, they would have jumped out with their booty, but before they could do that, the redoubt’s power inexplicably failed.

Which had left them on foot, with one open direction of travel: away from the rugged mountain range, onto the edge of the volcanic plain.

Many times in the past Ryan and his companions had taken large prey for their own after others, animal and mutie, had done the hard work of hunting and chilling—a case of survival of the best armed. From what Ryan had seen so far, the biggest critters living on this harsh landscape were yellow chipmunks. And they weren’t worth the price of a looted bullet. Not that a crispy, roasted chipmunk-on-a-stick or two wouldn’t have gone down nicely after thirty-six hours of starvation rations, but a hit by a nine mil or a .38 would have left a scrap of bloody fur with feet. In the jumble of broken flood basalt, it was impossible to catch or trap the little rad bastards. Escape routes, deep cracks and holes were everywhere.

“Might be a jackrabbit,” Krysty said. “They can scream.”

“Bobcat or eagle would make short work of a rabbit,” J.B. said. “One squeak and it would be over. If it wasn’t chilled on the first hit, it would just jump in a hole and hide, out of reach. It wouldn’t keep yellin’ like that.”

“There’s also the possibility that it’s a much larger animal, more difficult to pull down,” Doc said. “A deer or a stray horse resisting the attentions of a pack of predators.” Perspiration had pasted Doc’s long gray hair to the sides of his deeply lined face and neck.

“Or something much more highly evolved,” Mildred suggested.

“We can’t see what it is from here,” Ryan said. “And there’s only one way to find out for sure.”

“We don’t need more trouble than we’ve already got,” J.B. said. “For nuke’s sake, Ryan, it could be a trap, something triple-bad luring us in for an ambush—the oldest trick in the book. There’s a million hidey-holes for things to jump from. If we’re caught flatfooted on a patch of open ground, we’re never going to get out of this nukin’ frying pan.” The short man paused to thumb his wire-rimmed spectacles back in place, up the sweaty bridge of his nose. “We’ve got a lot of miles of lava field left to cross,” he said. “We should stay on the road, swing wide of whatever it is and never look back.”

Ryan took the Armorer’s point. But as things stood, their lives were balanced on a knife edge, and it was a question of priorities—a decision had to be made as to what came first.

“We need to round up some food,” Ryan said. “We won’t poke our noses in if there’s nothing to gain.”

Their stomachs audibly rumbling, Doc and Jak nodded in agreement.

Outvoted, J.B. screwed his hat back down with a flourish and said no more.

Ryan shoulder slung the Steyr and led them offroad, confident that J.B.’s injured feelings would quickly pass, whether or not they found fresh meat. J.B. was a team player, had been ever since the glory days with Trader—that meant honoring a group decision even if he didn’t agree with it.

Off the highway there were no trails for Ryan to follow. The jumbled chunks of lava were a solid mass underfoot. Sometimes he was stepping on jagged points, sometimes in between them, and the edges of the rock tore at the soles and sides of his boots. The surface was so rough that running over it without falling would have been impossible. Even walking a short distance in a straight line was damned difficult. Every ten yards it seemed, holes as big as semitrailers and twisting crevasses blocked their way.

Gradually, the vista ahead revealed itself, and it wasn’t as flat as it had appeared a quarter mile back—a trick of perspective and of the uniformity of the terrain’s coloration. Before them was a dished-out, sunken swath of ground, the top of a huge, collapsed lava dome. Ryan could see the far rim of the crater, a crescent of blacker black, and it was at least a mile away. The deepest part was in the middle, a hundred feet below the rim. The surface looked to be basalt, but the fractured plates of rock were much bigger and tipped up at steep angles.

Ryan knelt at the edge of the drop-off, hand-signaling for the others to do the same. From their new vantage point, the sounds were much more distinct and disturbing.

“My word!” Doc exclaimed. “That scream sounds almost human.”

Jak pointed and said, “There.”

Ryan caught a glimpse of movement in that direction, but it was too far away to make out details. He unslung the .308-caliber longblaster and uncapped its scope. Seven hundred yards downrange he saw a cluster of four-legged animals madly scrabbling, their heads lowered, their tails in the air, pulling and tearing at something on the ground. The low-pitched sounds he’d heard were their growls and snarls. What with the movement, the intervening heaps of rock, and the heat shimmer it was difficult to see clearly, but he could make out tall, skinny creatures with ribs showing through gray coats, and pointed muzzles and ears. And their heads were all oddly marked: the hair on top, between their ears, was bright orange-red. The violent tug-of-war took the animals and the prize they were fighting over out of sight behind the upturned slabs.

“Looks like a pack of wolves or coyotes,” Ryan told the others. “Real big ones. A couple dozen at least. They’ve chilled something large and they’re ripping it apart. Can’t see what they’ve got, but it isn’t fighting back.”

The shrill cry rolled over them again.

“There’s at least one victim still alive down there,” Mildred said.

“It appears to be begging for mercy,” Doc said.

“Begging the wrong critters for that, from what I saw,” Ryan said as he lowered the rifle.

“Guess we won’t be eating fresh meat tonight, unless it’s haunch of wolf,” Krysty said with dismay.

“In my experience,” Doc said, “no matter how it’s sauced, simmered, or pounded, wolf meat tastes like old boot.”

“A boot that’s stepped in shit,” J.B. added. “Okay, we’ve had our look-see. We should move on, and triple quick before they catch our scent.”

“We can’t leave whoever it is that’s trapped down there,” Mildred protested.

“More likely it’s a ‘whatever,’” Dix told her. “A scalie or some other mutie. And if it’s an ankle-biter, I say more power to the wolves.”

Ryan raised the Steyr to his shoulder, dropped the safety and surveyed the kill zone through the scope, waiting for the feeding melee to come back into view. No matter their complaints, no matter how nasty the meat tasted, he knew he and his companions would choke it down somehow, and with any luck it would keep them going long enough to get past the lava field.

Doc and Krysty were still discussing recipes when, a moment later, targets reappeared downrange.

Ryan held the sight post in the middle of the circling animals. He took up the Steyr’s trigger slack and held it just short of the break point, slowing his breathing and, by extension, his heartbeat. One of the creatures paused in the pitched battle. Panting hard, it straightened to full height, turning itself broadside to him.

To hit a bull’s-eye at the distance and with the twenty-degree down-angle meant taking an aim-point eight or nine inches low. Ryan dropped the sight post that far beneath the animal’s chest, and tightened down on the trigger. When it broke crisply, the Steyr boomed and bucked hard into the crook of his shoulder. He rode the recoil upward, working the butter-smooth action in a blur. Fresh round chambered, he reacquired the sight picture in time to see a puff of dust explode on the critter’s near shoulder. The .308 round drove it into the rocks hard. It bounced once, ragdoll limp, and stayed down.

The sound of the rifle shot and the echoes that followed turned the other animals into statues, but only for a second.

As they began to scatter, Ryan got off another round. His intended target juked an instant before the bullet struck, and a heart shot became a spine shot. Dust puffed off the animal’s back just in front of its hips. Its rear end and tail dropped like a deadweight. Meanwhile, the rest of the pack zigzagged away through the slabs—like the critters had learned how to avoid long distance rifle fire—and vanished into the lava field.

Through the scope Ryan saw the wounded animal crawling for cover on its front legs, dragging the back ones limp and useless behind it. “Two down,” he said, ejecting the spent cartridge. “The others took off.”

“Think they’ll keep their distance?” Mildred said.

“Depends,” J.B. said. “On how hungry they are.”

“They looked plenty hungry to me,” Ryan said, slinging the Steyr and unholstering his SIG-Sauer P-226 handblaster. “Stay alert and stay close.”

Weapons drawn, the companions carefully descended the crater rim after him, jumping from block to basalt block until they reached the bottom. Then they began working their way, single file, toward the center of the depression.

They walked in silence, except for the occasional scrape of boot soles. There were no more piercing screams for Ryan to home in on. The screamer had either been chilled by the pack of predators, or it was laying low in the wake of the gunfire, waiting until it sussed out the shooter’s intentions.

When they reached the kill zone, Ryan immediately signaled for the others to fan out and secure a perimeter. He and J.B. quickly tracked the wounded animal to a narrow opening in the lava. From the blood trail it had left on the rocks, it wasn’t likely to ever crawl out of the hole. Or live long enough to starve.

“Better have a look at this, Ryan,” Krysty called out. She and Mildred, wheelguns in hand, stood over the body of his first victim.

“Now that is what I call butt ugly,” J.B. said.

The spindly-legged corpse’s gray fur was mottled with yellow; amber-colored eyes stared fixedly into space. Its bloody canines were a good two inches long, and a purple tongue drooped out of its mouth. The .308 round had blown a cavernous hole crossways through its chest, sending a plume of pulverized flesh, bone, fur, and blood spraying across the hot rock behind.

Ryan could see things squirming in the puddles of gore. Thin, wiry things.

Parasites.

None of that was the “butt ugly” J.B. referred to.

Ryan dropped to a knee beside the body. The patch of color on its overlarge skull wasn’t composed of hair after all. From above the ears and eyebrows to the back of its head, the creature had a cap of brilliant, reddish orange skin; naked skin, wrinkled and seamed like a peach pit. He gingerly poked at it with the muzzle of his SIG.

Spongy.

The hairless patch rose to a massive sagittal crest, the anchor for jaw muscles powerful enough to crack the long bones of an elk.

“Look at the muzzle and the shape of the eyes,” Krysty said. “It’s not a wolf, it’s a coyote.”

“Part coyote,” Ryan said. “Definitely part somethin’ else.”

“A four-legged, nukin’ buzzard,” J.B. spit.

Ryan looked up when Jak appeared from behind a slab of basalt. He held a battered combat boot by the toe. It dripped thick blood off the heel; the laces were still tied and it still had a foot in it. The splintered end of a shin bone jutted out the top. “Rest over here,” Jak said.

The rest was quite a mess, and spread over a wide area.

“Sweet merciful Lord!” Doc said as he took it all in.

Spirit reduced to flesh, Ryan thought. And mercy had had no part in it. He had seen many terrible deaths in his time. This one was right up there with the worst.

The head had been torn from the neck and was missing, no doubt carried away, as were the four limbs, which had been gnawed off at the elbows and knees. The belly-up torso was nothing short of a wag wreck. And the wag wreck was what Ryan had seen the coyotes fighting over. The body cavity was chewed open, neck to crotch, ribs clipped to angry stubs, the organs and guts yarded out through the gaping wound—perhaps while the poor, luckless bastard was still alive. The torso was wrapped in a few bloody rags, the remnants of clothes. Gobbets of bone and flesh, drops of blood and hanks of long brown hair were spread over the ground.

Ryan sensed how quiet it had become in the crater. The weight of the silence seemed to press in on his eardrums. Then he got a whiff of superconcentrated funk. Rotting meat. Vile musk. Ammonia-stinking urine. In that instant he knew the mutie coyotes had doubled back on them, keeping out of sight by following the deep crevices in the rock. Pulse pounding in his throat, Ryan thumbed off the 9 mm SIG’s safety.

“They’re comin’!” Jak exclaimed, putting his back to the others and swinging up his Colt Python in a two-handed, fighting grip.

There was no time for a further warning.

A unison banshee howl was followed by a scrambling of claws and a concerted rush from all sides and all angles. The coyote pack relied on panic and confusion in a confined space to get the job done. Surprise, overwhelm and dismember. It probably worked champion on dumb animals and lost triple-stupe droolies, but the companions were a different breed altogether.

For Ryan and his companions the ambush drill had become second nature. Even as their weapons were coming up, they moved into a tight, back-to-back circle. This gave them clear firing lanes and reduced the span of those lanes to a mere sixty degrees, ideal for snap-shooting multiple near-targets.

Coyotes launched themselves from the tops of rock slabs. They shot out through gaps in the lava, their fangs bared, their amber eyes gleaming with blood lust. They had no more than twenty feet to cross to reach their victims.

Ryan swung the SIG’s sights from left to right, squeezing the trigger as fast as he could. Instant killshots weren’t required. The idea was to break the oncoming wave; any incapacitating hit would do.

To his right, J.B.’s M-4000 shotgun boomed as he cut loose from the hip. The high-brass load of buckshot blew an airborne animal off-course, into Ryan’s firing lane. As it twisted in the air, he punched a 9 mm round through its exposed underbelly. Before that creature hit the ground J.B. had jacked the pump gun’s slide, found a second hurtling target and fired again. With the same result: a sideways-flying coyote, like it had been snap-kicked by a giant’s boot.

There was no way and no time to count the attackers. There were too many of them. And they were coming too fast. No time to think, either. Ryan aimed for chests and heads, firing like a machine.

With Mildred, Jak and Krysty similarly cutting loose behind him and Doc blasting away on his blind side, the din of gunfire was deafening.

As Doc’s black powder LeMat barked into Ryan’s left ear, it sent forth successive gouts of dense gray smoke, which partially obscured the battlefield. The Civil War antique shot lead-ball ammo from its nine cylinder system, and a single shotgun round through a shorter underbarrel. After Doc emptied the cylinder, the shift to fire the shotgun chamber required moving a lever down on the end of the hammer.

Which meant a momentary pause in his stream of fire.

“Release me, you bastard!” Doc howled.

Ryan half turned at the cry and saw a flurry of movement beside him. A coyote had Doc’s right boot clenched in its teeth and was shaking its head, trying to tear off the foot at the ankle. The old man stood balanced on his left leg and the tip of his ebony swordstick, which he held behind him. Doc aimed the LeMat point-blank at the top of the animal’s garish skull. With a rocking boom, two feet of flame and a tremendous rush of smoke enveloped it.

Ryan didn’t know what the hell Doc had packed the shotgun barrel with this time—he usually favored metal scrap and shards of glass—but smidgens of skin, like wet shreds of orange peel spattered the front of the old man’s knee boots and slapped into Ryan’s thigh. The blast flattened the coyote and set its back and shoulders on fire.

It was the last blast of the battle.

The air was choked with the stench of blood and spilled guts, of burned cordite and flaming fur. Through the haze of gunsmoke, Ryan could see a ring of sprawled, four-legged bodies, a few still breathing laboriously.

They had discharged more than fifty rounds in a matter of seconds.

Ryan’s ears were ringing as he replaced the SIG’s spent magazine. Behind him, Mildred, Jak and Krysty dumped their empties and recharged their revolvers. J.B. thumbed fresh 12-gauge shells into his combat scattergun.

As the smoke thinned and lifted, Ryan glimpsed a couple of the coyotes making for the horizon. They kept looking over their backs, perhaps to check for pursuit. When the animals neared the crater rim, he shouldered the Steyr and sent a 7.62 mm round zinging after them.

A reminder to keep on running.

“It was almost like they were on a suicide mission,” Mildred said as he lowered the longblaster.

“Didn’t want to abandon their kill,” Ryan told her. “Fresh meat has got to be hard to come by around here.”

“It appears we have more than enough, now,” Doc said. He jabbed at the remains of the animal smoldering beside his boot with the tip of his walking stick, then added, “Such as it is.”

“Nearly blew off your own foot, didn’t you, Doc?” J.B. said. “How many times do I have to tell you, single actions suck.”

“I’m alive,” Doc said. He gave the corpse another poke. “And that hideous thing is not.” From the side pocket of his frock coat, he pulled out the leather pouch that held his black powder reloading gear. He then sat himself down on a nearby rock and with a quick, deft hand began charging and recapping each of the revolver’s chambers.

J.B. looked over at Ryan and shook his head.

The one-eyed warrior shrugged. At times, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner could be infuriatingly stubborn and cantankerous. And there was nothing they or anybody else could do about it. The twentieth century whitecoats who had time-trawled him away from the bosom of his family in the late eighteen hundreds, his beloved Emily and his two young children, had gotten so fed up with his contrariness that just to be rid of him, they’d sent him forward in time, to Deathlands. Despite the considerable downsides to the 250-year-old sidearm Doc carried, the truth was, only if and when the LeMat blew up in his hand would he ever consider replacing it.

As Krysty and Jak were finishing off the wounded animals with close-range head shots, a muffled voice called to them. “Is it safe to come out now?”

Ryan and the companions swung up their hand-blasters, searching for the source of the sound with gunsights.

“Help me, puleeeeeeze!”

It was a man. Very close.

“Are they all dead?” came an even louder holler. “Make sure they’re all dead!”

“Keep your pants on,” Ryan shouted back.

“I do believe I recognize that voice,” Doc told the others.

“How is that possible?” Krysty said.

“More ghosts from your past?” Mildred asked. “An Oxford don circa 1882? Is your merry old brain vapor-locking again, Doc?”

“Neither a supernatural occurrence, nor a mental aberration,” Doc said, refusing to rise to the bait, “but certainly a coincidence of note.”

“Help me! Puleeeeeeze, help me! I swear I won’t run off again.”

“‘Run off again’?” Krysty said. “He thinks we’re somebody else.”

“Somebody he’s scared to death of,” J.B. said, “or he’d have shown his rad-blasted face by now.”

Jak moved quickly and quietly toward a vertical fissure in the bedrock about forty feet away, his .357 Magnum ready to rip. Like a bird dog, he stood there on-point. Ryan and the others slipped into position on either side of him, in front of the narrow cave’s entrance.

“Come on out,” J.B. said. “Now.”

“Leave your blaster behind,” Ryan said.

“Coming out, got no blaster.”

The pancaked crown of a waxed-canvas fedora appeared in the crack in the rock, then a prosthetic right hand—ivory-colored, it had articulated fingers and a big knob on the back of the wrist for tightening them into a fist. The man whimpered mightily as he tried to squeeze his big body sideways through the gap.

He was halfway in, halfway out of the cleft when J.B. said, “Well, I’ll be nuked!” and drew a tight bead on him with the M-4000.

“Are you back for another trouncing, you traitorous dog?” Doc demanded, stepping forward and brandishing his ebony cane.

When the wedged-in man looked up and saw who his rescuers were, his jaw dropped. Grunting from the effort, he quickly retreated, squirming back into the fissure, out of sight.

“I told you I recognized that voice,” Doc said to Mildred.

Ryan recognized him, too. The man in the hole was none other than Big Mike, also known as Mike the Drunkard, and the “Tour Guide from Hell,” a turncoat huckster who had sold his services to the she-hes, the would-be colonizers from Shadow Earth. Riding around in a gaudily painted bus, he had conned gullible villefolk with free joy juice, free jolt, free sex and promises of a much easier life in Slake City. It was a nonstop rolling party until they arrived at the site, then the awful truth was revealed: they had been gathered up to slave until death in the nuke mines.

Ryan, his son Dean and the companions had themselves toiled in the sweltering, poisonous shafts at Ground Zero. Although they had eventually fought their way free, they had been unable to stop the she-hes from escaping this reality and Deathlands’ brand of justice. They had, however, waylaid and beaten one of the invaders’ vilest puppets to within an inch of his life.

That puppet was Big Mike.

They had decided to let him live because he was already an amputee. He had only the one hand, which made his surviving in the hellscape a constant, and ultimately losing battle. After all the pain and suffering he’d inflicted on innocent folk, simply chilling him would have been too much of a kindness. Ryan was surprised he’d lasted so long.

“Come on out,” the one-eyed warrior said. “We’re not going to beat you again.”

“Swear to it?”

“Come out now, you tub of shit,” J.B. ordered, “or we’re going to leave you here to rot. Put your hands up and keep them up.”

Big Mike obeyed, moaning as he forced himself out of the cave, holding his arms above his head.

“You seem to have lost something else since we last crossed paths,” Ryan said, gesturing with the muzzle of the SIG.

Big Mike glanced up at his left arm, which now ended in a stump. It was cut through clean, like it had been sliced off with a bandsaw.

And recently.

The massive scab was black and the skin around it an angry red.

“In a place as hard as Deathlands,” Krysty said, “a man who’s missing all you’re missing is in one hell of a pickle.”

“Hell, pickle ain’t the half of it,” Big Mike said. “Lookee here.” He held out his artificial hand. “Only way I can grip down on something is if I use my teeth on the fucking knob.”

“What happened to the other one?” Ryan asked. “From the looks of that stump, it wasn’t mutie coyotes who took it.”

“You must’ve really pissed somebody off,” J.B. said, making no attempt to conceal his amusement.

“My former bosses, the cockroaches from alternate Earth,” Big Mike replied. “The bastards are back at Slake City, working the mines again, only this time they’ve cut out the middleman. They’re rounding up their own slaves. They took me for a slave, too.”

Big Mike waved the blackened stump in their faces. “Getting free cost me this,” he said.

Chapter Two

Ryan sized up the double amputee, who sat in the shade of a slab of basalt, drinking greedily from a plastic water bottle death-gripped in his prosthetic hand. The grime caked on the big man’s face made his eyeballs and teeth appear much whiter than they were, as if he was peering out from behind a mask. He wore filthy bib-front overalls, a holed-out khaki T-shirt and battered, unlaced boots. His blinding reek reminded Ryan of a bear pit in midsummer.

In the past, Big Mike had proved himself a backstabbing con man, but the evidence of that fresh stump couldn’t be ignored. The cut at the wrist and the crust of scab looked far too neat for bladework. The only instrument Ryan had seen that could make such a precise cut—and simultaneously seal off the wound—was a laser. A technology lost in the wake of Armageddon, but perfected to a high degree by the invaders from Shadow Earth.

The last time Ryan and the companions had crossed paths with the she-hes, the combination of advanced weapons and intelligent armor had been more than they could handle. Unable to return effective fire against the battlesuits’ EM shields, they had been captured, then marched out to the middle of the hundred-square-mile, Slake City massif—the remains of a once-great, predark city melted and fused into a glacier of thermoglass by a multiwarhead, airburst nuke strike. At Ground Zero they were forced to mine radioactive ore from the maze of tunnels full of bloodthirsty stickies. They had no food but the rats they caught and cooked themselves. And just enough water to keep them working underground until they dropped dead of starvation or rad sickness.

Despite the long odds against survival, none of them had lost heart, and in the end, thanks to ingenuity and luck, they had prevailed. Ryan remembered with pride how his young son Dean had stood his ground, fighting alongside the others, turning the enemy’s own weapons against them.

Memories turned bittersweet.

Some time after the nuke mine ordeal, in the dead of night, Dean’s mother, Sharona, had stolen the boy away and taken him to who knew where. Ryan smothered the surge of fury that rose up whenever he thought about what she’d done. He couldn’t change the past, and dwelling on it only led to guilt and self-recrimination that served no purpose. His abiding hope was that his son Dean wasn’t lost to him forever, that he had just gone missing until they somehow, someway managed to find each other again. The boy was never far from his thoughts.

After the encounter at Slake City, it was clear to Ryan and his companions that if the black-armored invaders hadn’t come down with a hideous pox, if the disease hadn’t forced them to jump universes, the battle for Deathlands would have been lost. Though they were relatively few in number, nothing in the hellscape could stand against them. The battlesuits’ shields deflected even point-blank blasterfire. With their all-terrain wags and flying machines, they had the advantage of speed, maneuver and firepower. And the cherry on top, they alone could fully reap the bounty of Armageddon. They ran all their equipment, from the tribarreled laser rifles to the gyroplanes, with reprocessed radioactive waste.

If the she-hes had managed to establish a permanent base at Slake City, within a year they would have toppled the hellscape’s baronies, one by one.

While Ryan had no love for Deathlands’ brutal feudal system, it was paradise compared to what the invaders offered. And the ambitions of the Shadow Earthlings had no limits.

Ryan knew what the Shadow Earthlings had done to their home world because he’d been there—as proof of their success and the hope it offered the starving multitudes, the first expeditionary force had transported him back to their point of origin. On the parallel Earth he had seen what made the colonization of a place like Deathlands so appealing and so necessary. Shadow World was a planet stripped clean of resources.

At the top of the teeming human population of 100 billion were the CEOs of FIVE, the ruling corporate conglomerate, and their whitecoat minions; at the bottom, in the sprawling underground ghetto known as Gloomtown, the vast, expendable segment of the population was reduced to eating pulverized rock disguised as fast food. While the masses slowly wasted away from a lack of calories, the toxic side effects of “Beefie Cheesies” and “Tater Cheesies” drove them homicidally insane.

A bioengineered agrobacteria, touted as the solution to the global food crisis, had run amok, the resulting Slime Zone threatening to carpet the entire planet in green slunk. In order to slow the growth of the unemployable classes, the one-world-government’s Population Control Service had released a flesh-eating bioweapon into the environment, and like the agrobacteria, the self-replicating carniphages had promptly taken root in the megalopolis. They bloomed at random and picked clean the bones of anyone who didn’t reach cover in time.

What the Shadow Earthlings had done to themselves, to their own world, Ryan knew they were hell-bound to do elsewhere.

Big Mike lowered the nearly empty bottle and belched resonantly. “The cockroaches are attacking the nearby villes and sweeping up all comers,” he said. “Anyone who can hoist a chunk of ore they’re dumping at Slake City’s Ground Zero. The folks who can’t do a lick of work, the too-young and too-old, they just slice into chunks with their tribarrels. They’re leaving the villes empty except for the buzzards. And the buzzards are having a grand old time.”

The battle—so desperate, so hard won—wasn’t over after all.

Ryan read the grim faces of his companions. He saw anger and disbelief, his own churning emotions reflected back at him. Krysty’s beautiful green eyes flashed with something even darker, more primitive—savage hatred. And she had just cause. To ensure the survival of their kind, the she-hes had stolen his seed, not from his loins but from Krysty, violating her like she was a barnyard animal.

J.B. broke the stunned silence. “How many wags and aircraft?” he asked.

“They used three wags where I got scooped up, south of Slake City, over in Burrville off old Highway 24 near Fish Lake. Nuke-powered wags, high speed, with wheels and tires as tall as a man, and invisible-armored like the battlesuits against bullets. I saw one of their flying machines in action—a gunship. It lasered the shit out of a stick-and-mud hut where some of the folks were trying to hold off the ground attack. Lit it up in a green flash. Three seconds later all four walls collapsed and the roof dropped to the ground. Raised a huge cloud of dust. Nobody came out of there alive. After that, the rest of the people stopped fighting back. They just gave up and let themselves be taken prisoner.”

“How many she-hes are there?” Ryan said.

“Don’t know for sure,” Big Mike said. “I saw mebbe nine or ten, but there could be a few more. Hard to say because you can’t tell ’em apart in those cockroach suits. When they come and go, you could be counting some of them more than once.”

Ryan scratched the back of his neck. Just looking at the bastard made his skin crawl, and his trigger finger itch. There was no telling how many innocent folks Big Mike had steered to gruesome slow deaths in the mines. And now he was confiding in the companions like they were old running buddies. Like he held no lingering hard feelings for their kicking his butt until he could barely breathe. Like they were suddenly, miraculously all on the same side. As distasteful as that prospect was, the con man had information they badly needed.

“How long ago were you taken?” Ryan said.

“Twelve days,” Big Mike replied. “I was getting busy in a back room of the Burrville gaudy house. Caught with my pants down, you might say…” Behind the dirt mask, his eyes gleamed at the recollection.

“Just tell us what happened,” Ryan said, trying to avert a digression into erotic tall tales.

“Blasters started popping off all around the perimeter berm,” Big Mike told them. “Ten-foot-high dirt-and-rock wall meant nothing to those cockroach wags. They drove right up and over it. When I saw that I knew who was attacking us, and there wasn’t any point in wasting ammo on them. It was time to head for the hills. But we were already overrun, with no way out.

“After the gunship leveled the mud hut, I surrendered along with the others. The cockroaches lined us up, about thirty in all, and put a laser handcuff on everyone’s wrist. They didn’t have enough cuffs to do both hands and both feet. They ordered us to collect all the pieces of lasered-up bodies and pile them in a heap. The folks who refused to touch the corpses got their hands whacked off, then and there. Afterward the cockroaches clamped the dropped cuff on their other wrist.”

Ryan frowned. He and the others had worn those manacles. They were designed not to be a hindrance to hard labor. The bracelets of silver-colored plasteel weren’t connected by lengths of chain. The constant threat of losing something vital was enough to keep the slaves hobbled and compliant.

“Picking up the still warm, cut-up pieces of their relatives broke them folks’ spirit,” Big Mike said. “After that, they were like walking dead.”

“All except you,” Krysty said.

“Weren’t none of my kin, now were they?” Big Mike said. “When I tried to talk to the cockroaches, explain how I used to work for them, one of them recognized me. That’s how I know it was the same she-hes as before. What I’d done for them in the past didn’t buy me any slack, though. She-he said I had one good hand and two good legs, I could move nuke ore until I croaked. That’s all I was good for.

“Cockroaches trucked us to Slake City in the backs of the wags. About 150 miles, a four-hour ride with no food, just a little water. Took us to the same base on the edge of the nukeglass, only this time it looked a lot different. There were big blast craters everywhere—wags, semitrailers and tractors, gyroplanes, the black domes and tubular walkways all blown to shit. Somebody really did a job on their equipment stash while they were gone. Used high explosive and lots of it.”

“Given your predicament,” Doc said, “how did you manage to escape?”

Ryan had been on the verge of asking a variant of the same question: “Whose back did you stab to get away?”

“The other prisoners didn’t know what was coming, but I sure did,” Big Mike replied. “I told them about the mines. Made ’em see that if we were going to make a move to escape we had to do it before they started marching us across the glass.”

“They weren’t afraid of losing their hands to the cuffs?” Mildred said.

“They were afraid, all right, but they were a lot more afraid of dying. If I was willing to take the chance, seeing as I only had the one hand left, they knew I wasn’t kidding about what went on at Ground Zero.”

A steady, low buzzing sound behind them made Ryan half turn. A swarm of fat black flies had discovered the coyote corpses. The scent of spilled blood and guts was riding on the breeze.

“Everyone made a break for it at once,” Big Mike said, “heading off in different directions. In the confusion me and a few others got past the base perimeter. Of course as soon as the she-hes saw what was happening they triggered the laser cuffs. All the prisoners lost a hand, including me. It hurt like a son of a bitch, but since there wasn’t any bleeding it didn’t slow us down. We kept running fast as we could.

“I don’t know what the maximum range of those tribarrels is, but I’ll tell you this—they were cooking hearts and lungs at better than half a mile. And when those green beams hit rocks, they explode ’em like frag grens. One old boy running ahead of me was hit in the side of the head by some rock shrap, and when he slowed down he got a hole burned through his back and out the other side. Almost cut him in two. The she-hes didn’t come after the rest of us, though. Mebbe they figured five one-handed slaves weren’t worth chasing down with wags and aircraft. We drove ourselves hard, following the roadbed of old 84 northwest, trying to get as far away as we could.”

“How long ago was that?” Dix asked.

“We were six days getting here on foot,” Big Mike said. “Lived off rattlesnakes and lizards mostly. Yesterday we made it to the south side of the Snake River. That’s when things turned triple ugly again. There’s a highway bridge still standing across the river, two low spans, side by side. We should have cut cross-country, gone downstream and tried to raft or swim across, but we didn’t know what the heck we were getting into. We were just following old 84. Halfway across the span these coldhearts with white-painted faces like ghosts come after us, yelling and waving blasters. Turns out, it’s a rad-blasted toll bridge. Nobody crosses without paying something to the baron. Burning Man is what he calls himself.”

“Never heard of him,” Ryan said.

“Me, neither,” Big Mike said, “but I hadn’t been this far north in years. In addition to the war paint, the crazy fucker wears a flamethrower strapped to this back. He isn’t shy about using it, either.”

“A strange weapon to be hauling around,” Ryan said. “Got to be worthless outside fifty yards.”

“Not to mention being a waste of good wag fuel,” J.B. added.

“Take it from me,” Big Mike said, “inside fifty yards that hellfire contraption is nothing you want to mess with. Past that distance his sec men take care of business with bolt-action longblasters.

“Burning Man wanted to collect his toll from us, but we had nothing to give him except cold, cooked snake. When he saw our stumps, everything changed. Right away, he wanted to know how we lost our hands. He was real what you might call ‘insistent,’ waving that flamethrower nozzle in our faces. A couple of the boys panicked. Couldn’t blame them, really. The smell of gas was enough to knock you down. Seeing the baron and that weapon of his, even a triple-stupe droolie could figure out what made all the great big, blackened grease spots on the bridge deck. Our two boys broke ranks and dashed for the other shore. Then we were all running to save our hides. That’s when Burning Man cut loose with his pride and joy. He set three of us on fire. One jumped in the river to put out the flames. The others were still alive, thrashing and burning on the deck, when me and that poor bastard over there, what’s left of him, made it through the black smoke to the far side.

“Baron’s sec men chased us out here into this waste. That’s who I thought you were. They didn’t waste ammo potshotting, trying to pick us off. Thought they could run us down, maybe. They chased us for the better part of half a day, but we lost ’em in the lava field. Either that or they just got tired of playing the game. Figured being this deep in the badlands would finish us off. It almost did.”

The buzz of the flies grew louder.

Krysty let out a yelp and slapped her bare forearm, leaving a gob of flattened bug and a smear of bright blood. “We need to get the butchering done and get out of here,” she said. “These bastards are biting chunks.”

Chapter Three

Ryan swung his panga in a tight, downward arc and the heavy blade chopped through the ball joint of the coyote’s skinned-out hip. He averted his face as he struck the blow, this to keep from being hit by flying gore. Normally, the companions would have throat-slit and strung up the carcasses to let them bleed out, but they had a lot more ground to cover before sundown, and lingering in the collapsed lava dome for long wasn’t an option. The aroma of slaughtered coyotes was certain to draw buzzards, whose high-altitude circling would in turn attract other large predators. And there was a good chance the baron’s sec men were still tracking the pair of grease spots that got away.

Using the razor edge of the panga, Ryan cut into the still-warm flesh, slicing through the inside of the thigh, making sure he didn’t nick the musk gland near the base of the tail. Squadrons of black flies buzzed around his head. They landed on his bare hands and forearms, lapping up the red splatter. There was plenty of it to go around—no need to bite into him to get a meal.

Bloody-fingered, he tossed the separated haunch onto the pile he’d made in the shade of a rock slab. Under his sleeveless black T-shirt, beads of sweat dripped from the sides of his chest and along the middle of his spine. They trickled around his eyepatch and rolled down his cheek. To his left, Mildred and Krysty were dragging yet another 150-pound, limp coyote corpse over to J.B. and Jak for skinning. They were selecting animals for butchering that hadn’t been gutshot. Exploded bowel contents tainted the flesh even worse than butt-gland musk.

Ryan watched J.B. and Jak set to work on the fresh carcass. They had the skinning down to a science. After making incisions above the rear feet, they cut the pelt away from the lower legs. Then Jak held the back paws pinned while J.B. used brute strength to peel the animal’s entire skin forward on the torso, turning it inside out as he went, covering the mutie orange head with inverted hide. J.B. stopped peeling back the skin at the middle of the rib cage. There was no reason for them to skin the whole carcass as most of the meat was in the hindquarters. For the same reason, there was no point in gutting the coyotes, either.

Doc kept an eye on the crater’s rim through the Steyr’s scope, watching for signs of unwanted company, animal or human. The newcomer sat in a spot of shade beside him, fanning away the flies with his prosthetic hand.

“When we get on up to Meridianville,” Big Mike said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “we’re gonna be treated like nukin’ barons. It’s the biggest settlement left on that stretch of the Snake. Busted dams on nukeday washed away old Boise, and Twin Falls took a full-on groundburst—there’s nothing left of it but a glow-in-the-dark skeleton. Haven’t been to Meridianville for a long time, but I know a lot of folks there, and they all owe me.”

When no one responded to the boast, the big man pressed on. “Me and the whoremaster go way back,” he said. “I used to be his gaudy’s number-one scout. Grew up in the business, you could say. I traveled the hellscape sniffing out fresh talent for his stable. You know, the daughters of dirt farmers who wanted something more out of life than working their fingers to the bone and turning old before their time. I’d stop by their plot for a cup of water or to ask directions and take the lay of the land, see if they had any female younguns running loose. I could tell by the look in their eyes which girls were ripe for what I was offering, when they wanted some fun and frolic while they still had all their teeth. As soon as their mamas and papas suspicioned I was up to no good they run me off, but by then I’d already talked the talent into meeting me later on in the woods.

“Sometimes I had the whole dirt-farm brood out there, naked as jaybirds, lined up on their backs in the grass, waiting their turn. I’d give ’em all a full, ten-round tryout, and if they had the knack and were eager to learn new tricks, I’d sneak ’em away from their farm after everyone else went to bed. Take ’em on over to Meridianville to get broke in good and proper by the gaudy master and his sec crew. Got top jack per tail as my bounty. Those were the days.”

Big Mike reached over and gave Doc a nudge with his prosthesis. “How about you, old-timer? You look like you seen the world and then some. Ever done gaudy scouting? I tell you it’s the best damn job in the hellscape.”

“So I have heard,” Doc said without enthusiasm. “Despite the obvious compensations, it does seem to require rather a lot of repetitive effort.”

Big Mike paid no attention to Doc’s reply. Ryan reckoned he’d asked the question just so he could catch his breath.

“Trouble was,” Big Mike went on, “I was so good at stealing away younguns that pretty soon I wore out my welcome. Sod monkeys would see me coming down the path and they’d go straight for their blasters. No warning shouts, no warning shots. They just opened fire. Weren’t trying to wound me, either. They aimed at my head.

“In the end I had to travel so far from the gaudy to find homesteads where they didn’t know me that it wasn’t worth the time and trouble of hauling the little sluts back. Got to feed and water them the whole way, you know, and worst of all, you got to listen to them talk. Nearly broke my heart to give up that job, but things always seem to change, and for the worse, don’t they?”

Ryan turned the coyote carcass to give himself a better attack angle on the surviving hip joint. He was irked by the bastard’s buoyant tone, like he thought the companions were going to swallow his line of crap, adopt him as one of their own and nursemaid him from here on.

Sure, in order to get along they had taken up the causes of other helpless victims in the past, and put their lives on the line in the process, but the people they’d helped weren’t accomplices to—and profiteers in—slavery and mass murder. The people they’d helped had done nothing to deserve the injuries they’d received, or the mortal danger they’d been put in. Ryan felt no moral responsibility for the care and safety of the likes of Mike the Drunkard, but he was thankful they hadn’t chilled him the last time they’d met. If they had, chances were they would have learned about the she-hes too late to do anything about it.

Ryan stopped listening to the braggart’s jabber and concentrated on splitting bone.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER the last, campfire-ready coyote haunch hit the meat pile. As water was now in too short a supply to use on hygiene, Ryan scrubbed his fingers and arms semiclean with handfuls of fine dirt, while J.B. and Jak tied the hindquarters in pairs, foot to foot. Each cleaned haunch weighed about ten pounds. Even though they hadn’t discussed it, there was never any doubt as to who would be carrying them. The companions were already toting forty-pound backpacks and weapons.

“Get up,” Ryan told Big Mike. When he did, the one-eyed man stepped closer, drew his SIG and aimed it at his forehead. The distance to target was less than two feet.

“Oh, Mama,” Big Mike moaned, looking down the barrel.

“Don’t move,” Ryan said. At his signal, J.B. and Jak started draping paired haunches over the man’s shoulders.

“What is this!” Big Mike exclaimed, staggering to keep his balance under the full eighty pounds of deadweight. “You can see I’m a goddamn cripple!”

“You sure as hell can’t shoot a blaster anymore, but your legs work just fine,” Ryan told him.

“You’re taking advantage ’cause I can’t fight back anymore,” Big Mike said. “How low-down, sorry-ass is that?”

“As I recall,” Doc said, “fighting back never was your strong suit.”

“More like, roll up in a ball and beg for mercy,” Krysty added.

“If there’s more trouble ahead,” Ryan said, “that extra weight will slow us down. Mebbe slow us down enough to get everybody chilled. You want to follow along, you want to drink a share of our water, you want to eat later on, you’ll carry the load.”

“This ain’t right,” the big man said, but nobody was listening and he didn’t try to shrug off the garlands of meat.

After the companions had shouldered their packs, Ryan took the lead, setting off for the crater’s south rim.

“Now, wait just a nukin’ minute!” Big Mike shouted at their backs. “You’re going in the wrong direction!”

“Nobody’s holding a blaster to your head,” Ryan said. “You’re free to break your own trail anytime you feel the urge.”

“But not lugging our grub, of course,” J.B. added.

“Are you out of your rad-blasted minds?” Big Mike said. “I just came from that way. Nothing over there but Burning Man and the she-hes. You wanna keep on livin’ you’ll head north to Meridianville.” He turned and gestured. “It’s thataway.”

Even as he pointed, off in the distance, somewhere out on the plain above the crater rim, coyotes yip-yip-yipped. And it sounded like there were a lot more of them than just the two that had escaped.

“You wanna keep on livin’,” J.B. said, “you’ll shut your trap and get in line.”

“I’d stay real close to the rest of us, if I were you,” Mildred told him. “You’re pretty much a walking banquet.”

Big Mike opened his mouth, presumably to lodge yet another protest, then closed it without saying a word. His dirty face twisted into a scowl, he shuffled toward them, pinning the draped haunches to his chest with a forearm to stop them slapping against his bib-fronts.

Ryan figured he’d seen the light. On his own, in this heat without food or water, hiding in a hole from the coyotes, he would last about three days—three very unpleasant days. Ryan didn’t waste breath explaining the choice of route. He didn’t have to explain it to his companions. They had the same facts he did and they all knew the drill.

The sound of their massed gunfire would’ve carried tens of miles. If the baron’s sec men were still in pursuit, they would be heading this way on the run. While the old highway was by far the easiest path off the volcanic plain, it was also the most obvious. Sec men who knew the terrain could move quickly to the road and cut them off, front and rear. There was no cover along the ruined two-lane, either. They’d be easy targets for a triangulated longblaster ambush.

The lava field, as tough and as slow as it was to traverse, had some definite upsides to it. Because it was the least likely route for them to take, there was a good chance the pursuit, who couldn’t cover every possibility, would decide to ignore it. Tracking down a quarry over fields of rock was damn-near impossible unless you had a nose like a coyote, which was probably why the baron’s men hadn’t located Big Mike and his dead friend, yet. And then there was the chipmunk factor: a million places to take cover and foil an attack.

After picking their way single file across the crater floor, they climbed out of the depression, working their way up the jumble of rock slabs. When they got to the top, Jak took point and set a course for the southeast horizon.

Ryan and the others fell into a familiar rhythm of march behind him. Not too fast, not too slow. A pace they could maintain in the midday heat. A pace that allowed them to constantly recce their surroundings, keeping on the lookout for potentially hostile movement near and far. Every hour or so, Ryan or J.B. circled wide to the rear to check for pursuit.

No coyotes, no sec men.

As the blistering-hot afternoon wore on, Ryan’s confidence began to grow. It appeared they’d made the right decision by heading south.

Hours later, when the sun began to dip low on the horizon, the air temperature plummeted. As many miles of wasteland still lay between them and the Snake River, Jak went on ahead to scout some shelter for the night. While Ryan stood watch with the Steyr, the others fanned out and started collecting scraps of wood from dead limber pines that dotted the landscape.

They had gathered plenty by the time the albino youth returned. “Found good cave,” he told them. “This way.”

It was a few hundred yards to the southwest, down a small sinkhole, maybe fifty feet across and ten feet deep. There was a cleft in the far wall, and it led to a tunnel that angled back into the lava flow. The passage opened onto a low-ceilinged chamber, the result of an air pocket that had formed in the cooling magma. It was big enough to hold them all with room to spare. A sizeable fissure in the ceiling above a side wall let in a shaft of light. It was a natural stove vent.

The companions heaped the wood beneath it and shrugged out of their packs. With a grunt, Big Mike dumped his load of meat on the cave floor.

Jak and Krysty piled up loose rocks, building a long, narrow fire pit against the wall.

“We could get trapped in here,” Big Mike said.

“Not get trapped,” Jak said. “Picked good cave.” Crossing the chamber he pointed at a narrow opening in the wall near the floor. “Back way out,” he said. “Hard to crawl in, but cave gets wider after. Winds around, comes out long ways off, far side of cinder cone.”

“How am I supposed to squeeze through a little bitty crack like that?” Big Mike said in dismay.

“Better pray you don’t have to,” Ryan said.

Before the last of the daylight was gone they had a crackling blaze going in the makeshift hearth. The vent worked just fine, sucking the smoke up and out of the chamber. As the fire burned down and the heap of glowing coals built up, J.B. and Doc skewered the coyote hindquarters on to limber pine spits. Once the coals were plenty hot, they leaned the spits over them, between the fire pit border and the wall. Grease squirting from the meat made the fire flare up, but the resulting black smoke shot right up the chimney.

“Aren’t you worried something might get wind of that cook fire?” Big Mike said. “More mutie coyotes? Or those sec men? They could still be prowling around, looking for me.”

“No one’s after us,” J.B. told him. “No one anywhere close, anyway. We made plenty sure of that.”

“Even if the sec men could follow the smoke trail,” Ryan said, “there’s no moon, tonight. Anyone trying to track in this lava field is going to fall into a crack or a pit and break their legs, or worse. Like J.B. said, if the baron’s men are trailing us they’re still a long ways off. Odds are, they’ll hunker down just like we are until right before daybreak. By then we’ll be moving on, too.”

“Got to take our chances with the fire anyway,” Mildred said. “We’re not going to eat raw meat, not when we’re still at least a half day’s hard walk from the river. We get sick on the way there, we get dehydrated from being sick in this heat, we’ll never make it.”

Despite the constant, grease-fueled flare-ups, the companions didn’t bother knocking down the bank of coals. Instead they kept feeding the fire fresh wood to maintain the temperature. After about thirty minutes of frequent rotation, the charring on the meat was uniform. Doc deftly sliced into a haunch with the tip of his cane sword. “Done to a turn all the way to the bone,” he announced.

As Doc and J.B. moved the joints out of the fire to cool a bit, Big Mike smacked his lips and said, “You know, that doesn’t smell half-bad.”

“Wish I could say the same for you,” Krysty said, shielding her nose with a cupped hand.

If the fire had warmed the chamber to a cozy temperature, it had also warmed up Big Mike, releasing the full spectrum of his aroma. Even in a time and a place where regular baths with soap were unheard of, his stench was nothing short of spectacular. Before they passed out the food, Ryan made him move to a seat over by the cave entrance. The cold air sucked in by the fire’s draft blew most of his pong up the chimney with the wood and meat smoke.

When the joints had sufficiently cooled, the companions tore into them with both hands, hot liquid fat running down their wrists and forearms. Before Big Mike could begin to eat he had to torque down the knob at the back of his prosthesis with his teeth, closing artificial fingers in a vise grip on the foot end of the leg bone.

“Gaia, that tastes vile,” Krysty said, making a sour face. Her prehensile hair seemed to agree. It had drawn up into tight ringlets.

Behind the smeared lenses of his spectacles, J.B.’s eyes squeezed shut as he forced himself to swallow. “You know,” he said, “this is so bad it makes wolf seem like prime beef.”

“I have to breathe through my mouth to choke it down,” Mildred said.

“Gamier than roast muskrat,” Doc said. “And somewhat more fibrous than armadillo.”

“Bear’s not so greasy,” Jak offered.

“Mebbe we should cook it longer,” Krysty said.

“That won’t improve the taste,” Ryan assured her. The flesh had a definite harsh tang to it already from the burning limber pine resins. It made Ryan’s tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. As he chewed he felt something hard crunch between his back molars. He rolled the gob of meat around in his mouth until he could pick out the inclusion with his fingertips. When he held it close to the firelight, it looked like a lentil bean, flat, circular, but it wasn’t. It was the coiled-up body of a parasite cooked to a cinder.

He spit the entire mouthful onto his palm to examine it. There were more little hard tidbits.

Lots more.

“For nuke’s sake don’t spit out the wire worms,” J.B. told him. “They’re the best part.”

“Nutty,” Doc agreed.

Ryan popped the entire gob back in his mouth and gulped it down. Parasites cooked that hard were dead. And their eggs were chilled, too. Protein was protein. Like most Deathlanders, he wasn’t all that fussy about food. He just didn’t want to crack a tooth on a pebble or a chip of hip bone.

“I’ve had plenty worse than this,” Big Mike bragged, brandishing his half-gnawed haunch in the air like a club. The dripping grease had washed a clean, shiny stripe down his chin. His skin was bright pink under the beard hair. “Worst thing I ever had to eat was a plate of spider stew down in New Mex. Made with hot green chilis and tarantulas as big as your hand.”

“Tarantulas aren’t edible,” Mildred said dubiously.

“Not much meat on them after they’re cooked, that’s for damn sure, and what little there is you got to suck out of the bodies and legs. Real trouble is, they’re covered with all these little hairs that fall off in the stewing. They get caught down your throat and make you gag, so it’s hard to keep any of it down. And two hours later I had the squirts thermonuclear.”

“Arachnid’s revenge,” Doc said.

“You’d better believe it was hellfire at both ends,” Big Mike said through a greasy grin. He pressed the haunch to his mouth and greedily tore off another strip of meat with his teeth.

After a dozen mouthfuls of the cloyingly rich meat, Ryan had had enough. The pile of flesh he’d gulped sat like a boulder at the bottom of his stomach. As he had no desire to save the leftovers for breakfast, he tossed the rest of it onto the banked fire for cremation. If all went well, by the next afternoon they’d be off the volcanic plain and along the river where there would be plenty of better forage to choose from.

One by one, emitting various expressions of disgust and discomfort, his companions discarded their haunches as well.

“We’ve got things to discuss,” J.B. said, cleaning the grease smears off his glasses with the tail of his shirt.

Ryan glanced over at Big Mike, who was still chewing happily. Would the bastard betray them if given half a chance? Even without hands? Even after they’d saved his stinkin’ hide?

Hell, yes.

“Better do our talking outside,” Ryan said. “You stay right where you are,” he warned Big Mike. Resting his palm on the pommel of his leg-sheathed panga he said, “Stick your nose out and I’ll chop that off, too.”

The companions exited the cave and moved away from the entrance, well out of earshot. An overturned bowl of stars lay upon the black blanket of the lava field. It was difficult to see more than a few yards ahead. The clear night had acquired a bone-penetrating chill.

Ryan put his arm around Krysty’s waist and pulled her close as they looked up at the brilliant swath of the Milky Way. He could feel the tension in her body, and though he worried that she was reliving her humiliation at the hands of the she-hes, he didn’t say anything, he just gently held her. After a few moments in his embrace she relaxed, snuggled against him and said, “Nice and quiet out here.”

“For a change,” Mildred said.

“That fat bastard can’t stop running his mouth,” J.B. said. “You name it, and he’s always done one better.”

“Or one grosser,” Mildred added.

“We have another hellish trek ahead of us tomorrow,” Doc said. “Perhaps if we gagged our guest the time would pass more pleasantly?”

“Gagged him and left him behind, you mean,” J.B. said.

“We can’t part company with Big Mike just yet,” Ryan said. “We need the information he’s got on the she-hes.”

“Why they come back?” Jak asked.

“Mebbe they couldn’t find anything better in the alternate universes,” Ryan said. “Everything that’s missing on their Earth—food, clean air and water, open space, small population—we have plenty of.”

“I thought they’d written off Deathlands because of the infection,” Krysty said.

When the companions had examined the bodies the she-hes had left behind at Slake City, they found massive, ultimately fatal, bacterial skin infections. The invaders had been caught unprepared by native microscopic organisms.

“They must have found a cure for it off-world,” Mildred said. “Not unexpected, given the rest of their technology.”

“We’ve got two options come daybreak,” Ryan said. “We can either head for the hills or we can take the fight to them, only on our terms this time.”

“If we choose to retreat now, dear friends,” Doc said, “rest assured these aliens will propagate and then swarm. Like a plague of locusts they will devour the remains of this Earth, just as they devoured their own.”

“If we can believe what Big Mike told us,” Mildred said, “they’ve been here at least a few weeks already, setting up their operation. Their weapons, armor and transport are better than anything Deathlands has ever seen. Every day they go unchallenged they’re going to get stronger and more difficult to defeat.”

“If we run now, we’ll be looking over our shoulders until our dying breaths,” J.B. said. “I don’t like that.”

“Then we really don’t have a choice, do we?” Krysty said.

“Are we all agreed, then?” Ryan said, looking from face to shadowy face. “We fight them?”

The answer was unanimous and in the affirmative.

“When we last met, the she-hes took us by surprise,” Ryan said. “That’s why we ended up at Ground Zero in laser manacles. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen again. They still have their tribarrels and EM armor, but from what the Drunkard said they don’t have near as many wags as they did before. And mebbe only the single attack aircraft for backup. It doesn’t sound like they replaced any of the norm male soldiers they lost, either. It’s not going to be easy, no way around that, but we know where they are and they don’t know we’re coming. We can’t let any of them slip away. We’ve got to chill them all.”

After a moment of silence, Mildred said, “They were gone from this universe for a long time. I can’t help wondering where they went after they left.”

“Wherever it was,” Ryan assured her, “we’re gonna make them wish they’d stayed there.”

Chapter Four

Jak hunkered down on the flank of the ancient cinder cone, making himself as small a target for the wind as he could. In the past hour the breeze had picked up considerably, sweeping across the plain in shrieking gusts, lifting and fluttering his shoulder-length white hair, sandblasting his face with grit. The sawing wail was so loud it drowned out the chattering of his teeth.

His eyes had long since adjusted to the dim light and his perch afforded him a panoramic view downrange, but detail was difficult to pick out. Starshine reflected off planes and edges of rock, and the twisted trunks and branches of limber pines, turning them shades of gray, but the fissures, the rills, the sinkholes—fully three-fourths of the landscape below him—were pitch-black. Occasionally, he caught glimpses of movement, of what appeared to be rolling tumbleweeds—vague, round, silvery shapes that bounded between and vanished into the impenetrable patches of darkness.

He had had the foresight to survey the landscape from this position in daylight, and had mapped it in his mind, marking and memorizing all possible access routes to the cave’s back entrance—routes he would have taken if the mission was reversed, if he was the stalker, moving in for the quiet chill. He’d seen no evidence that the cave or the paths to it had ever been used by people, or by animals bigger than chipmunks. Which came as no big surprise. The plain was littered with similar hidey-holes.

As Jak systematically checked and rechecked each of the routes, looking for movement he couldn’t otherwise identify and for the glint of starlight reflecting off eyeballs, J.B. was doing the same thing, on the far side of the sinkhole. They had both drawn the second watch.

Despite what had been said in front of Big Mike about their not being followed, nobody had argued when Ryan suggested they post sentries throughout the night. Though pursuit by coyotes and sec men was a longshot, a bivouac in hostile, unknown territory demanded they take customary precautions. They’d been caught off guard before.

If the darkness, cold and wind challenged Jak’s skills as a scout, they also challenged his endurance. As strong as he was, as battle-hardened as he was, the effects of exhaustion and lack of sleep, of days of walking under a blazing sun on low rations with minimal water, were taking their toll. His mind kept wandering from the task at hand to his discomfort, and from his discomfort to replays of recent events, including the action plan the companions had discussed and all agreed upon.

They were heading deeper into the turf controlled by the flame-throwing baron and the freshly loaded ammo they carried was a prize he would surely covet. If Burning Man wasn’t in a trading mood when they crossed paths, he’d surely try to take it from them by force. Either way, parting with the ammunition wasn’t an option. They were going to need every round once they got to Slake City. The only answer was to avoid contact, to bypass the baron’s toll bridge and find another way to cross the river to the west.

“Even if we have to build our own barge…” Ryan had told the others.

A buffeting gust of wind jerked Jak back from the vivid memory. He had no idea how long he had been wool-gathering—a second, a minute, five minutes? To wake himself up, he pressed his kneecap into a sharp rock, leaning down with more and more weight until the pain made his red eyes water.

Below him to the right, low on the cinder cone’s slope, something moved.

A silent, silver blur against the blackness. There for a second, then it vanished.

There were no straight lines of approach up the cinder cone’s slope. Long sections of the winding routes, like the cracks and the gullys, were either sheltered from his view or from the starlight.

Tumbleweed, he told himself. Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, he watched for it to reappear.

It didn’t.

Maybe it fell in a gully, or got pinned against rock slab, he thought.

Holding his breath, Jak strained to hear over the howl of the wind, to pick up the scrape of boot soles, the scratch of claws.

Nothing.

A whole lot of nothing.

Jak found himself wishing for one of the she-he’s tribarrel blasters. With one of those babies, he could have lit up the lower slope in an emerald-green flare. He could have also heated a nearby slab of rock to keep himself warm.

Once again, seemingly of its own volition, his train of thought—and his attention—strayed.

He recalled how the companions had turned captured laser weapons against the invaders. Tribarrels didn’t work against the battlesuits’ EM shields, so they had used them to alter the nukeglass landscape, to collapse roads that crossed the deep crevasses, taking the invaders down with them.

The captured tribarrels’ nuke batteries had soon run out, and with the she-hes having fled to some other universe, repowering them was impossible. Even if they could have recharged the weapons, the tribarrels were designed for one purpose: chilling large numbers of tightly packed human beings. They weren’t any good for hunting game. The effect of three laser beams pulsing slightly out of sync produced grievous but cauterized wounds which, if they didn’t cause instant death, brought on intense shock. As the animal struggled to escape, nasty-tasting juices were released into the flesh.

A clattering rock slide somewhere on the slope below pulled Jak back into the moment. His hand instinctively dropped to grips of his holstered Colt Python, fingertips tingling from the adrenaline rush.

Fully alert, he strained all his senses trying to locate the source of the sound in the darkness, to pick up the slightest hint of movement. He heard nothing over the wind’s wail, saw nothing, smelled nothing. And yet he felt a vague pressure, a presence closing in on him from all sides. His pulse began pounding in his throat and the short hairs on his arms stood erect. The big, predark Magnum blaster came up in his hand, seeking targets, but there was nothing for him to aim at.

Seconds slipped by and the rush of adrenaline faded, leaving him even more exhausted than before. The sense of building pressure, of being stalked, faded as well. Mebbe he had imagined it because he was so tired? After all, a silent approach over broken, uphill terrain on a moonless night was next to impossible. Must’ve been the gusting wind that caused the slide, he told himself.

Just as he was about to reholster his blaster, it appeared as if out of thin air in front of him, not five feet away: a face as snow-white, as stoic as his own, blazing reflected starlight. For an instant it was like he was looking into a mirror.

Then the impasto of war paint cracked around a grinning mouth.

The sheer impossibility of it—that someone had scaled the slope, gotten so damned close, without his seeing or hearing anything—momentarily froze him. Before Jak could recover and sweep the Python’s muzzle three feet to the right, onto the target, the butt of a longblaster came out of nowhere and caught him full on the opposite cheek.

The crunch of impact made lightning flash inside his skull, then everything dissolved into black.

Chapter Five

The naked stickie sprang from a low crouch, its needle teeth bared, sucker fingers outstretched, nostril holes streaming mucous. It hurled itself at Auriel Otis Trask, a blur of lemon-yellow in her battlesuit visor’s infrared mode. As the creature reached for her faceplate, it collided with the force field blocking the entrance to its cell. The stickie bounced off the invisible barrier and crashed onto the mine shaft’s dusty, thermoglass floor. As it fell it cradled its infant under an arm, taking the full brunt of the impact on its opposite side.

For an instant a smear of snot and sucker adhesive hung in the air like a puff of green smoke, then it was vaporized by the force field.

With its offspring clinging to one stringy teat, the spindly-limbed mutant jumped up and screamed at its tormentors.

Not words.

It emitted a shrill, piping sound, like a blast from a steam whistle. The baby stickie mimicked its mother, adding its even higher-pitched shriek.

Auriel had seen human babies on other replica Earths. Although this infant was bipedal and stereo-optic, it wasn’t quite human. There were no cute rolls of fat on its arms and legs; its pale, wrinkled skin sagged in loose folds at the back of its bald head, its buttocks and behind its knees. Its hands and feet were disproportionately large, and the death-grip suckers were already evident on both. As the terrified little stickie pissed a thin arc, Auriel noted the odd—and distinctive—configuration of its male genitalia: a two-horned glans, like a miniature devil’s head.

This little mutant had come into the world with a full array of black-edged, needle teeth. Blood dripped along with the clotted secretions from torn nipples, striping its mother’s grotesquely distended belly. Because the blood and milk were cooler than Mama’s skin, the visor’s heat sensors rendered the stripes in bright lime green. There were matching, tiny, circular sucker marks on the flap-jack dugs and upper arms.

The mama stickie drew in a deep breath, preparing to unleash another piercing screech. Under the taut skin of its stomach, Auriel saw movement.

Not the kicking of an unborn stickie.

This was a crossways, sliding movement.

The mutant’s black doll’s eyes clamped shut, its face twisted in a grimace. Still clutching its infant, the creature doubled over, dropped to its knees and began to moan piteously. The little stickie bawled a counterpoint.

Auriel turned toward Dr. Huth, who stood on the far side of her second in command. Like her, both Dr. Huth and Mero were in fully enabled battlesuits and helmets, self-contained, impermeable microenvironments. Opening the com link she said, “How close are they to hatching?”

The whitecoat handed her a compact instrument with a knurled pistol grip. “Have a look,” he said.

Auriel aimed the miniaturized, full-body scanner, holding the four-by-four-inch LCD screen at arm’s length so both she and Mero could peer inside the mama stickie and its baby. There was nothing unusual about the infant’s innards, but its mother’s torso contained something in addition to the expected organs and bones. Something that appeared to be independently alive.

Coils of fluorescent green thicker than the stickie’s biceps slid over one another, reversing direction effortlessly—like they had heads at either end.

For the moment, the tightly packed clutch of monsters was contained by thin layers of muscle and dermis, caged by ribs and spinal column. When they were ready to venture into the wider world, they would expand their volume, ballooning in all directions, until the tremendous outward pressure literally blew their host’s torso apart. That had been the awful fate of Auriel’s mother, while she and her sister warriors helplessly looked on. Once the specters had burst out, once they had unlimited space at their disposal, they would divide, and in minutes the divided segments would regrow to full length, and then divide again. And again. On and on.

In a matter of days, the initial twenty or so specimens could easily become two hundred thousand.

And the air would pulsate with their wakes.

As the commander stared at the enemy through the scanner, not ten feet away, she felt a jumble of sensations: cold fury, frustration and, worst of all, bottomless dread. It appeared that all the pain she had endured while undergoing the Level Four enhancements, all the specialized battlesuit training had been for naught. Maximized physical strength and sense perception, accelerated reaction time, even hard-won technological advancements had proved useless against this unique foe. An enemy that was capable of inconceivable violence, like an asteroid’s impact with a planet’s surface—merciless, indiscriminate slaughter-to-extinction.

And the bitterest pill to swallow: they had brought the slithering horror upon themselves. They had blindly, inadvertently opened the gates of hell.

Auriel couldn’t help but remember her mother’s final pronouncement, hissed into her ear through clenched, bloodied teeth: “We are cursed.”

She hadn’t shared those last words, not even with Mero, who had been Dredda Otis Trask’s closest confidante, and was now hers. There was nothing to be gained by the disclosure, and everything to lose. The warriors under her command had already been humbled by the specters, decimated, hounded, chased like rabbits across the realities. Despite calamity and dogged pursuit, their spirit remained strong. Without it Auriel knew they didn’t stand a chance. Her sole task was to keep them focused and unified, fighting on until they either escaped this enemy or took their last breaths.

“As you can see,” Dr. Huth said, “the specters are about to emerge from this test subject. We will have to abort the experiment momentarily or risk loss of containment.”

“Loss of containment” was whitecoat-speak for a repetition of what had happened on the tenth, eleventh and twelfth Earths.

Against her own gut instinct Auriel had agreed to let him bring the seeds of destruction, a tiny sample of the endospores, along with them when they reality-jumped back to Shadow World. In the hectic final minutes on the twelfth Earth, his reasoning had been impossible to argue. They couldn’t be certain they had completely sterilized themselves before leaving. The external X-ray treatment might have been insufficient, or they might have already ingested spores, which were so small they were impossible to find. And they couldn’t be certain that by jumping universes again, by exposing themselves to the Null again, they wouldn’t be recontaminated.

Under strictly controlled, laboratory conditions deep in the mines at Slake City’s Ground Zero, Dr. Huth had infected more than a dozen of the indigenous humanoids. If he succeeded in breaking the specters’ code with his experiments, if he succeeded in finding a way to destroy them, the warriors wouldn’t have to reality-jump again. They could remain on this Earth and establish a permanent power base in Deathlands. If the experiments failed, they would be on the run until their equipment and energy supply were exhausted—one misstep short of annihilation.

“Give me a progress report,” Auriel said, lowering the scanner. “Have you found another way to kill them?”

“Tracking the planted endospores with radiation markers hasn’t proved as useful as I’d hoped,” the whitecoat said. “They appear to locate in the body randomly, whether they are inhaled, swallowed, or absorbed through the skin. Once inside a host, they don’t concentrate in any particular organ that can be targeted. They migrate through the tissues and eventually fill all the available empty space inside the torso. This makes removing specters in the endospore stage a very complex, whole-body problem. The level of X-ray radiation necessary to guarantee their complete destruction would certainly destroy the host.

“As we’ve already determined, the specters are vulnerable after they emerge from the endospores and before they break out of the host’s body. If the host is killed while they are still inside it, the specters also die.”

“But have you figured out why that happens?” Mero asked.

“The reasons for the simultaneous die-offs remain unclear,” Dr. Huth said.

“We’ve been through all this before,” Auriel said, her impatience growing. “Killing every infected host on a planet is logistically and technically impossible. Just as identifying every infected host on an entire planet is impossible. In order to wipe out this threat, we have to be able to destroy the specters in all three of their life stages. To that end what exactly have you accomplished?”

“My attempts to extract tissue and DNA from entities inside the test subjects have so far been unsuccessful,” Dr. Huth said. “The samples only contain the tissue and DNA of the host. The specters seem able to avoid a probe inside the host’s body same way they avoid laser beams after they break out.”

“And what way is that?” Auriel said.

“I’m afraid that, too, is unclear at this point,” Dr. Huth admitted. He hurried to add, “I do, however, have some working hypotheses….”

Auriel cut him off before he could elaborate further. “Tell me something you know for certain,” she said.

“Unfortunately, most of what there is to tell is negative,” Dr. Huth said. “The term ‘endospore’ that we’ve been using to describe the protostage is technically inaccurate. The encystation that contains the initial egg form of the specters isn’t like the protein coat of a bacterium. Instead of being the organic product of DNA, it’s an unusual compound of metallic silica. The fully grown specters appear to have no internal organs or nervous systems, and no external structures such as mouths or eyes. Or at least none that are discernible with the instruments I have at my disposal, and that has become a major focus of concern. These entities are certainly not of this universe, possibly not of any ‘universe’ that we humans can comprehend. They don’t seem to obey the same physical rules as we do. Because of the limitations, perhaps incompatibilities, in our existing technology we may be blind to what’s right under our noses.

“For example, I haven’t been able to determine how the specters acquire raw materials for growth. From the blood tests I’ve completed, they don’t appear to be taking anything from the hosts except a protected, dark, temperature-controlled environment in which to grow. The incubation time from implantation of endospore to breakout varies widely from species to species, and to a lesser degree from individual to individual. They seem to grow and mature faster inside mutants like stickies. Whether it has to do with their higher normal body temperature or their unique biochemistry is unknown.”

“If they aren’t taking anything from their victims,” Mero said, “why do they go on a kill rampage after they break out and divide?”

“That’s another unknown,” Dr. Huth said. “Again, it could be the fault of the instruments. The specters may be acquiring something that I can’t yet measure.”

It was a poor whitecoat who blamed his tech-gear, Auriel thought.

Her mother had never fully trusted Dr. Huth, perhaps because on their home planet his every breakthrough, his every innovation, had had an unforeseen and catastrophic downside. Auriel had more personal reasons for doubting and despising the man. She could never forget the look on his face was he peered in at her while she, a mere child, lay strapped, helpless in the Level Four isolation tank. The gap-toothed, self-absorbed “genius” had been deaf to her cries of pain and terror as her infant bone, muscle and neurosystem were reengineered, cell by cell. She might as well have been a baby lab rat, or a stickie. And it had been his latex-gloved hands that had excised her nascent reproductive organs. Thanks to Dr. Huth, she would never be a mother, nor even an egg donor.

Thanks to him, she was one of a kind.

Intellectually, Auriel understood the reasons her ovaries had been sacrificed. The male and female sexes each had built-in bioengineering limits, which were dependent upon the amount of body space and chemistry devoted to reproductive functions. Much more of a female’s biological potential—hormonally, metabolically, neurologically—was taken up by reproductive duties. If the biochemical obligations of motherhood were removed, there was room for the system to change and grow, and ultimately to evolve. Because a male’s reproductive functions took up very little of the body’s overall capacity, removing those functions had virtually no effect on biological potential. In other words, the other half of the human species had long since peaked.

Dr. Huth was a normal, genetic male, and that was part of the problem. Biologically, evolutionarily, he was a dead-ender—and he knew it.

As much as the commander loathed the sight of him, he was the only whitecoat they had, and at this point the only whitecoat they were ever likely to find. Whether his scientific expertise was better than none at all, whether it was worth enduring his continued presence, time would tell.

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