“Survival of the fittest,” Mildred stated

“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.

“There’s something called the principle of natural selection that says the strongest survive, and that a species continues to evolve through natural and sexual selection. The baron’s contest will ensure that the strongest male survives to breed with the strongest female.”

Ryan nodded, then got up from the table to sign up for the contest. Brody stood, as well.

“Where are you going?” the one-eyed man asked.

Brody put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “There’ll be at least a dozen men in that ring, all wanting to chill you. If you’re going to make a break out of here, you’re going to have to be alive to do it. You’ll need someone to watch your back, and that’s going to be me.”

“Thanks, Brody. You’re a good man.”

“You’re a good man, too, Ryan. Let’s just hope for the sake of your woman that you’re also the best.”

Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

Pilgrimage to Hell

Red Holocaust

Neutron Solstice

Crater Lake

Homeward Bound

Pony Soldiers

Dectra Chain

Ice and Fire

Red Equinox

Northstar Rising

Time Nomads

Latitude Zero

Seedling

Dark Carnival

Chill Factor

Moon Fate

Fury’s Pilgrims

Shockscape

Deep Empire

Cold Asylum

Twilight Children

Rider, Reaper

Road Wars

Trader Redux

Genesis Echo

Shadowfall

Ground Zero

Emerald Fire

Bloodlines

Crossways

Keepers of the Sun

Circle Thrice

Eclipse at Noon

Stoneface

Bitter Fruit

Skydark

Demons of Eden

The Mars Arena

Watersleep

Nightmare Passage

Freedom Lost

Way of the Wolf

Dark Emblem

Crucible of Time

Starfall

Encounter: Collector’s Edition

Gemini Rising

Gaia’s Demise

Dark Reckoning

Shadow World

Pandora’s Redoubt

Rat King

Zero City

Savage Armada

Judas Strike

Shadow Fortress

Sunchild

Breakthrough

Salvation Road

Amazon Gate

Destiny’s Truth

Skydark Spawn

DEATH LANDS®

James Axler

It seems most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end

Will come when it will come.

—William Shakespeare

Julius Caesar

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Epilogue

Chapter One

Ryan Cawdor opened his eye, then closed it quickly as a blinding jolt of pain lanced through his skull. He half rose to his feet, then sank back to the floor, dizzy. Bastard jumps always took a toll.

The mat-trans jump was over, and, as usual, he and his companions lay on the floor of the chamber, trying to gather their wits and keep the remnants of their last meal in their stomachs.

After a few minutes, Ryan tried opening his eye again. The pain was still there, but had now settled into a dull throb that he could handle.

“My word,” Doc Tanner said, removing his swallow’s-eye kerchief from a pocket of his frock coat and wiping away a trickle of blood that had seeped from his nose, “it never ceases to amaze me how utterly incapacitating these jaunts of ours can be.”

“Still able talk,” Jak Lauren commented, lifting his right hand and moving his fingers in a motion meant to simulate Doc’s flapping gums. Jak hadn’t fared as well. The front of the young albino’s tan T-shirt was stained with vomit that had leaked out the corners of his mouth. He tried to clean himself up with a few wipes of his sleeve, but all that did was spread the mess around.

Ryan’s son, Dean, had fared better than the others. He looked a bit dizzy, but was already able to stand. J. B. Dix sat with his back against one of the chamber’s walls. He’d lifted his head and had his eyes tightly closed as if he were in pain. He was struggling to catch his breath.

“You all right, J.B.?” asked Ryan.

The Armorer shook his head as he removed his wire-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. “Had a nightmare. I was alone in a forest somewhere. As I walked along a path, I was confronted by a huge mutie.”

“Chill it?” Jak asked.

“No, that’s the thing. It approached me and I leveled my blaster and squeezed the trigger…but the scattergun didn’t fire. I tried it again and again, but nothing. The creature kept coming, but the blaster wouldn’t fire. Dark night! Didn’t know what was wrong with it because I’d just finished stripping and cleaning it in my dream. So there I was, pointing a dead blaster at a mutie just itching to chill me.”

“And did it?” Mildred Wyeth asked.

“Tore me to pieces with a set of talons as long and sharp as my Tekna. And I couldn’t even wake up. Hurt like hell.”

Ryan looked at Mildred, wondering if the dream meant anything.

“Performance anxiety,” Mildred stated.

“What? I don’t have any problems with that.”

“No, I don’t mean sexual performance, John,” Mildred chided. “Our lives often depend on your knowledge. My guess is that lurking somewhere in your subconscious you have a fear that at some point, when it matters most, you’ll let one of us down.”

“But I was the one who was chilled.”

“Yeah, and that’s probably the way you’d want it to happen if it ever did.”

“Not worry,” Jak said, putting a hand on J.B.’s shoulder. “Not let us down.”

“Thanks.”

The few moments Mildred had spent analyzing J.B.’s dream had done wonders to revitalize the group. Krysty Wroth was showing signs of coming around, and the rest of the companions were on their feet but still pretty groggy.

“I suspect,” Doc said, tapping the silver lion’s-head handle of his swordstick against the walls of the chamber, “that this mat-trans is not constructed of armaglass as is customary.”

Ryan raised his arm and pounded the butt of his SIG-Sauer against one of the dark charcoal-gray walls. Instead of the familiar tink of reinforced glass, his ears were met with the sound of a dull, hard thud. “Concrete,” he stated.

“Not only that, but look at the LD button,” J.B. suggested.

Ryan scanned the walls, realizing that this chamber wasn’t equipped with a Last Destination button. “There is no button,” he said.

“What does that mean?” Mildred asked.

“Not sure,” Ryan replied.

“Maybe it’s a one-way chamber,” J.B. opined.

“What would you need one of those for?” Mildred asked.

“Who knows?” J.B. answered. “It’s just a thought.”

“The motivations of your predark government have baffled me at the best of times,” Doc stated. “Add another puzzle to the file for future reference.”

Ryan agreed with Doc. Whatever the reason behind this installation’s construction, it would be made clear to them soon enough.

“At least we’re alive,” Krysty stated.

Ryan turned and saw that Krysty was stirring. Her sentient hair had unfurled and was now stretching to its full length, falling over her shoulders like red waves. “How are you, lover?”

“I’ve had worse jumps,” she answered. “Any idea where we might have ended up?”

Ryan shook his head. It was possible to get an idea of the chamber’s location by the color of its armaglass walls, but they’d never been in this gateway before.

“I’ll take a reading with my sextant when we get outside,” J.B. said. “Hopefully the skies will be clear.”

Ryan sat down with his back up against one of the room’s six walls. Now that he knew his companions were all right, he decided to give himself some time to recover from the jump. This one had been easier than most, but he still had a fireblasted headache.

FIFTEEN MINUTES PASSED before the group had recovered and Ryan could risk opening the chamber door. As they’d learned over time, the friends needed to be on triple alert when entering a redoubt, never knowing who or what lay beyond the door. Anyone or anything could have discovered a break in the solid concrete walls and found a way inside.

“Triple red, people,” Ryan said, putting his hand on the door. He looked around the group, making sure that each of his friends was prepared for whatever might be out there. Krysty had her Smith & Wesson .38 at the ready, while Doc clutched his LeMat blaster. Mildred had her Czech-built target revolver in her right hand, bracing her right arm at the wrist with her left hand to steady it. J.B. had opted for his scattergun, despite its worrisome malfunction in his dream. Dean leveled his Browning Hi-Power and Jak brought up the rear with his Colt Python. Ryan had his SIG-Sauer ready, but since he was opening the door, it was unlikely he’d be the one taking the first shot in the event of trouble.

“Ready?” Ryan asked one last time.

Everyone nodded.

He opened the door to an empty room.

After a few moments of tension, the companions relaxed somewhat. The room was small and completely bare. The walls were made of cinder blocks, and the floor and ceiling had been constructed of poured concrete. When the door had opened, a single, naked bulb close to the high ceiling switched on, casting a dim light into the room. The room’s main feature was a concrete staircase that led almost straight up thirty or more feet before terminating at a landing that was about four feet directly below a set of large doors. The doors appeared to serve as a hatchway.

“What do you make of that?” Ryan asked.

“Strange,” Jak commented.

There was no arguing with Jak’s logic. The entrance to the redoubt was like nothing Ryan had seen before.

“Hey, there isn’t even a handle on the outside of the chamber,” Krysty said.

Ryan turned to take another look at the chamber and saw that what Krysty had said was true. If they shut the door they wouldn’t be able to use the chamber again.

“Looks like this really is a one-way chamber,” J.B. said. “And that—” he gestured to the stairway “—looks like the only way out.”

“Well, if that’s the only way out, we should quit standing around and find out where it goes,” Mildred suggested.

Without another word Ryan headed up the stairs toward the landing. When he reached it he had to crouch to avoid hitting his head on the doors above them. He signaled the others to join him.

“What now?” Krysty asked as the rest of the group reached the landing. Only Dean was able to stand up straight, but even he had to duck his head a bit to avoid hitting it against the heavy overhead doors.

Ryan pushed his right forearm against one of the doors. It didn’t budge. For the second try he put away his SIG-Sauer and pushed against the door with both arms. This time the door moved slightly.

“J.B. and Jak, one on either side of me,” Ryan said.

The Armorer and the albino took up positions to Ryan’s left and right and got ready to push on the door. The rest of the group readied their blasters.

“On three,” Ryan said. “One, two…”

On three they all pushed together. The door moved, and they could hear the metal hinges cracking, an understandable protest considering the hinges likely hadn’t moved in close to a century.

“Again,” Ryan urged.

Once more the three men pushed against the metal door. At last it began to move, allowing dirt, dust and daylight to spill down through the long crack that had opened up above them. They continued to push, but now Doc had joined them, giving just the little extra force they needed to get the door fully open.

The portal became lighter and lighter, then flopped over like a top hatch on a war wag. With the first door opened, they set to work on the second. It moved more easily than the first, and they soon found themselves standing at the edge of a long-abandoned farmer’s field, with nothing around them but knee-high grass, high stands of rocks and clumps of weeds covering acres of rolling land in every direction.

Ryan and the others took a look around. A stand of trees grew some fifty yards to their left, but mostly they saw only wide-open spaces. Farther on, perhaps a mile or two away, there were more wooded areas, and then more farmland.

“Any idea where we are now?” Krysty asked.

J.B. lowered his glasses. “Middle of nowhere’d be my guess.”

Ryan climbed up and out of the hole in the ground and onto the field. He immediately turned back to help lift out the others. In minutes they were all standing on firm ground.

“Close it up,” the one-eyed man ordered, putting a hand under the edge of one of the doors. With J.B.’s help, he lifted the door and let it fall. He hadn’t intended for it to make such a loud noise as it closed, but without anyone on the landing to ease the door into place, the noise couldn’t be helped. Jak and Doc lifted the second door and let it down on top of the first. It closed with a slightly smaller bang, but still one loud enough to attract attention.

With the doors closed, the exit to the gateway was nearly invisible. The ground was disturbed slightly, but after a few sweeps of their feet and hands, there was no evidence of anything unusual lying just beneath the surface of the field.

“Well, it’s definitely one-way,” J.B. said.

“Mebbe for escape,” Jak offered.

An escape hatch was definitely a possibility. That seemed to fit with the sparseness of the installation’s construction and outfitting. Anyone coming through this gateway was on a one-way trip, but why would such an installation be needed, and why here? Both questions, like all the others, Ryan knew, would be answered in time.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc thundered.

Ryan turned in time to see Doc’s feet being pulled out from under him by a strange mutie that had apparently crawled through the grass toward them. It was crouched low to the ground and seemed to move on all fours, like a spider. It was gnawing on Doc’s leg, trying to tear away the material of his pants in order to get at the pale white flesh that lay beneath.

Before the other members of the group could raise their weapons, Ryan had leveled his blaster and squeezed off a single shot that caught the mutie in the shoulder. The impact of the blast rolled the mutie away from Doc’s leg. As the one-eyed man prepared to get off a second shot at the mutie’s skull, a blaster roared on his right.

A neat black hole appeared in the middle of the mutant’s forehead, and a baseball-sized mass of gray matter and gore exploded out the back of the creature’s skull, taking its miserable life along with it.

Ryan turned and saw Mildred lower her blaster.

A little embarrassed by being taken unawares, Doc got to his feet, unsheathed his sword and was about to run the mutie through when Jak’s voice stopped him.

“More.”

Ryan looked across the field toward the nearby stand of trees and could see that there were at least half a dozen more of the hungry muties ambling toward them. They were all bone thin, filthy dirty and naked except for a flap of material around their midsections. They moved low to the ground, like spiders, hidden by the grass, but betrayed by it as their bodies pushed the tall grass under and left a trail across the field that any scout could follow.

“Hold your fire!” Ryan ordered. He had his blaster leveled, but he wasn’t sure that the muties were going to try what the first one had. And as he watched, his instincts turned out to be right. Instead of attacking the members of the group, the half-dozen muties crawled up to their dead brother and immediately set into its body with their teeth and hands. In minutes they were feeding wildly on the carcass, ripping into its flesh and muscles with all the savagery of a pack of starving wolves.

“Cannies,” Ryan muttered.

“And crazed ones to boot,” Mildred offered.

“Looks like they’ll be busy for a while,” Ryan said.

“So which way do we go?” J.B. asked.

“Feel anything, lover?” Ryan asked Krysty.

The fiery-headed woman closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment, trying to see if she could sense any nearby danger. “Can’t feel anything at all.”

“Okay, then, let’s head up that rise to get the lay of the land. I’ll take point, then Krysty, Jak, Dean, Doc and Mildred. J.B., you cover the rear. Okay, people, let’s go.”

Chapter Two

There was fear in her eyes, and Baron Franz Fox liked it. She was terrified of him, afraid of what he might do to her or what he might give others permission to do to her.

“It’s been five months since your last,” Baron Fox said softly. It was a statement, but both the baron and the woman knew it was intended more as a question. He placed his hands together, the fingertips pressing against each other. “Well, I’m waiting.”

The woman was in her early forties. She was heavy-set, especially in her hips, and her breasts sagged, which was to be expected after giving birth to five children in the past forty-eight months. She was dressed in a thin white T-shirt that left her big dark nipples clearly visible through the worn cotton fabric. She also wore a pair of old denim shorts and pair of fairly new black Western boots, her reward for delivering a set of twins a couple of terms back. The outfit would have looked good on a woman half her age, but as it was, the clothes looked a lot like the woman wearing them—old, tired and worn-out.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said, her voice a little breathless and tinged with fear. “I’ve been rutting almost every night.”

“With who?” the baron asked, walking the length of his office before turning to pace back across the same track of plush red shag. His burgundy bedroom slippers had worn a path in the carpet from years of pacing. When she didn’t answer his question, he came to a stop in front of her and put a hand under her chin. He lifted her head up so that she would have to look him in the eyes when she answered the question. “With who?”

“Jon,” she replied. “Jonathan Wyndam.”

“The entire time?”

She tried to nod, but the baron held her head firmly in place.

“Has he sired with anyone else in the past five months?” Fox asked his number-one man, Norman Bauer, who was standing quietly off to the side, observing. Bauer was an accountant by trade, and his ability to handle numbers and other statistics had made him invaluable in the successful operation of Fox Farm.

Bauer opened his ledger, leafed back and forth until he came to the page listing Jonathan Wyndam’s breeding history. “According to the ledger,” Bauer said, “Wyndam’s sired fifteen in the past two years—all norms—but none in the past five months. Either Wyndam has gone sterile, or the bitch is barren.”

In a flash, Fox pulled the riding crop from a specially designed pocket of his bathrobe and slashed the kneeling woman across the face. “You bitch!” he screamed. “When you knew you weren’t conceiving, why didn’t you turn Wyndam back to stud?”

An angry red welt appeared on the woman’s left cheek, and beads of blood were beginning to well up through the reddened skin. “He didn’t want—”

“Don’t fuck with me!” the baron roared, striking her again with the crop, this time with a backhand stroke that put a matching red line on her right cheek.

She shook her head. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, similar tears of blood leaving red streaks down her cheeks. “He didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay with me. He—”

Fox raised his hand again. “Don’t even think of saying it.”

“—loves me,” she said, her face flush with anger. “He loves me and I love—”

Fox didn’t let her finish. He struck her again and again with the riding crop about the head, neck and shoulders, much harder than before. Her T-shirt shredded and fell from her shoulders, exposing her breasts. Fox slashed at them, too, putting a series of X-like gashes across her chest.

“I don’t want to hear talk like that…ever!” Fox bellowed. He was in the business of making and trading slaves, of selling babies and love wasn’t allowed. Love destroyed everything, as evidenced by this over-the-hill bitch’s romantic notion of living happily ever after. She’d figured that if she didn’t get heavy she’d be able to spend more nights with Wyndam. She was right, of course, but the arrangement could never last long. At her age, five months without getting heavy and her days as a breeder were over. Same for Wyndam. Five months without siring a child, and he’d be on the next slave convoy out of Fox Farm. Then it would be six months to a year working in some mill or refinery and by then it would be time to board the last train west. And all for some triple-stupe notion like love.

The woman lay in a crumpled heap at the baron’s feet. He turned to Bauer, who had stood by impassively while Fox had administered the beating. “Take her to the sec men’s lounge. Tell them they can do what they like with her until the next convoy moves out.”

Bauer nodded. “Any restrictions?”

Fox shook his head. “No, just that if anyone chills her they’ll have to answer to me.”

“And what about Wyndam?”

“Put him in the sec cell overlooking the lounge. Let him watch what happens to lovers on Fox Farm.”

Bauer gave a little smile. “And after she moves out?”

“Give him a beating, then put him back in circulation. But keep an eye on him. He might get difficult.”

Bauer went to the door and summoned a pair of sec men into the room. “Take her to the lounge. And don’t chill her.”

“All right.”

“And while you’re having fun with her, find Jon Wyndam and put him in a cell with a view of the lounge so he gets a good look of his sweetheart in action.”

“Lovers?” the first sec man asked.

Bauer nodded.

“Stupe bastards,” the sec man muttered as he dragged the former breeder out of the office.

When they’d left, Baron Fox adjusted his bathrobe, retied the sash around his waist and sat behind the large oak desk in the center of his office. To his right was a foot-high pile of predark hard-core skin mags that specialized in fetishes, everything from lingerie and leather to bondage and domination. He pulled a mag off the top of the pile and opened it to a familiar pictorial in which a dark-haired woman dressed in a black corselette and stockings had her wrists bound behind her back with a heavy-gauge rope. In some of the pictures she was being whipped by a cat-o’-nine-tails. But while Fox found that exciting enough on its own, it was the spread’s final six photos that really aroused his curiosity. In each of the photos the woman was covered in blue-and-red wax, as if a burning candle had been held over her and allowed to leak hot wax onto her breasts, thighs and buttocks. Fox had wanted to duplicate the scene for months now, but quality candles were as difficult to find as working blasters, especially colored candles. He’d traded his human stock for a decent stockpile of weapons of all types, and was finally confident he had enough firepower to protect his operation from any outside attack. So maybe on the next trade mission to the east he might try to cut a deal for a few colored candles. If not, he could always use molten lead, which, as he thought about it, might even be more interesting than wax.

He replaced the magazine on top of the pile, then looked over at Norman Bauer, who was waiting patiently to be spoken to or dismissed. “What else do you have for me?”

Bauer turned the page of his ledger, but before he could speak, Grundwold, the sec chief, came in through the open door. The man was dressed in dark blue fatigues that were in good condition, and two rows of 12-gauge shells in bandoliers crisscrossed his chest. A Mossberg Persuader 500 shotgun rested in a holster belted to his thigh. It looked to be in remarkable condition.

“What is it?” Fox asked, knowing it would have to be urgent for Grundwold to walk in on him unannounced.

“A scout team spotted a group of seven outlanders approaching from the north, mebbe heading toward the falls,” Grundwold reported.

“Are they armed?”

Grundwold nodded. “Each has a blaster, mebbe more.” He paused a moment, then added, “They look like they know how to use them, too.”

“Women?”

“Two. One black, one white.”

Fox inhaled a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling as he wondered what the best course of action might be. From the sec chief’s report, it sounded as if these outlanders might be better left alone. He’d learned from experience that there was a big difference between scooping up families riding in convoys headed to the eastern villes and taking on seasoned outlanders who had learned to chill attackers on sight. While he’d gained plenty of farmworkers ambushing wag trains, he’d also lost a lot of good sec men to outlanders who preferred death over enslavement.

“Have them followed,” he said. “If there’s an opportunity to take the women, do it.” He waved his hand in the air. “Otherwise, let them go.”

“Yes, sir!” Grundwold turned on his heel and left the office.

“Two new women,” Bauer said, looking over his ledger and likely figuring out what that might do to the farm’s monthly output of offspring.

“Yes,” Fox said, picking up the mag once more and opening it up to his favorite spread. “They’ll make a nice addition to our breeding stock.”

Chapter Three

When they reached the top of the rise, Ryan used the ancient brass telescope he’d found a while back and spotted a ville some distance to the south. There were several tall buildings, and one strange structure looked as if a wag wheel cover had been impaled on a panga.

“Mildred,” Ryan said, “do you recognize that?”

Mildred Wyeth stood by Ryan’s side. “Looks familiar, but a lot of villes had towers like that.”

“Okay. We’ll head for it. Stay alert, people,” Ryan said.

The companions moved on, and at the bottom of the rise they came across a predark road overgrown with weeds. It was still tough going, but easier than walking through dead forests and across weed-covered fields. After a half hour on the road, they came upon fields of flatland dotted with dead trees whose stumps were lined up in neat rows.

“Predark farmland?” Krysty queried as they approached the skeleton of a large glass house that had only a few panes, out of what were once hundreds and hundreds, still unbroken.

“That’d be my guess,” Ryan agreed.

“Orchards,” Doc said. “Apples and pears, it looks like.”

“Acres and acres of prime farmland poisoned by rad dust, and chemical fallout, skydark, nuclear junk….” J.B. said.

“And who knows what else?” Mildred commented.

“The irony is rather precious, isn’t it?” Doc said.

“How mean?” Jak asked.

“These were once magnificent farms, with fresh food as far as the eye could see…but now the muties here think my old and somewhat withered body is a gourmet meal.”

Jak chuckled, but stopped abruptly when there was movement in the ruin of the glass house to their right. The friends stopped in their tracks, all eyes on the glass house looking for another glint of light or shift of shadows.

“J.B., Krysty and Doc, right side. Mildred, Dean and Jak with me. And mind the cross fire.”

Without another word the companions neatly split into two groups and approached the glass house from each side. As Ryan neared, he was able to see through the jagged teeth of the broken panes to the inside of the glass house. Tall green vines grew inside, stretching from the ground to the ceiling, twisting and tangling about as if each vine were trying to choke off the other. Ryan decided that there was nothing else living inside the glass house and what he’d seen was simply the wind twisting its way through the vines. But then he noticed several leaves twitch as if something were slowly moving through the vegetation—close to the ground.

Ryan followed the movement of the vines with his eye, waiting patiently for whatever it was to cross a small clearing to his left. Judging by the thing’s speed, it would be in the open in about two seconds and would be exposed for about half that time. Ryan readied the SIG-Sauer and waited.

When the thing appeared, Ryan held his fire because he wasn’t sure what it was. It looked like a gopher, but it was the size of a large dog. Its back was covered in glass shards embedded in its fur. The glass bits were sharp and jagged, and stuck out from its back at odd angles, making it look like a spike-covered war wag.

Glass or no, it was probably still good eating. Ryan raised the SIG-Sauer, but before he could fire he heard the sound of one of Jak’s leaf-bladed knives slicing through the air and vines. A moment later the knife pierced the side of the animal. The creature gave a small yelp before falling onto its side, dead.

“Supper time!” Jak shouted.

“No,” Ryan called, turning to see the albino already crawling through one of the glass house’s empty frames. Ryan reached out with his hand to try to stop him, but was too late. As soon as Jak was inside the glass house, a vine wrapped itself around his leg, holding him in place long enough for other vines to entwine his legs, arms and neck. The vines were a species of tanglers, and vicious ones at that. They’d left the gopher alone because the sharp glass in its skin made the thing too tough to chill. Jak, on the other hand, was an easy meal. His vest, with its shards of glass and pieces of jagged metal, wouldn’t protect him.

Jak was struggling to get at another of his knives, but the vines had already gotten hold of his arms. He opened his mouth to call for help, but a thick green vine slid between his lips, choking off his words.

Ryan holstered the SIG-Sauer and unsheathed his panga. After kicking in the metal framing in front of him, he stepped into the glass house and began hacking at the vines. They were tough, as thick as rope in places, each one requiring several hard chops with the big knife to cut through. When he reached the tangle of vines covering Jak, the albino was still struggling fiercely against the mutant vegetation. Wasting no time, Ryan began with the vines around Jak’s head, but before he could cut through anything, a vine wrapped around Ryan’s wrist, making his swings too weak to be effective.

He switched the panga to his left hand and used it to cut his right arm free of the vine. He had the panga back in his right hand and was again working on freeing Jak when another vine got hold of his right leg and pulled him off balance. The sudden movement changed the arc of Ryan’s knife, and he came dangerously close to lopping off Jak’s right ear. Luckily the panga cut through the vines wrapped around the albino’s neck and mouth, allowing Jak to draw in a much needed breath.

But now there were vines around both Ryan’s legs. He could cut himself free, but by the time he did that, Jak might be dead. He left the vines around his legs for the time being and concentrated on freeing Jak. Vines moved into place around his neck and head again, and Jak struggled for breath. Ryan cleared away the new vines from around his neck, but they now had him by the chest, as well, squeezing him hard and making it difficult for Jak to inhale.

“Ryan! Jak!” J.B. called.

“Over here,” Ryan responded.

In moments Ryan heard the sound of J.B.’s Tekna and Doc’s swordstick slashing through the vines.

Ryan doubled his efforts and began cutting and hacking at the vines around him. When he was free, he turned to Jak, who was now on the verge of losing consciousness. Ryan swung the panga over Jak’s head in a wide arc, and the vines stretching from the ceiling fell away like rope. As he began working on Jak’s left side, he could see J.B. and Doc approaching through the thinning wall of vines. They had cut a swath through the deadly vegetation and were now close enough to keep the vines away from Ryan as he continued working to free Jak.

It took a few moments, but Jak was finally free. His pale white skin was covered with dark red abrasions, but at least he wasn’t bleeding. “Let’s get out of here,” Ryan growled.

“Sage advice,” Doc said, slashing at a thin but persistent vine that was still trying to encircle the one-eyed man.

“Wait!” Jak took a few steps and picked up the glass-armored gopher by the tail. “Not waste food.”

Ryan stood with the panga in his fist as Jak made his way out of the glass house. J.B. and Doc exited next, followed by Ryan.

“Think it’ll be good eating?” Dean asked, rubbing a hand over his stomach.

“The glass will probably come off with the skin,” Krysty commented.

“Not worry,” Jak said. He had recovered from his encounter with the vines and was obviously proud that he’d procured dinner for the friends. “When finished, taste like chicken.”

Ryan nodded as he wiped his panga clean. It probably would at that.

“TRIPLE STUPE,” Grundwold said, hitting the young sec man hard across the face.

A spray of blood and a single tooth flew out of Rory O’Brien’s mouth as his head snapped to the left. He spit once before speaking. “I just wanted to get a closer look at them, see what kind of blasters they were carrying. I thought the glass house would be plenty of cover.”

Grundwold’s hand came back across O’Brien’s face, and this time his knuckles struck him full on the cheek. There was more blood this time, but all of the young man’s teeth remained, however loose, inside his mouth. “You nearly gave away our position. They’ve got blasters and long knives and they probably know how to use them. If they hadn’t got caught up in those tanglers, they might have seen you and the baron would have had to kiss those two breeders goodbye.”

O’Brien’s eyes widened in fear at the mention of the baron. “Just trying to do my job, Chief.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve got a new job now, starting as soon as we get back to the farm. And if I ever find the lavs aren’t clean enough to drink out of, your next job will be in some death trap of a mill shoveling black dirt with your bare hands.”

There was a look on O’Brien’s face that hinted he wasn’t too pleased with the demotion.

Grundwold erased the look of displeasure with a hard punch that caught O’Brien flush under the right eye. “Understood?”

O’Brien wiped at the blood that was beginning to pour out of his nose. “Yes, sir.”

Grundwold looked at his bloody knuckles and shook his head. “Now get out of my sight.”

O’Brien, doing as he was told, was gone in an instant.

Chapter Four

The friends decided to eat the gopher while it was fresh. They set up a spit in the middle of a crossroads so they could see anyone approaching. Doc, Dean and J.B. foraged for firewood, while Jak took a great deal of pleasure in skinning and gutting the animal that almost cost him his life.

When Doc and Dean got back with the wood, Ryan whittled a long stick of green wood with his panga and gave it to Jak, who used it to skewer the gopher lengthwise. Then he placed the stick on the upright branches embedded in holes in the asphalt and checked to make sure it was balanced as it turned.

In minutes the fire was burning hot in the spit and the aroma of cooking meat made the friends’ mouths water. Unfortunately the smell would also attract the attention of every mutie for miles around.

“J.B., Krysty, Dean and Doc,” Ryan called, “take up a four-point perimeter. Triple red.”

While Jak seasoned the meat with a few herbs, Mildred made sure the gopher cooked evenly over the spit, and it wasn’t long before the meat was cooked well enough to eat. Jak cut seven portions from the animal, pierced the meat with sharpened branches and handed them out to the group so they could all eat while on lookout against a mutie attack.

When Jak handed Dean his piece, he stood over the boy waiting to hear him offer an opinion. “Taste like chicken?”

Dean took a bite out of the haunch, chewed the meat and grimaced. “Not really.”

“Cannie approaching,” Doc called.

Ryan turned and saw one of the thin spiderlike muties coming up the road. “Careful, people,” he commanded. “If there’s one out there, there’ll be more.”

“Want chilled?” Jak asked, his Colt Python at the ready.

“No,” Ryan said. “Not worth the ammo.”

“Then what?” Dean asked. “We can’t just wait until they surround us.”

The boy was right. While Ryan didn’t want to waste precious rounds killing muties, they had to do something before there were a hundred muties around them and they’d have to blast their way out. “Everyone finish eating. Take seconds if you want, but leave the rest behind.”

The friends quickly ate what Jak had provided for them, even though the meat was a little tough and hard to swallow. Ryan, Jak and Mildred took seconds, leaving more than half of the huge gopher on the spit.

“Let’s move,” Ryan said.

“Bon appetite,” Doc muttered in the direction of the muties.

In a flash the friends were on their feet, continuing the journey south. By the time the group had taken fifty paces the first few muties were crowding around the spit and tearing at the leftovers. After they’d taken sixty paces, the muties numbered in the dozens and the gopher was all but gone.

THE BASEMENT of the main building on Fox Farm was cold, wet and dark, and smelled of a variety of foul bodily fluids. This was where the problem breeders were brought to be made heavy. It was easier for them if they bred willingly, but it wasn’t necessary for them to cooperate. Breeders could still get heavy while being chained to the wall, and they birthed children after nine months in the basement just as well as those breeders who worked on the farm during the day and rutted every night. Their offspring weren’t as healthy as those of the farmworkers and they sometimes had to be put down, but it was still better to have them breed than send them away on a slave convoy.

Fox paced under the dim light of an electric bulb waiting for his sec men to bring down the latest breeder who’d refused to rut. While he waited, he walked the length of one of the walls the breeders were chained to. The first breeder was a black-haired girl who’d never rutted before she’d come to the farm. She’d refused every one of the men assigned to her, and when it became clear she’d simply been putting off rutting, Fox moved her into the basement and had his four top studs rut her each night for a month until he was sure she’d gotten heavy. When she didn’t bleed at the end of the four weeks, he stopped the rutting. A few months later she began showing of signs of heaviness, and now she was more than eight months along and could give birth at any time.

“How do you feel?” Fox asked.

“Good,” she answered, pulling the chains away from her naked legs.

“After the birth, will you be ready to rejoin us on the farm?”

“Oh, yes please,” she said, her empty, broken expression replaced by a hopeful smile.

“You’ll rut every night, then?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll like it?”

“Yes…anything. I just want to get out of here.”

Fox smiled. Young ones always came around after just a single term in the basement. “You birth me a child and I’ll free you from those chains.”

“Thank you, Baron.”

Fox stepped forward and took his right foot out of his slipper so she could kiss it. When she did, Fox turned to Norman Bauer, his accountant, who stood nearby watching. “Make sure she’s comfortable after the birth…and give her three days’ free time in the ward before she starts work on the farm.”

Bauer opened the ledger and made a notation.

“Thank you, Baron,” she said, kissing his foot again with zeal. “Thank you.”

She was beginning to slobber over his toes. Fox pushed her away with his foot and slid it back into its slipper.

Next along the wall was an old blond woman who’d lived on the farm for years. She’d been one of his best producers, giving him twins twice and always producing strong, healthy offspring. But after her last—the thirteenth she’d given the farm—she simply stopped producing. Although she kept on rutting, she’d carefully avoided getting heavy. When Fox brought her into his office for an explanation, she’d simply said, “Enough!” Her declaration made Fox laugh. Retirement wasn’t an option for a functioning breeder. A woman bred until she couldn’t anymore, and when she was done, she was sold into slavery or traded for a blaster.

As Fox approached her, he smiled and said, “And how are we today?”

She looked up at the baron with an expression of contempt, then lowered her head and spit on his slippers.

Fox stood there looking at the stain and shook his head. “As charming as ever, I see.”

“Fuck you!”

Fox’s fist shot out and caught her in the right eye. Her head snapped back and slammed against the brick wall she was chained to. Fox stood impassively as she swung her arms and legs to strike back at him, knowing the chains were too short to allow her to touch him. He let her continue her futile attempt to hit him and when she was tired out, he struck her again under the left eye. This time, instead of fighting back, she fell unconscious onto the cold concrete floor.

Fox reached over and put a hand on her bloated belly. She was six months along and everything seemed to be progressing normally. Her fighting spirit would probably produce a similarly spirited offspring that would net him a top price at auction—a couple of blasters or a few barrels of diesel at the very least. The thought put a smile on the baron’s face.

He started toward the next breeder when a sec man appeared at the door. It was Kingsley, his number-three sec man after Grundwold and Fillinger.

“It’s the outlanders, Baron,” Kingsley stated. “They’re approaching from the north, heading toward the farm.”

“Is Grundwold still following them?”

“If he is, our lookouts haven’t seen his party.”

“Good,” Fox said, “then the outlanders probably haven’t noticed them, either.” Grundwold’s men were the best sec men the farm had, and their talent for stealthily following travelers had once again given Fox an advantage over passing travelers. In addition, he had several options as to how to get his hands on the outlander women. “If they approach the front gate looking to trade for food or lodging, let them in and bring them to me. If they pass us by, give them a polite wave and leave them for Grundwold and his men to handle farther down the road.”

“Yes, Baron,” Kingsley said and was gone.

AFTER AN HOUR’S WALK along the road, the companions came upon a huge steel fence topped with barbed wire. On the other side stood row upon row of neatly trimmed trees, all covered in green leaves and spotted with a magnificent bounty of ripening fruit.

The friends stopped on the roadway, admiring the view.

“Ah.” Doc sighed. “Now, that is what a farm should look like. A virtual cornucopia of all good things to eat.”

“It looks almost predark,” Mildred commented.

The farm was indeed well kept, Ryan thought. And the wire fence was an absolute necessity considering the number of hungry muties lurking in the area. Still, something about the fence didn’t feel right to Ryan. He scanned the length that ran parallel to the road and saw something hanging off the fence a few hundred yards south of their position.

“After that gopher meat, one of those apples would sure taste good,” Dean said. “You think they’d miss any apples if I climbed over the fence and picked us a few.”

“No,” Ryan commanded. “Don’t go near that fence.”

“Why, what’s wrong with it?” Krysty asked.

“Not sure.” Ryan headed south toward the object hanging from the fence. As the friends neared, it became obvious that it was the remains of a mutie. It was facing the fence as if in the middle of a climb with its hands and feet tangled in the steel weave. There was little flesh left on its bones, and what there was had been burned and charred black.

“An electric fence?” J.B. asked.

Ryan had never actually seen an electric fence, but he knew they’d existed, especially around military installations in predark times. “That’d be my guess,” he said.

“If it’s electric, why don’t I hear any hum?” Mildred asked.

“Maybe it’s not on right now,” J.B. suggested.

“It would seem to me that such a massive fence would require an equally massive amount of electricity to electrify it,” Doc said. “And since electricity is currently harder to come by than gasoline, where would so much electricity come from?”

“You’d like a few of those apples, too, wouldn’t you, Doc?” Mildred chided.

“Look there,” Krysty said, pointing in the direction they had come.

Ryan turned and saw a couple of muties behind them several hundred yards down the road, as if they’d been following the group. After they’d stopped, the muties moved off the asphalt and were approaching the northern corner of the fence, staring at the fruit on the other side through the heavy steel weave. Then the first mutie suddenly grabbed the fence and started to climb.

“Nothing happen,” Jak said, as the companions friends moved toward the muties for a closer look.

The second mutie scrambled up the fence behind the first, but when they were both halfway to the top, Ryan suddenly heard a dull mechanical thrum slowly rising in volume.

The fence was being charged with electricity.

When the current reached them, the mutant’s bodies jerked and spasmed wildly, every one of their muscles twitching and writhing uncontrollably. The air was tinged with the sweet and pungent odor of burning flesh and the sound of sizzling meat. Orange-and-blue flames began to shoot out from the hands and feet of the muties, as well as from their other body parts that came in contact with the fence. The muties’ hair and eyebrows burned away like flash powder, the ashes falling to the ground like dirty snow.

“Why don’t they just let go?” Dean asked.

“Can’t,” Mildred replied. “Their muscles are in total spasm. They can’t control them to release their hold on the fence.”

And then the hum suddenly stopped. The muties fell limp against the fence, their burned hands and feet curled around the steel mesh, refusing to let go. Their flesh had developed a hard outer shell and was producing tendrils of acrid gray smoke.

But the muties were still alive. They were gasping for air and groaning in pain, helpless to free themselves from their agonizingly slow death.

“It’s a terrible way to be chilled,” Mildred commented. “The electricity isn’t even the thing that kills you. It paralyzes your heart, shuts off your breathing and boils the fat under your skin so you’re cooked to death from the inside out.”

It was a horrible way to die.

“Maybe they can turn the power on at will,” Mildred suggested. “And at different sections of the fence, wherever it’s needed.”

“Or it’s governed by motion sensors, turning on the fence whenever motion’s detected.”

“Which may or may not mean that someone knows we’re here, people,” Ryan said, knowing he’d just put the friends on triple alert. “But let’s just continue on as if we’ve seen nothing new here.”

The companions began to move.

The muties continued to smolder on the fence.

FARTHER ALONG, the friends saw their first sec man patrolling the inside of the compound. He was armed with a longblaster, and wore a good pair of boots. Behind the sec man, about thirty people worked a row of trees, pulling weeds, trimming branches and picking fruit. They all looked to be healthy and well fed. A few of the women looked to be pregnant, but they were still able to help with the farm work.

Within a few moments of the friends’ appearance, the first sec man was joined by a second, who came riding up in a small white wag that had an engine that ran without making a sound. There was a heavy blaster set up on a swivel mount on the back of the wag that gave the weapon a 360-degree radius of fire.

The first sec man waved to the friends as they walked along the outside of the fence. Ryan returned the wave, and the others followed suit. But while the first sec man remained where he was overseeing the workers, the second sec man in the white miniwag matched their pace, following them all the way to the farm’s front gate.

“Fox Farm,” Mildred read the sign over the double steel gate that served as the farm’s front entrance. There was a kiosk just inside the gate where a sec man was on duty. The mobile sec man pulled up to the gate. He was joined by several others, all carrying blasters of different makes and models, but presumably all in good working order and fully loaded.

“Greetings, outlanders,” the sec man said, climbing out of the small white wag. “What brings you to Fox Farm?”

“Just passing through,” Ryan said.

“You’re welcome to spend the night here if you like. We have some excellent accommodations.”

That was out of the question. The electrified fence was probably just as good at keeping people in as it was at keeping things out. If they stepped through the gate, they might never leave.

“How much?” Mildred asked when Ryan said nothing in response to the sec man’s offer.

The sec man smiled. “One of your blasters perhaps, or mebbe some ammunition.”

“Thanks for the offer,” Ryan said. “But we need our blasters and ammo.” He turned to leave.

“Fair enough,” the sec man said, “but I can’t let you go—”

The friends all made subtle moves for their blasters.

“—without making some sort of trade. How about some food? Apples, pears, grapes, beans…I’m sure you have something of value we could exchange.”

Dean was first, producing an extra pocketknife. Jak searched his pockets and came up with a few rounds that didn’t fit any of the friends’ blasters. Krysty offered up one of her two combs, and Mildred decided she could part with a pair of socks.

“We travel light,” Ryan said as the others held up the goods for inspection.

“Not to worry,” the sec man responded. “These are all things we can make use of.” He turned to one of the sec men behind him. “Three bags.”

The sec man hopped into the white miniwag and drove up to a large building to the left of the gate. In less than a minute he came back with three bags filled with fresh fruit and vegetables.

“By the horn of the goat Amalthaea,” Doc gasped. “I never thought I’d live to see such a cornucopia such as this.”

“Fair trade?” the sec man asked.

It was more than fair, Ryan thought, which made him suspicious. In his experience, all traders always wanted to come out on top in a deal. These people either had far more food than they needed, even for trade, or they were after something else. But judging by how prosperous the farm looked, Ryan decided they could probably afford to be generous with their food—as a sign of goodwill, with an eye toward future trades of more valuable commodities. “Fair trade,” Ryan answered.

A sec man opened a small door in the gate at chest height, and the goods were passed through the opening.

“It’s been a pleasure,” the sec man said.

Ryan nodded. J.B., Doc and Krysty each took a bag, but no one grabbed a fruit, knowing they should keep their hands as free as possible in case something went wrong and they had to grab their blasters.

The small door closed and the deal was done.

“How far is the ville from here?” Ryan asked.

“Just down the road,” the sec man said, pointing south. “Hardly any people there, but plenty of places to spend the night.”

“Thanks,” Ryan said.

They were about to leave when J.B. stepped forward. “If you don’t mind me asking, where are you getting your electricity?”

“No secret,” the sec man said. “Power station at the falls has been making juice for more than two hundred years.”

“The falls,” Mildred said. “Niagara Falls?”

“That’s them.”

“Thanks for the trade,” Ryan said, “but we best get moving if we want to get to this ville by dark.”

“Mebbe we’ll see you again sometime,” the sec man said.

Ryan nodded. “Mebbe.”

The friends headed for the falls, Mildred and Dean covering the rear until they were out of range of the sec men’s longblasters.

Chapter Five

When the outlanders were almost out of sight, Baron Fox came down from his office and strolled out to the main gate to meet with Grundwold.

The sec chief had ordered the others in his team to continue trailing the outlanders while he made his report to the baron. He would catch up to them later.

The baron arrived at the gate wearing his familiar silk bathrobe, but now had a heavy pair of black leather boots on his feet. He took a pipe from a pocket in his bathrobe, filled it with some of the tobacco grown on the farm and lit it with a shiny chrome Zippo lighter, which had cost him a breeder. As always, Norman Bauer was several paces behind the baron, his ledger tucked neatly up under his right arm.

“The one-eyed man’s their leader,” Grundwold stated.

Fox chugged a few times on his pipe. When it was lit, he clenched it between his teeth and said, “Yes, he seemed to do all the talking for the group.”

“He’s good with a blaster, too,” Grundwold said.

“As they all are, no doubt.”

“It would make it hard for me to take them without losing a lot of my men.”

Fox grew angry with the sec chief. The redheaded one was exotic, and her hair was the most beautiful he’d ever seen. Even if she never got heavy, he knew a rich baron or two living outside the eastern villes who’d pay big jack to make a wig or weave out of hair like that. And the dark woman had the best set of breeding hips he’d seen in months. “Sec men I can get anywhere,” Fox spit. “I need breeders.”

“Yes, sir,” Grundwold barked. “What do you want me to do, then?”

“I want you to bring them here,” Fox said, blowing a plume of gray smoke just under Grundwold’s nose. “Bring me the women…whatever it takes.”

Grundwold nodded and looked down the road toward the falls. “What did you give them?” he asked.

“Three bags of fruit in exchange for some trinkets.”

“Ripe?”

“Most of the fruit is laced with sedatives. We didn’t have time to prepare the fruit in all three bags, but there’s a good mix. Should be enough to put a few of them off guard,” Grundwold stated. “That’s all the advantage we’ll need.”

“I’ll send the wag to the tower after dark.”

Normally the sec chief would have a wag at his disposal, but a slave had recently stolen one in an escape and they hadn’t been able to trade for a replacement yet. That made the second wag even more valuable, and the baron only wanted to let it outside the complex long enough to collect the new breeders and bring them back to the farm.

The sec chief nodded and said, “We’ll bring them back.” He started down the road at double-time to catch up with the rest of his men.

“Of course you will,” Baron Fox said. “Of course you will.”

“IT MAKES SENSE NOW,” Mildred said as the friends walked along the road toward the ville that was now less than a mile away. “The region around Niagara Falls was all farmland. Apple orchards, pears, plums, peaches and plenty of grapes for making some really good wine.”

“No more,” Jak stated.

“Not after the blast. The whole area was wiped out, except for that one farm.”

“In my day,” Doc offered, “Niagara Falls was the site of some of the most exciting theoretical discussion about the possibilities of electricity. Not to mention the incredible feat of engineering that would be required to make it possible.”

“Electricity would sure give the baron or whoever owns the farm one hell of an advantage,” J.B. commented.

“Like fuel,” Jak said.

“Better than fuel,” J.B. replied. “It’s harder to steal. No one can blow it up. And it doesn’t have to be refined. It could give them lights, even the power to pump fresh water.”

“So why hasn’t the rest of the area prospered?” Ryan asked. “If there’s power here, why is the ville empty?”

“After two hundred years the power station can’t be producing all that much electricity,” Krysty reasoned.

“He probably takes everything the station produces,” J.B. stated. “Or destroyed all the power lines, except for those running to his farm.”

“I must say the people working on the farm looked healthy enough,” Doc suggested. “They must all be doing well for themselves.”

“And for other traders,” Jak said, lifting the bag of fruit.

Ryan had to admit that the farm looked like a well-run operation. But there was still something about it that bothered him. The electrified fence was a logical defense system considering the type of muties that lurked in the area and the amount of electricity that was available. Still, it seemed to be run a little too smoothly for it to be just a farm, and he’d never seen a farm that was so well armed.

“You know,” Mildred said, “there’s another thing that Niagara Falls was known for in predark times.”

“What’s that?” J.B. asked.

“It was the honeymoon capital of North America.”

“What’s that mean?” Dean asked.

“It means that after people got married, they’d come here to, uh, celebrate by spending a lot of time in bed together.”

“Oh.”

“So that’s why the sec man said there were plenty of places to spend the night here,” Krysty said.

J.B. smiled. “Good. I could use a good night’s rest.”

“Not up to a little honeymoon, John?” Mildred chided.

“Oh, I’ll be up for it,” J.B. responded dryly.

At that moment they crested a rise in the road and suddenly Falls ville and the lake beyond it stretched out before them. There were dozens of buildings around the ville that had been destroyed by the shock waves from the initial nuke blasts, or the aftershocks that followed. But despite the damage, there were still several structures intact, such as the one that looked like a saucer set upon a knife that overlooked the water, and a cluster of buildings huddled together in the center of the ville.

The lake to the south was as big as an ocean, but was spotted by sandbars and dry patches along the shore. Water flowed over a horseshoe-shaped ridge, but it flowed only over two sections in the center of the horseshoe. The rest of the curve was dry and home to several large water birds.

“The falls have almost run dry,” Mildred said. “In predark times you’d be able to hear the water roaring from here. Millions of gallons of fresh water every minute, day and night, 365 days a year.”

“Now falls like rain,” Jak commented.

“Producing enough electricity to operate one farm, but not enough for an entire ville,” J.B. said.

“There’s something else I just realized,” Mildred said.

“What is it?” Ryan asked.

“If that’s Niagara Falls,” she said, taking a look at the geography around her, “then we’re on the Canadian side of what used to be the border.”

Chapter Six

“Being located in Canada would explain a lot about the construction of the gateway,” Ryan said.

“Anyone using it would be looking to get out of the country in a hurry,” J.B. surmised. “So it probably served as an escape hatch, mebbe for military commanders or politicians.”

“But there’s such a large underground system of redoubts and installations,” Krysty said. “Why would a one-way escape gateway be needed?”

“Things go wrong,” J.B. suggested. “Even underground fortresses can be infiltrated, especially from the inside. That gateway could get someone out of one hot spot without the risk of them landing in another one.”

Krysty considered J.B.’s reasoning. “So the trip through the gateway was meant to be one-way.”

“Someone going through that gateway likely wasn’t welcome back in the United States, probably wouldn’t want to go back to it, either.”

“All this talk of travel has made me rather famished,” Doc interjected. “Might it be possible to have one of those delectable fruits we are carrying?”

Ryan took a good look around. He hadn’t seen a mutie for some time. Although he had noticed a few of the creatures following the friends earlier on, they had dropped away now that the ville was near. They had another half hour before they reached it, and the route looked like fairly easy going. They had time to snack now while they walked, but when they entered the ville, they would need to be on the alert. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to eat something now.”

“I’ll have a peach, then,” Doc said, quickly pulling one of the fuzzy fruit from the bag he was carrying.

“Me, too,” Dean said.

Doc tossed Dean the peach he was about to eat, then pulled a second one from the bag for himself.

“I’ve got apples and pears in this bag,” J.B. said.

“Apricots and plums in mine,” Krysty added.

“I’ll have a few of each,” Mildred said. “My father used to make the best plum sauce in three counties. We’d have it on pancakes every Sunday after church.”

Krysty handed Mildred a handful of deep purple and golden-yellow fruits.

“I’ll have a pear,” J.B. said. “How about you, Krysty, Ryan, Jak?”

“Apple,” Jak said.

“Pear for me,” Ryan said.

Krysty smiled. “Me too.”

“These look good,” J.B. said, handing a reddish-green pear to Ryan, and then to Krysty. “Mebbe I’ll have one, too.”

J.B. fished a pear out of the bag for himself.

“These are truly wonderful peaches,” Doc said, admiring the fruit in his hand. “Did I ever tell the story about the man I met who rode with Kit Carson when the red-eyed son of a bitch burned out the peach orchard in Canyon de Chelly?”

“Yes,” Ryan answered.

“Heard it,” Jak said.

“Many times,” Mildred chided.

“Well, it is quite the story….” Doc said, his words trailing off until he bit into his peach again.

And for the next five minutes, the companions walked the roadway in relative silence except for the sounds of crunching fruit and the scrape of their boots on the asphalt.

THE SUN WAS JUST beginning to fall behind the western horizon as they entered the outskirts of Falls ville.

Most of the buildings they’d passed until now were in ruins. One of the buildings had been called Ripley’s, with the outside covered with pictures of two-headed goats, men joined at the hip and other common Deathlands mutations. The friends were somewhat confused by the renderings, wondering if the structure was predark or skydark.

“Ripley was a man who collected predark oddities and put them in museums for people to gawk at,” Mildred explained.

“People pay jack see this?” Jak asked.

Mildred smiled. “As one of Mr. Ripley’s colleagues once said, there’s a triple-stupe bastard born every minute.”

There were other similar establishments, all of them advertising wonders that were all too common in the Deathlands, many of them having to do with wax.

When the road ended at the water’s edge, they turned left and followed the weed-infested trail that ran parallel to the river as it flowed toward the falls. As they came to the falls themselves, the air became filled with a moist chill as the water crested over the falls and crashed onto the rocky gorge below. It was an impressive sight, but the amount of water running over the falls was nothing like what Mildred had said flowed there in predark times.

On their left was the strangely shaped tower that stood some two hundred feet above them and likely gave an excellent view of the falls and the surrounding area. Ryan made a note to check out the tower in the morning light. If the sky was clear, he’d be able to do an easy recce of the area for miles around. Directly in front of them were two buildings that looked to be fairly stable. The first was a large structure fronted by a steel framework that had obviously been covered in glass during predark times, but was now nothing more than a white steel skeleton. On one of the metal ribs a faded green sign read Casino Niagara, which was a special kind of place, Mildred explained, where people gambled away all their jack.

“Why would they do that?” Dean asked.

“For fun,” Mildred answered.

Next to the bones of the white skeleton was a much older building. It was also white, but only because that was the color of its stonework. Although most of the building’s windows had been blasted out, a few panes were still intact. Some of the pale red letters on the roof had toppled over, leaving the rest of the letters to read her ton-Fall View. It was obviously a hotel, and just as the sec men at the farm had said, there looked to be plenty of places to spend the night.

“That one looks like a fine establishment,” Doc said. “Why do we not sleep there tonight?”

“I could use some rest,” Krysty said, her hair falling straight down from her head and hanging limply over her shoulders. “Those last few miles really tired me out.”

“I’m beat, too,” J.B. added. “I’d like to sit down for a while, mebbe have some more fruit and call it a night.”

Ryan didn’t like the idea of sleeping in a strange building without a recce, but the ville seemed deserted enough and it wouldn’t be too hard to find a room on the first or second floor that they could make secure for the night. Besides, he was feeling exhausted himself, and a night in a hotel room, even the rad-blasted remnants of one, sounded good.

“All right,” he said. “That’s where we’ll go. Jak and Mildred, scout the grounds around it and meet us in the lobby.”

Jak handed his bag of fruit to Dean, and then the albino and the physician quickened their pace with blasters drawn and ready.

“Are you looking forward to a night in bed, lover?” Krysty asked.

“You have to ask?” Ryan answered.

GRUNWOLD CLIMBED the last few steps to the top of the Skylon Tower slowly. The sec chief had double-timed it to the lookout station from Fox Farm, and his lungs were complaining against the strain. He took a few moments to rest at the entrance to the observation deck, not wanting to show his men any weakness, then entered when his breathing and heart rate had come back down to something closer to normal.

“Where are they?” he asked the sec man on watch.

“They’re heading toward the Fall view,” the sec man answered, not taking his eyes from the binoculars that were trained on the heart of the ville. “My guess is that they’re going to stay there tonight.”

“Good,” Grundwold said. “Where’s the team on the ground?”

“They’re a few hundred yards behind.”

“Have they been spotted?”

“No. I even lost sight of them myself a few times.”

“Have the outlanders been eating any fruit?” Grundwold asked.

“Yes,” said the sec man. “They were all eating as they entered the ville. Looked pretty hungry, too.”

“Excellent!” Grundwold said with a smile. “That should make them ripe for the picking.”

Chapter Seven

“Jak’s still scouting the inside. The area outside the hotel is clear,” Mildred reported. “And there’s no sign that anyone’s been through the area in a while.”

Ryan nodded. He was glad for the news, but wasn’t sure how a ville with so many buildings didn’t have more people living in it. Where had all the people gone? It was another question whose answer would probably be forthcoming in time. But despite any misgivings Ryan had about staying in the old hotel, it was getting dark out and the friends needed to find a place to bed down for the night. “All right, let’s take a look inside and find a place to sleep.”

The friends stepped through the broken glass that had once been the hotel’s front door and entered the lobby with blasters in hand. While there didn’t seem to be anyone living in the ville, a few of the hungry muties could still be crawling around looking for a meal. But even that seemed unlikely, since there was even less food in the ville than there was in all the surrounding rad-chilled farmland.

As they moved through the lobby, Doc walked behind the front desk to have a look around. “Well, I’m honored to be one of the first guests here since 2001,” he said, wetting the tip of a pencil on his tongue and signing the guest book on behalf of the friends.

The hotel was laid out in a pair of long corridors that stretched out in opposite directions from the lobby. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but they could probably establish a defensible position somewhere in the hotel, allowing them all the good night’s sleep they so desperately needed.

Just then a door opened at the end of the ground-floor hallway. The friends immediately had their blasters raised and ready to fire, but it turned out to be Jak returning from his recce of the hotel’s upper floors.

“Long halls, many rooms,” the albino teenager reported. “Second floor best. One way up, many ways out.”

Ryan nodded. Since the elevators wouldn’t be working, the only way up would be by the stairs. But a building like this had to have at least two stairways, maybe even more in case of fire. “Only one stairway?” Ryan asked.

“Locked others. Now let out, not in.”

“Are the stairs the only way out?”

Jak shook his head. “Windows. Twenty-four each side, not far to ground.”

A ten-foot jump out a second-story window wasn’t Ryan’s favorite way of escaping a firefight, but with forty-eight windows and a few stairways to choose from, not to mention the possibility of going up, the one-eyed man was satisfied they’d be able to escape in the event of a mutie attack, or worse. Besides that, he was too tired to go any farther. If they didn’t stop here for the night, Ryan wasn’t sure he’d be able to go on. “Second floor it is, then.” He looked at the friends to see who was freshest and could take the first watch. “Jak, you take first watch, hour-and-a-half shifts.”

The teenager nodded.

The friends went to the end of the hallway and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

RYAN AND KRYSTY TOOK a room on the east side of the building at the far end of the hallway near one of the locked doors that led to the stairs. The windows on that side of the hotel were mostly whole, looking out over a back alley, which was just as deserted as the rest of the ville.

There were two large beds in the room, both covered with dusty sheets. Krysty took them off the bed and shook them out in a room across the hall, then replaced them on the bed. It had been a while since Ryan had slept in a bed with sheets, and he was looking forward to it.

But before he did, there was something else he’d been looking forward to even more. As he lay back on the bed, Ryan set his SIG-Sauer and panga on the nightstand next to him, then hid his Steyr SSG-70 under the bed. Then, in total comfort, he bit into another of the delicious pears they’d traded for, and watched Krysty slowly getting undressed. Seeing her shed her clothing like this always gave him a little thrill that stirred a desire deep within him. The first hint of her beauty was her gorgeous mane of fiery red hair and her strikingly brilliant emerald-green eyes. Even though she looked tired herself and her hair was hanging almost straight down from her head, she was still breathtakingly beautiful. That beauty was further evidenced as she stood at the end of the bed, slipping off her boots and then her jumpsuit and bra and panties, revealing her full breasts, long, muscular legs and firm buttocks.

Ryan took the opportunity to get out of his own clothes, taking off his jacket and shirt in one smooth motion, and then kicking off his boots and sliding out of his pants.

He was ready for her.

Krysty acknowledged that fact with a smile. “If you’re done with that pear,” she said, “you might want to try some cherry-tipped golden apples.”

Ryan stopped himself from taking another bite and put the pear down on the nightstand.

“I thought you might,” Krysty said. She crawled onto the bed and moved toward Ryan on all fours. As she straddled his legs, she bent down and kissed his hardness once, then flicked her head and dragged her long red hair across his body.

Passion flowed through Ryan, and Krysty seemed to have discovered some newfound energy as her hair was now curling slightly around her shoulders. He reached out for her, pulled her forward and, when she was in position, entered her.

They were lost in the throes of passion for a long, long time.

“DID YOU GO on a honeymoon, Doc?” Dean asked as he prepared his bed in the room he was going to share with the old man.

“Oh, I did indeed,” Doc answered, smiling.

“What was it like?”

“It was gloriously wonderful,” Doc said, looking out the window at the falls. “My dear sweet Emily and I went on a riverboat ride down the mighty Mississippi. While I knew that she was a lovely woman, I had no idea regarding the depths of her charms. She was warm, vibrant and loving, and even though the word hadn’t been in common usage, if people knew about my Emily, the word sexy might have been in common parlance long before the turn of century.”

“You mean 1900?”

“That’s the year.”

“So men and women spend a lot of time having sex on their honeymoon?”

“Well, now, yes they do.” Doc had turned away from the window and was a little unsure if it was his place to talk about such things with Dean.

“Why is that?”

“It is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years.” Doc pulled up a chair next to the bed Dean was stretched out on and sat. He stared out the window again and continued talking. “Honeymoon comes from the term ‘honey month.’ You see, even though people had always gotten married, they weren’t always faithful to each other. So, when a man and a woman married, they went off for their honey month, in which they drank an alcoholic beverage called mead, a sort of beerlike drink that was made partly from honey. The alcohol helped them…well, have sex, and it lasted a month because it allowed the woman to complete an entire reproductive cycle. This insured that the woman’s first child was undoubtedly the offspring of her husband, since no other man could have had an opportunity to mate with his wife during the honey month.

“Over time the ritual became unnecessary as there was less and less likelihood of a woman’s infidelity. However, the honeymoon still served as an opportunity for a newly wed man and woman to become intimate with each other, so it was maintained as a symbolic bonding period between two soul mates.”

Doc looked over at Dean and saw that the boy was already sound asleep. He pulled a sheet over him, then went to the other bed to lie down.

“Honey month, honeymoon,” he muttered under his breath as he prepared his bed and made himself comfortable on it. “Honey month, honeymoon.”

Minutes later Doc was asleep, dreaming of Emily and the Mississippi nights in which he’d thought he’d found a little piece of heaven on earth.

MILDRED WAS in the bathroom of the room she would be sharing with J.B. She’d taken a clean washcloth from the pile of clean towels she’d found in the bathroom and with a few splashes of water from her canteen, she was now giving herself a quick freshening up before bed.

“How long has it been, John?” she asked, looking at herself in the mirror.

“Too long,” the Armorer said between bites of a pear. He’d eaten several of them since they’d arrived in the room and was just starting to feel full.

Mildred drew her hands up over her stomach, marveling at how tight and toned the muscles had become since she’d arrived in the Deathlands. Although she was stockily built, her body had become hard and shapely. She cupped her full breasts in her hands, pleased that they had become firmer, and if she said so herself, more attractive, than they’d ever been in predark times.

“Too long is right,” she said over her shoulder. “I can’t even remember the last time.” Mildred waited for an answer, but there was none. “John?”

“Yes.”

“I said, it’s been so long, I can’t remember when we did it last.”

“I don’t remember, either,” J.B. commented, “but I do know that it was great.”

Mildred smiled. “Such a romantic.”

She finished up in the bathroom and gave herself one last look in the mirror, putting her hands on her hips and twisting her body from side to side. “You’re definitely in for a treat, John Barrymore Dix,” she whispered.

She left the bathroom and found J.B. stretched out on the bed closest to the window. His eyes were closed and a half-eaten pear was in his right hand, hanging over the edge of the bed and poised to fall to the floor at any moment.

Mildred hurried to J.B.’s side. “Are you asleep, John?” she asked.

No answer.

“John?” She shook his arm, and the pear fell from his fingers. “Are you all right?”

“Huh? What?”

Mildred stood, hands on hips again and doing her best to look indignant. “I can’t believe you’d fall asleep when you knew you had this to look forward to.”

J.B. smiled and shook his head. “I can’t believe it either.” He pulled himself into a sitting position and took one of Mildred’s chocolate-brown nipples between his lips. At the same time he let his left hand slide down between her legs, gently feeling the invitingly warm and moist folds of flesh that beckoned for more than the touch of his fingers.

“Are you going to get out of your clothes, John?” Mildred asked. “Or am I going to have to strip you down like a blaster?”

“That would be, uh, interesting,” J.B. said as Mildred began to work on his belt.

“More than just interesting, Mr. Dix.” She leaned in close, whispering in J.B.’s ear. “I’m going to oil your blaster and pull your trigger. Only in this dream, it’s going to fire…round after round, until you’re all but out of ammo.”

J.B. pulled Mildred close to him, loving her long into the night until they were both spent.

JAK GOT THE MOST comfortable chair he could find and brought it out into the hall. After positioning it in front of the only open doorway to the second floor, he sat down and had a peach.

Down the hall he could hear Doc snoring like someone’s grandfather and wondered how Dean was able to sleep with so much noise.

He looked at his wrist chron. Just another hour to go before he could wake J.B. and get some rest himself.

The soft noises continued to resound along the hallway.

One hour was going to seem more like two.

SEC CHIEF GRUNWOLD pulled back the frame of the door so the rest of his sec men could enter the hotel without a sound. They tread lightly over the broken glass strewed about the lobby, their boots making slight crunching sounds as they walked.

“Fillinger,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Sir.”

“Do a recce of the hotel, find out where they are and report back to me.”

Fillinger was gone without a word, treading silently down the first-floor hallway on his way to the stairs.

“I want at least one man on each of the stairwells, and two outside on either side of the hotel. I don’t want these outlanders slipping away.”

The sec men scattered, each filling one of the posts Grundwold had outlined. The sec chief remained in the lobby by the front desk, using it as a makeshift command center.

Five minutes after he’d been sent away, Fillinger returned, only slightly out of breath. “They’re on the second floor. They’ve got a sentry posted in the hallway in front of the only unlocked door to the floor. The other entrances have all been locked, so my guess is the rest of them are getting some sleep, taking turns on watch through the night.”

“Good work.”

“Do you have a plan?” Fillinger asked.

“Not yet,” Grundwold said. “Give them some time to fall asleep, and for the sedatives to kick in. Meanwhile, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure something out.”

Chapter Eight

An hour later, Jak Lauren was having trouble keeping his eyes open. During his entire time on watch, he hadn’t heard a sound other than Doc’s snoring—which had mercifully toned down as the time traveler fell into a deeper sleep—and he’d found it hard to remain awake and alert.

But now that he’d finished his watch, he was eager to be relieved so he could crawl into bed for some much needed sleep. According to the rotation they’d used of late, J.B. followed Jak. J.B. would be followed by Mildred, then came Doc, Dean, Krysty and Ryan. Jak could have waited for J.B. to come and relieve him, but with a mat-trans jump and a long trek on foot there was no reason why anyone would be getting up from a sound sleep on his or her own.

Jak got up from his chair and went into Mildred and J.B.’s room. They were together on the same bed and fully dressed, J.B. on the right side, closer to the door. Jak nudged the Armorer’s shoulder in an attempt to wake him.

J.B. didn’t stir.

Jak tried again, this time nudging the man a little bit harder.

Still nothing.

Jak took firm hold of J.B.’s shoulder and arm and gave him a firm shake, as well as tapping him on the side of the head with a finger. That seemed to do the trick, because in an instant J.B.’s eyes were open and his hand was under the mattress reaching for his Tekna. In less than a second he had it raised and pointed at Jak. But even though his eyes were open, the sleep wasn’t quite gone from his mind. If Jak’s white hair and ruby-red eyes hadn’t been so distinctive, J.B. just might have run the teenager through with his blade.

“Your turn take watch,” Jak said, his right hand on J.B.’s wrist just to make sure he didn’t slip with the knife.

J.B. sighed, opened and closed his eyes several times and tried to bring himself to wakefulness. It wasn’t easy. He’d been awakened in similar circumstances many times before, but he’d never had so much trouble rousing himself. “I’ll be right there,” J.B. said.

“Good,” Jak replied, leaving the room. “Tired. Need sleep.”

J.B. closed his eyes again, but immediately opened them, knowing that if he allowed himself to drift off, he’d never get up. He sat up on the edge of the bed rubbing his hands vigorously over his face.

“Is everything all right, John?” Mildred asked, awakened by J.B.’s movements.

“Tired is all.”

“Do you want me to take your turn?”

“No, I’ll be fine.”

“Call me early for my shift if you need to,” Mildred muttered, sliding back into sleep.

“Sure.” J.B. laced up his boots, then grabbed his spectacles and fedora off the nightstand and put them on. He decided to take his scattergun with him. It would cover the entire hallway with a single shot, and the noise would surely awaken the rest of the friends from even the deepest sleep.

“See you in an hour and a half,” J.B. whispered, giving Mildred a kiss on the cheek.

Mildred smiled as if lost in a dream.

THE OUTLANDERS obviously knew what they were doing, Grundwold thought. While their choice of spending the night on the second floor of the old hotel at first seemed unwise, a closer look revealed that they had taken up a fairly secure defensive position. There was only one way onto the second floor, but many ways off. A new sentry was watching the entrance, and he’d pulled his chair into one of the room doorways so that it was impossible to take him out with the first shot. At best, a sec man would have to open the stairwell door and rush the hallway, giving the sentry at least an even chance at getting off a shot before he was chilled. That would surely awaken the rest of them, and then all hell would break loose.

When that happened, the women could easily get caught in the firestorm. The baron wouldn’t like that at all. He wouldn’t care if only one of his sec men came back from Falls, as long as he had the two women with him. After all, a single stud could service dozens of women; it was the women who got heavy and delivered the goods.

As an experienced sec chief with plenty of loyal men under his command, Grundwold knew he couldn’t commit all his men to a firefight in the hopes of capturing just two women. But in this situation, what else could he do?

He looked through the glass of the doorway at the open end of the hallway. The short wiry man with glasses and a hat looked to be having trouble staying awake. That was likely thanks to the sedatives in the pears. It was just the sort of advantage Grundwold had been hoping for. If nothing else, they could sneak into the hallway, slit the sentry’s throat and then take out the rest of the outlanders as they slept, until they had captured the women or chilled all of the men.

“Kauderer,” Grundwold whispered.

“Sir!” the sec man responded.

“Go around and join Fillinger at the door at the other end of this hallway.”

“Then what?” Kauderer asked.

“We wait for this stupe in the hat to fall fast asleep, and then we start chillin’.”

The sec man smiled. “Yes, sir!”

KRYSTY STIRRED beneath the sheets. She could feel something was wrong. She reached over to check on Ryan. Her lover was there, warm and resting comfortably in a deep, peaceful sleep. She wondered if she should wake him and let him know what she was feeling, but decided it wasn’t strong enough to sound the alarm just yet. She’d have a look around, and if she noticed anything unusual, she could wake Ryan.

Slipping out of bed, Krysty was struck by the coolness of the night air. She dressed hastily, slipped on her bearskin coat, then picked up her Smith & Wesson and left the room.

The hall was quiet. J.B. was on watch down the hall, which was some twenty-five yards away. He was sitting on a chair in a doorway to one of the rooms and facing the open door to the stairwell. She’d check in with him later, but first she needed to check out the stairs at this end of the hallway. Something told her that whatever was sending her the danger signals was located at this end of the building.

She looked through the glass in the locked door, peering first down the stairs and then up them. No one was there, but still her feeling of unease persisted. She opened the door and took a single step into the stairwell to get a better look.

Suddenly a hand was on her wrist, and another on her mouth. She was yanked into the stairway, her Smith & Wesson torn from her grasp as she was thrown onto the concrete landing.

The door almost closed behind her, but was kept open by a clip from somebody’s blaster.

“We weren’t expecting you,” a sec man whispered. “But we’re glad you could make it.”

The second sec man plastered a large piece of silver tape over her mouth, and they both worked to tie her hands behind her back with a strong piece of nylon cord.

“And not even a scratch,” the first sec man said.

The second one laughed. “The baron will be pleased.”

GRUNWOLD COULDN’T believe his luck. As he’d watched through the glass of the door, one of the two outlander women wandered out of her room, opened the door at the far end of the hallway and was caught on the other side by Fillinger and Kauderer.

And best of all, she’d opened the door and now they were free to enter the second floor away from the end of the hallway being watched by the guard.

“Canady and Edson stay here,” Grundwold barked hoarsely. “The rest of you come with me.”

He headed down the stairs, padding softly on the steps so as to avoid causing any noise that might alert the sleeping outlanders. When he reached the other end of the second-floor hallway, Fillinger and Kauderer were just finishing tying up the redheaded woman. They had replaced the clip in the doorway with a knife that had been wedged into the door frame. It kept the door open and unlocked and was in no danger of being kicked loose.

“Good work!” Grundwold said. “Do you know which room she came out of?”

“Second one on the left,” Fillinger answered.

Grundwold turned to face the rest of the sec men who were lined up on the stairs. “Two of you take her to the tower and wait for us there. If I’m not there in one hour, take her back to the farm and make your report to the baron.”

Two sec men grabbed Krysty by the arms and led her away.

“And don’t mess with her,” Grundwold called down the stairwell. “I want her handed over to the baron in good condition.”

He turned to the sec men directly behind him. “Follow me,” he told Lewis. “The rest of you cover the hallway. If the outlanders discover us, I don’t want any of them coming down the hall. All right, let’s go.”

Grundwold stepped back from the door, and a sec man opened it for him. He and Lewis padded into the hallway, moving quickly toward the second door on the left. They kept a close watch on the man guarding the far door, but he didn’t stir.

They stopped just outside the door to the room, and Grundwold peered through the doorway. There was a man on the bed, asleep. They would chill him and move onto the next room in search of the other woman.

Grundwold entered the room, went around to the far side of the bed and leveled his blaster on the back of the man’s head. On the other side of the bed, Lewis drew his switchblade, pressed the silver button at the top of the handle and the knife snicked open.

The man on the bed suddenly stirred, and in a single quick and fluid motion, he had a huge knife in his hand and was slashing it across Lewis’s belly. The sharp edge of the monster blade cut through the sec man’s jacket and abdomen, spilling blood and entrails onto the hotel-room floor.

Lewis stood there with wide eyes as his hands reached down in an attempt to keep his guts from sliding out of his body.

Grundwold leaped onto the bed, grabbed the prone man’s arm with one hand and jammed the barrel of his Persuader up under the man’s ear with the other. “I’ve got sec men all over the hall. If you make another move, or make a sound, I’ll chill you and the rest of your friends where they sleep.”

The man’s body tensed, as if he were going to try something despite the warning. “We’ve already got the redhead. If you want to see her alive, you’ll do what I say.”

That seemed to convince the man that putting up a fight wasn’t a good idea.

The man slowly got off the bed.

“You can get dressed, but I’ll chill you and your friends in a heartbeat if you try anything.”

The one-eyed man nodded, seeming to accept his fate, or perhaps realizing that fighting back at the moment would be futile. Whatever the reason, he cooperated with them and began putting on his pants and boots. When Ryan was dressed, Grundwold picked up the man’s knife and blaster and led him out of the room, then down to the end of the hallway where a half-dozen sec men were waiting. As soon as they were in the stairwell, the door closed behind them and the sec men who’d been waiting on the stairs began tying the one-eyed man’s hands behind his back.

“Tie his legs, too,” Grundwold ordered. “Give him enough slack to walk, but not to run.”

“Where’s Lewis?” one of the sec men asked.

Grundwold shook his head.

The sec man, a friend of Lewis, stepped forward and threw a hard punch into the prisoner’s stomach. Ryan doubled over slightly, but recovered quickly. The sec man threw a second punch, fully catching the one-eyed man’s jaw. His head snapped left from the force of the blow, but he showed no signs of pain or fear.

Grundwold swung his arm in an arc and caught the sec man with the butt of his blaster before he could throw another punch. “Take it downstairs, before you wake up the rest of them,” Grundwold hissed. “We’ve still got one more breeder to catch.”

The sec man unclenched his fist and grabbed Ryan by the arm, pulling him hard down the stairs. The rope between the prisoner’s legs caused him to stumble, then fall down a whole flight of stairs.

The sec men picked him up by the arms, then dragged him the rest of the way down the stairs and out of the hotel.

“Fillinger!” Grundwold said. “Come with me.”

Grundwold and Fillinger reentered the hallway and began searching rooms for the other outlanders. Grundwold checked the third room on the left and found it empty. He looked back along the hall where Fillinger had just finished searching the second room on the right.

Fillinger shook his head. The room was empty.

Grundwold waited in the doorway of the room he’d just searched, his lovingly maintained Persuader 500 trained at the man guarding the far door, who still hadn’t moved.

Fillinger opened the door to the third room on the right, directly across from where Grundwold was providing cover. He had the door halfway open when he stopped in his tracks and looked over at Grundwold and jabbed his thumb in the direction of the room.

Someone was sleeping in there.

Grundwold kept the Persuader trained on the guard as he moved across the hallway to join Fillinger. Then they entered the room together, with Grundwold again moving to the far side of the bed. When they were in place, Fillinger lowered the barrel of his remade longblaster onto the head of the sleeping outlander while Grundwold reached down to pull back the sheet covering the sleeper’s head.

It was truly Grundwold’s lucky day. Sleeping on the bed was the other breeder.

“Make a sound and you’re chilled,” Grundwold whispered in her ear.

She opened her mouth to let out a scream, and Fillinger pressed the blue-steel tip of his blaster even harder against the side of her head.

She closed her mouth and held her tongue.

“If you want to try your luck, you should have gone to the casino next door. We don’t play games,” Grundwold said. “Put on your boots. You’re going on a little trip.”

Flashing him a murderous look, but without making another sound, Mildred put on her boots.

Although she was fully clothed, Grundwold enjoyed the view of the breeder’s full, voluptuous figure, but didn’t allow the sight to make him careless. “We’ll take your blaster, thanks,” Grundwold said, picking up the target revolver from the table and tucking it into the waistband of his pants.

Grundwold and Fillinger each took hold of one of the woman’s arms and led her to the door. There was something about the look on the woman’s face that Grundwold didn’t like. She seemed to still want to fight back, and there was a good chance she might do something stupe like try to warn the others.

“Hold it!” Grundwold said.

Fillinger paused at the door, and Grundwold took the rag he used to keep his blaster clean out of a jacket pocket. He wrapped the ends of the rag around each of his hands and pulled it taut between them. Then he pressed the rag between her lips until she opened her mouth and he could push it past her teeth. Finally he tied the rag around her neck, preventing her from uttering a sound.

“You say a word or try to make a sound, the head of the guard outside the door will be turned into wallpaper,” Grundwold said. “Understand?”

Mildred nodded.

“All right,” Grundwold said. “I think now she’s ready. Let’s get out of here. And keep it quiet.”

Together the sec chief and the sec man quickly ushered the prisoner out of the room and down the hallway. The guard was still there on his chair, his eyes never wavering from the door at the other end of the hallway.

As they reached the stairwell, the door was opened by an attentive sec man, and the three of them were able to pass through the doorway without a sound.

“Get her to the tower!” Grundwold ordered.

At once a pair of sec men escorted Mildred down the stairs and out of the hotel.

“Fillinger, go around to the other door and tell the men there to pull back.” Grundwold looked at his wrist chron. “I want everyone at the base of the tower in ten minutes.”

The sec men scattered without another word.

Grundwold lingered behind, making sure to give Fillinger enough time to go downstairs, through the lobby and back up to the second-floor landing to inform the others their mission had been successfully completed. When he was sure the sec men had pulled back from the door at the other end of the hall, Grundwold reached down and pulled the knife holding the door in front of him open.

The steel fire door swung closed…and locked, the sound of the locking mechanism echoing through a suddenly empty stairwell.

THE HUGE MUTIE CREATURE was on him. It looked very much like a lizard, but was as big as a horse. Its skin was made up of orange-and-green scales, and each of its forward arms ended with a set of three razor-sharp talons.

The Armorer had confronted the beast before and had lost. This time would be different. This time he was going to chill it, blasting it into a hundred different pieces.

The mutie beast neared, its three-inch fangs dripping gore left from its last meal. J.B. took several steps backward, giving him some time to draw his Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun. In a few moments there would be a hole in the creature’s chest big enough to drive a wag through, and the whole episode would be little more than a bloody memory.

J.B. leveled his blaster at the beast, squeezed the trigger and heard the terrifying sound of a metallic click of the hammer falling on an empty chamber.

The beast lunged—

And J.B. awoke from his dream before it tore his limbs from his body.

He sat on his chair, gasping for breath. His eyelids still seemed heavy, as if he had been awakened from another mat-trans jump, and hadn’t simply dozed off for a few minutes.

Had it been a few minutes?

J.B. glanced at his wrist chron. “Dark night!” he exclaimed. According to the chron, he’d been on watch for more than three hours. How could that have been? While there was no excuse for falling asleep while on watch, why hadn’t Mildred or one of the others relieved him?

He ran down the hall to his room to check on Mildred.

She was gone.

He went across the hall to check on Ryan and Krysty…and found a dead sec man from the farm in their room, his belly slashed open, most likely by Ryan’s panga.

Ryan and Krysty were gone, but Ryan’s Steyr SSG-70 longblaster was still tucked safely under the bed.

What in dark night had happened to them? J.B. wondered. What had happened to him that he could sleep through it all?

He ran out into the hallway, shouting. “Doc, Jak, Dean!”

In moments the three friends appeared in the hallway, blasters in hand.

“What is it?” Dean asked.

J.B. stood in the middle of the hallway with Ryan’s Steyr in his hand. “Ryan, Krysty and Mildred,” he said. “They’re gone.”

Chapter Nine

“I can see the head!” the healer cried, sweat dripping off his nose. He’d wanted to call in an assistant hours earlier, but Baron Reichel had forbidden it, not wanting any more people than were necessary to see his wife in such a compromised state.

Reichel ville, on the southern shores of Erie Lake, hadn’t been blessed with a newborn for many, many months. Things had been born, but they bore no resemblance to children. The baron could ill afford to let it be known that such monsters were born into his family. His bloodline was pure, and his heirs needed to be full norms. If his wife bore him a mutie, the fewer who knew about it the better.

Baron Reichel sat on a bench out in the hall just on the other side of the door to the healer’s room. He had been in the room for the longest time, but his constant concern over his wife’s agonized shrieks had prompted the healer to ask him to leave, allowing the healer to do his work without the interference and misguided concerns of an impassioned observer.

“You must push,” the healer said. “Push harder!”

“I can’t,” the woman gasped, nearing the point of exhaustion.

The healer believed her. In all his years he had never seen such a lengthy and painful birth. Everything about the delivery of this child was slow and complicated when in truth there were absolutely no signs warranting complications, or even pain for that matter. But here was the baron’s wife, in labor half the day and still hours to go before the child was born.

“You must try,” the healer urged, his voice showing far more compassion than normal. Usually he was very hard on women during birth, forcing them to work harder in order to end their ordeal more quickly. But Gayle Reichel had already suffered too much, for too long.

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