“Something’s wrong here.”

“Yeah. I feel it, too,” Jak said, a concealed knife dropping into his hand from his sleeve.

“Better stay in the mat-trans,” Ryan said. “If we come back with a droid on us, we’ll need backup.”

Turning away, he saw that J.B. was already at the oval hatch, looking for traps.

“Clear,” the Armorer reported.

“Okay, friends, triple red.” SIG-Sauer at the ready, the one-eyed man pressed down the lever and the hatch swung open silently. Then with a snarl, Ryan instantly stepped backward, dropping into a crouch.

In the next room, several men in Navy uniforms operated the controls of the humming comps….

Moonfeast

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

They sang the song eternal, and strove to drums infernal. Then marched-marched-marched to the edge of the world. The damned fools sang as they marched to the edge of the world.

—Private A. B. Hassan,

Confederate Army 1861

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter One

Pretending to scratch his belly, Ryan Cawdor loosened the 9 mm blaster at his side. A seasoned veteran of hundreds of fights, the man knew when the blood was about to hit the fan. It was chilling time, that much was certain. Death was close. He just wasn’t sure from which direction. Not yet, anyway.

A tall man with broad shoulders, Ryan had long curly black hair, and a badly scarred face that rarely knew a smile. A wicked heavy eighteen-inch blade called a panga was sheathed on his thigh, a holstered SIG-Sauer 9 mm blaster balancing the oversize blade on the other side. A bolt-action Steyr longblaster hung from a shoulder. Spare ammunition filled the loops in his leather gunbelt, marking him as a wealthy man, and also a deadly killer. Brass was better than gold, as the saying went, and the Deathlands was filled with the unmarked graves of strong men who had been brutally aced for a single live round. To display that much live brass meant that you were tough enough to keep it, and thus served as a clear warning to anybody smarter than a stickie to stay away—or else.

Crude alcohol lanterns hung from the overhead wooden beams, filling the tavern with a murky blue light, and swirling clouds of pungent smoke filled the air of the Busted Axle like a morning mist on distant mountains. Everybody seemed to be puffing on homemade cigs, or corncob pipes, and the roaring blaze in the brick fireplace was leaking smoke out the sides to add a rich woodsy smell to the mixture of tobacco, maryjane and a local favorite called coot, hemp rope cigars soaked in sweet shine.

Most of the people in the tavern were eating dinner at their tables, hunched over the hubcap plates as if they were afraid somebody might try to jack the horse meat stew, which was highly unlikely. Uniformed sec men were playing dominoes at a large table near the front door, their scarred faces scowling in concentration. Each man had a handblaster tucked into his belt, and a flintlock longblaster hanging from the back of his chair, shiny chunks of flint jutting out from the cocked hammers. The museum pieces were in perfect working condition, and in a world where a single round of live brass bought a person a few days of food and bed, the black-powder rifles were the standard weapons for many ville sec men. No other table in the tavern was close enough for another patron to try for a grab. A drunken outlander had tried anyway, and his corpse was cooling outside, waiting for the loser of the game to bury the triple-stupe fool.

Small piles of live brass lay in front of each sec man, and everybody seemed to be playing with one hand hidden under the table clutching the handle of a knife. Just in case, as Baron Harrison always liked to say. The only cure for stupidity was a hot dose of lead in the head. True words, indeed.

In the corner, a young boy without shoes was playing a dilapidated upright piano with considerable skill, but there was no jack in the tip jar perched on top. On the second-floor balcony, a host of gaudy sluts leaned over the battered wooden railing, their bare breasts openly on display to entice new customers upstairs for fifteen minutes of sweaty delight.

Telling jokes and pouring shine behind a plywood counter, the bartender was a tall man named Mark Michalowski, a thin man with a shaved head and a wide, easy grin.

Gathered along the counter were a couple of sluts and a dozen burly men. Mountain men from the looks of them, Ryan guessed, remembering a friend of his from a long time ago. The hunters were dirty, unshaved, and dressed entirely in clothing made from animal hides: griz bear boots, deerskin pants and shirts, beaver coats and coonskin caps, minus the tails. They looked friendly enough, but machetes hung at their backs and muzzle-loading longblasters hung across their shoulders. The men looked so similar to one another that Ryan knew they had to be close kin, and from a pretty damn small gene pool, at that. Which only made them that much more dangerous. The only true law in the Deathlands was that kin helped kin, especially in a fight.

The mountain men were talking low among themselves, drinking shots of shine from cracked plastic tumblers and stuffing their bearded faces with handfuls of salted popcorn as if they’d never encountered the stuff before. Ryan knew that the locals used the stuff to feed their pigs when it got stale, but when it was fresh, Big Mike the bartender gave it away free, the heavy coating of rock salt a mighty inducement for his customers to drink more shine, and eventually end upstairs where their pockets could really be emptied. The one-eyed man knew that there was no such thing as a free lunch. That phrase had never been so nuking true than in the desert ville of Hobart where everything had a price. Baron Felix Harrison was so crooked that he could eat soup with a corkscrew, and the sooner Ryan and his companions were out of this rad pit the better he’d like it. But for the moment, they were trapped. Nobody could leave Hobart without a signed pass, and those were damn near impossible to get from the baron. However, Ryan knew one of the ville sec men from his days riding shotgun with the Trader, and the man was going to meet Ryan here at any moment.

“Ya wanna refill?” a serving girl asked, the wooden tray expertly balanced on an outthrust hip as if it was nailed there.

The teenager was shapely and well proportioned, with a lot of cleavage showing over the top of her tight leather bodice. Unfortunately her face was horribly scarred from once being caught in an acid rain storm, and her features were nearly destroyed. What little there was remaining had twisted into a permanent scowl as if she hated the whole nuking world and wished it to die screaming, as had her youthful beauty. Even her long auburn hair was sprinkled with white from the ravages of the acid rain. Only her full breasts seemed to have been spared. They were pink and plump, and damn near perfect.

Ryan had heard several of the customers call the teenage girl Crate, and guessed that was a short version of Crater-face, the nickname given because of her ghastly resemblance to the moon. Unconsciously touching the disfiguring knife scar that crossed his own face, Ryan felt a tug of camaraderie for the disfigured girl.

“Just some more beer and bread,” Ryan said, tossing over a .22 cartridge. “And lean over more when you bring it, honey.” He had no real interest in bedding the girl, but Doc always liked to say that good manners cost nothing. Which was true enough, the man supposed.

Making the catch with a free hand, Crate seemed startled by the crude pass, then clearly warmed to the idea. “This much brass will get ya the best beer we got, and some time with me in the back room, if ya like,” she whispered, a suggestion of a smile appearing briefly on her distorted lips. “I’m good. Damn good, and I don’t mind facing the wrong way, if you know what I mean.”

Clearly hearing the need in her voice, Ryan understood that in spite of working in a tavern situated under a gaudy house, the girl had never shared a bed with anybody before. The local boys had to be feebs. The fruit of the desert cactus looked like a brain tumor and was covered with more barbed needles than a mutie porcupine, but inside was the sweetest damn pulp a person ever tasted. Mother-nuking-ambrosia. Ryan knew that ugly didn’t tell you drek about what juicy treasures waited for a smart man on the inside of an apron.

“So what do they call you?” Ryan asked, looking directly into her face. Her eyes were bright and alive with intelligence.

“Crate,” she muttered, both cheeks turning bright red.

“Short for Catherine, eh?”

The girl blinked in surprise at that, then smiled broadly and leaned over to rest an elbow on the table, both breasts nearly spilling out of her bodice. “You can load that into your blaster,” she said in a throaty purr. “Short for Catherine.” Impulsively she reached out to touch his face. “I’ll bet the other guy lost a lot more in the fight.”

“Damn straight he did,” Ryan muttered, adjusting the leather patch covering the empty socket that had once held his left eye. His own brother had taken the eye in an effort to chill Ryan and claim the throne of their home ville, Front Royal. However, in the end, Harvey was breathing dirt, while Ryan was still walking the shattered earth, so there was no question to him who won that fragging knife fight.

In fact, Ryan and the companions had been on their way from Ohio to visit friends at Front Royal when an avalanche had closed off the only pass and they had been forced to circle around through Hobart. Now all they wanted to do was to get out again, as soon as possible.

“Well, what do ya say?” Catherine asked eagerly.

But before Ryan could answer, the front door swung open and Derby Joe Schwartz sauntered inside. Tall and slim, the man appeared to be made out of nothing but bones and darkly tanned skin. His scraggly hair hung to his shoulders, and a battered old derby rested on top, an eagle feather sticking out of the leather band. Blasters rode on each hip, and a cloth star was sewn onto his shirt, showing he was the sec boss for the entire ville.

Whistling sharply, Ryan caught the man’s attention, and Joe nodded in greeting, already heading over.

“I’ll have to put a timer on that ride, Catherine. My friend is here, and biz comes first,” Ryan said, patting her on the rear. It was nice, warm and well-rounded. The man didn’t finish the offer because soon he would be long gone, but Ryan never saw the profit in hurting somebody weaker than yourself just because you could.

“Anytime, anywhere, Blackie,” Catherine stated, her damaged face alive with raw sentiment. The girl unexpectedly leaned in to kiss him hard on the mouth, then turned to rush away through the smoky tavern and disappear into the steamy kitchen.

“Hey,” Joe said, pulling out a chair and sitting in it backward to keep a clear and fast access to his blasters. “How drunk are you to be sucking face with Crater?”

“The name’s Catherine,” Ryan replied, a rare smile coming and going just as fast. “And, brother, the man who corrals that mare is in for the ride of his life.”

“That so?” Joe asked, tilting back his derby to expose a large bald spot. “A fellow could forget that face, if she could really cook.” Then he smiled lewdly. “Who knows, mebbe she even knows how to do stuff in the kitchen!”

Slapping their palms together into a shake, the old friends shared a mutual laugh. Then the men jerked their hands back and clawed for weapons. The subtle sound had almost been lost in the sea of conversations filling the tavern, but somebody somewhere had just worked the pump-action on a scattergun. The noise was unmistakable.

“Nothing behind you,” Ryan growled, easing the SIG-Sauer into his lap.

“Look south by southeast,” Joe answered softly, both of his hands out of sight below the table.

Risking a glance sideways, Ryan saw a bearded man eating stew at a small table in the corner of the tavern. A fat gaudy slut was lounging alongside, smoking a cig and drinking shine.

“Nuking hell that was good!” the man said, stuffing the wooden spoon into a pocket, then lifting the plate to lick it clean.

“Honey, if you bed like you eat, I’m not going to survive going upstairs,” the gaudy slut drawled, lifting a glass of shine in mock salute. She was a plump blonde wearing a thin cotton dress, and it was plain to see that she wasn’t wearing anything under the clothing but a lot of bare skin.

“Hungry. Ain’t eaten for a week,” the man replied, wiping his mouth on a sleeve. The gesture made his coat part, showing that he was carrying a brace of handcannons tucked into a gunbelt, with two more riding in a rope shoulder holster.

“And now you’ve eaten enough to last for a week.” She laughed, leaning back in her chair to spread her legs wide. That made her dress ride high, exposing a lot of smooth thigh and a host of lewd tattoos.

The man looked where he was supposed to, and grinned. “No need to prime the pump, darling.” He chortled, hitching his gunbelt higher. “Just let me drop some ballast, and I’ll ride you till dawn!”

“About time!” she answered, lifting the glass again, and this time draining it completely.

Moving quickly, the big man lumbered toward the side door of the tavern marked with a small half-moon. But just as he cleared the last table, a scattergun roared, blowing the door off its hinges in an explosion of lead and splinters.

“Hold it right there, Brinkman!” a gruff voice bellowed, and there came the sound of a scattergun being worked.

Instantly the entire tavern went still, until the only sound came from the crackling log in the fireplace.

His hands only inches away from the blasters on his belt, the man stopped moving, then slowly turned his head to see the bartender aiming a predark 12-gauge in his direction.

“What’s the jam in your breech?” Brinkman demanded, puzzled, his fingers itching to reach for iron. “I paid for the meal already, and the fat slut, too!”

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Mark replied, leveling the scattergun. His friendly smile was gone, replaced with a grim expression of raw hatred. “But last summer I was in a convoy that got jacked by some coldhearts. My wife got shot in the belly and took a week to die.”

“Nothing to do with me,” Brinkman answered, sweat appearing on his brow. “I ain’t never been to the Great Salt.”

Both Ryan and Derby Joe grunted in disgust at the amateurish gaff. The feeb had just confessed to everything.

“Didn’t say where it happened, Brinkman,” Mark whispered, moving the barrel of the weapon down a little to point at the stomach of the other man. “Hey, Joe!”

“Right here, Mark,” Joe, replied, easing out his weapons. The blasters were big-bore Ruger .44 Magnums, the muzzles pitted and worn from constant use.

“You want him?” Mark asked, his sight intent upon the coldheart.

“I’d be happy to have him dance in the air for ya, but the outlander ain’t done anything wrong in Hobart,” Joe answered truthfully. “So if you shoot him cold, then I gotta take you in. The baron won’t stand for it.” Then he smiled coldly. “Unless it’s a fair fight, of course.”

“Understood,” Mark stated, dropping the primed weapon and immediately going for the small blaster holstered behind his back.

Instantly, Brinkman went for the blasters on his hips, then both men drew and fired in unison. The double explosion of the black-powder weapons filled the smoky tavern with dark fumes so thick that it was nearly impossible to see what had happened.

Chapter Two

A cold breeze wafted through the shattered door, thinning the acrid gunsmoke in the tavern until the air was relatively clear. With a low moan of pain, Brinkman crumpled to the floor, the twin Colt .45 blasters tumbling from his limp hands to clatter on the wooden floor.

Standing behind the counter, Mark looked down at the red stain spreading across the sleeve of his shirt and grunted. “Crate! I need you to take over the bar!” he shouted, shifting the smoking S&W .38 revolver to his left hand and awkwardly tucking it back into the holster. “I gotta go see the healer!”

“No prob!” she called back, stepping out of the kitchen, sliding a .22 zipgun into the pocket of her patched dress. “And the name is now Catherine.”

Clutching the bloody wound in his arm, Mark merely raised an eyebrow at that, then shrugged in acceptance and shuffled away through the muttering crowd.

“All right, boys, divvy up his possession,” Joe commanded, holstering his weapons. “The baron gets any live brass, I want his knife, and you can keep everything else.”

“Then find something to block that damn door,” Catherine added tying on an apron, “and get that garbage out of here!”

Grinning in avarice, the sec men abandoned their game of dominoes and pushed their way to the corpse to start stripping off his weapons and boots.

“That was a nuke of a good shot, old buddy,” Joe said, sitting.

“Nothing to do with me,” Ryan muttered, putting away the warm SIG-Sauer.

Fanning himself with his derby, Joe smiled tolerantly. “Now that’s funny, because Mark couldn’t hit the ground if he fell off a mountain. That’s why Crate…er, Catherine, bought him that scattergun last winter.”

Taking a sip of his warm beer, Ryan said nothing, waiting to see where this line of questioning would eventually end.

“How much do you want to gamble that if I was to dig the slug out of that coldheart,” Joe continued, “it would be a nine, the exact same caliber of your blaster?”

“Lots of 9 mms in the world,” Ryan said, lowering his arm so that his hand rested on the checkered grip of the blaster. “Think that’s gonna happen?”

“Nope,” Joe said amiably, laying the hat on the table. “But it’s just another good reason to get you the frag out of my ville.” Fumbling inside the hatband, he removed a small piece of folded paper and passed it over. “Okay, you saved me from stickies when Trader passed through Broken Neck, and now we’re even. That pass is good until nightfall. So, use it right quick. Because I’m suppose to arrest you at midnight.”

“Arrest me for what exactly?” Ryan asked, tucking away the paper.

The sec boss scowled. “For using too much air. Spitting on the sidewalk. Treason, murder, the charge doesn’t matter, Ryan. Hell’s bells, Baron Harrison wants your fancy blaster more than a jolt addict wants another fix!” he stated forcibly. “So go far, and fast, old friend. I swore an oath to obey my baron, and if he sends me after you, I’ll have to hunt you down.” He frowned. “I won’t like it, but I’ll put you on the last train west.”

“You can try,” Ryan answered coldly, pushing back the chair to slowly stand. “For old times’ sake, it was good to see you again, Joe.”

“Same here.” The man sighed, wiping the inside sweatband of his hat with a cloth. “Now make sure it never happens again.”

Since there was nothing more to add, Ryan simply grunted in reply and strode from the tavern. But the man somehow felt that he was leaving behind more than just a friendship. A small piece of his life with the Trader had just died, and that disturbed him more than expected.

Stepping onto the brick sidewalk, Ryan looked around the busy ville and soon found three of his friends across the street leaning against a battered old school bus that had been converted into a crude war wag. Cobbled together from a dozen other wags, it was a formidable little brute. Barbed wire covered the roof and sides, spikes lined the bumpers, and steel plates had been welded over the tires to protect them from bullets or arrows. The glass was gone from the windows, replaced with louvered shutters that protected the passengers from attacking muties, while still letting them shoot at any coldhearts who attacked. The bus was short, but looked more than ready to handle anything the Deathlands threw its way. The sec men and civies passing by gave the group of heavily armed outlanders a wide berth, some of the wiser people actually crossing the street to stay as far away as possible. He headed that way.

Built from the ruins of a mining town, Hobart had paved streets, although the roads were now so heavily patched it was damn near impossible to tell which sections were the original pavement and which were the replacement. Ryan had heard that the baron sometimes sent out gangs of slaves to rip up other roads and bring back the slabs of asphalt to use in his town. That sounded like mighty hard work for a pretty small return, but then, Ryan had met several barons who had more than a touch of madness.

“Hey, lover, how did it go?” Krysty Wroth asked, her arms casually crossed with hands on her elbows.

“I got the pass,” Ryan replied

She smiled. “Thank Gaia.” Almost as tall as the one-eyed man, Krysty possessed an abundant wealth of flame-red hair that oddly seemed to always be stirring by an unfelt wind, almost as if the filaments were alive. She was dressed in an old olive-drab jumpsuit and a bearskin coat. A canvas gunbelt was slung low across her hips, a S&W .38 revolver holstered in the front for easy access. A knife was strapped to one of her shapely thighs.

“How long got?” Jak Lauren drawled, a touch of his bayou ancestry softening the words.

“It expires at dark,” Ryan said, glancing at the darkening sky. “So we better haul ass.”

“Good, I don’t like this place,” Krysty said, openly scowling in distaste at a group of armed sec men walking by with a prisoner in chains. The old man had been badly beaten and he was dragging a twisted leg that would probably never work correctly again.

“Damn straight,” Jak agreed, both hands resting on his belt buckle to stay close to his blaster. A true albino, the lean teenager was pinkish-white, as if the savage Deathlands sun never reached his pale skin. His long hair was the color of fresh snow, his eyes as red as the dawn after a storm. A pair of sunglasses poked out of his shirt pocket for when needed, the bridge repaired with a piece of duct tape. A knife was sheathed at his side, another at the small of his back, and a third jutted from the top of his left boot. Several others were hidden all over his body. A big-bore Colt Python .357 Magnum blaster rode in a leather holster at his side, the brass in his gunbelt an odd combination of both .38 short rounds and the slightly larger .357 Magnum Express rounds.

“Then let us make haste, Hermes, and outrace the golden apple of yore!” Doc Tanner rumbled in a deep bass.

“Come again?” Jak asked, blinking.

“Let’s blow this pest hole before nightfall,” Ryan said by way of translation.

The albino teen smiled. “Fucking A.”

“Quite so, my young friend. Quite so,” Doc stated in agreement, dourly watching the sec men shove the prisoner into a tan brick building. The faded lettering on the side proclaimed that the place had once been the Hobart Public Library, but now it served as the city jail, an internment facility from which few, if any, ever departed still requiring air to breathe.

Tall and slim, Theophilus Algernon Tanner was neatly dressed in clothing from another era: a frilly white shirt with a black string tie, and a swallowtail frock coat. Everything he wore was patched, but clean, and his fingernails were neatly trimmed, which set him apart from most people in Deathlands. His long face was heavily lined, but not from age, and his luxuriously thick hair was a deep silver in color. A massive Civil War blaster called a LeMat rode on his hip, the pouches of his gunbelt bulging with black powder and other items needed to feed the monstrous handcannon. A small eating knife was sheathed behind the revolver, and an ebony stick with a silver lion’s head was thrust into the gunbelt like a Japanese war sword.

Born in the nineteenth century, Dr. Theophilus Tanner had been an unwilling participant in a time-trawling experiment. Ripped from the bosom of his family into the late twentieth century, Doc had been deemed too difficult a subject and was sent one hundred years into the future to what had become Deathlands. Alone and confused, Doc had nearly gone insane struggling to survive in the savage reality of the shockscape until Ryan rescued him from the slave pit of a sadistic sec chief named Cort Strasser. Sometimes, Doc’s mind slipped a little, and he briefly imagined that he was safely back home in the loving embrace of his wife, but he always rose to the occasion if there was trouble. Doc was a valuable member of the group with his mental encyclopedia of arcane knowledge, and a deadly fighter. However, the companions knew for a fact that the man would abandon them in a heartbeat if he ever got a chance to go back home to his children and beloved wife, Emily.

Going to the folding door of the bus, Ryan yanked it open and climbed inside. The wag was empty. “Where are J.B. and Mildred?” he growled, sliding into the driver’s seat. The man had fully expected them to be asleep in the back.

“Just down the street,” Krysty replied, slipping into the gunner seat opposite the man. “There was a commotion down at the local healer’s, so Mildred wanted to see if there was anything she could do to help.”

“And J.B. went along to guard her six.”

“Exactly, my dear Ryan,” Doc stated, taking a place alongside Jak. “He is the Daemon to her Pythius.”

Understanding the obscure literary reference only because the time traveler had used it many times before, a brief flood of anger filled Ryan, then he forced it aside and accepted the simple bad timing. There was nothing else to do in the matter. Dr. Mildred Weyth, a freezie from the twentieth century, had her own set of priorities, and helping folks in need of medical attention was at the top of that list.

“All right, let’s find them fast, then roll,” Ryan said, pulling the lever to close the door. It cycled shut with a hiss of working hydraulics.

“No prob,” Jak said confidently, cracking open the cylinder of his Colt Python to start removing the .38 rounds and replace them with the much more deadly hollowpoint .357 Magnum cartridges. One reason the teenager carried this particular model blaster was that it could use both size brass, a unique feature that had saved his life many times.

Working the throttle and gas, Ryan fought the old diesel engine into life, then rumbled away from the curb and started down the middle of the road. Kids and barking dogs scattering at the advance of the rattling vehicle while adults went to hide inside homes and stores, and mounted sec men fought to control their frightened horses at the sound of the sputtering engine.

“Rad-blasted bastards,” Krysty muttered, reading the lips of a passing guard. “These local boys really hate us.”

“We not slaves. Of course hate,” Jak stated, closing his blaster. “They try capture, we fight. Easier ace drunks and crips.”

“How true, lad,” Doc agreed, thumbing back the hammer on the single-action LeMat. “Too long have these cowardly poltroons feasted upon the flesh of the weak, and the taste of an honest fight fills their bowels with Hobbesian turpulence.”

“They still outnumber us fifty or sixty to one, Doc,” Ryan reminded him, turning the wheel sharply to take a corner. “So stay razor, people!” Then he added almost as an afterthought, “And if a man wearing a derby hat comes at you, chill him fast.”

“Isn’t that your friend who got us the exit pass?” Krysty asked, her animated hair curling in confusion.

“He was,” Ryan growled, going around a huge pothole before angling into the parking lot of a large brick building with a lot of tiny windows set high off the ground.

Once, long ago, the place had been a carpet warehouse. But now the ville used it as the slaughterhouse for the animals they raised to feed the baron and his army of sec men. Supposedly, it was also what passed locally for a hospital. There was a strong smell of blood and excrement in the air, and from somewhere inside the building came the agonized squealing of a hog that abruptly stopped, only to be followed by the dull thuds of a butcher’s hatchet.

“By the Three Kennedys, this is an abattoir!” Doc said in utter repulsion.

“Not our business,” Ryan stated, braking to a halt. Briefly, the man checked the plastic mirrors to make sure nobody was lurking outside the wag, before cycling open the door. “Let’s just find our people and jump out of this rad pit.”

“Agreed, lover,” Krysty said, removing the tape from the handle of a gren. Gaia, the Earth Mother, said that all living things were precious, but the woman also knew that sometimes the only way to save an innocent life was to chill an enemy. She saw no contradiction in this. It was merely common sense, a question of balance in maintaining the circle of life.

After checking their weapons, the companions dutifully clambered out of the vehicle, and Jak went behind the wheel.

“I stay,” the teen announced, slipping on his sunglasses. “Keep engine hot in case we run fast.”

“Just remember the codes,” Krysty warned, and the teen scowled in reply as if such an event was beyond impossible.

Heading past a low corral full of bleating sheep and a couple of three-eyed goats, the companions walked into the slaughterhouse and were instantly assaulted by the nearly overpowering reek of bodily fluids. The concrete floor was covered with a mixture of sand and sawdust clotted with feces and spilled blood. Clattering chains hung overhead, the dressed carcass of a cow going by, the warm meat steaming slightly in the afternoon chill.

Lining the walls were tiny stables of assorted animals waiting to be aced, rough trenches were cut into the flooring to drain away their urine to be used in the tanning process.

Scurrying around were teams of young children carrying plastic buckets full of blood, probably to be made into sausage, while somber adults pushed along wheelbarrows piled high with raw animal skins. The hides were covered with thick layers of salt as a preliminary step to becoming cured, then tanned and turned into various useful forms of leather.

Off to the side was a claw-foot bathtub full of slimy animal brains, and right alongside was an open hole in the floor that a squatting man was using as a toilet.

“Mildred must have gone ballistic over these filthy conditions,” Krysty muttered, trying not to breathe through her nose. Outside the slaughterhouse, the combinations of ripe smells was horrendous, but inside the building they were beyond description, almost becoming a tangible force.

“You got that right,” a familiar voice said.

Turning, the companions saw a short, wiry man step out of the shadows. He was in a worn leather jacket, a battered fedora and fingerless gloves. An Uzi machine gun was slung at his side, and a strip of damp cloth was tied across his nose and mouth.

Called J.B. by his many friends, John Barrymore Dix was also known as the Armorer, a nickname given to him because there wasn’t a firearm known that the man couldn’t repair. Hanging at his side was a bulging leather bag, a stiff piece of fuse and the end of a pipe bomb sticking out from under the protective flap. A S&W M-4000 scattergun was strapped across his back, the nylon strap lined with fat, red, 12-gauge cartridges.

“Here, try this,” J.B. said, tossing over a plastic bottle.

Catching the container, Ryan removed the cap then pulled out a handkerchief to liberally douse the cloth with the murky fluid. He passed it over to Krysty, then tied the makeshift mask around his face. Instantly the reek of the place eased noticeably, to be replaced with the sharp, antiseptic sting of witch hazel. It made his nose tickle, but the urge to vomit was seriously reduced.

“Millie hated to waste the witch hazel, but there was no other choice. This place stinks worse than a stickie’s underwear,” J.B. said, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses. “So, did we get the pass?”

“Yes, but we have to leave right now,” Ryan stated, covering his mouth with a hand. “Where’s Mildred?”

“This way,” J.B. said, walking deeper into the reeking building.

Just beyond a pile of rock salt that reached almost to the ceiling was a curtain of red velvet that had probably been salvaged from a movie theater. Pushing it aside, the companions saw only smooth concrete floor and canvas cots. Most of them were filled with limp bodies lying perfectly still in a way no living being could ever duplicate.

At the sight, Doc was stunned speechless. This was also the ville morgue? Reaching into a pocket, the man extracted some beef jerky he had purchased from a street vendor and surreptitiously threw it away. He would rather starve than consume anything processed from this house of horrors.

In the center of the room, several large wooden spools used to carry cable had been tipped over sideways to be used as makeshift tables. Old-fashioned glass lanterns stood on each of them, the alcohol flames turned up all the way to give the maximum amount of light. Surrounded by the tables was a sec man firmly strapped into a chair, and a black woman was standing nearby running the flame of a butane cigarette lighter over the end of a pair of ordinary pliers.

Short and stocky, the woman’s beaded plaits hung to her shoulders and occasionally clattered when she moved. She was dressed in denim jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, and a lumpy canvas satchel hung at her side, the worn fabric bearing the faded lettering M*A*S*H. A police-issue gunbelt circled her waist, the holster supporting a Czech-made .38 ZKR target pistol.

Born in the twentieth century, Dr. Mildred Weyth had gone into the hospital for routine surgery, but something had gone terribly wrong and the attending doctors desperately attempted to save the life of their friend by putting her into an experimental cryogenic freezer unit. A hundred and some odd years later, Mildred awoke to find the nuclear war long over and herself trapped in a never-ending battle for survival in the nightmarish world of what had once been the United States of America.

“Now this is going to hurt,” Mildred said, cutting off the lighter and waving the pliers to cool them down. “But there’s no other way if you ever want to eat meat again. Understand?”

Dumbly, the man nodded, his muscles visibly tightening.

“I don’t know about this,” said a stocky man wearing a bloodstained carpenter’s apron. The loops were filled with different types of knives, homemade probes and car mechanic tools. “I’ve never been able to transplant the teeth from a corpse into a living man before.”

“That’s because you probably waited too long,” Mildred admonished. “Or washed the teeth first. Never do that. Teeth are alive, but if the roots are cleaned of blood they die in moments. You have to remove the bloody teeth from a warm corpse, and hammer them into the gums of the patient as fast as you can. Then lash his mouth shut to keep him from using the teeth for a week. After that, he should be okay.”

“’ow eat wid no ’eeth?” the sec man mumbled.

Mildred smiled tolerantly. “We’ll leave a gap in the front for you to drink soup and water.”

“’hine?” he asked hopefully.

“Absolutely,” she said. “All the damn shine you want.”

“Sorry to interrupt, Millie, but we have to go,” J.B. said, resting a hand on her shoulder.

She shook the man off, intent upon the forthcoming surgery. “In a minute, John,” she answered, examining the bowl of freshly extracted teeth.

“Now, Mildred,” Ryan stated gruffly, stepping closer.

Hearing that tone in his voice, the physician sighed and passed the sterilized pliers to the ville healer. “Wash them with shine afterward. Wash everything with shine, before, after and during.”

“Understood,” he said, touching the pliers with a dirty finger to test their cleanliness.

Sighing deeply, Mildred quickly stuffed the rest of her instruments haphazardly back into her med kit, wished the patient good luck and followed the other companions out of the building. Her instruments, such as they were, could be cleaned and organized later. But first and foremost, the physician had to stay alive. It was a sort of sidestep to the ancient Hippocratic medical code: first, do no harm.

Reaching the bus, the companions checked for anybody loitering nearby, then Ryan rapped on the bumper with the barrel of the SIG-Sauer.

“Hey, Albert,” Ryan said, using the code for all-clear.

“The name’s Adam,” Jak replied, working the handle to open the folding door. As they entered, the teenager wrinkled his nose. “Who-wee! What all been doing? Skinning week-aced-old stickies?”

“I would not at all be surprised if that exact scenario occurred here on a daily basis,” Doc rumbled, taking a seat. “Immediately followed by a dung-fire barbecue.” Rummaging though his backpack, he extracted an MRE food pack and found the tiny lemon-scented moist towelette that came with each U.S. Army meal-ready-to-eat. Removing his handkerchief, the man wiped his face and hands thoroughly, then did it again. Better.

Since Jak was already behind the wheel, Ryan went to the seat directly behind the teenager and settled into place with both of his weapons at the ready. Everybody else took similar positions, and for a moment the wag was filled with the mechanical sounds of bolts being worked and safeties being disengaged.

“Nice and slow,” Ryan advised, placing the Steyr out of sight and pulling out the pass. “Remember, we have the baron’s permission to leave.”

“If only it true,” Jak said, shifting gears and easing in the clutch. The clouds were thick overhead, but they could still see that the masked sun was starting to dip behind the western mountains. One heartbeat after that, the pass would become only a piece of paper again, as useless as a eunuch in a gaudy house.

Rolling along the paved streets, the teenager kept the pace of the wag steady, as if they had all the time in the world. A wrinklie with a crippled leg hobbled along the sidewalk, using his lantern to light the pitch torches set on the corners. The workday was nearly done, and the crowds of ville people were going into the ramshackle huts to start the evening meal.

Passing a group of sec men standing on a corner, Doc tried to smile affably, but they scowled in return, one of the women going so far as to hawk and spit at the vehicle.

“The age of courtesy is dead, and so shall we be, if our egress is long delayed,” Doc muttered, hefting the massive LeMat just below the louvered window. “Make haste with thy chariot, Hermes!”

“For once, the old coot is right,” Mildred said unexpectedly. “Better move it, or lose it!”

“Hear that,” Jak muttered in agreement, shifting into a faster gear.

“J.B., do we have any explos?” Ryan asked, scanning the rooftops.

“Some,” the man replied. “Want me to make some bombs?”

“Just a big one,” Ryan countered grimly. “We’ll try blowing a hole in the wall before we go into the chains.”

“We don’t have enough to breach the ville wall,” J.B. stated honestly.

“Make it anyway,” Ryan ordered, pulling out a butane lighter and setting it on the seat.

The rumbling storm clouds were turning lavender as the bus turned the corner at the barracks and headed for the main gate of Hobart. The wall was massive, as it needed to be this deep in the Deathlands, well over ten feet tall, and made of everything and anything the locals could get their hands on: bricks, pieces of smashed bridges, concrete slabs, wooden logs, cinder blocks, thousands of pieces of broken glass and endless coils of barbed wire. Armed sec men walked patrol along the wide top, and guard towers were situated every hundred feet, the wooden platforms equipped with machine guns. There was no way of knowing if the baron had any brass for the military rapidfires, but only a feeb would put them on the wall otherwise. The gate itself was a composed of railroad beams bolted and chained together into a formidable mass, the outside surface studded with thousands of sharp nails.

Set directly in front of the gate was a sandbag nest blocking the path of any possible invaders. The nest contained armed sec men and two shiny brass Civil War cannons that Doc called Napoleons. Nearby were small wooden barrels of black powder and several low pyramids of dull gray cannon balls.

“They set for war,” Jak said, going around the nest and braking to a halt directly in front of the deadly cannons. He hated to park there, but it was the only way to leave. The baron was a triple-cursed bastard, but not a fool.

Impatiently the companions waited for a sec man wearing sergeant stripes to leave the others and saunter their way. The man was clearly in no hurry, and deliberately took his sweet time crossing the scant few yards.

Somewhere in the ville, a bell began to toll.

“Nobody can leave,” the bored sergeant said as a greeting.

“We got a pass,” Ryan countered, lifting the window to hold out the paper.

Scowling in disbelief, the sergeant took the slip and unfolded the paper, reading it carefully. His cocky smile slowly vanished. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “It’s real!”

“Mind getting a shake on there?” J.B. added, resting an elbow out the window. “We got some business to handle for the baron. And you know how he hates failure.”

“Sure, sure, no prob,” the sergeant replied, then looked up and cupped his hands. “Ahoy, the wall! Open her up!”

“Say what?” a guard yelled down. “Nobody ever leaves, Sarge. You know that!”

“You been smoking wolfweed again, sir?” Another guard laughed.

“I said, open the fragging gate!” the sergeant boomed, a hand going to his blaster. “They have a pass from the baron himself! So move your asses, or you’ll go to the mines!”

That threat clearly startled the sec men, one of them dropping a smoking cig from his slack mouth.

“Yes, sir!” the first guard replied loudly, snapping off a proper salute. The second guard merely dashed into the thickening shadows.

A few moments later there came the sound of a gasoline engine sputtering into life, then rumbling gears, and the titanic gate slowly scraped aside, moving slower than winter ice.

“Be back soon,” Jak cheerfully lied, and shifted gears to casually drive through the widening crack between the gate and the wall. They were less than halfway through when somebody unexpectedly shouted for them to stop.

“Fake!” a sec woman shouted. “The pass is a fake!”

“Chill them!” the sergeant shouted at the top of his lungs, spittle flying from his mouth.

Instantly, Ryan triggered the Steyr, and the woman flipped over backward, her red life spraying into the air. As the rest of the companions opened fire at the sec men behind the sandbags, Jak stomped on the gas pedal and shifted into high gear. The engine paused as it revved to full power, then the armored bus shot forward with a roar, black smoke pouring from the exhaust pipes.

Releasing the handle on the gren, Krysty threw it backward over the bus and it hit the ground to roll a few feet then violently detonate. A score of screaming people clutched their faces, blood gushing from the hundreds of tiny shrapnel wounds.

Twisting the steering wheel hard, Jak guided the wag at an angle where the cannons couldn’t reach. One of the Napoleons thundered anyway, the cannonball humming past the rear of the vehicle and missing by the thickness of an atheist’s prayer.

“Move this heap!” Doc bellowed, holding down the trigger of the single-action LeMat and fanning the hammer with the palm of his other hand. The big-bore blaster fired a fast three times, and two more sec men tumbled into eternity, one of them discharging his own handblaster impotently into the sky.

“It’s a break!” somebody shouted on the wall, and a blaster boomed, sending out a thick cloud of dark smoke.

Something zinged off the roof of the bus, and J.B. responded with a short burst from the Uzi. A man cried out in pain and fell back into the ville.

“Hug the wall!” Mildred shouted, snapping off shots from the ZKR. “The machine guns in the towers can’t reach us there!”

However, a flurry of arrows shot down from the sec men on the wall and something crashed to the ground just behind the bus and exploded into flames.

“But their Molotovs can,” Krysty cursed, her hair flexing wildly. “We can’t risk going all the way around to the pass with those raining down.”

“No choice then. Head for the trees!” Ryan growled, acing a dimly seen figure brandishing another Molotov. The man fell and the bottle shattered, whoofing into a fireball. Standing upright, the man shrieked insanely, his entire body covered with flames. Ryan tracked the man as he dashed around madly, but didn’t waste a brass on acing an enemy who was already on the last train west. Hopefully, the pitiful screams would discourage the other sec men from following his example.

“That’ll put us into range of the machine guns,” Mildred reminded, hastily reloading.

“Got better plan?” Jak asked over a shoulder.

“No!”

“Then hold on to ass!” the albino snarled, and banked away from the safety of the wall.

As the wag streaked across the open grassland, everybody braced for the arrival of machine-gun fire. Nothing happened for almost a full minute, and the speeding bus was nearly at the trees when the ville gate began to lumber aside and out poured a dozen sec men on galloping horses, closely followed by a dozen more.

Chapter Three

Just then, the rapidfires in the guard towers cut loose with a rattling cacophony, the leaves in the trees over the bus exploding in an emerald blizzard.

“Keep the riders between us and the machine guns!” Ryan shouted, firing his longblaster twice. “They’re not going to ace their own people!”

With a cry, a sec man clutched his arm while the horse next to him buckled with a wounded knee. The riders were so tightly packed, the horses collided with one another, sending three more riders down in a tangle of limbs and cursing. However, the rest of the hunting party arched around their fallen brethren and kept coming, bent low over the necks of their horses, now even more grimly intent upon reaching the hated runaways.

As the companions sent hot lead at the sec men, Jak steered the jouncing bus into a swatch of shadows thrown by the ville wall from the setting sun. Once inside the darkness, he hit the headlights to see, then cursed and aced the lights. Their glow would only silhouette the wag and make them a perfect target. The teenager would have to do this the hard way. Shaking his head, Jak sent the sunglasses flying away, then squinted hard into the darkness ahead, starting to zigzag around what seemed to be bushes and tree stumps. Most villes kept the area around their walls completely clear so that an enemy would have nothing to hide behind during an attack. However, one good-size rain gully, or a tree stump, and the bus would be smashed, leaving them stranded and helpless at the mercy of the brutal ville sec force.

Reloading her blaster, Krysty started to aim at the riders once more, when she had the oddest sense of danger from ahead of the bus. Acting on impulse, she flipped on the headlights again, the beams showing a large griz bear sitting directly in the path of the racing vehicle eating a wiggling rabbit with too many legs. Triggering her S&W a fast five times, the woman wounded the giant beast, as Jak arched around it from the other side.

“Why do?” the teenager demanded angrily. A seasoned hunter, the albino teen didn’t chill animals for fun, only for food.

“Watch,” Krysty replied, reloading once more.

Seconds later, the riders encountered the bear. Bellowing a strident roar, it reached out with both paws and slammed two of the sec men out of their saddles to start mauling them. The other riders slowed for only a moment, then resumed their pursuit of the outlanders in the bus. But the gap between the two was significantly wider now.

The rapidfires in the towers spoke again, louder and longer this time, then stopped as the thick greenery of the forest closed over the companions, removing them from sight.

“Okay, give some cover, Doc,” J.B. snarled, biting the fuse on a pipe bomb in two, then flicking alive a butane lighter.

Surging to the rear of the vehicle, Doc yanked aside the locking bar and lifted the rear shutter, then fired the LeMat twice, the booming reports vomiting forth a dark cloud of gunsmoke. Safely out of sight of the riders for a single instant, J.B. quickly lit the fuse and simply dropped the bomb in their wake. Then both men ducked as a fusillade of blasterfire came from the riders, their assortment of handblasters, predark blasters, longblasters, scatterguns and zip guns making them sound like an army. The lead hit the louvered shutters like a hailstorm, rattling them hard and chewing the green wood into splintering ruination. More than one slat broke apart and simply fell away, leaving a wide gap in the protective shield.

“Bah, wooden armor,” Jak snorted, swerving around a tree stump and crashing through a bush to just avoid slamming into an oak tree. There was no road, or even a path, in this direction through the forest, which was both good and bad. The companions would have thicker cover faster, but it also meant they would be traveling a lot slower. Jouncing over a hole, Jak heard a headlight shatter, but kept his boot pressed hard against the rubber floormat. Speed was their only hope now.

“Herd them in!” Ryan yelled, and started shooting from the right side of the bus. Krysty was close behind him doing the same thing, and everybody else went to the left.

Assailed from the sides, the sec men rode their horses a little closer together, then a sec man shouted a warning and they began separating once more. But it was already too late. In a thunderous blast, the pipe bomb violently detonated, throwing aside ragged pieces of men and horses in a boiling hellflower of fiery destruction. A dozen sec men were aced in the explosion and several more thrown from their mounts to slam into the nearby trees, their bones breaking.

Whinnying in terror, the remaining horses reared high, throwing additional sec men to the ground before bolting away, leaving their former masters sprawled unconscious among the dead and the dying. Then the bushes parted as the griz bear arrived, its long teeth shining brightly in the dappled forest.

As the bus rattled away into the greenery, the screaming began and didn’t stop.

“Okay, that should do it,” Ryan stated, working the bolt on the Steyr to clear a spent brass from the breech. “But keep a watch for any stragglers. There were too many of the bastards to count. I have no idea if we got them all.”

“Not catch,” Jak said confidently, turning on the remaining headlight. “They on horseback, we in wag!”

The blue-white light of the halogen beam stabbed into the murky forest, brightly illuminating the trees and bushes. A score of inhuman eyes blinked in surprise at the intrusion, then quickly disappeared, leaving the wag to rattle through the wild greenery in relative peace.

“Hatred always makes a man fast,” J.B. countered, pulling an empty clip from the pocket of his leather jacket to start thumbing in live rounds from the loops on his gunbelt. “And these boys have a real hate-on for us.”

“Then more the fools they,” Doc replied, his hands already busy in the laborious process of reloading his black-powder blaster. A stiff brass brush first purged each chamber in the cylinder, the spent powder sprinkling down like black snow. Next, he began to carefully charge each chamber.

“We’re probably the first people to ever leave the ville in ages,” Krysty added, leaning back in the seat, her hair moving against the wind blowing in through the louvered shutters. She was still rather tired from the single instant of mentally sensing the unseen danger of the bear. Gaia offered her followers many gifts, but afterward the woman was always exhausted. Krysty really wanted to catch some sleep, but that would have to wait until they were inside the underground redoubt, safe behind the nukeproof blast doors.

“Yeah, we’re gonna have to do something about Hobart one of these days,” Ryan stated, taking down a canteen and unscrewing the top to take a long drink. The water was warm, but it cut the tang of the gunsmoke from his throat.

“Derby Joe?” J.B. asked, holding out a hand.

Nodding, Ryan passed over the canteen. If Baron Harrison was turning into a slaver, that was bad enough, as Hobart was fairly close to Front Royal. However, Joe had also run with the Trader, the same as Ryan and J.B., and the man might know where their former boss had hidden his caches of predark supplies—weapons, wags, fuel, even some nerve gas. Front Royal was heavily defended, but those predark mil supplies could easily tip the outcome in favor of Harrison if the man ever decided to expand his territory.

“Don’t want to ace Joe,” J.B. said, taking a drink, then putting the cap back on with a twist. “But if we have to make a choice, my vote goes to Front Royal.”

“Indeed, sir, as does mine,” Doc intoned, finally holstering the LeMat. “Blood must be defended. Your nephew, my dear Ryan, is family.”

“Speaking of blood, is anybody hurt?” Mildred demanded, looking over the companions. They were slumped in their seats, loose brass rolling on the floor-mats under their boots. But nobody was showing any red, or seemed to be cradling a wounded limb. Good enough.

Softly a wolf howled in the distance, and then quite unexpectedly the forest ended. Flat grassland stretched ahead of the wag, the single halogen beam bobbing along to illuminate tufted tops of the low weeds and reeds.

“Where now?” Jak asked, relaxing slightly in his chair.

“Tell you in a sec,” J.B. answered, pulling a compass out of his munitions bag. Impatiently the man waited for the spinning needle to settle down. “Okay, we’re heading due west toward the Sorrow River, so head to your right. We should see the foothills in about fifty or sixty miles.”

It was closer to a hundred miles, and dawn was tinting the eastern sky when the tired companions encountered the foothills of the Rockies. Before skydark rearranged the topography of much of the world, these mountains had dwarfed the Darks. But the rain of nuclear bombs had hammered the Rockies down to merely rolling hills, occasionally adorned with a live volcano.

Retracing their original route down from the hills, the companions found the small section of predark road that still existed along the edge of a ragged cliff. The crevice was deep, the bottom lost from sight by the mist of a nameless river not on J.B.’s predark map. Just more nuke-scaping, as Mildred liked to call it. A hundred cars and trucks were piled in jumbled heaps on the road, some of them in fairly decent condition, the all-destroying acid rain cut off from reaching them by an overhang of solid granite that extended from the hills like the eager hand of a beggar.

This was where the companions had found the necessary parts to assemble the bus in the first place for the long journey to Front Royal. Now, it was where they had to leave it. If Baron Harrison sent more sec men after the companions, or worse, those mountain hunters, the tire tracks could easily lead them someplace the companions didn’t want anybody else alive to know about—a redoubt.

Buried deeply underground and powered by nuclear reactors, the massive military bunkers were proof to the killing radiation of the ancient bombs, but more importantly were interconnected with a series of mat-trans units, top secret machines that allowed people to jump from one redoubt to another in a matter of seconds, no matter how far apart they were located. Sometimes Ryan and his people found clothing, tools or edible food in the rooms of the subterranean bases. Occasionally there were caches of condensed fuel and working vehicles, or even better, military weapons, a vital necessity for maintaining life. But most importantly, the mat-trans units gave the group mobility, the ability to quickly escape a dangerous area as they searched for some small section of America that could someday again be called home.

“Everybody out,” Jak said, pulling the lever to open the door.

It resisted at first, the frame bent slightly from the ride through the forest, but the albino teen put some muscle into the task and the door finally yielded, squealing loudly as it cycled aside for the very last time.

Gathering their belongings, the companions clambered outside, adjusting their clothing against the morning chill. Winter was coming soon, even though it was early August.

“Hate to let her go,” Mildred said, affectionately patting the battered machine. “Took us a week to build her.”

“Can’t leave it for the others to use,” Ryan said, his breath visible in the cold air. “Remember when we were attacked by the Leviathan? I’m not going to let that happen again.” Lifting a louvered shield, the man reached in through the window and yanked the gear-shift into neutral, then released the handbrake. The bus rolled back a few inches, then stopped.

“Okay, put your shoulders to it, people!” Krysty ordered, flexing her hands.

All together, the companions started pushing and soon got the wag creeping along. Slowly, it began to build some speed along the slight incline, and they promptly let it go. Steadily gathering speed, the homemade war wag rattled and clattered as it jounced along the cracked pavement until reaching the end of the cliff. Sailing off the edge, it began to tumble end over end, and they watched as it vanished into the white mists below. If there was an explosion when the wag crashed, nobody could hear it over the murmur of the unseen river.

“Now we walk,” Ryan said, shifting his backpack to a more comfortable position.

It was noon by the time they reached the small arroyo set amid a craggy span of outcroppings. There was nothing to mark any of them as special in any way.

Drawing their weapons, the companions assumed combat formation and eased into the arroyo, half expecting to be ambushed at every step. It had happened once before, and they were grimly determined that it would never happen again. Jak stayed in the rear and used a tree branch to erase their footprints.

At the end of the arroyo a huge black door towered more than twenty feet high, the metal as smooth and perfect as the day it had rolled out of the foundry more than a hundred years earlier.

An old enemy of the companions had boasted that nothing known to modern science could damage the blast doors of a redoubt. Ryan and J.B. had no reason to doubt the statement, but privately they had discussed whether an implo gren might do the trick. However, that was an experiment neither man wished to try unless it was absolutely necessary, and even then they’d want to be very far away from the event.

Going to a small keypad set into the jamb, Ryan tapped in the access code. There was a pause, then the colossal door rumbled aside to the sound of smoothly working hydraulics. Now exposed was a long, dark corridor, the terrazzo floor clean of any dust or dirt, much less scratches or wear.

A warm breeze wafted over the companions as they stepped through the opening, and at the touch of their boots on the floor, the overhead lights flickered into life bathing the entryway and showing the first of many turns. Ryan quickly pressed the required code to close the blast door.

Warily, the companions watched for the strings they had rigged just before leaving the redoubt to see if anybody, or anything, had gotten inside the subterranean fortress. But the strings were intact.

“We are alone,” Doc said with a sigh, holstering the LeMat. “It would seem that the only real danger in this redoubt is hunger.”

Ruefully, the others agreed. The contents of each redoubt were different, and this one had been particularly annoying. The arsenal had been well stocked with automatic rifles, but no ammunition whatsoever. There were hundreds of pairs of combat boots, without laces, while the pantry was full of condiments—salt, pepper, catsup, mustard and such—but no actual food, and the freezers were working perfectly, endlessly making ice cubes.

“At least Millie didn’t have to make some more of her infamous boot soup.” J.B. chuckled, nudging the woman.

Trying to hide a smile, Mildred nudged him back. “Don’t complain, John. It kept us alive long enough to find real food.”

“Tasted like used sock.” Jak snorted, then felt his stomach flip at the realization that that was an accurate description.

Past the last turn, the companions finally entered the top level of the redoubt. The garage was huge, fully capable of parking dozens of civilian wags, or half that number of bulky military vehicles. Except that the rows of parking spaces were empty, devoid of even an oil stain. Workbenches lined the wall, the pegboard covered with the silhouettes of tools to show exactly where each one should go. But the board was empty, along with tool cabinets and drawers. There wasn’t a spare fuse in the garage, much less any engine parts. Even the supposedly limitless fuel depot had proved dry. The pumps worked fine, but only delivered a stale air that smelled faintly of chems. Whether the stripping of the base had occurred when the military personnel departed, or long afterward by some intruder, nobody could say. It didn’t matter. Empty was empty, the details of who and when were thoroughly unimportant.

“I was looking forward to a shower,” Krysty said, stroking her flexing hair. “But we might as well jump, and then wash at the next redoubt.”

“Sounds good to me,” Ryan stated gruffly, rubbing his stomach. “Mildred, what’s the food situation?”

“Nine cans of stew, one self-heat of hash, four assorted MRE packs and a couple of smoked gophers that should be good for another week or so,” she replied, without even glancing into her backpack. “I was expecting to purchase more food at Hobart, but after seeing their slaughterhouse…” She gave a shiver and didn’t bother to finish the sentence.

“Gopher.” Jak frowned, putting a wealth of meaning into the single word.

“Agreed, my young friend. If our choices are gopher for dinner, or risk a jump, then suddenly a journey through the mat-trans sounds like an exceptionally fine idea,” Doc declared, casting a sad glance at a soda machine standing mute in the corner. Just like the fuel pumps, it still worked, but the hoppers were empty. “I always did like the odd taste of Dr Pepper,” he said unexpectedly.

“Me, too,” Mildred said in surprise. “Good Lord, we actually agree on something?”

He shrugged. “It had to happen eventually, mad am.”

“Not had,” Jak replied, dropping his backpack onto the floor in front of the elevator. “Taste like shine or caf?”

The man and woman exchanged glances, each completely unable to even vaguely explain the amazingly complex mixture of flavors of the delicious predark soda.

Tapping for the call button, Ryan was pleased when the elevator doors opened immediately, the cage having waited there patiently for them for the past few weeks. It was another good indication that the redoubt was totally deserted. Some of the underground bases had devices that provided protection from unauthorized intruders, and the companions were as unauthorized as they could possibly be. More than once they had encountered a sec hunter droid, a robotic guardian. The machines came in several different types, each more lethal than the next, and were hard to chill. True, J.B. had a stash of pipe bombs, but it was highly doubtful those homemade bombs would be powerful enough to stop one of the deadly machines. Running away was usually the best tactic. Except that this time, the companions had nowhere to run but another redoubt.

Stepping over the threshold, Ryan waited until the rest of the companions had hurried inside before hitting the button for the middle level. The ride down was smooth, silent and uneventful.

Leaving the elevator, they proceeded down a long corridor lined with doors and entered a room full of comps. On the other side was another door. Stepping through the doorway, the companions closed the portal behind them and walked across a small antechamber to the mat-trans unit.

“Okay, this time we each take a drink before leaving,” Mildred directed, holding aloft a canteen.

The battered container sloshed as she removed the cap. There came a strong smell of coffee, shine and something sweet. For some time now Mildred had been working on a remedy for the jump sickness that always hit some of the companions after arriving at their destination. So far, the physician had achieved scant success, but she still tried.

“What is this, coffee and…honey?” Krysty asked, taking a sniff.

“Close enough. The best results I ever had against jump sickness was with a crude form of Irish coffee,” Mildred said apologetically. “I figure the relaxing effects of the shine, combined with the mental stimulant of the caffeine in the coffee, is what does the trick. But since I don’t know how these damn things work, it’s just a guess.” She gave a wan smile. “For all I know it could be the water content that keeps us from getting dehydrated, and the sugar.”

“Credo qua ab, sur dom est!” Doc announced dramatically.

Mentally, the physician translated the garbled Latin into, “I believe you, because the idea is absurd.” She wanted to snap back at the time traveler, but sadly, he was right.

One at a time, the companions took a drink, then stepped into the hexagonal chamber and found a spot to sit. There was an alphanumeric keypad set into the wall where a person could tap in the code for their next destination, but since they had never found a directory, Ryan, the last person in, closed the gateway door, which would automatically trigger a random jump.

White mist flooded the chamber, swirling around the companions, faster and faster. A powerful hum started to build as tiny sparks appeared inside the mist like a billion imprisoned stars, then the floor seemed to vanish and the companions dropped through infinity, accelerating beyond logic and reason. Each of them had related that it sometimes felt as if their skin pulled away from the bones, and that knives shot painfully through their bodies, piercing every organ. Other times there was no pain, but the companions experienced vivid jump “nightmares.”

Slowly, the noise faded, and there was only the sound of the friends’ harsh breathing. But a few minutes later a warm breeze started to blow from the wall vents, the sterilized air helping considerably to revive them.

“Eas…easy…jump.” Ryan coughed, then stopped talking as his stomach roiled, its contents threatening to leave.

Concentrating on his breathing, Ryan managed to ride out the usual wave of nausea and carefully sat up to inspect the others. Everybody else seemed fine, just limp and exhausted, but that was how they always arrived. Except for Doc and Jak. For some reason the jumps hit them harder than the others, and Doc was sprawled on the floor, clearly unconscious.

“At least…not bad sick,” Jak panted, wiping some drool off his face. “New juice helped.”

“Th-thanks. B-but I h-have no f-fragging idea if it h-helped or not…” Mildred wheezed, laying on her back to stare at the ceiling. She knew the unit was motionless, but it felt like it was spinning around and around, and standing at that moment was completely impossible.

It was often this way after a jump, and it took the companions several minutes to recover, during which they were almost completely unable to defend themselves. As a physician, Mildred thought this was a purely natural reaction, merely random synapses firing in their brains from being reduced to their component molecules being disassembled. Doc philosophically considered it merely a side effect of their disintegrated bodies being without a soul for a little while until it found them again at the new destination. Mildred considered that total nonsense, of course. However, as a scientist, she was forced to honestly admit there really was no way of knowing for sure which answer was correct. Or if the truth was somewhere in the middle, a sublime combination of both answers, with maybe another element unknown to either science or religion.

With a low groan, Ryan forced himself to stand, one scarred hand pressed to the smooth wall to help him remain upright. In a sheer effort of will, the one-eyed man took a shuffling step forward, then collapsed inadvertently on the lever that opened the door to the mat-trans unit. The portal opened, spilling Ryan into the antechamber. Blinking hard to clear his vision, he looked up to see that the armaglass walls of the mat-trans were colored a pale flesh tone with a diagonal black stripe. The theory was that each mat-trans was different so that a traveler instantly knew where he or she had arrived, but that was only a guess. The redoubts were as jammed full of the mysterious as they were advanced technology.

“Peach and black,” Ryan muttered, brushing back his damp hair. “We’ve never been here before.” A quick look showed no one lying in wait, but oddly the door leading to the control room was a closed oval hatch.

Sluggishly joining his friend, J.B. removed his glasses from the shirt pocket where he always put them for safekeeping during a jump.

“Yeah, this is a new redoubt,” he said, a gloved hand resting on top of the Uzi machine pistol. The man wasn’t sure if he had the strength to control the bucking 9 mm Israeli blaster, but it was better to have a blaster ready and not need it than the other way around.

Surreptitiously, Mildred made a note of the colors in her journal. Someday the information might come in handy.

“Something’s wrong here,” Krysty said with a scowl, a hand going to the blaster at her side. The woman seemed perfectly normal, but then she had always recovered faster than anybody else.

“Yeah, I feel, too,” Jak said, a knife dropping into his palm from a sleeve as his other hand drew the .357 Magnum Colt Python. “Sound wrong.”

“Then let us…” Doc began but broke into a ragged cough that drove the old man back to his knees. “Proceed…with care…” he whispered, using both hands to draw the huge LeMat and clumsily cock back the trigger.

“Better stay in the mat-trans,” Ryan decided, feeling the strength returning to his body. “If we come back with a droid on our ass, I want a backup here.”

“C-consider me…Balador on the…rainbow bridge…” Doc wheezed, then managed a smile. “None shall…pass.”

“Crazy old coot,” Mildred snorted, then passed the man the canteen again. “Here, finish it off, the coffee will do you a world of good.”

Nodding his gratitude, Doc holstered his weapon and accepted the canteen to start sipping at the contents with obvious pleasure. Slowly, some color began to return to his pale face.

Turning away, Ryan saw that J.B. was already at the oval door hatch, checking for traps.

“Clear,” he reported.

“Okay, friends. Triple red.”

Pulling out his SIG-Sauer, Ryan pressed down the lever that operated the oval door and it silently swung aside. Then with a snarl, the man instantly stepped backward, dropping into a crouch.

In the next room several big men in U.S. Navy uniforms operated the controls of the humming comps, M-16 assault rifles slung across their backs.

Chapter Four

Ryan swung up his longblaster, but before he could fire, the sailors at the work stations began to sag, then shrivel, their bodies wasting away in moments until there was nothing left of them but some grinning skeletons in perfectly preserved uniforms.

Giving a low whistle, Ryan waited until J.B. took a position behind him, his Uzi at the ready. Moving slowly forward, Ryan eased into the control room, his eye sweeping the interior for anything suspicious. But everything was as it was supposed to be, aside from the uniformed skeletons.

While the air vents sucked away the swirling cloud of dust, Ryan studied the comp. He had no idea what the twinkling lights on the console meant, but after so many jumps, he could tell when they took on a new pattern, which always meant trouble. Thankfully, it was the standard sequence.

Going to the opposite door, Ryan listened for any movement in the corridor. Hearing none, he tapped the standard code into the keypad. The door slid open and he sneaked a peek outside. Dozens of corpses wearing Navy uniforms were on the floor, each in the process of crumbling from the infusion of fresh air coming from the vents.

Ryan then turned to find the rest of his companions already in the control room. Krysty and Jak were standing guard, while Mildred and J.B. checked the clothing and blasters.

“This man…excuse me, this woman, was a lieutenant in Navy Intelligence,” Mildred said, fingering the rank insignia. “While this fellow was a corporal in the Navy SEALs and the other man was a pilot in the Navy Air Corps.”

“If this isn’t a bastard ship, then we must be at a Navy base,” Ryan stated, thoughtfully rubbing his jaw. “Or at least, damn close to a base.” That was good news. The Navy always stored tons of extra supplies in their bases. With any luck, dinner would be beef stew, not gopher surprise—surprise, it’s gopher again.

“These weapons are in fine shape,” J.B. noted, working the arming bolt on one of the M-16 assault rifles to cycle a round out the ejector port. “The springs in the clips are weak, but still functional, and aside from that these rapidfires should work without any trouble. There’s no rust at all on the brass from the dry air.”

“Dead air,” Mildred corrected him. “I suspect that in this redoubt, when the sensors don’t detect anything alive inside, the computers flood the base with inert gas to retard any corrosion or chemical decompositions.”

“Which is why the bodies were in such good shape until we activated the life support system,” Ryan guessed.

“Quite so,” Doc rumbled from the other side of the oval door. “Apparently even the conqueror worm is humbled before the iron law of science.”

“Amen to that,” Mildred said with a half smile.

Bemused, Doc grunted in reply.

“Any spare clips?” Krysty asked.

“Plenty,” J.B. replied, opening an ammo pouch on the belt. “Five, no six. Mixed rounds, solid lead, HEAT and tumblers.”

“Expecting trouble,” Jak stated, holstering his Colt Python. “Still might come. I take.”

After adding a few precious drops of homogenized gun oil to the rapidfire, J.B. passed two of the rapidfires and ammo pouches to Jak and Krysty, then gave another to Mildred. With sure hands, the three companions checked the assault rifles for themselves. The action was a little slow, and the trigger kind of stiff, but aside from that the weapons were in fine shape and ready for battle.

“Damn, barrel blocked,” Jak said, looking through the weapon at the ceiling lights. Shaking the assault rifle, he saw a slim roll of tightly wound paper fall onto the floor. Why hide cig? the albino teen wondered, then took a sniff. This wasn’t tobacco, but maryjane! Jak started to tuck the joint into a shirt pocket, but the pressure of his fingers made it crumble into loose leaves and ancient dust.

“No loss. It would have tasted awful,” Mildred said with a knowing wink. “Wine and whiskey age well. Weed does not.”

“And exactly how do you know that, madam?” Doc asked accusingly.

“Ah…I had glaucoma in high school.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Dead air, or not, we still need to do a sweep of the base to make sure that we’re alone,” Ryan stated, entering the code to open the door, as it had automatically closed behind him. He entered the corridor again. As expected, the vents had finished their task and the clouds of desiccated human flesh were gone. Now, only loose clothing and skeletons dotted the entire length of the corridor. One figure lay blocking an open doorway, a petrified doughnut in his hand with a single bite taken.

“These folks died fast,” Ryan stated, scowling at the grim sight. “Think it was some sort of plague?”

“No disease I know kills this quickly,” Mildred said, hefting the assault rifle to try to find a comfortable position. “Not even the genetically created plagues.”

“Rad leak?” Jak asked nervously.

Both Ryan and J.B. checked the rad counters clipped to their lapels.

“Clear,” J.B. announced. “Not even a trace of rad.”

Mildred bit her lip. “My guess would be that a gas of some kind did this.”

“Nerve gas took out an entire redoubt?” Doc asked, shocked. “Is that even theoretically possible, madam? I mean, with all of the automatic safeguards of a redoubt?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” J.B. added, pushing back his fedora to scratch his head.

“Well, the gas must be long gone by now, or else we’d be facedown on the floor,” Krysty stated, the rapidfire balanced in her hands. “Where next, lover?”

“Armory,” Ryan stated, heading for the stairs. “If this was done by nerve gas, that’s the most likely storage place. We better make sure that whatever leaked is completely empty.”

“Before we, too, join the choir invisible,” Doc rumbled, glancing nervously at a wall vent.

Nobody commented on that dire possibility as they followed Ryan along the corridor. The skeletons were everywhere, and the companions had to exercise care to not tromp on any of the bony hands. Every room they passed had more bones, some of them merely scattered piles, while others were lying neatly tucked into their beds, holding a clipboard or working at a comp or listening to music.

Once, very long ago, the companions had found a redoubt with eerie sounds playing over the intercom. But instead of a half-crazed survivor, it had proved to only be a music CD still trying to play reveille after a century. But this redoubt was disturbingly still. Quite literally, the quiet of a grave.

In the ward room, five sailors in pants and T-shirts were sitting around a table, a game of poker in progress. Several more were on a sofa watching a TV monitor now showing only static. One fellow wearing glasses was reading a paperback novel, while another died on the toilet, a yellow newspaper lying nearby bearing the precise date of the nuclear doomsday.

“Brass by ton,” Jak said happily, noting the countless array of sidearms worn by the skeletons. Most of the officers seemed to carrying 9 mm Glock blasters, but the guards were armed with Colt .45s, the regulation gunbelts holding a standard four spare clips. Those were the best; the Colt was a brutal little manstopper that could blow the head off a stickie at fifty yards.

Unfortunately the stairs were choked with uniforms, or rather, loose piles of bones that were still tumbling down the steps now that the last vestiges of flesh holding them in place were gone. With no choice, the companions took the elevator to the armory level. Two of the cages were full of skeletons, but the third was empty.

“This is rather unnerving,” Mildred said, watching a sec camera in the corner of the ceiling steadily move back and forth. The people were all aced, but the machines continued to function on whatever was their last setting.

“Be a lot worse if somebody had activated a sec hunter droid before collapsing,” J.B. countered, pulling out a pipe bomb and tucking it into his belt for fast access.

Without comment, Ryan reached up and yanked out the power cord of the vidcam, the red indicator fading to black.

“How many of those do we have, John Barrymore?” Doc asked pointedly, gesturing at the explosive charge with the barrel of his LeMat.

“Just the one.”

“Then pray, make it count, my friend.”

“That was the plan, Doc.”

Reaching the fifth level, Ryan and the others found the main hallway clear of bodies. But that was only to be expected. Combat personnel didn’t lounge around the armory for fun.

Located at the end of the hall was a massive armored door, a truncated cone of layered steel and titanium that not even a laser could burn through. Luckily, the formidable barrier was ajar, a skeleton lying across the threshold, holding a clipboard of ancient papers, a CD player clipped to his belt.

“Hmm, he had good taste in music,” Mildred said, reading the title through the clear plastic.

“Beethoven?” Doc asked curiously.

“Billy Joel.”

The companions stepped over the bones and into the armory.

“Good God!” Mildred gasped.

Turning fast, Ryan had his blaster out and ready, but then he blinked in surprise and slowly smiled. Jackpot.

Many of the armories the companions found were completely bare, not even a scrap of paper remaining behind. Sometimes they found a few loose rounds under a shelf, or a single live gren left behind when the base personnel departed before or after skydark, heading for, well, wherever they had gone a hundred years earlier. None of the companions had ever discovered where all of the people had gone, or even had a plausible theory. But this armory seemed to never have been touched. It was completely full, literally stocked to the rafters.

The companions couldn’t speak for a minute at the miraculous sight of dozens of pallets filling the room, the wall shelves jammed full of supplies. There were also endless racks of M-16 assault rifles, M-203 combination assault rifles, 40 mm gren launchers, M-60 machine guns, even bulky .50-machine guns too heavy for a person to carry, much less fire and remain standing. There were entire rows of plastic drums marked as containing ammunition, and pallet after pallet of sturdy plastic boxes that the companions knew contained grens, and even LAW rocket launchers. It was the military might of the predark world spread out in front of their astonished eyes like a holiday feast.

“Nuke me, this redoubt was never emptied after skydark!” J.B. cried happily. “The people must have died just before the evacuation order came.”

“Fully stocked redoubt,” Jak muttered. “More than we dream finding!” For the normally laconic teenager, that was an extraordinarily long speech.

“Thank you, Gaia,” Krysty whispered.

“Not even that deep storage locker in New Mex had this much ordnance,” Mildred agreed, already looking around for any medical supplies. Sometimes, field packs were stored in the armory along with the weaponry.

“All right, fill your pockets, but nothing more,” Ryan ordered brusquely, resting the stock of the Steyr on a hip. “Krysty and I will stand guard. Don’t weigh yourself down for the rest of the sweep. We can come back later and take what we want.”

Instantly the rest of the companions separated, walking swiftly through the stocks and piles, checking the numbers on the countless sealed containers and mentally translating those into descriptions. Boots, combat, size ten, for use of. Milk, powdered, vitamin fortified, for daily consumption. HazMat suits, Level 10, hazardous materials: antinuclear, antibacteriological, antichemical.

Going to a wall cabinet, Mildred pulled it open to find a stack of boxes full of MRE food packs. Grinning widely, she went to a nearby pallet and grabbed a nylon duffel bag, then returned to start packing the shiny Mylar envelopes. There was beef stew, veal parmesan, meat loaf and mac and cheese. Pausing for only a second, the woman removed the smoked gopher from her backpack and unceremoniously deposited it into a waste chute.

Eagerly, Doc went in search of trade goods. Among the thousand and one things stored in the redoubts, the predark government had considered the fact that some sort of crude civilization might arise from the nuclear ashes of America all by itself, so the base personnel would need trinkets to trade with the survivors outside. The companions had found such things before and they were always tremendously useful, such as unbreakable pocket combs, Swiss Army knives, Bowie knives, plastic mirrors, pots and pans, rain ponchos, fishing hooks and, of course, lots of weapons. Mostly battle axes, shields and swords. The Pentagon had clearly expected civilization to fall all the way down to true barbarism, but sometimes there were also black-powder weapons, which was what Doc wanted. Especially the tiny copper nipples full of fulminating mercury that the Civil War–era .44 LeMat used as primers. He never had enough of those.

Unfortunately, Doc was unable to find any such items on this initial pass, and consoled himself with a Webley .44 revolver and a cardboard box containing fifty live rounds.

Meanwhile J.B. was having trouble restraining himself from taking everything in sight, and was snagging only a few choice items, several sticks of TNT and a box of detonator caps, a small coil of primacord, a fistful of waterproof timing pencils and items for pipe bombs. Then the man paused at the sight of a wall safe. A safe inside a vault?

Mentally crossing his fingers, J.B. went to work on the combination lock and soon it yielded with a soft click. Turning the handle, J.B. opened the door and stopped breathing. A portable lockbox filled the safe, and he removed it as gingerly as if defusing a land mine. Placing it on the floor, J.B. used his knife to trick the lock, then lifted the lid. There nestled in the soft, gray foam, were six implo grens, the most powerful predark weapon invented by the human race. It worked just like a regular gren: pull the safety pin, release the arming lever and throw. But instead of an explosion, the gren created a gravity whirlpool, an implosion that could condense an Abrams tank to the size of an orange in less than a microsecond. With these at their command, the companions no longer had to worry about sec hunter droids, or much of anything else, for that matter.

Quickly rummaging in his munitions bag, J.B. found some duct tape and securely attached the arming lever of each gren before transferring it to his bag. The weight was considerable, but the man had never seen this many implo grens.

Affectionately patting the leather bag, J.B. proudly started back to find Ryan when he saw something twinkle out of the corner of his sight. Twinkle? Oh shit.

Frantically grabbing for an implo gren, J.B. sniffed hard for any trace of ozone, but the air in the armory was warm and flat, sterilized and purified until it was completely without any taste or flavor.

With the gren clenched tight in a fist, J.B. crept around a pallet stacked high with plastic boxes containing M-4 rifles, to stop dead in his tracks. There was a small alcove directly ahead of the man, thick metal bars sealing it off from the rest of the armory. Set into the metal was an alphanumeric keypad similar to the type used to open the redoubt’s door, and behind the bars were a dozen crystalline containers, inside of which was a swirling white cloud filled with sparkling lights. The sight almost made him drop the gren.

“Cerberus clouds,” J.B. whispered, the soft words somehow sounding louder than thunder.

Backing away slowly, J.B. tried not to breathe, the terrible sight of the inhuman slayers filling his world. Just for a second, the man looked at the implo gren in his hand, then realized in cold reality that if the charge didn’t chill all of the clouds at once, he and the rest of the companions would be in for the fight of their lives.

When their old boss the Trader had first discovered the existence of the redoubts, the entranceway had been guarded by a cloud that bit, and chilled. Over time, the companions learned the inhuman guardian of some of the redoubts was called a Cerberus cloud, and aside from an implo gren, the friends knew the things were virtually indestructible. The clouds were sentient, or at least they acted that way, but if it was only a software program running into their vaporous minds, or if they were truly alive, who knew? Certainly no one alive in Deathlands. What was known for a fact was that they ruthlessly aced unauthorized personnel inside a redoubt.

Going back around the pallet full of M-4 rifles, J.B. never took his sight off the crystal jars while he softly whistled like a nightingale. Immediately everybody else in the armory stopped talking, and soon the others were alongside the man, their weapons primed for combat.

“Trouble?” Ryan asked, looking around.

“See for yourself,” J.B. whispered, indicating a direction with his chin. The implo gren was still in his fist, the tape removed from the arming lever, a finger in the safety ring.

Starting forward, the companions paused at the first twinkle of light. While Ryan and Jak sniffed hard, Krysty tried to sense anything unusual, Mildred held out a mirror to see around the stack of boxes, and Doc stepped onto the pallet to sneak a peek over the top.

“By all that is holy, a Cerberus cloud!” Doc whispered in a strained voice. “No, by thunder, it is six of the Hellish constructs!”

“Jars of Cerberus clouds,” Mildred said in awe. “This must be how they transported the damn things.”

“Use implo gren,” Jak suggested. “Use all.”

“And what if there are more of these things that we haven’t found yet?” Mildred asked, trying to ignore the tingling sensation on the back of her neck. The physician knew it was only a psychological reaction to the tense situation, but her hackles still wanted to rise in preparation of immediate flight.

The teenager scowled at the possibility, and hunched his shoulders as if getting ready to charge the clouds.

“Okay, people, fall back by the numbers,” Ryan commanded softly, walking backward on the toes of his combat boots, trying not to make any noise.

The rest of the companions closely followed his example, and the group carefully retraced its path through the massive armory until reaching the entrance again. Quickly, Ryan and Krysty removed the old bones from the threshold, and anxiously waited while the massive door cycled shut then rotated slightly to firmly lock.

“All right, if those clouds come alive, this’ll buy us some time,” Ryan said, slinging the Steyr over a shoulder. “But we better haul ass out of here, just in case.”

“Jump?” Jak asked succinctly.

“No,” Ryan decided. “We’ll check outside first. See where we are before we do another blind jump.”

“A wise choice, my dear Ryan,” Doc said. “To be honest, I am still feeling somewhat queasy from our last impromptive sojourn through the ethereal void.”

“And without any more of Millie’s juice, we’ll probably arrive puking out our guts this time,” J.B. added, glancing at the ceiling. “Mebbe we can drive out of here. Should be lots of wags in the garage upstairs just waiting to be used.”

“Wherever the nuke we are,” Krysty retorted, starting for the elevator banks in a long stride.

Along the way, J.B. passed an implo gren to each of the others. That way, in case he got chilled, they would still have a fighting chance to survive.

Piling into the cage, the companions started for the top level of the redoubt, each of them feeling slightly more at ease the farther they got from the armory. Six Cerberus clouds. They would have been happier finding a roomful of rampaging stickies.

Arriving at the garage, the companions were delighted to find the place full of vehicles: civilian wags, vans, trucks and some motorcycles. There was even a score of military wags: trucks, Hummers, several armored-personnel carriers, and even a couple of LARC amphibious transports. Even better, the worktables were covered with equipment, the pegboard walls festooned with tools of every description. Unfortunately, each APC seemed to have been undergoing some serious maintenance on the transmissions. There were numerous skeletons in greasy coveralls bent over the exposed diesel engines, tools and spare parts scattered across on the floor.

Over by the fuel pump, skid marks on the floor revealed that a big GMC truck had clearly come out of the tunnel too fast and lost control, desperately trying to brake to a halt before crashing. However, the driver failed, and the big Jimmy had plowed into an SUV, the two vehicles then smashing a Hummer into the wall.

“And there is the source of the nerve gas,” Mildred stated, running stiff fingers though her beaded plaits.

In the rear compartment of the crashed Hummer was a large equipment trunk securely strapped into place. But the crash had snapped the restraining straps and popped the locks, allowing some of the containers inside to tumble out. Their broken valves lay nearby, the concrete severely discolored from the escaping contents. The containers were small, hardly larger than a fire extinguisher, and painted a very bright yellow with a black skull and crossbones painted on the side, along with the universal logo of a biohazard.

“I stand corrected. It wasn’t nerve gas, but some type of a plague.” Mildred scowled in open hatred. “It must have been airborne to spread so quickly through the entire redoubt before the scrubbers cleaned the air.”

“Germ warfare,” Doc snarled. “The most foul and cowardly of weapons!” Doc had read hundreds of books during his stay in the twentieth century, and he had been astonished by man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.

“We safe?” Jak asked in an even tone. If the teen was frightened, there was no sign of it in his calm demeanor.

“Safe? Oh, absolutely,” Mildred stated, her shoulders easing. “There’s not a plague in existence that could survive a hundred years in such a sterile environment.”

“That you know about,” Krysty countered, her hair coiling protectively around her face.

Without comment, the physician shrugged. The world was full of unknown dangers. That was just part of life.

“Any way to check, see if the plague is still live?” J.B. asked, taking the stub of a cigar from his shirt pocket and tucking it into the corner of his mouth.

“No, John. Afraid not.”

“Damn,” the man muttered. In spite of Mildred’s disapproving look, he used a butane lighter to light the cigar and take a deep drag. “Frag it then. We’re still standing, and that’s good enough.”

“Agreed,” Ryan declared. “Krysty and Doc, find the least damaged APC, see what needs to be done and start the repairs if you can. Jak and Mildred, start filling gas cans, and find some extra engine oil. Those wags burn it like crazy. J.B. and I will go outside and see where we are.”

Everybody began to hustle, but as the two men headed for the exit tunnel the elevator doors unexpectedly closed and the cage began to nosily descend. That caught everybody by surprise as there was nobody else in the redoubt to summon the elevator…

Chapter Five

“Gaia, the clouds must be loose!” Krysty cursed, pulling out an implo gren.

Spinning, Ryan raced toward the elevator bank. “Forget the outside recce! Doc, grab some fuel! Everybody else, find something that rolls, any mother bastard thing, and let’s haul ass!”

Everybody exploded into action. Bitter experience had taught them that a Cerberus could move faster than a running man, so a wag was their only hope of escape. However, the garage was full of vehicles, most of them in pitiful shape despite the inert gas that had filled the redoubt. The civilian wags were the worst with flat tires that had deflated over the years, and many were situated over dark puddles that might once have been engine oil, but now was closer in consistency to tar. Those vehicles were ignored and the companions concentrated on the mil wags, each choosing something different.

Reaching the working elevator, Ryan rammed his panga into the rubber seal between the two doors and managed to force them apart by sheer strength. Instantly the cage stopped moving. That bought them a few moments, and every second counted now.

Scrambling to the workbench, J.B. grabbed a welding torch and wheeled it over to the stairwell door. It took him a few tries to get the equipment working, then the rod gushed out flame. Narrowing that into a white-hot stiletto, J.B. expertly moved the torch along the edge of the metal door, feeding in a melting iron rod to try to create an air-tight seal.

Risking a glance down the shaft, Ryan heard nothing moving inside the cage, but then caught a faint twinkling of reflected light through the ventilation grille. Fireblast, it was a cloud, all right. Mebbe even several of them, or even all six. The weight of the implo gren in his pocket was sorely tempting, and he thrust in a hand to touch the charge, but then decided to save it for an emergency. The cloud seemed to have stopped for the moment, but the man knew that it could simply float to the shaft if it wanted, so there was no sense clearing a direct path for it that lead directly to the companions.

Lying sideways inside the cab of a Mack truck, Jak tried to hot-wire the engine. It struggled to start, then coughed hard and roared into life, only to immediately bang and stop cold. Hot rads, it blew a rod!

Extracting himself from the wiring, the albino teen yanked open the rear door of an APC to try for better luck there. Kicking the skeletons of the sailors out of the way, Jak headed straight for the driver’s seat and started flipping switches.

Turning away from an ambulance in disgust, Mildred next yanked out a grinning skeleton from behind the wheel of a Hummer. The physician desperately longed to raid the medical supplies stored in the back of the ambulance, but that was impossible right now, so she forced those thoughts from her mind. Run away, and stay alive, was her mantra for today.

Leaning dangerously far into the shaft, Ryan used the curved blade of his panga to slash at the control wires until he was satisfied that the cage would never work again without extensive repairs. Then he stepped back and let the door close again. When nothing happened, Ryan grunted in satisfaction and went directly to the next elevator to repeat the process.

“John Barrymore, please extinguish that cigar!” Doc barked, dragging a pair of sloshing cans across the garage, the nozzle of the fuel pump dripping slightly onto the floor. “How are we going to detect the dulcet smell of ozone with you puffing on that reeking cheroot?”

Accepting the logic of that, J.B. spit out the precious cheroot and crushed it under a boot, but his hands never stopped in their desperate work. Sweat was running off the man from the staggering heat of the acetylene torch, but J.B. was more than halfway done, the door nearly welded shut. Whether that would stop a Cerberus cloud he had no idea, but it was the best plan he had.

There came a whirring sound and an engine sputtered into operation, then settled into a steady roar of power. Whistling sharply for everybody’s attention, Krysty waved from inside the tiny pilothouse of a LARC amphibian transport. Resembling a flat-bottom boat with wheels, it looked about as speedy as a wheelbarrow, but this was the first wag they found that worked, and that was good enough for today. Checking over the small control board, Krysty saw that both of the fuel tanks read empty, and she quickly killed the V8 diesel engine to save what gas was still lingering in the ancient fuel lines.

Finished with the elevator bank, Ryan turned just in time to snarl a curse at the sight of twinkling lights coming from a wall vent. The bastard clouds were inside the ventilation system! Now pulling out the implo gren, the man backed away to a safe distance, ripping off the duct tape and curling a finger into the arming pin. Ryan would only get one chance at a chill, and he couldn’t miss.

Tossing the spare gas canister over the gunwale of the LARC, Doc went to the rear fuel port and used the butt of his LeMat to hammer off the rusty gas cap. With no concern for his own safety, the man simply turned the canister upside down, to quickly pour as much as possible into the amphibious transport. A lot of the fluid splashed onto the sloping side of the vehicle, staining his pants and shoes, but Doc never slowed for an instant in his task. Clothing could be replaced, but not that elusive state of existence colloquially known as life.

With a dry mouth, Ryan watched as the Cerberus cloud flowed from the grille of the wall vent, growing ever larger. Released from its jar, the thing was twenty feet across, the sharp smell of ozone filling the garage.

Rushing over to the LARC, Mildred tossed in an M-60 machine gun yanked from a Hummer, and Jak heaved two more gas canisters into the middle span. Then everybody yanked out an implo gren and clawed off the strip of duct tape.

“Done!” J.B. announced, stepping back triumphantly.

But then he cursed as he saw a tiny glowing spot in the middle of the door. That wasn’t his work, he had been nowhere near the center. As J.B. watched, the spot got a little bigger as it changed color from a dull red, to bright cherry red rapidly escalating to orange, then yellow and finally white. Then the door would melt, and the cloud on the other side would flow through. He had spent ten minutes welding the fragging door shut, and the Cerberus cloud would get through in only a few moments. Not knowing what else to do, J.B. shoved the welding torch at the orange splotch. The white-hot flame instantly cut through the softened metal and there came a sound from the other side, almost as if the cloud had experienced pain.

Trying to keep his hand steady and pointed at the same location, J.B. watched for the formation of any other burns, knowing that he was now trapped. If he dropped the welding torch, the cloud would pour though the hole like escaping steam. The implo gren was in the pocket of his leather jacket, the tape removed and ready to go. But that might as well be on the moon for all the good it would do him right now. There were more iron rods on the workbench, but by the time he got back, the cloud would be through. Not that any of that really mattered, because the pressure gauge on the acetylene tank was rapidly approaching zero. Suddenly the man was filled with the overwhelming urge for a smoke.

Gunning the diesel of the LARC, Krysty wheeled the long vehicle around to point toward the exit tunnel. She reached for the horn, but like most military vehicles, the amphibious transport didn’t have one, rush-hour traffic being one of the few problems for sailors storming an enemy beach.

“Time to go!” she yelled, the muscles standing up on her back from the sheer force of the cry.

Wheeling over a tool chest, Doc set it directly in front of the door, and J.B. arranged the welding torch into position, then used a heavy wrench to hold it there. Releasing his grip, the man stepped back to check the work, then turned and bolted for the waiting half-track with Doc close behind, the tail of his frock coat flapping behind him.

As the cloud started to move away from the wall, Ryan yanked the pin and gently rolled the gren along the floor, then turned and raced away. Reaching an APC, he grabbed onto a stanchion set into the armored hull and held on for dear life. His skin began to prickle from the close proximity of the Cerberus cloud, then there came a musical ting and the gren activated.

Instantly the garage was effused with a blinding white light, the Cerberus cloud emitted an inhuman noise that might have been a scream, and then a violent wind filled the inside of the underground garage as the gravitational vortex began dragging every loose item toward its epicenter. Dust streamed toward the powerful implosion, papers went flying, bones rattled across the floor, and small tools pelted Ryan as they hurtled by. The ceiling lights swayed, a motorcycle toppled over, an empty jumpsuit sailed through the turbulent atmosphere like a kamikaze ghost—then the wind stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

Releasing his hold on the APC, Ryan glanced at the circular crater where the air vent had existed. Yards wide, a huge section of the floor and wall were gone, vanished, compressed into an allotropic state beyond comprehension. Shuffling toward the LARC, Ryan could see the internal plumbing and wiring, the ventilation shaft a wide gaping mouth, the edges mirror-bright. There was no sign of the cloud, even the smell of the ozone was gone, every trace annihilated by the staggering power of the deadly implo gren.

Clambering over the low gunwale of the LARC transport, the Deathlands warrior nodded to Krysty in the pilothouse, then saw her face contort with fear, and knew the truth. Turning fast, Ryan saw another cloud rising from the open ventilation shaft. Only this one began to move across the garage before it finished rising from the shaft. Fireblast, Ryan thought, the fragging things learned from their mistakes!

“Me this time,” Jak snarled, standing in the vehicle and yanking out the arming pin.

Flowing over some of the disorganized skeletons on the floor, the cloud paused for a few moments, the bones vanished, and the mass of the cloud grew slightly larger.

“Eat dead?” Jak snarled. “Try eat this!”

Throwing the gren against the distant pegboard, the albino youth banked the shot, and the mil sphere rolled toward the cloud from behind. As the cloud turned at the noise, Krysty slammed on the gas and the LARC lumbered into operation, the four huge tires squealing in protest.

Angling fast around the first corner, Krysty heard the gren activate, her hair fluttering from the wind of the implosion.

“Dark night, I saw the torch go out!” J.B. stormed, adjusting his glasses. “That means another cloud is on the way.”

“The three heads of Cerberus, eh?” Doc rumbled, yanking the pin from his gren.

“Save that bastard gren until you see the thing!” Ryan commanded, grabbing the side of the gunwale with both hands and holding on tight.

At the best speed possible, Krysty raced the cumbersome LARC along the zigzagging tunnel, the steel hull throwing off sparks as it scraped along the walls. In the backseats, the companions were thrown around helplessly. Once, there had been safety belts, but implacable time had reduced those to a gossamer thinness more suitable for a bathroom than a restraining harness. As the LARC careened off a sharp corner, the M-60 bounced over the side. Jak tried for a save, but the weapon tumbled away, a sacrifice to the god of speed.

“The sixty!” Doc cried out aghast, then the man used a word that normally he pretended didn’t even exist.

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