Doc probed deeper

“The question remains unanswered. Is there any of the poisonous old tech still on the premises, the rancid remnants of a bygone and perhaps best forgotten age? Some relic of that pernicious evil known as the Totality Concept?”

Doc hadn’t idly brought up the name of the Totality Concept. He had spoken the name in the hopes of eliciting some kind of reaction.

The baron hadn’t recognized the name at all, and had seemed genuine in his bemusement at the use of the term. But then, Doc hadn’t been watching the baron. His eyes had been kept firmly on Jenna, and he had seen her sharp features harden as the words were spoken. The raven eyes had fixed on him, met his full on and tried to fathom his intent.

There was old tech here. Old tech related to secret government projects of the past. And maybe there was something that would link this ville to the main body of the Illuminated Ones, and the place in the North they were searching for.

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

DEATH LANDS®

James Axler

…there have always been secrets, and there has always been power. It’s just that some of it has been out in the open, and some of it has been in the shadows. That’s the worst—you can never be sure what’s going on in the shadows. That twilight world where there are only half-truths and half-lies, and no such thing as trust.

—From a report to a Congress Committee on hidden cabals and covert operations,

August 23, 1954

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

Epilogue

Chapter One

Ryan Cawdor opened his eye.

A sharp, stabbing pain shot through his head, piercing to the back of his brain like a red-hot needle pushed through the center of that diamond-hard blue orb.

No matter how many times he made the jump using the mat-trans, no matter how often he steeled himself for the inevitable agonies of recovery and regaining consciousness, it still amazed him that it could hurt so much. He’d lost count of the number of times his scarred and pitted torso had been injured in combat, racked with pain in torture; still, any of that seemed preferable, right now, to the agonies of regaining full consciousness after a jump.

Ryan’s muscled body, honed by years of travel and combat, trained to cope with a harsh existence, complained in no uncertain manner as he rose from his prone position onto one elbow. His curly black hair, matted with sweat, hung down over his active eye and the empty socket, protected by a patch and scored by a long, livid and puckered scar.

The lead in his muscles moved as the lactic acid dispersed, and the oxygen from the stale air he breathed so heavily started to traverse his bloodstream. He looked across to the seemingly slight but deceptively wiry frame of J. B. Dix, the man known as the Armorer, a position he had fulfilled for Trader, and where Ryan had first met the man he could call friend in a land where such things were rare.

John Barrymore Dix was slumped across the frosted floor of the mat-trans chamber, across the now still disks that glowed when the chamber was about to activate. A faint tang of ozone remained in the brackish air, a sign that Ryan hadn’t taken long to regain consciousness after the final stages of the jump. J.B., on the other hand, was still out cold, his chest moving visibly as he tried to gulp in air. His precious and battered fedora lay beside him, along with his Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun, his Uzi and the Tekna knife that had been invaluable when the aging tech of the blasters had given trouble.

Not that it often happened. The Armorer was an artist, if such a thing could be said to exist in the Deathlands. His eyes would sparkle behind his wire-rimmed spectacles—now safely stored in his pocket against the trauma of the jump—when he talked of weaponry, and his knowledge of blasters, grens and any other weapon was second to none. He made sure that the group with whom he traveled kept its weaponry in excellent condition at all times, taking pride in his work. A pride that was far from idle, as a misfiring blaster in the middle of a firefight would mean buying the farm when survival was much the preferred option.

Beside the prone J.B., her hand reaching out to him protectively, was Dr. Mildred Wyeth. Sometimes cynical in the face of adversity, her phlegmatic attitude in some ways echoed that of the Armorer, and had led to their relationship and understanding deepening over their travels. Despite the horror of the post-apocalypse world into which she had been thrown, Mildred’s predark idealism still powered her onward. Trapped in cryogenic suspension following complications during a minor operation, Mildred had awakened into something that for her was a nightmare. Initially, she had clashed with Ryan Cawdor, questioning his right to assume leadership of the group. But Ryan’s fighting skills and survival instincts had won her respect, as had his strong sense of justice, albeit tempered by necessary pragmatism. Besides which, she noticed that although assuming leadership and thus having the final say, Ryan believed strongly in teamwork, and played to the strengths of his companions.

Mildred’s beaded plaits hung over her dark face, almost a pallid gray as the waves of nausea from the jump dragged her toward consciousness.

A low moan, tortured and like a wailing lost soul seeking rest, drew the one-eyed warrior’s attention, causing him to turn slowly. As it came from the inside of the chamber, and was in a tone he knew well, he allowed himself the luxury of taking his time, allowing his still complaining equilibrium to adjust to the movement of his head. If he hadn’t recognized the sound, or if it had originated outside the chamber, he would have steeled himself, ignored the sudden dizziness and nausea and reached for his panga and his 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster.

This time there was no need: the moan emanated, as he knew it had to, from the bony and angular figure dressed in a frock coat who lay propped against the far wall of the chamber. Dr. Theophilus Tanner was, in real time, somewhere in his mid- to late-thirties. Yet his real age was incalculable, as he had been plucked from his own time into another, and then tossed back into the stream of time. Doc’s muddled and bemused memories told of a time before the turn of the twentieth century, when life was sedate and ordered. The unwilling and unwitting subject of an experiment by the whitecoat scientists of a time immediately prior to skydark, Doc had proved too quarrelsome, too much trouble, and had been used as a test subject in an experiment to project forward in time.

It was an irony that the experiment had probably saved his life, landing him as it did nearly a century after the devastation of the nuclear war known as skydark. However, the damage to his physical and mental states was a subject of speculation. Mildred often referred to him as a crazy old fool, but was the first to own that this was merely irritation with his more unstable moments. The truth was that the Oxford- and Harvard-educated Tanner had weathered experiences that would have broken a lesser man. He looked weatherbeaten and aged—strangers would take him for twice his probable age—and from time to time was inclined to ramble in a seemingly senile and illogical manner, though these bouts were not as common as they used to be.

Yet he was also capable of a tenacious and wiry strength, and possessed a razor-sharp mind that could cut through the stress and strain of his most unusual life. For a man whose first experience of the Deathlands had been near death under torture at the hands of Baron Jordan Teague and his psychopathic sec chief Cort Strasser in the ville of Mocsin, Doc was surprisingly able to hold his fragile sanity together.

“I know—how much more of this can he take? Right, lover?”

Ryan turned back at the sound of Krysty Wroth’s voice, which sounded like a sonorous bell in the enclosed space, clear and ringing, yet quiet and controlled. The flame-haired woman was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chin, wrapped in the bearskin coat that hid the toned and shaped curves of her body. She flashed Ryan a smile that sparked through her green eyes. Yet she still showed signs of the strain caused by the jump.

Ryan allowed himself a smile in return, and cursed as he felt the muscles of his face ache as they moved. “Always read my thoughts,” he replied. Then he indicated Doc. “It’s true enough. Hurts bad for us, let alone what Doc’s been through.”

“Crazy old coot’ll outlive us all, you’ll see…” Mildred tentatively raised herself onto one foot, remaining half-kneeling until she was sure of her balance. J.B., still on his back but now conscious, allowed himself merely a grunt of assent.

“Okay, people, how are we doing?” Ryan asked. It was a rhetorical question. They were doing well, so far.

By now, Ryan and Krysty were on their feet, both massaging life back into their aching and dulled limbs. It was a luxury they knew they could allow themselves. J.B. was checking his blasters, which was no more than second nature to him. Mildred was checking Doc, pulling back his eyelid to see his rolling eyeball as his muttering grew less incoherent.

“My dear woman, I would appreciate a less heavy hand on my optic nerve,” he murmured from his incoherence, the eyeball beginning to still and focus.

“No thanks, not a bit of it,” Mildred replied with an indulgent smile, breathing silent thanks that Doc had made it once more.

There were still two members of the group who had failed to completely surface from the jump. Jak Lauren, the whip-thin and immensely strong albino, still lay on the floor of the chamber. His patched camou jacket, littered with the leaf-bladed throwing knives that were his specialty, seemed almost to smother him. As always seemed to happen during a jump, he had vomited, wretched strings of bile that dripped from his nose and mouth, forming small acrid puddles around his face. His breathing was regular and shallow, and he showed little sign of regaining consciousness. The boy beside him, however, was beginning to stir.

The casual observer would think that it was Ryan Cawdor who was prone on the chamber floor, then would notice that under the black mop of curly hair, the chiseled face was bereft of scarring and still held two eyes. The limbs were rangy, the musculature strong but still taking shape. But there was no mistaking that the boy was of Cawdor blood.

Dean Cawdor, recently turned twelve years old, was his father in miniature, and for Ryan it was an uncanny experience to look on his son and see himself some twenty-odd years previous. He even recognized the bridling brashness and overconfidence in his abilities that Ryan himself had been prone to at that age—except that Ryan had gone through this stage in the comparative safety and security of Front Royal, under the patronage of his father, the ville’s baron. Dean had to go through this learning experience in an environment where one wrong move could mean instant death, or worse…a lingering, tortuous death. So perhaps sometimes the older Cawdor was harsh in slapping down his son’s brazen self-confidence, but only because he was aware of what was happening inside the boy and felt an urgent need to quell the impetuousness that could be Dean’s undoing.

Even as this passed through the one-eyed warrior’s mind, Dean groaned softly and raised his head slowly, opening his eyes and then raising himself in the same manner as his father.

With Doc also now on his feet, Mildred devoted her medical attentions to taking care of Jak. The albino’s tolerance to the bodily stresses of the jumps was lower than the others.

Slowly, Jak came round, wiping the sticky mucus and bile from his face with his sleeve, and hawking a glob of phlegm from his throat.

“Okay to go?” Ryan questioned him.

Jak nodded. “As ever be.”

“Let’s do it.”

THE DOOR to the chamber had unlocked automatically when the jump had been completed. It was a safety facet of the mat-trans system that the doors on both the sending and receiving chambers had to be shut before the transfer could take place, and that the comp systems would automatically lock and unlock the doors when the transfer got underway and ended. Or at least, the aging and mostly uncared-for tech had worked that way thus far. Any deviation was beyond their control, and so not really worth consideration or worry.

They exited the chamber singly, checking the immediate area as they went, prepared to provide cover and defense for those who would follow. As always, Ryan took the lead, with J.B. at the rear.

The anteroom and control room outside the mattrans unit were empty. The comp consoles winked and chattered softly in the semidarkness, with much of the lighting having fallen prey to the passing years and lack of maintenance. The lack of dust was due to the antistatic air conditioner, which still worked.

There were no signs of life.

It took little time for them to ascertain that the redoubt was, on these lower levels at least, completely deserted. It was in a reasonable condition. There were signs of stress in some of the walls, suggesting that earth movements resulting from the tremors and quakes following skydark had made some impact on the redoubt, but most of the lighting was still working, and there was some circulation of air through a purification plant. The air was clean, but a little thin, suggesting that the plant was damaged.

“Can’t stay here too long,” Mildred remarked as they explored the empty rooms. “The air’s fine now, but it won’t last that way forever.”

“Why not?” Dean countered. “It’s been okay up to now, right?”

“Think about it, my boy,” Doc interjected with a sardonic note. “The air is, shall we say, a little thin down here. Suggesting, I should imagine, some malfunction of the ancient technology keeping this place alive, albeit perhaps in a wheezing and somewhat dubious manner…A little like myself, in fact.”

“So?” Dean prompted, still in the dark.

“So, it’s thin and strained when the redoubt is empty. But now it has seven people breathing in at a ridiculous rate. A rate made, with some irony, even faster by its very paucity.”

“Big words for say we use faster than made,” Jak commented with an amused look at the old man. Doc merely shrugged.

“So how long you reckon we got?” J.B. asked Mildred.

She shook her head, the ends of her plaits moving rhythmically as though caught by a much needed draft of air. “Couldn’t say for sure, John. It’s like being at a high altitude. I don’t think we’d suffocate for a few days, but the more rarefied it gets, the more it might affect us. Hallucinations, maybe.”

“Great. Like jolt only not so good,” Jak muttered in a dour tone.

“Think we can risk a night?” Ryan asked Mildred. “I’d like us to get some rest before tackling whatever may be out there or risk another jump.”

“I’d say we could do that,” Mildred replied after some thought.

“Good. Now let’s try and find the shower stalls, mebbe some clean clothes. That’d make me feel better for a start,” Krysty added.

“Right. Stink like mutie polecat on heat,” Jak grunted.

It didn’t take long to find the shower stalls and washing facilities. Like most redoubts, this one was laid out to a specification that had been generally used. There had been exceptions, but for the most part it could be assumed that if a person had explored one redoubt, he or she had a fair chance of navigating every other one he or she came across.

The showers were still working. As with several of the redoubts they had encountered so far, the lighting in this one was erratic. But the water was still on, and the heaters still worked. The first streams of water were lukewarm, flecked with some decay and foreign matter from the pipes, but after a minute or so by Ryan’s wrist chron the water was clear, flowing freely and of an even temperature.

They took turns to shower, keeping a guard at all times. It seemed that the redoubt was deserted apart from their presence, but they could never be too sure. The friends had been taken unawares on a previous occasion.

It was a simple matter to find clean clothing. The store rooms for all redoubts were situated in the same place, and in this redoubt they were lucky enough to find underclothes and thermally insulated outerwear that had lain unused for over a century. They took the opportunity to change clothes and would later launder what they usually wore.

One strange thing, though—the clothes weren’t the usual regulation khaki and olive-green, or white. Some of the clothes were in colors that seemed, under the dim lighting, to be black or a dark blue. Some of it, under the better lighting of the corridor, even revealed itself to be purple, a color rarely if ever seen in predark sec conditions. And the lighter colors were yellows and sky-blues. It was a small but significant difference.

“These make a change,” Dean remarked as he dressed, “but it doesn’t seem right to me.”

“You’re right,” Krysty agreed. “The armies from before skydark would never have used this.” She held up a purple T-shirt that seemed, in the light, to have streaks of a faded pattern running across it. “This is no ordinary military redoubt.”

“Built on the same lines, though,” Ryan said thoughtfully. “Odd. Most of the nonmilitary redoubts we’ve jumped to have been different. But this…”

“I know,” Mildred said. “It’s uncanny, and maybe just a bit creepy. It’s a military base, but with so many nonmilitary touches. If only it wasn’t so damned dark…I’d swear that these rooms are just a bit smaller than the usual size. It’s like someone got the military blueprints but had to downscale just a bit.” Mildred shivered. “It just gives the place a screwy atmosphere, like looking into a distorting mirror.”

Jak looked at her, puzzled. “Not feel danger here,” he said simply. “Old sec weird. Seen plenty weirder.”

Doc, who had so far been silent, leaned thoughtfully on his swordstick, hands clasped over the silver lion’s head. “I wonder…” he mused, then lapsed into silence.

“Wonder what, Doc?” Ryan asked gently, knowing that when the old man was straining to recall, it was best to keep patience and coax it from him.

“Whitecoat paranoia,” Doc continued. “You know, those fools always believed there were secret cabals out to overthrow them—private armies, hidden money and knowledge. All power, I suppose. But perhaps…”

“If this was such a place—another sec force—then mebbe it’s got a good armory.” J.B. almost smiled as he jammed his fedora onto his closely cropped scalp. The twinkle in his eyes betrayed his excitement.

“We could do with a few new blasters, mebbe some grens,” Ryan said. “Should be easy to find the armory if this follows standard layout, right?”

They all nodded agreement.

“Well, I vote we get some sleep first,” Krysty said with a sigh. “We know we can’t stay here too long, and I can’t feel any danger at all, lover.”

“Okay. We’ll search for the armory after we’ve slept, mebbe see if we can access some information. This place seems to be in good order, so mebbe the comps won’t be too fucked up.”

The weariness with which his companions agreed and the fact that the Armorer was content to leave the weapons search until after sleeping were sure signs that the friends badly needed some rest.

As they had all suspected, the dormitories were easy to find. Echoing Mildred’s impression that the redoubt was on a smaller scale than most old sec installations, the dorms housed only a few beds per room. In fact, it looked as though the total personnel of this redoubt couldn’t have been more than thirty at most.

Dean, Jak and Doc took one room. Mildred and J.B. another, leaving Ryan and Krysty to take their pick of the remaining dorms.

Shutting themselves away from the others, and gaining a rare privacy since the beginning of their travels, they settled into one of the beds. The controlled environment of the redoubt had kept the linen fresh, and little dust or dirt had accumulated over the preceding century.

Krysty moved closer to Ryan, molding herself to his body and running a fingernail over the ridges of the one-eyed warrior’s ribs.

“Still tense, lover?” she asked, feeling the knotting of his muscles.

“Mebbe it’s got to where I’ve forgotten how to relax,” Ryan replied. “It’s too quiet, too calm. I don’t like it…. It’s not right. Too easy.”

Krysty drew circles with her nail on his rippling muscles. “Mebbe so…I can’t feel anything, and I’m cherishing the calm. Gaia knows we don’t get too much of that. It’s not a calm and peaceful world, so finding an oasis of peace for just a little while…Do you think you’d be able to settle if we ever did find the promised lands?”

Ryan smiled at her choice of words, knowing that she had deliberately picked them to amuse him, relax him. “Mebbe. And mebbe I just can’t think of that now when there’s a fight around every corner. Guess I’ve spent, hell, we’ve all spent too long having to be on our guard. Peace like this just feels like the calm eye of some rad-blasted storm.”

“Well, we’re in the eye of that storm right now, so we may as well make the best of it,” she replied softly, moving on top of him, using every muscle in her body to coax the tired warrior away from his concern and into focusing on her. And their togetherness.

Krysty was so skilled, and moved so intuitively, that Ryan found his restlessness draining away, and his attention drawn entirely to his lover’s body as she roused him to a passion that they had too little time to consummate.

And afterward, he slept his first entirely dreamless and restful sleep since he couldn’t remember when.

Chapter Two

Both Ryan and Krysty awoke the next day refreshed. Ryan felt easier, and on examining his wrist chron found that they had slept for almost twenty-four hours.

After he and Krysty had risen and dressed, they ventured out of the dorm. The unearthly quiet that always accompanied a deserted redoubt was broken by the distant and muffled sounds of talk and the clatter of dishes. Exchanging puzzled and amused glances, they followed the sounds until they became more audible.

“…don’t give shit. Not eating slop when self-heats there.”

“C’mon, Jak. Doc’s done his best, and it would make more sense to keep the self-heats and take them with us.” Mildred’s exasperation was showing through in her edgy tone.

“Yeah, but this crap’ll kill us before we get out of the main door, so then we won’t need self-heats anyway, will we?” There was a wry edge to Dean’s tone that suggested he was enjoying helping Jak to exasperate the more sensible Dr. Wyeth.

Who was looking for backup. “John, don’t just sit there and say nothing. Help me out on this one.”

“Leave me out of this, Millie,” came J.B.’s laconic tones. “This crap isn’t really edible, but then I don’t like self-heats much, either.”

Ryan and Krysty entered what was obviously the redoubt’s kitchen to find their companions arguing at a table, with the exception of Doc, who was standing over a pan that bubbled busily on a hot plate. He greeted them with a sheepish grin.

“I fear I may be the cause of some discontent,” he began. “Upon finding a supply of self-heats, but also some foodstuffs that had been dried and preserved, I reasoned that it would be sensible to try to make a meal from the latter, thus preserving the self-heats for our travels. However, I must confess that my attempts at the culinary arts have not been altogether—shall we say—successful.”

Krysty wrinkled her nose at the stale stench emanating from the pan, then glanced at Ryan. He, too, had noticed the smell. Doc noted their silent exchange.

“Precisely,” he replied to their unspoken question. “The desiccated foodstuffs and—well, what they were I can only assume—seem to be as stale as the spices with which I have endeavored to enliven them. Also, the consistency leaves a lot to be desired.”

“It’s not going to kill us,” Mildred argued. “It’ll still be nutritious, and that’s the main thing. We can’t waste self-heats.”

Ryan looked from Mildred to Doc. The old man shrugged once more, and smiled, revealing his eerily perfect teeth.

“I suspect I know exactly what you’re thinking,” he stated. “If I had merely dismissed the dried foodstuffs as so much dross, and merely pointed out the discovery of the self-heats, then all this argument could have been avoided.”

Ryan laughed. It was the first time for ages that he had felt able. “Don’t worry about it, Doc. Guess you’re right, but it’s nice to just be somewhere for a while where we have the time to argue about nothing.”

Doc grinned, his gleaming white teeth in his tightly drawn and lined face giving him the appearance of a skeletal jester. He said no more, but tossed the one-eyed warrior a self-heat, which Ryan opened.

“Let’s just enjoy it for now,” Ryan added, opening the container and setting off the process by which the contents were heated.

Doc distributed some more of the containers, and even Mildred conceded that, as poor as some self-heats could be in terms of taste, they were still superior to the bizarre hotchpotch, still bubbling gently if a little malevolently, Doc had thrown together on the hot plate.

They ate in silence, none of them realizing until that moment how hungry they were, and how tired they had to have been to sleep without even thinking about food prior to this.

When they had finished, Jak placed his container on the cluttered table and belched. “Air getting bad,” he muttered.

“And you’re not helping,” Dean pointed out.

“Seriously, though, Jak has a point,” Mildred added. “We’re going to have to think about leaving. The air-conditioning plant won’t be able to cope with us for much longer, and the air’s just going to get worse.”

“Okay, we’ll find the armory, check it out, then head on out,” Ryan said decisively. “Let’s check ourselves first, though—don’t want to be too relaxed.”

The group ran through their weapons and supplies. As well as his leaf-bladed throwing knives, Jak also carried a .357 Magnum Colt Python with a six-inch barrel. It was, as always, in immaculate condition. Dean checked his Browning Hi-Power, Mildred her Czech ZKR 551 .38-caliber target revolver, which she favored because it fitted in with her predark shooting skills that had seen her win an Olympic silver medal.

Doc’s favored blaster was a LeMat double-barrel percussion pistol, usually firing two different kinds of shot. It was effective as a scattergun at longer ranges, and deadly in close quarters. A .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 640 was Krysty’s preferred blaster, and this was also checked. Ryan shouldered his Steyr SSG-70 rifle, and inspected his SIG-Sauer handblaster.

Mildred and Krysty made sure that they had gathered the remains of the self-heats and tucked them into their backpacks.

They were ready, if still relaxed. Now to check out the armory.

As with everything else in the redoubt, it was ridiculously easy to find. And there was no sec lock on the door, which was easily opened.

“Dark night,” J.B. growled. “I knew it was too damned good to be true.”

The Armorer and Ryan walked into the room that had once housed the armory. It was empty, apart from one open crate, which contained several rifles.

“Something’s better than nothing,” Ryan commented, removing one of the rifles from the crate and handing it to J.B.

“Guess I was mebbe expecting too much,” J.B. replied, pushing his fedora back from his forehead and taking the rifle with his other hand. “But what’s this?”

“I was kind of hoping you could tell me that, partner,” the one-eyed warrior replied as he, too, examined one of the rifles.

They were of a fairly conventional shape, although the lines of the barrel and stock seemed to almost blur as they molded into one. The blaster was of some alloy with which they were both unfamiliar, and had a large, round red sight on the top, which was non-detachable. There was a crystal in a cage at the end of the barrel, instead of an opening, and there was no way of inserting ammo.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Ryan questioned.

J.B. put the rifle down and carefully wiped his spectacles. “Yep, guess so. Mebbe some kind of laser tech. Who knows how that kind of shit works? Never come across enough of it to figure that out. So if these were left here because they’re defective…”

“Then we leave them because they’re just deadweight to us.”

The Armorer nodded. “One way to find out.”

Ryan nodded agreement. Making sure that the armory was clear apart from themselves, they tried each rifle, toying with the settings. None would fire; most wouldn’t even fire up the digital displays that came up in the red sight. Those that did had low power readings and error messages that made little sense without a trained tech or a manual.

J.B. threw the last one to the floor in disgust—a disgust measured by his treatment of something he would usually cherish.

“Knew it was too good,” he repeated.

“Guess we better just watch that it’s as bad as it gets,” Ryan said quietly.

He and J.B. returned to the others. There was no need to explain, as they had gathered the results.

“So we head out?” Mildred asked.

Ryan assented. “Recce on the way to see if we can pick up anything of interest.”

They began to walk the corridors that led toward the elevators, emergency stairwells and upward ramps that would take them to the surface. The corridors were dingy, with just enough light to see in front, but not enough to stop the corner of vision from being obscured by shadow. They passed through several sec doors that were permanently open.

“Hey, has anyone noticed something weird?” Dean asked suddenly as they passed through yet another open door.

“How would you define weird?” Doc queried.

“Well, because all these doors are open I wouldn’t swear to it being the same all the way through, but I’ve looked at the last couple of sec panels, and they haven’t got numbers scratched on them.”

Ryan frowned. It was something and nothing. Predark sec men sometimes scratched the sec-code numbers onto the scratch plates on the reverse side of the sec door, in case they forgot the number sequence.

“So you think what?” he asked his son.

Dean shrugged. “Don’t know. Guess mebbe this wasn’t a regular military place. Whoever was stationed here, was here all the time, and wasn’t likely to forget.”

“And why all open?” Jak added. “Not usual.”

Ryan shook his head. “No, this isn’t an ordinary redoubt. What—”

He looked round sharply, guided by an instinct that told him Krysty had stopped behind him. She was staring at a closed door, and the hair around her nape had formed tendrils that hugged her neck.

“Mebbe we’ll find an answer in there,” she said. “It feels bad, but not like danger…just residual bad feeling.”

“If it can’t hurt us,” J.B. remarked, throwing a glance at Ryan. The one-eyed warrior gestured, and the Armorer stepped forward to the door. It had a computerized lock with a blank digital display, and when he tried the handle underneath, the door failed to yield.

With a shrug, he took a small piece of plas-ex from one of his pockets, added a detonator fuse and set it. Waiting until the others took cover, he activated the fuse and hurriedly stepped back himself.

The lock and display on the door was of glass and a soft metal, and the small blob of plas-ex was enough explosive to make the metal buckle and yield. Waiting for the friction-heated metal to cool for a few seconds, the Armorer tried the door once more, and it swung open. The smell of the explosion lingered in the poor air, catching at their throats.

Personal artifacts were strewed across the desk and the carpet, as though someone had wrecked the room in a rage. A swivel chair lay overturned on the door side of the desk, and the remains of a body were visible in the hollow beneath the desk.

Mildred moved around to get a better view. The body was dressed in a black T-shirt and combat pants, with scuffed boots. It looked paramilitary rather than military to her, reminding the woman of the punks and metalheads from her own predark days who had become obsessed with apocalyptic and militaristic imagery. Strands of hair still clung to the skull. The skeleton still clutched a gray service-issue Colt .45 with a customized mother-of-pearl pistol grip. The cause of death was obvious: part of the skull was lying across the room, splintered by the bullet that had passed through the right temple and out somewhere above the left ear.

Ryan noticed a poster on the wall. It was faded and crumbling, and over a dreamlike image were written, in gothic lettering, the words “Grateful Dead.”

“Guess he was,” Ryan said grimly, indicating the poster.

The comp terminal on the long-dead man’s desk would give them no clues. It had been thoroughly trashed and was beyond repair, with the keyboard dismembered and the screen smashed. There were only a few pieces of paper scattered about. They were fragile with age and crumbled when Dean or Ryan bent to pick them up. The fragments that remained were so faded with scrawled ink that they were unreadable.

“It seems to me that we are in the hands of some apocalyptic cult or other,” Doc commented mildly, squinting to read several posters that were still hanging—just—from the walls. They were faded, and the light was poor, but there was enough for him to see that they all had biblical imagery or photographs of dead, dying and starving people. The slogans beneath spoke of humankind—what was left—rising like a phoenix from the ashes of mass destruction.

“Creeps knew what coming,” Jak commented.

“I don’t think this was anything to do with the military,” Mildred said, looking around her. “Can you imagine predark soldiers having these weird posters?” She gestured at the walls, and then looked at her companions. “No, I don’t suppose you’d know, really,” she added lamely, suddenly feeling the weight of her years.

Doc broke the silence. “From my somewhat limited knowledge, I would have to agree. I suspect this truly is some kind of nonmilitary base. In which case, it may be worth our searching for clues, as we may find information—if not weapons—that can be used to our advantage.”

J.B. acknowledged Doc’s point. “Okay, but where do we look?”

“There’s as good a place as any,” Krysty said, pointing to a poster.

Ryan didn’t question her instinct. He simply tore down the poster, which crumbled at his touch, to reveal a small wall safe hidden behind. Set into the wall, it had a simple tumbler lock.

“Better be something here—can’t keep wasting this,” J.B. grumbled as he repeated his previous procedure with an even smaller blob of plas-ex.

The explosion sounded louder in the enclosed space as they retreated to outside the door. When the plaster dust had settled, Ryan could see that the door of the safe was hanging loosely from its hinges, and that the plaster surrounding had powdered in the blast. Advancing to the safe, Ryan used the long barrel of the Steyr to maneuver the door open, mindful of any booby traps that may not have been knocked out by the initial blast.

The door creaked and fell off the hinge. Peering inside, Ryan could see nothing but a small, spiral-bound notebook. Taking it out gingerly, he could feel that the pages weren’t of paper, but rather of some kind of plastic that was as thin as paper.

He put the book on the desk and opened it. The pages were typed, which made it easier to read.

“What does it say, lover?” Krysty asked, peering over his shoulder.

“Makes no sense to me,” Ryan said simply, shaking his head. “I can see the words, but what they’re supposed to mean…”

“Let me see.” Mildred took the book from him and began to read.

Obviously, it made some kind of sense to her, as she began to flick through the pages, referring back and forth, and nodding to herself from time to time.

“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed after a few minutes, the tension getting to him. “Are you just going to stand there until we all get old and die, or are you going to tell us what it says?”

Mildred gave Ryan a withering look. “The psycho who wrote this was clever, but mad. It kind of makes sense, but I need to read it through to get the gist. So lay off for a minute, eh?”

Ryan grinned in apology. Mildred grinned back and returned to the text.

Finally, she put the book down.

“Oh, boy, you’re going to love this,” she began. “These guys had nothing to do directly with the U.S. military, which means that this redoubt isn’t, strictly speaking, the same as the others we’ve come across. But—and this is a big but—they were part of a secret order that was partly funded by some black operations within the U.S. government.”

“Who gives shit now?” Jak interrupted.

“Yeah, that bit may all be ancient history, but it does explain why this is different from other redoubts. It was built using official plans and official money that had been siphoned off from official budgets. Strange, really, but I used to kind of think back in the old days that people who talked about that sort of thing happening were all nuts. Guess I was wrong and they were right, for all the good it did them.”

“Nice story, but still no nearer to telling me why it’s so important now,” J.B. mused.

“Ah, I think I may have an idea,” Doc interrupted. “Would I be right in assuming that some of that old whitecoat paranoia was therefore justified, and that the men behind this redoubt—and doubtless others like it—were more powerful than even their paymasters would suppose? After all, those laser rifles…”

He paused, waiting for the import of this to sink in. J.B. gestured. “Okay, go on, Millie.”

“Why, thank you, John,” the doctor answered with a sardonic edge to her voice. “According to this journal, this order, the Illuminated Ones, was in possession of knowledge that foretold the end of the world, and were hoodwinking the U.S. government. All the while they were supposed to be developing new tech and providing an extra bolt-hole for some government higher-ups, they were working on their main plan, which was to find the secret world at the center of the earth.”

“Crazies,” Jak spit, turning away.

Doc allowed himself a chuckle. “Of course, it does all fit, does it not, my dear Dr. Wyeth? Even when I was a young man, there were secret societies devoted to the accumulation of arcane knowledge, power and wealth, led by men who believed themselves better, and somehow ‘illuminated’ by secret truths. And men talked about secret entrances to hidden worlds at the center of the earth, and of gateways to enormous knowledge and wealth that lay to the north—”

“Like Trader’s stories and legends?” Ryan asked. “Could that be all they were?”

“Stupes like him could make it so by going there, Dad,” Dean answered, gesturing to the plaster-dusted skeleton on the carpet.

“It’s a fair point, lover,” Krysty added.

Ryan allowed himself a smile, and was about to answer when Mildred cut him short.

“There’s a couple of things I haven’t mentioned yet. Important things.”

“And they are?”

“Firstly, this journal ends about fifty years after skydark. This guy decided to stay behind when some made the jump to another gateway.”

“What? Then there may be—”

“Hang on, Ryan, I haven’t finished yet. Some made a jump, and others decided to move up top. He couldn’t face the change, so—” she let the comment hang, with just a glance at the skeleton “—so I guess there may be a colony waiting for us up top.”

The one-eyed warrior shrugged. “It’s possible, sure. But this also means that they must have had another base, better equipped, right? They wouldn’t just jump at random. Not if they’d been here that long.”

“That’s a reasonable assumption,” Mildred agreed. “So maybe we should make sure we can get back in here when we’ve taken a look outside, see all we can see.”

Krysty nodded her agreement, although the way her hair was moving closely around her neck and shoulders suggested a deep-seated unease at developments. “Mebbe their jump was to the mythical base in the north—the promised lands.”

“That is a lot of supposition, and it’s possibly joining dots to form an abstract picture,” Doc mused, “but it’ll do for fitting the pieces together until something better comes along.”

But J.B. had spotted the hesitancy in Mildred’s voice. “Why do we need to make sure we leave a way back in? If the main door is in as good condition as the rest of the redoubt…”

“That’s the problem, John. These crazies were so keen on their center-of-the-earth theory that they made their redoubts deeper than any we’ve ever come across. Deep enough to protect it from quakes nearer the surface that have affected other redoubts. That’s why this is in good repair still. But…”

“But it means it’s a whole lot longer of a way up, and there’s no knowing what we may find, right?” Ryan fixed his steely blue eye on Mildred.

“Right. And if the way is blocked, then we’ve got big trouble. We either risk a quick jump and God knows where this redoubt is linked to, or we stay here and gradually suffocate as the air gets poorer.”

“Shit choice,” Ryan said simply. “Guess we’ll just have to find a way out.”

Chapter Three

The Armorer was restless as they made their way through the darkened corridors of the redoubt toward the elevator shafts and stairwells that led to the surface.

“If there are still survivors up there, then they may be able to tell us about this so-called promised land…if they don’t try to chill us first,” he added with a wry inevitability.

“Erewhon,” Mildred muttered.

J.B. gave her a questioning look.

“Sorry, John,” she answered him. “It’s just the name that journal gave it.”

“An apt name,” Doc interjected dreamily. “A source of much pride to an ancient philosopher who should have known better. Would Samuel Butler smile at his Erewhon Eden being used for something that may be so apt?”

Dean shot Doc a quizzical stare. “What does all that mean?”

Doc smiled. “Erewhon, nowhere…just change a few letters. It could all be so apt.”

They came out into a loading bay about forty feet square and ill lit by the one remaining, flickering light. It was dustier than the rest of the corridors, and the temperature dropped a few degrees in the wide concrete expanse.

Directly in front of them were two large elevator bays, with the tempered-steel alloy doors closed. Small gatherings of dirt and dust on the floor swirled slightly in a faint draft, and collected at the point where the supposedly airtight door met. It didn’t encourage a belief in the working condition of the elevators.

“Could be that just the seals have broken down,” Ryan muttered, hunkering down to feel the dirt, and to judge the draft.

Krysty joined him. “Not good,” she whispered, almost to herself. “This isn’t just surface dirt—this is rock dust.”

Ryan stood, noting that his own sense of unease was mirrored in the way Krysty’s hair had tightened to her skull. The one-eyed warrior examined the comp panels that had controlled the elevator. They were dead, blank screens failing to register any signs of life no matter how many buttons he pressed.

“Guess it’s the stairs and maintenance shafts, then,” J.B. drawled, watching Ryan. “Good exercise.”

Ryan smiled. “Guess so. Gonna be a hell of a climb, though.”

“Why?” Jak asked.

“These people were obsessed with getting deep into the earth, and this is much deeper than the usual redoubt. So we’re going to have to climb farther,” Mildred explained.

“So the sooner we get started the better, I guess,” Dean said, looking around to find the access door to the emergency stairwells that were used to access a redoubt’s maintenance ducts.

The unassuming entrance was hidden in the dark shadows of the bay, and wasn’t on the centralized comp mainframe for the redoubt. This had been a measure to insure that parts of the redoubt could be accessed by engineers in cases where the mainframe had gone haywire and caused a malfunction that jammed the sec doors or elevators. So each door accessing the shafts on every level was notable only for having no sec lock, but a large lever lock.

For Ryan and his people, trying to get out, this became irritating, as they couldn’t just tap in a code, but had to blast the lock from the door and waste valuable plas-ex or ammo. J.B. complained bitterly to himself as he used yet more of the valuable explosive to blow the door. He had hoped that the armory would replenish his stocks, but was still sorely disappointed by what they had found.

The door blew, swinging noisily on dry hinges.

Coming forward to the dark hole that the stairwell formed, Ryan peered upward, his good eye trying to focus through the stinging dust. Form took shape in the blackness.

“Still some kind of stairs or ramp, and it looks intact for as far as I can see. We’ll spread out and take it at twenty-yard intervals. J.B., you’re last. I’ll go first.”

With that, Ryan stepped into the darkness.

IT WAS crushingly claustrophobic in the service shaft. There was no way of seeing which way was up and which down; there was no way of telling where the ceiling lay, and how far in front there was actually a floor left. Ryan kept a hand out to his left, his fingertips brushing the side of the stairwell shaft so that he had some kind of bearing. To his right may have been a wall or a sheer drop as he continued upward.

The air was fresher, suggesting that somewhere above them was access to the surface that was letting in air untreated by the redoubt’s defective conditioning plant. The problem with this was that a gap or hole letting in untreated air suggested that there had been a landslide of some kind. That in turn suggested the unpleasant thought that the shaft may be unstable.

In the enclosed dark, Ryan could hear his combat boots on the concrete, coming down in measured tread, with only the occasional skittering of small stones, concrete chips and gravel beneath his feet. Behind him, he could hear Krysty, treading delicately on the concrete, measuring each step for danger. Her silver-tipped cowboy boots made a higher note on the sounding board of the concrete. Her breathing, like his, was slow and measured.

Jak was inaudible, despite being third in line and only forty yards behind Ryan in the enclosed darkness. The albino had uncanny hunting instincts, and was able to move in silence amid the most impossible conditions.

Doc, in the middle, was even more audible than Krysty. Despite his tenacious strength, the battering of time travel and torture had told heavily on Doc’s reserves of stamina and the way in which he could cope with such obstacles. His feet shuffled, his swordstick tapping rhythmically on the concrete floor. His breathing was regular, but hard and rasping.

Dean, behind Doc, was out of hearing range, but Ryan could feel his son’s impatience, lest Doc slow too much and leave the party falling too far behind. With Mildred bringing up the rear, Ryan knew he could rely on her to be on hand to help Doc, and that J.B. would keep things together.

So far, Ryan had resisted the urge to either call out to his people or to use one of the precious flares that he carried. Like so much other salvaged tech, the flares were inclined to be erratic when set off, and sometimes could fail to ignite…or would explode with enough force to take off the hand of whoever tried to ignite them.

“Listen up,” he said in a low tone that he hoped would carry sufficiently to the back of the strung-out group. “I’m going to light a flare, see what the fireblasted hell is in front of us. So no one jump when the lights go on.”

He had been unwilling to raise his voice. Since entering the service shaft and stairwell they had all maintained silence, broken only by the odd whispered word of warning to the immediate follower if there was an obstruction on the path that could cause injury, a raised piece of concrete that could turn an unwary ankle and hold them all up. Without a recce of the shaft ahead, there was no way of knowing if a sudden noise would set off a collapse of some kind. So they had all kept quiet. But the risk of startled exclamations and shouts when the flare went off was a greater risk than Ryan’s hoarse cry.

“You okay, lover?” Krysty whispered.

Ryan nodded, forgetting the dark. “Just about. But we need to see what’s ahead.”

He took the flare from the canvas bag that was slung on the opposite side to his Steyr. The flare spluttered twice, small sparks illuminating Ryan’s concerned, concentrated visage, before seeming to die off. Then, when he was almost at the point of giving up, it suddenly hissed and sputtered into life, throwing a phosphorus glare around the shaft.

Looking back over his shoulder, Ryan could see his companions in a line behind him, all adjusting their eyes to the sudden light. He could also see the way in which the shaft was constructed. Reinforced-concrete beams supported the roof and lined the walls at regular intervals. Also regular, but falling in between the beams, was a series of graduated steps, each forming a platform of about twenty-five feet in length, some of which were irregularly raised.

“Most ingenious,” Doc murmured on observing this, taking the brief opportunity to halt for a moment’s rest. “Not steps, but neither a ramp. The slightest movement of the earth will merely alter the one platform, rather than stress and crack a complete ramp or break a fixed staircase.”

Ryan looked at his wrist chron. They had been progressing up for nearly an hour. The incline was gradual, and the shaft had a slight bend to it. Looking ahead, he could see that the platforms were a little more uneven, suggesting earth disturbance. But all the columns appeared to be intact. He noted that the width of the tunnel was less than he had supposed, and it would have been possible for him to stand in the middle with both arms extended to touch the sides.

From the elapsed time and the gradation of the tunnel, he suspected that they still had a long way to go.

“Okay, now we know where we’re going,” he said, almost to himself. “Let’s go.”

A flare would last twenty minutes, the last five showing a fading light, so Ryan knew that they had been walking for over fifteen minutes when they came to a sharp corner, the first they had encountered.

But even by the fading light he could see that it wasn’t a constructed corner. The earth had savagely taken the shaft and bent it to its own will.

“Problems,” he said over his shoulder, trying to make his voice carry without raising it. “We’ve got an earth move.”

As he said it, he was aware of the platform beneath his feet moving. It was a slight movement, but growing with every second. The concrete platform was tilting on loosened earth, the angle of tilt increasing the momentum in a dangerous equation.

“Fireblast!” he yelled, the flare falling from his grip as he slid on the platform, a thin coating of moss from the seepage of damp earth causing his heavy combat boots to lose their firm hold as the angle increased.

Ryan tilted his muscular frame to the bend of the earth, not fighting the momentum but rolling with it, using it to adjust his own equilibrium. As the shaft tilted and rolled in his vision, he saw that the others were also encountering similar problems. Krysty had been slammed into the wall of the shaft, and was fighting to regain both footing and the breath that had been driven from her body. Behind her, Jak was down, but already springing to his feet. Doc was down, and beyond him there was darkness, filled with the rumble of moving earth and the crunch and whine of breaking concrete and twisting metal as the support rods in the columns bent beneath the pressure of the moving rock and earth.

And then, as suddenly as it had started, it ceased. Ryan stood silent and still, straining every nerve to detect any further movement. By the fading light, he could see Krysty, propped against the near wall of the shaft.

She caught his glance and briefly shook her head. With her razor-sharp mutie sense, she was the likeliest to detect any further danger in the depths of the earth.

Doc looked up, not yet daring to clamber to his feet.

“Safe?” he whispered. It seemed uncannily loud in the silence following the miniquake.

Ryan nodded, moving slowly to pick up the spluttering and dying flare, and moving with an infinite care back to where Krysty stood.

“Go back and check,” he said quietly. Krysty assented, and they both crept back to Jak, who was standing perfectly still, feeling for the slightest movement through the balls of his feet. As they approached, the albino looked at them, the flare illuminating his red eyes so that they glowed like coals.

“We move, not it adjust us,” he murmured, indicating that the resettled earth should be still for some time. The three of them went back to Doc, who was gingerly picking himself up and dusting himself down. Without a word, Doc fell in behind them and muttered an oath to himself when he saw that a wall of concrete, earth and rock cut them off from the others.

“Hope they behind, not in,” Jak said simply.

IT WAS PITCH-BLACK, and Mildred clung to the concrete floor, aware that she was at some crazy angle where her feet were above her head and her hands were pressing against the angle where the floor and wall now met.

The dust and dirt that filled the air clogged her nose and mouth. “John,” she spluttered through a mouthful of earth, “are you okay?”

“In one piece,” the Armorer replied quietly. “How about you?”

“Everything works and nothing hurts…much,” she replied with a smile no one could see. “Damned quake’s got me almost upside down, but other than that…”

“I’m coming forward,” J.B. replied. And then there was silence for a short while, broken only by the distant shuffle of earth on concrete. J.B.’s voice broke again. “I must be near you. Things seem to have died down, and it’s all pretty solid. There’s a ten-foot raise in front of me, but enough of a gap to get through.”

While Mildred tentatively picked her way around the steeply angled shaft until she was once again upright, she could hear J.B. ascend to the top of the platform and the scrape of his boots against the concrete as he felt his way down to floor level.

“Millie, where are you?” he whispered, only feet from her. She reached out to embrace him, and they silently thanked fate that each was, so far, okay. Finally, he said, “We need to get forward, find the others. Think we can risk a flare?”

“Uh-uh…too risky until we know how much air we’ve got. If we’re in a pocket, then the flare could use it too quickly.”

“Okay, let’s find out,” J.B. said simply, passing her and tentatively moving forward. He went only a few yards before reaching a wall of rock and earth.

“Shit, we’re cut off back here.”

“And no way of knowing how deep that wall of rock is,” Mildred added, almost to herself.

DEAN KNEW that he had been unconscious, but had no idea for how long. He only knew that his mouth tasted bitter, and his head was ringing as he raised it.

Slowly, allowing himself time to adjust to the crazy angle of the floor and for his balance to assert itself over the waves of nausea that washed past him as he sat upright, he took in his surroundings. There was no light, and he waited in silence for his eyes to adjust to the residual light.

But there was no residual light.

Dean fought back the sudden surprise and panic, and tried to think logically. He was still alive, and although the fall and subsequent unconsciousness had left his body aching, there was no damage that would impair him. On his hands and knees, moving slowly to keep any disturbance to a minimum, Dean explored the limits of his enclosed world. It was only a couple of yards each way around, and the roof was too low to enable him to stand straight when he attempted to rise to his feet.

The extent of his problem hit him squarely. He now knew he was cut off from all his companions, and what was more he had no way of knowing which direction was forward, which direction actually led to the unblocked passage or back to the redoubt, or even if there was a way out.

For a second, the black despair of loneliness threatened to engulf him, and hot salt tears pricked at the back of his eyes. If he managed to get out, was there any guarantee that he would find his father alive, or Krysty or Doc or…?

Cursing himself for being weak at a moment when he needed strength, the Cawdor blood began to tell. A steely resolve settled on Dean, and he shifted onto his knees, picking one end of the enclosure at which to begin his attempts to burrow out. Extending one arm upward, he felt once more the concrete passage support that was keeping the roof in place. His fingers feeling along gently, he could trace stress lines and fracture contours in the concrete where it had been twisted in the tunnel fall. In places he could reach into the column where the concrete had broken away and the cold metal of the steel reinforcing rod was bared.

A tentative push showed him that the roof support, such as it was, was firm enough for the moment. Firm enough for him to start disturbing the earth and rock, moving it away from the pile that had formed at one end of the enclosure.

It had never occurred to Dean that any kind of earthmoving work depended so much on being able to see what he was doing. As he moved the loose earth around clumps of rock, he found himself cursing repeatedly as shifting rocks crushed his fingers, and every time he made some small headway into the rockpile he felt other loose rocks tumble in to fill it—rocks he would have shored up if he could see them.

He had no idea how deep the fall went; it was something that he couldn’t even think about. It could have fallen all the way to the top of the shaft, in which case he would run out of air long before he had the chance to make any progress. But there was nothing else he could do. So he concentrated on the matter at hand.

SWEAT RAN in rivulets down Mildred’s face and neck. She could feel it down her back, gathering in a cold pool in the hollow at the base of her spine. She had stripped down to her undershirt, her clothes bundled beside her in the angle where wall met floor. She felt as though she had been shifting rock and dirt for all her life, and still she seemed to be making no headway. The atmosphere was already fetid and rank, and she was glad for the small flow of cleaner air coming through the gap where J.B. had climbed from his part of the fall.

Loose earth gathered at her feet, while large rocks were passed back to the Armorer, who disposed of them at the back of the enclave, piling them carefully. He would have liked to heft some of the smaller ones over the gap and into the space behind, but couldn’t risk one loose rock landing in such a way as to trigger a minor slide.

They worked in silence, to preserve air and energy, and because they had to concentrate intently on the task at hand. Neither wanted to think about the possibility of the rocks building up behind them before they broke through, and their making for themselves an even smaller, tighter prison.

J.B.’s head was filled with random thoughts of the past, or early days traveling with the Trader, of meeting Ryan and of the friends they had lost along the way. Now to be lost himself? He dismissed that as he took another rock from Mildred.

Mildred was remembering when she was a girl, scared of the dark and locked in the basement at her father’s Baptist church. She had only been there an hour after the door had closed behind her while she was exploring. How old was she then, about six? It had been so boring and so cold until she was discovered. She could do with that cold now, and someone like her father to just come along and open a door that would let them out.

BY THE LIGHT of the flare, it was easier for Ryan and Jak to remove rocks and brush falling dirt out of the way. Krysty and Doc took the rocks as they were removed from the earth fall, piling them at the sides of the shaft so that they still left a clear path.

With light and more air, Jak and Ryan were working at speed, forming the beginnings of a tunnel. Jak used the flatter slabs of rock to shore up the two-foot-high tunnel, enough for a crawl space if little else. They were working on limited time for themselves as much as anyone who was left on the other side of the landslide: there could be another miniquake at any time, triggered by their activity in the shaft.

Jak suddenly froze. “Stop,” he hissed. “Listen.”

Ryan also froze, straining every fiber of his being to pick up whatever Jak had heard. The albino’s face was rapt, his eyes narrowed, his teeth biting into his bottom lip with an intense concentration that was beginning to draw blood.

Krysty and Doc exchanged a look, both standing expectantly, feeling useless at that moment.

It was there again: Jak briefly looked at Ryan and nodded once, then again, in time to the noise.

A smile flickered at the corners of Ryan’s dust-caked lips. Faintly, so faint that it was almost impossible to hear, came the rhythmic scraping sound of rock being moved.

“Still alive,” Jak stated baldly, “and trying to get through.”

DEAN FELT exhausted, and was on the verge of giving up. Not with frustration, but simply because it seemed to have been going on forever. Deprived of all other sense, there was just the darkness, the heat, the stench and the rocks. He felt as though he were moving automatically, not even knowing what he was doing or why.

He moved another slab of rock, which jammed against one that was sticking out of the mass at an angle. The stones grated on each other, and Dean pulled at them, powdering small fragments that he breathed in with the increasingly bad air, feeling it scour his nasal passages and bite into his throat. Even to cough was too much effort, and he choked down the bile that the reflex of coughing brought up. He maneuvered the stone from side to side, trying to lever it clear.

The blackness was becoming all-encompassing. It wasn’t just lack of light. It was lack of sound, lack of feeling, lack of everything.

Dean began to slide once more into unconsciousness.

“STOPPED…get moving,” Jak said, snapping back into action with renewed energy. His sinewy limbs twisted around rocks, digging out earth with his bare hands to grip the rocks and pull them loose, but still making sure that he shored up the small tunnel as he went along.

Ryan didn’t waste time on a reply, but joined the wiry albino in his task. Ryan’s hands were larger, his arms thicker, but he worked just as determinedly to loosen the rocks and tunnel deeper.

Behind them, Krysty and Doc cleared the rocks and dirt that they left in their wake as their progress increased rapidly. No one spoke, but they all knew that the cessation of the noise was a bad sign. It could only mean that whoever was digging had either reached the point of exhaustion or had become unconscious.

And either option was bad.

MILDRED WAS LIKE a machine. She could no longer think about what she was doing, just act purely on instinct. And instinct was telling her that what she had to do to survive was keep digging out those rocks and dirt, keep shoring up that space she was making, keep passing it back to J.B.

The Armorer was also acting like an automaton. His spectacles—useless in such a situation—were secure in his pocket for when he would need them. His fedora was jammed on the back of his head, his close-cropped hair underneath wet with sweat. His clothes stuck to him with a paste of perspiration and dust that would have felt uncomfortable if he had been able to spare the attention to focus on this. But there was no part of him that could afford to focus on anything other than collecting and disposing of rocks.

Mildred kept burrowing until something jolted her out of the routine she had established. Something that took a moment to register.

She was picking at loose soil, and a warm draft came through that dirt. Then she was picking at nothing….

“John, we’re through. It’s empty….” Her voice was nothing more than a pained croak, but in the silence it was enough to penetrate the Armorer’s consciousness.

“Millie, keep going…got to get there,” he returned, suddenly aware of how dry and cracked his own throat seemed.

Jolted back to a form of consciousness, Mildred redoubled her efforts and had soon made a hole large enough for herself to crawl through. She had a bad feeling as soon as she was through, and coughed at the poor air in the new enclave. She crawled a few feet farther to allow J.B. to follow, pushing her clothes and their blasters before him.

“It’s too hot. Must be a hollow in the slide,” she whispered. Grasping before her, she felt a leg in the darkness. “Oh, sweet God,” she wailed, continuing to feel up the leg until she came to the torso, “Dean?”

“Is he alive?” J.B. managed to husk.

Mildred could feel his chest rise and fall in shallow breath. She nodded, then managed to croak “Yes” when she realized that J.B. couldn’t see her.

But how could they go on? What lay in front of them?

“FASTER,” Jak murmured, his mouth set in a thin, determined line.

“Not too fast—bring it all down on us,” Ryan reminded him, feeling tightly enclosed in the dark tunnel. Jak was a couple of feet ahead, passing rocks down his body and packing the walls and ceiling. He was full length, and Ryan knew almost the whole length of his own body was in the tunnel. So they had to have burrowed through at least three yards of earth and rock.

“Nearly there,” Jak snapped back. “Earth loose…”

MILDRED HEARD the movement of the rocks and earth grow louder, and climbed over Dean to where the rock that had defeated him stood, jammed in the tunnel entrance he had made.

“Pull him back, John,” she whispered, and as the Armorer pulled Dean’s prone body back from under her, she began to work at the rock. The rocks and earth around it began to loosen as the opposite side of the rock moved. She used the way in which it had wedged to swing it around and shore up dirt that was beginning to fall from the roof of the small tunnel.

The earth fell away slowly from one side while she clawed at it from the other. A residual light from the other side of the tunnel, almost unbelievably bright in the total darkness she had been forced to work in, backlit the white hair and scarred pale features of Jak Lauren.

Mildred almost cried with joy to see him. The flicker of a smile even flitted briefly across the albino’s features. It was driven away as he remembered how precarious their position was at that moment.

“Quick, not last long,” he breathed.

Mildred nodded and began to enlarge the hole where the tunnels met. Soon it was large enough for Jak to crawl through.

“Come,” Mildred gasped, “Dean’s unconscious.”

As she backed out of the tunnel, Jak crawled through. He was completely blind in the total blackness, but felt Dean’s limp body, and slithered back into the tunnel, dragging the prone boy after him.

Ryan scrambled back out of the tunnel, having heard Mildred and realizing that he would be of better use at the tunnel mouth to help bring his son into the open shaft.

As Jak appeared, pulling the still unconscious Dean, Ryan suppressed the fear that his son was dead…but not enough for Krysty not to notice and shoot him a worried glance.

Mildred crawled through, drawing the cleaner air in great gulps through her tortured throat. J.B. brought up the rear, and lay gasping for breath as Mildred immediately checked Dean, ignoring her own condition.

“He’ll be okay,” she told Ryan in short gasps as she drank greedily from the canteen of water he offered her. “Just needs to recover from the heat and the air—get some oxygen into him.”

Even as she spoke, Dean was stirring slightly. Krysty was resting him in a reclining posture against her, and Doc held the boy’s head, gently tipping water to his lips.

“Take it easy, my dear boy,” Doc whispered. “The worst is over.”

“Mebbe,” Ryan said softly, overhearing Doc, “but we need to get moving quickly, no matter how tired we are. We can’t risk staying here.”

“Take turns carrying Dean until recovered enough walk alone,” Jak offered.

Ryan nodded. “Me and you first to give J.B. and Mildred a chance to recoup their strength.”

The albino nodded and turned away, looking at the sudden bend in the shaft.

“Hope not hit another slide,” he said quietly.

Chapter Four

“Dark night! This explains a lot,” J.B. said breathlessly, wiping his spectacles on his shirt.

Ryan whistled softly. “Seems stupe to go all the way up just to go all the way down, but I guess mebbe that’s the only way for it to be.”

Jak was sitting with his legs dangling over the precipice. “We okay, but how Doc?”

Doc made an expression of distaste. “I think that after the trials of the past few hours, this will be a mere bagatelle.”

They had finally reached the top of the shaft after several hours’ climb, lengthened because of their weariness in dealing with the landslide. Although all of them would have liked to have rested, Ryan was certain that the only viable course of action was to keep moving. The others knew he was right, even though J.B. and Mildred were almost unconscious as they walked, and Dean was carried for the first hour by a relay of Ryan and Jak, and then Krysty and Doc, the latter breathing heavily the whole way, but refusing to give in to his own weariness until Dean was able to stand unaided.

Ryan’s decision to keep moving was vindicated by the number of partial earthslides and movements that they had to traverse as they made their way up the shaft. It was no surprise that the elevators had long since been decommissioned by the change in geography, as the shaft, which had previously been fairly straight, began to bend at ridiculous angles, so much so that at times they felt they were turning back on themselves. The concrete platforms that formed the steps had moved to angles that sometimes entailed a climb of several feet to get over the top, followed by a drop to where the level had fallen on the other side. It became harder to discern their depth and when they were likely to surface. They could only tell when the tunnel began to lighten, and the hole formed at the top of the shaft became visible.

Eventually, with aching muscles that had begun to weaken to jelly, they saw the top of the shaft widen, and after two more scrambles over bizarrely angled platforms, they found themselves at the mouth of the shaft.

This had to have been the way that the survivors of the redoubt had taken some fifty years before, as the growth of mutated plant and vegetation around the mouth of the shaft was thick and heavily spread, suggesting that it had been established sometime, and therefore the earth movements had occurred during the period when the Illuminated Ones were still in the redoubt.

It was only when they came out of the mouth of the shaft and looked around that they could appreciate what had occurred.

They found themselves some fifty feet above the surrounding country, with the mouth of the shaft facing a sheer drop on one side, and a seventy degree descent on the other among some verdant foliage that almost choked the hillside. The shrubs and plants formed an unbroken carpet, hiding whatever mutated horrors might be found ground level.

It seemed obvious that in the time directly after skydark, when the Deathlands was formed in the upheaval and devastation, this part of the country had suffered severe tremors and quakes that had lifted up a part of the ground that, by chance, contained the gateway to the redoubt. The sec doors to what had once been the entrance were probably hidden and decayed in the lush vegetation beneath. The maintenance and emergency shaft had only been protected and preserved by the concrete platforms of the graduated steps.

They now took the opportunity to rest and recuperate before pressing on. Although it would be easy for them to be spotted from the lower levels, they also had a clear view of any potential enemy themselves. It would be impossible for anyone—except perhaps Jak—to move through the forest below without causing disturbance. The territory beyond the sheer drop was more sparsely vegetated, with the remains of a two-lane blacktop road about three miles to the east, with a ruined gas station and diner sitting on it like a toy. Anyone moving on the terrain would be as visible to them as they would be on top of the hill.

“So which way you reckon we move, lover?” Krysty asked Ryan as the one-eyed man stood on the edge of the drop, scanning the horizon.

“Guess we go down the rock face. It won’t be easy, but it’ll be less risky than going down into that forest,” he said. “What do you say, J.B.?”

The Armorer shrugged. “I don’t reckon either of them, but seeing as we can’t go back, either, I guess there isn’t much choice.”

“Better danger seen than not seen,” Jak added.

“I take your point, gentlemen,” Mildred said slowly, “but do you think all of us are up to it right now?”

“Madam, I shall endeavor as always to do my best. I can ask no more nor no less of myself.” Doc bridled.

“Relax, you old coot, I wasn’t particularly thinking of you,” Mildred answered. “I’m not too sure about myself at the moment, and even more so about Dean.”

“I’ll be fine,” Dean spit. “You can save your worry.”

“Don’t be a fool, boy,” Ryan snapped harshly. “Mildred’s right to a degree. You’ve been unconscious and haven’t had a chance to recover. If you’re concussed, then it could be a tricky descent.”

“I’ll be fine, Dad. What are we going to do, wait here forever ’cause I’ve had a sore head or Jak needs a bandage on a grazed knee or—?”

“That’s enough,” Krysty said softly. “If you stumble, we all do, remember?”

Dean stood and stared for a moment, biting his tongue. Then his temper subsided, and he had to agree. “Yeah, you’re right. But I’ll be okay. I just won’t be stupe about it.”

“Just as a matter of interest, where would you say we were…I mean in general geographic terms?” Doc broke the awkwardness by changing the subject. He knew the cloud cover would prevent J.B. from taking a reading with his minisextant.

“My guess is to the north, probably more eastern than central, judging by that forest,” Ryan replied, indicating the slope to their rear.

“I would have thought so, too,” Doc mused. “I wonder if that means the Iluminated Ones had their bases within more than just mat-trans distance to the so-called Erewhon?”

Ryan pondered on that for a few moments. “You mean like within a fairly easy wag distance, in case they needed to do it over the surface? If the mat-trans failed and they were surface safe?”

Doc nodded. “It’s a thought, is it not? After all, it would fit with what little we know from the journal and also from the surrounding area.”

Ryan nodded. “Then we try and head north along that old road when we reach it. Head for the building first, see if there’s anything there to salvage.”

“Sounds good to me,” J.B. muttered. “Just got to get down there first…” As he spoke, he looked up to the sky. The dark, purple-tinged chem clouds overhead began to discharge a fine spray of rain that began to soak through.

“Great, that’s all we need,” Dean said, hunching against the rain.

“Feels fresh after all that dust,” Mildred said absently.

They all spent a few moments absorbing the rain, resting up with their thoughts before they began the descent.

It was Doc who first noticed it. After scratching absently at an itch on his cheek, he rubbed the tips of his fingers together with a bemused expression.

“What is it?” Ryan asked, his sharp eye catching Doc’s gesture.

“I think it may be time for us to move,” Doc said with a distracted air. “My dear Dr. Wyeth, would you do me the honor of rubbing your fingers together?”

“What?” Mildred gave Doc a puzzled stare. Then, seeing the seriousness of his expression, she rubbed the index and middle fingers of her left hand together. The texture of the skin on her fingertips was softened, almost soapy. As she rubbed, the skin peeled painlessly away.

She felt her face, where the rain was gently falling. There was the same soapy texture.

“A mild acidic solution, if I surmise correctly,” Doc said.

Mildred nodded, then said to Ryan, “We need to get going. It’s a way to that roadhouse, and we need the shelter. Too much of this rain and it’ll peel our skins off.”

Ryan nodded, tentatively fingering his own face. “Then we go now,” he said simply.

The descent down the sheer drop would be difficult for all of them. They had no equipment with which to facilitate the climb, and it would mean going down with nothing to link them together other than a thin nylon rope.

Looking over the edge, Doc raised an eyebrow. “Well, at least it gets an incline after about thirty feet, so that will be the worst over with,” he said with a grin.

“That makes me feel a whole lot better,” Mildred said sarcastically.

Linking themselves together with the rope, they began the descent. Jak went first, as he had an instinctive talent for the climb, and would hunt out the best hand- and footholds he could find for the others. He was followed by J.B. and Mildred. Krysty came next, with Dean following. In both pairings, the former was to keep a close watch on the latter, in case their weakness following the landslide experience was to affect their ability during the descent. And for this reason, Ryan left Doc to bring up the rear, covering the older man. So if Doc stumbled and lost his footing, then Ryan would be able to take the strain.

The descent began well. Jak found that the surface of the hill, although straight down, was pitted with enough outcrops to provide ample foot- and hand-holds. He crawled down the surface with ease, his hands and feet probing the surface for the largest pieces of jutting rock. Following in his wake, J.B. found the descent easier than he had feared.

Mildred and Krysty had been wary for different reasons. Mildred was worried that her weariness would take a toll and Krysty had thought about doing the climb without her boots, concerned that they were far from suitable for such a climb. Jak’s choice of footholds took that into account, however. Dean followed behind Krysty with barely a sign that he was exhausted. He marshaled his concentration in a single-minded display worthy of the Cawdor name.

The one-eyed warrior noted this in his son as he followed on after, but suppressed his pride to concentrate on Doc.

Doc was finding the climb difficult, and the light rain seemed to be more irritating to him than to the others. He was far more tentative in feeling for the hand- and footholds, and a couple of times Ryan had felt the nylon rope tighten as Doc had either moved away and pulled on it, or else had stumbled and almost fallen, his weight straining against Ryan.

“Everything okay, Doc?” Ryan called.

Doc replied with difficulty, his breath coming short and his tone distracted. “I shall get by, my dear Ryan, but I’m not saying it’ll be easy.”

The rock face was bare of vegetation except for a few small patches of moss and one or two scrub trees that grew at awkward angles from fissures in the rock. One of these scrub trees was covered in sparse green foliage and appeared to house a nest of some kind. Always wary of the possibility of mutie birds, Jak had steered a path away from it, a path followed by the others in their descent.

But not Doc.

As he passed within a few feet of the scrub tree, Doc felt his foot slip on the small protrusion he rested it upon. It was his second such stumble in just a couple of moves, and he panicked momentarily. Flailing backward, his weight pulling against Ryan, he fell to his left. The nearest handhold was the scrub tree, and Doc grabbed for it gratefully.

Below him, Ryan was glad for the strength of the wire-thin nylon rope as he felt it strain along its short length as Doc teetered above him. He wasn’t so pleased as he looked at the scrub tree.

“Good heavens!” Doc exclaimed as he steadied himself, his feet finding solid purchase beneath him, his balance regained. For the tree bent under his grip to reveal a bird’s nest in the center. And in the nest were four jet-black chicks of a young age, their mouths open automatically for food at the movement of their nest. Their voices broke the quiet of the air with harsh, strident cries that belied their small size. He peered over them, momentarily enchanted and forgetting his precarious position.

As one, they snapped at his face with strident cries, panic and fear of attack overtaking their desire to feed.

The loud cries were echoed by a deeper, much more strident call. Doc looked up, and the only impression he received was of a black shape swooping down on him at great speed. He barely had time to raise an arm to protect himself before the bird was upon him, screeching loudly and pecking at him with a beak as hard as the rocks to which Doc clung.

Doc hugged in close to the rocks, his face contorted in a rictus of pain as the flesh of his hand, clinging to the scrub, was ripped and torn by the slashing cross of the bird’s beak, the stench of its body and the shiny black glare of its feathers filling his vision as the rhythmic beating of its wings and the hideous eardrum-splitting screech of its anger filled his ears.

“Fireblast! Move away from the bastard, Doc,” Ryan yelled as he drew the SIG-Sauer from its holster and tried to aim at the bird. It was mutated somewhere along its lineage from hawk, but the beak had developed into a honed knife-edge slashing machine. Its dark eyes gleamed dull hatred as it bobbed and weaved around Doc, hovering close to him, its ten-foot wingspan obscuring the man’s huddled form. Ryan bobbed and weaved like the bird, trying to line up a shot that wouldn’t risk hitting Doc, but it was proving impossible.

Below the one-eyed warrior, Dean, Krysty and Mildred had all drawn their blasters. All were good target pistols, but the bird was saving itself by the sheer ferocity of its attack, staying too close to its prey for them to risk loosing a shot without hitting Doc.

At the bottom of the rope, J.B. and Jak exchanged a hurried glance.

“Too close for a shot,” the Armorer yelled.

Jak nodded his understanding, and was already scrambling up the rock face, the rope pulling tight against J.B. as the albino passed him. From the patched and ragged camou jacket, Jak palmed one of the lethal and razor-sharp leaf-bladed knives with which he was so deadly. Taking aim, he let fly with a throw that propelled the knife straight and true for the flapping creature’s vital organs.

Jak was astonished to see the knife hit the black hawk’s feathers and bounce harmlessly away. The bird didn’t even seem to notice the knife’s impact.

“Hot pipe! The mutie must have armor for feathers,” Dean exclaimed.

“Figures,” Mildred said. “If it rains like this, it’d be a protection against the acid.”

“Nice theory, Mildred, but it doesn’t help Doc,” Ryan shouted down to her, still trying to get in a clean shot at the bird. “Doc’ll have to try and deal with this himself.”

Which was something Doc was attempting. His hand had almost gone numb on the scrub from the overload of nerve damage and pain he was feeling. He felt his frock-coat sleeve ripped by the iron-hard beak, and the similarly armored claws plucked at his pants, tearing through to the flesh beneath. He knew that unless he acted swiftly, he would be forced to let go of the scrub, let his other arm fall and leave his face and eyes vulnerable to attack.

He had to chance all on one throw of the dice. Doc had not, in his youth, been a gambling man, recognizing the innate losing chance stacked against the fates. But since arriving in the Deathlands, he had learned that sometimes the long odds were the only ones.

Like now…

The bird’s attack had been insistent and concentrated, yet not truly effective. Something at the back of Doc’s mind told him that, sooner or later, the bird would have to fly away from him or change the angle of its attack in an attempt to penetrate his feeble defenses. When that happened, then he would have the briefest of moments in which to launch his own attack, or for his companions to come to his defense. Yet he knew he couldn’t leave it to them, as they may be undergoing the same trial as himself.

This was something he had to do alone. And it had to be soon. He prayed that his chance would come soon.

As Doc’s mind raced to formulate some plan of action, the black hawk screeched once more. But was that a note of irritation or frustration he could hear in its cry?

His moment had come. The bird, tired of mounting a seemingly ineffective attack, had drawn back in order to change the angle at which it attacked the prone figure. As it hovered just a few feet away from him, shining black wings flapping loudly and remorselessly in the air, blocking the sun, Doc used his few seconds’ respite in which to act.

Still keeping his handhold on the scrub—for in truth his shredded flesh was too numb to move with any speed—Doc moved the arm that had been flung protectively across his face.

It seemed to him that it moved in slow motion, but with a relentless inevitability. He didn’t take his eyes from the bird as it hovered, and could see in the glittering dark eyes the recognition that he had made himself vulnerable to it. It wheeled in the air, rotating its body to swoop back and attack the unprotected face.

All the while, Doc’s free arm moved across his body to the LeMat, which he kept in his belt. The heavy double-barreled percussion pistol came up in his hand, leveled at the bird as it flew toward him.

The black creature filled his vision, the heavy dark feathers gleaming in the light and rain with an oily, almost metallic sheen. The screech of the bird’s cries were almost symphonic, so close to Doc that he could hear strange and wonderful voices in the cacophony that filled his ears. The razor-sharp, armored beak opened, exposing the red maw and fetid breath that was close enough to hit Doc in hot waves as it cried out. Underneath the bird’s body, its claws were raised, ready to grip, tear and rend.

It took an almost arrogant patience to wait until the barrels of the LeMat were nearly touching the beak as it closed in, a perfect grasp of timing as his strained arm muscles were trembling, causing the pistol to waver slightly. Just a moment too soon, and some of the shot may have missed the bird. A moment too late, and the talons would have caused serious—perhaps fatal—injury before he had discharged his shot.

But Doc’s timing was perfect. As the pistol touched the tip of the beak, his fingers tightened, gripping the stock of the pistol and squeezing the trigger. First one barrel, then the other, in succession so rapid that it almost sounded as one shot. A shot muffled by the explosion’s enclosure in the bird’s mouth.

Ball and grape at enormous velocity discharged into the maw of the mutie bird. Although its outer feathers, and possibly the skin underneath, had become hardened and mutated to protect itself against the acid rains of the area, the inside of its body was still soft and fleshy. Even the armored beak could prove no protection against ball and grape at such close range.

The bird screeched a high, almost inaudible note that was choked short as its throat disappeared in a spray of tangled flesh, blood and feather. The beak was ripped into sharp ribbons that whipped up into the glittering eyes, tearing them as it had torn at Doc and all its prey. The eyes, perhaps, registered surprise at its own natural advantage being turned against itself. But it was only brief, as life had already begun to flicker and die as the brain was pulped and mashed by shot that ricocheted around the skull, breaking through the top and spreading fine splinters of bone and feather into the air.

For a split second, the rain became red, and the bird hovered at the apex of its flight, the body hanging in the air, bereft of a head. For the beak had become detached from the skull, which itself had imploded into thousands of fragments.

The silence after the muffled explosion and the high-pitched cry was heavy and oppressive for that fraction of a second, broken only when the bird fell heavily, plummeting toward the bottom of the sheer rock face, hitting the incline where it began only a few feet from Jak. The weight of the bird pulled it to earth with increasing velocity, breaking the once fearsome body upon the rocks.

While the others were still watching the bird fall, Ryan was edging toward Doc.

“Doc,” he said softly, “you ready to move?”

Doc looked at Ryan.

“I fear that I may still be paralyzed by fear, my dear…Oh God, I’m so sorry, my friend, but I fear your name has temporarily escaped me.” Tears welled in the old man’s eyes as he pushed the LeMat into his belt.

“Don’t worry about it, Doc,” Ryan soothed, “it’ll soon come back. You’ve done the hard part. Now, let’s get out of this rain.”

“Yes, I fear that it may be a great mistake to stay out in the rain. One could always catch pneumonia.”

Although still trembling, Doc was able to descend from the rock face with a greater ease than any of the others would have thought possible, perhaps because there was still enough adrenaline flowing in his veins to give him the extra strength and sureness of foot needed to make the descent.

Ryan kept close to the old man, just to make sure that he was able to make the descent, and was relieved when they were all on the flat earth.

The corpse of the mutie hawk, already crawling with insects, caught his eye. “Did I do that?” he asked absently. “I seem to recall—”

“I wouldn’t worry about that right now,” Mildred said gently, taking Doc by the arm. “Right now we just need to get to shelter.”

Covering the exposed areas of their flesh as best they could, they set out on the hike to the old roadhouse.

“Mebbe we would have been better staying in the shaft,” Dean complained as they trudged across the bare terrain, with hardly any scrub to provide shelter between the bottom of the hill and their destination.

“Couldn’t risk it, son,” Ryan replied. “What if there had been another slide, either trapping us or forcing us out? Then we would have had to make the trek anyway. You don’t like my calls? You try making them sometimes.”

The one-eyed warrior didn’t like having his decisions questioned, especially by his own son. But if the boy could learn why a certain call was made, then Ryan was prepared to accept the occasional complaint.

Besides which, the rain was getting harder, stinging his eye as it blew across the flat earth. It was more important to set a strong pace and reach the shelter of the roadhouse.

Chapter Five

The diner looked deserted, but looks could be deceiving. There had been no signs of life from the roadhouse while they were hiking across the three miles of plain between the hill and the two-lane blacktop, and certainly they had been in a position where they would have been open and easy prey if anyone in the building had wanted to mount an attack. Even so, there was no way that they were going to walk straight in without doing a recce first.

While the others adopted defensive positions as best they could on the arid plain around the old road, Ryan and Jak went forward to carry out a quick survey of the building.

Keeping low to the ground and fanning out to divide any possible fire, they approached the building from the side that had the fewest windows.

Ryan took the front. There were double glass doors, with the glass still intact. One of the long windows was broken, but the other was still in place. Ryan dived to the duckboarding veranda tacked on to the front of the building to give it an old-world look. He crawled along under one of the windows, SIG-Sauer in hand. He had left the Steyr with J.B.

He took the double doors at a roll, landing beneath a table that he flipped up with a hefty kick of his left foot. He was now in cover and able to survey the inside of the building.

Empty. And layered with undisturbed dust, enough to suggest that it was a long time since the diner had been in regular use.

“Jak?” he called.

“Clear out back.” The albino slid through the kitchen door, the .357 Magnum Colt Python still in his fist, red eyes still darting side to side, aware of any movement in his peripheral vision.

Ryan rose to his feet. “Guess we’re okay to rest up here, then.”

He went to the side of the diner and opened the window. He could see the rest of the group, plainly visible despite their best attempts to seek cover in the sparse scrub. He gestured to them to come on, thankful that the diner hadn’t been occupied. He judged that the weather had to be harsh in this part of the country, as the land was wind and rain blasted. The forest on the gentler slope of the hill could only have grown because the sheer rock face acted as a weather break.

Truly a rock and a hard place.

The others had now gained the safety of the diner, and were glad to be out of the rain, which had increased in volume from a gentle spray to a hard shower that beat on the duckboard exterior of the building.

“It’s just as well this was here,” Mildred said as she divested herself of the outer layer of her clothing. “I’d guess we’ve all had a few layers of skin softened. It’s just a matter of how long we had until it started to peel.”

“Or how long it’ll take until it starts right now, unless we can wash it off,” Krysty added, shrugging off her coat and pulling her hair back from her face. The sentient red tresses clung tightly to her, and not just because they were damp. They could sense the damage being caused by the rain.

“We have attained shelter. To hope for ambrosia and nectar would be too much, would it not?” Doc asked wearily, seating himself at a padded bench seat by the window. No one replied directly, and it wouldn’t have mattered, as the old man was off in a reverie, distant from his friends.

“Mebbe not that, whatever means.” Jak smiled slyly. “But one thing for sure—this place not that deserted.”

Ryan furrowed his brow and cast a curious glance at Jak. “Meaning?”

“Someone use place sometime. Why else running water?”

“You’re kidding,” Mildred said. “That would be too much to hope for.”

She headed past Jak for the kitchen area at the back of the diner, while J.B. called cautiously, “Watch what kind of water it is, Millie. If the supply is rainwater, well…”

Mildred poked her head from the kitchen door, good-natured annoyance puckering her features. “Give me some credit, John. Of course I’ll test it first…on you, if you like.”

As a joke, it wasn’t even that funny. But the tension of the passing day needed some kind of diffusion, and Mildred had supplied the safety valve.

On examining the water supply, Mildred found that a water-purification unit had been rigged in a storage tank that stood in an attached outhouse. It was a system cobbled together from pieces of salvage, but the filters appeared to have been changed recently, as there were only a few crystals attached to the copper pipes used to electrolyze the acid from the water.

Ryan agreed with Mildred that this suggested a ville somewhere near, and one that had a good working knowledge of predark tech. Certainly, someone with a good knowledge of chemistry had rigged the filtering system and kept a mains supply maintained from a nearby reservoir or river, which suggested a small pumping system of some kind. The water pressure was erratic, but constant enough to indicate good maintenance on the pump.

The positive aspect of this was clean water to drink, and also to shower. The rest rooms of the diner-roadhouse were supplied with showers, and the group took the opportunity to wash the acid rain from their skin. Once this had been done, Mildred tackled Doc’s wounds. The deep scratches on his hands had ceased to bleed, but needed dressing. Searching the scavenged medical supplies in her med kit, Mildred found antiseptic and some bandages. Hoping that she would strike it lucky, she searched for the first-aid kit that all such diners would have carried by law before skydark. Cursing, she found that whoever used the diner had also used most of the first-aid kit, and there were only a few bandages left. The seal on the package had long since been broken, probably for several decades, as the adhesive on the small bandages was no longer of any use.

Doc was grateful for the bandages she could supply, and Ryan allowed the old man to rest while he organized watch. It was imperative that they take turns standing guard, as it was now apparent that the diner was in use as a way station, perhaps on a trading route.

It was while J.B. and Dean were on watch that the Armorer made his discovery.

The diner was lit by a small oil lamp that they had found in the kitchen, along with fuel to keep it going. There was a small generator, which again suggested that the roadhouse was in semiregular use, but it was empty, and they could find no fuel to run it.

The oil lamp was better. It enabled them to have just enough light to see what they were doing, without advertising their presence to the immediate area.

Dean took the kitchen and one side of the diner as his territory, while J.B. took the front and other side. They patrolled between the windows, keeping low and watching for movement outside. It wasn’t difficult, as the terrain was so flat and open.

After a short while on watch, J.B. decided to poke around the area of the front diner where the others weren’t sleeping. Although the front seemed to be in little use, judging from the way the dust and dirt seemed undisturbed, it seemed unlikely that, by the sheer law of averages, whoever used the kitchen and rest rooms didn’t, at some point, use the front.

And if they used the front, then there was a chance that they may have inadvertently left behind some clue as to their origin or position in the terrain.

If there was such a thing, then it wasn’t immediately obvious, and so the Armorer began a methodical search of the benches and tables of the diner.

Most of the seats were padded and covered in a PVC plastic that had originally been a bright orange check but had now faded to a dull pattern that was barely discernible. The covering was cracked in places, and it creaked when J.B. leaned on it or moved it to run his hand down the cracks between seats and cushioning.

But it was worth the effort. Down the back of one bench was a scrap of paper, much folded and worn. Taking it back to the light and straining his eyes, the Armorer could see that it was a hand-drawn map. It was crude, and with no indication of scale, but with ville names and travel routes written on it.

And just to help them, it even had their own location clearly marked.

“I MUST ADMIT this is surprising,” Doc remarked the following morning after taking the map from Ryan. “I would have put us much farther east.”

The one-eyed warrior nodded. According to the map, they were right in assuming that they had arrived to the north of the Deathlands, but were wrong in assuming that were still on the remains of the Eastern Seaboard. Although the lush vegetation they had seen on the gentler slope of the hill resembled the kind of growth they had seen to the east, they were in fact far to the west of the country, well on the way to what had once been Seattle.

It was an area of intense memory. Seattle was the area where Ryan and J.B. had traveled in a war wag to meet up once more with Trader, their old mentor, and his companion Abe. It was the area where Ryan and Trader had almost been ransomed into marrying the hideous daughters of a deranged baron before Abe and J.B. had rescued them.

And now they were back. On a different trail, and a long way down the line, Abe and Trader had gone from their lives once more.

“From the Illuminated Ones’ point of view, it could still make sense to be based here,” Mildred said. “In the old days, there were a lot of military bases along the line from here up through Canada to Alaska. The redoubt may only have been one in a chain. Besides which, it’s near enough to Washington, without being too near….”

She left unspoken her point that the redoubt and surrounding area were still habitable, whereas the hole in the world that had once been the capital of the old United States was still too rad-blasted for anything other than mutie bacteria to dwell.

“So which ville do we head for?” Krysty asked. There were two on the map, equidistant from the diner.

“This one looks the better bet,” J.B. said, pointing to a ville that was marked but wasn’t named. From the scrawled lines, it looked as though the city was belowground, using the network of surviving tunnels and sewers that had proliferated before skydark.

“It’s certainly where whoever owns this map comes from,” Ryan mused, “and it looks like whoever they are is part of what’s left of the Illuminated Ones.”

He indicated the map. Around the edges were scrawled numerous slogans and words: “Kallisti = Kaos;” “The future lies in the hands of the hidden past;” “Dreams are reality;” “The sun people are the shining ones.”

“If the ‘sun people’ are illuminated by that sun, then I suspect that may be right.” Doc sighed. “Why do these philosophies always seek to be self-aggrandizing?”

Dean gave him a puzzled stare. “Doc, sometimes I wish you made more sense. But mebbe you can tell us what this ville means.” He stabbed a finger at the other marked ville on the map—Samtvogel.

“That’s not English, is it,” Ryan stated rather than asked. Unlike most dwellers of the Deathlands, Ryan was at least aware that there were other lands outside of his own, and that there were other tongues.

“German,” Mildred replied before Doc. “It means—”

“Velvet bird,” Doc finished for her. “A most curious name…and with a most sinister edge.”

“It certainly doesn’t feel right,” Krysty said, her hair weaving about her. “I’d opt for the underground ville any day. Doc’s right, there’s just something…” She tailed off.

“No ville’s an easy option,” J.B. said quietly. “Always trouble around every bend.”

“Which is exactly why we should follow our gut instincts,” Ryan said decisively. “We’ll head for the ville that seems to be old Seattle.”

THE NIGHT’S REST in the diner had restored their energy, and although it was disappointingly bereft of any food, it was still good to eat from a proper table, even if it was only self-heats. They spent some time checking their supplies and cleaning their blasters, then hit the blacktop, heading farther east for the outskirts of the ruins of Seattle.

A breeze blew across the arid plain, breaking the heat from the sun that beat down from a now cloudless sky. The blue was tinged with a pale orange glow, the remnants of the chem clouds that carried the acid rain.

It was good weather for such a trek: not too hot, but neither numbing with cold. The rain, hopefully, would stay away. It would take a sudden increase in the speed and intensity of the wind to bring chem clouds scudding from beyond the horizon, but there was no such thing in the Deathlands as even or predictable weather conditions.

JAK SLOWED, a frown crossing his scarred features.

“Hear that?”

Ryan turned from his position at the head of the line. “I hear nothing…yet. What is it?”

Jak concentrated. “Wag. Going fast.”

J.B. looked around. “Dark night, we’re sitting targets here.”

Ryan looked around them. The Armorer was right. They were on the asphalt ribbon that stretched to the horizon in either direction. The hill from which they had descended was like an anthill in the distance behind them, and there was little around except sparse scrub and a few sickly trees, bent over and half-dead from the acid rains.

“Fireblast, where the fuck do we go?” he muttered.

As he scouted around for defensive cover, the wag came over the horizon, shimmering against the asphalt and seeming to hover above it as it careered toward them, the sun behind it making them squint against the glare to follow the wag’s progress.

The nearest cover was a small stand of scrub bushes 150 yards to their left. A smaller group grew to the right.

“Split into two, divide their fire,” Ryan snapped. “J.B., you take Mildred and Dean and that patch—” he indicated the smaller crop “—Krysty, Doc, Jak, over here…” With that he took off for the sparse cover, knowing that J.B. would already be halfway to his own patch.

The one-eyed warrior knew that he could trust J.B. to follow tactics close to his own. They had learned together under Trader, and knew the only way to handle a situation like this. Perhaps, if they were lucky, whoever was in the wag would pass by without stopping. There was no way they could actually have been missed, standing out against the empty road, or maybe the driver of the wag and his passengers would be friendly.

But the only thing it was wise to assume or expect was hostility. Anything other than a firefight would be a bonus.

Ryan hit the ground with the Steyr already unslung, settling the stock into his shoulder as he lined the sight against his eye. Without looking, he knew that Jak had his .357 ready, Doc had the LeMat poised and Krysty had the Smith & Wesson .38 in her hand.

On the other side of the road, J.B. had his Uzi set to rapidfire, while Dean and Mildred had their blasters ready for use.

The engine of the wag rattled, coughed and died. On the last rattle, the rear exit door descended. It was a six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, probably ex-military. It was armored, with opaque glass on the windshield and side doors, and nothing along the side. Instead of standard military colors, it was painted in red, blue and green swirls that offered no camouflage and just made it stand out in the arid, dull landscape. Not that there was anywhere to hide.

With a massed cry, six figures emerged from the rear of the wag. All were carrying rifles of the type J.B. had found in the redoubt armory, and were dressed in one-piece suits that fitted closely to their bodies. Although of a uniform design, the suits were of varying bright colors. That two of them were female was obvious from their body shape, but their faces were hidden behind the opaque glass shields of silver helmets.

They were unlike anything any of the companions had ever seen before, and the surprise this caused gave the anonymous attackers just the edge they needed to take the offensive.

The air crackled as pulses of laser light shot from the crystals at the end of the rifles, searing heat into the dirt and scrub that raised clouds of smoke and left small trails of fire.

The weaponry may have been impressive, but the attackers were poor shots. While the pulses of rapidly fired laser bursts ate into the dirt in front of them, both Ryan and J.B. opened fire. Taking the man nearest to him, the Armorer loosed a quick burst from the Uzi. It wasn’t the optimum distance for accuracy with the weapon, but it was enough to tear into the man’s orange suit at knee level, the material ripping and spraying red as blood spurted from entry wounds. He pitched forward, his high-pitched scream of agony muffled by his helmet and his rifle flying off to his right as he threw out his arms to cushion his fall.

Ryan opted for one of the middle two, a man in a dark blue suit and the tallest of the attackers. A head shot would have been the optimum for a quick kill, but the one-eyed warrior had no way of knowing if the opaque glass on the helmet was bulletproof. A chest shot would have been difficult because of the way the man was holding his laser rifle, so Ryan aimed lower, for the abdomen. He squeezed gently on the trigger, channeling all the tension and adrenaline into the perfect shot.

The blue figure stumbled backward, doubling over and dropping his rifle, his hands instinctively flying to his stomach as though to stem the flow of blood that spread across the material of his uniform, turning it red.

Of the remaining four, two dropped to their knees and shot a steady beam of laser fire that scorched up a trail of earth on either side of the blacktop, each headed for the scrub where the two defending parties were covered.

“Shit, time to move,” J.B. exclaimed, knowing that the laser would at the very least set their scant cover alight, even if it didn’t actually touch any of them.

Mildred was out of cover, rolling to the left of the scrub and coming to rest with her elbows braced on the ground, her left hand locked to her right at the wrist, steadying her aim as her finger began to move on the trigger. Three shots barked from her blaster. It was too swift for a perfect aim, but she was close enough to the moving targets to cause two on her side to cease their fire and duck while Dean and J.B. took the opportunity to leave the now burning scrub and assume firing positions.

The same was happening on the other side, except that it had become a race between Jak and Doc to see who could come up and fire first. Doc was surprisingly swift for such a frail-looking man. His deceptive strength was matched by a burst of speed that saw him roll and aim in a fraction of a second.

But the albino was quicker. Death had always been Jak’s trade. Hunting animals or people, it amounted to the same thing. The Colt Python barked fractionally before the roar of the LeMat, causing the two attackers standing to their side of the road to dive haphazardly for cover that wasn’t there.

Things were now equal, and also stalemated. With no cover for either side, it was a firefight that could only end in complete annihilation for one side. There was nowhere to run and hide as the laser rifles crackled their beams of intense light and heat, failing to find range because of the fire from the more conventional blasters.

There were more of Ryan’s people firing, but they had the problem of reloading, while the laser rifles seemed to have an indefinite life.

Automatically, Jak and Krysty had fallen into firing alternately to allow each other and Ryan more loading time, also covering Doc while he reloaded the LeMat.

On the other side of the road, J.B. kept up short bursts of Uzi fire while Dean and Mildred alternated shots with their blasters.

“Time for a little change,” the Armorer muttered to himself as he laid down the Uzi and extracted the M-4000 scattergun. J.B.’s favored shot from the blaster were barbed fléchettes that would cause considerable damage, even at this range.

Covered by Dean and Mildred, and pushing his fedora back on his head, J.B. lined up the M-4000 and let fly with the scattergun. The barbed metal charge spread out in the air, scratching the paint on the side of the wag, scraping the opaque glass on the helmets of the nearest two attackers and tearing into their flesh. The thin material of their uniforms was no defense against the charge, and both went down beneath the hail of hot barbed metal.

Whether they had been chilled was unimportant. It brought the brief and bloody firefight to a close as one remaining male attacker kept up a covering fire while the remaining woman hurriedly gathered the laser blasters, throwing them into the rear of the brightly colored armored wag. That done, she climbed in and helped pull in the man whose knees had been ripped to shreds, and who had been attempting throughout the firefight to edge toward cover.

The man covering their retreat edged toward the rear door, pausing only while the woman assisted one of those wounded by the fléchettes to struggle into the wag.

With one last covering blast, the man climbed into the wag, the door slamming shut as the engine coughed into life. The wag shot forward enough to complete a tight turn before screeching past them and back down the blacktop the way it had come, disappearing toward the horizon.

Ryan and J.B., on their respective sides of the road, had already signaled the firing to stop, and the retreat had been carried out with only the bare minimum of cover to stop the laser blaster taking accurate aim. It was pointless to waste valuable ammo on a retreating force.

The companions regrouped on the blacktop, looking down at the corpses of the chilled attackers.

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

“Not see sec like that before,” Jak said, gesturing at the corpses.

“Or blasters like that. They’re impressive when they work,” J.B. added. “No idea of how to shoot in a firefight, though.”

“Perhaps just as well in the circumstances,” Doc added. “Interesting that they should take such care to recover their arms, do you not think?”

Krysty looked down the road, where the wag had vanished over the horizon. “They came from the way we were headed,” she said quietly.

Dean pursed his lips, shaking his head. “Hope they don’t come from the ville we’re headed for, then.”

“You hold that thought, son,” Ryan said. “Because we’ve got to press on, see what we find.”

Chapter Six

The map found by J.B. in the diner showed them that the remains of the blacktop was the main route from the redoubt to the remnants of Seattle. With the sparse vegetation surrounding, Ryan felt uneasy that his people would be exposed and in the open as they followed the route. On the other hand, at least it would be easy to see any other traveling parties.

They continued the route in silence, the clear sky an orange blue that shimmered under the rays of the sun as it beat down on them. What would be better—the acid rain and a cooler temperature, or the humid heat of the blazing sun? Ryan thought.

He watched with concern as Doc seemed to wilt visibly in the heat, his overstressed body finding the blazing heat hard to handle.

Dean and Jak dropped back in order to help Doc, with J.B. bringing up the rear and not allowing the party to straggle too much. They were still tight enough to adopt defensive positions with speed, if required.

But so far the route march had been uneventful.

Over the past half mile, the level of plant life, cover and vegetation was growing thicker and more verdant, the previously empty horizon becoming crowded with the skeletal remains of buildings. They were now overrun with mutated growths, bizarrely colored flowering plants with thick, toughened stems growing up around the concrete. Ryan went over the advantages and disadvantages. The cover would protect them from the elements and hide them from any potential enemies, but it would also hold unknown hazards and hide any potential enemies from them.

Casting his icy blue eye to the melting heat of the sun, feeling the sweat run down his forehead from his soaking hair, he reckoned that right then the shelter from the sun was worth any amount of hazard. Besides, the fact that they were reaching the ruins meant that they were approaching the outskirts of Seattle, and their destination.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.