Krysty’s voice cried out, her blaster blazing steadily

More voices rang out, the smoke and the steel walls distorting their origins. The LeMat discharged five, six, seven times in a row, the last answered by an anguished scream. Slapping in a fresh clip, Ryan grunted his approval.

Suddenly he heard the sound of splintering wood, followed by the sound of two blasters firing together. Pocketing the gren, Ryan headed for the baron’s home. As he jogged past a well, a spear stabbed out of the swirling fumes, the shaft coming so close it passed through his hair, ripping some out by the roots. Ignoring the pain, Ryan spun and fired from the hip. There was a meaty thump of a slug striking flesh, but no cry of pain.

A flintlock discharged, a revolver answered; then there was silence. Barely breathing, Ryan stood stock-still, straining to hear anything. But the eerie silence continued, seeming thicker than the clouds of gray smoke.

Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

Pilgrimage to Hell

Red Holocaust

Neutron Solstice

Crater Lake

Homeward Bound

Pony Soldiers

Dectra Chain

Ice and Fire

Red Equinox

Northstar Rising

Time Nomads

Latitude Zero

Seedling

Dark Carnival

Chill Factor

Moon Fate

Fury’s Pilgrims

Shockscape

Deep Empire

Cold Asylum

Twilight Children

Rider, Reaper

Road Wars

Trader Redux

Genesis Echo

Shadowfall

Ground Zero

Emerald Fire

Bloodlines

Crossways

Keepers of the Sun

Circle Thrice

Eclipse at Noon

Stoneface

Bitter Fruit

Skydark

Demons of Eden

The Mars Arena

Watersleep

Nightmare Passage

Freedom Lost

Way of the Wolf

Dark Emblem

Crucible of Time

Starfall

Encounter:

Collector’s Edition

Gemini Rising

Gaia’s Demise

Dark Reckoning

Shadow World

Pandora’s Redoubt

Rat King

Zero City

Savage Armada

Judas Strike

DEATH LANDS®

James Axler

To Abduhl Benny Hassan,

gone but not forgotten

Beware of smiles. A heart-bound oath spoken with ease often means duplicity. Betrayal is a two-edged sword that can mortally strike your enemy while only wounding you—if you are wise, if you are ruthless, and if you know exactly when the betrayal will take place, and more importantly, by whom. Then the spiteful traitors will die in their own trap.

—Li Quan,

Warrior/philosopher

China, 700 B.C.

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

Prologue

On a brisk January afternoon, the United States of America disappeared in a thundering microsecond of nuclear fire.

Within a heartbeat, the governments of the world were gone, scattered to the searing radioactive winds. Every major city was reduced to glowing ruins under rumbling mushroom clouds, while tidal waves of boiling water swept along the coastlines of the continents. Mountains rose and fell, lakes were burned dry, volcanoes erupted at random and titanic earthquakes racked the landscape, shattering bridges and dams and changing the shape of the planet forever. In New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, millions perished in screaming agony before most people even realized what was happening. It was the end of civilization.

When the firestorms finally ceased, and the quakes calmed to gentle rumblings beneath the broken streets, the few survivors stumbled from the ruins of their homes only to discover that the telephones, radios, computers, automobiles and trucks that they depended upon were now useless lumps of plastic and steel. Advanced technology was gone. Glowing craters dotted the landscape, creating deadly deserts where once proudly stood thick forests, cool lakes and rich green fields.

The sky was dark for decades, the endless thunder and lightning heralding the deadly storms of acid rain, torrents of pollution that stripped the flesh off a body in only minutes. Humanity learned to hide from the lethal downpours, but then hordes of mutants rose from the radioactive craters, shambling creatures in every shape imaginable.

Dressed in rags, thousands fled the blackened ruins of the cities, hoping for a better life in the wilds. But the rad-blasted earth would not grow crops, and the scattered clean areas were viciously fought over. Crude cities—often surrounded by high walls—were built from the twisted scrap of the predark world to protect the patches of clean earth and to keep out the slavering muties. Safe behind the ramshackle walls, a primitive form of civilization started to evolve. However, these barbarous enclaves were brutally ruled by self-proclaimed barons and their private armies of sec men who walked the thick defensive walls. In any ville, to disobey a command from a baron meant instant death.

Hideous new diseases, savage cannibals, muties, slavers, acid rain, rad pits, that was America in the twenty-second century.

Welcome to the Deathlands.

Yet amid the madness and death, a handful of fighters roamed the cursed earth of North America. These companions were led by Ryan Cawdor, the son of a baron.

Endlessly searching for some section of the world where they could live in peace, the companions traveled incredible distances in relative safety because they had access to the greatest scientific secret of the predark world. Buried deep underground were huge military bases called redoubts. Nuke-proof, these fortified bunkers were powered by fusion generators and were safe havens of fresh air, electric lights and clean water, their vanadium-steel doors resistant to any conceivable attack. Designed to house hundreds of soldiers, the secret bases had originally been stocked with megatons of food, medical supplies, clothing and weapons. But sometime soon after skydark, the troops disappeared, taking almost all of the supplies with them, leaving only the occasional MRE food pack or stray box of ammo for the companions to salvage. A pair of boots here, a can of oil there, yet these precious items gave them the necessary edge to stay alive in the Deathlands.

Even more amazing than the redoubts themselves were the mat-trans units. These incredible machines were somehow able to shift objects from one redoubt to another in only seconds, no matter how distant the second redoubt. Unfortunately, the knowledge of how to precisely control a mat-trans “jump” had been lost, so the friends had to make a blind jump into the unknown. Usually, it was only to an empty redoubt, once to an Alaskan redoubt full of weapons and food, and sometimes to a bunker full of muties that had forcibly penetrated the defensives of the underground base.

Arriving at a hand-built gateway, Ryan and the others found themselves trapped in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific, one of which was the infamous Bikini Atoll, ground zero for dozens of nuclear bomb tests. The companions also arrived in the middle of a revolt against Lord Baron Kinnison, a disease-ridden drug addict who ruled the tiny villes of the rad-blasted islands with an iron fist.

With muties everywhere, the companions raced to regain the damaged gateway and escape, but were ambushed and blown off the side of a mountain to plummet helplessly into the cold sea….

Chapter One

Slowly, Ryan Cawdor awoke to the feeling of being dragged.

Rough grass moved along the back of his head, and as he tried to brush it away, he discovered that he couldn’t move his arms. In a sudden rush of icy adrenaline, the one-eyed warrior fully awakened to see a giant three-foot-wide crab dragging him by the boots over a flat expanse of warm sand, its shiny black mandibles closed around his combat boots like a serrated vise. Somewhere nearby came the sound of waves breaking on a shore, and the tangy smell of salt was thick in the air.

What was going on? Where were the sec men from the PT boat? For a brief moment he had a flashback to the previous night and the fight on the bridge with the giant spider. Rockets came from the blackness of the ocean, explosions filled the world and he plummeted into the briny depths of the Cific Ocean along with the rest of the companions. Vague memories of fighting to stay afloat filled his mind, brutal currents pulling them into the night, away from the gunboat and the burning wreckage. Wherever the hell he was now, it wasn’t on any of the islands he knew about. There were no mountains on the horizon, no sounds of the jungle or the bitter smell of a partially dormant volcano. He had to have washed ashore someplace new. Which meant the sec men could arrive at any moment. Those PT boats were fast, and way too well armed, even if only with black-powder blasters.

The weeds scratching at his bare skin, Ryan muttered a curse as he tried again to reach the 9 mm SIG-Sauer pistol at his hip, but his right arm was pinned down by mounds of sticky white goo covering most of his shirt. He was cocooned for dinner.

Fumbling with his left arm, Ryan found his belt knife and clumsily drew the deadly curved length of the panga. Awkwardly, he started sawing at the flexible goop holding him prisoner, trying to be as subtle as possible. He had to get the blaster before the crab noticed he was alive. Trapped like this, he would be an easy chill for the big blue mutie. Those pincers holding his boots looked as sharp as broken glass.

But small as his movements were, the crab swiveled the eyeballs at the end of slim stalks toward him and abruptly released Ryan’s boots to scuttle over the man, drooling more wet goo from its segmented mouth onto his knife. The stuff was warm and felt heavy, thicker than old honey. Almost instantly his movements were slowed.

The body of the mutie was out of his reach, so Ryan flipped the blade over and slashed sideways at the closest leg. The colorful chitin armor cracked and hot green blood pumped from the jagged wound. The crab retreated, squealing in agony, then turned in a circle and snapped its mandibles for the one-eyed man’s vulnerable face. Ryan quickly jerked back, and only a snippet of his long black hair fell to the ground.

Too close! Thrusting his legs upward, the Death-lands warrior pinned the creature to his chest and started to stab wildly, more hot blood spraying from the savage cuts. Its legs thrashing about, the wiggling mutie squealed in pain, its mandibles snapping constantly, but it was unable to reach the flesh of its tormentor from the awkward angle. Ramming the blade into the back of the crab, Ryan moved the panga about inside, trying to cause as much internal damage as possible. A river of green blood began to pour out, and the knife slipped from his grasp. Ryan scrambled to reclaim the blade without releasing the mutie. His clothes were soaked with warm gore, and he knew the creature was dying. The battle would soon be over. Then from out of nowhere, two louvered tails arched into view from behind the crab and thrust for his face.

Throwing the mutie off, Ryan saw it land on its back, legs and twin scorpion tails thrashing madly about in the air as the creature fought to get upright again. This close, Ryan could see that the hooked barbs at the tips of the tails glistened with some sort of oily residue. Most likely poison.

Rolling to his feet, Ryan staggered a moment, trying to get his balance, and was surprised to find himself feeling so weak. How long had he been unconscious? It might have been days since he’d last eaten. Now that he was awake, his stomach felt like a rad crater, hot and empty. Swallowing saliva, he ignored the stomach cramps and started hacking at the sticky bonds once more. More than once Ryan slipped and cut himself, but he didn’t care. Reaching the blaster was all that mattered.

Glancing around, Ryan saw he was in a vast field of low weeds, a warm breeze from the sea ruffling his long hair and clothing. Gulls circled high in the polluted sky, waiting to feed upon the loser of the battle. He wondered where the rest of his friends were. Could it be that he was only survivor of the bridge explosion? If so, then he had a major score to settle with Kinnison and his pretty-boy lieutenant. But first he had to reach his blaster.

Catching a root in its mandibles, the crab managed to flip itself over and immediately started to circle its prey. Still working on the goop, Ryan turned slowly to keep the creature directly in front. Warily, the huge crab moved forward only to retreat as Ryan clumsily brandished the blade. It knew what the knife could do, and it respected the danger, but there was no fear in its movements. Constantly bobbing behind the crab, the two barbed tails poised expectantly in the air, occasionally thrusting at Ryan in a feint. No dumb brute this.

The panga was making progress, but not fast enough. The goo on his chest was still tacky, and Ryan had to cut carefully to keep the blade from becoming stuck. The crab darted forward, and Ryan kicked sand in its face. It retreated, but not very far. As he strained against his bonds, a section of the material parted with a ripping sound and his right arm came free from the elbow down. Grimly, the one-eyed man clawed for the blaster at his side, a fingertip brushing against the checkered grip of the predark weapon and the crab charged again.

Waiting until the last moment, Ryan dived forward, going over the mutie, landing painfully on his shoulder and rolling to his feet. But now the panga was gone, dropped in the desperate maneuver.

Stingers waving, mandibles snapping, the crab tried to get behind the man, but Ryan spun on his heel and put his combat boot into its face with all of his strength. The impact jarred him to the bone, and the mutie scuttled away, its left eye completely gone, the orb crushed into fibrous pulp.

As the crab scurried back, on the offensive, Ryan kicked dirt into its face and shouted. It darted away in surprise, but came right back even faster than before. Ryan dodged, and they circled each other again. He tried for the blaster again, but simply couldn’t get a satisfactory grip. Clear fluid dribbling from the ruin of its face, the crab shuffled around trying for a snap, always darting out of the way of the steel-toed boot.

Then Ryan spotted the panga in the muddled weeds and threw himself on the knife, fumbling in the sand for the handle. Sensing weakness, the crab rushed forward. Ryan reared back both boots and launched a double kick to its body. But the crab dodged, and the boots only struck one of its many legs. With a crack, the limb broke clean off and fresh blood flowed from the yawning pit in its shell.

Galvanized with the pain, the crab whipped both stingers around in a defensive pattern just as Ryan found the knife. Struggling to his knees, he hacked at the weakened goop on his right arm. Come on, almost there…

Suddenly, the crab charged and slashed out with both tails. Twisting out of the way, Ryan avoided one, but the other hit his thigh and searing pain exploded like electric fire. Gasping for breath, he sliced down with the panga and cut off the tip of the tail embedded in his thigh. Oily fluid pumped from the sheared stump, and the crab darted into the weeds.

Gritting his teeth, Ryan dropped the knife and recklessly plucked the slippery barb from his skin, throwing it away. But a numbness was starting to spread in the limb, and the one-eyed man knew he had only seconds before he was on the last train west. He was barely able to hold off the mutie; with a wound he wouldn’t stand a chance.

Grimly, the Deathlands warrior put everything he had into forcing his right arm downward. A fingertip brushed cool metal, but that was all. Ryan ignored the growing lack of feeling in his left leg and raged against the cloying bonds. Tendons swelled and the remaining goo stretched a little. Gritting his teeth, he redoubled the effort, the predark shirt ripping slightly from the strain. Ryan gained an inch, his fingers almost going around the grip of the blaster. Minutes passed in the silent struggle, but the numbness in his leg was getting worse, and his breathing was labored, his physical resources depleted from starvation. Sweat was stinging the old cut on his palm, and it made his fingers slippery. Refusing to quit, Ryan snarled in defiance and rammed his arm down one last time, gaining another inch, but the blaster still eluded his grasp. Then the cuff button of his shirt snapped off, his arm came free and he had the weapon.

Only Ryan found that he still couldn’t get it out of the holster. There still wasn’t enough room to pull the blaster free. The crab scuttled from the weeds, and he turned to keep it in view. The creature was going to attack again, and Ryan couldn’t chance another strike from its tail.

Having no choice, Ryan fell on his back and started to pull the trigger of the blaster, shooting through the bottom of the old leather holster. Caught in the open, the crab paused at the gentle cough of the silenced weapon, then jumped as it was hit by a 9 mm Parabellum round. The soft lead slug punched completely through the shell, shattering the chitin and exposing the pulsating organs inside. But instead of running, the mutie actually charged, the undamaged stinger lashing about insanely.

Firing nonstop, Ryan swung his legs after the side walker, tracking as best he could. The first couple of shots only scored furrows in its hard shell, but then a round slammed into the gaping shoulder wound. Organs burst apart as the slug plowed through the mutie. The barbed tail went instantly limp, the crab shuddered violently, then toppled over and went very still.

Keeping a close watch on the creature, a grunting Ryan reclaimed his knife and without any further interruptions was soon free from the imprisoning white goo.

“Tough bastard,” he growled, pocketing the spent clip and sliding in one of his few remaining reloads. There was more ammo in his backpack, wherever the hell that was. It had to have fallen into the sea along with everybody else. He could only hope the others had also washed up on the same shore that he had. But he knew the backpack and the extra ammo were long gone. He had to save every round he could.

Then his oddly numb knee buckled, and the man got busy cutting away a section of his pants until the stab wound was exposed. The skin was white and puckered at the center, a bright red all around and very tender to the touch. Not good.

Wiping the blade clean on his shirt, Ryan played the flame of a predark butane lighter along the blade to sterilize it. Then he carefully sliced open the skin and a clear oily fluid oozed out. Good, the poison was still in the wound, not in his blood yet. He had a chance. Squeezing the area hard, Ryan kneaded the numb flesh until more transparent fluid came out, then some yellow pus and finally red blood.

Some feeling was returning, and the man braced himself for the next part. This was going to be bad, but without anybody to suck out any remaining poison he had no choice. Jacking the slide on his blaster, Ryan ejected a few rounds, cut off the wads of lead and poured the silvery powder directly into the raw wound. The nitro stung slightly, then he flicked the butane lighter into life and ignited the powder.

There was a sharp flash without smoke, and Ryan heard or saw nothing for several minutes as he rode out the explosion of pain. Slowly, the throbbing waves of hot torture ebbed, leaving his leg wrapped in throbbing anguish. Wiping the sweat off his face, Ryan inspected the wound. All of the hair was burned off his thigh, and the flesh around the puncture was puckered with white ridges. Gently touching it, he found the area hurt like hell, but that only meant he had moved fast enough. The poison appeared to be gone.

Reaching for his canteen, Ryan cursed to find it missing, and made do with sucking a smooth pebble to curb his thirst. Using a clean handkerchief to bind the cauterized wound, he tried to stand and found that normal walking was impossible. The best he could do was a slow step and drag. He’d have to find a stick or something to use as a crutch if he was going to do much traveling. His longblaster would have been perfect, but that was with his backpack.

Shuffling over to the corpse of the mutie crab, Ryan saw its remaining legs were faintly twitching. A hunter since childhood, Ryan knew that lots of things moved slightly after they were chilled, but he had no intention of taking a chance on this bastard. Ruthlessly, he stomped the corpse, grinding the thing under the heel of his combat boot until there was no chance it could regenerate.

Satisfied for the moment, Ryan stood tall and glanced around. His next move was to find the others, and hopefully his backpack. But only low swells of sand with some patches of dry weeds were visible in every direction. Nothing else. Rubbing his chin, Ryan wondered how long he had been unconscious. Could the crab have eaten six other people, and he was simply the last? But checking his beard, Ryan decided it had only been a day or two. Nowhere near long enough, unless there were a hell of a lot more of these crabs.

The sounds of the ocean came from several directions, and Ryan headed for the loudest waves. That should be the closest, and the beach was a logical place to start a recce. At first, the going was slow, his wounded leg stiff and unable to carry his full weight, but the pain diminished and strength returned after only a few dozen yards.

Reaching the crest of a dune, Ryan paused as his stomach loudly announced its emptiness with a long sustained rumble. Yeah, it had to have been a while since that big meal at Cold Harbor ville. Ryan searched his pockets for anything edible and found only sand. Turning, he glanced at the dead crab and saw that it was already covered with a flock of seagulls tearing the corpse apart with their needle-sharp beaks. The man touched his blaster, then decided against it. Raw gull tasted like he imagined used underwear would. He wasn’t quite that hungry yet. Besides, he was down to the last full clip for the SIG-Sauer. Best to save every round until absolutely necessary. If he didn’t find his backpack, there might not be any more.

Hobbling down the far side of the dune, Ryan found the tracks where he had been dragged into the weeds and followed the marks with his blaster firmly in hand. The dune was cut with a rain gully that ended in a fan of small rocks, which extended across a pristine white beach. A hundred or so feet away lay a lone figure sprawled on the sand. Long flame-red hair covered the features, but the woman was wearing Khaki coveralls, a bearskin coat and blue Western boots decorated with the outline of a spread-winged falcon. There was no question it was Krysty Wroth, and her chest rose and fell in a regular pattern. She was alive.

As Ryan worked his way across the beach, a fat blue crab crawled into view from the other side of the supine woman and started dribbling white goo from its segmented mouth onto her right arm. In one smooth move, Ryan aimed and fired. The distance was fifty yards, but the soft-lead slug slammed the crab off the top of her breast and sent it tumbling into the ocean. The mutie hit with a splash and sank out of sight, leaving a trail of green blood in its descending wake.

Reaching the woman, Ryan checked her over quickly and was relieved when there were no signs of damage. “Krysty, it’s me,” he said softly, shaking her shoulder.

Her eyelids fluttered, then opened wide. “Ryan?” she croaked, her long hair flexing and moving around her lovely face as if the red filaments were endowed with a life of their own.

“Alive and well, lover,” he answered gently.

Coughing hard, she tried to sit up and became instantly wide-awake. “Gaia! What’s wrong with my arm?”

Drawing his knife, Ryan brought her up to date while cutting away the tacky goop. When he was finished, Krysty pulled her arm free from the white residue smeared on her coveralls. The material stretched but didn’t rip. Rising carefully, she swayed for a moment, then stood easily, her animated hair a wild corona in the breeze.

“Any sign of the others?” Krysty asked, drawing her blaster and checking the weapon. Safe in its leather holster, the S&W .38 revolver was undamaged, the stainless-steel piece still shiny with oil. Cracking the cylinder, she ejected four spent shells and tucked them into a pocket of her bearskin coat before thumbing in fresh rounds. Without her pack, the woman was down to only five spare rounds for the revolver.

“Not yet,” Ryan answered truthfully. “But we can search for them later. Gotta find some shelter for the night. It’s getting dark, and those crabs will be a triple bitch to ace in the dark.”

“Could use some food, too,” Krysty said over the growling of her stomach. Briefly, her hands checked pockets and came up empty. Not even a used piece of gum. “Got your canteen? Mine was in my backpack.”

He shook his head. “Same here.”

“Gaia! Hopefully those washed onto the same island as us,” Krysty said, remembering only a few days ago when the precious supplies had sunk into a shark-filled harbor. They had gotten them back, but at a terrible cost.

“Hell, I’m surprised any of us survived that rocket attack from the PT boat,” he stated. “Got no idea how we stayed afloat in the water for so long.”

Grunting in agreement, Krysty looked along the beach in both directions. The clean white sand was perfectly flat where the waves reached. Not a footprint was in sight.

“We could split up,” Krysty suggested. “Go both ways and save time.”

“Trader always said never to divide your forces in unknown territory,” Ryan said, quoting his old teacher. “We’ll go a hundred yards toward that dune, and if we don’t find anything, we’ll try the other way. Folks almost always turn to the right, do it automatically if they’re hurt or confused.”

Brushing some loose sand from her shaggy coat, Krysty studied Ryan for a moment, then smiled.

“Sounds good, lover,” she agreed, putting some feeling into the words. “Lead the way.”

The compact sand of the beach made for easy walking in spite of Ryan’s bad leg, and the couple reached the turnback point in only a short time. After glancing around, Ryan started back when a motion in the sky caught Krysty’s attention.

“Gulls,” she said, pointing. “Might be circling a kill.”

“Probably only some dead fish, but we better check,” he agreed, rubbing the wound on his thigh. It was throbbing now, but nothing he couldn’t handle.

Continuing onward, the man and woman went past a stinking pile of rotting seaweed. Just beyond that, the beach started to rise in irregular mounds of what they could tell were pieces of predark buildings and broken sidewalks. Wreckage from skydark. A fallen collection of marble and bricks blocked the way, and the pair was forced to wade waist deep into the surf to get past. Both kept a sharp watch for crabs, but none was in sight below the foamy waves.

Once back on the shore, Krysty stopped in her tracks and Ryan scowled as they saw the corpse of a gigantic spider sprawled in the wet sand farther down the beach. The mound of flesh rose more than six feet high, the splayed legs dangling loosely in the shallows. Its head was completely gone, the yellow-and-black body fur charred as if by fire, loose strips of flesh hanging off the gleaming white bones of an internal skeleton. And its entire length was covered with dozens of the blue crabs. Sharp pincers ripped away strips of the rotting flesh as the shelled scavengers steadily tore the spider apart. The skin writhed from endless motion inside the body, and a crab wiggled into view from the neck stump to pass out a glistening length of entrails. Some small crabs danced around the crowd of larger blues, occasionally darting forward to grab a morsel of food for themselves. The rest of the meat was being carried into the shoals by the bigger crabs. They disappeared beneath the waves, only to return moments later with empty pincers.

Frowning deeply, Ryan saw that he had fought one of the small crabs. These new ones were huge, and looked brutishly strong, their legs as thick as soup cans. He wondered if the companions had ridden the dead insect like a raft. Made sense.

In a flash of white, a gull dived from the sky toward the ripe corpse and a crab perched on the spider’s back leaped into the air, slashing with both stingers. A spray of feathers went swirling, but the undamaged gull winged once more into the sky, crying loudly in frustration.

They fought in teams, Ryan realized, and with assigned tasks. Just how smart were the creatures?

“Too damn smart,” Krysty said aloud, as if reading his thoughts.

“No sign of the others,” Ryan said, studying the area for strips of cloth or human bones. “Best we check the other side. Just to be sure.”

Thumbing back the hammer on her blaster, Krysty started to walk inland to go around the feeding ground. Ryan limped along as best he could, but a couple of the smaller crabs scuttled over to investigate. Once they were in the weeds and out of sight of their brethren, Ryan dispatched the muties with his silenced pistol, then Krysty crushed their heads under her boots to make sure the crabs stayed dead.

The muffled crunches of splintering chitin caught the attention of the large blue patrolling on top of the spider, and its eye stalks extended fully to watch as the two-legs traveled around the precious lump of food. Since they kept their distance and didn’t threaten the horde, the big male saw no reason to attack them and continued its vigil against the winged predators in the sky.

Stopping on the crest of the dune, Ryan and Krysty could see there was nothing on the lee side of the huge corpse to indicate that any human had been slain by the crabs. But the lack of physical remains didn’t raise any false hopes. It didn’t mean the others were alive; it simply showed that their friends hadn’t been chilled and eaten here.

“Back we go,” Krysty said listlessly, holstering her piece.

“Later,” Ryan countered, walking along the top of the dune heading toward a ragged cliff. “First, we eat.”

Shielding her face with a cupped hand against the setting sun, Krysty soon spied what he was referring to. Food, and lots of it.

Working their way back to the shore along a rocky arroyo, Krysty and Ryan splashed into an irregular bay dotted with hundreds of small tide pools. Basins of seawater had been trapped in depressions in the hard ground as the tide withdrew, accidentally leaving behind some of the bounty of the sea. Most of the puddles contained only water and colorful shells, but several were impromptu aquariums housing an assortment of small marine life, tiny fish, sea horses or waving kelp.

Kneeling in a pool, Ryan reached into the inches of water and came up with a fat oyster. “Dinner,” he announced, tossing over the mollusk.

Krysty made the catch and eagerly pulled out a knife to open the hard shell. The oyster resisted and failed. “There must be hundreds of them,” she stated, chewing steadily. “Enough food for months!” The raw meat was slimy but delicious. However, her stomach rumbled unabated, the tiny morsel barely denting her ravenous appetite.

Tossing her another, Ryan readily agreed. He took the third oyster himself, splitting the shell and slurping down the creature intact. Chewing would have only wasted time. Casting the empty shell aside, he started to pass Krysty another when he saw the woman was already splitting an oyster she had located.

Together, the couple waded across the basin raiding every tide pool, devouring the oysters equally. They almost feasted on a small squid, but the nimble creature squirted out oily black ink when captured and squirmed from Ryan’s grasp to escape back into the rising sea.

“Too bad,” Ryan said, washing his hands clean in a puddle. “They taste like chicken.”

Spitting out a flawless pearl, Krysty started to make a comment when she was interrupted by the crackle of distant gunfire, closely followed by the dull thud of a black-powder gren.

“Sounds like us,” she stated, sheathing the blade.

“Could be. Let’s go see,” Ryan said, and they began to splash toward the sounds of combat.

Chapter Two

Not far away, a group of armed people strode around the base of a predark lighthouse. Located at the far end of a sandbar that jutted into the ocean, the hundred-year-old structure was intact and undamaged from war or weather. The sloping walls of granite blocks were as strong as the day it was built, and the resilient Plexiglas panels unbroken around the crystal-and-glass beacon atop the tower.

The roof was covered with bird droppings, and piles of seaweed and driftwood partially buried under windblown sand were banked against the base of the tower. The white paint had been removed by sheer passage of time to expose the blue-veined granite blocks composing the building. Unfortunately, there was no door in sight, and fat blue crabs were underfoot everywhere. It seemed as if the more the companions shot, the more crawled out of the water. It was as if the damn creatures were attracted to explosions.

Swinging his shotgun off his shoulder, J. B. Dix rammed the stock of the weapon against the side of the lighthouse. The resulting thud gave no indication of weakness, or even of empty space beyond the adamantine material. The lighthouse was a fortress.

Adjusting his glasses, the wiry man returned the shotgun to its usual position over his shoulder slung opposite the Uzi machine pistol.

“Nothing,” he said, rubbing his unshaved chin. “Anybody got some ideas?”

“Well, the balcony is too high to reach,” Dr. Mildred Wyeth stated, her hand resting on a canvas bag slung over one shoulder. The faded lettering M*A*S*H was almost unreadable, but the bag was neatly patched and contained a meagre store of medical supplies.

Held at her side was a sleek Czech ZKR target pistol, a state trooper gun belt with attached holster strapped over her regular belt. Loops for extra ammo ringed the gun belt, but most of them were empty. The vacant sheath of a small knife peeked from her left boot, and a long thin dagger bearing the logo of the Navy SEALs hung from her belt.

Just then, something blue scuttled around the side of the lighthouse, closely followed by three men armed with blasters, their faces grim and unsmiling. As the crab came close, J.B. crushed it underfoot. The shell burst apart, and the hideously mangled mutie started thrashing about.

“Bastard things are everywhere,” Dean Cawdor complained, kicking the bleeding creature into the waves. It disappeared with a splash. “I killed six more on the other side.”

“Good,” J.B. snorted. “The more aced the better.”

The young boy nodded in agreement. Almost twelve years of age, Dean was beginning to resemble his father in frightening detail and already carried himself with the calm assurance of a seasoned combat veteran. A Browning semiautomatic pistol was in his hand, jacked and ready for trouble. There was a slash across his denim shirt, showing some badly bruised ribs, minor damage incurred from the exploding bridge at Spider Island. A fat leather pouch hung from his belt distended with ammo clips, but the pack rode high, telling of scant ammo in the precious collection of magazines. An oversize bowie knife rode at the small of his back with easy access for either hand.

The nearby waves gently crested on the rough shoreline, foaming and breaking endlessly. A seagull winged silently overhead, something small and wiggling held tight in its deadly beak.

“Normally, a lighthouse would be placed on a cliff or jetty to maximize visibility,” Mildred said thoughtfully, gazing at the railing that encircled the walkway around the beacon on the top level. “Must have been some major earthquakes to move it to sea level.”

“Built to withstand the worst weather possible,” J.B. said. “Only reason it’s still standing after skydark.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dean said. “There’s no door, so I say we keep walking along the beach.” He hitched up his belt. “We haven’t even covered half of the island yet.”

“Very true, my young friend,” Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner rumbled. In a frock coat and frilly shirt, the silver-haired gentleman appeared to be from another era, which, in fact, he was. “Yet the panoramic view offered by the sheer height of this construct should be invaluable in helping to locate your father and Krysty.”

Doc’s clothes were of the finest material and patched in a dozen places. He was leaning on an ebony swordstick, the silver lion’s head peeking out between his fingers, and a mammoth revolver was hung at his waist. The LeMat was a Civil War weapon holding nine .44 rounds, with a single shotgun round under the main barrel. The blaster used black powder, not cordite, but the solid lead miniballs did more damage than a sledgehammer at short range.

“Besides, with the tide comes those damn crabs,” Mildred added grumpily, watching the shoreline for any sign of the nasty muties.

“Indeed, madam. Our local cornucopia of antediluvian crustace is merely another reason why shelter for the night is mandatory,” Doc espoused, baring his astonishingly white teeth.

“Still gotta get inside,” Dean stated stubbornly.

“Tower short,” Jak Lauren said, crossing his lean, muscular white arms.

A true albino, the teenager was dressed in camou fatigues with a bulky Colt Python .357 Magnum hung from his belt. An ammo pouch lay flat at his opposite hip. His camouflage leather jacket was decorated with bits of shiny metal and feathers, and more than one sec man had seized the teenager by the lapels only to have his fingers cut off by the razor blades sewn into the lining. At present, the arms of his jacket were tied around his waist, showing a lot of his pale skin. His hair was shoulder length and bone-white, his red eyes peering out of his scarred face like ruby lasers. More than a dozen leaf-bladed throwing knives were hidden on his person, with two more tucked into his belt. The handle of a gravity knife was visible in his left combat boot.

“Is it?” Dean asked suspiciously. “Looks okay to me.”

Doc walked closer to the structure as if seeing it for the first time. “By the Three Kennedys, it is too short,” he stated in agreement. “By necessity, lighthouses are always tall, sixty to eighty feet high. This is only, say, thirty.”

The man glanced at the ground. “The lower half must be buried beneath the sand. The front door must be buried, twenty, thirty feet underground.”

“It’ll take days to dig that deep by hand,” Mildred said, scowling. There was already traces of purple on the horizon. Night was coming fast.

“Try a gren,” Dean suggested.

“Only got one,” J.B. answered, titling back his fedora. “I’m saving that for an emergency.”

“If we could reach the balcony,” Mildred continued thoughtfully, “then getting inside would be no problem. Even if the door is locked, we could go through the lens itself. Those were made of glass to withstand the searing heat of the beacon.”

J.B. removed his hat, smoothed down his hair, then replaced it. “Sounds good. But how do we get up there?”

“Mayhap there is another way in,” Doc rumbled.

Going to the lighthouse, Doc put his back to the building and gazed out over the field. He appeared to be counting under his breath.

“There!” Doc said, and walked briskly to the end of the sandbar where there was a short stack of rocks covered with seaweed. Removing handfuls of the soggy greenery, Doc exposed not jumbled rocks, but broken bricks. Tossing them aside, he soon exposed a perfectly square hole that went straight down and out of sight.

“It’s a chimney,” J.B. said with a grin, slapping the man on the back. “Good work, Doc. I didn’t know a lighthouse would have a house attached.”

“A cottage, actually,” Doc replied primly. “But yes, many do.”

Cupping his hands as protection from the sea breeze, Jak lit a match and dropped it down the opening. The tiny flame fluttered away and was gone. The teenager then lit another and stuck his entire head into the passage.

“Too small me,” his voice echoed, and he stepped away from the chimney. “Mebbe Dean, too.”

Dubiously, the boy eyed the flue, then used a stick to measure the opening, then himself. “Tight,” he agreed, and slid his backpack to the ground. He removed his canteen and belt knife, then unbuckled his gun belt and took off the ammo pouch.

“I’m going to need every inch to get down that,” Dean stated, shucking his Army jacket.

“What if filled with crabs?” Jak asked pointblank. “Trapped where no help, no light. Candles iffy.”

“Here, this will help,” Mildred said, rummaging in her med kit to extract a small flashlight. She squeezed the handle on the side of the device several times to charge the ancient batteries, and flicked the switch. The light was weak, but still serviceable.

Dean accepted the flashlight and tucked it into his shirt for safekeeping. Then he double-checked his blaster, making sure there was a round under the hammer for instant use.

“You see or hear any of the blues, get out of there fast,” J.B. said sternly. “Just cut and run.”

The boy nodded in agreement, his thoughts private.

“Now, lad, there should be plenty of ropes and tackle near the base of the tower,” Doc said, the wind blowing his hair across his face like silver rain. “Along with torches and cork jackets to rescue people from drowning. Just toss a line over the balcony and we shall climb up.”

“Gotcha.” Dean climbed onto the pile of rubble and carefully slid his legs into the brick-lined darkness. He wiggled back and forth a bit, going lower with each move, until his hips passed the top of the flue and he unexpectedly dropped. J.B. and Jak both snatched a wrist, but Dean had already stopped himself by grabbing the top layer of bricks.

“Thanks,” he panted, shifting his stance in the flue until his boots were more solidly braced on the rough surface. “I’m okay now.”

The adults released the boy, and he started into the darkness once more. The rest of the companions backed away from the hole to allow the greatest amount of the dying sunlight to illuminate his way. In only a few moments he was gone from sight.

“How you doing?” J.B. called after a while.

“Busy,” the boy’s voice echoed back upward, closely followed by a muffled curse.

Long minutes passed with only the sound of the surf and the breeze disturbing the peaceful ocean front peninsula. Overhead, the always present storm clouds began to darken as the setting sun drained all color from the world, the shadows growing long and thick. Doc and Jak began to gather driftwood into a pile for a campfire.

“How much longer do we give him?” Mildred asked, brushing back her tangled mass of beaded locks.

Rubbing his chin to the sound of sandpaper, J.B. scowled. “Long as it takes. We don’t have a way to go down there and check on him.”

“Good thing there is no sign of those accursed PT boats,” Doc rumbled, looking out over the sea. “At present, we are prepared neither to wage war nor to retreat.”

“Got that right.” Mildred sighed. “I’m down to ten rounds.”

Feeling uneasy, J.B. unfolded the wire stock on the Uzi. “What had Jones called the baron again?”

“Kinnison,” Jak answered, whittling on a piece of wood with a knife. The pile of tinder grew steadily under his adroit ministrations. “Called him Lord Bastard, too.”

Suddenly, a sharp whistle sounded twice from the weeds and stunted brush growing inland, and the companions dropped into combat positions, taking cover behind the bricks. Working the bolt on his machine pistol, J.B. replied to the call with one long whistle. It was answered by the same, and everybody relaxed as Ryan and Krysty rose into view, holstering their blasters.

“You’re hurt,” Mildred said, rushing forward and kneeling to probe Ryan’s wounded leg.

The Deathlands warrior inhaled sharply at the contact of her fingers. “Just a scratch,” he grunted. “I got the poison out and cauterized the hole.”

“Maybe. Better let me be the judge of that,” the physician said, untying the torn pieces of cloth. Closely, she looked over the puckered scar, shiny and new among many older ones.

“Well?” he said in controlled impatience.

“It’s clean enough,” Mildred reported, tying the strips of cloth closed again. “And thankfully not infected. But it must hurt like hell.”

“Pain means you’re still alive,” Ryan muttered, then glanced around. “Where’s Dean, on patrol?”

“Down chimney,” Jak replied, jerking a thumb. “Finding door for lighthouse.”

His face a stone mask, Ryan limped to the pile of bricks and looked down the hole. He whistled sharply and waited, but there was no response.

“Any other way inside?” Ryan asked.

J.B. snorted. “Not that we could find. Lighthouse has got solid granite walls. Need a C-4 satchel charge to even dent the place.”

As Ryan limped over to the lighthouse, Doc started to offer the man his ebony stick, then thought better of the gesture. Ryan would never take it. Not from foolish macho pride, but with one of them possibly in danger the man wouldn’t have the time to spare thinking about his own pain. In the New York Herald of his day, Doc sometimes read of officers whose troopers claimed they would charge with them straight into hell. The scholar had never met such a person until Ryan freed him from a slave pit so very long ago.

Another crab scuttled by, and Jak caught the mutie in his hand, keeping well clear of the scorpion tails. “Wonder if good eat?” the teenager asked. The eye stalks of the creature extended fully, and it stared at the albino as if in open hatred. It unnerved him slightly how much intelligence there seemed to be in its steady expression.

With a gentle laugh, Krysty pointed to the east. “There’s an oyster bed in a tide pool some hundred yards that way with enough to feed an army.”

“Excellent, madam. Exemplary!” Doc stated, lifting an imaginary hat to the redheaded woman. “Once more you are the source of our succor.”

Jak tossed the crab away, uncaring where it landed. The mutie hit the beach on its back just in time for a wave to flip it over, and it hastily disappeared into the briny foam.

“I fill sack,” the teenager stated, and took off at a run.

“Speaking of which,” J.B. said, walking over to a slab of bare rock and lifting up a canvas bag. “Here are your backpacks. They washed ashore near us couple of miles down the beach.”

Krysty took them both and passed one to Ryan. The packs were torn in spots, probably from coral reefs, and still damp from the ocean, but were still okay.

Easing the longblaster free from the tangled straps, Ryan briefly checked the Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle for damage. He worked the bolt a few times to make sure sand and salt hadn’t gummed the works. The carriage moved smoothly, chambering a 7.62 mm brass round from the transparent plastic clip.

“Some sand in the barrel,” Ryan announced, sliding the weapon over a shoulder, “but no blockage.” He had actually felt off balance with the longblaster gone.

Going through the backpack, he used his big hands to squeeze excess moisture from the stiff canvas. Everything inside smelled dank, especially the dog-hair socks, but nothing seemed seriously damaged. Satisfied for the moment, Ryan stuffed some more rotary clips for the Steyr into his jacket pocket and filled the ammo pouch on his belt with clips for the SIG-Sauer. He was still very low on ammo, but better armed now then he was before.

Closing her backpack, Krysty tossed away a handful of soggy mush that had once been dried fish wrapped carefully in banana leaves. The sagging glob of food smelled rancid, and she heaved it into the weeds. Immediately, insects began to converge on the unexpected bounty.

“Any idea where we might be?” Krysty asked, sliding her pack onto her back. “Got no idea which island this is,” J.B. answered, touching the minisextant hanging around his neck. “The sun has been behind clouds since I woke up. Never once got a chance to fix our position. This doesn’t look like Spider Island, though. Too barren. No mountains.”

But the woman barely heard the man’s reply. Her hair wildly flexing, Krysty was listening to the wind. What was that odd sound? It was like hard rain hitting a tin roof, only lower, softer. How odd.

“Well, we can’t be too far away,” Mildred said. “Without a raft of some kind, we couldn’t have stayed afloat in the water for very long, even if the currents were with us.”

Ryan started to explain about the dead spider when a pistol shot rang out and Jak burst into view over the low sand dune. He paused at the crest to fire two more rounds, then raced toward the companions.

“Crabs!” the teenager shouted in warning just as a horrible blanket of blues swarmed over the dune, their armored bodies covering the ground for yards.

“Chill them all!” Ryan shouted, sliding the Steyr SSG-70 off his shoulder and working the bolt. It was the big crabs from the spider carcass. They had to have been following him and Krysty to see if they could find more people. And he led them right here.

Snarling in fury, Ryan fired and a blue exploded, spraying its guts over a dozen others. But the rest of the pack kept coming, and even as Ryan fired again, chilling another, he already knew there were a hell of a lot more crabs than they had ammo.

“Bastards are enormous!” J.B. muttered, firing short bursts from the Uzi. The 9 mm rounds wreaked havoc along the front ranks, but even as they fell the others scuttled callously over their fallen brethren.

As the rest of the companions opened fire with their blasters, spent brass flying everywhere, Doc slid the ebony stick into his belt, drew the LeMat and set the selector pin from the shotgun round to the .44 cylinder. Cocking the huge hammer, Doc began firing pointblank at the nearest crabs. A lance of flame stabbed through the billowing black cloud that thundered from the maw of the huge weapon. A three-foot-wide crab literally exploded under the trip-hammer arrival of the .44 miniball, then there came the musical twang of a ricochet from an out cropping near the chimney. Doc savagely grinned and dropped flat the ground to fire again. The solid lead miniball plowed through the first crab, blowing the shell off its body, and continued on to chill two more. Then one of the small pale blue crabs darted for his face, and Doc scrambled to his feet. Only to find the tiny mutie was clinging to his silvery locks with its pincers, while its scorpion tails probed for his eyes. He slapped the weapon at the crab, and there was a sharp tink as a barbed tail bounced off the steel barrel.

“Damn it!” the scholar cursed, cocking back the hammer.

“Hold still!” Mildred ordered, and with lightning speed she sliced off a chunk of the man’s hair with a knife. The crab landed among the boots of the companions and was stomped in a second.

Glancing at the crushed crab, Mildred spied the war over the rancid fish, the beetles covered with ants, being eaten alive. The symbolism rattled her nerves, and the physician dropped a round while frantically shoving ammo into her empty blaster. Her hands hadn’t shaken this bad since her first autopsy as a med student. Then the woman forced herself calm and began to eliminate the muties with surgical precision. It was them or her. End of discussion.

Through the fading light of the setting sun, the friends could see that the tide was steadily rising, the waves crashing high on the peninsula, spraying them with salt water. How high it would go they had no idea. To their knees, waist, more? Plus, every gunshot seemed to attract more of the muties, the scattered array quickly becoming a solid mass of the squat invaders.

“Put your back to the wall!” Krysty shouted, throwing herself backward.

The companions followed her lead, and safe from one direction, they tried to coordinate their firepower. Only now, tiny crabs raced over their boots, and one managed to climb inside the torn leg of Ryan’s fatigues. He swung the wounded leg against the lighthouse, crushing the mutie. The noise made the rest arch their stingers in shocked reply, and the horde advanced, their barbed tails stabbing forward constantly.

Stomping on another crab, Jak dropped the spent brass from his weapon and slid his last four rounds into the cylinders of the Colt Magnum pistol. That was it for ammo. Thirty feet away, a large adult crab snapped its pincers in the air at the teen, and Jak flicked his arm. A second later, a leaf-bladed knife slammed into the mutie’s face, and it went stock-still, paralyzed or dead from the attack.

The SIG-Sauer coughing hot lead death, Ryan cursed under his breath. If he didn’t know better, the man would swear the crabs were sending their old and young to attack the companions, keeping their big adults in reserve, so the companions would waste ammo on the weakest members of the horde. Was that possible?

“Ignore the little ones!” Ryan shouted, holstering his blaster and unslinging the Steyr SSG-70. “Chill the adults!”

J.B. passed the Uzi to Mildred and swung around the S&W M-4000 shotgun. Pumping the action, he frowned at how stiff the slide was. It had to be choked by salt residue. It still worked, but not very well. Aiming at the biggest group of crabs, J.B. fired and the deafening spray of fléchettes from the shotgun blew away the sea creatures by the score, chunks and pieces flying everywhere. J.B. fired three more times, destroying the front line of the clattering muties, then reloaded as fast as possible. The rest of the adult muties hastily retreated, the old and young scuttling about in total confusion.

“How many you got left?” Ryan demanded, working the bolt on the Steyr to clear a jammed round from the breech.

“Ten more shells,” J.B. reported, thumbing a fat cartridge into the belly of his weapon. There were loops sewn into the shoulder strap used for carrying the scattergun, most of them empty now. “And there’s gotta be fifty or sixty more of these things.”

A crab was on the wall beside him, and Ryan crushed it flat with the heavy wooden stock of his longblaster. They could try to blow a path through the gathering creatures and escape off the peninsula, but it was too close for a gren. Besides, the crabs would only follow until the companions dropped from exhaustion and were overrun. Hundreds to six were bad odds in any fight. And even with the fresh ammo, he was down to thirty rounds for the SIG-Sauer, and even less for the Steyr.

Jak shot a crab off Mildred’s leg, then holstered his piece. Krysty placed three .38 shells in his hand, and the teen nodded in thanks as he hastily reloaded. The main reason he carried the Colt Magnum blaster was the fact it could use both .357 rounds and regular .38 ammo. More than once that had kept him off the last train west.

“Dean, hurry!” Krysty shouted at the top of her lungs, blowing away an old blue with deep scars in its chitin armor. There was no reply from the lighthouse or chimney, and she sent a silent prayer to Gaia to watch over the boy. He was alone in the dark; at least they were in a group.

“Here they come again,” J.B. shouted, readying his weapon. The crabs were advancing once more, but slower this time, as if testing the deadly firepower of the two-legs. They had seen what the shotgun could do and were afraid now.

The cylinder of his blaster empty, Doc slid the selector pin to his one shotgun round. After that, he’d be down to hammering the creatures with the gun butt. The sword hidden inside his ebony stick would be useless against these armored muties.

Conserving ammo, Krysty and Mildred both waited until the last moment to fire. Crabs died, but the horde kept advancing as steadily as the rising tide.

“We could try for the ocean,” Doc suggested above the clacking of the creatures. “Crabs do not swim well, and we could easily outdistance them in deep water.”

“We gotta get some distance first,” Ryan stated, firing a fast three times. Two more crabs died; the third was only wounded, green blood seeping from the gash in its thick shell.

“Got any plas or grens?” he asked, brushing black hair off his face with the hot baffle silencer.

The Armorer reached into his munitions bag and passed over the last. Ryan ripped off the safety tape, twisted loose the firing pin, dropped the handle and dropped the charge on the ground directly at their feet. Instantly, the companions broke ranks and raced around opposite sides of the lighthouse while the crabs poured after them, sensing victory.

Counting to eight, the companions stopped and covered their ears as thunder shook the tiny peninsula. A minute later a couple of bleeding crabs crawled into view from around the building. Those were easily stomped to death by Jak and Doc, while Ryan chanced a quick recce around the building. The rest of the crabs were still retreating from the smoking crater of the blast, the old and young actually going over the other adults in their haste to leave.

Then Ryan spotted the large blue sitting away from the others on top of a tree stump. It sat there like a general surveying his troops in battle. Ryan swung his blaster in that direction, and the big blue dropped out of sight behind the rocks. Holstering his piece, Ryan felt a cold shiver run through his body. A mutie with intelligence. Unbidden, a memory of Kaa and his terrible army filled the man’s mind, and Ryan shook off the thoughts. These were just crabs, nothing more.

“Did it work?” Mildred asked hopefully as he returned.

“No. Only bought us some time,” Ryan stated grimly.

“But not for swimming,” Krysty said, glancing at the jagged rocks filling the shoals below them.

“More grens?” Jak asked, pulling back the hammer of his revolver and firing repeatedly. In his other hand, the teen held a knife by its blade, ready for a fast throw.

Scowling, J.B. thumbed in his last shotgun round. “That’s it.”

Shading his good eye, Ryan glanced upward, then unexpectedly shouldered his longblaster. “Krysty, guard the right. Mildred, the left. We’re gonna form a pyramid and get to that balcony. J.B. on my back!”

“But your leg,” Mildred stated in concern.

“Fuck it. Move!” he bellowed.

Watching the ground, the women assumed firing positions as Ryan placed his hands flat on the rough granite blocks. The Deathlands warrior grunted in pain as J.B. climbed onto his back, bracing his boots against Ryan’s hip bones and gun belt. Doc went up next and finally Jak. Balanced precariously atop the tall scholar, the teenager stretched out a hand as far as he could and just barely managed to brush his fingertips against the rust-streaked bottom of the steel posts supporting the railing.

“Not enough!” he cried. “Gonna jump!”

On the ground, a small crab scuttled into view, then another.

The lower men braced themselves and the youth lunged upward, his hands grabbing the lowest pipe. But the thick layer of rust crumbled under his grip, and one hand slipped completely off the railing. Supported by only one arm, Jak dangled helpless for a moment as he fought to reach the railing once more. Then a pair of hands reached over the balcony and helped the teenager up and out of sight. More crabs arched around the lighthouse, and the women opened fire as a bundle of rope sailed over the balcony, uncoiling as it fell. It hit the rocks, landing partially in the surf, and the muties immediately attacked the new invader with their sharp pincers.

The men climbed to the ground and stomped the old crabs to death, rescuing the rope. There was a large loop at the end for no discernible reason.

Shouting a warning, J.B. cut loose with the M-4000 as the first of the big crabs appeared around the lighthouse, and the others started to scramble up the length of rope. One by one, as they reached the top, each companion gave cover fire to the remaining people below until only Ryan was left. Working as a team, the people hauled up the big man, his wounded leg hanging limply behind. As he ascended, a crab jumped after him, but it missed and fell to its death amid the other bloody corpses.

Reaching the top, Ryan stiffly stood and shot a half smile at his son. The boy was bleeding from a scratch on his cheek, and had the beginning of a black eye, but otherwise seemed fine.

“Good job,” Ryan grunted.

“Thank God you found some rope in time,” Mildred panted, holstering her piece after two tries. Exhaustion draped over her like a shroud. “But why is it knotted at the end?”

“It came that way,” Dean replied.

“What mean?” Jak asked suspiciously.

“I got it off a dead guy. Come on, I’ll show you,” Dean said, and started to walk into the bowels of the old lighthouse.

Chapter Three

“Hold it a sec,” Ryan said, going to the edge of the balcony.

Looking out over the island, he could see only sand and weeds, the crumbling ruins of some predark skyscrapers jutting from the earth like the bones of a colossus. Then he studied the ruins more closely and realized those were the skeletons of warships, not houses. Carriers, battleships, destroyers, the maritime might of the predark world lay embedded in the dunes, their vaunted armor peeled away to reveal the bare inner layers of struts, and rusting keels. Those were useless. Anything valuable on board had been long ago destroyed by the wind and the surf.

Out to sea, there was empty water to their left and right, the calm expanse broken only by the occasional splash of a fish jumping at the reflected light of the setting sun. However, to the east were neat rows of thin islands, each slightly higher than the one before, steadily rising toward the north. Their island was about in the middle of the formation.

“Looks like the sea bed buckled upward from nuke quakes,” he said, waiting for the throbbing in his leg to subside.

Krysty shielded her vision from the setting sun. “Some sort of a ville three, no, four islands over,” she said, gesturing with her chin. “I see a big wall, and smoke.”

Extracting a device from his munitions bag, J.B. extended the antique Navy telescope to its full length. The device compacted to smaller than a soup can, but had much better range than even the best predark binocs.

“Yeah, it’s a ville,” he said. “Big one, too, with one hell of a good wall.”

“Cold Harbor?” Dean asked anxiously, his young face fiercely stern.

“Nope, someplace new.”

“Good,” the boy grunted. “Any place better than there.”

Leaning against the railing to support himself, Ryan took a turn at the telescope. “These nearby islands are only a hundred or so yards away from each other. Be an easy swim.”

“Except for the crabs,” Krysty said, pausing so they could hear the endless scraping from below.

“Let’s go inside,” Mildred suggested, heading for the open door of the beacon room. “Get away from those things.”

Trundling inside the framed structure on top of the granite tower, the companions found it stifling hot behind the glass walls. But as the heavy glass door closed, the sounds of the fighting crabs and crashing waves completely vanished. Silence reigned supreme.

“Perhaps it would be wise to leave the door open,” Doc suggested. “We shall be needing cross ventilation from the chimney to breathe downstairs.”

“Right,” Dean said with a nod, and propped the door ajar with a pile of the rope.

The central area of the beacon room was small, the huge lens assembly taking up most of the space. The walls were thick glass with massive support columns every few feet. The floor was only three feet wide and circled the beacon until reaching a steep set of wrought-iron stairs with no railing. Support was offered by grabbing hold of the steel column the stairs wound around.

Ryan looked at his son. “Any problems downstairs?”

“The place is empty,” Dean replied, scrunching one side of his face. “Except for the dead guy.”

“Hey, what if the crabs get inside through the chimney flue!”

“I closed the flue,” Dean replied. “No way they’re getting through plate steel.”

“Good. Smart move.”

“Mighty hot,” Jak said, loosening his collar.

“Greenhouse effect,” Mildred muttered, a bead of sweat trickling down her cheek. “Sunlight comes in and the heat gets trapped.”

“Like a magnifying glass?”

“Sort of, yes.”

Screwing the cap back on his canteen, Ryan wiped his mouth on a sleeve. He knew that explanation wasn’t quite right, but let it pass.

Taking a sip from his canteen, Doc wandered closer to the huge prism and lens assembly that dominated the middle of the room. The intricately carved glass lens stood six feet high, with concentric circles cut in short arcs on the thick glass, the reflective prisms spaced evenly around a central bull’s-eye-style magnifying glass. Behind the lens was some sort of a mechanism with a silvery reflecting dish.

“A first-order Fresnel lens,” Doc said, sounding impressed. “This must have been some very bad water. These are extremely powerful.”

“Yeah? How far?” Dean asked, fingering the pattern on the thick glass.

“Twenty miles, or so I have been told,” Doc replied. “And since the horizon is only seven miles away, that gives it quite a decent range.”

Jak scowled at the information. After night fell, they could see far, but the beam itself would broadcast their presence to the world. No good. He had no wish to face another of the baron’s PT boats until they had more blasters. Maybe even some of those Firebird rockets, too.

“Fresnel?” Mildred asked curiously, rubbing her neck with a damp cloth.

Leaning on his ebony swordstick, Doc pursed his lips. “A Frenchman, I believe. I have a cousin who retired from the Navy and became a lighthouse keeper. He used to regale my dear Emily and I at every opportunity with stories about the new types of lenses, and such. Poor man was always afraid the Confederate Army would smash his beacon to make Union Army supply ships crash on the shore. Odd fellow.”

His smile fading, Doc blinked several times. “Why, even after the Civil War was over…” The gentleman paused, his voice taking on a soft quality. “Is the war over? Only last week, we heard about Lee crossing the Potomac. Or was it last month?”

As he wandered off, the others paid the man no attention. Doc often slipped into the past, but always returned if there was trouble. Privately, Mildred envied the man slightly. At least for a few brief minutes, he was back among his family and friends, a land without radiation or muties. As time passed, she found it ever harder to recall her life before awakening in the cryo unit and joining Ryan. Sometimes, she even imagined that this had always been her life and the past was but a dream from childhood. On impulse, she reached out and took J.B. by the hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. The man turned and smiled at her, maintaining the intimate contact.

“Something wrong, Millie?” J.B. asked softly.

Only he called her that. She had always been Mildred to her family and associates. The past had many pleasures: clean sheets, pizza, air-conditioning, cable TV, but there had never been a man in her life like John. He was worth the violence and horrors of the Deathlands. To be with him was worth any price.

“Not a thing, John,” she said with a smile. “Just thinking.”

Giving her a hug, J.B. released her hand and continued his examination of the huge lens.

“What’s the light source for the beacon?” Ryan asked, grabbing hold of a ceiling to rest his leg.

“Electric,” J.B. replied, then grinned. “Which means generators and juice in the basement.”

“Emergency jenny, if nothing else,” Ryan agreed. The generator was old, but still serviceable. “If the baron’s sec men haven’t located the gateway, we might find enough juice here to operate the generators and still leave these islands. Dean, show us the way.”

“Yes, sir!” The boy started down the steep stairs with the immortal assurance of youth.

Taking Doc by the elbow, Krysty guided the mumbling old man down the stairs along with the others. The wealth of light reflecting off the lenses and prisms of the beacon cast bizarre shadows down the circular staircase, and the companions had to light candles before even reaching halfway down.

“This is the spot,” Dean said, playing the beam of the flashlight over a bare section of the stairs. “The rope was tied here, and he was hanging over there.”

“Suicide,” Jak said, frowning. “Easier throw somebody off top. Let grav chill.”

Ryan looked down and could see nothing below. “Better check the corpse,” he said, drawing his blaster. He could get a lot of info from the corpse, suicide or not.

The yellowish cone of the flashlight bobbing about, the companions proceeded carefully down the angled steps and spread out when they reached the bottom level of the tower. Mildred took the flashlight from Dean and pumped the charging handle several times, but the beam stayed as dim as before. The battery was dying again. Turning it off, she pocketed the device to save for medical emergencies.

Now in the flickering light of the candles, the companions did a quick recce of the tower. This area was twice as wide as the beacon room, and it was much cooler, probably because they were now twenty feet under the sand. There were several large wooden lockers full of tackle, and assorted equipment for rescuing drowning people and maintaining the beacon. A heavy-gauge power switch was set on the granite block wall between a couple of windows, each showing only a smooth expanse of compacted sand against the other side of the glass.

A tangle of bones and cloth stood in the middle of the floor. Ryan and Mildred knelt alongside the mess to pull out a human skeleton. There was a terrible crack yawning wide in the skull, but the breakage was fresh, obviously caused by the fall and not from a blow to the temple while the man was alive.

“I found him hanging halfway down the circular stairs,” Dean reported, setting the candle on a wall shelf. “The rope was in fine shape, so I cut him loose and took it.”

As Ryan started to go through the pockets of the ragged clothing, Mildred lifted the skull and turned it.

“Well, he’s definitely from the predark days,” she stated, opening the jaw wide as it could reach. “Look at those ceramic fillings! That’s prime dentistry.”

“How die?” Jak asked bluntly.

“Tell you in a minute,” Mildred replied. Carefully, she laid out the bones, placing them in order. Then she ran her trained hands over the skeleton, checking for damage, and found nothing.

“Okay, he died of strangulation,” Mildred announced, rocking back on her heels. “Damn fool must have tied the noose wrong and it didn’t snap his neck when he jumped off the stairs. Poor bastard just hung there until his air ran out. Might have been a couple of minutes, or a whole day if he was particularly strong.”

“A bad way to die,” Krysty stated.

“There’s no good way to get aced,” J.B. said with conviction. “Some are just worse than others.”

For some reason, that made Mildred feel incredibly sad. Maybe it was because, while they often found dead folks, few were from predark. It made her feel a sort of kinship with the nameless man. “Ashes to ashes,” she whispered, making the sign of the cross, “dust to dust. And may God have mercy on your soul.”

“Soul,” Jak snorted in disdain. “Right.”

Holding a small leather journal in his hand, Ryan stood and tried to force open the lock, but the ancient mechanism was strong. He stopped when the leather cover started to give instead of the lock. Shit, he’d have to open this later or risk tearing it apart.

“Okay, let’s finish our sweep,” Ryan said, tucking the journal into a shirt pocket.

A big door closed with heavy bolts seemed to lead outside from the trickles of sand that rained down along the jamb every time they touched the handle. A second door led to a hallway that opened directly to the cottage, and the third was locked tight.

“This should be the basement,” Ryan decided. “Mebbe storage area, or even a bomb shelter, if we’re lucky. Could be useful stuff down there.”

“On it,” J.B. said, removing tools from his shoulder bag.

But just then, a clang sounded from the second doorway, the noise echoing slightly in the darkness.

Quickly leading the way, Ryan found a set of double doors standing open, and strode into the kitchen of the subterranean cottage. Nothing seemed amiss there, and he waited for the sound to ring out again.

Ryan stood guard while the others swept the kitchen. The range and refrigerator were both electric, there was a dishwasher under the counter and a full assortment of fancy cooking machines, each totally useless without electric power. The cabinets yielded some herbal tea, which Mildred appropriated, and a small amount of exotic spices, but no real food. Checking under the sink, J.B. took some of the cleaning solutions to tuck into his munitions bag, and left the others.

Moving on, they found a small laundry room behind a pantry, the shelves starkly empty. Past the kitchen was the main room of the cottage. It was a big place. The living room had a small eating table with some chairs. In the far corner was a big-screen television and DVD player, stacks of rainbow disks piled high. Near the sand-filled windows was a large desk with a complex military radio and stacks of nautical charts showing the tides, deep currents and shipping schedules. Two side doors led to small bedrooms, one disheveled, the other neat. Everything was coated with a thin layer of dust, but otherwise seemed in good condition.

Holding their candles high, the companions stood in the flickering blackness, straining to hear anything. Then Doc shook off Krysty’s arm and walked over to a sideboard, where he lifted a lantern from amid the items on the table. There was still a small residue of oil in the reservoir, and soon he had the wick going, bright white light filling the subterranean cottage.

Now they could see the recliners and sofa placed before the television, and a gun rack on the wall with several longblasters and several sagging cardboard boxes of ammunition. On the far wall was a large bookcases full of paperbacks that crumbled into dust as they approached, producing an amazingly large acrid cloud. The fresh air from the open door in the lighthouse was seeping into the cottage, finishing the job of destruction started by the sheer passage of time.

Then everybody froze as a soft metallic patter sounded. It came again as a faint spot of light appeared on the bricks of the hearth and with a loud clang the flue moved aside and a blue crab dropped into view.

“Hot pipe, they pried it open!” Dean shouted, and stomped on the mutie before it could scuttle away, grinding it underfoot until the thing was paste on the flagstone floor.

Grabbing a fireplace poker, Ryan hooked the catch on the flue and forcibly pulled it closed, cutting off the pincer of a crab halfway through the vent. The limb fell onto the andirons, and a frantic scratching could be heard as something moved wildly about on the sheet iron.

“Now what?”

“Build fire,” Jak suggested, lifting a wooden chair.

“Have to open the flue or we choke to death on the smoke.”

Ryan pulled the poker tighter to hold the flue closed. “Find something to jam it in place!”

Breaking a chair apart, Jak forced a piece of wood into the fireplace. The chair leg splintered as it scraped across the rough brick, and the teenager had to use the butt of his Colt Python to pound it into position. There was a lot of scampering about on top of the flue from the noise, but he sat back to inspect the work and nodded.

“Not come through this,” he stated as a fact.

Nervously, Mildred glanced at the windows. “Some species of crabs can tunnel,” she said. “We better nail those bookshelves over the glass just in case.”

“Tools in the laundry room,” Ryan said, moving his head. “Jak, Dean, give her a hand.”

“I’ll check the blaster rack,” J.B. said, already moving in that direction.

With the Steyr cradled in his arms, Ryan rested his aching leg on the dining table and watched the open doorway and the fireplace for any sign of movement. The situation wasn’t good. They were still alive, but trapped down there, low on candles, almost out of ammo and food. Eventually, they would have to leave, and then the waiting muties would swarm once more. They might be able to swim to the next island, but that would require a diversion to get rid of the crabs, and they had no more explosives of any kind. Hopefully, the rounds in the blaster rack were still live.

The work of closing off the windows went very slowly, the panes of glass vibrating with every fall of the hammer. Krysty solved that problem by sliding the sofa cushions between the glass and the wood slats. After that, the job progressed much faster.

Shifting to another position, Ryan felt the journal in his pocket. Pulling it out, he used the panga to slice off the lock and flipped through the book to see if there was a diagram of the cottage, or any useful info inside. The handwriting was faded, but still legible in the dancing illumination of the candles.

“Good enough,” Mildred finally announced, and placed aside the hammer. Walking around the cottage, the woman surveyed the work. The planks were double thick over every window, almost four inches. No way could the crabs get through that. “Good idea about those nails, Dean.”

The boy shrugged. Driving some nails through the wood before they attached them over the windows seemed an obvious thing to do. Anything coming through the glass would impale itself on the sharp steel points. Crude but effective.

“Looks pretty solid,” J.B. stated, returning a rifle to the blaster rack. All of the weapon were useless, rusted solid, and the ammo was even worse.

Fortunately, he spotted some silverware in the kitchen. If it was real silver, and not just silver plate, then with some clean sheets and sunshine he could start producing high-explosive guncotton by the pound. Then disassemble the plumbing and they’d soon have some pipe bombs. Fuses were the problem. Maybe he could use the merc primer in the dead ammo to bleed a crude flash-fuse. Yeah, that just might work.

“Hey,” Jak said, going to the dining table and emptying his pants pockets of oysters. “Forgot had. Got before crabs came.”

Knowing the mollusks wouldn’t stay fresh long once out of the water, the companions took seats and started dividing up the seafood. Having eaten only a short while ago, Krysty let the others have the oysters and took some small sips from her canteen to control her hunger. Even if they found edible food down here, there was no chance of clean water. That they would have to distill from the sea. A long and slow process.

Screwing the cap back on, Krysty noticed Ryan was still engrossed in the little journal.

“What is it, lover?” she asked, going closer. The man wouldn’t be spending this much time reading some suicide note.

“Good news, or good luck for us, whatever you want to call it,” Ryan said, thumbing deeper into the book until coming to blank pages. The last few pages were written in a different color ink than the rest, which made it easy to find the pertinent parts.

J.B. glanced up. “What do you mean?” he asked around a mouthful of oyster.

“The dead guy we found is from predark days, all right. He talks about how this lighthouse has a bomb shelter in the basement. If the seals held, there should be ammo, food, everything we need. And lots of it.”

“Hot pipe!” Dean cried, jumping from his chair. “Let’s go!”

“Slow down, son,” Ryan said, rubbing his chin. “The door is booby-trapped. Gonna be a triple tough to get through. Plas mines in the floor and ceiling—we miss one, and the whole place goes up.”

“Read in journal?” Jak asked frowning.

“Yeah, he rambled on about skydark for a while, then got to the important stuff.”

“He saw the war.” Mildred said the words as if each one were alone and independent of the others.

Ryan tossed over the journal. “Read for yourself. J.B., let’s start on that door.”

As the men walked off, Mildred snatched up the journal and started to turn the pages. The personal journal of somebody who actually saw the world end. Incredible.

In the background, Doc snored softly in a chair, and the mutie crabs clawed and scratched at the iron plate blocking their way into the underground cottage. Placing her blaster on the table for easy access, Mildred moved a candle closer for better light.

She began to read aloud:

“My name was Ronald Keifer, and in this journal I will confess everything. But I cannot be judged, because there is no law anymore. Not since this afternoon when the bombs began to fall and the whole world caught fire while David and I watched from the imagined safety of our island….”

PLACING ASIDE his fountain pen, Ron reached up to close the window above the tiny desk. For a moment, he listened to the thick silence, the ticking of the windup clock on the shelf blessedly silent now that he had smashed it with a hammer.

A trickle of sweat formed in his hair and flowed down the side of his unshaved face to dangle from his badly healing chin for a second before plummeting onto the clean white page of the pocket journal. He stared at the tiny stain as it spread across the paper and blurred the words. His sister had given him this book to jot down his thoughts, and to remind him to write while he was stationed here in the Marshall Islands. The goddamn middle of nowhere. The edge of the world. The words made the man shake, and he concentrated on breathing to stay in control. But it was so quiet here. So very quiet.

He had been watering the garden when the horizon strobed with brilliant light flashes. At first he thought it was a ship at the Navy base exploding, or maybe lightning, but then he felt the powerful vibrations in the ground and realized those were nukes going off. A lot of them.

Holding a bucket of paint and a brush, David stopped painting the side of the cottage and stared directly at the growing fireballs in disbelief until suddenly he started clawing at his face, screaming. Ron was already hugging the ground, his face buried under both arms while he prayed to God this was just some a horrible dream. But the terrible rumblings of the nuclear detonations grew in volume until quakes shook the island, then came the hot wind that stole the breath from their lungs, boiling atmosphere pushed out of the way of the expanding mushroom clouds. Even as he crawled for the door, every window on that side of the lighthouse shattered. Only the lighthouse beacon itself survived the atomic concussions.

Dragging the weeping David through the howling winds, debris from the annihilated naval base peppering the island, Ron somehow managed to get inside and to bolt the heavy door closed. Designed to withstand the worst tropical storm, the lighthouse saved their lives that day, the granite walls holding back the unimaginable hurricane of the sky bombs.

Bandaging David’s eyes, Ron put his partner to bed and tried to summon medical help. But the telephone was dead, the static and hash so thick on the landline it was impossible to even know if it was working. And the radio didn’t function at all, even though the internal parts hadn’t been damaged from the glass shards of the windows. Then Ron recalled a lecture that the electronic pulse of a nuke would fry civilian computer chips, and such things as radios and computers would be permanently dead. The sudden realization that they were alone hit the man hard, and he forced it from his mind, clinging to the belief that the U.S. Navy or the local coast patrol would soon arrive to take them to safety.

Carrying the now unconscious David into the cellar, he fumbled with the military lock to open the lead-lined door of the bomb shelter and closed it tight, using all four bolts. It was a pointless act. They were alone on the island; besides, the gamma wave from the blasts had already come and gone. If he was dying of radiation, there was nothing he could do about it now. However, it made Ron feel better, safer. Without turning on the chemical lights, he slumped to the cold concrete floor and raged at the fool politicians who had ordered the death of the human race. What the hell had they been thinking, that humanity could somehow survive a nukestorm? Were they mad? Of course they were.

Outside, the hellstorm of cobalt fire raged louder than any possible hurricane, and days passed before the vibrations in the air and the ground slowly ebbed. While the winds battered the building above them, David wept insanely when he wasn’t asleep, the rationed shots of morphine all that Ron could do for his friend. And every time he regained consciousness, the man began to scream, raking cracked nails across his sunburned face to rip away the dressings. Blisters had formed on every inch of exposed skin, and Ron didn’t know if his friend would live. And he was certainly blind. The medical supplies were only the basic materials, field-surgery kits for fast repairs to keep a wounded sailor alive until the corpsman arrived.

But there would never be any more corpsman or doctors. No relief ship, no helicopter, no cops. The two men were on their own until further notice. Forever. The journal was his only solace, and Ron wrote in detail about a tidal wave that swept across the nearby islands, broken aircraft carriers and battleships mixed into the churning brown silt from the bottom of the sea. A radioactive tidal wave. Every ship in the archipelago had to have been destroyed. The Geiger counter built into the wall was still registering high, but no longer spiking the deadly red line. The bombs used had to have been the so-called clean nukes that the Pentagon was so proud of developing. Bombs with ultrashort half-life isotopes in the warheads. In ten or so years, any island still in existence would be livable again. That was, if there was anybody left alive.

Trying to pass the time, Ron did a detailed inventory of everything the Navy engineers had stashed in their little bolt-hole. Emergency supplies for the base personnel. It was a criminal offense for him to even open a box to peek inside. But there was no law anymore, and he felt no remorse as he went through the government property. It all belonged to him now.

Ripping open a wooden crate full of bottles, Ron used his teeth to work out the cork of a whiskey bottle and drank directly from the neck, ignoring the rows of clean plastic glasses lining the shelf. Food wasn’t a problem; there was enough for twenty years, and quite a decent stash of weapons and ammunition. Enough to start a small war. But war was gone from the world for a while. Everybody would be simply trying to stay alive, way too busy to argue religion or political beliefs. Personal survival would be the only rule for those still in the world, and it would be the same here. Survival at any cost.

Standing, Ron took another deep swig from the bottle and walked over to where David sprawled in the bunk.

“Hey,” the wounded man whispered, a pained smile twisting his feature. “It’s not a dream is it? They dropped the Big One.”

“Looks like,” Ron said, placing the bottle aside. He felt cold. So very cold.

David sniffed. “You drinking booze?”

“Yeah.”

“Morphine is doing me fine, but you go right ahead and have one for me. Hell, have one for everybody!”

“There’s lots of food,” Ron found himself saying. He had no idea why. It was as if somebody else were speaking through him. God, what was he doing? Dave was his best friend. Pulling the 10 mm U.S. Navy pistol from his belt, Ron clicked off the safety, the tiny noise incredibly loud in the locked bunker.

“Trouble?” David asked, struggling to sit upright. He reached out a hand for Ron, and the man stepped out of the way. “Somebody at the bunker door?”

Ron felt a hysterical laugh bubble up from inside. “I wish to God there was somebody at the door,” he said softly, “but there isn’t, and there never will be. We knew the risks when we took this assignment. World War III, pal. We’re all alone and nobody is ever coming to rescue us.”

“Nonsense,” David began gently, a shaking hand rubbing his bandages. “Why, over on Kwalein Island they have an underground base the size of—”

“Shut up!” Ron screamed, his hand shaking so badly he almost dropped the weapon. “Shut the fuck up! There’s only enough food for twenty years! Twenty, that’s all!”

“So?” David asked, puzzled, leaning back in his bunk. “Hell, that’s plenty. A lifetime!”

Ron fired again and again at the blind man until the corpse fell off the blood-soaked bunk.

“Now it’s forty years,” Ron whispered, watching the body twitch and then go terribly still.

That was ten years ago. Long lonely years. Taking up the fountain pen once more, Ron shook his head to banish the memory of that insane day. But it had been a decade since he heard a human voice. The TV and radio never worked again, the phone only static. The CD player and VCR were junk, the computer useless. The hundred thousand Web sites of the Internet vanished in the first microsecond pulse of the nuclear detonations. His new URL was now www.gonetohell.com.

There were still ten thousand gallons of diesel fuel in the storage tanks for the generator that powered the lighthouse. But he hadn’t turned on the beam in years, first to save fuel, then out of fear others would arrive and discover his crime. Murder. That was the word. He was a murderer. Assassin. Coward.

Thousands of people were probably raping and killing one another across the world, but this had been while the ground was still shaking from the bombs. While the taste of civilization was still in his mouth. There had been enough food for forty men for one year, or two men for twenty years, or one man for forty years. The math was easy, the results unacceptable. He had wanted a full long life, but now Ron was paying the price for his bloody crime.

Sometimes in the dark, Ron could hear the dead sailors from the Navy base whispering, asking why he did it, calling him a traitor. He woke screaming, drenched in sweat and used up all of the whiskey to force dreamless sleep. When it was gone, he switched to the morphine, but now that was depleted, and the nightmares were tearing apart his mind, until he wasn’t sure when he was awake or asleep. David stood behind him a lot these days, never visible, but always there, reminding him that he had something to do. One last act before he could finally sleep.

Putting aside the pen, Ron slowly walked to the middle of the stairwell, checked the rope he had tied there yesterday, slipped the noose around his neck and jumped. It was that easy.

The shock of the noose tightening filled him with cold adrenaline when Ron realized in horror that he hadn’t tied the noose correctly. It was supposed to break his neck and kill him instantly. This was slow strangulation! Standing at the foot of the stairs, David watched him thrash about with those pure white eyes and did nothing to help. Clawing madly at the rope slowly crushing his windpipe, Ron managed to suck a sip of air into his burning lungs. Then another, and another. He was going to live. Live! With excruciating slowness, Ron started to climb the rope, going hand over hand back to the stairs.

That was last week.

He was ready to try again. David had told him what he had done wrong, so he wouldn’t fail next time. Knot the rope more, that’ll do the trick. Soon, he’d be asleep forever. Absolved of his crimes.

Oh God, please let me die this time.

“THAT’S IT, the rest is blank,” Mildred said, closing the journal and placing it flat on the table. “Guess he finally made it.”

Dean chewed a lip. “So he went mad from loneliness?”

She smiled sadly. “It’s called cabin fever. Almost got it myself once.”

“His mental failure was completely understandable,” Doc rumbled, joining the conversation. “Most crimes merely mutter their presence. Only murder shouts.” He had awakened in the middle of the reading and stood quietly by until she was done.

Out of breath, Krysty appeared at the hallway door. “We’re in,” she said urgently. “Lend a hand, we need some help moving the door.”

Leaving the table, Mildred, Dean and Doc joined the others and put their backs into forcing aside the massive portal to the bomb shelter. Digging in his heels, Dean was surprised at the weight of the door, until he saw it was only wood on the outside, the thin veneer covering a mammoth slab of steel and lead. Good camou.

As the portal swung aside, air billowed out, smelling stale and dry.

“Been closed tight for a long time,” J.B. observed, covering his face until the dead air dissipated. There was a cool breeze coming down from the open door atop the lighthouse, carrying the tangy smell of the sea.

While Jak jammed a knife under the door to make sure it didn’t swing shut, Ryan jacked the action on his SIG-Sauer pistol and started down a short flight of brick stairs. In the enclosed space, the old lantern gave off a wealth of light, and the man could see the deactivated palm lock and keypad mounted on the wall normally used to seal off the shelter from intruders. A grille at the bottom of the stairs was ajar, and Ryan followed the path of a zigzagging tunnel very similar to the ones used in the redoubts. Rads could only travel in a straight line, and with a dogleg junction, once you stepped past the corner you were safe.

The tunnel opened onto a small room filled with stacks of crates and machines. The walls were lined with shelving packed with boxes and mysterious objects wrapped in vacuum-form plastic. Closed blaster racks were filled with military weapons, and tarpaulins covered large piles that could be anything.

“Jackpot,” J.B. said, almost smiling.

The silenced muzzle of the SIG-Sauer sweeping the room ahead of him, Ryan strode through the maze of boxes, looking at everything but touching nothing. Doc stayed near the grille, a hand resting on the lion’s head of his swordstick. Sometimes they found others waiting for them in a military supply dump—sec men, muties that had sneaked in through the ventilation system, wild animals and on a couple of occasions a sec droid, almost unstoppable machines designed to kill unauthorized intruders.

Warily, the companions spread out and started to hunt through the piles of supplies for specific items. Later on, they would do an inventory and decided what to take, but first and foremost it was ammo and food. Everything else was secondary.

“MRE packs.” Dean grinned in delight, going to a nearby shelf and pawing through a plastic box marked with the military designation for the long-storage food packs. Prying off the lid, he felt another rush of trapped gas and started running his fingertips carefully over the assortment of foil envelopes searching for even the tiniest pinprick or corrosion.

“Perfect condition,” the boy announced happily, filling the pockets of his jacket until they bulged.

Snapping the pressure locks on a large plastic box, J.B. flipped off the lid and grinned at the M-16 automatic rifles nestled in a bed of thick black-green grease. Another crate yielded an M-60 machine gun, but upon closer inspection there was a crack in the case and the weapon was heavily corroded, especially its main recoil spring. As careful as if handling a bomb, J.B. closed the case and set it aside. The only way the M-60 could handle its incredible recoil was to house an eighteen-foot-long spring. Once long ago, the Armorer had been trapped without ammo, and let the spring fly loose just as a stickie was crawling in through a window. The coiled length went straight through the mutie and kept going for another fifty yards. A damaged M-60 was a dangerous thing.

“Ammo over here,” Krysty reported, opening a sealed cabinet. The interior shelves were neatly filled with a wide collection of different caliber ammunition. A lot of it was in 10 mm, which they couldn’t use. They often found the ammo, but never a 10 mm blaster. However, there were a few boxes of the older 9 mm rounds, and some civilian grades. Probably stored here to trade with any survivors outside. Pushing aside the .44 and .45 packs, Krysty discovered quite a lot of plastic-wrapped 5 mm ammo blocks for a Heckler & Koch G-12 caseless rifle. Ryan used to carry one, and gave it up because ammo was so hard to find.

On a lower shelf behind some cleaning kits, she finally found some boxes of .357 ammo, whistled sharply and threw one to Jak. The teenager made the catch and nodded in thanks. Going to another locker, Krysty uncovered a staggering cache of .38 rounds and took every box, stuffing her coat pockets full. Never had enough of this caliber. It was used by herself, Mildred and Dean. Jak, too, sometimes.

Clearing some space on a workbench, Jak opened the cardboard box and reloaded his blaster on the spot, then he tucked a few extra rounds in his pockets and put the rest in his backpack. Armed once more, Jak continued his search for clothing. Their pants and shirts were in tatters, underwear and socks always in short supply, and his left boot had a spot worn thin as a baron’s promise. Unfortunately, he was only finding things like flak jacks, scuba suits, rain gear and a lot of those computerized helmets that attached to the telescope mounted on a MR-1 rapidfire blaster. J.B. had told him you could stick the blaster around a corner and see what was on the other side on a tiny vid screen suspended from your helmet. Then flip a switch and see in pitch darkness, or track an enemy by his body heat. Amazing stuff. When it worked. But that tech required heavy batteries, and all sorts of computer software. None of which they had ever found in any redoubt. Now where the hell were the boots?

Heading directly for a large red cross on the far wall, Mildred found a small medical section, most of the chem in the bottles only dust now. The latex gloves for surgery cracked apart from sheer age when she tried to put one on, and the rubber on a stethoscope was as brittle as glass. The frustrated physician located the M*A*S*H field-surgery kit mentioned in the journal stuffed in the fridge. She had hoped it would be in there. The refrigerator would make the morphine last longer, and even with the power off, the fridge should keep out most of the moisture and air. The med kit was almost identical to her own, except in much better shape, and Mildred immediately began transferring the contents of her old med kit into the new bag.

Reaching a clear area situated before a steel desk, Ryan saw a complex radio wired to a nuke battery from a Hummer. Checking the dials, he found the batteries had been left on, and were totally drained. Even those amazing devices had limits. It was a sobering thought. The radio would have been worthless anyway, but they might have been able to use the nuke battery to power some electric lights. Too bad. They often found wags, or at least parts of vehicles in the redoubts. No chance of that in a bomb shelter.

He found a chem bathroom in the corner, next to a row of shower stalls carpeted with mildew, and a line of bunk beds attached to the wall, the pallets reaching from the ferroconcrete floor to the ceiling. Accommodations for a full company of soldiers. Only a single bed was disheveled, but another was stripped, the mattress gone leaving only the bare metal springs and frame. The scene of the crime, as Mildred would say.

Following the power cables attached to the bare wall, Ryan soon located the generator, or rather, what was left of it. A tiny drip from a water pipe in the ceiling had slowly reduced the huge machine into a pile of rust over the long decades.

“Never get those going again,” J.B. stated, joining the man. He pushed back his fedora. “This isn’t the prize we thought. Half this stuff is useless.”

“But half isn’t,” Ryan stated. He gestured. “Any fuel in those tanks?”

The Armorer rapped on the side of the tank with a knuckle and got a dull answering thump. “Sure, lots,” J.B. answered, puzzled. “But it’s diesel. Turned to jelly decades ago. Even if we got some to the gateway, it would be too thick to run the turbines. Need to cut it with something.”

“Shine?”

“Anything that burns would be okay.”

“Good, save a gallon to take with us,” Ryan said, then paused to let the throbbing in his leg ease. They had been on the run, fighting every step of the way for too damn long. The half-healed cut on his gun hand was starting to stiffen, seriously slowing his speed. Not good. Across the shelter, Krysty was rubbing her bad shoulder, and the others looked as if they had been run over a couple of times by a war wag. Everybody was scratching at the itchy dried salt on their clothes, and down here in the close confines of the shelter house, the rank smell of unwashed bodies was starting to leave an oily taste in his mouth. Mildred was always touting cleanliness for health, but more importantly, when they went outside the stink would reveal their presence to anybody in the vicinity, and leave a hell of a fine trail for dogs to follow. And those triple-blasted crabs.

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