“This could change all our lives for the better,” Mildred said.

“If there’s another world out there, an unnuked world, maybe we wouldn’t want to come back.”

“Mebbe you wouldn’t want to come back,” Krysty said.

“If you’ve got big love in your heart for Deathlands because you were born here, that’s your business,” Mildred told her. “From what I’ve seen, I’d say all the hellscape does is kick our asses.”

“And what if the captain isn’t telling us the whole truth?” Krysty said.

“A guy doesn’t survive solo without having some neat tricks up his sleeve,” J.B. said with confidence.

Ryan held up his hands. “It’s about the devil we know versus the devil we don’t. The familiar, bad as it is, is still familiar. We can pretty much reckon how we’re gonna die. Starvation. Thirst. Gutshot. Ate by some mutie. I don’t particularly care where I croak or how.”

“So you’re for taking this pipe-dream trip and mebbe never coming back?” Krysty said, aghast.

Plague Lords

Death Lands®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction.

—The Holy Bible,

Book of Daniel

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Prologue

When a mosquito speared Okie Moore right between the eyes, he deftly squashed it against his forehead. Blood from the bug’s crushed abdomen trickled in a cool bead down the side of his nose. He wiped it across his cheek with the back of his hand, smearing a fresh daub of red into the impasto of squashed bodies, legs, wings—tiny gobs of black mush trapped in the hairs of his beard. A cloud of bugs wheeled around his head; mosquitos broke formation and dive-bombed him in waves, trying to get at his earlobes, but they were protected by his greasy, shoulder-length hair.

Okie ignored the shrill, singsong whine and concentrated on the Fire Talker’s rapid flow of words and exaggerated gestures. They were the evening’s featured entertainment. The young ’uns squatting in the sand next to him moved a dozen steps to the right, into the shifting river of smoke that poured off the communal bonfire—the skeeter No Fly Zone.

The air this particular evening was heavy with bugs and moisture, that and the smothering heat made deep breathing difficult. Circled around the campfire were more than two hundred filthy people in brand-new, matching clothing. The men, women and older children wore baggy, gaudy Hawaiian-style shirts and shorts, still creased from the packaging, and gleaming white high-top basketball shoes. The toe boxes of the women’s and kids’ shoes were crammed with rags to make them fit. They looked like a band of homeless who had just looted a Wal-Mart summer clearance sale, or a gathering of Jimmy Buffett impersonators.

These Deathlanders weren’t homeless, though, and they weren’t defenseless. Well-oiled AKMs, semi-auto pistols, slide-action shotguns and heavy machine guns all stood close to hand, shoulder slung or holstered, or tripod swivel-mounted to spray 180 degrees of water approach with predark alloys of lead.

The price of sitting on a gold mine was eternal vigilance.

And the gold mine in question was above ground and visible for miles in all directions.

In the furious aftermath of Armageddon, the Yoko Maru, a container ship loaded with substandard, U.S. market-reject merchandise bound for Brazil, had been driven high and dry onto the shoal of Padre Island. The narrow slip of Padre, once two hundred miles long, had been crosscut by category 7 storms into a chain of hundreds of smaller landmasses and barely submerged sandy reefs. The little landmass that Okie and his clan shared with the Yoko Maru stood directly opposite the entrance to Corpus Christi Bay, which had expanded to drown the low-lying Texas port community of the same name. Tidal waves had swept away the pillars and roadway of JFK Causeway Bridge that once connected Padre to the mainland. Postnukecaust, the only access to the island was by boat.

“And then the Vikings jumped in their time dilator and took their war to Mars,” the Fire Talker announced with a dramatic, skyward sweep of his arm. A camouflage survivalist do-rag encircled the itinerant storyteller’s head, layers of duct tape held together his lace-up, Nam-surplus boots. He wore a camouflage hunting vest with overstuffed pockets and no shirt underneath, and a pair of hacked-off, holed-out, olive-drab BDU pants for shorts. “They’re the ones who made the stickies and scalies, the talking lungfish and the celery people,” the entertainer told the audience, his voice rising in pitch and excitement. “It was part of their ancient Norse magic, what they call the Rune Stone Concatenation. And their minions launched a devastating counterattack against the Iroquois Ninja princess’s cloud operatives…”

“For nuke’s sake, get to the fucking point,” someone from the far side of the ring growled.

Grumbles and hisses chimed from all sides. The Nuevo-Texicans, many of whom were sitting in injection-molded, white plastic lawn chairs, were getting more and more restless.

“What about the Matachìn?” someone else prompted. “That’s what we want to hear about.”

“I’m coming to them,” the Fire Talker replied. “Patience, my friends, patience. Past is prologue. It’s important you’re brought up to speed on the real background of recent events…”

Okie noted the halfhearted way this stranger fanned at the swirling mass of skeeters circling his head and shoulders. He didn’t squash a single one, nor did he manage to dislodge the legions feeding on his bare arms and shoulders and speckling his uncovered legs.

The Fire Talker bore vague resemblance to a picture Okie and the others had seen before. It had been stuck inside ten thousand, thin, clear plastic cases they’d found in one of the Yoko Maru’s cargo containers. The predark image was of a brilliantly smiling, blockheaded guy with a dark stubbly beard and eyelashes that were way too long and lush. George Mackerel? Or was it Mackerel George? Okie couldn’t recall. No one on Padre Island had had a clue what the golden disks inside the cases were for. The island’s kids had torn open the cases and used the disks as flying toys. The litter of picture inserts had long since vanished, turned to pulp by torrential rain and washed out to sea. The CDs were still in evidence, stomped to golden bits and scattered through the sand.

Even from a distance, their twenty-acre, windswept island home looked like a garbage dump; downwind it smelled like one. Mounded debris—paper, plastic, wood and metal—smothered the remnants of dunes and dune grasses. All that was missing from the landfill were flocks of seagulls. With the local shortage of fresh meat, roasted gull made a nice change from fish and the other main staple, rat on a stick. Following their noses, the rats kept swimming back across the channel, but the birds weren’t that stupid. Despite the complex and alluring aromas, they rarely overflew the island anymore, and those that did paid dearly for the mistake.

Thirty years before, the first families had caught a glimpse of the grounded ship from the mainland shore. Well-armed and well-provisioned, they had walked the Gulf coastline, up from below the former international border. These offspring of some of the very last Americans, saved from incineration by their Mexican expatriation, had come north to take stock of their squandered inheritance. The original Nuevo-Texicans weren’t patriots. They were scroungers, looking for booty, spoils, something weakly defended to steal, and they had stumbled upon a prize so big they couldn’t shift it, not in a dozen lifetimes, so they had simply moved in.

The Yoko Maru and its bounty had sat rusting and unmolested for seventy years because of ignorance and fear, the twinned lodestones of the reshaped planet. Vast sections of the Gulf Coast were rumored to be so nuke-poisoned as to be impassable. To just set foot there was certain death. That was myth, as the Nuevo-Texicans had soon discovered.

The people of the postnukecaust world knew even less about radiation effects than their progenitors, who didn’t know very much, either, even though mortality data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki was widely available before the arsenal-emptying U.S.-Soviet exchange. Common wisdom posited a quick, horrible demise from radiation overdose when in fact, lethality depended entirely on intensity and exposure time: in the case of Hiroshima victims who weren’t killed in the initial blast and who survived their burns, it had taken twenty-five or thirty years for the damage to fully manifest.

In Deathlands, the odds over a quarter century were infinitely better that something or someone was going to beat rad cancer to the punch.

One of the “somethings” in play were the muties—deadly new creatures that had crawled out of the Apocalyptic ooze to plague and slaughter the vestiges of humankind. Again in error, the survivors blamed this spreading terror on the effects of radiation. Whatever had really come to pass when civilization ended, however the cage doors to hell had been opened, the information necessary to understand it had been lost. And even if it hadn’t been, the struggling humans lacked the ability and inclination to interpret it. In point of fact, the Apocalypse had tainted the invisible genetic material of every living thing: post-nukeday, there were no “norms,” just degrees of mutie. That was an impossible pill for the human survivors to swallow. They had been pitched into a frightening, altered landscape where safety and survival were hard-won, and could be lost in the next instant.

For those reasons, humanity had kept its head squarely between its knees for generations.

News along the ruined Atlantic and Gulf coasts was fragmentary and transmitted by word of mouth from passing traders and wandering storytellers. These infrequent campfire soliloquies were the only entertainment on offer. The Fire Talkers swapped their tales for grub, joy juice and the gratis services of gaudy sluts. On Padre, guest speakers who failed to sufficiently amuse faced a long, almost always fatal, forced swim back to the mainland.

“Cloud operatives are pulling all the strings from their base behind the moon,” the survivalist raconteur asserted.

And was immediately challenged on the facts.

“But you just said they were pawns!” a graybeard on the far side of the ring called out.

“No, I said they might be pawns,” the Fire Talker countered, flashing his startlingly white teeth. “Obviously, there’s a big difference.”

“You didn’t say might,” the graybeard scoffed.

“Yes, I did.”

“No, you didn’t,” the woman sitting beside the graybeard countered.

“What an asshole,” someone catcalled.

Okie had had enough of the tap-dancing, too. Stepping forward, he thrust a grimy finger in the Fire Talker’s face. “Isabel ville, Browns ville, Mata-fuckin’-moros ville,” he thundered. “Tell us about something real, Mr. Mackerel George, or you’re goin’ skinny-dippin’ with sharks.”

As if a dam of tension had burst, Okie’s threat brought forth braying laughter, whistles, hoots and applause.

The Padre islanders had good cause to be on edge. According to stories that had recently filtered up the Gulf shore, seafaring invaders were ransacking the villes to the south. Known as the Matachìn, they were animalistic butchers and murderers, pirate scum. If the tales were accurate, they had already raided the remnants of the biggest coastal cities of eastern Mexico, towns that had fared much better postnukeday than those in the American Southwest. According to rumor, Veracruz, Tampico and Cancun still existed, albeit much diminished in size and population. The Fire Talker claimed to have come from that direction, and to have eye-witnessed the recent pillaging; that’s the only reason they had ferried him across the water, that’s why they had fed and liquored him up at their own expense.

Okie and the others weren’t concerned about raiders from the north. The flooded, nuked-out wasteland that was the Texas shore served as a barrier to the East Coast barons’ desire for expansion. And the barons had enough trouble, anyway, defending the territory they already controlled. Armies sent off to new conquests left homelands unprotected. There were no navies worthy of the name, just a handful of intrepid traders working out of small, wind-powered boats.

The Fire Talker flashed Okie a big, pearly toothed grin and said, “The Matachìn attacked Browns ville and Matamoros ville nine days ago.”

This news was met with gasps and groans.

Browns ville was just 160 miles to the south.

“They came in a fleet of tugboats, half a dozen at least,” the storyteller went on. “Motored top speed right up the mouth of the Grandee.”

“They were under engine power?” Okie said in disbelief.

An assault like that called for diesel in the tens of thousands of gallons. An unheard-of, even mythic quantity of fuel.

“Engine and Viking power,” the Fire Talker replied. “Stacks pumping out dark brown smoke in broad daylight, horns wailing, firing cannons mounted fore and aft. Their allies, the Vikings, manipulated the virtual time continuum along the meridian lines, the power grids of Earth’s magnetic core, and turned the sky black and the sea red. Just imagine the ville folks’ fear. Imagine their horror when the darkness and death fell upon them.

“The Matachìn shelled the perimeter defenses with high explosive. Browns ville folk only had small arms and a few homie bombs. They couldn’t make a dent in the attackers, couldn’t turn them back. After cannon shells breached the berm, the pirates started lobbing explosives into the ville proper. Fires started up and spread, flames leaping high into that awful black sky. The smart folks ran north, left behind everything they had. They got out before the Matachìn landing parties hit the beach. The pirates wore special suits and helmets manufactured on Mars and given to them by the Vikings. Even bullets fired at close range can’t penetrate the overlapping plates of armor. When the gates of the ville came down, then came the slaughterfest and the sacking.”

Okie looked around the ring and saw doubting, distrustful, angry faces. He and his fellow Nuevo-Texicans were a hard-bitten, realist crew. Habitually cautious. Naturally suspicious. Even though they lived in a garbage dump, they could tell when something didn’t smell right. Only the handful of droolies among them wore eager grins; the droolies were eating it up.

“So you’re saying the Vikings are trying to take over Deathlands because of this time dohickey?” one of the men asked archly.

“No, they are servants of the Martian hordes,” the storyteller said. “Vikings are just ancient barbarians who were allowed access to deep space technology, or DST, as I already explained. Do you want me to explain it again, in more detail?”

The offer was met by a booming negative chorus.

Okie joined in the boos. As a Fire Talker, Mackerel George was a flop. If he had any pertinent information, it was buried under tons of indecipherable bullshit. His story had no characters. No great battles. No romance. No titillating sex. It was just dry, boring history. So-and-so did this, then so-and-so did that. One loony idea spiraling off into the next, heading in five directions at once, and complicated by big-word double-talk and constant self-corrections. Okie had seen the handwriting on the wall the first time he mentioned the “celery people.”

A smiling, oblivious Mackerel George was going over that furrowed ground again, despite the audience’s complaints, connecting the existence of a race of walking vegetables to the machinations of superintelligent beings on another planet. As he spoke, skeeters landed on him and fed at will, raising overlapping circular weals on his face, arms and legs.

The islanders had had enough. Adults and children started pushing up from their plastic lawn chairs.

Only a handful sat listening with rapt attention, Okie noted. They weren’t called droolies for nothing. Long, swaying strands of their saliva reflected in dancing firelight. They didn’t bother to wipe it off their chins. Some of them habitually crapped their pants, as well, too stupid and slow to lower their drawers in time.

That sorry respite was all that stood between the Fire Talker and a fatal swim.

The non-droolie audience, Okie included, slipped away from the fire ring, heading for the claustrophobic comfort of their respective hovels, grumbling out loud about the waste of time and the pointless expenditure.

DANIEL DESIPIO PRESSED a palm against the gritty roof of an overturned cargo container, bracing himself, his homemade BDU shorts down around his duct-taped boot tops. The can of predark pork and beans the islanders had rewarded him with had tasted like sweetened red chalk, washed down with a half cup of harsh joy juice he was still belching, and now the pièce de résistance, an oral servicing by a toothless hag of a gaudy slut. Looking down at her bobbing gray-haired head, Daniel decided it wasn’t dark enough out, not by half. He tightly closed his eyes and tried to imagine a hot young MTV star of his own era, but the calluses on her tongue and the insides of her cheeks kept intruding on and deconstructing his fantasy.

In the midst of this joyless congress, he caught himself replaying the evening’s events. A familiar unfolding: helplessly watching an audience lose interest in his narrative, fielding their angry questions and challenges, watching them melt into the darkness. It was his former life all over again.

Almost.

The Big Wheel of Karma had turned, but not in the way he or Creedence Clearwater Revival had anticipated. This time, there was payback. Unimaginable payback.

Daniel didn’t swat the bugs that landed ever so lightly on his face and arms. The welts raised by their bites camouflaged the tiny red whorls that dotted the surface of his skin—freezer burn from a century spent in the narrow confines of a cryotank. He let the skeeters have a good, deep taste of his tainted blood, then gently fanned them away. He didn’t want the bugs to get too full. After wetting their stabbers on him, they attacked the kneeling slut. His disgruntled audience had gone back to their shacks and lean-tos with clouds of similarly infected mosquitos hovering over their heads and shoulders.

Daniel had no feelings of remorse, no pangs of conscience over what he had done to them. In fact, he gloried in it. The Big Wheel had remade him; it had given him a destiny worthy of his talent for the epic and the tragic. He was Satan’s Sword, cleaving the multitudes. A transformation that gave new meaning to the twentieth–century catch phrase, “knocked ’em dead.”

After a couple of minutes, Daniel decided he had had enough pièce de résistance. He put his free hand against the slut’s forehead and levered himself from her suctioning grasp. She was so ugly and beat down he actually had qualms about delivering the climactic facial.

Then he thought, oh, what the hell…

Chapter One

Over Ryan Cawdor’s right shoulder, five scattered, flickering, red-orange suns dawned along the horizon line to the south, sandwiched between greasy black sea and menacing black sky. Across the expanse of flat water, maybe ten miles away, a string of Gulf coast oil rigs still burned, as they had day and night for more than a century. In the distance ahead of the one-eyed warrior, the real sun—immense and an even bloodier red, squashed into an ovoid by atmospheric distortion—struggled up from deep purple night.

Ryan and his five companions ran east through the slowly lifting darkness. They drove themselves at a brutal and unforgiving pace, down the granularized ruin of an ancient, asphalt road, kerchiefs tied over their noses and mouths.

Running through the Deathlands at night and over unfamiliar ground was risky business; in this case, not running was far riskier. For two and a half hours they had been hard at it.

Jak Lauren was on point. Ryan could see the wild child silhouetted by the hell ball of the emerging sun, his shoulder-length mane of white hair flying, his Magnum Colt Python in his fist. In wire-rimmed spectacles and screwed-down fedora, the diminutive J. B. Dix held down the column’s rear with his M-4000 12-gauge pump. Ryan’s lover, the long-legged Krysty Wroth, jogged on his left with her Smith & Wesson Model 640 .38-caliber revolver in hand. Krysty’s emerald eyes searched the dim verge of the roadway ahead, her red, prehensile mutie hair drawn up into tight curls of alarm. Ryan carried his SIG-Sauer P-226 with a 9 mm round chambered, safety off, index finger stiffened outside the trigger guard. His prized long-blaster, a scoped, Steyr SSG 70 sniper rifle, was strapped tightly over his shoulder and back by its sling, slap-proofed.

Behind Ryan and Krysty, in the middle of the pack, were the group’s pair of time travelers.

Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been ripped from the bosom of his young family in the late 1880s, time-trawled against his will by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. Caught in their net, he had been dragged forward to 1998, the first subject to survive the time travel experiment. If the whitecoats expected their Victorian lab rat to appreciate the Big Picture and be grateful for the sake of science and the expansion of knowledge, they were very much disappointed. They were so arrogant, so oblivious, that they never considered his outrage over the kidnapping, or his continuing grief over the loss of his loved ones. After months of captivity and near-constant poking and prodding by Operation Chronos technicians, Tanner became an intractable embarrassment. Shortly before Armageddon, to be rid of him and as punishment for his truculence, the whitecoats sent the Harvard-and Oxford-educated scholar forward in time.

It was an act of intentional cruelty that had saved his life.

Doc Tanner didn’t look over two hundred years old; he looked a fit sixty and his biological age was actually midthirties. His teeth were still excellent. A tall scarecrow in a tattered frock coat and tall leather boots, he loped with a sheathed, ebony sword cane in one hand and his massive, Civil War-era black-powder blaster in the other.

Beside him, Dr. Mildred Wyeth kept pace, ready to cut loose, deadly accurate, with her .38-caliber Czech-made ZKR 551 target revolver, the same make and model weapon that had helped her earn a freestyle shooting silver medal in the last-ever Olympic Games. The African-American physician had been cryogenically frozen on December 28, 2000, a few weeks prior to skydark, after an adverse reaction to anesthetic during surgery. Dr. Wyeth had slept in suspended animation for more than a century before the companions freed her. Like Tanner, Mildred was still in her midthirties, biologically speaking. As she ran, the beaded plaits of her hair clicked together, keeping time with her steady footfalls.

Triple red.

Along the shoulders of both sides of the road, thorny, tangled scrub brush grew waist high. The unbroken walls of cover were made to order for a close-range cross fire and ambush.

Using the predark mat-trans system was always a gamble because so many things could go wrong, midjump and postjump. The mat-trans gateways had been designed to surreptitiously move personnel and goods between the government’s deep subterranean redoubts, which were scattered across the continent. The companions had no control over their destination, except that it was someplace other than where they started. This time they had materialized in a pitch-black, east Texas redoubt, perilously close to the Houston nuke-a-thon’s ground zero.

Using precious flashlight batteries for illumination, they had attempted to jump again, but the system wouldn’t power up. They tried the Last Destination button with the same result. They were stuck and in the dark. The redoubt’s lights wouldn’t come on, either. Apparently the nuke reactor had had one last burst of power left in it. They were radblasted lucky to have materialized at all.

To conserve their batteries, they had lit torches made of paper, cardboard and rags—whatever debris they could find—and explored the deserted, underground complex, looking for a way out.

The reason why nothing worked soon became apparent. High-water marks stained the walls near the ceiling. The redoubt had been flooded at some time in the past. Dried mud, like beige talcum powder, coated walls, floors, comps, desktops, overturned chairs, and the crumbling litter of printout paper. Corrosive salts from the water had etched silicon chips and circuit boards into junk.

To keep from inhaling the potentially dangerous dust their footsteps raised, they had covered their faces with kerchiefs.

In a side room, they found a 3-D plastic topographic map of the Houston area, all the way to the Gulf coast. On the opposite wall was a row of large, glass-faced dials. J.B. and Ryan had brushed the dried mud from the faces and the engraved plastic labels beneath them. The units were radiation counters, connected to distant remote sensors. The name plates read: Central Houston, South Houston, Bunker Hill Village, Lynchburg, La Porte. The counters were nonfunctional; all but one of the needles was pinned in the red—the Barrett dial was stuck in mid-arc. Which had two possible meanings: that area had been hit by less radiation on nukeday, or the dial’s mechanism had broken and its needle had fallen back from the little post at the far edge of the red.

Because the companions had no alternative, they took it to mean the former, that the Barrett direction was the only safe corridor leading away from ground zero. Every second they remained in the hotspot, they got a bigger dose of rads. Even though it was the middle of the night, they had to go, and go quickly.

There was another problem, too. Though they had water and jerky left in their packs, it wasn’t enough to fuel a multiday journey. Not when they were running full-tilt. The Houston redoubt’s stores, although untouched by looters, were useless to them. What wasn’t ruined by the water was most likely contaminated by radiation carried in by the flooding, so there was nothing they could risk eating or drinking. Rad-tainted material was like a timebomb in the guts as well as the lungs, a constant source of poison that gradually sickened and eventually chilled.

After they found the exit to the surface and J.B. had taken a compass bearing, they headed south, cross country, until they intersected what was left of the old County Road 90. If they kept traveling east on the ruined road, they knew eventually they’d hit Louisiana, and safety. There was no way of knowing what the ambient rad levels actually were; that’s why they kept the masks over their faces.

The gathering Texas dawn revealed a flat, featureless landscape, a plain of dense, twisted, black vegetation that the rising sun could not brighten or penetrate. To Ryan, the sea of brush looked like it had been burned by a terrible wildfire, but he knew it hadn’t. The cruelly spiked scrub had sprung from the ashes of Armageddon, a stubborn mutation that defied the effects of toxic soil, air and water. Its fat, lobate fruits—a gaudy orange, and bigger than a man’s fist—hung in heavy clusters and lay in scattered, rotting piles along the shoulder. In the motionless air they gave off a sickeningly sweet smell, like an exploded joy-juice still.

Food gathering was not an option for them. They were too close to the Houston craters; the fruit wasn’t safe to eat. And they had to cover as much ground as they could before the day really heated up and the threat of death by dehydration forced them to stop and find shade until evening.

They had made the right choice for a getaway route. Dawn also revealed that County Road 90 was well traveled. Narrow, knobby tires had gouged countless, crisscrossing ruts in the black asphalt sand. Predark motorbikes were the answer to the hellscape’s ravaged highways. They used minimal fuel and could run at high speeds offroad to avoid pursuit. There was no chance of getting drive-wheels stuck in mud. Obstacles could be circumnavigated. Motorcycles were ideal for small-payload traders and bands of hit-and-git coldhearts. If someone was lucky enough to score one.

After the sun rose they holstered their sidearms; J.B. slung his scattergun. The likelihood of a surprise attack had diminished, as they could see for miles across the almost tabletop-flat landscape.

As Ryan ran, beads of perspiration trickled in a steady stream from his hairline, following the ragged edge of the welt of scar that split his left eyebrow. He kept brushing away the sweat to keep it from seeping under the black eyepatch he wore and burning into the socket emptied by a knife slash years ago. He couldn’t brush away the familiar ache in the pit of his belly or the burning dryness in his throat. Hunger and thirst were elements of daily life in the hellscape, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground, but always somewhere in the mix.

With Jak in the lead, the companions climbed a slight grade for about a mile under the brightening sky, then the roadbed curved to the right and began a long, straight descent through the stands of black scrub. Looking east from the highest point, Ryan saw the horizon was pale brown, not black. The scrub dead-ended in what appeared to be a definite borderline. He remembered a north-south running river valley from the redoubt’s topo map. The brown had to be that valley. There was no hint of green life ahead, just a beige flatland of bare dirt and rock.

No ambush to worry about.

No shade, either.

Mebbe the river had dried up, he thought. Not that it really mattered. If there was water flowing above or below ground in the streambed, they didn’t dare even wash their faces in it. They weren’t far enough from ground zero for that. Before he and the others reached Louisiana, about 150 miles distant, the odds were good that to survive they would be drinking their own warm piss.

The companions coasted downhill, running in easy strides, taking advantage of the long, gradual grade. After another mile, when they were back on the flat but still five or six miles from the riverbed, over the rasp of his own breathing, Ryan heard the sawing throb of insects. Thousands upon thousands of them. Then he hit a wall of stink. A caustic, invisible fog; not excrement, but excrement-like, on a much grander, more symphonic scale. It was the hellscape’s unmistakable signature scent: ruination, the choking, searing, off-gases of biological decay.

At the front of the file, Jak drew his Colt Python and signaled for the column to slow to a walk.

The others pulled their weapons and advanced with caution. The buzzing increased in volume and intensity.

Ryan looked over Jak’s slim shoulder at what lay on the road ahead. Under a haze of flying insects, half-naked bodies, at least twenty of them, were scattered from one side to the other. Some faceup, some facedown. Pale skin was blotched purple and black. The flesh looked semisoft, like it was melting from the bones; the torsos and limbs were grotesquely bloated.

Bipedal corpses.

But not norm. Definitely not norm.

“Stickies,” Jak announced as he led the others into the obstacle course of decomposition and swarming insects.

For noses, this version of the race of muties known as stickies had two holes in their flat faces. Legions of hairy black flies crawled in and out of the holes, and in and out of lipless, gaping maws lined with rows of black-edged needle teeth. Emptied eyesockets were packed with masses of juddering bugs, feeding, fighting, egg-laying.

Holding her kerchief tight to her face, her eyes watering from the stench, Mildred stopped and knelt beside one of the bodies.

Ryan could see the mutie’s mouth and facial bones had partially dissolved; the inward collapse created a caldera effect in the hairless flab. The creature’s bare, distended belly had burst a yawning seam right up the middle.

“No way of telling what chilled them, or when,” Mildred said. “Daytime temperature has got to be over a hundred degrees around here. And they’ve been cooking on the black sand.”

“Rot quick, too,” Jak said.

Even in cold weather, Ryan thought. Dead stickies disintegrated and dissolved like burning candles.

“They could have eaten the fruit and gotten poisoned,” Mildred speculated as she rose from her crouch. “Or they could have died from gunshot.”

“The damned bugs are eating the bodies and they aren’t dead,” Krysty said, fanning flies from her eyes.

“Neither are the wire worms,” J.B. said, gesturing with the muzzle of his Smith & Wesson scattergun.

Between the lips of the gaping fissure that ran from the corpse’s pubis to sternum, a bolus of the blood-washed, hair-fine parasites squirmed weakly.

“It wasn’t blasters that chilled them,” J.B. said, thumbing his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose. “No empty shell casings on the road. No bullet holes in the muties, either.”

“Too many of the abysmal creatures to be a mere ambush party,” Doc pronounced gravely. “This, my dear friends, is a steed of a different hue.”

Doc had put into words what they were all thinking.

During certain times of the year, the friends had encountered an odd mating ritual. Stickies swept across the hellscape in a living wave, gathering numbers to breed. Some, like these perhaps, dropped dead of exertion along the way. The muties mated en masse, indiscriminantly, for days at a time. To be caught in the path of their sexual rampage meant horrible death. Not just from the needle teeth. Stickies had adhesive glands in their palms and their fingers were lined with tiny suckers; they killed by pulling their victims limb from limb.

“You’re right, Doc,” Ryan said. “They’re breeders.”

“Mebbe we’ve missed them?” Krysty said hopefully. “Mebbe they’ve already passed us by.”

“They’re in front of us, then,” Mildred said. “They could be anywhere ahead.”

“Mebbe so,” Ryan said, shifting the sling and the weight of his Steyr SSG 70 sniper rifle from his right arm to his left, “but we’ve got no choice. We’ve got to keep following the road east. We can’t bust that black brush without getting torn to shreds, and we sure as hell can’t go back the way we came.”

J.B. checked his weapon, cracking the combat pump gun’s action just enough to see the rim of a chambered, high brass buckshot round. Snapping the slide forward, he said, “Guess we’d better get on with it, then.”

Chapter Two

They were about a quarter mile from the black to brown color change when a crackle of small-arms fire erupted in the near distance ahead. At the sudden noise, the companions reacted as a well-honed unit. J.B., Doc and Mildred ducked to the left shoulder; Ryan, Krysty and Jak to the right. Crouching, weapons up, in an instant they were ready to pour withering fire down the road.

The initial burst was joined by others, which turned into a frenzy of overlapping gunshots.

But the shooting wasn’t aimed at them.

“Perhaps another band of travelers has been set upon by the stickies,” Doc suggested.

“Or road warriors could be resolving a dispute among themselves,” Mildred countered.

“If they’ve got that many bullets to burn,” Ryan said, “they’ve probably got extra food and water.”

“Can’t tell without a look-see,” J.B. said.

“Scout ahead,” Jak offered, already moving forward.

Ryan reached out a hand and stopped the albino. “No recce,” he said. “There’s no point. We’ve got nowhere to retreat. Whatever’s up ahead, we’ve got to get past it. We need to go in full force.”

As they advanced low and fast along the highway’s shoulder, the melee of shooting was interrupted by two rocking booms, one after another. Too loud to be grens. Way too loud. Down the road, at the horizon line, a huge plume of off-white smoke and beige dust billowed skyward. It was hard for Ryan to imagine Deathlands’ motorbike traders blowing each other up over a few knapsacks of predark spoils. High explosives were far too valuable to waste.

Ryan and the others kept moving. The firing ahead dwindled to feeble, scattered bursts. Apparently the tide of battle had turned, or the combatants had managed to destroy each other. Either way, there would be less argument over who-owned-what when the companions burst onto the scene.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, the gunfire stopped completely.

Another column of smoke slowly snaked up in front of them. This plume was oily black and much skinnier, the source hidden down in the river valley, below their line of sight.

For a moment, over the slap of his own footfalls, Ryan thought he heard the wind in his ears, high and shrill. But there was no wind; the air was dead calm. As they closed on the entrance to the highway bridge that spanned the riverbed, it sounded more like cats fighting, screaming.

The roadway ended abruptly just beyond the start of the bridge deck in a ragged lip of asphalt and concrete. The five-hundred-yard-long structure had collapsed, probably shaken apart by shock waves on nukeday. The tops of the bridge’s massive support pillars stretched off in a straight line to the far side of the gorge. They were crowned by short sections of broken-off highway and guard rail. There were yawning, impassable gaps between them.

The screaming from below continued.

Unslinging the Steyr longblaster and flipping up the lens covers of its scope, Ryan crept forward, past the bike trails that had been worn into the hardpan on either side of the collapsed roadway—travelers had apparently forged an alternate route to the other end of the bridge and the resumption of the highway. Ryan peered over the verge on one knee, bringing the rifle’s buttstock to his shoulder, looking over, not through, the optics.

In a fraction of a second, he took it all in.

There were two parallel, north-south running slopes in the valley below them. The first was a gradual shelf, then came the steep drop-off to the river bottom, which mostly lay out of sight because of the view angle. The edge of the drop-off was marked by overlapping blast rings with black scorch marks at their epicenters. Inside the circles, the concrete rubble had been swept clean of dust. Dead stickies and parts of same lay scattered around the joined circumferences. Beyond the litter of death, the blast rings were haloed with crimson.

The bridge deck lay in a line of massive, jumbled chunks on the ground, chunks that sprouted rusted rebar bristles. Amid the fallen blocks, about a hundred yards away, the hapless motorcycle crew had made camp for the night.

It was also where they made their last stand.

Immediately, Ryan caught frantic movement among the concrete slabs. A pair of norm survivors—the screamers—were being circled and set upon by packs of half-naked muties. Other stickies played tug of war with the corpses of fallen bikers.

And that wasn’t the worst part.

“Nukin’ hell!” J.B. growled over Ryan’s shoulder.

Seventy-five yards away, dense black smoke poured up from a pile of offroad motorbikes. They were completely enveloped in flame. At the edges of the blaze, spindly armed muties gyrated with abandon, empty plastic jerri-cans of gasoline lay scattered at their feet. Stickies loved fire almost as much as they loved senseless chilling. Stickies didn’t ride—machinery of any kind was beyond their limited understanding. Eight of the muties were shoving the remaining four dirt bikes toward the conflagration by the handlebars and rear cargo racks.

“Go! Go!” Ryan snarled back at the others as he thumbed the right rear of the Steyr’s receiver, sliding off the safety and peering through the scope with his one good eye. He could have opened up on the muties attacking the survivors, and mebbe, just mebbe driven them off their defenseless victims before they were torn to shreds, but if he had done that, the last of the motorcycles would have surely burned.

And the motorcycles were the companions’ only way out.

Ryan held the crosshairs low to compensate for the down-angled, close-range shot. He took a stationary lead on the stickie pushing the front of the first motorcycle, aiming at the head, as stickies were hard to kill otherwise. As he tightened the trigger to breakpoint, the companions were already skidding down the bike trail to his right, beelining for the pyre. His predark Austrian sniper rifle barked and bucked hard into the crook of his shoulder. With the gunshot echoing in the chasm, Ryan rode the recoil wave back onto the target. Through the optics he saw his stickie target bowled over. When it went down, it took the bike down, too, in a cloud of beige dust. Ryan worked the butter-smooth 60-degree bolt, locking down on a fresh 7.62 mm NATO round. He ignored the stickie standing frozen and empty-handed over the rear of the dropped motorcycle.

Chilling them all was secondary at this point.

Perhaps impossible.

And with any luck, unnecessary.

He swung his sights to the right, compensating for the suddenly altered course of the stickies. The daisy chain of bike-pushing muties was so focused on the bonfire, on adding more fuel to the blaze, on doing their little arm-waving, stickie fire dance, that they didn’t run for cover. They just lowered their hairless heads and pressed onward. Ryan touched off a second round. The 147-grain slug hit a handlebar stickie at the base of the neck, shattering its spinal column and blowing out half its throat in a twinkling puff of pink. The nearly beheaded mutie bounced like a ragdoll off the handlebars and fork, flopping to the ground on its back. The rear pusher couldn’t hold the dirt bike upright. It toppled over onto the downed stickie’s legs.

From below the bridge came a chaotic rattle of single shots: Krysty and Mildred’s .38s, Jak’s .357 Magnum, J.B.’s 12-gauge and Doc’s black-powder .44. Around the bonfire, struck by a hail of slugs, the stickie dancers jerked to a brand-new beat. As they fell to earth, the companions charged. A center-chest scattergun blast lifted and hurled the last of the dancers backward into the blaze, where it briefly thrashed, fried and died.

Suddenly sealed off from their goal by a row of blasters, the bike-pushing stickies stopped in their tracks. As they dumped the motorcycles, the last mutie in line spun toward the campsite, toward its brother-sister creatures who were merrily disjointing dead traders and tearing off their flesh in strips. The stickie opened the black hole of its mouth and from high in its throat, shrieked like a teakettle—for help.

Already locked on target, Ryan snapped the cap. As the sniper rifle boomed, it punched hard into his temple. The NATO slug slammed the stickie sideways and down, turning off the piercing squeal like a switch. Too late. As the gunshot resounded in the valley and the mortally wounded creature dervished in the dirt, arms flapping, legs kicking, the other muties abandoned their sport and scurried to the edge of the rubble field, regrouping for an attack on new victims.

Fresh screams and bloody meat. New bones to crack, marrow to spill.

Closing fast on the dropped motorcycles, the companions spread out in a skirmish line and fired at will. J.B. shot from the hip, Mildred from her Olympic stance; both with deadly effect. Smoke and flame belched from Doc’s ancient blaster, lead balls blasting through stickie chests and backs as they turned to flee.

J.B. and Doc quickly booted the corpses off the bikes while Krysty, Jak and Mildred used speedloaders to recharge their wheel guns. In front of them, fifty or more muties massed behind a slab of bridge deck. Waving their pale arms over their heads, the stickies made kissing sounds with their lipless mouths, jigging to their own silent, hardwired hip-hop, working themselves into a mindless fury.

Ryan’s predark longblaster was no longer an option. Single shots from the Steyr couldn’t turn back stickies swept up in a chill frenzy. Slinging the rifle, the one-eyed man vaulted for the side of the road and the crude bike trail. The downslope was close to sixty degrees, and the path practically a straight line. He half skiied, half fell 150 feet to the bottom. He hit the ground running, yanking his SIG-Sauer from hip leather.

At the same instant, the stickies broke from cover and rushed the five companions, who had closed ranks to concentrate the effect of their weapons. Because Ryan knew he couldn’t reach them in time, he sprinted wide right to flank the ten-abreast, mutie charge and give himself a clear line of fire.

In an elegant dueling stance, left hand braced on the silver lion’s-head pommel of his unsheathed sword stick, Doc started the fusillade with a mighty boom. A yard of flame and gout of black-powder smoke belched from the muzzle of the LeMat’s top barrel. A fraction of a second later the others cut loose a ragged volley.

Under the rippling smack of bullet impacts, the center of the stickie front wave crumpled and folded. Half of the closely following second rank crashed to earth, as well; some from high-velocity through-and-throughs, but most were simply tripped up, unable to avoid the sudden tangle of legs and torsos. Which, momentarily at least, saved their wretched lives.

The third, fourth and fifth rows of attackers split down the middle and veered around their own fallen, like a torrent flowing around a boulder field. The smell and taste of the aerosolized gore, the shrill cries of pain made them all the more frantic. As they reformed their inhuman wave, the companions’ blasters roared again.

The few muties in front who had escaped the first volley—heedless of their exposure, driven by urges too powerful to deny—high-kicked to close distance on the companions. As a result, the second round of fire was at near point-blank range, a cross-chest barrage that swept the stickies off their bare feet.

Ryan advanced on the mutie flank, holding the SIG-Sauer in a solid, two-handed grip. Because both he and his targets were moving, it wasn’t the time for fine shooting. The blaster barked and bucked again and again, action cycling. Ryan punched out rapid-fire, center body shots as the tripped muties tried to scramble to their feet. The mutie bastards were so pumped up by the prospect of more chilling, that unless it was a head shot it took two slugs to put some of them down.

A round punched through a scrambler and slammed the runner behind it in the side of the head. The others dashed past like they had blinders on, even as Ryan blew their packmates to hell.

His next shot smacked a sprinting stickie high in the upper arm, and the impact spun it around ninety degrees. It then launched itself at him, banshee wild, mouth gaping, needle teeth bared, open palms leaking strands of milky adhesive. Body language notwithstanding, the stickie’s black eyes were devoid of emotion, like a shark’s or a doll’s.

Ryan fired the SIG-Sauer into the center of the open yap. The mutie’s hairless head snapped back as if it had been poleaxed, eyes skyward as a glistening strawberry mist gusted from the back of its skull. Bright arterial blood shot from the creature’s nose holes as it crashed onto its back, the soles of its trembling feet black with crusted grime.

There wasn’t enough time to dump the SIG’s spent mag, reload, aim and fire at the stickies veering his way. He could have unslung the Steyr from his back and gotten off one or two shots before they were on him. Not enough to make a difference. Shifting the pistol to his left hand, Ryan whipped his eighteen-inch panga from its leg sheath.

He glanced to the left as the LeMat’s shotgun barrel thundered. Along with a plume of caustic smoke it spewed forth the combination of broken glass and potmetal fragments that Doc called his “facelifter” load—at a range of ten feet, that’s exactly what it did. It was his last shot. Doc immediately raised his edged weapon, neatly sidestepping to avoid an oncoming stickie, simultaneously rolling the wrist of his sword hand. With surgical precision and speed too quick for the eye to follow, the point of his rapier blade opened a second, grinning mouth three inches below the spike-rimmed maw the mutie had been born with. Blood sheeting down its naked chest, the hellspawn dropped to its knees in the dirt, then onto all fours.

Also out of cartridges, J.B. used the barrel of his M-4000 scattergun like a short club to bash and smash the heads of the monsters that lunged for him, beating back the horde, providing cover and time for Krysty, Mildred and Jak to reload.

From the git-go, based on the companions’ rate of fire, their weapons’ mag capacities, the stickie numbers and the size of the battlefield, Ryan had figured that combat would devolve to hand-to-hand. To be pulled down by this enemy was to be torn apart.

Fully aware of what was on the line, the one-eyed warrior met chill rage with chill rage. The heavy blade of his panga was made for chopping and hacking, and that’s how he used it. The panga sizzled as it cleaved the air, hardly slowing when it met mutie flesh and bone. It clipped wrists into stumps, left arms dangling free from shoulder sockets, and opened godawful, diagonal torso slashes, from nipple to opposing hip. In his wake, mewling stickies scrabbled on their knees in the dust, trying to collect and stuff back the slimy gray coils of their guts.

The sight of their fellows falling in pieces under the bloody blade didn’t give the stickies pause. As they threw themselves at him, Ryan’s mind and body were one, measuring attack angles, kill order, the necessary rhythm of perfectly executed forehands and backhands—all in a fraction of a fraction of a second.

Stepping around another set of outstretched sucker fingers, Ryan swung the panga so hard that he sliced off the top of the stickie’s head, front to back. Half a loaf of pale, cross-cut brain flopped steaming to the ground, followed by its stone-dead, former owner.

Their weapons loaded, Mildred, Krysty and Jak rejoined the fray. They split up to get clear firing lanes, then head shot the last of the surviving stickies at close range.

As quickly as he had switched it on, Ryan shut off the rampage, but the sustained burst of all-out effort left him gasping for breath. His kerchief mask’s hem dripped pink from its point, pink from his pouring sweat mixed with sprays of stickie blood.

As the echoes of gunfire faded, screams from the rubble field became audible. Anguished, rasping screams.

“Start up the bikes,” Ryan said, wiping the panga’s blade on his pant leg before he scabbarded it. “Come with me, Doc,” he called to the old man, who was recovering his sword sheath. As the two of them trotted for the remains of the travelers’ campsite, Ryan dropped the SIG’s spent mag into his palm and swapped it with a full one from his pocket.

Before they reached the edge of the bridge deck debris, three of the bike engines were running. Sitting astride the machines, J.B., Mildred and Krysty goosed their respective throttles to redline, making the engines whine. There was another sound, as well, much less encouraging.

Phut-phut-phut! Phut-phut-phut! Phut-phut-phut!

When Ryan looked back, he saw Jak stomping the fourth bike’s starter pedal, throwing his whole weight against it, over and over again.

“This way!” Doc said.

They hurriedly followed the moans, moving past the campfire pit and the traders’ abandoned, fully loaded backpacks. As they closed in on the source, the sounds became distinguishable as words.

“Sweet blessed Charity!” Doc gasped, stopping short.

“Chill me! Pleeeeease, chill me!”

The liquid, bubbling prayer came from a ruined hulk of a human being. He lay on his belly on the ground in the lee of a tipped-up slab of concrete, most of his clothes had been ripped away. “Please!”

As the trader begged, Ryan could see bloody molars and moving tongue through the huge hole torn in his right cheek. He had been scalped, as well, down to the shiny white bone. His right foot faced the wrong way, still in its duct-tape-patched boot. The other foot was missing altogether; his left arm hung semidetached, torn from its socket, hanging by a thread of golden sinew. Smeared stickie adhesive had sealed off the ruptured major blood vessels. The poor, broken bastard wasn’t going to bleed out, not anytime soon.

“End it!” the man plaintively croaked, stretching out the bloody claw of his good hand. “Use your blaster!”

Doc gave Ryan a questioning look; the one-eyed man minutely shook his head. Their bullets were in short supply, and the route to safety too long and too precarious. He pointed at the steel pommel and worn leather handle of a knife sticking out of the rubble. In the heat of battle it had fallen out of the reach and sight of the mortally wounded man. The Ka-Bar’s noble blade had been sharpened so many times it had been reduced to a steel sliver.

Doc used the point of his rapier to flip the knife closer to the whimpering wreck.

Without pause, without a nod of thanks, the trader grabbed the combat knife and propping the pommel on the ground, held the blade’s tip below his sternum. Grunting from the effort and the pain, he rolled over hard onto the knife, driving the long steel through his heart and into his chest to the hilt. After a moment of convulsive quivering, his body lay still. The point pitched a little tent in what was left of the back of his shirt.

A faint morning breeze swept down the river valley, carrying with it an awful odor. It wasn’t coming from the dead man.

“Do you smell that?” Ryan asked, pulling his sopping wet kerchief down under his chin.

Doc yanked down his mask, too. “Spoiled herring?” the Victorian said with a grimace.

Then the truth hit Ryan. Without a word, he turned and dashed for the chasm. Doc loped after him. As the one-eyed man looked down over the edge, into the riverbed, his stomach dropped to his boot soles.

Not rotten fish.

Spunk.

“Lord have mercy,” Doc intoned.

The bottom third of each of the bridge’s massive supports was black with stickies. Hundreds of them. They clung to the sides of the pillars, crawling, squirming over each other like bees in a hive.

Unfortunately, the dirt bike track ran right past the foot of the pillars and the puddled genetic muck before it crossed the dry riverbed to the other side.

Even more unfortunate, the smell of spilled blood from above, the screams and the gunfire and explosions had roused the writhing, hip-thrusting masses from their rut stupor. As Ryan watched, stickies disengaged and started to descend the ladder of slippery bodies to the ground.

They would follow the blood scent like a homing beacon.

“Quick!” Ryan growled, waving Doc after him as he raced back toward the campfire.

When they got there, they shouldered as many of the loaded backpacks as they could carry. As Ryan ran from the rubble field, over the sounds of the idling dirt bikes, he realized Jak’s motorcycle still wouldn’t start.

“Leave it!” Ryan shouted through a cupped hand. “Come on! Over here!”

The albino youth let the machine drop to the ground. Mildred passed her bike to him and climbed on the seat behind J.B. Krysty already had her motorcycle moving. When she roared up, Doc and Ryan jammed a couple of backpacks in the cargo rack, then battened them down with bungees. There was no time to check the contents.

“Gaia, what’s that smell!” Krysty exclaimed as solo-riding Jak, and J.B. and Mildred joined them.

“Hundreds of stickies copulating,” Doc announced.

“Down there?” Mildred said, pointing toward the drop-off and the riverbed.

“Oh, yeah,” was Ryan’s answer.

While he and Doc were tying down the backpacks, J.B. thumbed high brass shells into the loading port of his M-4000 as fast as he could. When the mag was plugged, he racked the action to chamber a round, stuffed a final shell in the port, then passed the scattergun back to Mildred.

“Stop for nothing,” Ryan told the others as he climbed on the seat behind Krysty. “All we’ve got going for us is speed and surprise. That means staying on the existing path.” He adjusted the Steyr strapped across his back, then unholstered his SIG. “If we try to break fresh trail and go around them, we might dump the bikes. If that happens, they’ll swarm us and we’re dead meat. J.B., let’s go!”

The Armorer screwed down his fedora, then roared away with Mildred pressed against his back. As Krysty and passenger Ryan, and Jak and passenger Doc followed, the lead bike vanished over the verge of the chasm. A few seconds later, the 12-gauge boomed.

Mildred was doing more than riding shotgun.

Krysty slowed a little to keep from going airborne when they hit the drop-off. As soon as the front wheel pointed down, she opened the throttle wide in second gear. The slope was steep, the dished-out path worn smooth. Along with the gut-wrenching acceleration, wind howled past Ryan’s ears and whipped at his clothes and his one good eye. Stickies who had been driven off the trail by J.B.’s passing and the shotgun blast watched dumbfounded by the combination of velocity and shrill engine noise.

As Krysty hurtled toward the stickie-covered pillars, Ryan leaned to the side and glimpsed Mildred standing on the dirt bike’s footpegs, knees bent, left hand firmly gripping the back of J.B.’s coat collar. Holding the scattergun by the pistol grip with her right, she aimed straight ahead. Another boom rang out. The spray of close-range buckshot momentarily cleared the road of obstacles, exploding a stickie’s head like a liquid-filled piñata.

Hunched over the fuel tank, Krysty shifted to third and wound the engine to redline, leaving Ryan’s stomach far behind. He didn’t know how fast they were going—he couldn’t see the speedometer—but it felt like ninety. Firing his weapon was out of the question. He couldn’t do anything but hang on.

If the muties had thrown their bodies at the bikes, they could have made them crash. Suicide in the service of chilling was certainly in their repertoire. If the strategy had occurred to them, before they could act on it, the six companions were already past the pillar bases in a screaming blur.

Dead ahead, J.B.’s brake lights flashed on, the bike shimmied as it slowed and Mildred sat down hard. Coming up on them too fast, Krysty hit her brakes, too, then downshifted an instant before they bounced into the riverbed, skidding across the loose stream gravel. To keep her from laying down the motorcycle, Ryan slammed down his left boot. Feathering the throttle and the brake, Krysty regained control and righted the bike, then she rocketed them up the much more gradual incline on the far side of the riverbed.

When Ryan glanced behind, he saw Jak powering up the slope through the dust cloud they had raised. Lanky Doc was perched on the seat behind the diminutive albino, his shoulder-length gray hair and the tails of his frock coat flapping in the breeze. With his boots propped on the footpegs, Doc’s knees were level with Jak’s shoulders. Ryan thought they looked like a radblasted carny act.

At the crest of the grade, there was nothing but open road ahead of the companions, stickie-free and string-straight.

Unable to contain his glee, J.B. accelerated away from the others like a madman. Holding down his treasured hat with one hand, throwing back his head, he hollered “Yeehah!” at the top of his lungs.

Chapter Three

Under the wide brim of a straw planter’s hat, Okie Moore squinted through rubber-armored minibinocs. Behind him, fixed to the rusting rail, a tattered, homemade Lone Star flag snapped in the onshore breeze. From his vantage point atop the Yoko Maru’s radar mast—some twelve stories above the main deck, five stories above the roof of the wheelhouse, almost four hundred feet above ground—he could see twenty nautical miles. The cheap Taiwanese optics were never quite in focus—if one eye was sharp, the other was slightly blurred—but they were good enough to spot a telltale blip along the seam between white-capped Gulf and cloudless blue sky. So far, there was nothing to see, but the combination of fuzzy images and the glare of the midday sun had given him the beginnings of a monumental headache. It felt like someone had inserted a flexible steel rod up his right nostril and then corkscrewed it through his sinus passages until the pointy tip bored into the nerves behind his eyeball.

Okie hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours, not since the trader’s sloop beating in from the southwest had dropped sail and coasted slowly through the sheltered anchorage on the Corpus side of the island, the black plastic, trash bag pennants on its headstay fluttering like dying crows. From the cockpit, through a megaphone, the skipper shouted a warning to the beach and the handful of moored ships. The three-man crew had seen Browns ville from a distance. It was a funeral pyre, set alight by the Matachìn.

Until that moment, only droolies had taken the Fire Talker’s stories seriously.

“How long ago?” someone along the shore had shouted back.

“Four days.”

“Stop!” the islanders cried. “Stop! Heave to!”

The sloop continued coasting east, the captain steering with one hand and holding the megaphone in the other.

“Are the pirates coming this way?” Okie had bellowed, running along the sand to keep up.

“Who knows?” was the reply. “Could be a day behind, or three hours behind. Or mebbe they took their spoils south. Not sticking around to find out. If you got any brains, you won’t, either.” The skipper tossed down the megaphone, and to his waiting crew he snarled the order “Up sail!”

The sheets filled with a resounding whipcrack and the ship accelerated away. The captain never once looked back.

The three predark vessels moored in the cove began immediate, frantic preparations to weigh anchor. Ignoring the shouts and curses of the islanders, the ships’ crews had pushed half-loaded dinghies from the beach and rowed away. The only evacuation on the traders’ minds was their own. As soon as the dinghies had been hoisted aboard, without even stowing cargoes belowdecks, the two battered Tartans and the Catalina winched up their hooks, raised all sails and left the Padre Islanders to meet their fate.

After the observation and blasterposts that ringed the perimeter had been alerted, the heads of the Nuevo-Texican founding families and their lieutenants, Okie included, met in emergency session in the Yoko Maru’s windowless galley. They had planned to dump the Fire Talker on the mainland shore that very day. Now they didn’t dare. There were unanswered questions about how he had managed to reach Padre so quickly on foot. If he was a pirate spy, and they turned him loose, he could report back on the island’s fortifications and armament. Some of the headmen wanted to chill him at once, just to be safe, but when a vote of hands was taken they were in the minority. The majority decided it was better to keep him alive and close, as he might give away an impending attack, either inadvertently or under torture.

The Nuevo-Texicans had beaten back invaders on many occasions in their short, violent history, usually before the bastards even set foot on the beach. Streams of triangulated blasterfire from strategically placed blasterposts took an unholy toll on shore landings. The islanders were proud of their fighting spirit and resilience; moreover, they were supremely confident in their battle prowess. Their chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, borrowed from their nuke-fried ancestors, was “Bring it on!” Though they lived amid the unthinkable consequences of that philosophy, the irony was lost on them.

The threat of long-distance shelling by the Matachìn meant their normal defensive tactics went out the window. They couldn’t count on the blasterposts surviving a high-explosive barrage from offshore. The only hardened, defensible structure on the island was the cargo ship itself. In stacked containers and vast belowdecks holds, it held virtually all of the islanders’ wealth.

After a brief discussion, the headmen had decided that if and when the enemy was sighted, they would withdraw the island’s population to the freighter, and make the attackers take it, deck by deck, bulkhead by bulkhead. If the Matachìn shelled the ship to break the resistance, they’d destroy everything they came for, and waste precious ammunition in the process.

Absentmindedly scratching an angry cluster of mosquito bites on the inside of his wrist, Okie turned on the platform and gazed down on the foredeck, at lines of people carrying valuables and food into the ship, and heading back empty-handed for more. A natural incline made of compacted, wind-driven sand led from the beach to the portside gangway. Before the pirates landed, and after everyone was on board, they would blow it up, forcing the Matachìn to use grappling hooks and ladders to reach the top deck. Which would put them squarely into the kill zones of the firing ports staggered along the hull. The narrow slits hacked into the steel were just big enough for ramp and post sights and blasterbarrels.

Looking down over the crow’s nest rail, feeling the rickety platform sway under him in the wind, Okie had an awful surge of vertigo. Heights normally never bothered him; they certainly never made him want to vomit. Putting it down to too little sleep and food, and too much frantic activity, he shut his eyes for a moment and concentrated on breathing deeply and evenly through his mouth.

When the whirling sensation passed, Okie once again peered through the binocs, scanning the lines of people filtering between stacked cargo containers for his two hugely pregnant wives. He didn’t see either of them, or any of his six kids. Everybody who could fire a blaster was carrying one. Women and the older children wore AKs and sawedoff pump shotguns slung across their backs. There were no tear-streaked faces, no quivering lower lips. The islanders, to a person, were jut-jaw defiant.

They had all heard other Fire Talkers’ stories about the Matachìn, selected, fragmented details that were, of course, calculated to entertain and raise the short hairs. There was no way of telling if any of them were true, or how much the facts had been exaggerated.

It was rumored that the pirates all carried machetes with razor-sharp cane hooks at their tips—gut rippers. It was said they used the heavy blades to chop off any hands raised against them. After cauterizing the fresh stumps with torches so their captives wouldn’t bleed to death, they nailed the severed appendages in pairs to the ramparts of conquered villes, palm outward in a gesture and symbol of permanent submission.

It was rumored that they made the subjected people kneel whenever they passed, kneel with noses and foreheads pressed firmly into the dirt. It was said they wore glittering garlands of looted gold jewelry entwined in their matted dreadlocks and around their scarred boot tops. Apparently, they never washed themselves, either.

Never.

Stink was their religion. Pong was their manifesto.

According to the stories, some of the Matachìn wore bright, floral frocks over their blood-stained trousers and boots, shoulder-seam–split trophies ripped from the women they had ravaged and murdered.

According to the Fire Talkers, the Matachìn indulged in bloody and brutal ritual spectacles; they had established an extensive slave trade along the Atlantic coast of Mexico and Central America; they worked their captives to death in their agricultural fields and gaudies; and to amuse themselves during long sea voyages the pirate crews choreographed and staged slave fights to the death.

The common denominator in all the Fire Talker variations was death, unpleasant and prolonged.

Down in the ville, islanders were still gathering up everything of value, including excess stockpiles of food and fresh water. The water they couldn’t move, they dumped onto the sand. The idea was to leave the pirates nothing to eat or drink. The Nuevo-Texicans were well prepared for a long siege. They had the entire storehouse of the Yoko Maru at their disposal. The pirates had only whatever they brought along with them. Assuming the islanders could hold the ship for the duration, sooner or later problems of resupply would drive the Matachìn back to whatever hell-hole had spawned them.

The possibility did exist that the pirates had taken their fill of spoils in Browns ville, that they weren’t coming north, after all. But that wasn’t something the islanders could count on. Even as the residents crisscrossed between the ville and the Yoko Maru, explosive charges were being laid in the narrow, winding paths between the shanties. The predark Claymore mines with their payloads of steel ball bearings wouldn’t be trip-wired and armed until the enemy came into view and the last of the women and children were safely onboard the ship.

Okie raised the binocs, taking in the bow of the vessel. Surrounded by a rapt, deck-seated audience, the Fire Talker was perched on a bitt, waving his arms and talking animatedly.

Giving the droolies more to slobber about, no doubt.

The islanders’ usual practice was to securely tether the triple stupes, staking them at least three yards apart to keep them from playing hide the slime eel. When droolies mated with droolies of the opposite sex, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: more droolies. In camps elsewhere in the Deathlands, these unfortunates were not so tenderly cared for. The moment the symptoms surfaced—the slack lower jaw and vacant stare—heads were smashed in. The Nuevo-Texicans kept their little flock alive, not out of compassion or a sense of parental duty, but because the droolies were so damned amusing, even if the camp dogs failed to get the joke. Having someone around visibly more messed up than you were had another benefit, as well. It made a person feel instantly better about him or herself. “At least I’m not a droolie,” was the unspoken but ever present refrain.

Okie was struck by a sudden chill that started at the base of his spine and rippled up his back and neck, and crab-crawled over the top of his scalp. Which he found very strange, given the air temperature even with the wind was in the high eighties. As the shudder passed through him, the steel rod behind his eye probed deeper into the nerve bundle. He saw bright, dancing spots of light and once again felt the urge to spew. Worse, there was a simultaneous, uncomfortable pressure building deep down in his bowels. Had to be something he ate, he thought. Underdone rat on a stick, mebbe. Closing his eyes and gripping the rail in both hands, Okie tried to will the sensations away. He still had another couple of hours before he was relieved of the watch.

“TIME DILDO-LATOR! TIME DILDO-LATOR!” The seated droolies rocked their hips, scooting their behinds on the deck in time to the gleeful chant. “Time dildo-lator! Time dildo-lator!”

Daniel Desipio sat back and basked in their adoration. They couldn’t get enough of his backstories and technical explanations, although it was unclear if they understood a single word of the complex scientific and philosophical concepts that underlaid his narratives.

Still, the frenzied attention buoyed his spirits.

From the Yoko Maru’s bitt, Daniel surveyed the squalid little ville spread out below. Construction had started in the most weather-protected spot, in the lee of the freighter’s bow. The first cluster of single-story huts used the ship’s hull for their rear walls. Building materials had to be salvaged and ferried from the flooded ruins of Corpus, so subsequent structures shared both side and rear walls. Nothing in the ville was straight, not roofs, not doorways, not lanes, not side yards. Everything was made of accumulated scrap, unpainted or covered in peeling layers of paint. Over three decades the slapdash habitations had spread to the shore of the anchorage on the north side. The islanders had built monuments to themselves, expressing their personalities, desires, artistic senses with found materials, the restricted pallette of the rubbish heap. It could have been a village on the edge of a garbage dump in predark India or Brazil. Or a squatter camp in South Africa.

That said, the grounded container ship’s bounty had provided every ramshackle hut with its own Taiwanese knock-off Weber kettle and fancy barbecue tools, and its own plastic lawn furniture.

The Nuevo-Texicans were damn proud of their little corner of the world.

Daniel Desipio, twentieth-century freezie, had a different perspective: a shithole by any other name.

For what had to have been the thirtieth repetition in as many hours, the Fire Talker recited the story of how the Vikings acquired the time dilator, the desperate bargain they had made with the Martian hordes, and their combined exploitation of the ancient Norse Runestone Concatenation. That terrestrial-extraterrestrial plot had been frustrated by the intervention of the Iroquois Ninja princess—proud, statuesque, with raven hair and slanted black eyes, and spots of blushing rose in the centers of her buckskin-colored cheeks—and of her singing katana, and her coterie of cloud operatives that moved from one human mind to another like stops on a subway line.

As he mechanically regurgitated the pulp fiction series’ canon—something he could have done in his sleep—Daniel watched his audience for the initial, subtle signs of infection. A growing restlessness. A flushing of the face. A sensitivity to light. He visualized the viruses invading individual host cells, commandeering reproductive machinery, replicating until their sheer volume burst cell walls, then spewing forth in a torrent, hardwired to penetrate and infect new cells: an unstoppable, rising tide of the submicroscopic, leading to debilitation, agony and horrible death. All of which derived from the poison that lurked in his 137-year-old blood, and to which he was happily immune.

Whenever Daniel reflected on what had led him to his most peculiar fate, the answer was always the same: the blind pursuit of Art. It was what had animated and enthused him since the third grade when he started reading and collecting various pulp action series from second-hand bookstores. He had pored over the “Golden Age” titles until the yellowed, musty pages dropped from the bindings, absorbing the nuances of style and content. All Daniel Desipio had ever wanted to do was to write adventure books like those. Doggedly determined, he had eventually achieved his goal, but in the twenty years between his introduction to pulp and his first sale of a novel, the industry had changed. Series action fiction had become a franchise operation, produced by hamsterwheeling, faceless ghost writers; it was in effect a dead-end career.

Slaughter Realms, the house-owned pulp series he had slaved upon for seven years, had had several nameless authors and had run to well over 250 titles. All nagging questions of artistic control and continuity had been resolved by Armageddon, by more than a century of elapsed time, and by his unlikely survival.

Even before the nukecaust, individual books in the series had been forgotten, consigned to landfills and bonfires, and along with them Daniel’s contributions to the canon. He had come up with gemlike, signature exclamations for two of the main running characters, Ragnar the Viking and Nav Licim, the wilted but defiant patriarch of the celery people. In return for his devotion to his Art, Daniel Desipio received no author credit, an hourly wage well below the established national minimum and no royalties on book sales.

The turning point for him had come on March 13, 1998, when after finishing his twenty-ninth book in the series he had asked the publisher for a hundred-dollar raise and was denied. Crushed and mortified, for the first time Daniel actually considered abandoning his lifelong dream. He considered becoming a Realtor. If he had taken that career course, he would have certainly perished along with almost everyone else in the U.S. on that January day in 2001. But in a moment of pure inspiration, fueled by the depths of his outrage and despair, Daniel had decided to do something truly radical in the name of his craft, for the sake of fresh experience, of something truly unique and exciting to write about. Without a thought to the possible consequences—not that even he could have imagined them—he had thrown himself into the meat grinder of Science.

More than a century post-nukeday, the world’s values had taken a hard U-turn, and a turn for the better as far as he was concerned. The idea of bottom-rung fiction or bottom-rung consumer merchandise lost all meaning when there was nothing left for either to be compared to. Which is why the cargo of the Yoko Maru was worth fighting and dying for.

A self-guided sightseeing tour of the island’s shantytown had told Daniel what was stored in the container ship: white running shoes aplenty, wardrobes of summer fashion, circa 1999, and plastic lawn furniture. But also toothbrushes and toothpaste, toilet paper, linens, bathware and canned goods in profusion. Empty tins of pork and beans, peas, pearl onions, peaches, black olives and potted meat lay scorched in the camp middens, as well as cast-off plastic packaging from barbecue potato chips, honey-roasted peanuts, jerky sticks, cookies and candy bars. Daniel had seen bag charcoal, car batteries, spark plugs, fan belts, flatware, dishes, pots and pans, stuffed toys, cooking oil, and grooming and beauty products—bar soaps, lotions and lipsticks. There was also a variety of made-in-India, factory-loaded ammo: 9 mm Parabellum, 7.62 mm Russian and 12-gauge low-brass quail loads, among others. Apparently, the Yoko Maru held a large stockpile of predark centerfire munitions.

As he prattled away on automatic to his spellbound audience, Daniel took in the islanders’ highly organized defensive preparations, the lines of people moving on and off the ship, the self-sacking of the ville. They had a good plan. Obvious, but good. From the hard looks he was getting, they suspected him of something far more nefarious than rotting the minds of droolies—as if their suspicions mattered at this point. The fight for the island was already lost; the Nuevo-Texicans just didn’t know it…yet.

“Battle armor! Battle armor!” Daniel’s audience hollered, shattering his reverie. “Battle armor! Battle armor!”

He held up his hands for quiet. “All right, all right,” he conceded, “but this is absolutely the last time today…”

To the delight of his listeners, in highly numeric and acronymic detail Daniel went over the specifications of the Martian-made assault gear, down to the chemical composition of the metallic-plastic alloys, the thicknesses of individual body plates and the “theory” behind the nanotech circuitry they contained.

Chapter Four

After the companions had motored three miles up the road, Ryan signaled for a pull over and parlay. As the dust settled around them, Krysty, J.B., and Jak killed the motorcycles’ engines and everyone dismounted. No longer in motion, they felt the full impact of the sweltering heat.

The first words out of Ryan’s mouth were, “Check your ammo.”

The one-eyed man didn’t have to check his own. Every round he had left was loaded up, seven shots in the Steyr’s box mag, a full 15-round clip in the SIG-Sauer. While the one-eyed warrior unslung his longblaster and stood lookout, Krysty, Mildred, J.B., and Jak started their round counts. Doc, the deep creases of his prematurely aged face rimed with dirt and sweat, retired to a wide sandstone boulder at the side of the road.

Ryan watched the time traveler take a seat on the low rock and carefully lay down his sword stick. Doc dug black-powder reloading gear from his frock coat’s pockets.

More than once over the years Ryan and J.B. had tried to talk him into switching over to a weapon-chambered centerfire, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Doc was one hard-headed Victorian son of a bitch. No matter what they said, he always argued that the proof was in the chilling. And that he had never had a problem doing that with the 250-year-old LeMat. Privately, J.B. assured Ryan that someday the radblasted thing was going to explode in his hand like a frag gren.

Doc prided himself on how fast he could reload his treasured if obsolete weapon. And Ryan had to admit he was plenty fast. Since the immediate danger was miles behind them, Doc gave the chambers and both barrels a quick going over with the bore brush to scour away the worst of the burned residue. He lined up the first chamber with the hammer at halfcock and the muzzle aimed skyward, then unsnapped the pistol’s jointed rammer from its barrel clip. He measured the powder, poured it into the shallow chamber, and levered the rammer to seat a lead ball on top of it. After flicking away the little ring of excess lead the lip’s tight fit trimmed off, he put dab of grease over the bullet to lube the barrel and keep the sparks from other chambers from causing spontaneous ignition when they fired. Rotating the cylinder a full notch, he proceeded to load the next chamber, and the next, and the next, and so on. His rate of speed was as steady as his hands. After he finished the ninth chamber he securely snapped the rammer back into its clip.

The .63-caliber shotgun chamber he loaded last, using a homemade wooden ramrod to seat the aft wadding, grapeshot and front wadding. He capped all ten chambers, lowered the hammer into one of the safety notches between nipples and slipped the massive blaster back into its hand-tooled Mexican holster.

Just under five minutes had elapsed from start to finish.

In the meantime, the other companions had taken stock of what was left of their ammo. J.B. had six high-brass rounds in his M-4000’s tubular magazine. Mildred and Krysty had full cylinders in their revolvers. They had used up their speedloaders; between them they had eight loose shells. Jak had two .357 Magnum bullets left in his revolver and nothing in his pockets. Of the six, only Mildred and Krysty could swap cartridges back and forth interchangeably as they both carried .38 Specials. They evened things out with Jak, giving him a couple of bullets each. Jak could fire their .38s in his .357, but they couldn’t shoot his cartridges because of the Magnum’s longer case.

J.B. was the first to dig into one of the looted backpacks.

“Well, lookee here!” he exclaimed, holding up a plastic-wrapped, gold-colored brick for all to see.

Taped to the outside of the kilo of C-4 was a sealed blister pack that contained blasting caps and electronic trigger, radio detonator and two sets of lithium batteries—one to set off the cap, one for the remote detonating device. As a backup, there was also a coil of thick, white blasting cord.

Ryan and the other companions quickly dumped out the contents of the other five packs. There was no ammo. No food. No water. Just predark plastic explosive and detonators. There was enough plastique piled in the middle of the road to turn a square city block into rubble.

“Well, we know the stuff still works,” Mildred said.

“Stickies found that out the hard way,” Krysty said. J.B. turned the brick over in his hand and read the text on the packaging. “Check the address,” he said, showing Ryan what was written.

“What is the significance of the label?” Doc asked, staring down at a brick he had picked up.

“Back in the day,” Ryan explained, “when J.B. and me were running with Trader, there was a rumor going around about a predark industrial plant in western New Mex, where the government used to turn high ex into C-4. Supposedly the finished product was stored in deep, blastproof bunkers in the desert. Looks like our dead scroungers stumbled on the motherload.”

“Worth big jack,” Jak said appreciatively, toeing the pile with a boot tip.

“To the right buyer,” Mildred said. “The trouble is, we’re a long way from the nearest baron.”

Ryan nodded. Mildred was on target, as usual. HE was a useful tool in the defense of territory, and in taking territory away from someone else; it was a weapon of war. For the hellscape’s smaller scale, everyday business of robbing, extortion, forced servitude and the like, it was serious overkill.

“It’s still worth plenty to a middleman,” Ryan countered. “We’ve got to find someone who has what we need, short-term. Ammo, food, water and gas for the bikes. If we can trade away a small part of the stash, we can haul the rest of it east, where it will bring the most jack. Check the fuel in the bikes.”

They unscrewed the gas caps and J.B. peered inside each of the tanks.

“Fuel levels are pretty much the same,” he told Ryan. “Not enough to get all of us to Louisiana, that’s for sure. If we’re lucky we can get mebbe another twenty miles before we start to run out. Radblasted stickies burned up all the extra gas in their victory dance.”

“Then we’re going to have to detour south to trade for bullets and supplies,” Ryan said.

“Why south?” Mildred asked. “Beaumont is due east on this road. We’ve easily got enough gas to get there. Couldn’t be more than ten miles.”

“Beaumont is a no-go,” J.B. said emphatically.

“It was hit hard on nukeday,” Ryan elaborated. “Nothing there but glow-in-the-dark rubble and twisted steel. Trader always gave it a wide berth and beelined his convoys for Port Arthur ville on the Gulf shore. If the head man down there is still the same, he’s a thieving pile of crap—”

“A giant thieving pile of crap,” J.B. interjected.

“—but,” Ryan continued, “it’s still the closest place to swap some of the C-4 for what we need.”

Jak used a hand to shield his unsettlingly red eyes from the glare as he looked up the road. “Port A ville mebbe thirty miles,” he said.

If the companions had been riding solo, Ryan knew they might have made it on the little fuel they had. They wouldn’t split up, though. Not a chance under these circumstances. Not of their own volition.

“How much water have we got?” Mildred asked J.B.

The Armorer produced a scarred, two-liter plastic bottle from his backpack. It was half-full of a cloudy, slightly brown-tinged liquid. There was a layer of fine sediment at the bottom. Ryan took the container; the sun beat down on his head and shoulders, the heat sang in his ears as he held it up for all to see.

“That’s it?” Krysty said.

“That’s it,” Ryan said. Another question had to be asked, even if he already knew the answer. “We can drink it all now, or we can drink it later. What’s it going to be?”

The companions were accustomed to privation, to hard, long marches over difficult terrain. The consensus was to drink it later, when they really needed it.

The companions repacked the C-4, saddled up and rode off at a steady, fuel-conserving twenty-five miles an hour. The breeze blowing over Ryan’s sweat-lubed body felt like air-conditioning.

ABOUT AN HOUR DOWN THE ROAD, J.B. lost power first. As he dropped back, his engine went dead and he and Mildred coasted to a stop. Krysty and Jak braked their bikes and turned back to join them.

“I make it we’re still five or six miles from the edge of Port A ville,” Ryan said as he swung off Krysty’s backseat.

“Too far to push the bikes in this heat with so little water,” Mildred said.

The motorcycles were valuable, all right, but they weren’t worth taking the last train west for. Certainly not when they had sixty kilos of operational plastique to trade.

“Jak,” Ryan said, “scout ahead and find us a good spot to hide the bikes. If we can barter some gas in Port A ville, we’ll come back for them later.”

Doc dismounted from the motorcycle’s rear seat and the albino sped away. Jak returned a few minutes later with a typically terse report. “Gulch behind rock pile, not see from road,” he said. “Quarter mile up.”

They abandoned the three motorcycles in the shallow ravine, about one hundred yards from the edge of the ruined two-lane highway. It was a good location, and they could easily find it again from the sandstone outcrop.

Before they set off they shared the last of the water, which amounted to a couple of good swigs per person.

The companions left the gulch lugging one extra backpack each, about twenty-five pounds of additional weight.

It took them almost three hours, walking at a steady pace to reach the outskirts of Port Arthur. They smelled the ville long before they saw it. The faint sea breeze carried a raw stink of sulfur. As they advanced on the southwest horizon, the skeletal, rusting ruin of the predark oil refinery came into view. Its storage tanks had ruptured long ago, spilling their precious contents into and poisoning the surrounding soil. The wide street in front of them was lined by tangled, fallen telephone and power lines and jumbled poles, and by cinder-block-rimmed foundation holes and concrete slabs sprouting stubs of plumbing and curlicues of electrical conduit. The few houses that remained standing sported caved-in roofs and buckled or bowed walls. In the aftermath of skydark, countless Category 5 storms had bored inland from the Gulf. The high-water marks were greasy brown stains on the canted, twisted eaves, stains from crude oil released from the refinery’s ruptured tanks, oil floating atop the flood. As a result of the mixing effect of the water and the weather, every square foot of ground was littered with some bit of predark rubbish.

Across the panorama of decimated flatland the companions were the only things moving. Port A ville’s residents had retreated like dogs into the deep shadows. Without air-conditioning, the brutal heat of the day was something best slept through.

The farther south they walked, the stronger the brimstone odor got. To a discerning nose it was as much swamp gas as petrochemical—the odor of wet rot and mold. It was coming from the direction of Port A ville’s waterfront downtown, now permanently flooded thanks to the overall rise in sea level. That rise, Ryan recalled, had also swallowed up most of Pleasure Island, the 18-mile-long, man-made island on Sabine Lake. The expansion of the lake and seawater had turned one-third of the habitable land between Groves ville and Port A ville into a marshy, fetid waste. Along the former Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which paralleled downtown, a motley fleet of traders’ sailboats would be moored to the bases of partially submerged, rusting loading cranes.

Two blond boys in holed-out T-shirts popped out from behind a cinder-block foundation and cut across the deserted street in front of them. Both were barefoot; one of them wore shorts, the other was bare-assed naked. They were carrying a five-gallon bucket of water between them, trying not to spill the contents as they headed for a small cinder-block structure. Metal-roofed and one-story, it looked like a power company or road maintenance shed. Windowless. Eight by twelve. The only door had been crudely sawn in two horizontally—the Dutch door was a way to get some air circulation. The top part of door was open. The inside looked dark and dank and blistering hot.

“Hey, how about a drink of that water?” Ryan shouted at the kids.

They stopped, turned and put down the heavy bucket. “Gimme a shotshell,” the taller of the two said. He was the one wearing shorts. He was seven or eight.

A broad figure appeared above the maintenance shed’s Dutch door, stepping from darkness into the light. Naked from the waist up, Mama held a rust-splotched, fold-stock AK-47 pointed skyward, her finger resting on the trigger guard. She was a big woman with stringy brown hair, huge flabby arms and massive breasts. Cradled in her other arm, a baby contentedly nursed on one of her dirt blotched, stretch-marked dugs.

“That’s the price,” she shouted hoarsely. “Pay it or fuck off.”

Krysty muttered a curse under her breath, and her emerald eyes flashed with anger.

Appropriate anger.

The compensation being demanded was outrageous.

Ryan hated like hell to give up one of their precious few cartridges, but he had to keep the bigger picture in mind. They’d come a long way and they needed to drink now and rehydrate if they were going to be clearheaded when they got down to the business of bartering their loot. “We’ll pay it,” he said. “Give the boy a round, J.B.”

The Armorer ejected a live shell from his scattergun. He handed it to the kid, who checked the primer and shook the shell next to his grimy ear. His eyes lit up and he smiled gaptoothed at his mama.

“Go on,” she said, gesturing with the flash hider and ramp sight of the battered AK.

The companions took turns at the bucket, drinking their fill. The water was sweet, cool and fairly clean.

When they were done, Krysty said to Mama, “We paid you for the water, now what do we owe you for the air?”

At a signal from their mother, the kids kicked over the rest of the bucket on the ground. That was followed by a caustic stream of profanity and death threats from the tiny family.

“Friendly town, isn’t it?” Mildred remarked as they carefully backed away and continued on.

“Make no mistake about it,” Ryan said, his voice deadly cold, “this isn’t your run-of-the-mill hellpit. This is the radblasted end of the line, the last outpost on the Gulf coast before the Dallas-Houston death zone. Folks don’t end up in Port A ville by choice. They end up here because they were driven out of the eastern baronies on account of who they were or what they did. I’m talking about the lowest of low—diseased gaudy sluts, jolt fiends, coldheart robbers and crazy chillers. The traders who come through here specialize in looting the interior’s hotspots, and robbing the scroungers who got there first. They’re used to taking the biggest risks, to chilling first and never asking questions after. Keep your eyes open and your blaster hands free. From now on, we’re triple red.”

After another couple of miles of deserted gridwork streets and sprawling ruination, they came to the intersection of two main roads, and in the near distance, the remains of an enormous predark shopping center. Almost all of its structures lay in piles of fractured concrete. There was no telling what had brought the buildings down: storms from the Gulf, earthquake, flood, demolition. Any or all of it was possible.

The parking lots were covered in layers of dried mud and in places trees grew up through cracks in the asphalt. Visible from a quarter mile away, four huge letters hung crooked on a concrete-block building’s lone surviving wall.

“They sold ‘ears’?” Jak wondered out loud.

“No,” Mildred said. “No, the S must’ve fallen off. It’s Sears.”

Before she could elaborate, Ryan urged them on. “Let’s keep moving,” he said. “We’ve still got some ground to cover.”

Maintaining the 450-yard buffer, he led them over swampy, trash-littered, former backyards and between cinder-block foundations, filled with stagnant, black water, around to the west side of the mall. From this angle, they could see almost all of the complex’s connecting interior corridors and colonnades had collapsed in on themselves. A single big-box store was still standing.

“That’s BoomT’s,” Ryan told the others as he signaled a halt.

The entrance to the three-story building was shielded by a pair of Winnebagos sitting on their rusting wheel rims. A mob of people waited in the heat to pass single file through the gap between the RVs. Some wore heavy backpacks; some stowed their trade goods in homemade wags and dog carts. Those were the small-timers. There was a separate queue for big-time traders—a lineup of horse-drawn carts, motorcycles, pack mules and tethered-human bearers at the back bumper of the Winnebago on the right, along the building’s windowless facade. Everybody stood under the watch of crude blastertowers at the corners of the roof.

As Krysty scanned the setup through minibinocs, she said, “How does the operation work?”

“Small-timers are dealt with by BoomT’s sec men,” Ryan said. “Before they get to go into the building, the sec men put a value on their trade goods. The customers get a chit, which they can use for any of the goods inside up to the amount of the chit. Inside there’s a drop-off area for newly bartered stuff. Folks find what they’re after and hand back the chit. The exit’s on the south end of the building. Can’t see it from here.”

Krysty passed the binocs to Mildred, who had a look-see and said, “Who’s the fat man coming out of the Winnie on the right? He’s as big as a Sumo wrestler and it looks like he’s wearing a chenille bedspread. Good God, look at that flab!” She tried to give Ryan the binocs.

The one-eyed man waved her off. He didn’t need magnification to identify the man lumbering onto the tarmac. “That would be BoomT in the flesh,” he told the others. “He handles the major trades and shipping deals himself.”

“What are all those pinkish blotches on his arms and back?” Mildred asked as she took another look through the binocs. “He seems to have a skin condition.”

“Yeah, from bullets,” J.B. answered. “Those are wound scars. Definitely a hard man to chill.”

“A lot of folks have tried to put BoomT in the ground,” Ryan said. “He’s put them all there instead. It’s the flab that protects him, that and all the muscle underneath. He’s one powerful son of a bitch, and he’s a lot faster than he looks. Rumor has it, he can snap a grown man’s neck with either hand.”

“Need a dead-center hit with an RPG to take out that giant tub of guts,” J.B. added.

“BoomT opened up shop about fifteen years ago,” Ryan went on, “after scroungers started going into the hot zones to the north and west to look for spoils.”

“By ‘spoils,’ I take it you are referring to undiscovered caches of predark manufactured goods?” Doc said as he accepted the binocs from Mildred.

“Correct,” Ryan said.

More than a century after the Apocalypse, there was still no large-scale manufacturing in the Deathlands. The necessary machines, the understanding of engineering and assembly-line processes had all gone extinct, along with democracy, the forty-hour work week and cable TV. In actuality, nuclear Armageddon had turned back America’s clock more than two hundred years, to before the Industrial Revolution. The United States of America had devolved into a feudal, agarian and hunter-gatherer society.

“Trader never trusted BoomT,” J.B. said.

“He had good reason,” Ryan said. “Big Boy over there is a double-dealing, backstabbing mountain of crap. And we don’t have enough ammo left to defend our booty. If we take more spoils with us than we’re willing to lose, chances are we’ll lose everything and get ourselves chilled in the bargain.”

“So, we’ve got to hide most of the C-4?” Mildred said. “Where?”

“I know a good place farther south,” Ryan said, waving on the companions.

Circling wide around the south end of the mall, through the shimmering waves of heat they could see a pair of four-mule carts crawling for the line of moored sailboats at the water’s edge. The heavily laden wags rolled on scavenged auto axles and wheels down the cracked and granularized street.

Between the mall and the distant water was a wide expanse of rolling, undeveloped land. There were stands of mature trees; some bare-limbed and dead, some living. Among the twists and turns of the landscape stood patches of irrigated fields that were bordered by little clusters of field-hand shanties.

“From the lay of it, I’d say it used to be a golf course,” Mildred said.

It was a golf course no more.

It had become the breadbasket for Port A ville and vicinity.

Local folk had abandoned the city streets in favor of the open space. The soil there was unpolluted, and there were no wrecked buildings that had to be cleared before it could be cultivated. The former Babe Zaharias Memorial Golf Course was, in fact, the path of least resistance.

Ryan led the companions across the mule-cart route, past the imploded shell of the former links’ clubhouse, and onto what had once been a lush and rolling green. The farm fields on either side weren’t fenced. No field hands were in evidence. With the sun straight overhead, it was too hot to do grunt work. No heads appeared in the doorless doorways or glassless windows of the huts, either. If the laborers were inside, they were dozing soundly through the suffocating heat.

The companions climbed a shallow grade, then passed through a stand of tall trees. In a shallow bowl below, out of sight of the surrounding fields, was a water hazard that had once challenged golfers. The small lake’s surface was choked with mats of chartreuse algae.

Ryan led them down to the shore, then handed J.B. his scoped longblaster and said, “Leave your C-4 here and head up to the ridge on the far side of the lake. Make sure no one is spying on us from that direction.”

As J.B. trotted away, Krysty put two and two together and said, “We’re hiding the explosives in the water?”

“It won’t hurt the C-4 because it’s sealed in plastic,” Ryan said as he dumped the contents of his backpack onto the bank. “Everybody take out one detonator blister pack,” he told the others.

The companions unshouldered their loads and did as he asked.

“Put the batteries in your detonators,” Ryan said as he put batteries in his. When they were all ready, he added, “Now try the test button.”

All of the remotes lit up. Green for go. They were functional.

The one-eyed man pried the two tiny power cells from the black plastic case and slipped each of them into a different pants pocket. “Okay, now remove the batteries,” he said. “Hide them in your gear separate from the detonators. We don’t want some drooler arming one of the remotes and pushing the ‘fire’ button by accident.”

As Doc pocketed his depowered detonator he shook his head and said, “Batteries in, batteries out. Dear Ryan, I must admit to puzzlement. For the life of me I cannot fathom your intent.”

He was not alone.

“Where are you going with this, Ryan?” Krysty said.

“I’m just buying us some getaway insurance.”

With the point of his panga Ryan carefully slit the plastic on one of the bricks along a lengthwise seam. Using the components from a blister pack, he quickly rigged the two-kilo block of plastique for remote detonation. Then he pressed closed the slit he had made in the plastic wrap. Because it stuck to the explosive material, the incision was almost undetectable. He repacked the backpack with ten parcels of C-4, putting the rigged brick near the bottom.

“Now any of us can detonate the entire load if the shit hits the fan,” he said.

“We better all be a long ways off when that happens,” Mildred said. “Twelve kilos of plastique is going to raise some dust.”

“But, Ryan, anybody else can set it off, too,” Krysty protested. “Why did you leave the detonators and batteries in the load we’re going to trade?”

“Had no choice,” Ryan told her. “For all we know, BoomT is expecting this C-4 to show up. He could have contracted the dead scroungers to bring it to him from New Mex. And if he did, he could know there were supposed to be remote detonators included in the deal. If the detonators are missing when we show him the goods, you can bet the farm he’ll have his sec men search us. When they find what they’re looking for, it’ll take the play away from us. If the detonators are in the mix, BoomT isn’t going to dig deeper, and we’ve still got our hole card.”

“So, we show up with the C-4 instead of the traders he contracted with?” Mildred said. “How’s that going to go down?”

“BoomT won’t care who makes the delivery or who he pays for the C-4,” J.B. said. “He sure as hell isn’t going to care what happened to the scroungers. That’s the kind of shit-snake he is.”

“But it is possible that he was expecting the arrival of all six backpacks,” Doc interjected.

“In that case, he’ll be happy that one actually showed up,” Ryan said. “We’ve got a believable story. His pet scroungers were chilled by stickies. We salvaged a single load. Hell, it’s almost even true.”

The one-eyed warrior sat on the grass, untied his boots and kicked them off. “No sense in more than two of us getting wet,” he said. “Jak, gather up a couple of backpacks of C-4 and wade out with me.”

Leaving his own pack on the bank, Ryan hoisted three others and moved slowly into the warm water, careful to tear the smallest possible rip in the algae mat.

The albino kicked off his boots, grabbed up the remaining unbooby-trapped packs and waded out to midthigh. The two of them sank the packs under the water, holding them down until all the trapped air bubbles escaped. As they backtracked their path to shore, they brushed together the torn edges of the bloom.

Ryan and Jak carefully dried their feet on the grass before putting on their boots. When Ryan stood, he waved for J.B. to hurry down from the lookout.

“I am still at rather a loss here,” Doc confessed. “What exactly is your larger strategy?”

“If we can get cartridges and gas in trade for the one load of C-4,” Ryan told him, “we can lug the fuel and the sunken explosives back to the bikes, and ride on east to Louisiana in style. If we can’t get gas, we’ll have to find transport by water, or keep walking. If things go sour with BoomT, and we have enough of a head start, we can come back here and recover the rest of the C-4. If not, we can leave it where it is for now and come back later.”

After J.B. rejoined them, Ryan retrieved his long-blaster, shouldered the last backpack of explosives and said, “Let’s go cut ourselves a deal.”

Chapter Five

They returned to the mall, retracing their circuitous route to approach it from the north, an extra but necessary precaution. If things went badly, BoomT and crew wouldn’t think to look south for any spoils they had hidden. As the companions stepped onto the sunbaked parking lot, the dried mud crunched under their boots like layers of crisp pastry dough, and each step sent up a little puff of fine brown dust.

Keeping the edge of the mall’s acres of mounded rubble on their left, they headed for the big-box store. As Ryan got closer, he could see that a side entrance to the mall’s interior and its covered walkway were still intact and connected to the north wall of BoomT’s emporium. The interior hallway and roof were supported on the opposite side by the facades of gutted storefronts. Ryan led the others wide right of the doorless opening, giving them some room to maneuver, if need be.

Just inside the shade of the corridor on the left, a bevy of rode-hard and hefty gaudy sluts reclined on tubular aluminum chaise longues. Barefoot, in carelessly belted, ratty nylon housecoats, they were showing off their wares and airing them at the same time.

There were no takers among the handful of scroungers loitering on the other side of the partially collapsed hallway.

Too hot.

Too sober.

Or mebbe the airing was incomplete.

Above the row of overtaxed chaises, a predark restaurant sign said Cantina Olé in red, three-dimensional letters. The “i” of the sign was a little cartoon cactus and the “O” was wearing a yellow sombrero.

Jak leaned close to Mildred and in a deadpan voice said, “Did H fall off?”

At first Mildred was puzzled by the question. Then she stared in amazement at the wild child. A second later she burst out laughing.

“Nuking hell!” J.B. exclaimed, turning to the others. “Did you catch that? Jak just made a joke!”

Although his mouth remained a thin line of implacable reserve, the albino’s ruby-red eyes seemed to glitter merrily.

A loud scuffle and angry shouts and screams from deeper in the corridor put an abrupt end to conversation and sent hands grabbing for gun butts. From out of the darkness of the interior spilled a trio of wild-ass, go-for-broke combatants. The companions stepped clear as the herky-jerky, high-speed fist and foot fight tumbled out into the blinding sunlight of the parking lot.

It wasn’t two against one; it was every man for himself.

Joltheads, Ryan thought, keeping his hand on his holstered SIG-Sauer.

The evidence for that conclusion was incontrovertible: the stringy, emaciated arms; the sagging, prematurely wrinkled skin dotted with angry sores; hair missing from the scalp in fist-size patches; the bulging, jaundiced eyes; the rotten, black-edged teeth; the clothes that looked like they’d been salvaged from a garbage dump and put through a shredder.

And the capper was the insensate violence.

The trio punched and kicked one another at extreme close range, spitting blood and fragments of teeth, tossing up tufts of ripped-out hair, raising clouds of dust when they fell through the mud crust on their backsides, jumping up again like they were on springs. Even though the battle was powered by a drug, there was no way human bodies could maintain the frenetic pace. After a couple of minutes of all-out combat, gasping for air, the fighters pulled black-powder handblasters out from under their clothing.

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