“Describe him,” Ryan demanded

The one-eyed man’s heart was pounding in his chest. It was impossible. This could not be happening.

The brothers exchanged a glance. “The Trader? Hell, I dunno,” Sparrow said. “Never saw the guy. He was always inside a big-ass tank, stays behind a blister of the mil glass.”

“How many wags?” J.B. pressed him. “Describe them!”

Sparrow scrunched his face. “Well, there were three, one big wag and two others, each plated with metal and covered with blasters. Big stuff. Baron Gaza was scared to death of the guy. Hell, who wouldn’t be with all his weapons?”

“More,” Ryan said through clenched teeth.

Fumbling for a reply, Jed scratched his head. “Well, I heard Kate call the big truck War Wag One. That help any?”

The universe seemed to go still at those simple words, as if it were breaking apart and rejoining in a new pattern, reorganizing itself on a most basic of levels.

“He made it,” Ryan said quietly. “Trader’s alive!”

Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

Pilgrimage to Hell

Red Holocaust

Neutron Solstice

Crater Lake

Homeward Bound

Pony Soldiers

Dectra Chain

Ice and Fire

Red Equinox

Northstar Rising

Time Nomads

Latitude Zero

Seedling

Dark Carnival

Chill Factor

Moon Fate

Fury’s Pilgrims

Shockscape

Deep Empire

Cold Asylum

Twilight Children

Rider, Reaper

Road Wars

Trader Redux

Genesis Echo

Shadowfall

Ground Zero

Emerald Fire

Bloodlines

Crossways

Keepers of the Sun

Circle Thrice

Eclipse at Noon

Stoneface

Bitter Fruit

Skydark

Demons of Eden

The Mars Arena

Watersleep

Nightmare Passage

Freedom Lost

Way of the Wolf

Dark Emblem

Crucible of Time

Starfall

Encounter:

Collector’s Edition

Gemini Rising

Gaia’s Demise

Dark Reckoning

Shadow World

Pandora’s Redoubt

Rat King

Zero City

Savage Armada

Judas Strike

Shadow Fortress

Sunchild

Breakthrough

Salvation Road

Amazon Gate

Destiny’s Truth

Skydark Spawn

Damnation Road Show

Devil Riders

DEATH LANDS®

James Axler

For my buddy, Rich Tucholka

The sun and the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago…had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.

—Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (1923)

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Epilogue

Chapter One

As muted thunder rolled across the grassy field, a group of people burst from the bushes, running for their lives.

Many carried bundles of possessions, but most had already thrown away the packs for greater speed. Death was coming fast, and every second counted. Their convoy had been ambushed at a water hole, and most of the mercies hired to guard them from coldhearts were aced already. Now there was nothing else to do but run.

“The Devils are here!” a burly man shouted, pulling a rusty blaster from within his ragged shirt and thumbing back the hammer. “Head for the trees!”

Some of the fleeing people did as ordered. Others ran mindlessly across the open ground. A few fell weeping to the ground in surrender. Only two others pulled weapons and turned to face the onrushing enemy. The man held a homemade scattergun, the woman a crude crossbow built from car parts. As the man cocked back both of the hammers on the shotgun, the woman pulled a razor-tipped arrow from the quiver on her back and nocked it.

“Aim for the front,” the first man commanded, licking dry lips. “With luck the rest will be close behind and they’ll crash into the one we ace.”

“We ain’t gonna ace nobody,” the woman growled. “Nothing can stop the Devils.”

Constantly wiping his sweaty hands on his trousers, the man with the shotgun said nothing and tried to control his breathing.

High above the screaming people, sheet lightning crashed among the purple and orange clouds, while black velocity streamers sliced through the sky like the slashes of a knife. Suddenly from out of nowhere, an arc of fire streaked across the polluted atmosphere as another predark satellite descended too low and was caught by the gravity to be disintegrated in a fiery reentry.

On the ground, a wave of black-and-silver motorcycles bounded into view from over a groundswell, the riders carrying nets and clubs to take their prey alive. Each rider had a human skull, painted red, attached to the yoke of the handlebars. Some had a tuft of hair still in place, but most were missing teeth, or entire jaws, the grisly remains of their victims saved as trophies to adorn their machines. The Blue Devils, coldhearts of the Panhandle.

“Ace ’em!” the leader of the convoy shouted, then fired his blaster twice at the oncoming motorcycles.

A spray of sparks leaped from the handlebars of the lead Harley as a slug ricocheted off the chromed steel. The bikers paid no attention to the incoming lead and spread out after the sprinting people.

Tracking her target, the woman released the arrow, which hit a bald biker in the leg. The man cursed as his machine swerved, then the rest of the gang were among the defenders, the heavy nets filling the air.

A spread of net caught a woman, dragging her to the ground, and as she tried to rise another rider slammed her with his club, knocking her unconscious. Rising from the thick grass, an older man shoved a wooden spear into the spokes of a passing Harley, but missed completely. However, the attack was noticed and the lead coldheart sharply changed direction and revved the bike’s big engine. The front of the vehicle raised off the ground to then slam down on the attacker, crushing his chest with the horrible sound of splintering bones.

More nets flew through the air and people fell tangled in the ropes, tiny hooks woven into the mesh catching skin and clothing alike. The leader of the convoy fired his blaster at a nearby biker, but there was only a spray of sparks from a misfire. Jouncing over the irregular field, a fat biker covered with tattoos swung the barrel of a scattergun toward the leader’s skull. But the man ducked just in time and pulled the trigger again, this time a roar sounding from the blaster. Blood sprayed from the biker’s arm, and he swung the scattergun about to pull both triggers. The double explosion caught the leader full in the face, blowing off his head in a frothy eruption of bone, brains and blood.

More lightning flashed across the sky as the big engines roared, the bikers circling their prey, driving them closer together while they pulled more nets from bulging saddle bags. The woman let fly an arrow from her crossbow again, hitting nothing, and then was hit from behind by a net. She dropped squirming to the ground, then pulled a knife and buried it into her chest, bright blood gushing from the mortal wound.

Dropping the empty scattergun, the older man raised his hands in surrender. A Devil biker slammed into him from behind, spinning the whitehair, who crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs. Soon, the roar of the engines mixed with the cries of the trapped people. Another blaster discharged, and a biker smashed a young man across the back with a thrown club, sending him sprawling to the ground.

With the blasters empty, the battle was over in minutes and the captives were freed from the nets. Hands tied behind their backs, the prisoners were kicked and shoved into a line before their grinning captors.

This close, the old man could see that the biker gang was dressed in rags draped over their thick leather jackets to hide their wealth, but were armed to the teeth with more blasters than any two villes worth of sec men. The machines they rode were old and patched, draped with saddlebags bulging with supplies and a few precious cans of slick, grain alcohol cut with traces of gasoline to fuel the big Harley engines. Every member of the pack was armed with some kind of a blaster, mostly scatterguns, yet only three of the bikes had an intact headlight, and only one had a windshield. The machines were battered, but still powerful, able to go places that no heavily armored war wag could ever reach.

“What’s the total?” Cranston asked, the lead biker leaning over the handlebars of his purring machine.

The man was a craggy giant with closely cropped blond hair. His nose was flat and wide, but whether that was a natural mutation or a very old injury was impossible to discern. The handle of a knife jutted from each boot, a big bore handcannon rode on his right hip and a longblaster wrapped in dirty rags was strapped across his back. The stock was deeply carved, and feathers dangled from below the muzzle of the weapon. The old man knew what that was for. To test the direction of the wind when he was placing a long shot.

“Ten people, four corpses,” Krury announced, running a hand across his bald head. “A pretty fair haul.”

“Not bad.” Cranston grinned, killing the engine on the bike, then using the edge of his boot to force down the stand. Stepping off the Harley, he walked over to the line of prisoners. Ignoring the men, he checked the women, separating the very old and the one pregnant girl from the rest.

“You boys can fuck these,” he said. “But no broken bones. We want them fresh for the market. Start a fire going and jerk the corpses to smoke the meat.

“Cannies!” the old man gasped. “You’re not slavers, but nuking cannies!”

In a blur of speed, Cranston slapped the man across the face, driving him to the ground. The prisoner looked up with open hatred in his face, blood trickling from a split lip.

“Don’t back talk me, wrinklie!” the biker snarled. “We don’t eat people, but we know folks who do, and they pay us in plenty of slick for our wheels in exchange for the long-pig meat. So it’s the mines or the stew pot, take your choice.”

Slowly, the prisoner stood in a surprising display of strength for a man with so much gray hair. “How about a third choice?” he said, hawking to spit the blood from his mouth. “Bet that I can chill any one of you cannie coldhearts with my bare hands.”

At that, the bikers roared with laughter.

“Black dust, but the wrinklie’s got balls!” Cranston smiled, then his eyes went as hard as broken glass. “Well, we got enough to spare one for some entertainment. Okay, slave, if you win, you take the place of the stud ya chill. Never have enough men with real guts.”

“And if I lose?” the old man asked, standing straighter.

The rest of the prisoners stayed motionless and silent. Their doom was sealed; this madness had nothing to do with them.

Hooking both thumbs into his leather gun belt, Krury sneered. “Then we deliver ya to the cannies alive,” he said in an edged voice. “They got a ceremony called the Blood Dance. Starts with taking off your skin and feeding it back to ya. Something about sweetening their food.”

“Then they get creative,” another biker added, rubbing his crotch. “And guess what ya eat next?”

The old man swallowed with difficulty, but said nothing.

“Still game, old man?” Cranston demanded, resting a hand on his blaster.

A stiff breeze from the stormy clouds overhead ruffled the prisoner’s gray hair as he nervously flexed both hands.

“The name’s Denver Joe,” he said softly. “Denver Joe Sinclair, although I’m really from Indy.” For some reason this seemed to be important to the old man, a source of pride.

“Be smart, old-timer!” Another biker laughed. The man had long dirty red hair tied off in a ponytail that reached his waist. “Choose the mines and live. Anything’s better than being a toy for the cannies.”

One of the women prisoners burst into tears at that, and the others merely trembled. A man on the end of the line looked as if he were about to be sick.

“Yeah, I should work in the mines,” Denver Joe shot back. “But then a gutless feeb like you would suck scabbies in a gaudy house to stay alive. I’ll go down fighting, ya mutie lover!”

Vastly amused by the unexpected display of rebellion, the bikers laughed even louder this time. With a snarl, the redheaded rider started forward, drawing a hatchet from his belt, but Cranston stopped the man with a stiff arm across the chest. The two stood there for a moment, like a breed master holding back his prize bloodhound.

“Whatcha think, Larry?” Cranston said, glancing at the skinny old man and then the muscular biker. “You missed twice with your net and killed a slut we could have ridden tonight. I think you owe the pack some entertainment.”

“Anytime,” the biker snarled.

“Winner take all?” Denver Joe added as insultingly as possible. “My life against your place in the gang?”

“Done!” Larry growled, starting to strip off his leather jacket and spare weapons. Kneeling as if in prayer, the old man took some dirt and rubbed it into his palms.

Cranston narrowed his eyes at that. Dirt in the palms was a fighter’s trick from the arena of a baron. A person did that so the sweat wouldn’t make him drop his knife. But the wrinklie didn’t have a blade. Was this some sort of trick, or worse, a trap? It almost seemed as if the whitehair was trying to goad the biker into a fight right then and there. But that made no sense. Larry was twice the old man’s size, and there wasn’t a chance in hell the outlander could win. Gut instincts learned in a hundred battles told the chief biker there was something very wrong here, but he couldn’t figure out where the danger was. No sense taking chances, though.

“Not here,” Cranston announced loudly. “We’ll drive to the mesa near Death River, and you two can fight after we eat tonight.”

“Gonna chill him now!” Larry snarled, his face contorted with hatred, and he charged at the helpless old man.

With surprising agility, Denver Joe dodged out of the way of the lumbering biker, then held his bound wrists toward Krury. Face-to-face, the two men stood for a long moment, then the biker pulled a blade and slashed the ropes around the old man’s hands. Now free, Denver Joe brutally kicked the biker in the balls and grabbed the knife from his limp hands just in time to block another slash from Larry. The two men circled each other, looking for an opening to end the fight fast. The oily knives gleaming evilly in the setting sunlight, the fighters darted in slashing, then moved apart again, while the watching bikers cheered and laughed. Mute as forgotten stones, the helpless slaves said nothing under the watchful blasters of the remaining coldhearts.

Diving forward, Denver Joe stabbed at the biker’s face, driving him backward. But Larry shifted to the side and speared his knife into the older man’s thigh. Blood welled from the wound, and Denver Joe cursed loudly as he grabbed the wound, trying to staunch the blood flow. One inch more inward, and the blade would have cut the big artery in his leg. He had to move faster and end this quick.

The bikers cheered as Larry danced in closer and stabbed Denver Joe again in the leg, and then the side, the smaller blade of the oldster only cutting air as he tried again and again for a death blow to the throat.

But the blood loss was starting to slow his hand, his breathing becoming more labored. Backing away from the younger fighter, Denver Joe headed for some weeds and was soon splashing in ankle-deep water. Then he dramatically slipped and fell into the shallow creek. Grinning in triumph, Larry charged in for the kill and Denver Joe threw a fistful of mud at the biker’s face. Larry easily sidestepped the gob and went straight into a tangle of weeds. Tricked! As he tripped, the biker threw himself forward to avoid going down, and Denver Joe rose to rake his knife deep along the exposed neck of the fumbling man. Now the cheers and laughter of the biker gang stopped completely.

Blood spurted from the severed artery, and the hapless biker dropped his knife to grab the ghastly wound in both hands. But tiny squirts of red continued to pump from between his dirty fingers. Denver Joe shifted about in the muddy water, seeking another opening as his adversary mouthed curses and removed a hand from his gore-streaked throat to pull a small blaster hidden inside his shirt.

“Here’s something for ya, wrinklie!” he stormed, thumbing back the hammer.

Moving fast, Denver Joe threw the stolen knife as hard as he could and it slammed deep into the biker’s wrist, pinning his hand to his chest. Fingers convulsing, Larry accidentally triggered the blaster and the rear of his shirt ballooned as the .22 slug blew out his side.

Cranston inhaled sharply at that, and started to draw his own weapon, then paused. Larry could still win this. It was only a flash wound, nothing more, and Denver Joe was defenseless. Just pull out the knife and shoot him dead. Do it, boy!

Blood was swirling in the muddy water, as a pale Larry pulled the hand free and fired twice at the older man, missing each time. Diving into the mud, Denver Joe rolled closer to the biker and incredibly came up with the earlier dropped knife to ram it to the hilt in Larry’s crotch. A geyser of blood pumped from the hideous wound, and the biker screeched as his adversary slowly stood, using the strength of his legs and arms to force the blade upward through balls and stomach. As Larry started to convulse, Denver Joe grabbed a fistful of hair to yank back the dying man’s head and then cut the exposed throat open from ear to ear.

Gurgling horribly, Larry fell face forward into the filth of the creek to weakly shudder before going completely still, only a few small bubbles of escaping air rising from his buried face.

Breathing hard, Denver Joe waded to the shore of the water hole and tossed the crimson-splattered blade on the ground before the stunned bikers. Dead silence reigned for an impossibly long time before somebody spoke.

“Black dust, ya did it,” a burly biker snarled in amusement. “Cut Larry open like a hog.”

Rubbing an old scar, Krury added, “Never seen that done to a man before.”

“He was a punk,” Denver Joe wheezed, his clothing trickling red from the minor wounds. He was still at the mercy of the coldhearts, and lived or died at their whim. Killing Larry hadn’t been enough. He had needed to do the chilling with style and win their respect, too. But if he’d gone too far and earned their fear, he would be gunned down before taking another step. When you were captured by the Blue Devils, you joined by blood trial, or were taken as cargo.

“Well?” Denver Joe asked impatiently. “Somebody going to give a man a hand out of the fucking mud?”

“Do it yourself,” Cranston ordered brusquely, releasing his grip on the handcannon at his belt. “The Devils don’t ask for help from nobody. Remember that.”

So he would live. Forcing his trembling legs to work, Denver Joe clambered through the weeds and back onto solid ground.

“Which one is mine now?” he said, trying not to weave while standing. He felt ill, but any sign of weakness could send him back to the chains.

Spreading his cracked lips in a grin, a bald man covered with crude tattoos jerked a thumb at the empty motorcycle parked amid the dozen bikes. “The bike with the knucklehead engine is yours now,” he said. “Own her fair and square.”

Stiffly walking to the bike, Denver Joe checked the saddlebags and found some clothing that wasn’t too dirty to bandage the small wounds. He was pleased to see some supplies tucked away in the bag, including a plastic jar of honey. Smearing the cuts with honey, he then tied them off with the cloth, grunting as the crude bandages cinched tight.

“What the fuck you doing?” Ballard demanded, puzzled.

“Honey is a natural—” Denver bit back the pre-dark word. “The wounds won’t fester and rot.”

“By using honey?” The biker chortled. “Nuke me, never heard that shit before. Sure it works?”

“Like a bullet in a blaster,” the oldster said confidently.

“How do ya know that?” Krury demanded.

Larry’s gun belt was draped over the handlebars, with a big bore blaster tucked into the oiled leather. Near the skull a badly nicked hatchet was jammed into a spring-clamp on the handlebars for fast action, and a double-barrel shotgun jutted from a leather boot alongside the flat-top engine. Drawing the scattergun, Denver Joe checked the load inside and closed the breech with a solid satisfying snap. “I used to know a healer,” he said, pulling the blaster to check its ammo. Then he tossed the blaster to Krury who made the catch.

“For the loan of the knife,” Denver Joe said gruffly.

Snorting a laugh, Krury slipped the blaster into his belt. “Worth it,” he said.

“So what we do about that?” a woman biker asked, indicating the muddy corpse with a motion of her chin. Angelina was fat with a roll of belly resting on her wide belt. Her leather vest laced together showing a wealth of acne-scarred cleavage. She was the chief bitch of the gang, but also the best butcher they had. Meat spoiled fast in the summer, and unless the bodies were cleaned and smoked properly, there was nothing to deliver to the cannies in exchange for the slick.

“Put him with the rest,” Cranston said, climbing onto his bike and kicking the engine alive. “Then we leave this place right now. Anybody says different and I ace them. Move!”

Having done this many times before, the bikers got busy tying a corpse across the rear fender of each bike, and lashing the prisoners together. The slaves could either run to keep up with the Devils, or fall and get dragged to their deaths and be added to the meat supply. It really made no difference.

Drinking deeply from a canteen of warm beer, Denver Joe wasn’t surprised when Larry was put on his bike, and the small palm blaster given over as part of the loot. It was a .22 derringer with four barrels, and he’d never seen one like it before. Interesting.

Twisting the throttle, Denver Joe gunned the big engine, blue and gray smoke blowing out the twin exhaust pipes. Studying the reactions of the engine, he eased back on the choke until the single-stroke engine was purring with controlled power.

So far, so good. He had specifically joined the caravan traveling in this direction hoping they would be attacked by the Devils so that he might have a chance of joining the gang.

However, leaving the flatlands before dark wasn’t to his liking, yet there was nothing he could do without drawing unwanted attention to himself. This wasn’t working out exactly as expected, but he would stay the course. Denver Joe had great faith in the plans of the Trader.

Chapter Two

Slowly, the wisps of electronic fog filling the mattrans unit faded to nothingness and the seven people sprawled on the gateway floor began to stir.

Stomachs heaving from their passage through the predark transporter machine, the companions writhed in agony. It had been a bad jump, but unfortunately there was nothing to do but suffer through the nausea and pain until the aftereffects of the instantaneous journey eventually subsided.

“Anybody hurt?” Ryan Cawdor asked, coughing as he held his sides against the racking pain in his belly. It felt as if fire ants were eating his guts, and his skin seemed to be moving about, shifting positions as if draped loosely over his aching bones.

“I’m a-alive,” J. B. Dix whispered, kneeling on the floor. An Uzi machine pistol hung at his side, and a pump-action S&W M-4000 scattergun was strapped across his backpack. A canvas bag lay on the floor alongside him.

Fighting a tremor, J.B. wiped a string of drool from his mouth with the cuff of his leather jacket. “J-just not sure why after that slice of hell.”

“I hear ya,” Ryan agreed, bracing a scarred hand against the cool armaglass wall and forcing himself to stand. A Steyr SSG-70 rifle was sticking out of his backpack, while a 9 mm SIG-Sauer pistol rode at his hip alongside an eighteen-inch-long panga.

Blinking hard to clear his vision, the one-eyed man could see that outside the mat-trans unit was a hexagonal chamber with cream-colored walls laced with a gold lattice pattern. That scheme was unfamiliar, which meant they had never been to this redoubt before. The walls of each gateway in the network of underground installations was a different color, the purpose of which was, the friends concluded, to let a jumper know immediately where he or she landed.

Leaning against a wall, Dr. Mildred Wyeth pulled a canvas satchel into her lap.

“H-here, t-try this,” she muttered, fumbling to open the bag. Inside was an assortment of precious surgical tools. The physician was slowly building a collection of medical supplies—sterile water, plastic baggies filled with sterilized cloth, a jar of sulfur dust for wounds, and such. Hardly little more than supermarket curatives back in her day, but enough to save a life in the shockscape known as the Deathlands.

Extracting a canteen, Mildred screwed off the cap and took a healthy swig before passing it to a boy almost in his teenage years. Physician heal thyself, she thought, waiting for the throbbing headache to ease.

Sitting on his butt, an arm propped against the floor to keep himself upright, Dean Cawdor accepted the container and took a long drink, sloshing the fluid about in his mouth to try to cut the taste of bile before finally swallowing.

“Tastes awful,” Dean said, making a face and handing the canteen away to a nearby woman with impossibly red hair.

Sitting with her legs folded, the woman was almost completely hidden by the shaggy bearskin coat. She threw back her head, revealing a face of inordinate beauty and eyes as green as the troubled sea. Her slim hand shook slightly as she raised the container and took several very small sips from the battered canteen.

“It’s not supposed to be delicious,” Mildred retorted, brushing away the beaded plaits from her own face. “Just calm your stomach enough so we don’t puke out our guts from jump sickness.”

“Need it for this one, that’s for damn sure,” Krysty Wroth said, passing the canteen to a pale teenager, crouched on his hands and knees.

Snow-white hair cascading past his pale face, Jak Lauren shook his head, ruby red eyes narrowed to mere slits in his pale face as if the stubborn youth were fighting the jump sickness by sheer willpower. Jak always fared poorly after a jump and usually was violently ill. This time was no better.

“What’s in this batch?” J.B. asked, accepting the canteen but taking a sniff before he drank. Some of Mildred’s brews worked pretty good, but others were totally useless. And one memorable batch actually made them feel sicker afterward.

“It’s the last of the aspirins, some vitamins, mint, skag root and a shot of brandy I’ve been saving for an emergency.”

“Fair enough,” J.B. said, and took a deep drink.

His churning stomach calmed almost instantly, and the headache cleared in only a few minutes. Feeling much better, he passed Ryan the canteen and reached into his shirt pocket to pull on his pair of wire-rimmed glasses. The wiry Armorer always took them off in case he fell sprawling to the floor and broke the spectacles.

Splashing a few drops into his palm, Ryan wiped down his face before taking a swig, holding the concoction in his mouth for a moment to cut the metallic taste of the bad jump. As he swallowed, he scowled deeply at the mat-trans unit. A sprawled form wearing an antique-style frock coat remained still, an ebony walking stick inches away from an outstretched hand.

“Mildred, something’s wrong with Doc!” Ryan snapped.

Grabbing her satchel, Mildred crawled over the floor and awkwardly rolled the silver-haired man onto his back to check the pulse in his neck with a fingertip. But the beat was strong and slow with no sign of arrhythmia. The frilled shirt rose and fell as the old man breathed steadily.

“He’s fine,” Mildred announced. “Just passed out from the jump. They always hit him hard.”

“Because he’s from another time, or because he has jumped so much more than us?” Dean asked in concern. “Are the jumps going to get worse for us over the years?”

“Good question. However, I have no idea,” Mildred answered honestly. “But let’s hope not. Any worse than this one and we’ll arrive as corpses.”

“Besides,” J.B. added, straightening the fedora on his head. “We haven’t been…” Here, the Armorer fumbled for the right word, then chose the truth. “Experimented on by the lunatics who built the redoubts, or tortured for years by an insane baron.”

“Sometimes I’m surprised that he’s sane at all, poor thing,” Krysty said softly.

“Indeed, m-madam,” Doc Tanner rumbled, slowly raising his head in a saurian manner. “So a-am I, if any are t-truly sane these d-dark days.”

“Aw, stuff it, ya old coot,” Mildred said, but the words carried no anger. “You’ll outlive all of us combined.”

“Perhaps I already have,” Doc said, “and that is the problem from the start.” Then the tall man shook as he violently coughed, but that subsided and he gazed at the others with clear eyes. “Cream and gold, I perceive. We have not been here before, my dear Ryan.”

“No, it’s a new redoubt,” the one-eyed man replied, tossing the canteen.

Across the chamber, Mildred made the catch and shoved the container into Doc’s grasp. “Here, drink the last of the jump juice. Do you a world of good.”

“Somebody else made it, then, madam, and not you? Excellent news.”

“Shaddup drink,” Jak growled, slowly standing. The teen weaved slightly, but then the weakness passed and he stood without hindrance.

Draining the last of the brew of meds and roots, Professor Theophilus Algernon Tanner soon felt the universe slip into focus once more and he recapped the canteen, returning it to the physician with a grateful nod.

Smoothing the frilly front of his white shirt, Doc tightened his black string bow tie, then used stiff fingers to try to control his unruly crop of silver-white hair. Although only thirty-eight years old, his forced journeys through time had visibly aged the man, and scrambled his memory until often the past and the present mixed freely.

With careful hands, Doc checked the massive blaster at his side to make sure none of the black powder charges had come loose in the jump. The .44 LeMat was a Civil War revolver carrying nine chambers in the primary cylinder, and a short 12-gauge barrel set under the main barrel. It was slow to load, but hit like a cannon. But even more important, the weapon was from Doc’s own time period, a direct physical link to his lost home and the family still waiting for him in the distant past.

Hawking to clear the phlegm from his throat, Ryan spit into the corner of the chamber and fixed the leather patch that covered the puckered ruin of his missing left eye, a gift from his brother Harvey. In grim efficiency, Ryan then did a weapons check, briefly touching his small arsenal of blasters and knives.

Pulling out his SIG-Sauer blaster, Ryan clicked off the safety and then racked the slide to chamber a round for instant use. Everybody was back on their feet, so it was time to recce the rest of the redoubt to see if there was anything useful in the storerooms.

There was something odd about this redoubt. The air coming from the wall vent was warm, instead of cool. Sniffing carefully, Ryan couldn’t detect the smell of an electrical fire, or lava. Last year, a jump to a tropical redoubt had the group arriving just as the local volcano erupted. They had barely escaped, with chunks of the molten stone actually arriving with them at the next redoubt. And that was cutting the razor edge of life just too damn close by anybody’s standards.

“Get ready, people,” Ryan growled, and the rest pulled blasters and checked their loads.

“Ready,” Krysty said, closing the cylinder of her .38 S&W revolver.

“I got your back, Dad,” Dean added, levelling his Browning Hi-Power. The rest simply nodded, holding their weapons in an easy grip. They had done this a thousand times before, but routine made a person careless, and careless got a person chilled in the Deathlands.

Stationing himself near the door of the chamber, Ryan stood guard alongside J.B. while the man checked the portal for boobies. Traps were unusual, but a few other people knew about the secret of the redoubts, and while most of them were now in the boneyard, some were still sucking air and walking around.

But this time the door was clear, and at J.B.’s signal, Ryan worked the lever to swing it open. The SIG-Sauer leading the way, Ryan took the point into the control room with the others fanning out behind. The room appeared to be deserted, the only motion coming from the comps that operated the military base.

Comp screens lined the walls, and control consoles winked and blinked in silent frenzy as the massive comps went silently about their imponderable functions.

Then Doc whistled softly and gestured with the barrel of his big LeMat. An entire section of the monitors were dark. Ryan didn’t remember ever seeing that before. It made him uneasy to see the complex machinery do anything out of the ordinary. That almost always meant trouble. Mildred went to the front of a monitor and flipped down the tiny control panel to check the contrast and power.

“Live and functioning,” she reported after a minute. “These are dead because they’re not receiving any data.”

“Leave,” Jak said with a scowl. “Busted here, means busted elsewhere.”

Listening to the rest of the comps humming softly, Ryan gave the matter some serious thought. A malfunk could mean the rest of the base was frozen solid with ice, or flooded, or airless as the moon. Opening the door to the hallway could bring instant death. The comps did everything here, and if they were broken, then anything was possible. Damn things might have even cycled open the blast door to the outside world and let in anything, stickies, runts, hell hounds or a host of various muties. Automatically, Ryan checked the implo gren in a coat pocket. Need a lot of space to use the gren, but it could stop just about anything. The trick was to make sure the person throwing the implo didn’t get aced along with the target.

“No, we aren’t leaving yet,” Ryan decided, rubbing his unshaven jaw. “I want to check the hallway before deciding to make tracks. J.B. and Mildred, stay by the door to the mat-trans chamber. But if we come running back, slam it tight behind us.”

“Got ya covered,” J.B. said, and the man and woman went back through the other doorway and into the chamber.

This time, Krysty and Jak stood guard, while Ryan placed a palm against the corridor to check for heat. It was warm, but not hot, so he listened for a moment for any sounds coming from the other side, then worked the handle and opened the door a crack.

The corridor was empty. The overhead lights were working, but the bright glow of the fluorescent tubes had been reduced to a dim bluish sheen from the passage of the years. The air vents were still blowing warm air instead of cool, but Ryan was starting to wonder if that was deliberate. Maybe the redoubt was at the North Pole, or inside a glacier, and it needed to be kept this warm. Anything was possible. The predark government had hidden the subterranean bases in the oddest places.

Placing fingers in his mouth, Ryan whistled sharply twice, and J.B. and Mildred rejoined the group. With practiced ease, the group spread out in groups of two and checked the offices lining the corridor, one person staying at the door while the other went inside. Then the pair switched and did the next room. As usual, Doc served as the anchorman, the colossal .44 LeMat held as reserve firepower.

As he kept track of the others as they moved from room to room, just for a split second the scholar thought he heard a metallic noise and almost called out a warning. But when it didn’t occur again, he grudgingly relaxed.

After a few minutes, the companions regrouped at the end of the corridor near the elevator and the door to the stairwell.

“This place is clean as a glass lake,” Krysty stated, sliding off her heavy coat and tying the arms around her waist. The heat was starting to bother her slightly.

“Found a humidor with two cigars,” Mildred announced, patting a pocket. “But since J.B. is trying to quit, I’ll just add them to the trade goods.”

“Thanks a heap,” J.B. muttered

“No ammo, no booze,” Jak added. “Lots bottles, all dry.”

“Couple of pencils,” Dean said, reaching into a pocket. “And a lighter. Anybody need a replacement?”

Tough and resilient, butane lighters were the gold of the new world. Even after a hundred years they still sparked a flame and worked for months with careful hoarding. Nearly worthless in the predark society, now the plastic cartridges were a month of eating, or a week of pleasure in a ville’s gaudy house.

“Mine’s almost dead,” Mildred said.

Without a comment Dean passed it over. The woman flicked the lighter to make sure it worked, then tucked it away. “Thanks. Nothing like them for cauterizing a wound.”

“No prob,” the boy answered, feeling a touch of pride at finding something useful.

Suddenly snapping her head to the left, Krysty frowned at the empty corridor.

“Something?” Ryan demanded softly, glancing about with his good eye. The hallway was clear, not even dust moving on the floor.

The woman started to speak, then shook her head. “Nothing, I guess. Must have just been the air vents.”

Doc frowned at the comment. “Indeed, madam. I also thought there had been a noise before,” he rumbled. “But dismissed it as superfluous clatter.”

Holstering his 9 mm blaster, Ryan eased the butt of the Steyr SSG-70 out of his backpack and worked the bolt. First it was too hot in the redoubt, now mysterious noises.

“Okay, get hard, people,” Ryan ordered. “Jak, Dean, watch the elevator. Anything that comes out, blast it. Doc and Mildred, guard the stairs. The rest of us will walk down to the reactor on the bottom level. Then come back up before searching the upper levels. This way we can know nothing is coming from behind.”

Cradling his Uzi, J.B. added, “Any trouble, fire a round. If nobody comes back in ten, then come running.”

“I shall serve as Horatius,” Doc rumbled, taking position near the corner of the hallway. This offered a clear field of fire in two directions and possible cover in case of incoming rounds.

“Horatius had two companions with him on that bridge,” Mildred muttered, joining the scholar, “and they both died.”

Leaning against the wall, Doc smiled widely, displaying his oddly perfect teeth. “Which is exactly why,” he said politely, “I was very careful to state that I alone was Horatius, and not you.”

Glowering at the man, Mildred said something in Latin that made his eyebrows rise in shock while Ryan eased open the door to the stairwell. As he did, a sound was clearly heard echoing down from the levels above. Something metallic and moving. Then came a horrible scream.

Chapter Three

“Air vent, my ass,” Ryan cursed as the scream echoed away.

He started forward, then paused, and for a tense moment sharply debated leaving. Whatever was happening here probably wasn’t their concern. Then again, the redoubts were the lifeline of the companions. If there were people in here, they needed to know how they got inside and what, if anything, they knew about the mat-trans system.

“Dad?” Dean asked anxiously, his knuckles white from the tight grip on his blaster.

“That could have been a child,” Krysty said, remembering a particularly gruesome event at a redoubt where the companions had arrived only seconds too late to save a young girl who was starving to death from taking her own life.

Anxiously, Doc added, “Knowledge is power, my dear Ryan.”

Yeah, the Trader used to say that, too. “Okay, we move as a group,” Ryan decided, almost against his better judgment. “I’m on point, one yard apart, two on two formation. Let’s go!”

“Just a sec,” J.B. countered, walking to the elevator and hitting the call button. The indicator lights in the lintel chimed in response as the cage started to descend from the upper levels.

Ryan nodded in approval at the distraction; every little bit helped. Doc and Mildred quickly joined the others in the stairwell and, moving fast, the companions quietly started up the ancient stairs of the redoubt, blasters leading the way.

At each level they paused, straining to hear anything, but there was only dusty silence. The dining hall, barracks, communications, medical, storage, each section was as still as a empty tomb. At the top level, the companions paused before the last door and were rewarded by some sort of humming noise.

“Dark night, but that’s familiar,” J.B. said, setting his fedora farther back on his head as a prelude to a fight. “Just can’t recall what the nuke it is, though.”

“I don’t like this,” Krysty whispered, her hair coiling tightly in response to the tension.

“Got something?” Jak asked, flexing his left hand. A knife slipped from the sleeve of his leather jacket into his palm at the gesture.

“No,” the redhead said slowly, as if unsure. “I’m not reading anything. This just feels wrong, a gut instinct.”

“Same here,” Mildred added, chewing at her lip.

With a worried expression on his young face, Dean grunted in agreement.

There was no light coming from under the jamb, so working the latch carefully, Ryan opened the door slightly, and held out a hand toward Doc. The scholar passed over his ebony stick and, easing it through the crack, Ryan reached toward the nearby light switch, flicked it on with a loud click and threw open the door.

This top level was the garage of the redoubt, tool benches and storage rooms to the left, the exit corridor to the distant right. The rest of the cavernous room was filled with vehicles, mostly civilian wags—compact cars and station wagons, some falling apart from body rust, others in decent condition.

However, a few of the larger machines were military wags, 4×4s, some Hummers and even an APC. The armored personnel carrier was lacking wheels, the axles resting on the stained concrete floor above a dark grease pit, but the chassis seemed intact.

“Hot pipe, over there!” Dean cried and started to fire his blaster.

Ryan turned fast and triggered his longblaster without conscious thought. Across the garage was a three-foot-wide crack in the nukeproof wall. That was unusual, but not startling. They had found damaged redoubts before. Some of the weapons used in skydark had been fantastically powerful. But standing directly in front of the crack was something potentially more dangerous than any nuke.

At first glance it resembled a chrome-plated humanoid, stooped over slightly like a hunchbacked ape. Its domed head was fronted with large crystalline eyes, the body composed of chrome rods, two elongated arms, one armed with a pneumatic hammer, the other sporting a set of tarnished blades that spun at blinding speed. That was the source of the humming noise.

Even as he fired the Steyr, Ryan narrowed his eye. A sec hunter droid! The companions had previously encountered the mech guardians of the redoubts. Once a hunter got your “scent,” it could track a person through a crowd of a thousand other people and across ten thousand miles, locked on to the target’s genetic code. The droid couldn’t be turned off, diverted from the chase, and never stopped until the allocated target was aced.

With a grinding noise of rusted gears, the machine turned away from the crack and started for them, the hammer thumping loudly as the spinning blades thrust forward.

“Double line!” Ryan shouted, and the companions hit the droid with everything they had, knowing only seconds remained before it would reach them, and in the cramped confines of the stairwell they would be chilled.

Dropping to their knees, Jak and Doc threw thunder at the hunter with their big bore blasters, while the others fired over their heads. Lead and steel hit everywhere on the machine in a deafening cacophony of firepower, but the droid seemed undamaged. Then the impossible happened—one of the chrome rods dented, then another and a third broke apart. Encouraged, the companions concentrated on the opening in the droid’s armored body. Wires snapped, and something crackled with electricity inside the machine. When only yards away, smoke began to pour from the battered torso, then the spinning blades jammed motionless almost tearing off the arm. The droid slowed its advance, but the companions continued to fire, expending ammo at a frightful rate. Suddenly, the pneumatic hammer stopped, the lights dimmed in the crystal eyes, fat blue sparks crackled over the machine and it tipped over from the incoming barrage to crash onto the floor, sparking and oozing hydraulic fluid. Its limbs twitched for a few seconds, then the machine went still with a ratcheting noise.

The companions stopped shooting and for a few moments could only stare at the smashed war machine in amazement.

“Nuke me,” Ryan growled, levering in another round purely out of habit. “We took out a sec hunter. That never happened before, not this easy. Damn droid must have been held together by little more than its wiring and paint job.”

“It appears that immutable time has done the job for us,” Doc stated, waving the thick acrid fumes away from the muzzle of his blaster.

“Best stay sharp,” J.B. warned, removing the spent clip from his Uzi and easing in a fresh one. “There could be another.”

True enough. The companions once found five of the droids in a redoubt and barely escaped alive. At a gesture from Ryan, Jak and Doc started doing a recce sweep of the garage, moving through the amassed collection of civilian and military vehicles searching for other droids in hiding. While the rest of the companions carefully watched the men, Krysty walked past the pile of mechanical debris on the floor and held out her fingers testing the air.

“Feel that?” she said. “This crack is where the hot air is coming from. Might reach all the way to the outside.”

Fireblast, she might be right, Ryan realized, and quickly checked the rad counter clipped to his lapel to see the device was registering only standard background activity. It was just heat, not radiation from a nuke crater in the vicinity.

“Think it’s another volcano?” Krysty asked, sniffing.

Inhaling deeply, J.B. held the breath, then exhaled and shrugged. “Don’t smell any sulfur, but that doesn’t mean the area is clear.”

“What about that scream we heard?” Dean asked, kneeling to look underneath the parked wags nearby. “Think it was somebody trying to get in and the droid aced ’em?”

“Sure as hell might be,” Mildred said, frowning. Reaching into her satchel, the physician unearthed a flashlight and pumped the small handle attached to the survivalist tool several times to charge the batteries inside. She pressed the button, and the flashlight gave off a weak yellowish light. The bulb was old and the batteries were gradually dying from sheer age, but it was a lot better than the candles and torches the companions carried in their backpacks.

Playing the pale beam around inside the crack, she could see the jagged opening only reached a few yards into the thick wall and appeared to make a sharp angle to the right.

“Looks like a dead end,” Mildred said hesitantly, then a scraping noise caught her attention, and the woman pulled back just in time as a wriggling creature charged into view. In the feeble beam of the flashlight all she could see were fangs and wild hair.

“Muties!” she screamed, scrambling backward and firing her blaster.

The creature screamed like a human child, and the companions paused for a moment, unsure of their target until the thing reached the edge of the crack and reared into the light. Even in the fluorescent lights, at first it appeared to be some kind of a fuzzy worm, or a big caterpillar, its belly coated with thousands of tiny legs endlessly moving. But the head possessed no eyes or ears, only a wide segmented mouth and a set of fanged pinchers that closed to overlap each other like scythes.

“Millipedes!” Krysty cursed, shooting steadily. So that was what the droid had been doing, trying to keep out the mutant insect.

“Aim for the head!” Ryan yelled, stepping around the redhead to get a clear view. Fireblast, the thing had pinchers on both ends! So which was the head, or was the brain somewhere in the middle?

Firing a short burst from the Uzi, J.B. cursed as the rapidfire jammed on a bad cartridge. Dropping the weapon, he pulled the S&W M-4000 shotgun out of his backpack, jacked the slide with a jerk and cut loose with a hellstorm of fléchettes. The millipede exploded into gobbets of pulsating flesh, tiny legs flying everywhere, as the fusillade of steel slivers cut the writhing mutie in two, both ends pumping geysers of pink blood. But incredibly, both ends continued to move and attack.

“Not the head, aim for the heart!” Mildred cursed, dancing out of the way of the sharp pinchers. The fanged mandibles closed on a piece of the droid, denting the metal. Even as the companions peppered the creature with lead, it savaged the broken droid for a few seconds before turning back toward them.

What the hell? Ah, the damn bug was probably attracted to the intense magnetic fields of droids, and the huge power plant in the bottom level of the redoubt. Mildred remembered hearing about how nuclear power plants back in her day had endless problems with invading cockroaches and such. Great, then the area around the redoubt could be infested with dozens, maybe hundreds of these monstrosities!

Climbing onto the buckled hood of a car, Jak held the Colt Python in both hands and aimed downward at the snapping mutie. “Where heart!” he shouted, cocking back the hammer.

“The thick red band in the middle!”

“Which one? There are two bands, madam!” Doc shouted, ducking sideways as he triggered the thunderous LeMat once more. A fist-size chunk of flesh was ripped off the mutie, blood hosing from the gaping wound in one of the red bands around its body. But the thing never slowed nor stopped.

“Hit ’em both!” Ryan commanded, blowing flame at the furry horror.

Moving behind the creature, Dean crouched and discharged his Browning directly into the segmented face of the bleeding millipede. But the end of the bug only rippled from the impact, as if he were shooting into a pool of water.

“Use the grens?” the boy shouted, emptying his blaster at point-blank range, but only succeeded in cracking a pincher. The broken stub oozed blood, but the bug seemed only enraged, not mortally wounded from the damage.

“We’re too close!” his father growled in reply. “Gotta take it out this way!”

As it surged for him, Dean jumped out of the way of the mutie and the fuzzy creature went underneath the APC. “Look out, it’s behind us!” he warned, yanking the spent clip and reloading. Down to one more loaded clip, then he would have to use his knife.

Dropping onto his belly, Dean spotted the piece of bug circling around the axle to come back for him. Jak appeared from the other side of the chassis, and they both pumped hot lead into the mutie. Guts flew everywhere, spraying the belly armor of the APC with stringy goop, and the bug curled into a ball as it pumped out sticky blood and died.

“Got one!” Dean cried, standing and looking for another target.

But the last section of the millipede was already reduced to ragged pieces, the companions crunching the segmented body flat under their heavy combat boots.

“Anybody hurt?” Ryan asked, yanking out a spent magazine from the Steyr and inserting a new one. When there was no answer, he continued. “Okay, let’s find something to block that bastard hole!”

Going to the nearest wag, Krysty grabbed the rusty door of a smashed station wagon and tried to pull it off the frame. With hardly any effort on her part, the door ripped free and hit the floor bursting into pieces, completely eaten by rust. Useless.

Lifting a piece of the droid, Ryan tried to shimmy it into the crack, but there were too many gaps around the chrome metal from the irregular shape of the crevice. He left it there as a start and checked the droid for anything else, but all of the other parts were either too large, or much too small.

“My kingdom for a bag of nails,” Doc muttered. Then he spied the workbench and headed that way.

“Mebbe we can use busted glass from the windshields,” J.B. suggested, thumbing fresh cartridges into the shotgun. “Used to work keeping out the rats back in Colorado.”

“Sounds good,” Ryan grunted, turning away from the droid.

Spent brass falling to the floor in a musical rain, Mildred reloaded her target pistol and snapped the cylinder shut. Tucking the blaster away, she yanked a hubcap off a civilian wag to hold it at arm’s length inside a civilian vehicle.

Still on its hood, Jak smashed the windshield with the butt of his Colt and the glass shattered into a million pieces, overfilling the hubcap. In disgust, Mildred stared at the pile of tiny, sparkling green cubes.

“Safety glass,” she snorted, pouring out the hubcap. “Couldn’t cut yourself on the stuff if you tried.”

“Use headlights,” Jak suggested, then frowned. “No, not enough. What else use?”

“Hell, I don’t know!”

Checking the gauges at a fuel pump, J.B. turned and shook his head at the others. The reservoir was completely dry, only a faint exhalation of escaping gas came from the nozzle.

“Went dry over the century,” he told them, returning the nozzle to its indented rack. So much for a firewall to stop the bugs.

Taking the keys from the ignition, Dean opened the trunk of the car and carried over a spare tire, sliding it into the crack on top of the piece of the droid, then he rushed away to rummage for another. Busting open a dusty soda machine, Krysty started throwing in glass pop bottles, the glass shattering at the rear of the crack. But there were only a few, the rest made of plastic or aluminum cans.

Carrying over a corroded bumper from a Cadillac, Ryan added it to the pile, shoving the chrome-plated metal as far back as he could. Not much, but a start.

Leaving the workbench, Doc went to a nearby closet and yanked open the door. “By the Three Kennedys!” he cried, hauling a twenty-gallon container into view. “Gasoline! Hundreds of containers!”

But Ryan could see the military identification number on the side of the cans and knew what the man had found was a lot more valuable than gas, or shine—it was condensed fuel. Unlike other flammable liquids, the stuff simply didn’t evaporate worth a damn, yet worked equally well in civilian engines and military diesels. What the hell it was made of he had no fragging idea, not even Mildred could take a guess, but the stuff did the job and that was all that really mattered.

“This is what the droid was set to guard,” Ryan grunted, as he hurried closer. “Juice enough for a fleet of wags! Okay, start hauling them out. We can block the crack with a fire bowl, use a hubcap as a basin and some rope as wick. Two or three should do the job.”

“Nothing like fire,” Jak said, then grimly added, “Except stickies.”

“Then mebbe we can get one of these wags working and leave,” J.B. added. “The farther we get from this hellhole, the better!”

“I’ll find some rope,” Dean said, running to the workbench on the far wall.

“Check the Hummers,” Ryan suggested. “They always carry spare tackle.”

“On it!”

“I’ll find more bottles for Molotovs,” Krysty said. “Maybe there’s some of those foam coffee cups in the kitchen.”

“Jak, go with her,” Ryan ordered brusquely. “Nobody goes anywhere alone until we are far from these tripcursed things!”

The albino teenager grunted in agreement and joined the woman at the stairs to disappear into the bowels of the redoubt.

Meanwhile, the remaining companions started for the closet to assist in clearing out the fuel cans. Four of the containers were already in a line on the garage floor, and as Doc turned back for another load, he spit a curse in Latin and pulled out his LeMat to shoot from the hip. Something screamed like a child inside the closet and blood sprayed onto the floor.

“There’s another crack!” Doc shouted, backing away from the room of volatile fuel. He was holding the trigger down on his single-action weapon, a raised palm hovering above the hammer to fan the black-powder cannon into action, but he withheld shooting. The bugs were crawling over the cans of fuel! One ricochet and that entire area of the redoubt could be engulfed in a firestorm of burning fuel.

As a millipede dropped off the last row of cans and started out of the supply closet, Doc shot it twice at both ends, blowing off its pinchers. Already moving, Ryan and J.B. charged forward to hit the door with their full weight. It slammed shut, cutting the insect in two. Pumping blood, the mutie wailed in agony and Doc soundly kicked it away, the dying bug hitting the wall with a splat and leaving a gruesome stain.

“That’s where the first crack leads to,” Mildred cursed, her ZKR trained on the door. “The damn fuel storage closet!”

“Droid couldn’t stop them there without chancing the whole damn base would blow,” J.B. added. “And neither can we!”

“How many bugs you think there are?” Dean demanded, quickly thumbing fresh rounds into the spent clip of the Browning. He shoved it into a pocket and started on another. Not too many loose rounds were left, so he’d have to make every shot count.

Even as the door shuddered from an impact on the other side, Ryan caught saw a flurry of motion in the crack.

“Too many!” Ryan snarled, pumping lead into the darkness. The muzzle-flash of the weapon lit the crevice in a wild strobe just enough to show a swarm of millipedes crawling along the sides and top of the opening past the makeshift barricade.

“Back to the mat-trans!” Ryan ordered, firing the Steyr. There was a gush of blood and a childlike scream, but another mutie crawled over the twitching corpse to reach the edge of the crack and snap at the companions.

Riding the Uzi in short controlled bursts, J.B. laid down some suppressive fire with his blaster, while the others retreated for the stairs. From there they covered the man until he joined them.

“What the hell is going on?” Krysty demanded from the next level below, her arms loaded with foam coffee cups.

“We’re leaving!” Mildred grunted, leaning against the stairwell door to try to keep it closed. “Anybody know a way to lock this thing in place?”

Whistling sharply, Jak tossed a knife upward and Ryan caught it by the handle, then rammed the thick blade under the doorjamb. Hesitantly, the others released the door and it held, but clearly not for long.

Nobody needed any encouragement to start racing down the stairs. As they reached the middle level, there was a slam from above and a rustling sound that grew in volume. The companions charged through the flickering control room. Jak tried to stab another knife under the jamb, but it wouldn’t hold. Abandoning the effort, the group moved into the antechamber, closed the vanadium-steel door and locked it tight.

“Safe at last,” Doc exhaled in relief, mopping his brow of a handkerchief.

Seconds later, there was a thump against the metal, followed by a scratching noise as something raked across the dense material.

“Bugs are fast,” J.B. said, removing his glasses and tucking them into a shirt pocket.

“Mildred, any more jump juice?” Ryan asked, heading across the chamber.

“Not a drop,” she said, shaking the empty canteen.

“Too bad for us, then. Everybody in!” Ryan ordered, striding to the chamber.

As the companions crowded into the unit, the heavy thumping increased against the steel portal to the chamber, then a soft electronic mist started to gather at the ceiling and floor. A tingle filled their bones, but even as the companions felt themselves drop through the floor into the infinity of the subelectronic void they noticed a change, a subtle shifting from the usual procedure, and they instantly knew that something was terribly wrong.

Chapter Four

“We’ll camp here,” Cranston shouted over the engines, and eased the big Harley off the dried riverbed and over a bumpy culvert to head toward a gigantic rock mesa.

The jagged column of stone rose from the sunbaked red ground to dominate the countryside for miles. Several tiny creatures with wings circled the top of the mesa, but the details and even their cries were lost in the distance. The sheer sides of the mesa were vertical walls of grayish rock, impossible to climb. No plants grew from the sides of the mesa, not even vines of scrub brush. It was as bare as a dead man’s bones.

Riding along the swells of ground, the coldhearts circled around the mesa until reaching the shadows of the eastern face. Now masked by the darkness of the setting sun, they drove into a deep arroyo that cut into the mesa like a wild lightning bolt, a zigzagging path of culverts, dead ends, caves and cutoffs. Slowing to a crawl, the bikes went single file, endlessly making turns until they were deep within the stony maze. Flexing his hands to keep a grip on the handlebars, Denver Joe had to appreciate the location. Anybody not knowing the correct path would soon become lost and easy prey for any snipers hidden in the rocky face soaring high above the pebble-strewn floor of the canyon.

Open space suddenly exploded around them as the Devils rolled into a box canyon. The ground here was smooth and flat. Several huts lined the far side of the canyon, with sandbag nests on top for guards. There was a shaded corral for the bikes, a pit edged with barbed wire for the slaves and a still surrounded by rusty barrels.

Riding through the middle of the canyon, the gang passed a low stone pillar with a rusty I-beam laying across the top. The beam was dripping with chains, while the pillar was decorated with grinning human skulls, the stone darkly stained. A shiver took Denver Joe as he spotted a few black scorpions crawling about picking at the sun-dried bits of blood and flesh still attached to the old bones. So that was the Learning Tree the others had been talking about on the ride here, a grisly monument where slaves were whipped, bikers beaten for disobedience and enemies slowly tortured until they begged for death. It was where outlanders and muties learned the wisdom of pain.

Entering the shadows again on the western side, it felt good just to be out of the direct rays of the sun, but Denver Joe felt there was a definite coolness in the air, and as he parked his bike near a hut, he saw a tiny waterfall splashing out of the side of the mesa into a small pool. There were green plants growing alongside, some corn and marijuana, the broad splayed leaves unmistakable.

“Hell of a find,” Denver Joe stated, climbing stiffly off the motorcycle. “This our ville?”

“One of ’em.” Krury laughed, kicking a leg over the bike to stand. “We never stay in one spot very long, and nobody can find ya. Wheels mean freedom, man.”

“Loads my blaster,” Denver Joe said in agreement, trying not to groan aloud. He felt sore in every muscle, his back a knotted lump of cramps. The predark paved roads in the area were in poor shape with potholes everywhere, and the drive across open ground was even worse. The nukescaping was pretty bad here, although the others said it was even worse to the south, toward the Texas Badlands. Been a hell of a rough trip.

Then the man felt like a feeb for thinking that, as he glanced at the bedraggled slaves, heaving for breath, their bound hands held in front of them as if they were still running to keep up with the bikers. Most had bleeding feet, and two of the older folks had fallen and been dragged to their deaths before the Devils stopped to gather the corpses. Only the pregnant girl had been allowed to ride on a Harley. But then, if she gave birth to a healthy norm baby, she would be worth more in ammo and fuel than a hundred slaves. More than one baron would pay big jack for a healthy child.

After the slaves had been shoved into the pit for safekeeping and the bikes given some maintenance, it was time to dress the corpses. As the newbie of the group, Denver had to assist. Attaching chains around the ankles of the dead people, the bikers hauled them into the air from the crossbar of the Learning Tree and cut away what remained of their clothing. Then it was purely a matter of skinning and scraping the bodies, much the same as butchering a fat hog. When the last of the organs had been removed, the Devils built a smoldering fire under the gutted figures and let them dangle in the thick smoke to cure.

Darkness came with sunset, and a bonfire was built of rubbish and some wood taken from ruins along the dried river. Dinner was canned beans and some freshly killed dog. Good food, but Denver Joe had to force down his share to not appear weak from the horrid butchery. He had washed his hands four times in the runoff of the little pool, but could still detect the coppery reek of human blood and entrails.

As several of the bikers lit up joints and passed around a bottle of triple-brewed shine, Denver claimed he was still too tired from the earlier knife fight to join in the gang rape of the female prisoners. The man he replaced on watch was delighted to swap, and Denver Joe was given a Winchester longblaster to watch the opening of the arroyo, more for snakes and wolves than any possible human invaders.

Putting the Learning Tree at his back, he fed wood chips into the campfire and tried not to listen to the screams from the slave pits. Then when he was fairly sure nobody was watching, the old man reached into his boot and removed a flat plastic box. The casing had been slightly cracked from the fight at the creek, but there didn’t appear to be any water damage. Unfortunately, he didn’t know of any way to test the damn thing. The transmitter either worked, or it didn’t. As surreptitiously as possible, he laid the predark device near the campfire and watched as it hopefully was accumulating electrical energy from the heat of the campfire. Something about a thermocouple, but exactly what the old tech talk meant was far beyond him.

As the silver crescent of the moon rose over the mesa walls and filled the canyon with silver light, Denver Joe added a branch to the campfire and knocked the device into the crackling flames. The transmitter caught fire and burned very quickly from the oily rags stuffed inside to protect it from moisture, and soon there wasn’t a trace remaining that it had existed. Soon his replacement guard sauntered over, naked except for his boots and blaster, smoking a handrolled marijuana stogie. Denver Joe listened to the biker boast about the sex in the pit for a while, then passed over the Winchester and stumbled off to bed for some much needed sleep.

Masked by the deep shadows of the sandbag nest on top of the largest hut, Cranston smoked a cig laced with jolt and wondered what in hell the newbie had been doing at the campfire. Unfortunately, the Learning Tree had been in the way and the chief biker never got a clear view. Mebbe he was just trying not to be sick in front of the others. Made sense. Lots of men vomited their guts out cleaning a deader for the first time. But the secretive actions made him mighty uneasy, and Cranston spent a long night thinking hard on the matter.

AS THE ELECTRONIC FOG faded from the mat-trans, Ryan cursed in recognition at the cream-colored walls with their golden lattice pattern. They were in the exact same redoubt!

Glancing about, Jak frowned. “Went nowhere!”

“Damn LD button must have shorted, or something,” J.B. growled, sliding on his glasses and peering at the control panel. There was no obvious damage to the array of buttons, but who could really tell with the predark machinery?

Shifting the Steyr rifle on his shoulder to a more comfortable position, Ryan rubbed his good eye, debating the possibility of trying one more time to jump out of the infested redoubt. But his gut feeling was that the machine was broken, and that they had been riding luck from the first moment they arrived.

“Should we try again?” Dean asked, hitching the straps of his backpack.

“Can’t take the risk,” his father said grimly. “A malfunk in the mat-trans could send our atoms to the middle of nowhere.”

“Think the entire network is down?” Krysty asked in concern, looking around as if she could see inside the armaglass walls.

“Only one way to find out,” Mildred said, scowling at the sole door of the chamber.

Just then the lights in the chamber flickered, and a scream erupted in the control room.

“Fireblast, the muties are eating the comps!” Ryan cursed, pulling a weapon and striding forward. “That’s why we can’t leave!” To the bugs, the intense EM fields of the comps had to be like jolt to an addict.

Rushing to the door, the companions prepared their blasters and threw open the portal. In the control room, a dozen of the hairy millipedes were crawling over the control banks, several of them partially inside the delicate machinery.

Aiming the SIG-Sauer, Ryan paused in frustration. Nukeshit, they were caught again! If they missed a bug, the blasterfire might destroy the controls. A bug hissed at their arrival and started forward with surprising speed.

“Blades only,” Ryan ordered, holstering his 9 mm blaster and pulling his panga.

“No, wait,” Krysty countered, dropping her pack and rummaging inside. “I have a better idea. Just keep these things off me for a minute.”

Jak jerked his arm and the handle of a knife appeared in the forehead of the onrushing mutie. It reared in pain, and Doc slashed out with his sword, ending its life. But the noise attracted other millipedes, and now several headed their way, crawling along the floors and walls.

Standing in triumph, Krysty yanked the cap off a road flare, and scraped the top of the waxy tube. As the flare sputtered into life, she thrust it at a nearby millipede and the furry body caught on fire. Keening in agony, the insect hastily backed away from the sizzling, popping flare.

Sporting a grin, J.B. unearthed another flare from his munitions bag as did the rest of the companions. In a concentrated effort, they herded the cringing insects into the far corner where they stomped the muties flat, gore splattering the walls and consoles. A few of the muties scurried out the open doorway, the sec controls no longer functioning, but that was okay. Once the control room was clear, Dean manually shut the door, and Jak rammed another knife into the jamb to hold it shut. Then Ryan grabbed a chair and stuck it underneath the handle.

“That won’t last long,” Krysty warned, as her flare sputtered and died. The air reeked from the fumes of the road flares, yellow drops of the excess burned material crusting the dirty floor.

“We only need a little time,” Ryan said, tossing away his flare as it went out. “Watch the air vents!”

“Think we can fix the controls to do a jump?” Mildred asked. “Hit the reboot switch, maybe?”

Before the question could be answered, there was a rustling noise in the ceiling, and the companions turned to fire at the exact same moment. Shot to pieces, the ceiling panels burst apart and a bleeding millipede dropped to the floor. Putting the tip of his blaster to its featureless face, Ryan fired the SIG-Sauer once, the slug blowing out its other end and the mutie went completely still. Good, they were learning how to efficiently chill the triple-damned things, but at a tremendous expenditure of priceless ammo.

“Mebbe fix self,” Jak said hopefully, going to the main console in the control room.

“Should have done that already,” Ryan noted, checking the hole in the ceiling for any further movements. No more muties were in sight, but he was taking nothing for granted.

“Looks like we have to get out the front door,” Dean said slowly, “past all of the muties upstairs.”

“The muties don’t seem to like fire, so we can make torches,” Ryan added gruffly. “But that means searching the darkness for something to use as a staff. Broom handles, mops, table legs, anything like that would do.”

“Check. We can cut up our spare clothing for the swaddle, or get some sheets from the base laundry. But we don’t have anything to grease the rags.”

“Grease in garage,” Jak reminded. “Bugs too.”

“Cooking grease will do,” Mildred suggested. “Or machine lubricant from the reactor in the basement.”

“Easier to scrape some off the elevator cables,” Ryan said, thoughtfully scratching the scar on his face with the tip of his blaster. “Sounds good. We can do this.”

Suddenly, there was a series of loud clicks and the emergency lights crashed on, filling the control room with a harsh white light.

“Son of a bitch,” J.B. whispered with a growing smile.

“Farewell the necessity of crude torches,” Doc rumbled pleasantly, then frowned as the light noticeably lessened. “By gadfrey, they are weakening already. We must be swift to play Prometheus and light the darkness!”

Just then, the door shook as something hit it from the other side. The companions trained their weapons in that direction, but withheld firing.

“We better hit the kitchen first,” Krysty said. “Find some water glasses or jars to put our candles in so the flames don’t blow out if we have to move fast.”

“Any idea how long will the air hold out?” Dean asked, fighting to keep a touch of nervousness from his voice.

Standing in the closest, Mildred placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. Even though a veteran of the Deathlands, he was still only twelve years old. “About two days,” she said calmly.

“After that?”

“Well, we’ll start getting headaches from the accumulation of carbon monoxide, unable to sleep but always be tired, then we fall asleep and never wake up.”

“We sleep,” Jak stated as a fact. “Bugs eat.”

With a grimace, Doc rumbled, “Indubitably, my succinct friend.”

“Bad way to go,” J.B. added grimly, a bead of sweat trickling down his face. “Although, there ain’t really a good way, either.”

“We’ll use the implo grens if it comes to that,” Ryan stated. “Take the dirty little muties to hell with us. But we can always open the blast doors in the garage to bring in fresh air.”

“But without power…” Dean stopped himself, remembering that the bases were designed to operate after a nuke war and were built to open without hard current. There were stored power cells inside the walls, and even jacks for the nuke batteries of wags to get wired up to power the hydraulic system that opened the main exit. Worst case, there was a hand crank, but that was harder than pushing a tank uphill with your bare hands. Hopefully the wall units still worked.

“Sure wish the APC was intact,” the boy added wistfully, changing hands holding the lighter. “Be nice to just climb in and blast our way out.”

With a start, Ryan perked up at the mention of the armored personnel carrier. Yeah, that might just work. As dangerous as kicking a nuke, but then what wasn’t these days?

“I know that look,” J.B. said to his friend. “Okay, what’s the plan?”

“Yeah, I got one, but you aren’t going to like it.” As he explained, the faces of the companions grew tense, then hopeful.

“Hell of a gamble,” Krysty said, as the door shook once more, and something raced overhead across the ceiling. “But I think it might work.”

“Okay, forget the kitchen, we hit the offices first,” J.B. ordered, opening his munitions bag and pulling out the lone stick of dynamite. It was old and wrapped in sticky electrical tape to retard sweating pure nitro, but it was the only explosive they had aside from the grens, and they were just too damn powerful.

“Better switch to candles. Can’t be swapping grips when these lighters get too hot.”

Following the sage advice, the companions were soon ready. Kicking the chair away from the door, Ryan took the lead into the heart of the infested redoubt, one hand holding a candle, the other his blaster. The hallway was clear, but every open doorway was passed as if it were the muzzle of a loaded cannon.

Reaching the stairs, the companions went past the deactivated elevator and went carefully up the stairs. Millipedes were found scurrying along the walls or sitting on the ceiling. To conserve ammo, the muties weren’t harmed unless they attacked first. But each fight seemed to attract more of the creatures, constantly slowing their progress. To reach the office of the commanding officer of the base, the companions passed close to the armory and briefly paused, trying to decide if they should look inside, but the emergency lights were starting to seriously dim by that time and they had to move onward. Seconds counted now, before they were fighting in the darkness at the mercy of the deadly insects.

“READY, GO!” Ryan shouted, awkwardly opening the sagging door to the garage.

Cutting loose, the companions opened fire on the scurrying millipedes, blasting a tight path through the living carpet. Reaching the wrecked vehicles, the friends hastily climbed on top and jumped from hood to hood so the insects couldn’t bite them from underneath the wags. However, the noise from the millipedes quickly grew in volume as more and more of them poured into the garage at the arrival of the companions.

Placing his shots carefully, Ryan felt his heart pound at the sight, even though it was exactly what they wanted. Attracted by the mag fields of the base, once inside the things found virtually nothing to eat and were slowly concentrating their attention on the only food available. The humans.

Situated high in the corners, the emergency lights were beginning to turn yellow at this point, and as the companions jumped to the roof of the APC a bulb started to flicker. It was horribly obvious that the lights were dying faster than expected.

“Left side!” Ryan snarled, and the companions concentrated their blasters there to clear a section of the floor free of bugs.

Jumping down, Dean placed a coffee can on the floor, a tiny nubbin of prima cord sizzling on top as a fuse. Kicking a bug off his boot, the boy grabbed the hands of his friends and climbed hastily back up out of reach of the chittering muties.

“Okay, right side!” Ryan shouted, shooting a millipede off the bare concrete ceiling above them.

Now Krysty did the same thing, while Jak used a broom to shove the third charge underneath the armored vehicle. As they scrambled back on top of the war wag, Mildred put the last charge on a flat section of the armored roof, the burning fuse less than an inch long.

“Get inside!” Ryan growled, chilling two more smaller bugs charging across the rooftops of a nearby Hummer. “Move!”

Firing from the hip, J.B. used the shotgun to clear off the rear hatch, and the companions jumped to the floor and threw open the double doors with their blasters firing. The single small millipede sitting on the floor was torn to pieces and the companions piled inside the steel box, kicking out the twitching body before slamming the hatch shut and locking it tight.

“Seal the rest!” Ryan ordered, checking the gunners hatch in the ceiling and finding it already bolted tight.

“Hot pipe, there’s no lock on this one!” Dean yelled as the driver’s hatch trembled slightly and a millipede appeared at the crack, snapping its pinchers.

Twisting the head of his ebony swordstick, Doc withdrew a thin sword of Spanish steel and plunged it through the face of the bug. It screamed in agony and withdrew.

Yanking off his belt, Dean looped it through the handle of the hatch and pulled the hatch tight. Removing her gun belt, Mildred fed it through Dean’s and managed to stretch the leather just far enough to reach a stanchion and anchor it securely. The makeshift pulley would hold, but not against a lot of the determined bugs, or for very long.

Krysty already had two candles lit and placed on empty machine-gun mounts to fill the gutted war wag with vital illumination. From outside the APC, she could see that the flickering of the emergency lights was getting worse, then one array suddenly began to strobe wildly and died outright, casting the section of the garage into darkness. Gaia, they were cutting this close.

“We’re secure!” J.B. announced, tightening the latch on the belly hatch.

“Okay, start cutting!” Ryan growled, holstering his blaster and drawing the panga.

Whipping out their knives, everybody played a candle flame over the blade for a precious second, then nicked a finger and started smearing blood around the louvered air vents and small blaster ports of the vehicle. Even though they knew it was risking a finger to stick it outside, they spread the blood about as far as possible. But at the first imagined touch of a mutie, they yanked the endangered hand back and dabbed the blood merely around the ports.

The chittering soon became a muted roar, and the APC actually shook slightly from the arrival of countless dozens of the muties. The smell of blood was driving the millipedes crazy, and within moments every air vent and blaster port was alive with pinchers and slimy tongues reaching for the food.

“Wait for it,” Ryan commanded, as the tapping of the pinchers grew until it sounded like rain on a tin roof. Watching the second hand move on his wrist chron, the one-eyed man waited until the sixty-second mark and shouted, “Now!”

Covering their ears, the companions opened their mouths to equalize the pressure and try to save their hearing when the entire world seemed to erupt. The APC rocked violently from side to side from the concussions of the explosions as the dynamite charges in the coffee cans detonated slightly out of sequence.

The blasts punched through the air vents like invisible fists knocking the companions about, Ryan slamming into a hatch and crumpling to the floor. Outside, the chittering of the muties swelled into screams for a split second and then was gone as the reverberations of the trip-hammer explosions and stilettos of flame stabbed through the air vents and blaster ports, and a monstrous crunching sound filled the garage. Screeching as it scraped along the concrete floor, the wheelless APC was shoved sideways and brutally slammed into another vehicle, then flipped over sideways, tumbling the companions together into a heap and extinguishing the candles.

In the smoky blackness of the APC nothing moved, aside from the slow drip of blood.

Chapter Five

With the coming of the dawn, the Devils rolled out of the box canyon and headed north along the dried riverbed to finally reach a scraggly plain of scrub brush that slowly changed into a grasslands and finally to forest.

After the heat of the desert, it was a very welcome change for the bikers. The line of chained slaves didn’t seem to notice the difference, their every thought concentrated on placing one foot ahead of the other.

Passing a copse of trees, a group of stickies charged at the biker gang, hooting and waving their arms like the mad things they were. The Devils hit the muties with firebombs made from glass bottles, rags and shine. Several of the muties were engulfed by the chem flames, but still chased after the escaping food, until they simply toppled over dead, their brains literally cooked through.

“Black dust, those are hard to chill,” Denver Joe said, returning a Molotov into his saddlebag. “Is it much farther to this cannie ville?”

“Another day’s ride,” Cranston growled, glancing sideways at the newbie. “You’ll know it when we get there.”

That sounded rather ominous to Denver Joe, but he made no reply as the miles steadily rolled underneath the purring bikes, and the frantically running slaves.

High above, the purple and orange clouds crackled with sheet lightning, warning of a coming storm, mebbe even a twister. But there was no smell of acid rain, so the bikers kept their leisurely pace along the forest trail. Dead slaves were of no use to anybody, so every couple of hours the bikers would slow and let the people walk a few miles to catch their breath. For the hungry slaves, food would come at the end of the day, but the Devils ate while they drove, tearing off greasy chunks of dried dog wrapped in oily cloth, and drinking warm water cut with juniper-berry juice from battered aluminum canteens.

The trees were becoming thick in the heart of the forest, and soon the gang was rolling along a narrow trail through the tall evergreens and oaks, the ground covered with a thick carpet of pine needles that sweetly scented the air. Without warning, there was a loud crunching noise to one side and a thick tree snapped off at the base to come crashing down across the path, blocking it completely.

“Razor up,” Cranston ordered, drawing his longblaster and thumbing off the safety.

The bikes eased to a halt and the point men instantly slipped longblasters off their shoulders, while the women pulled levers to draw their crossbows and nocked iron arrows into place.

Resting both legs on the uneven dirt road, Cranston throttled down his bike’s big engine and listened to the silence of the forest.

“Whatcha think?” Ballard asked, his good eye sweeping across the trees.

Paying no attention to the man, Cranston leaned over the handlebars to inspect the soil. The ground here was moist, but not swampy, and there was no sign of rot on any of the other trees in the area. There was no reason for a tree to just fall over like that.

Krury scowled into the shadows under the dense canopy of evergreens. “Could have been from the rumble of our bikes,” the bald biker said slowly, almost as if he were trying to convince himself of the idea.

“Tatters, check the base of the tree,” Cranston commanded, pulling a pump-action shotgun from a leather holster strapped to his back.

Holding tight on to the pump, he racked the weapon with one hand by simply jerking it up and down. The solid mechanical sound of the receiver taking a fat 12-gauge cartridge was reassuring to the biker. The first cartridge was predark, in prime condition. The rest were handloads of questionable power. Oh, they would fire all right; he just wasn’t sure how far they could throw the combo of lead and razor blades.

Turning off his bike, the skinny Devil kicked out the stand and rested the machine carefully, watching the trees as much as he did the Harley. As the youngest member of the Blue Devils, Tatters always got the shit jobs.

Engines purring softly, the members of the biker gang stayed on their vehicles, the patched exhaust pipes steadily puffing blue-gray clouds of exhaust, as they closely watched the teen go over the base of the big tree and check the exposed roots. Nobody spoke. There was a palatable tension in the air, as thick as a rad fog above a glass lake.

“Looks rotten to me,” Tatters called out, prying back a rubbery root with the tip of his long knife. The weapon was actually a cavalry saber taken from a predark museum, but the blacksmith sharpening the blade had been careless and ground a good foot off the steel before being stopped. The short saber worked fine, and the sheath bore the same tattoo that had once been on the arm of the clumsy blacksmith.

“No greasy smells, or acid smell of plas?” Cranston demanded, the blue-steel of the pump-action shining oily smooth in the dim of the hidden sun.

Craning his neck, Tatters breathed in deep, then smiled. “Nah, it’s just a dead tree. Krury must be right. It fell over from the vibes of the bikes.”

“Mebbe, mebbe not,” Cranston stated, easing his grip on the shotgun. “Everybody stay sharp. Shoot anything that moves. David, Shelly, Denver—stay here and cover us. This looks clean but I got a tingle in my bones like when those swampies tried to jump us outside Alamo.”

A chorus of grunts signaled agreement, and the group split into two unequal parts. Revving the big engines, the coldhearts eased in their clutches and rolled off the road onto the wild grass and weeds lining the trail. Twigs snapped under the studded tires, as the motorcycles drove past the leafy crown of the dead tree and safely reached the other side of the road.

Easing his stance, Cranston sheathed the shotgun and sharply whistled at the other bikers. A lot of crap about nothing. If this had been some sort of trap, nobody in their right mind would have let half of the group just leave.

Revving their engines, the guards rolled around the tree and joined the pack again.

“Wasn’t nothing but a tree,” Dee said, her greasy shirt tied under her massive breasts to give them some support. The woman jiggled outrageously with every bounce, but no male in the gang ever complained about the sight.

“Seems so,” Cranston muttered nervously, working the throttle as the bike started to stall from overheating. The damn carb was sticking again, he thought. Have to clean that tonight.

Then the chief Devil added, “But I still got me a tingle. Let’s waste a few gallons and rocket this road. There’s something wrong here, I can fucking well feel it.”

Krury nodded assent. Denver Joe just grunted and shrugged. Whatever they decided was fine by him.

But before the bikers could travel another yard, a loon called from the deep shadows under the evergreen. Instantly, Denver Joe dived off his bike and rolled into the bushes as if he were on fire. The unattended machine toppled over, and the engine died with a sputtering cough.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Cranston stormed, then stopped as there was a sudden movement among the trees, and he had only a split second to react before a massive log suspended from thick ropes slammed into his chest with the force of a cannonball. Blowing guts out his mouth, the dead man was thrown off the bike and arched through the air to land sprawling in the pine needles as boneless as a bag of shit. Then rusty bear traps snapped shut with bone crushing force, the zigzag blades slicing off his hands and removing most of his thigh.

“We’ve been suckered!” Krury cried, firing his blaster blindly into the trees.

That was the cue for all of the bikers to cut loose with their weapons. In response, six more logs came swinging from the leafy tops, two missing the bikers completely, but the others smashing men and women from their saddles, the lifeless corpses hitting tree trunks with the sound of wet clothing.

Rising from behind a bush, Denver Joe sprayed the Devils with his blaster, blowing hot lead and flame at the coldheart holding the chain of the slaves. As the man stumbled backward pumping blood, the lead slave grabbed the keys off his belt and started fiddling with the locking mechanism.

“Son of a bitch!” Ballard cursed, firing at Denver Joe and then at the slaves. The first prisoner caught a round in the belly and doubled over, but the second snatched the keys before they touched the dirt and started on the lock again.

“Retreat!” Krury shouted, walking his bike around in a circle, but then another tree fell over, blocking the way again, and then a third, sealing them tightly into a killing box.

With the gang cut into two groups, panic took the Devils and they wildly wasted more lead as incoming rounds started slapping into the bikers, the sniper fire cutting them down like helpless old wrinklies. Both groups pulled their bikes into circles and took refuge behind the machines, trying to get a glimpse of the attackers. But the shadows were too thick, and the only signs were brief flashes of muzzle-fire, stabbing from the darkness in a hundred different locations.

“Nuking hell, how many of them are there?” a biker demanded, reloading frantically. Bullets hummed past the man, but he continued to shove fresh rounds into his longblaster with shaking hands. He knew that being scared didn’t chill a person, but freezing motionless in fear sure as hell did.

Flinching as a round scored her cheek, Dee shot back and growled, “What’s with this sniping shit? Why didn’t they just nuke us with more trees?”

“How the hell do I know? Mebbe they want our hogs!” Tatters cursed, grabbing Cranston’s fallen scattergun. Briefly, he checked the weapon, then triggered the 12-gauge at the hidden snipers as fast as he could.

Mostly just leaves went flying, then a man cried out and fell into view, his leg pumping blood. The bikers cheered, but then two of the Devils broke ranks and tried to make a run past the fallen trees. As they climbed on top, a machine gun opened fire, cutting them down. Just then a biker shouted in warning, and Krury turned to see the slaves escaping into the trees, Denver Joe waving them on to safety. Son of a bitch was a spy! If he ever got his hands on the mutiefucker, it’d take him a year to die on the Learning Tree!

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