DUST DWELLERS

Seeking refuge in a post-Armageddon America, Ryan Cawdor and his crew of misfits travel together for survival and sanity. Known as Deathlands, this lawless hellscape is defined by destruction, death and despair. Only those who persevere with the belief in a better future stand a chance in this world where each day brings a new, and potentially lethal, struggle.

HARNESSED MINDS

Desperate to find water and shelter on the barren plains of former Oklahoma, Ryan and his team come upon a community that appears, at first, to be peaceful. Then the ville is attacked by a group of its own inhabitants—people infected with a parasite that has turned them into slave warriors for an unknown overlord. The companions try to help fend off the enemy and protect the remaining population, but when Ryan is captured during a second ambush, all hope seems lost. Especially when he launches an assault against his own crew.

Three of the six-wheeled

vehicles skidded to a stop

Nine longblasters were poked up over the cabs and aimed at Jak, J.B. and the members of the collective.

“People of the Silvertide collective, you are ordered to surrender immediately, or we will be forced to open fire!” The voice that boomed over the loudspeaker sounded familiar. “You have ten seconds to comply.”

All through the camp, fighting men and women looked up at the voice. When they saw the overwhelming force arrayed against them, they turned to J.B., who shook his head.

“Stop! It’s over,” he shouted.

“Not serious,” Jak muttered.

“For the moment, yeah, I am,” the Armorer whispered. “But stay ready.”

“Lay down your weapons, put up your hands and walk toward the sound of my voice.”

The driver’s door of the main truck opened and a tall man stepped out into the light. When they saw him, both J.B.’s and Jak’s jaws dropped.

The newest leader of the kidnappers was Ryan Cawdor.

Hive Invasion

James Axler

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788–1860

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 pre-dark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on ad-versity, 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

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quote

Legend

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Epilogue

Copyright

Chapter One

“Gaia, Ryan, just do it!”

Taking a deep breath, Ryan Cawdor flexed his fingers, then picked up the scalpel. He wished there was some other way to do this, but just like the last time, it was the simplest, more direct way of solving the problem, despite the potential fallout. “Now, hold still—”

“I am! Just get on with it!”

Ryan had faced countless dangers during his life: power-hungry barons holding the lives of countless people in their hands and willing to kill whoever they thought might take that power away; mechanical nightmares, created by long-dead mad whitecoats, that still roamed the land to hunt and kill; monsters of every stripe, from the tiny to the gargantuan, all roaming the hellscape called Deathlands.

He’d lost count of the number of folks he’d chilled during his travels and never even thought about how many muties and other freakish creatures had lost their lives at his hands. But every few months he took his own life in his hands; even worse, each time he did so willingly.

Before him, a gorgeous, flame-haired woman knelt on the dry ground. Only her fingers tapping her thigh revealed any tension. Tall and well built, Krysty Wroth turned heads wherever she went. She was also smart, levelheaded, good with a blaster and a deadly hand-to-hand fighter.

Ryan stepped closer to her, weighing how best to begin. Choosing a thick lock of her long red hair, he pulled it away from the rest with one hand and wasn’t surprised when it trembled and curled around his fingers.

Krysty was also a mutie. She could sense things, such as the life force of nearby people and creatures, and their emotional state. And she also had strange, prehensile hair that reacted to her moods. Getting Krysty drunk was the best—and only—way to cut her hair. Unlike everyone else’s, from Ryan’s thick curly black hair to Jak Lauren’s blindingly bright white mane to J. B. Dix’s close-cropped pate to Doc Tanner’s silver-white tendrils to Mildred Wyeth’s beaded plaits, Krysty’s hair was alive on her head.

Cutting it hurt—a lot. She compared it to taking a blade and dragging it across your skin hard enough to draw blood, then multiplying that pain by a thousand.

They stood on a plateau overlooking what would have been a bucolic river valley a century ago. Skydark had changed all of that in a few terrible hours. Now the landscape looked more like something out of a geologist’s nightmare.

Even since their arrival in this part of the old Midwest—J.B. guessed they were in the middle of the plains state known as Oklahoma—they’d been trying to figure out what had happened here. The more pragmatic members—Ryan, J.B. and Mildred—thought it was left over from the long-ago nuclear bombs that had flown and fallen around the world, irrevocably altering the late-twentieth-century civilization into the twisted remnants that struggled to survive every day.

Doc and Krysty, however, thought that a fault line near what had been the Mississippi River had finally erupted at some point, and that this stark landscape was the result.

Huge shelves of earth rose against one another in massive jagged waves. They weren’t high enough to be mountains, nor solid enough to be hills, and they kept falling and reforming all the time, making the nearby ground tremble as they moved. Even now, a patter of falling earth made Ryan look up to see a dusty brown hillock collapse in a cloud of dirt. The phenomenon appeared to be confined to this one valley, which relieved him—he didn’t want to have to keep looking over his shoulder to make sure the ground wasn’t collapsing behind him when they left this place.

“I’m waiting, lover,” Krysty said through gritted teeth.

“Right.” Ryan gathered the limply sprawling strands of crimson in his hand again and put the razor-sharp scalpel edge under it about four inches up. Although her hair was relaxed, Ryan easily sensed his lover’s tenseness. Without a word of warning, he sliced through the lock in one swift motion.

Krysty hissed with pain. The hair next to the severed strand tried to hide underneath the rest, while two thick tendrils wrapped themselves around Ryan’s wrists, attempting to pinion his hands. Fortunately, although Krysty’s hair could move, it didn’t have a lot of strength, and Ryan was able to complete the rest of his task with relative ease.

Two minutes later it was done. Just in time, too, as Krysty leaped up the instant he severed the final strand. Ryan was careful to take one step back while she paced back and forth, breathing heavily, her red tresses curled up tight at the base of her skull. “You all right?” he asked cautiously.

“I’ll make it....” Krysty said, shuddering as she paced back and forth, calming herself.

Krysty stopped in front of Ryan, then before he knew it, he was falling backward to the ground, with her on top of him.

She leg-swept me, he thought as he crashed to the dry earth, only barely breaking his fall with his arms.

Before he could protest, Krysty was on him, straddling his chest as she kissed him hard, coming up for air after a few seconds. “Want you to take my mind off what just happened, lover. Think you can handle that?”

Ryan’s hands were already moving, caressing her lush curves, barely constrained under her modified sleeveless jumpsuit. The front zipper was lowered a few inches, and he arched up and tugged it lower with his teeth while his hand snaked across the back of her neck and brought her face toward his for another hard, luscious kiss before nipping at her neck. Her hair now quivered with excitement, any memory of the torture inflicted on it a minute earlier fading fast.

Krysty’s moans were now of pleasure rather than pain, and her fingers were doing their own walking as they unbuckled his belt and began sliding inside his fatigue pants. As they did, another tremor shook the ground around them.

Ryan kept going for a second, cupping her breasts before realizing she wasn’t in the moment anymore but was now listening intently to something. And that was when he realized the initial tremor wasn’t stopping.

“Earthquake?” he asked.

She shook her head. “This one’s different.” She rolled off him in a fluid move, crouching and pressing a hand to the ground. Ryan just watched her. He’d known doomies in his time, and the whole group had met empaths more than once, but Krysty’s sensing skill was something else entirely. “Not the earth itself shaking... Something shaking it as it moves through it.”

Ryan propped himself up on his arms. “You mean underground?”

She nodded. “We better get back to the others—”

Before she could finish, the bone-dry soil erupted around them, spraying the two with dirt. Looming before them was an animal neither had ever seen before.

Rising several feet out of the ground, it looked like a cross between a giant ant and a praying mantis. Its carapace was a mottled green, brown and orange, and covered its entire thorax and abdomen in thick chitin. Its head had a pair of bulbous, copper-colored eyes, and large mandibles easily capable of severing a person’s arm that clacked together hungrily. Four arms waved in the air, each one tipped with a serrated, daggerlike claw at the end.

As Ryan went for his blaster, one of those limbs blurred down, aiming right for his crotch!

Chapter Two

Ryan was already scooting backward as the needle-sharp claw spiked into the dirt between his legs, missing his family jewels by a hairbreadth. As it landed, he drew his faithful SIG Sauer P226 blaster and snapped a shot off at the monstrosity’s chest.

There was an odd, flat crack, and Ryan’s eye widened to see the creature still up and full of fight. He hadn’t missed—there was no way, not at this range. The 9 mm round wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the chitin.

Still hauling himself backward with his free hand, Ryan aimed more carefully at the big bug’s head, or more specifically, its eye, and fired again. This time the bug’s limbs thrashed around madly, then the creature flopped to the ground a second later.

“Shoot the head!” he shouted over the sharp report of Krysty’s Glock.

“Behind you!” Her answering yell came as another shower of dirt fell on Ryan. He looked up to see one of the nightmares right above him, its daggerlike claws spearing down toward his chest.

He rolled out of the way as three hooks slammed into the ground where he’d been a moment ago. Turning onto his stomach, Ryan put a pair of bullets into the head of his would-be ambusher, then scrambled to his feet to help Krysty.

She stood over another of the wriggling, green mutants, her Glock 18C aimed at its chittering head. The blaster cut loose, and the bug shuddered once and went limp. A second mutie lay near the first, its head also oozing black ichor.

“Is that all of them?” she asked, looking around. Ryan was doing the same while rebuckling his belt when his head snapped around at the sound of more blastershots echoing across the plains.

“Sounds like they found the others. Come on!” Grabbing his Steyr Scout longblaster, he took off toward the camp, with Krysty right behind him.

“Looks like we were all wrong about what was making those hills!” she said in between breaths as they ran.

“Yeah, and I hope it’s the last mistake we make here,” Ryan replied, his long legs eating up the distance. The blaster shots continued, louder now, making him even more concerned. Ryan’s fears were briefly allayed when he and Krysty arrived on a rise overlooking their campsite. Their companions stood back to back around the campfire, which was already dying from lack of fuel. Every person below was shooting into a veritable tide of the green-brown bugs boiling up from the ground all around them. The razor-clawed muties chittered madly as they tried to break through the wall of lead being put up to stop them. At least two dozen bug bodies littered the dirt, with several only a couple of yards away from the defenders’ feet.

Even as he tried to figure out how in the hell he was going to get them out of there, Ryan admired how calm his companions were under what would have been overwhelming terror for anyone else. It was obvious that the burrowing insects had been stalking them for at least the past couple of days, and had sprung their ambush well, encircling the group and reinforcing the blockade with more ravenous frontline soldiers.

To defend against the onslaught, Ryan’s friends had arranged themselves in a points-of-the-compass formation that gave everyone overlapping fields of fire. Each shooter could be reinforced by at least one other person at all times, which was good, because from what he could see, the huge mob wasn’t stopping until the insects sank their claws into warm norm flesh.

On the north point was Doc Tanner, a man who appeared to be some sixty-odd years old by one measure and more than two centuries old by another. Time-traveled a hundred years forward from his home in the late nineteenth century, then from there forward another one hundred years to the Deathlands, his mind often teetered on a razor’s edge between lucidity and madness. Hidden within its depths were secrets of the predark technology built by the scientists of that time. He was a staunch friend, and had saved his companions’ lives on more than one occasion. Wielding a .44-caliber commemorative LeMat revolver in one hand and a rapier in the other, the old man blocked a pair of questing claws with his blade and put a bullet into his attacker’s head, pulping it and dropping the insectoid beast.

Standing near him on the western front was Mildred Wyeth, also a time traveler of a sort, but by very different means. A doctor back in the twentieth century, she was cryogenically frozen when what should have been minor surgery went terribly wrong. Resuscitated a century later by Ryan and his companions, she’d awoken to a world much different from the one she’d known. Now she made her way as part of the group, their friend and healer. It also didn’t hurt that she was a crack pistol shot, as good as Ryan himself. This was evidenced by her carefully aimed and placed shots. Every time she squeezed the trigger of her Czech-made ZKR 551 target pistol, something died.

Next to her, guarding the south with his well-used .357 Magnum Colt Python, was Jak Lauren. His shock of white hair and pale skin were almost as blinding as the massive, chrome-plated blaster he clutched in his hand. Whipcord lean, the albino was the shortest of the men in the group, but more than made up for it by being the best hand-to-hand fighter Ryan had ever seen, hands down—and he’d seen a lot of them. Jak was taking down the insectoid invaders on his side, the heavy bullets shattering chests and blowing heads apart.

The fourth member holding the defenses was Ricky Morales. The newest member of their team, he was a few years younger than Jak, and an inch taller. Ricky had joined their group searching for his sister, captured by slavers on their home island of Puerto Rico. He was still looking for her, searching for any scrap of information that might lead him to save his only surviving family member. Like his idol, J.B., Ricky was a weaponsmith and tinkerer, always ready to play with some new bit of tech they might stumble across while exploring a redoubt. He could fix damn near anything, particularly blasters, making him another valuable member of the team. Normally he carried a .45 Webley revolver and a silenced, bolt-action De Lisle carbine. Now, however, he was blasting bugs apart with an automatic shotgun.

Last but not least, on the inner circle of their perimeter was J. B. Dix, Ryan’s oldest friend. Nicknamed the Armorer due to his encyclopedic knowledge of weapons and armored vehicles, Dix was the opposite of what most Deathlands people thought a weaponsmith should look like. Mildred had called it during a night of drinks, saying back in her day, people probably would have called him a shorter Ichabod Crane, glasses and all. She’d spent the rest of the night telling everyone the story of the Headless Horseman and other spooky tales from long-lost American folklore.

When he’d heard the comparison, J.B. had just shrugged and hadn’t said a word. Slender, bespectacled and sallow skinned, wearing a well-worn grayish-brown leather jacket and a battered but serviceable fedora jammed on his balding head, J.B. would be the first to admit that he didn’t look the part of a blaster expert—which suited him just fine. “The more an enemy underestimates me, the more surprised the person is when I do make my move,” he’d said during that same night.

During the battle with the bugs, he was backing up whoever needed him, his durable Mini-Uzi, stock extended and snugged to his shoulder, chattering as it spit short bursts of 9 mm slugs. As Ryan watched, the ground beneath the Armorer began to churn and collapse as a bug tried to ambush him from underfoot. As cool and collected as ever, J.B. took one step to the side and brought his submachine gun down. A three-round burst later, the ground stopped churning, with only a pair of clawed arms sticking out aboveground to serve as a crude gravestone for the dead bug.

As he dropped to his stomach on the flat rock plateau, Ryan was figuring out avenues of advance, retreat and flank, all in the name of getting his friends out of what might have been their last stand. They were roughly one hundred and fifty yards away. Normally an easy enough walk, even over the rough terrain, but that was without a mob of kill-crazy mutie bugs attacking from all sides, including from below. Still, Ryan thought he saw a way out. It would require timing, and more than a bit of luck, but if anyone could do it, they could.

“I’ve got to clear a path for them to get up here,” he said as he shrugged off his bandolier of magazines and set it beside him, then snugged the butt of the Steyr Scout longblaster to his shoulder and put his lone eye to the scope. “I need you to spot and reload mags if necessary. Keep an eye on the bugs and let me know if any of them get close to our people.”

After giving those instructions, Ryan went to work. Methodically he began picking off the muties coming out of the south area of the ring around J.B., Mildred, Doc and the rest. With his 7.62 mm bullets punching holes through the backs of the attackers, it took all of two seconds for J.B. to see what was going on and immediately organize a fighting retreat toward Ryan’s position.

Aided by Ryan picking off the vanguard of the muties with his longblaster, Jak and Ricky led the way, clearing a path with sustained fire. Doc and Mildred came next, the stocky black woman and reedy old man backing up the two teens and also watching their own respective sides. Last came J.B., fighting a rear-guard action that put him in harm’s way more than once if not for the timely intervention of Ryan and his Steyr. At one point the one-eyed man shot the head of a burrow-bug off its thorax just as its mandibles were about to close on J.B.’s leg. The bullet shattered the bug’s face, and its quivering body was quickly overwhelmed by its brethren, who didn’t seem to care that they were carving up one of their own.

The group was making slow but steady time toward the rock plateau that would be their salvation when a high shout echoed off the steep walls of the makeshift ravine.

Ryan was already shifting his longblaster toward the source even as Krysty told him what was going on.

“Doc’s down!”

But Ryan could already see that. Doc was sprawled on the ground, his right leg vanished into the soft earth from the knee down. Several sprays of dirt around him signaled the worst was happening.

The creatures had sprung a second ambush—and they’d caught Doc.

Chapter Three

Each member of the group had his or her own quirks and foibles, which sometimes drew teasing from the rest. In J.B.’s case, it was often said that if he wasn’t concerned or worried about something, he wasn’t happy.

As usual, the phlegmatic Armorer would counter that by saying there was plenty to worry about in the Deathlands every day—he just concentrated on whatever looked most urgent and figured the rest of the group would handle the other, less-pressing matters.

And right now they were in a hell of a mess. There was no helping the ambush—after the past few days here, everyone had gotten used to the minor tremors shaking the ground at all hours, so when the latest one had started, no one had thought anything of it until the bugs had starting bursting out of the ground.

J.B. had seen his share of massed swarm tactics before and knew how to handle that. It usually involved pit traps, a moat and a good, solid, high palisade wall, preferably with sharpened spikes pointing toward the enemy.

But since they didn’t have access to such barriers, he’d been forced to improvise. Everything had been going reasonably well—their blastershots had brought Ryan and Krysty back to find out what was going on, and as he’d figured, Ryan had begun creating an escape route, which they were fighting their way through. So far, so good.

Assuming their ammo held out.

J.B. was also often compared to a walking computer, particularly when it came to logistics and supplies. Again, he said that knowing what people had on them was often the difference between life and death every day. He kept a running tally of every bullet each person in the group carried, often knowing more accurately how many an individual had than he or she did. And right now, his computerlike mind was running through the calculations of how many shells they’d expended fighting their way out of this trap, and he wasn’t liking what he was coming up with.

It would have been a different story if these burrow-bugs had the common sense to retreat when faced with overwhelming firepower. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to have the brains to understand when they should have been running away instead of forward to the slaughter.

But again, that worked only if their ammo held out.

And right now, there didn’t seem to be any end to the insect army coming after them. No matter how he figured it, if they didn’t reach the safety of that rock ledge, this fight would have only one possible outcome—J.B. and the rest of the group were going to be dinner. Of course, the Armorer had no intention of going down that way. He’d eat the barrel of his Mini-Uzi before things got that bad. Right now, he was busy making sure none of the chittering, scuttling, eight-foot-long insects got the drop on any of his friends. You want dinner that bad, he thought, you’re going to have to work for it.

But when Doc shouted in surprise as his foot broke through the ground and he sank awkwardly up to his knee, J.B. had had to give the bugs a grudging bit of respect. After all, they didn’t need to get the drop on their next meal—not when they could make it drop in on them.

He lunged forward, grabbing under the shoulders of Doc’s ancient frock coat with one arm. He heaved back, but he might as well have been trying to pull the old man out of concrete. J.B. also had to watch his footing, since it was hard to tell where the pit trap began, and if he wasn’t careful, he could end up stuck in there with the old man.

Doc’s shout had also attracted Mildred’s attention, and she’d turned back to help, as well. “Get to the others!” J.B. shouted.

Her answer was to fire a shot that whizzed past his head. J.B. didn’t need to turn and check to know a dead bug would be lying on the ground behind him. “Not till you get him out and moving!”

J.B. would have argued, but there was no time. By now, Doc had slipped into the dirt up to his waist. Instead of panicking, he was watching the moving earth below him intently. “I say, John Barrymore, would you be so kind as to hold this for me?” he asked, holding out his LeMat.

“Doc...how in the hell am I supposed to hold that and hold you up at the same time?” the Armorer asked through gritted teeth.

“Well, you are not going to like my answer,” Doc began as a booming crack echoed across the hills, and J.B. felt something brush his back as it fell.

“Just spit it out, Doc!”

The old man turned to look back at him, his gaze and voice crystal clear. “You are going to let me go.”

“If I do, you’re dead!”

“Not quite, John Barrymore.” Doc held up his other hand, which still held his sword. “I will dispatch the villain attempting to carry me away, and then return—”

Another, closer shot rang out, and this time one of the bugs fell against J.B. as it died. “Whatever you two are going to do, do it fast!” Mildred snapped.

“All right!” Snatching the LeMat out of Doc’s hand, J.B. let him go and turned to take out two bugs that had been charging at him from the rear. He heard a shout from Doc—something about eating cold steel—then the man disappeared completely from sight.

“Doc? Doc!” J.B. dropped to his knees at the edge of the collapsed six-foot-deep pit and looked for any sign of the old man.

“Come on, John! These bastards aren’t going to stay away forever!” Mildred said as she shot another one through the eye.

“Hang on!” he shouted back, although he knew it was growing more hopeless by the moment. More seconds passed, bullets flying around him, but J.B. kept looking. He was just about to give up hope when he still saw nothing below, but then a wrinkled hand burst up from the dirt, looking for something to latch on to. J.B. leaned down, grabbed it and hauled upward with all his strength.

Emerging from the ground like an old gaunt gopher, Doc spluttered and coughed as dirt cascaded off his face and head. Once he’d sucked in a great, gasping breath, he was able to help by shoving on the sides of the pit with his feet, propelling himself up until they were both lying at the edge of the hole. Doc was still clutching his lion’s-head sword, its blade coated in the same thick black gunk that had come out of the other burrow-bugs.

With a mad chitter of rage, a bug exploded out of the pit, its clawed legs feeling about madly for its prey. J.B. aimed Doc’s revolver at it and pulled the trigger, hoping the old man hadn’t emptied the weapon.

He hadn’t. The slug cored the bug’s head and sent it falling back into the pit to disappear under the loose dirt. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” J.B. said.

“Agreed, John Barrymore, much agreed,” the other man replied. But when he rose to his feet and tried to take a step forward, he sank to the ground, his face twisted with pain. “I am afraid that one of those buggers may have injured me more than I thought.”

“Can you walk at all, Doc?” Mildred asked while J.B. stood over both of them, his Mini-Uzi back online and spitting lead death.

Doc tried to stand again, only to sink back to the ground with a grimace. “I fear not. Mayhap it would be best if you two went on without me. I shall hold the rear to my last breath— I say, whatever are you doing?”

“Saving your skinny ass,” Mildred replied as she hoisted him up and slung his arm over her shoulders. “Although I’ll be damned if I know why. If I left you here, I wouldn’t have to listen to your pontificating anymore. J.B., we’re leaving!”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied as he reloaded. “About time too. I’m on my last mag. Move out. I’ll cover you.”

Mildred still had her blaster in her free hand, and with Doc holding his sword en guard to fend off any close encounters, the three headed out again. J.B. estimated they were about fifty yards from the rock shelf, and he saw Ryan, Krysty and Ricky already there. The Puerto Rican teenager was lying next to Ryan, sighting down the barrel of his De Lisle carbine to take out more of the attacking insects. Between Ryan and him, the path to the plateau was opening up—awash in the bodies of dead bugs, but opening up nonetheless. With the two marksmen covering their left and right flanks, J.B. divided his time between guarding their six and making sure neither Mildred nor Doc fell into any other pit traps.

The ground in front of them suddenly dropped away into a pit at least fifteen feet deep. Mildred and Doc skidded to a stop at the edge, breathing hard as they realized just how close to disaster they’d come.

Unfortunately, J.B. had been backing up behind them as he kept an eye on the dozen or so bugs that were tracking the trio about ten paces back. Before Mildred or Doc could tell him to stop or move out of the way, he bumped into them hard enough to overbalance the pair and send them both tumbling into the pit.

Chapter Four

Mildred was more than familiar with the concept of the ant lion, a small, predatory insect whose larva scooped a pit trap in the ground to capture its prey. In her previous life, she’d given a report in the fourth grade about it and other insects of North America. However, she’d never, ever expected to find herself in one of those exact traps.

Of course, she’d never expected to awaken in this nightmarish land in the first place, filled with predators on two, four or, like these, six or more legs. But Mildred was a survivor, and had adapted as well as she could to her new, harsh circumstances. It had helped that her revivers were Deathlands natives, able to provide a brutal crash course in living day to day here.

The primary thought on her mind as she tumbled to the bottom in a cascade of sandy dirt was to keep hold of her pistol—if she lost it down there, odds were she wouldn’t live long enough to find it again. The secondary goal was to avoid landing wrong and injuring any limbs. It would be difficult enough to climb out of here, and nearly impossible with a busted arm or leg. Bad enough Doc, with his sprained ankle, was also in the trap with her.

Spitting out grit, Mildred scrambled to her feet, aware that the ground was already shifting as the first of the burrow-bugs began emerging to see what they’d captured. She could still hear gunshots above, and knew Ryan and Ricky were keeping the bugs at bay. But that wasn’t going to help get Doc and her out of there.

As she began reloading, her fingers ejecting shells and inserting bullets as if they had a mind of their own, Mildred glanced up to see how far up the pit edge was. Her heart sank when she saw it was easily six feet overhead.

“Upon my word, Mildred...that is a ride I would not care to embark upon again.” Doc shook his head, sending a shower of dirt pattering around them.

“If you can talk, Doc, you can stand,” Mildred said. “We’ve got to get out of here before we’re bug food.”

“But of course, dear lady. Never let it be said that Theophilus Algernon Tanner did not come to the aid of a friend in need—”

“Less philosophizing, more stabbing,” she replied as she aimed at the bottom of the pit and pulled the trigger of her revolver twice. The dirt there rippled and sprayed around as the insect underneath thrashed and died. However, no sooner had it stopped moving than it was replaced by another one.

“You okay, Doc, Mildred?” J.B.’s head appeared over the edge of the pit.

“Oh, just fine, thank you, except I’m stuck at the bottom of a pit with huge bugs trying to eat me!” she yelled back.

“Well, yeah, I meant besides that,” J.B. answered. “Here, grab my jacket.” He dropped his arm over the edge of the pit, holding the sleeve of his leather jacket. The rest of the garment dangled down the side of the pit, the other sleeve a tantalizing couple of feet away.

A mortal, high-pitched squeal drowned him out as Doc skewered the next bug that appeared, driving the point of his rapier into the armored joint between its head and thorax. With a twist, he withdrew the blade, bringing a trail of the black gunk that served as the insect’s blood with it. “They seem to be exhibiting a sort of hive mentality—” he began.

“That’s great. You can tell me all about their social structure later. Right now, I’m going to boost you up so you can grab John’s jacket. You get out, then the two of you can get me out.”

“Are you sure I should go first, Mildred?” Doc asked. “After all—”

“No time for chivalry, Doc!” Mildred said as she put another two slugs into the bottom of the pit. “Your ankle’s sprained. That means you go first. Now, shut your yap and step up! Use both hands!”

While the latest bug casualty was being swallowed back up by its brethren, Mildred shoved her blaster into her waistband, then laced her hands together to form a stirrup. Doc tossed his rapier and its sheath up out of the pit, then, grimacing in pain, braced himself with a hand on her shoulder as he put his feet into her improvised step. As he did, she heaved him up with all of her strength.

“Whoa—!” Caught off guard by the move, Doc waved his arms like a particularly ungainly stork, then grabbed hold of the leather sleeve. “Got it! Pull, my good John Barrymore, pull!”

His long legs scrabbled against the side of the pit, sending another shower of dirt into Mildred’s face. Shaking her head to clear her eyes, she felt Doc’s weight leave her, and drew her blaster and turned just in time to confront the latest abomination coming for her.

“Not today.” At less than a yard away, she couldn’t miss—and didn’t. The .38 bullet entered the bug’s eye and punched out the back of its armored head, splattering the pit wall behind it with globs of black goo. The brain-dead bug stood there for a moment, then toppled backward, falling with a crack on the next one coming up.

“Okay, anytime you guys want to get me out of here would be fine!” Mildred shouted up.

“Working on it! Sit down and watch my back, Doc!” J.B. replied. “Here it comes, Mildred!”

J.B.’s entire upper body appeared over the pit edge this time as he leaned down so he himself dangled into the hole. The reports of Ryan’s longblaster echoed steadily overhead, reassuring Mildred that Doc wasn’t left to fend off the bug army alone.

“Be careful, John!” she said.

“Grab the sleeve, and I’ll pull you up!”

“I’m getting there, I’m getting there!” Backing up to the far side of the pit, Mildred used the sinking corpse of the burrow-bug as a precarious platform to push off. Running as hard as she could across the shifting dirt, she scrambled up the side of the pit and grabbed the jacket sleeve. “Got it!”

“Okay, just hold on.” J.B. was starting to pull her up when the wall next to her exploded. Pelted by dirt clods, her vision obscured, Mildred didn’t see what hit her. The next thing she knew, she was knocked backward by a powerful blow that made her lose her grip on the jacket and tumble back down to the bottom.

Something thrashed and writhed on top of her, and Mildred felt a sharp pain stab into her upper chest. Hearing something clacking near her head, she blindly thrust out a hand, ignoring the stabbing ache that coursed through her arm, and grabbed a thick, jagged mandible, cutting her fingers. Realizing a bug had landed on top of her, she jabbed her pistol, still clutched in her other hand, above the shaking bug pincer and squeezed the trigger twice. The bug’s body shook spasmodically on top of her, then collapsed and lay still.

“Son of a bitch!” Still feeling the dirt quiver and move around her and knowing she couldn’t rest, Mildred squirmed out from under the bug carcass, wiping dirt out of her eyes.

“Dark night, that was close! Come on, Millie, let’s get you out of there!” J.B. said.

“Amen to that!” Still clutching her pistol, Mildred took a running start again and leaped for the jacket sleeve. This time she used the edge of the hole in the wall for leverage, and was able to get even higher. She grabbed the sleeve with her free hand and pointed her blaster down the black tunnel, hearing faint skittering and chittering noises from inside. “Pull me up!”

J.B. started to do so again, and had almost gotten her to the lip of the pit when Mildred felt a strong tug on her combat boot. She glanced down to see yet another of the bugs with its mandibles firmly clamped around her foot. “Shit! Hang on, John. I have to do a little extermination!”

“Hurry up, for shit’s sake!” he said through gritted teeth.

Mildred aimed and squeezed the trigger, but the hammer fell with only a dull click. She pulled it again, but with no better result. “Damn it, I know I had one left—misfire!”

“Great!” J.B. said. “Doc, a little help!”

The old man’s head appeared over J.B.’s. Apparently he was lying on the Armorer to provide ballast. “Oh, my. One moment...” He stretched out a long arm with his LeMat revolver extending from his hand. His face was caked in dust and dirt, and his eyes were watering profusely, leaving wet tracks down his face and making him resemble some sort of demented, muddy clown. “Do not move, Mildred!”

“Jesus! Can you even see what you’re aiming at, Doc?” she shouted back while trying to dig her other foot into the dirt. The burrow-bug increased its pull on her, making Mildred feel as if she was being stretched apart.

“The beast is fairly large—” Doc squeezed the trigger of his LeMat, and the slug buried itself in the bug’s head. “That should do it!”

And it did. The bug slumped to the ground—but its mandibles were still locked tight around Mildred’s ankle.

“Dammit!” Still holding on to the jacket for dear life, Mildred kicked at the bug’s head with her other foot. Slowly it began loosening from her foot.

“Careful, it’s starting to tear!” J.B. said. He was right—his jacket had been through a lot already, and the stitches around the shoulder were starting to pop loose.

“Almost got it—off!” With a last hard kick, Mildred freed her foot just as Doc shot another of the tunneling beasts scuttling toward her. Its body slithered back to the bottom, where it disappeared into the tunnel below.

“Can’t...hold...on!” she cried. Her bleeding fingers were slippery, and Mildred felt the leather slide through her slick hand. She glanced down to see three of the hungry muties jostling one another to be the first to sink their pincers into her when she fell. Although she squeezed the jacket sleeve with all her strength, she still felt herself slipping. Mildred tried to lift her other hand to support herself, but the injury in her chest flared when she raised her arm higher than her elbow, and she had to let it drop again. Looking back up, she saw more thread tearing away, and the hole between the sleeve itself and the rest of the jacket growing larger. “Please—”

A strong hand suddenly gripped her wrist, and she looked up to see Doc’s lined face smiling down at her. “You are so close to being free of this accursed hole, and the world is an infinitely more interesting place with you in it, my dear Dr. Wyeth. Now come with me.”

And just like that, with Doc and J.B. helping her, Mildred was free of the pit. J.B. gave her a quick hug, also patting her down for injuries at the same time. “Where are you hurt?”

“Below my shoulder. I can walk,” Mildred replied, already rising to her feet. “Let’s go.”

“No time to reload,” J.B. said. The cylinder of Mildred’s target pistol didn’t swing out for quick reloading—each shell had to be manually ejected with the rod on the side of the gun and bullets inserted one at a time.

He handed her the Mini-Uzi and took up Doc’s LeMat. “I’ll help Doc, you cover us. Only got about fifteen rounds left. Make each one count.”

“Ace on the line with that,” she said, switching the fire selector to single shot for more accuracy.

J.B. hoisted Doc’s arm over his shoulder, and with the old man’s silver stinger ready to repel attackers, the three skirted the large pit and continued on their way toward the large rock plateau.

But they had no sooner gotten around the hole in the ground than they faced a group of the bugs at least three deep and six wide. Aboveground, the bugs were about six feet tall, each one rearing to form an L shape. Eight legs were now visible—the rear four used for balance and movement, the front four for attack and defense.

Mildred glanced back to see more of the armored killers forming to encircle them again. “Damn it, boys, didn’t we just leave this situation a few minutes ago?”

“Back in it now...” J.B. began, just as the heads of the first row all opened up as if each one had been hit with a hammer, one after another, spraying black goo over Mildred, J.B. and Doc. Booming reports thundered around them as the entire first row keeled over, dead.

The surprise attack seemed to confuse the second wave of bugs, and they hesitated for a moment. It was all the time Mildred and J.B. needed.

With both the Uzi and the LeMat raised, the three charged forward as fast as Doc’s injured ankle would allow, clearing their own path with lead and steel. Six more went down in the first seconds of their charge, five by bullet, one by sword.

Two others stepped into their path and were mowed down by accurate head shots. With a loud, long war cry, Doc impaled another one trying to flank them, pinning the struggling bug with his blade as if he were mounting a particularly large specimen under glass.

The rear guard was charging after them in a wave, and Mildred could feel the animalistic fury at their backs. It just made her go faster, although not fast enough to leave J.B. and Doc behind.

The burrow-bugs were getting closer now, braver. Any that got within three steps died, but Mildred sensed others closing ranks around them. If someone tripped, if an ankle turned on a loose rock, then that’d be all she wrote—the others would have to make the split-second decision to try to help the downed person and risk being torn apart, or keep moving.

J.B.’s Mini-Uzi bucked in Mildred’s hand, each shot finding a home in a bug’s head. Again, at this range, she couldn’t miss, but she also couldn’t just shoot indiscriminately either. Only head shots would do.

The bugs were close enough now that they could brush her with their claws if they chose, although Mildred would make sure she was the last thing they touched in their lifetime. She snapped off a shot at one that lunged at her, dropping it in its tracks.

She heard the deafening boom of J.B.’s shotgun and glanced up to see Jak standing like a snow-haired avenger at the edge, blasting away at the bugs behind them. They just might make it....

Doc let out a strangled gasp as his leg buckled. J.B., however, didn’t miss a step. He just hauled the taller man with him the last few steps to the rock wall.

“Jump!” Ryan called down, his hand extended to grab the first person coming up.

“Go!” J.B. said to Mildred. Mildred didn’t need further urging, and leaped for Ryan’s hand. Before she knew it, the powerful man hoisted her up onto the rock shelf, unceremoniously dumping her nearby and leaning down again.

“Hey—” Mildred said, then clamped her mouth shut as she realized he was going back for the others. Doc was next, the old man wheezing as he stumbled away and sank to the ground. Mildred rolled to the edge of the plateau, still firing the Mini-Uzi into the mass of bugs as Ryan hauled J.B. up and onto the plateau. As his combat boots hit the rock floor, the submachine gun clicked on an empty chamber.

“Think you could have cut it any closer?” Ryan asked with the hint of a grin as they watched the bugs surge back and forth below them.

The Armorer shrugged. “Would have been here sooner, except I had to keep stopping for other folks,” he replied with his own wry smile.

“‘Stopping for other folks?’ In case no one happened to notice, Doc and I almost got killed down there!” Mildred said.

Both men turned to her, the smiles still on their faces. “We know, Mildred, we know. But we’re safe now—”

“No, we’re not,” Krysty interrupted. She was also standing at the edge of the rock ledge. “If anything, we’ve just made them madder.”

Curious in spite of herself, Mildred got up and joined the red-haired woman at the edge. All she saw was a huge group of the burrow-bugs below them, with more coming out of the tunnels every second. “You can sense their mood?”

Krysty shook her head. “I don’t need to sense anything to know how creatures are going to behave. Look there.”

She pointed at the bottom of the cliff wall, where a single line of bugs about five wide stood there, as if waiting for orders. Then another line of bugs ran over and stood by the first row. A third line ran over and climbed on top of the row nearest the cliff face, with another row behind that taking a position so that yet another row could climb on top of the second-level row.

“Oh, my God,” Mildred said. “They’re forming a ramp out of themselves.”

“It certainly appears so,” Doc said beside her. “And at the rate they are going, it will be high enough to reach us in less than two minutes.”

Chapter Five

“Fireblast!” Ryan swore. “Our asses aren’t out of the fire just yet.”

“We don’t have enough ammo to hold them off here,” J.B. said. “Have to fight hand to hand.”

“So be it.” Drawing his panga, Ryan turned to the others. “All right, Jak, Doc, you’re with me on bug-repelling duty.”

Doc redrew his sword and saluted Ryan with it. “Sí, mon capitaine!”

“All right, Doc, save it for the bugs,” Ryan replied. “Ricky, Krysty, you take the right flank, Mildred, J.B., you’re on the left. We should be able to kill most of the bastards, but if any slip through on either side, you’re taking them down. Don’t leave your partner to face one of these muties alone.”

“Not to argue, Ryan, but are you sure Doc’s up to the job?” J.B. asked with a glance at the old man. “No offense, but you did hurt your leg down there.”

“None taken, John Barrymore.” Doc smiled grimly at the other man, revealing a set of peculiarly white and even teeth. “If I am given the chance to go down while stabbing at these hell spawn, then I will have at them until my blade is ripped from my cold, dead hand.”

“Good enough for me,” Ryan said. “J.B., we’re holding a fixed position and Doc’s got the reach with his sword. We need you on a flank.”

J.B. nodded. “You got it.”

“All right, positions, people. They’re almost here!” Ryan called out.

During their brief conversation, the bugs had ascended almost to the lip of the ledge. Those on the bottommost layer, no longer visible, had to have been crushed by the sheer weight of the ones on top, yet the others kept climbing, heedless of their brethren below.

Ryan, Jak and Doc stood a couple of yards apart at the edge of the plateau. “Hit them hard, get them away and move to the next one,” Ryan said. “No soliloquies or reciting poetry to them, Doc.”

“Never fear, my dear Ryan—Wordsworth or Burns would be wasted on these cretins. Besides, if my Harvard education still serves, most bugs cannot hear anyway, but detect movement and sound by vibration, so my eloquent words would be for naught.”

“Damn—Doc takes longer say ‘okay’ than anyone,” Jak muttered.

“Here they come!” Ryan said as the first of the bugs crested the ridge.

In their own unique way, each of the three men was singularly well suited for the task at hand. On the left, Doc had already seen action against the creatures during the battle on the ground, and as such had a good idea of how to face off against them. He was able to parry each bug’s attack and either feint to mislead it, then stab, or simply batter its legs aside and skewer it. His rapier darting and stabbing, he spiked every bug that came near him, shoving each carcass off his blade with his foot and sending it falling back into the charging mass boiling up from below.

On Ryan’s other side, Jak didn’t carry a melee weapon other than his lethally accurate throwing knives. He didn’t need one, since he was a melee weapon. His rock-hard fists and skinny yet powerful arms and legs were capable of frightening feats of strength. Even against armored opponents such as these, where an unarmed warrior would normally be at a disadvantage, Jak was still in his element. Despite three or four claws coming at him at once, he evaded every one and delivered devastating counterstrikes. His first blow split the abdomen chitin of one of the bugs in two, the kinetic shock wave from the impact pulping its internal organs and killing it. He soon found their weak spots, the heads and joints of their legs, and was crushing eyes and skulls and tearing off limbs with abandon.

And what about Ryan, in between them?

At this point in his life, Ryan was near physical perfection from a lifetime of survival. Two hundred pounds of pure, coiled power ready to be unleashed on command. He was the strongest of all of them, and Jak’s equal in dealing death to any opponent.

His fighting style was brutally efficient, and his chosen melee weapon, the panga, was the perfect weapon for this situation. Its broad, heavy blade was perfect for either cracking armor or pulping bug heads, and Ryan laid into the surging mass with abandon, his panga, hand, arm and face soon streaked with black, clotted gore.

They repelled the first tide, but more charged up, with still more behind them. Although the bugs attempted to overwhelm the trio, there wasn’t enough room for them to mass a truly overwhelming assault, and each quartet of insects that gained the top of the ridge was immediately reduced to bleeding, dead bodies and flung off to land on the rest of the swarm below.

That wasn’t to say there weren’t close calls. More than once, Doc or Jak had to rely on their backup to help out when a particularly ornery knot of the bloodthirsty insects ganged up on them. More often than not Ryan was there, as well. Whether chopping through two limbs on the side of a bug’s body with one powerful sweep of his panga or just relieving a bug’s body of its head with one powerful swing of his blade, he was death incarnate.

And still they kept coming.

The seconds turned to minutes, the minutes stretched on into who knew how long. Sweat dampened their clothes, and everyone’s muscles grew weary with each blow, but the front three, as well as the others, didn’t let up for a moment. Everyone knew that it would take only one gap for the bugs to break through and overwhelm them, and if that happened, there would be no hope of stopping the attackers.

By now Ryan had entered a kind of primal killing zone, his conscious mind focusing solely on slaying anything that was green and brown with claws. He swung and bashed, hacked and cleaved, kicked and punched. Everything he touched, whether with fist, boot or steel, died.

The sun was beginning to sink into the west, and they were still at it. Doc had been relieved on the front line by J.B., who was wielding the old man’s sword in both hands, lopping off limbs and heads with economical swings of the blade. Jak was also still holding his ground, leaping into the air and kicking a bug’s head clean off its body with a vicious roundhouse kick. He punted its body back down the bug ramp and moved on to his next victim, blocking the two limbs that came at him, grabbing them and tearing them off at the joint. Jak drove the animal’s own amputated claw into its eye, then made it shriek even louder for a second before he twisted off its head.

For his part, Ryan had lost count of how many bugs he’d killed, or how long he’d been up there. He knew only that the attackers were still coming, and they had to be stopped. A part of him, deep inside, even exulted in the massacre, for that was what it was. He was pure predator now, and there was no shame or dishonor in defending himself and his friends.

Finally, he looked around, but there was nothing left to kill. The whole rock plateau was covered in a half inch of black gore and littered with bug limbs and smashed, broken chitin. Ryan sucked in great gulps of the cooling air, his muscles still tense from the long combat. Wiping his wet forehead, he stared at the mixture of sweat and blood on his skin and realized he had to have taken a flesh wound during the fight. He trudged over to the edge and looked over.

The burrow-bugs were retreating, taking the bodies of their fallen with them. In a few minutes, except for many rapidly drying black stains on the ground and the holes left from their assault, there was no sign of the mob of carnivorous insects.

“Madre de Dios!” Ricky said as he sat down and mopped his forehead. “I never dreamed something like that could exist.”

“Determined bastards,” Jak said as he examined a shallow cut on the back of his hand, the only injury he’d sustained during the fight.

“Everyone all right?” Ryan asked as he walked into the shade cast by the rock wall on their right.

Krysty and J.B. nodded, although J.B. had a troubled look on his face.

Meanwhile, Mildred was examining Doc’s swollen ankle, with the older man stoically trying not to reveal how much her probing fingers were hurting him. “All that swashbuckling didn’t do his ankle any good,” she said. “Although I have to admit you looked damn impressive up there, Doc.”

“I only hope I acquitted myself honorably.”

“Absolutely, Doc. You sent a bunch of those bugs straight to hell,” Ryan said. “Mildred, what’s the word on him walking out of here?”

“If I bind his ankle tight, and we cram it back into his boot, he can probably limp along for a while, but it’ll be at half speed at best.” She reached for his boot, then hissed in pain and put her free hand to her chest. “Almost forgot one of those eight-legged bastards tagged me, as well.”

“Why didn’t you say so earlier?” Krysty asked. “Here, let me take a look.”

“Sure, just hang on.” Rummaging in her pockets, Mildred came up with a small tube of antibiotic ointment.

“Jak, catch,” she said as she tossed it to him. “Rub a bit on each cut. The last thing we need out here is infection.”

While the two women examined Mildred’s wound, and Jak and Ricky treated themselves, J.B. walked over to Ryan. Despite the half dozen instances of near death they’d all encountered in the past hour, he was as calm as ever, but Ryan saw through the placid demeanor of his oldest friend and realized something was seriously wrong.

“How many loaded mags for the Steyr do you have left?” J.B. asked.

“Fireblast, J.B.! I thought I’d take a minute to enjoy still being alive, mebbe wipe the black shit off my face before I did inventory—”

“Hey, I’m as happy as a scavvie in a honey hole that we made it through that, but it doesn’t mean our problems are over.” The Armorer stepped closer. “How many mags?”

Ryan walked over to where he’d stashed his empties along with the bandolier and blinked at what he found. “One full and one with four bullets left. Damn, blew through more shells than I thought,” he said at J.B.’s slow nod. “My SIG has two full mags. What about you?”

“I ran out of 9 mm for the Uzi while getting up here, and there’s mebbe a handful of shells left for the shotgun. I haven’t checked with the boys yet, but I bet Jak’s got one reload for his Colt, and Ricky might have a dozen, mebbe eighteen rounds left. And you know neither Doc nor the women carry a lot of bullets in the first place.”

Ryan had already pulled his spare blaster magazine and handed it to J.B., who began pushing bullets out with his thumb and loading one of his empty magazines. “We’re low on ammo, is that it?”

The Armorer nodded. “In a nutshell, yeah. I mean, I’m not blaming anyone—we all did what we had to do to get out of there, but now we’ve got to figure out what comes next, and that involves getting off this rock, and I bet it’s going to be some hard running and fighting to get out of here in one piece.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the killing ground below. “Those bugs don’t seem to be the type to forgive and forget. And with Doc lamed and all of us low on both firepower and supplies, it’s going to be a rough, hard trip out of here.”

“You thinking those things might come back?” Ryan asked.

“Probably should ask Krysty about that. She seemed to have a pretty good line on them,” J.B. replied. “Bottom line is we can’t stay here, but we’re not sure where we’re going, either, except out of this damn valley, I figure.”

“Ace on the line,” Ryan replied. “Well, we best figure out what we should do sooner rather than later. Come on.”

He led J.B. back to the rest of the group and took a minute to explain the situation as the Armorer saw it. “Now, we all kicked some serious ass today. However, there could be another hundred, five hundred or thousand of those bastard bugs down in their hive or lair or whatever. So we should figure on getting out of here while they’re still recovering from their ass-whippin’. The more ground we put between them and us, the better.”

Nods and murmurs of agreement met his announcement. “A capital idea, my dear Ryan, but where are you suggesting that we go?” Doc asked. “Surely not back to the redoubt.”

The redoubt that had brought them here had been cracked open and looted long ago, and their arrival had destroyed its mat-trans unit, as well. Since then, they’d been traveling the dusty plains, with this valley their only encounter with living creatures in the past three days.

Ryan shook his head. “That’s a dead end. The important thing is for us to get out of this valley and see where we are, then we can figure out where to go. But that’ll mean moving as fast as we can, and with ammo low, we’re going to have to be careful how we take care of problems like those bugs, which J.B. and I imagine are going to come after us.”

As Ryan spoke, he looked around at the others, seeing exhaustion and pain on everyone’s face, even Jak’s and J.B.’s. Although part of him wanted to set out right then and there, he knew pushing everyone now would only result in more mistakes later on.

“I figure we should rest for a few hours, then head out at dusk,” he continued. “If we travel through the night, we should be free of this place by sunrise. Anyone got any questions or anything else to add?”

Jak spit to the side. “Wonder if bug parts okay eat.”

“Only one way to find out,” J.B. said.

“But how are you going to cook them?” Ricky asked. “I mean, you’re not going to eat it raw, are you?”

Jak shrugged as he walked over to the limbless torso of a bug that had died on the ledge. “Eat worse before.” He cracked the thorax, sliced off a piece of the translucent, jellied inside and touched his tongue to it, then spit it out. “Tastes like putrid mutie shit!”

“And you would know that how, Jak?” Mildred asked with a smile.

The weak joke took the edge off the grim mood, and Doc was the first to snort laughter at Mildred’s question. Soon everyone was chuckling at the albino, who flipped all of them off with both hands and a narrow grin.

“All right, let’s get some rest,” Ryan said. “I’ll stand guard for the first hour, then Krysty, then J.B., then Jak. If anyone sees anything, hears anything—bugs, whatever—get everyone up. We move out in four hours.”

Chapter Six

Ryan brought his panga down, pulping another of the everlasting horde of burrow-bug’s heads with the heavy blade. He whirled, searching for another enemy to kill, but saw none. He was alone, surrounded by hacked and broken insect bodies.

He took a moment to suck cool night air into his starving lungs while checking himself for injury. Blood streamed from several small cuts on his hands, arms and chest, oozing through his torn and ragged T-shirt. Every muscle ached; other than perhaps an hour’s rest all told, he’d been running and fighting almost nonstop for the past eight.

He glanced up at the stars but saw no glimmer of sunlight to the east. Not that it mattered—all daylight meant was that it was a bit easier to chill the rad-blasted muties. But just like back at the plateau, for every one he’d killed, two more took its place.

Although Ryan possessed a never-say-die mentality that had served him well through countless encounters with adversity, for the first time in a long time, he was starting to wonder whether he and his companions were going to make it out of this valley of death alive.

They’d eaten a few bites of tough, salty beef jerky—the last of their food—and barely gotten a couple of hours of rest when J.B. had woken everyone, saying he’d heard movement from the holes below. With Jak in the lead, throwing blade in hand, they headed higher into the rocky hills, hoping to lose the burrowing monsters before heading out to escape the valley.

Their attempt had been doomed almost from the beginning. With eight legs, the burrow-bugs were well suited to continue their pursuit, their claws clacking on the rocks as they swarmed up after the group. Ryan was hoping their head start would have been enough to discourage pursuit, but Doc was slowing everyone. It also didn’t help that the mutie insects were single-mindedly unstoppable in their quest to kill the intruders.

Traveling through the darkness had turned into a nightmare of running and gunning, trying to cross the broken terrain while constantly keeping an eye out for burrow-bug pursuers behind them and pit ambushes ahead of them. When every step could be the last, it made people hesitant and jumpy. As a result, they were making piss-poor time out of the valley, but it couldn’t be helped.

Ryan had issued a no-blasters rule unless there was no other choice, but that edict had been discarded in the face of the odds against them, although to everyone’s credit, they tried to conserve their ammo whenever possible. But every so often a bug got too close while someone was fighting another one or two and had to be dispatched with a single shot.

After four hours of a grueling pace, interspersed with several skirmishes, Ryan had called a five-minute break so they could catch their breath. Doc hadn’t sat as much as fallen down, his expression nobly stoic, despite the pain he had to be suffering. Leaning heavily on his swordstick, he had staggered through the past hour of travel, and more than once Ryan had thought he was going to have to carry the old man. But Doc hadn’t made a sound or said a word about how he felt, just kept up with them as best as he could. But at this point, Ryan wasn’t sure how much the old man had left in him.

Ricky and Krysty had also broken out the water bottles only to find more bad news—they were practically empty.

“This trip is getting better and better,” Ricky said with a grimace.

* * *

“ONE MOUTHFUL EACH. We’ll find more when we’re out of here.”

Ryan walked over to Mildred and kept his voice low. “You got anything that’ll keep Doc moving for another couple of hours?”

“You read my mind.” She glanced at the tall, thin man, who was drawing his frock coat around him to keep warm in the chilly night air. “He’s a stubborn old coot, I’ll give him that. But he’s also on the edge of exhaustion.” She reviewed her small stash of medicine supplies. “I’ve got a couple of amphetamines that’ll keep him going for a few more hours, but when he crashes, it’ll be hard.”

“As long as it gets him and us out of here, he can sleep for a week afterward, as far as I’m concerned,” Ryan replied. “Try to get him to take it now. When we move out, I’ll hang back and create a diversion to give you all more time to get out.”

“Not to be telling you what to do, Ryan, but you have to be as beat as the rest of us.” Mildred held out one of the small capsules. “Take this. Use it only if you think you’ll need it. It’ll get you through.”

Ryan tucked the pill into his pocket. “Thanks, Mildred. Get Doc taken care of, okay?”

As she headed over to the old man, Ryan went to J.B. and filled him in on the plan. The Armorer’s only reaction was to raise one eyebrow. “If you think it’s best, Ryan, I’m not going to argue. Just make sure you get back to us on one piece, okay?”

Ryan’s answering grin was grim. “Trust me, I’d rather not, but if we all stop to fight them, we risk getting surrounded again. Don’t worry about me. I’m not planning on catching that last train west just yet. We’re almost out of the valley. Just make sure everyone keeps moving, and I’ll catch up with you as soon as I can.”

“See you out there.” J.B. went over to make sure everyone else was ready to move. Ryan went with him.

“How you feeling, Doc?” he asked, checking his face with a small light he carried.

The old man stared back at him with bright eyes. He was breathing a bit faster and had two spots of color high on his cheeks. “Upon my word, Ryan, I am markedly improved from just a few minutes ago. Even my foot does not hurt nearly as much as it had been. That antibiotic Mildred gave me seems to have done the trick.”

“Good to hear,” Ryan said with a glance at the doctor, who shrugged and rolled her eyes in a “what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him” gesture. He turned back to Doc. “Everyone get ready to head out. I’ll join up with you in a few minutes. I’m going to backtrack and make sure none of those bugs are on our trail.”

Krysty rose from her haunches and walked close, her strong hand grabbing Ryan’s T-shirt. “Sure hope you weren’t going to head out without saying goodbye first—”

Ryan cut her off in midsentence with a long kiss, tasting her sweat and musk, which combined to create a scent that would have made his head spin under different circumstances. “I’m not saying goodbye, just so long for now. Get out of this bastard valley and I’ll see you on the other side.”

That had been at least an hour ago, and since then Ryan had been engaged in a constant running fight with the bugs. His diversion had worked, all right, but it might have worked a little too well, since it now seemed that every remaining bug in the place was on his ass and his ass alone.

He heard skittering from just about every direction he could go but up. Backed against a sheer rock wall at least fifteen feet high, Ryan drew his SIG Sauer and raised his panga. The bastards weren’t going to get him without a fight.

The vanguard of the bugs came into sight, a pair sidling along low to the ground, antennae waving in the air as they tracked their prey. Upon locating him, they paused for a moment, then split up, one coming at him from the left, the other heading right.

Clever little bastards, Ryan thought as he lined up his blaster on the head of the nearest one. A squeeze of the trigger sent a 9 mm bullet deep into the head of the bug on the left, making it collapse to the dirt, legs twitching feebly.

Before Ryan could bring his blaster around, the other burrow-bug rushed in, clawed legs waving. Its two arms beat at his blaster hand, making it impossible to aim and fire. Ryan used his panga to keep the bug’s other limbs from stabbing him as well, chopping at them to break or disable them.

Man and mutie strained against each other for a few moments, both seeking to gain the advantage. Then the bug’s head darted down, its mandibles seeking Ryan’s throat. He twisted out of the way just in time, and the insectile jaws clamped onto his shoulder, serrated teeth shredding his skin and flesh.

Forcing his blaster through the mutie’s pummeling legs, Ryan placed its muzzle against the side of the bug’s head and squeezed the trigger. The bullet blew the insect’s brains out just as its claws stabbed at Ryan’s side, opening a long, shallow slash along his ribs.

The bug collapsed on top of him, and Ryan heaved the corpse off with a grunt. He looked all around but didn’t see any others. However, his predator’s senses were still tingling, and he knew he was still in danger from somewhere.

The scrape of a claw against rock was enough to alert him. Ryan lunged forward as the bug overhead leaped off the rock face. It missed landing on him, but an outstretched claw raked down the back of his leg, making him stagger and fall on his face.

Before he could turn, the bug was on him, claws pinning him to the ground. Ryan heaved and lashed out behind him with his panga, but couldn’t connect with the bug’s body. His blaster was equally useless. Although he aimed it behind him and fired several times, he didn’t hit anything vital. Ryan struggled to the last, trying to fight free, but he could feel the mutie’s head coming closer to the back of his neck....

The bug stiffened suddenly, then fell on top of Ryan, crushing him into the dirt. The one-eyed man twisted, rolling the spasming body off him and sitting up. The taped hilt of a throwing knife jutted from the back of the bug’s head.

“Jak,” Ryan muttered as a white-haired shadow detached itself from the darkness on the outcropping above him and tossed down a rope. Although he wasn’t displeased to see the albino, Ryan was concerned about the others getting into trouble with two of the best fighters away from the group.

“Worried you havin’ all fun, so came find ya. Hurry up. Bugs not stay away forever,” the teen said with a grin. “And get knife before haul ass up.”

Sheathing his panga, Ryan jerked the blade out of the insect’s head. Wiping the knife clean, he clamped it between his teeth, then reached for the rope and began to climb. But when he put weight on his right arm, his injured shoulder flared with white-hot pain, making him fall back to the ground. Ryan spit the knife out and tucked it into his boot. “Shit! Bastard chewed up my shoulder good. You’re going to have to pull me up.” Able to hold his blaster in his weak hand, Ryan looped the rope around his left. “Go!”

“Hold on!”

Ryan was jerked off his feet as more bugs swarmed into the area. He took out the nearest two with head shots as three more ran toward him. Ryan brought his legs up just as they lunged at his feet, pushing off the rock face as Jak hauled him up, reaching the top ahead of several more that were already climbing in pursuit.

“Son of a—” Jak had his own blaster in hand and blew two of the ascending insects off the wall, sending them crashing down on the rest. “Time go.”

“You’ve got that right.” Ryan dug out his amphetamine pill and swallowed it, then sent a trio of 9 mm slugs down into the mass, killing two more and injuring one so that all it could to was shriek and writhe on the ground, before his blaster’s action locked back. “Go, go, go!”

Fortunately, the slash on Ryan’s leg was shallow, and he could run with little impairment. He took off after Jak, who was like a white-haired ghost flitting from rock to shadow to rock again.

“Where the...hell’re we...going?” Ryan panted as they ran.

“Just follow,” Jak replied, not even breathing hard. “Got surprise waitin’ for bugs.”

Ryan glanced over his shoulder to find the ground behind them covered with bugs as far as he could see. “Better be a damn good one.”

Jak flashed a death’s-head smile at him. “Is.”

The pill kicked in now, reducing Ryan’s various aches and pains to dull, faraway throbs. His flagging energy level spiked, and soon he’d drawn abreast of Jak, who skidded to a stop beside him. “Head there.”

“There” was a deep, narrow gulch carved out of the rock by wind and water over hundreds of years, snaking up the hill a good sixty or seventy yards. Not waiting for an answer, Jak began to climb, moving so fast up the steep surface he resembled an albino mountain goat.

Ryan followed him, still favoring his injured shoulder. The floor was steep, making the climb difficult, but not impossible. The only question was whether Ryan could reach the top before the burrow-bugs reached him.

It was a close call. Near the summit, the gulch turned almost vertical, making Ryan seek out hand-and footholds to propel himself the last dozen or so feet. Aided by Jak and Ricky, he was half pulled, half dragged onto the top, where he rolled over, breathing heavily.

“You old man,” Jak said, still pulling on his arm.

“Watch it, youngblood,” Ryan said as he pushed himself to his feet. “What’s the plan, hold them off again here?”

“Nope.” Ricky’s teeth gleamed white in the moonlight. “J.B. planned something way better.”

Ryan peeked over the edge to see a large knot of the bugs boiling furiously up the arroyo toward them. “Whatever he’s doing, he better do it fast.”

“Would, if we off this piece rock,” Jak said, dragging him farther back. “Come on!”

Ryan allowed himself to be led away from the edge to the other side of the hilltop, where the rest of the group crouched behind a small outcropping.

“Got Ryan,” Jak said.

“Now look who’s taking his sweet time,” J.B. remarked.

“Yeah, you,” Ryan replied. “Those bugs chased Jak and me clear up here and are going to be coming at us any minute now. What?” he asked on seeing the broad smiles on his friends’ faces.

“Are they, now?” J.B. asked.

As he said that, Ryan heard a dull crump that he felt in the soles of his feet and the pit of his stomach. The ground around them began to shake, and Ryan heard the patter of gravel, followed by the rumble of much larger rocks breaking loose. The noise grew until it was impossible to think, much less talk. A large cloud of dust billowed over everyone, making Ryan and the others cough. After about thirty seconds, the commotion died down, with only scattered falling pebbles and acrid dust hanging in the air left over.

Ryan walked back to the gully’s edge, now several feet farther back from where Jak and he had climbed up. J.B.’s controlled blast had brought down the entire cliff face, turning several tons of rock into a lethal landslide. Waving drifting dust away, Ryan squinted through it to look down the hillside. Other than scattered parts of burrow-bugs—a leg here, a smashed thorax there—sticking out of the large pile of jumbled rocks several stories below, there was no living sign of the small insectile army that had been pursuing them.

“Ricky came up with the idea,” J.B. said as he came up beside him. “Then it was just a matter of finding the right place to set it off.”

“Plus, if fortune smiles on us, the resulting blast should cause no little consternation among those damnably persistent insects,” Doc said.

“Yeah, but even that isn’t the best news,” Krysty said. Taking Ryan’s hand, she led him to the far side of the hill, where the sun was just beginning to rise over the eastern horizon. Across a few foothills below them, he looked out onto a barren wasteland that, although sun-parched and desolate, didn’t contain any sign of the burrowing horde.

Wiping his face free of blood and bug goo, Ryan smiled. “We’re out of the valley.”

Chapter Seven

One day later, Ryan would have happily taken on one of those bugs again. He was so thirsty he would have hacked its head off with one swing and gulped down its thick, black blood as if it were fine wine.

His swollen tongue flicked out to try to moisten his parched, split lips, but retreated the moment it touched them. From the arid, cracked ground to the sullen, cloudless, crimson-red sky, everywhere he looked, there wasn’t a drop of water to be found. Or plants. Or animals. Once, they heard a long, far-off shriek of some kind of bird, but never saw any sign of it. Doc had grunted that it was staying out of the heat, proving that even a birdbrain was smarter than all of them. Save for the seven people trudging across the bleak landscape, there was no sign of life anywhere—just the endless horizon, wavering and blurry in the relentless heat.

The large lemon-yellow sun beat down mercilessly on them, sapping strength and making it hard to think, much less walk. True to Mildred’s prediction, Doc had crashed after the effects of the amphetamine had worn off. He was now being hauled by J.B., who plodded along with the older man’s arm slung across his shoulders. Mildred was also favoring her injured arm, bound in a crude sling across her chest. Ryan had also felt the slowness and exhaustion of the pill wearing off, but he powered through it, just as he did every other day of his life. His entire body hurt as if someone had beaten each inch of it with a club, but he walked on, determined not to show any weakness.

Even the normally indefatigable Jak was showing signs of wearing down. “Got find shelter soon...gonna cook, we stay out any longer.” His red eyes peered out from the folds of the dingy bright pink T-shirt wrapped around his head and neck, making him look like some kind of demented Bedouin.

“Just...like the...proverbial goose...my milk-haired friend....” Doc wheezed with every limping step.

“Save your strength, Doc,” J.B. said. “Need every bit of it to get through this.”

Despite her injury, Mildred didn’t seem all that affected by the heat, nor did Krysty. In fact, Krysty was scanning all around them, at times lifting her nose almost as if she was scenting the air.

“Something up?” Ryan asked.

“Don’t know. The breeze is rising, but it doesn’t feel right, somehow.” Shading her eyes with her hand, Krysty scanned the horizon all around. “Something’s coming. Surely there has to be some kind of shelter somewhere.”

“We could dig a hole in the ground, cover up and wait for the bad weather to pass, right?” Ricky offered.

“You take a shot at it, Ricky,” J.B. replied. “This hardpan is rock solid. I might be able to blast a hole in it with plas-ex, but it wouldn’t be large enough to do us any good.”

“Right now I’ll settle for any moving air. That breeze should feel good,” Mildred said, eyes on the ground in front of her as she walked, her combat boots kicking up small puffs of dirt with every step.

“Mebbe—if it doesn’t bring anything with it,” Ryan replied, keeping his tone neutral. If a storm blew up here—sand or dust or anything else—they were as good as dead if they couldn’t find any cover. Squinting, he tried to pick out anything that might serve as refuge for them from the surrounding wasteland.

“Our real problem is dehydration,” Mildred continued. “It’s so hot out here that we’re losing water but not realizing it because our sweat’s evaporating as soon as it comes out.”

“Always ready to give us the good news, aren’t you, Millie?” J.B. said with a quick smile to let her know he was kidding.

“Nothing funny about it,” she replied. “Facts are facts—if we don’t find water soon, we’re done for.”

The breeze was freshening, but even it was deceptive; a hot, dry wind that plucked at their skin and clothes, but provided no relief.

In the end, Ricky spotted their salvation. “There,” he said, pointing off to the south. “I think I see a stone building?”

Ryan and J.B. both shaded their eyes. “Hard to tell...” J.B. said. “Out here everything looks like dark smudges against light smudges.”

“If it is a building, we’d best get to it,” Krysty said, glancing behind them. “A storm’s definitely coming our way.”

Ryan glanced back as well and saw a dark cloud a few miles away. “Yeah. Best move out double-quick. J.B., I’ll spell you with Doc.”

“It is not necessary...my dear Ryan....” Doc whispered. “I just need...to rest...a spell....”

“Close those lips and move those legs, Doc, and we’ll be safe and sound before you know it,” Ryan said as he draped the older man’s arm across his shoulders.

The wind was already blowing harder now, ruffling hair, kicking up dust and driving everyone forward with more urgency. As they traveled, the smudge far ahead solidified into what looked like a large, low, stone building.

“What if it’s a ruin?” J.B. asked as they went.

“Any shelter’ll work to protect us from whatever’s coming,” Ryan said, leaving the rest of his thought unspoken. Deathlands was home to all sorts of crazy weather, from chem storms to acid—real acid—rain. “It’s gaining on us,” Mildred said, casting a glance to their right. “Since we’re no longer moving ahead of it, it’s going to catch us pretty soon.”

“I can see the building now. It’s old, but still standing,” Ryan replied. “We’ve just got to get there first. Everybody keep moving.”

Somehow, they all managed to quicken their pace. Ten more minutes of trotting and walking brought the companions close enough to see the large, solid stone building in the distance, squat and immovable. And just in time, too, as the storm was almost on them. Visibility was falling rapidly, and everyone was covered in grit from the swirling wind.

“Almost there! Keep your eyes on it—don’t look away, or you’ll lose it!” Ryan shouted over the now howling wind.

“Everyone join hands!” J.B. said, grabbing Mildred’s. If someone got separated or lost, it would be nearly impossible to find the person in the dense cloud.

Staggering through the rising dust storm, the companions pushed on toward their destination. By the time they reached the building, the wind had risen to a deafening howl, and they all were shielding their faces as they fought to stand against the gale. The dust whipped up by the storm was everywhere, caking, blinding, choking.

Ryan was practically carrying Doc along when he reached the old wooden doors. Even in this deserted landscape, they were stuck or locked. “Shit! Won’t open!”

“Let me try!” Jak shouted. Ryan hauled Doc away from the entrance while Jak backed up a few steps, then ran forward. When he was a couple of yards away, he leaped into the air and drove his foot into the seam between the two doors. Ryan faintly heard a loud crack above the storm. “Again—do it again!” he said between coughs.

Now hacking himself, Jak backed up and ran at the door again. This time his kick broke the doors open, and he fell in the entryway. “C’mon!” he said, holding one of the doors open.

The rest of the group piled inside, and Jak and Ricky struggled to push the doors closed, wedging them shut with pieces of the broken crossbar Jak had smashed through.

“Looks like this might have been some kind of school back in the day,” Mildred said as they looked around.

They were standing at the end of a long hallway, with several doors on each side of it. Old gray metal lockers lined the walls between the doors. Lights that hadn’t turned on in a century hung from the ceiling, and faded papers hung on the walls, unreadable after all this time. Although it was easier to breathe here, dust could still be seen filtering in through cracks under doors.

“Let’s see if we can find someplace as far away from the dust as possible,” Ryan said after trying to bring up enough saliva to spit, but failing. “Bet there’s not a drop of water to be found in here either.”

“Doubt it,” Mildred said. “This place was probably abandoned even in my time. Small town, maybe a mining or oil community once, then the mine closed or the oil dried up, and the town dried up along with it. It happened all the time.”

“Lucky for us they didn’t tear everything down when they moved on,” J.B. said as they walked farther into the hallway. Jak tried opening one of the doors, but a gust of wind and sand blew into his face, and he quickly shut it again while pawing at his eyes.

“Damn dust—hurts like hell!”

Ryan’s concern seemed to be well founded. In the center of the building they found a larger room that looked to have been a cafeteria in another lifetime. But when he tried the taps in a large, industrial-size sink in the kitchen, they didn’t even move, frozen shut by a century of nonoperation.

“Looks like we made it here, only to die of thirst,” Mildred said.

“We’re not dead yet, and there’s still more to explore. Might find a cache no one knows about,” Ryan replied. “Let’s keep going.”

They reached the end of the corridor and found a stairway behind a wooden door with a wire-reinforced window in it. The stairway led down.

Mildred frowned. “That’s weird. I didn’t think most buildings in tornado country had storm cellars, although they sure needed them.”

“Let’s take a look.” Ryan grabbed the rusty knob and turned it, opening the door with a scrape across the dusty floor. The moment he did, he froze, except for his blaster arm, which drew his SIG Sauer in a single practiced movement.

Turning back to his friends, he saw they’d all heard what he had once the door was open.

Faint voices from below.

Chapter Eight

Ryan immediately pulled back in case there were any guards nearby. The voices continued talking, echoing down the underground passage. They sounded as if they were fairly far away.

J.B. was beside him in an instant, Mini-Uzi at the ready. “Can you make out what they’re saying?”

Ryan shook his head, his reply just as low. “Too much echo. If I had to guess, it sounds like someone arguing over something.”

He glanced at Krysty. “You got anything?”

She also shook her head. “The storm is overwhelming everything, and something about this building is blocking my ability. It’s like a dead zone in here.”

“No tracks on the way in. They must have been here awhile,” Mildred said.

“No sign vehicles outside,” Jak added. “Caught storm like us?”

“Only one way to find out.” Ryan slowly eased the stairwell door open again. “Jak, you’re on point. Throwing blades for right now—don’t need to cause an alarm if we can avoid it. I want to get the drop on whoever’s down there.”

Jak had unwrapped the T-shirt from around his head and stowed it while making a knife appear in his other hand as if by magic. “Sneak and peek—fun.” He eased through the door, as soundless as a mirage. Ryan gave him a few seconds’ lead, then followed, with J.B. a step behind him.

The concrete stairs were covered in a thick layer of dust, also with no footprints on them. “Where the nuke did they come in from?” J.B. muttered.

“Shh,” Ryan cautioned, although he’d thought the same thing. They’d already encountered burrowing bugs. The last thing he needed to see was some kind of burrowing humans living in here.

Making no noise on the steps, the companions descended to the lower level, with Jak signaling all clear every few paces. A single light shone from an open doorway at the far end of the hall. They passed a few other doors on both sides of the hallway, most hanging open, revealing empty rooms inside. As they progressed down the dark tunnel, the voices became more distinct.

“—take us to the rest of your people, that’s all I’m asking. If she don’t get help, she’s gonna die!”

“What do you expect us to do? Whatever sickness she’s got ain’t like nothing I ever seen before!”

“’Sides, it’s hard to believe you don’t mean us any harm with that blaster pointing at us.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m out of patience, and I’m through asking!”

“Look, we can’t go anywhere until the storm dies down. And she’s right, all we could do is make your friend comfortable until she passes aw—”

A low, loud, bone-chilling moan interrupted the second speaker, the sound of someone in mortal agony. It continued for several seconds, cutting off the argument inside and making Ryan’s skin crawl. He exchanged a glance with Mildred, her eyes white and wide against her dark skin, and got a shrug in return as they drew closer.

Jak stepped up to the side of the doorway now and looked at Ryan, who was already handing him a small, polished metal mirror. Jak crouched and carefully extended it past the door frame to get a look into the room. He held it there for a few seconds, angling it around while the discussion of taking the injured woman somewhere continued. Finally Jak pulled his hand back and turned to Ryan, signaling what he’d seen.

Four people inside, all on far side of the room. Hurt one lying down. Two scavvies sitting against the right wall. Man with blaster standing between them and woman.

With a clear picture of the interior and its occupants now, Ryan was ready to take them. He pointed at Jak, then at the left interior wall next to the door. Jak gave him a curt nod, but waited while Ryan detailed what the rest of their strike party was going to do. When everyone was ready, he held up his hand and counted down from three fingers...two...one.

The albino stepped through the door and took up his position on the left side, while Ryan went in and took up a position on the right side. J.B. came next, followed by Mildred and Krysty. Ricky was staying outside with a nearly unconscious Doc.

“Nobody move, and nobody has to die,” Ryan said, the muzzle of his blaster dead center on the standing man, who turned his head to look at the newcomers in shock. They stood amid several empty freestanding shelves lining the walls, indicating this had once been a storeroom.

It was the break one of the raggedly dressed people sitting against the wall had been waiting for. He launched himself at the man, barreling into him and sending him staggering across the room. The blaster flew from the man’s hand, skittering across the floor to stop in front of J.B., who stooped and picked it up without taking his eyes off the two struggling, cursing figures.

“Fireblast!” Ryan said, striding forward. The scavvie crouched on top of the other man, who was dressed in a relatively clean light blue jumpsuit, and pummeled him with wild, flying fists. The former hostage taker was doing his best to protect his head and face, but his assailant was so pissed that only one out of every three blows was landing.

“All right, enough of that!” Grabbing the one on top by the back of his ragtag jacket, Ryan hauled the short wiry guy, arms still flailing, off the downed man. When the guy tried turning to punch Ryan, he simply lifted him off the floor and held him in midair.

“What’re you— Let me go! You gotta kill him before they kill all of us!” the captive yelled in a high-pitched voice. He was dressed in a patchwork combination of what other people would have called rags, but on closer examination, Ryan saw they were stitched with care and fit the guy’s small frame well. His pants were a mix of canvas, blue denim and leather, and his shoes were worn construction boots that had been repurposed with what looked like rubber patches on the toe and heels. Ryan turned him around to see his face, revealing short-cropped, dirty blond hair framing a definitely female face now twisted into a combination of rage and fear.

“Look, just calm down, all right? He’s unarmed now, and it doesn’t look like you’re in any real danger.”

“You don’t understand!” she cried. “They’ll—”

Another loud groan interrupted her, and everyone glanced over to see another person lying on the floor, a jacket fashioned into a crude pillow under her head. The woman was dressed in the same kind of jumpsuit as the man, except her abdomen was grossly distended, making the fabric bulge out.

“Just relax, Sammee,” the man on the floor said through swelling lips. “Please, help her if you can. That’s all I ask.... I’ll do whatever you want, just help her.”

“You best do what Tully said, kill both of them quick before they come for all of us,” the second person sitting against the wall, a lanky black-haired man, said.

“I’m not taking orders from any of you right now,” Ryan said. “J.B., Jak, watch these three. Mildred, check her out.”

“It’s all right, I’m a healer,” Mildred said as she crossed the room and knelt by the sweating, ashen-faced woman holding her bloated stomach with both hands. “Do you know how long you’ve been pregnant?”

The woman shook her head, but broke in as Mildred began asking another question. “Not...pregnant. It’s...dying.”

Mildred’s brow furrowed. “It? What’s it?”

Sammee opened her mouth as if to answer, but instead let out a high-pitched scream at the top of her lungs. Mildred placed a hand on her stomach, then drew back. “It’s distended and hard...and, oh, my God.”

As Ryan and everyone else watched, something stretched out the woman’s skin from the inside, creating a small bump as if poking at her, then retreated.

“Do you have a parasite living inside you?” Mildred asked as she pulled out her small medical kit. “Do you know how long it’s been there? Or how you contracted it?”

Sammee shook her head. “Dunno—just know it’s killin’ me—” Her words turned into another scream of pure pain.

“I’m going to try to cut it out of her!” Mildred selected a scalpel and positioned it at the top of her stomach. But the moment the blade touched the woman’s skin, she jackknifed forward, tendons in her neck popping as she strained against something inside her, mouth open in a silent scream, then fell back onto the floor, motionless, her wide eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

Mildred checked her pulse at both the wrist and carotid artery. “She’s dead. I’m sorry.”

“No! No! No! No!” The other man crawled over to his dead woman and cradled her in his arms. “We were leaving, gonna make a new life...” He looked at the ceiling and screamed, “We were going! We would have left you alone! Why couldn’t you just leave us alone?” Mildred was already preparing a small tranquilizer shot, one of the precious few she had, and stabbed it into the man’s arm as his screams faded into loud sobs. The man didn’t notice, just cried until the drug took effect, and he slumped over into unconsciousness. When he was out, Mildred closed Sammee’s eyes, removed the jacket from under her head and covered her with it.

For a moment, no one moved. Then Ryan spoke. “What the hell’s going on here?”

“Let me down and I’ll tell ya.” With both of the jumpsuited people out of commission, the blonde fist fighter had calmed down a bit.

“All right—just remember who has all the blasters.” When she nodded, Ryan carefully lowered her to the floor.

Tully straightened her clothes and walked back to her partner before saying anything. “You know I’m Tully, and this here’s Latham.” She nodded at her bearded companion. “We’re part of a group heading west. We come from south of the Lachan Mountains, but over the past few years the barons over there have been gettin’ more and more greedy, putting folks off their land, and killin’ them that don’t go peaceful. When we had enough, we headed west. Heard of plenty of good land out there, with few people to bother us. We’re just lookin’ to settle down somewhere and farm and live without any trouble.”

Ryan nodded. He’d heard this story many times before. Tales of some sort of fabled Eden were a dime a dozen—and worth just about as much, too. “Go on.”

“I will, but first...” Tully rummaged in her pack and pulled out a metal canteen. Opening it, she took a drink, then offered it to Ryan. “You all look pretty dry.”

Ryan slowly reached for it, trying not to betray his eagerness. “Thanks.” He forced himself to take one mouthful—even though every last inch of him cried out to drain the entire container—then handed it to Krysty. “One swallow each. Jak, have Ricky bring Doc in here.”

While he instructed the others, Tully talked quietly with her companion, who grudgingly surrendered his canteen to Ryan and the others. Each of them took a second, precious gulp of the flat, metallic-tasting water, savoring it as if it were the finest predark liquor.

“We’d encountered another dust storm like the one outside a few days ago, and hunkered down in a ville a few miles east of here. That’s when we were attacked—” Tully nodded at the sleeping man and his dead companion “—by these folks.”

Jak frowned. “Not seem like much threat. Chill and keep movin’.”

The man called Latham snorted. “You wouldn’t say that if you saw them in action. These two—” he waved at their prisoner and the corpse “—don’t even come close. Can’t put them down, not easily.... They take a shitload of damage and just keep comin’.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “They’re...different. They all move and fight together, like...ants or somethin’. I don’t know how to explain it. I just know I never seen humans actin’ that way before.”

“Anyway, they first struck as the storm was dyin’, and carried off a half dozen of our people,” Tully said. “Came back a few nights later—and our own people were among the force hitting us.”

Latham stared at the ground, and Tully paused for a moment as she glanced at him, then shook her head. “I couldn’t believe it. We had to—had to chill them that we’d called our own just a couple days earlier...before they did the same to us.”

Ryan exchanged a glance with Krysty and J.B. Through their travels, they’d encountered many strange and terrible sights, so this one wasn’t that far-fetched. A rogue experiment created by whitecoats, some odd mutation that affected an entire population, or even a strange sect that practiced an unusual form of combat could be behind this new potential threat.

“The elders held a meeting and decided to send parties out to find help. That’s what we were doing when we came across this building.” Tully spit into a corner. “That fuck got the drop on us, and tried to force us to take him and her back to our people. Then you all showed up, and now here we are.”

J.B. had been examining the man’s weapon while the two were talking, and now he looked at Ryan while holding up the blaster, a brand-new-looking matte black 9 mm Beretta 92-F. “Wherever he’s come from, they got good tech.”

“Yeah, they had other weapons, too—longblasters,” Latham said. “If it hadn’t been for Tully and some of the others, our group wouldn’t have survived.”

“What do you mean by that?” Krysty asked. “You’re not a mercie?” At the other woman’s frown, she elucidated. “A hired blaster, coldheart, that sort of thing.”

The smaller woman grimaced. “Naw, just got a temper, that’s all. Our people don’t practice violence.... It’s just not our way. But when I saw others bein’ carried away or killed, I knew I had to do somethin’. I jumped one of them, got his weapon away and shot him. Shot a bunch more and freed some of the caught ones so we could drive them off.”

“But they’ll be back,” Latham said. “We all know it.”

Ryan and J.B. exchanged weary glances at this part. Along with the pipe dream of Eden, a place to live in peace and quiet, right behind that was the idea of not being bothered by any bandits or raiders or anyone, or not having to take up arms to defend what was yours. Ryan and his companions knew that was only wishful thinking on those people’s parts, since it was always easier to take than to work, to steal and destroy instead of build and create. There was no shortage of people willing to turn to that kind of life to sustain themselves. It was plain survival in the Deathlands, a way of life. Eventually, the takers would come calling no matter where you were—or how well you thought you’d hidden yourself.

“So keep moving,” J.B. said. “If they come and go like you say, they have a base of operations, and once you get out of range, they’ll leave you alone.”

“A lot of us want to do just that, but the elders don’t want to leave family members behind, even ones who’ve been...changed like these two,” Tully said. “If we push on now, we’re doomin’ them to whatever captivity they’re stuck in. If we stay, we risk losing everybody and everything to these people. That was why we were lookin’ for help. We got food and water, that’s all we can really offer anybody, but that should count for something, right?”

Ryan nodded. “Right.” And so does the idea of someone nearby having predark technology and ammunition, he thought. “Why don’t we all get some rest while the storm blows itself out, and when it’s done, we’ll figure out what to do, okay?”

Tully blinked, as if the idea of these new people actually helping them had never occurred to her. “Uh...sure, okay. I mean, we’re already in your debt for savin’ us from them. The least we can do is feed you before you head out on your way.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Krysty said.

“Don’t suppose you have any of that food on you right now?” Ricky asked.

Latham nodded at their bedrolls in a corner. “It won’t go very far among all of us, but you’re welcome to what we have. We’re not too far from the main camp—well, we weren’t till you found us—but because you’ll be walkin’, they’re about a day’s travel away.”

“You got a faster way of traveling?” Ricky asked.

Latham nodded. “Easier to show you than tell you.”

“What about them?” Mildred pointed at the other two.

“Didn’t seem to have much on them,” Tully said. “And they weren’t too hungry, either, for some reason. Only took a couple of bites. Don’t know why.”

“Stress, or whatever parasitic creature was in that woman, may explain part of it,” Mildred said. “I wouldn’t mind taking a closer look at her if I got the chance.”

“Not now,” Ryan said. “We’re all pretty strung out. We also need to get some rest—” and talk about what we should do, he casually signed to the rest “—before figuring out what to do next, okay?”

They shared the scavvie farmers’ meager rations—a couple of mouthfuls of relatively fresh bread and dried meat—and used a self-heat tab found on the still-unconscious man to make a cup of watery broth for Doc. Within a few minutes, the two, along with Doc, were fast asleep, leaving the rest of the group free to talk. Even so, Ryan moved them all out into the hallway, finding a vantage point where he could keep an eye on the sleeping scavvies and the jumpsuited man, as well.

The conversation was brief and to the point. “Not a convoy of wags loaded with ammo and trade goods, but it’s a damn sight better than nothing,” J.B. said.

“Besides, do we have much of a choice?” Krysty asked. “With the mat-trans gone, it could be a couple hundred miles or more to the nearest redoubt. At least if we go with these people, we have a shot at finding wherever the others are coming from, mebbe even locate a redoubt of their own. Solve a couple problems at once.”

“Exactly,” Ryan replied. “Our low ammo and supplies are major problems, so we might as well stick with these folks and see what we can see. At the very least we’ll get fed, and if things go our way, we could get a hold of a lot more than that.”

“Maybe when he wakes up in a few hours, we can ask him about where he came from.” Mildred yawned. “Don’t know about you folks, but I’m dead on my feet. I’m going to take advantage of the relative peace and quiet here and sack out.”

“Works for me,” J.B. said. “Watches?”

Although tempted to let everyone get some shut-eye, Ryan knew all too well the potential folly of trusting folks they’d just met. “Two-hour spans. I’ll take the first, Jak second, Krysty third, Ricky fourth.” He nodded at the three sleepers in the next room. “They shouldn’t give any trouble, but even so, don’t get too close. Everybody get some rest while you can. Jak, I’ll wake you when your turn comes.”

Chapter Nine

Though surrounded by the hot, baking plains and the searing dust storm, for some reason Jak dreamed of his home, deep in the swamps of what had been Louisiana long, long ago.

It wasn’t a true dream, just a series of disjointed images and sounds...trickling water...a snake slithering through the deep forest...and perhaps a slaughtered animal being dragged toward a ville for butchering.

It was this last sound that caused the albino’s eyes to pop open and blink to see Ryan standing over him. “Time, huh?”

The black-haired man nodded. “Heard some scuttling earlier—there may be a rat around here. Keep your eyes open.”

Jak rolled his eyes. “No shit. Why not teach me suck eggs, too.”

As the albino got up and stretched, Ryan walked over to Krysty, curled around her protectively and was asleep in seconds.

Jak watched the sleeping couple for a moment, wistfulness passing over his scarred features. The land they were traveling through reminded him of the area around the farm he’d stayed on for a few months with his wife, Christina, after leaving the companions. Those had been good times—until she and their baby girl had been killed and the homestead contaminated by a bunch of rad-blasted crazies. With the life he’d built in ashes, Jak had rejoined the companions, and been with them ever since.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t mourn the loss of his wife or daughter, or envy those in the group who had found love. Granted, he was happy for them, but at the same time, he wondered if he’d ever get the chance to know real love again, like what he’d had with Christina.

A slight rustle in the dark room, near the body of the dead woman, attracted Jak’s attention, and he glanced over at her. Night had fallen outside, rendering the room and outer hallway so dark that they’d left a small flashlight on for visibility. It was dim, but more than enough for Jak to see the entire room as if it were high noon.

As he looked more closely at the woman’s body, he saw the jacket Mildred had placed over her head and chest had slid off. Something gleamed wetly in the light, and the albino walked over to check it out.

Her stomach had deflated over the past few hours, and now the corpse looked like any other normal dead woman. Well, not quite. Jak leaned closer to see what looked like some kind of shiny mucus ringing her mouth. “What...” He leaned over to see the trail of thick slime dripping down the side of her dead face and onto the floor...as if something had come out of her mouth and left it behind.

A throwing blade appeared in Jak’s hand as he looked along the glistening trail to the nearest person—the still-sleeping guy who had taken the scavvies hostage.

But as Jak peered closer at the man, he realized he wasn’t just sleeping—his entire body was twitching, as if he was being shaken or something. As the albino took a step closer, he realized that the trail ran not only to the man’s body, but whatever had come out of the dead woman had actually slithered onto him. Jak wrinkled his nose at the thought, even as he leaned down for a closer look at the sleeping man.

That was when his eyes snapped open.

At the same time, his hand shot up and grabbed Jak around the throat—or tried to. Jak, however, had been fighting since he could walk, and evaded the clumsy grab with ease. His blade flicked out in return, and the man drew back three bleeding fingers.

The albino took a step back as the man sat up, then rose to his feet. All trace of his earlier hysteria was gone, replaced by an intense stare at the white-haired teenager.

Jak stared back at him. “Best sit, if know what good for ya.”

The man cocked his head as he regarded Jak. “Current subject appears to be result of massive mutations in parents, resulting in abnormal skin, hair and eye appearance. Given the typical genetic weaknesses inherent in offspring of mutations, subject is deemed not suitable for implantation. Recommend rejoining the rest of the primary group for debriefing and complete physical examination.” He flexed his fingers, which had already stopped bleeding.

“What say ’bout me?” Jak asked. The man didn’t answer, but stepped to the side, apparently intending to go around him. The albino moved over to block his path. “Not goin’ anywhere—”

This time the man moved fast—so fast that even Jak was caught off guard. He slammed an open palm into the smaller man’s chest, knocking him back several steps. Hitting the wall, Jak rebounded and came at him again, cutting him off before he reached the door. “Fucker!”

“What’s going on, Jak?” Ryan asked.

“Slime trail from dead woman,” Jak replied, not taking his eyes off his opponent. “Went this guy. Tried grab me. Said nonsense, now tryin’ leave. ’Bout show him that’s bad idea.”

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