Labyrinth
James Axler
It took only minutes for human history to derail in a mushroom cloud–now more than a century later, whatever destiny lies ahead for humanity is bound by the rules that have governed survival since the dawn of time: part luck, part skill and part hard experience.For Ryan Cawdor and his band, survival in Deathlands means keeping hold of what you have–or losing it along with your life.In the ancient canyons of New Mexico, the citizens of Little Pueblo prepare to sacrifice Ryan and his companions to demons locked inside a twentieth-century dam project. But in a world where nuke-spawned predators feed upon weak and strong alike, Ryan knows avenging eternal spirits aren't't part of the game. Especially when these freaks spit yellow acid–and their creators are the white coat masterminds of genetic recombination, destroyed by their mutant offspring born of sin and science gone horribly wrong….
Ryan raced up to the floor-to-ceiling barrier
The gate was made of heavy steel, ribbed vertically and horizontally for strength, and was nearly watertight. Its hinges were on the other side, inaccessible. The gate was jammed closed. He tried kicking out one of the unreinforced panels, hoping it had rusted through.
It hadn’t.
“Fire blast!” he muttered, giving the gate another kick for good measure.
From the channel behind him came the sound of a terrible collision and a squeal of bending metal. There was a pause, then it sounded again. Collision. Squeal.
“Ryan!” J.B. shouted, his cry echoing down the channel.
And then the Smith boomed, and kept on booming.
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Dectra Chain
Ice and Fire
Red Equinox
Northstar Rising
Time Nomads
Latitude Zero
Seedling
Dark Carnival
Chill Factor
Moon Fate
Fury’s Pilgrims
Shockscape
Deep Empire
Cold Asylum
Twilight Children
Rider, Reaper
Road Wars
Trader Redux
Genesis Echo
Shadowfall
Ground Zero
Emerald Fire
Bloodlines
Crossways
Keepers of the Sun
Circle Thrice
Eclipse at Noon
Stoneface
Bitter Fruit
Skydark
Demons of Eden
The Mars Arena
Watersleep
Nightmare Passage
Freedom Lost
Way of the Wolf
Dark Emblem
Crucible of Time
Starfall
Encounter: Collector’s Edition
Gemini Rising
Gaia’s Demise
Dark Reckoning
Shadow World
Pandora’s Redoubt
Rat King
Zero City
Savage Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
Salvation Road
Amazon Gate
Destiny’s Truth
Skydark Spawn
Damnation Road Show
Devil Riders
Bloodfire
Hellbenders
Separation
Death Hunt
Shaking Earth
Black Harvest
Vengeance Trail
Ritual Chill
Atlantis Reprise
Labyrinth
DEATH LANDS ®
James Axler
As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.
—Christopher Dawson
1889–1970
THE DEATHLANDS SAGA
This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.
There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.
But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.
Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.
Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.
J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.
Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.
Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.
Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.
In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….
Contents
Prologue (#uf4ce1d6e-74b0-574a-951e-a8a3133422fd)
Chapter One (#ua972d335-a4b2-5152-8745-d603cc8fdcd5)
Chapter Two (#u744c39fa-56d1-5356-a9b8-d059cb11cf51)
Chapter Three (#u4ac845b8-7765-5971-a24c-ae17d5606cd9)
Chapter Four (#ub322d0d4-d816-5ffc-a9db-66c27e1b07f5)
Chapter Five (#u33213435-47df-5354-a23f-81133216222f)
Chapter Six (#u71e09ec0-ad14-505c-9fec-572637918739)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
Corn Blossom choked on the first sip of the potion and her eyes filled with tears. Despite the harsh, bitter taste, she had to drink every drop. The eleven-year-old brushed aside her tears and took another, bigger swallow from the shaman’s feather-decorated gourd.
From the ledge on which she stood, the far side of the canyon was a wall of black, topped by a starry sweep of sky. Trapped heat came off the distant rock in waves, pulsing through the breathless night. Her clan made its home in a broad hollow high in the canyon face, carved over millennia by wind-driven sand. Light from the communal firepit flickered over their flat-sided, mud-brick dwellings.
Hundreds of feet below, the rustling sounds grew much louder. Something crashed through the dry grass and chapparal on the canyon floor. Something huge and powerful. Drawing strength from their fear, Corn Blossom’s people began to chant and beat drums with sticks, this to drown out the terrifying noises. Like her, they had painfully bloated bellies and their lips were cracked and bleeding.
The rain had stopped two winters past, rain the clan depended upon to grow squash, corn and beans in the canyon, and on the mesa directly above the cave. As the stockpiles of food in their stone-lined pits dwindled, Corn Blossom’s people scavenged far and wide, but there was no game left in the canyon, and the fish had vanished along with the river. They were reduced to eating grass and insects. A world that had been lush and full of promise had become a wasteland of suffering and slow death. Dust storms divided the day, and at night the blistering air spawned hungry demons.
Neighboring settlements in the other galleries along the canyon’s cliffs had already been abandoned, the long ladders discarded, the dark window openings and doorways of vacant houses like the eye sockets and drop-jawed maws of piled skulls.
The people who left the canyon were never heard from again. No trace of them was ever found. No campsites. No clothing. No bones. To spend even one night on the canyon floor meant destruction. Under the light of the full moon, Corn Blossom’s own father had disappeared like a curl of smoke.
Before descending the ladder to face and fight the evil that was bedeviling them, he had given her a necklace, his most prized possession. As she drained the last of the shaman’s potion, she tightly squeezed the small white shells between her fingers. In Corn Blossom’s world, before the coming of Colombus, before Heisenberg, Einstein and Rutherford, all events were connected, like the string of beads around her neck. In 1300 A.D., coincidence didn’t exist; everything that happened had a cause. It was a logic born of ignorance. Of desperation. Of fear.
Logic said something had brought this calamity upon her people. It said such causes could be addressed, disastrous outcomes averted by human action. Of the ten young girls in her encampment, Corn Blossom was the brightest, the happiest, the quickest. Cherished by all. Logic said only she could appease the angry gods, because it was her life, her joy, they coveted.
As the herbal concoction took effect, Corn Blossom swayed on the balls of her feet. She felt light enough to lift off and float free of the earth. Then she began to dance to the drums, her bare feet shuffling in the dust, eyes burning from the potion and the shifting pall of smoke.
After she had made a number of slow circuits around the firepit, the shaman led her to the domed rock that jutted from the lip of their ledge like a bowsprit.
Corn Blossom climbed to the crest of the rock and looked back at her mother, her sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles and grandparents. Their drumming and chanting was mixed with sobbing and shrill cries. She loved them, and she loved the world as she remembered it, before the rain stopped falling. For the return of that happy time, no sacrifice was too great. She turned away from the familiar faces, her heart aching.
Arms spread wide, Corn Blossom closed her eyes and jumped into the dark.
The shaman had promised her no pain.
He was almost right.
The wind whipping past her ears drowned out the drumbeats and the screams of sorrow. When her head hit the sloping cliff some fifty feet down, there was an instant of sharp discomfort, then her unconscious body started to tumble and bounce. She never felt the impact with the canyon floor.
At daybreak when her people climbed down, they found no body. The only footprints in the sand were theirs.
SOME SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS later, in the spring of 1992, a Korean war-surplus 6x6 stopped on the same canyon floor. The river flowed cloudy and green in a deep channel along the foot of Corn Blossom’s cliff. Among the ten tourists sitting in the bench seats on the truck bed was a stocky black woman in her late twenties. She aimed her 35 mm camera at the high cleft. The telephoto zoom lens revealed a double row of deserted structures partially hidden in shadow.
A thirteenth century high-rise, Dr. Mildred Wyeth thought, snapping the shutter. She wished she could have seen the view from up there. But that was impossible because the archaeological site, like the others in the canyon, was off-limits to nonmembers of the Hopi tribe, who owned the land.
Other shutters clicked around her, like spastic castanets.
With the long lens Mildred picked out the hand- and footholds chipped into the nearly vertical bedrock—the commute to and from the canyon bottom had been perilous, to say the least.
The canyon’s vanished residents had been a vigorous, athletic people with no fear of heights. A stark contrast to Mildred’s fellow passengers, who preferred to have their life experiences spoon-fed to them while sitting down. Her companions for the day included four Japanese men in Bermuda shorts; an impatient German couple who had brought along enough food for six, but had offered to share none of it; and three portly, middle-aged American ladies in brand-new, pastel bill-caps, T-shirts, daypacks and hiking shoes.
Mildred would’ve much rather explored the canyon on foot or horseback, but the constraints of a week-long holiday and a lengthy itinerary made that impossible. It was her first real vacation in a long time, and she had crammed it full of interesting things to do. Perhaps too full, it turned out.
Though Mildred was a medical doctor, she didn’t have a client practice. She worked for a university-affiliated, cryogenic research company. Her field of expertise was cellular crystallization, one of the major obstacles to successful reanimation of living tissue from deep cold.
The basic problem was biophysical. When the cells of most animals were frozen, their watery fluids turned to ice, which expanded to burst or crush vital, cellular components. Only a handful of species had cells that could withstand freezing, and those species revived on their own when warmed. The cells of these unique creatures contained a sugar called trehalose, which acted like antifreeze, lowering the crystallization temperature. Mildred had already verified that the transplant life of dissected, refrigerated rat hearts could be extended by many days when stored in a trehalose solution. Her ongoing research tested ways the sugar could be introduce into living bodies, and the effects of different concentrations during freezing.
Mildred was passionate about her work, which she believed would ultimately change the way all human disease was fought. Once the cryogenic process was perfected, dying patients could be safely stored until science found cures, however long that took.
While Mildred and the others snapped photos of the ruins, the sour-faced Hopi driver-tour guide probed his ear with a wooden matchstick. He wore a straw cowboy hat and his gray-streaked black hair was pulled back in a long ponytail. No cab separated him from his passengers; the 6x6 had a floorplan like a bus, only without a roof or side walls to obstruct the views.
When the shutter-clicking slowed, the driver tucked the grooming tool back in his hat band and spoke into a hand microphone. His slow drawl came out of a loudspeaker screwed to the truck bed’s wooden rails. “That settlement’s number eleven on your list,” he informed them. “We call it the Castle because it’s so high up, and because folks think it looks like one. It was first excavated in 1928, by archaeologists from the University of California at Berkeley. The buildings are from the Pueblo Three Period, from 1050 to 1300 A.D. Our ancient ones lived up there for more than five hundred years.”
By “our,” he meant Hopi.
From her advance reading on the subject, Mildred knew there were few hard facts about the cliff people of the canyon. They had drawn symbols on the rocks, but had left no written language to explain them. It was assumed that extended drought, which the area was prone to, had driven them away. Where they had gone and what had happened to them was anybody’s guess. The Navajo, who had lived nearby for millennia, referred to the cliff people as “our ancient enemies.” The Hopi and Navajo had been enemies for as long as anyone could remember, so the Hopi concluded they were related to the cliff people.
Mildred tuned out her guide. Aside from parroting terms and theories devised by social scientists to fill doctoral theses, he had nothing new to say about the missing residents, or their erased culture. Looking up at the abandoned site, Mildred felt a profound sense of loss, and of tragedy. Looking up at the ruins, she was certain that what had happened to the cliff people could never happen to her own, immensely more powerful civilization. Mildred believed in human progress and the perfectability of knowledge, a juggernaut of scientific truth rolling ever forward, ever faster.
She was dead wrong on all counts, of course.
Numbers alone didn’t guarantee immunity from extinction. Nor did the weight of accumulated scientific knowledge. A century would pass before she saw the awful truth with her own eyes: That a juggernaut of progress could fly apart in an instant and take everything with it.
The final site on the tour was a half mile down-canyon, on the other side of a freestanding spire almost as tall as the mesa. Shutters snapped, but feebly this time; the pile of rocks on a low slope was hardly scenic.
“Those are the ruins of an old cabin, number twelve on your list,” the guide said. “The woman who lived in it spent her whole life in this canyon. She was born here. She never married. She died in that hut at age 109 in the 1930s. People believe she was the last of a long, unbroken line of powerful witches. They say she spoke with the spirits of our ancient ones, and that while she was alive her magic spells kept the canyon’s demons sleeping. Some folks say they still do.”
Mildred perked up. There was very little in the academic literature about the spiritual beliefs, or supposed beliefs, of the canyon’s lost people.
“What demons?” she asked him.
“Man-eaters,” he said matter-of-factly. “Folks say they’ve always been here. No one’s sure whether the drought makes them, or whether they bring the drought with them when they come. The two are kind of a package deal. Legends say the demons are born hungry, out of the hot, still air. They only hunt at night. They love the dark. Lucky for us, we haven’t had a serious drought in a long time.”
“What are they supposed to look like?”
“No one knows. No one who has ever seen one has survived to talk about it.”
Before the guide could elaborate further, the German couple started complaining loudly about the biting flies rising from nearby stands of scrub laurel. When the other passengers chimed in, the show was over. Smiling for the first time all day, the guide cranked up the 6x6 and drove on, crossing and recrossing the meandering stream as the canyon grew ever wider. On the other side of a broad meadow, the rutted dirt track intersected a paved road.
A mile down the two-lane highway, they reached cultivated fields and widely spaced, ramshackle trailers and cinder-block houses of riverside farms that gradually gave way to the outskirts of a small New Mexico town. Little Pueblo had an aroma all its own: part fertilizer, part Mexican spices, part grain silo.
The driver stopped the 6x6 in the parking lot of the Rest Easy Motel, where the trip had begun five hours ago. As his passengers rose to their feet, he said, “If you’re looking for an authentic Native American meal tonight, try the fry bread tacos at Lupita’s, off the town square. They’re the real deal. And I’m not just saying that because she’s my auntie.”
Mildred had two more national parks to hit before her flight home on the weekend. And even though she did have time to stop and eat, dinner at Lupita’s was out of the question. She’d peeked in the café window earlier, while waiting for the tour to start. The pillowy, golden brown fry bread dripped with artery-plugging grease.
When Mildred left sleepy, pungent Little Pueblo in her rental car that afternoon, she was sure she’d seen the last of the place.
She was wrong about that, too.
Chapter One
Ryan Cawdor gnawed the final, juicy gobbet of flesh from the boar rib, then tossed the bone over his shoulder to the pack of dogs prowling the rows of long tables. The resulting, savage combat was barely audible over the general din.
The stone hall’s arched ceiling rang with the fiddles, squeezeboxes, trumpets and drums of a half-dozen, competing musical groups. It resounded with the clatter of knives on plates, the crash of shattering crockery, and from the far side of the room, with the scuffling, grunting chaos of a bare-knuckle brawl. The immense room was lit by bonfires roaring in massive fireplaces, torches burning in iron stanchions and candelabras spaced at intervals along the tables. Huge, faded tapestries draped the mortared walls. Dimly visible in the gloom overhead were strings of colorful pennants that hung from the high, wooden rafters.
After wiping his fingers on the table linen, Ryan paused to scratch the thick welt of scar that split the left side of his face from brow to cheek, zigzagging beneath the black patch that concealed an empty eye socket. A servant in a stained leather tunic placed a heaping platter at his elbow. Char-roasted backstraps of venison beckoned.
But first, something to cleanse the palate.
Ryan hefted a discus of sweet potato pie. The crisp, buttery crust fractured in his hands as he raised it to his mouth. In three quick bites he ate half of it. The rest he chucked over his shoulder. Drawing his panga from its leg sheath, he speared a backstrap and settled down to serious work.
It was gamy but good.
It was all good. And the courses kept coming.
Ryan ate like an animal, trying to satisfy a bottomless appetite. Though the food tasted delicious, it had no substance after he swallowed it. He had been eating for what seemed like hours, so long that his jaws ached from the chewing, and still his stomach felt hollow.
He sat in a throne chair on a dais, slightly elevated above the other diners. Beside him on a less ornate chair was his lover and battle mate, Krysty Wroth. The color of her low-cut, emerald-velvet gown matched the color of her eyes, and set off the blaze of her long sentient red hair, which had retracted into a mass of eager coils around her face. Perspiration glazed the silky cleft between her breasts and her cheeks were brightly flushed, consequences of the hall’s sweltering heat.
A wave of dizziness swept over Ryan, and he nearly passed out into his plate. He was so hungry he kept forgetting to breathe between bites. He forced himself to slow down and look up from the food.
The others seated at his table had come a long way to join the party.
From the far side of the grave, to be exact.
Prince Victor Boldt, Baron Nelson Mandeville, Mashashige, Yashimoto, Captain Pyra Quadde, Baron Sean Sharpe, Cissie Torrance, Baron Tourment and Ryan’s misshapen brother, Harvey, had thrown off their shrouds and were again housed in living flesh.
Despite the fact that Ryan had sealed their respective dooms, his old enemies seemed to bear him no grudge. They were in excellent spirits, gorging on the mounded banquet platters and drinking from steaming mugs of high-proof, buttered grog.
At the surrounding tables, through the shifting clouds of smoke, he glimpsed less familiar, but recognizable faces, the cannon fodder of a hundred battles, sec men and mercies who had fallen to his blaster or blade. It was among these triple stupes that the brawl had broken out.
Ryan was still pondering the puzzle of the party’s guest list when Harvey Cawdor got up from his chair. Death, it appeared, had shown him no more mercy than life: Harvey still had the cruelly twisted body he’d been born with. He hoisted his mug high in salute. “Here’s to Ryan Cawdor,” he cried, “the glorious hero of Deathlands!”
Harvey shouted over the cheers. “Considering what he did to each of us, I think one thing’s safe to say—we should have kept an eye out for him.”
The tired joke drew groans and boos. Boldt and Quadde pelted the deformed man with compressed wads of bread and bits of gristle.
“And how about that panga?” Harvey crowed, undeterred. “Sure, long is good when it comes to blades, but isn’t eighteen inches overcompensating for something?” He waggled his pinkie finger at Ryan.
A much better comedic effort.
Encouraged by the coarse laughter of his audience, Harvey climbed to a precarious perch on the seat of his chair. He plunged a hand into his fly and unlimbered himself. “Here’s to brotherhood!” he cried, urinating in a broad arc across the banquet table, spraying and scattering the guests on the other side.
“Judging from Little Harvey there,” Krysty remarked, “your knife must be a yard long.”
Her jibe put the diners over the top. As they howled in glee, they pounded on the table with their fists and the pommels of their knives. Harvey was so amused he fell off his chair.
Penis jokes and golden showers, normally grounds for bloodshed in Ryan’s world, raised no hackles this night. Everybody was having too good a time to take offense. The no-longer-dead hooted and backslapped one another as they reclaimed their places at the table.
Servants brought fresh platters of roasted meats, and long trays of cakes and pies. As everyone got busy, fiddle, squeezebox and drum started up right behind the guest of honor’s throne.
Krysty pointed at a corner of Ryan’s mouth. “You’re dripping,” she told him.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then looked down at a smear of red across his knuckles. Something tickled in the back of his throat, and he sneezed suddenly, and with great force. A gob of bloody matter shot out of his nose and landed on the tablecloth. As he stared at it, the gob fell apart, its minute components wriggling off in all directions. Ryan belched and tasted copper; his head started to spin, then his stomach convulsed. Hunching over, he vomited a shapeless, fluid mass onto his plate. Gray under their sheen of blood, like fibers of steel wool, the squirming wire worms gave off a rotten-egg stench.
Ryan shoved violently back from the table, and looking up, viewed the feast in a new light.
Literally.
The row of torches had ignited the threadbare tapestries, and the walls seethed with flame, brightly illuminating the hall—and its occupants. Seated at his table, and all the other tables were cobwebbed, moldering corpses. He turned to Krysty, and seeing her, let loose a bellow of pain.
A small, hairy-legged spider had built a home between her shriveled breasts. Her hair hung lank and lifeless to her shoulders. Her eyes were closed, and deeply sunken in their sockets, but the skin of her eyelids, face and neck twitched and rippled, animated by the stillbusy parasites beneath.
As Ryan recoiled in shock, the high-pitched notes of the fiddle and squeezebox turned into a shrill, electronic whine, and the drumbeat became an intermittent whipcrack.
He came awake with a hard jerk, gasping for air.
There was none.
He lay curled on an armaglass floor, his throat scorched, a burning pain spearing deep in his lungs, and withering heat beating against his back. Gray smoke, thick with particulate matter, swirled in the small chamber, transected by wild flashes of electricity.
The jump dream had ended but his nightmare continued.
The mat-trans unit was on fire.
Beside him on the floor, he could see the slumping forms of his five companions. As he pushed up from the blistering hot armaglass, his world went dim around the edges—lack of oxygen was shutting down his brain. If he allowed himself to pass out, they would all die, and horribly. A tingling rush of adrenaline brought Ryan to full consciousness.
He had to use his shoulder to crack loose the door of the mat-trans unit, which was stuck in the jamb. It swung open, revealing an anteroom lit by a bank of flickering fluorescent bulbs. Fresh air rushed in around him, feeding the flames. Ryan sucked down a quick breath, then turned back to the blaze and his helpless friends.
He grabbed hold of the nearest arm and dragged its owner’s body over to the portal. The tails of Doc Tanner’s frock coat were smoking as Ryan tumbled him out of the chamber. The lanky old man didn’t move. There was no time to check for a pulse—fire was starting to shoot up along the expansion seams in the armaglass floor.
Ryan gathered Krysty in his arms. Though she was unconscious, her prehensile mutie hair had retracted into the tight ringlets of mortal fear. She moaned as he unceremoniously pitched her out of the doorway.
When Ryan tried to do the same for Jak Lauren, the albino came to in his grasp. Faster than a blink, the wild child of Deathlands had the razor-sharp point of a leaf-bladed knife jammed against the front of Ryan’s throat, his slitted, blood red eyes glittering.
“Jak, it’s me,” Ryan said, giving him a hard shake. “For nuke’s sake, wake up.”
The youth’s eyes widened, and he immediately lowered the blade.
“Come on,” Ryan said as he turned back for the others. “We’ve got to hurry….”
After dragging their two remaining companions over the threshold, he and Jak did the same with all their backpacks. Crossing the chamber was like being caught on an armaglass skillet. Impervious to heat, the unit’s floor plates weren’t burning; it was the material beneath—circuitry, floor joists, insulation—that was on fire. Boot soles melting, Ryan retrieved his predark treasure, a scoped Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle.
Jak staggered out of the mat-trans ahead of him, his lank white hair and ghostly skin peppered with soot. Ryan was relieved to see the rest of his crew, certainly worse for wear, but alive and awake.
Krysty sat on the floor, her long legs drawn up to her chest. She looked dazed, but she wasn’t burned. In the eerie, flickering light, trapped smoke rose like steam from the shoulders and back of her fur coat.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth knelt beside her. The stocky black woman was dressed in an OD jacket, camouflage BDU pants, jungle boots and a sleeveless gray T-shirt. She wore her hair in braided, beaded plaits. On her hip was a Czech ZKR 551 revolver in a pancake holster, the same weapon she had used to win a silver medal in pistol shooting in the last-ever Olympic Games. Shortly after that victory, she had been the victim of complications during surgery, a result of reaction to anesthetic. To save her life, the medical team put her in cryogenic stasis. Less than a month later, when a massive thermonuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union ended civilization, Mildred slept dreamlessly through it. She continued to sleep for another hundred years, until Ryan and the others revived her.
What had gone so terribly wrong on January 20, 2001, was anybody’s guess.
Human error. Machine error. A combination of same.
And the sad truth was, it no longer mattered.
All the people who gave a damn about laying blame had been vaporized The great mistake, once made, was uncorrectable; by its very nature, it could never be repeated. It had destroyed Earth and its potential; it had derailed human history.
While Mildred attended to Krysty, Doc released the catch on his ebony sword stick and unsheathed the rapier blade. Satisfied that it wasn’t damaged, he re-sheathed it and checked his side arm. From a tooled Mexican leather holster, he drew a massive, gold engraved revolver. The two-barreled Le Mat was a Civil War, black powder relic, and the original “room broom.” Beneath a six-and-a-half-inch pistol barrel, hung a second, scattergun barrel, chambered for a single load of “blue whistlers.”
Though Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner appeared to be a well preserved sixty, as with Mildred Wyeth, appearances were deceiving. Chronologically his age was closer to four times sixty. The Harvard- and Oxford-educated Tanner had the distinction of being the first human time traveler, albeit an unwilling one. He had been ripped from the loving bosom of his family in 1896, and drawn one hundred years into the future by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. Doc had spent his brief time in the late 1990s as a prisoner, locked down inside the ultrasecret facility. The jubilation of the twentieth-century scientists over their success was short-lived, thanks to Tanner’s ingratitude, truculence and general unpleasantness. Shortly before skydark, to rid themselves of the troublemaker, and to further test the limits of their experimental technology, they had hurled him forward in time. In so doing, they had inadvertently saved him from the nukecaust.
John Barrymore Dix, his fedora pushed way back on his head, was preoccupied, patting down his coat pockets. Ryan and J.B. had been running buddies since their convoy days with Trader, Deathlands’ legendary freebooter. It was Trader who had given J.B., a weapons specialist of extraordinary talent, the nickname “Armorer.” Finding nothing in his coat, with more urgency J.B. turned to his trousers. When he looked up from the fruitless search, Ryan read the expression behind the smudged, wire-rimmed glasses.
Triple red.
Dropping his Smith & Wesson M-4000, 12-gauge shotgun, J.B. jumped for the mat-trans unit. “Fire in the hole!” he shouted. “Get down!”
As J.B. grabbed the edge of the door, a string of explosions from inside the chamber rocked the room. In the same instant, a volley of buckshot ricocheted out the portal at a steep upward angle, cutting ragged furrows in the acoustic tile ceiling and shattering fluorescent bulbs.
J.B. slammed the door shut, sealing the last of the 12-gauge cook-offs behind armaglass and steel. Over the muffled explosions of the accidentally dropped shells, J.B. cursed a blue streak. He had cause to be upset with himself. In Deathlands, reliable ammo was more valuable than gold.
Even with the door closed, the adjoining walls and ceiling were starting to blister from the heat. Though there were smoke sensors and fire suppression nozzles placed at intervals along the ceiling, the century-old system was inoperative.
Still a bit dazed, Krysty got up from the floor. “What the blazes happened?” she groaned.
Ryan pointed out the deep scoring of tool marks along the door frame. Next to it, a head-size hole in the plaster revealed a mass of melted conduit and charred wiring.
The conclusion was as unmistakable as it was disheartening.
“Somebody’s beaten us here,” Mildred said.
“And when they saw the heavy door,” Ryan added, “they must’ve figured to find sweet pickings on the other side. They couldn’t open it with their pry bars and sledges, so they attacked the wall, looking for another way in. That was a dead end, too.”
J.B. agreed with him. “After the damage was done, the unit just sat there until we showed up,” he said. “The rematerialization power surge short-circuited the system. We were lucky to come through in one piece.”
“One thing is certain,” Doc said as he dusted off the lapels of his frock coat, “the machine has jumped its final cargo. Once again we find ourselves reduced to more primitive means of transportation—namely, our own two feet.”
“The smoke is getting worse in here,” Mildred said. “No telling what kind of toxic fumes we’re inhaling. There could even be a radiation leak if the containment vessel’s been breached. I suggest we take this show on the road before we start glowing in the dark.”
She didn’t have to add that whoever had wrecked the unit could still be lying in wait.
After drawing their weapons and shouldering their packs, the six companions exited the anteroom and control room, then entered the long, doorless corridor that separated the mat-trans unit from the rest of the redoubt. Jak took point, with his lightning reflexes and .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver.
Motion sensors triggered the overhead lights as they rapidly advanced, single file. Some of the fluorescent tubes were missing, some blinked erratically, others just buzzed and snapped. Vandals had caved in the walls in places; chunks of concrete and bits of glass from broken lights crunched underfoot. The dusty floor of the hallway revealed no recent bootprints. The air was as still and stale as a crypt.
The hall ended in an open doorway. As the companions stepped through it, the light banks switched on, revealing a broad, low-ceilinged room. What had once been a communications center had been turned into a debris field of broken glass, plastic and metal, waist-high in places.
At the sight, J.B. muttered a string of obscenities.
He and Ryan had spent most of their adult lives seeking out and pillaging similar predark strongholds. The network of secret installations, complete with stores of food, ammunition, fuel and vehicles, had been built to shelter and support America’s political, military and scientific elite in the case of nuclear war. But the end had come far too quickly for mass evacuations, and the installations were never occupied and used as the builders intended. The quirk of fate had left the redoubts’ caches of matériel and technology waiting, intact, for someone to find.
In this case, discovery was a done deal.
Here and there in the mounds of trash, individual sleeping chambers had been burrowed, then insulated and cushioned with layers of cardboard. In the middle of the room, a four-foot-high berm of trash had been pushed back, exposing an area of the floor and a wide, blackened hole chipped into the concrete. Smoke stained the ceiling above the crude firepit. Ringing the pit were a half-dozen ergonomic chairs missing their wheels and to one side of the hole lay a neat stack of fuel: gray plastic-veneered pressboard from workstations and cubicle dividers hacked into kindling.
Dix knelt and picked up a chunk of charcoal, which he easily crushed to powder. “Nobody’s lived here for years,” he said.
The alcove they found on the far side of the room confirmed that.
Once a lounge for computer operators, its row of vending machines were torn open and gutted, spilling waterfalls of multicolored wire. Shredded candy wrappers and crushed aluminum cans littered the floor. Along the alcove’s opposite wall were eight, molded plastic and tubular steel arm chairs. A large hole had been cut in each of the seats. Though the wastebaskets positioned beneath the chairs contained heaped evidence of their function, it had been so long since anyone had used the communal toilet that no odor remained.
Among the cartoons of sexual organs and acts defacing the alcove’s enameled walls were scattered bits of writing. In addition to the names and erotic interests of people long gone, if not long dead, were some familiar commentaries.
“Science Blows.”
“Jolt Is God.”
“So many muties, so little rope.”
And across the wall in a banner of rusty ink that was most likely blood: “I want to eat your liver.” To Ryan the letters looked like they had been applied with a mop. Or perhaps a neck stump.
Below the graffiti was a postscript so tiny and cramped that he had to lean close to the wall to make it out. It said, “I’m right behind you.”
He didn’t turn and look, of course, but for an instant he thought about it, just as the writer had intended.
With a resounding clunk all the lights went out, plunging the companions into pitch darkness.
From Ryan’s left came the scrape of a chair and shit bucket being kicked over. “By the Three Kennedys!” Doc moaned in dismay.
Heart pounding, Ryan cleared his SIG-Sauer pistol from shoulder leather. If the blackout was a prelude to an ambush, at least they were in a good defensive position, with the closed end of the alcove at their backs. Dropping into a fighting crouch, he let his eye adjust.
After a few seconds he could see the fire’s faint orange glow at the doorway on the other side of the room. He smelled caustic smoke. Then a turbine started to whine on a floor far below them, and the lights came back on, only this time much weaker and with a more pronounced, almost strobelike flicker.
There was no ambush; they were alone.
“There’s no point in our searching the storage levels,” Ryan said as he reholstered his side arm. “This bird’s been picked clean.”
Successful looting of predark caches boiled down to two things: luck and timing. The luck was in finding them, as the redoubts were well-hidden, usually deep underground, often in remote areas. Though the companions’ access to the mat-trans system gave them a big advantage over the competition, it didn’t guarantee piles of booty at the end of the day. Booty required timing; in other words, getting there first. They had faced this disappointment many times before, and they took it in stride, now. Coming up empty-handed was part of the game.
To locate their position in the complex, and find the quickest way out, the companions started searching the adjoining rooms for a copy of the redoubt’s floorplan. They found it in a ransacked office, behind a sheet of Plexiglas screwed into wall. J.B. shattered the plate with his shotgun’s steel butt plate, and Krysty freed the paper map, which laid out and labeled the stronghold’s levels, and all the exits.
From the other side of the room, Mildred called out to the others, “Hey, take a look at this.” She stood before a three-dimensional, injection-molded, plastic relief map that covered a section of wall, almost floor-to-ceiling. Though the map had been defaced and damaged, it was still readable.
“From the lat-lon grid, that must be us,” she said, indicating a small red circle nestled between a pair of desert mesas at the upper left corner. Halfway down the map was the start of a long, diagonal stripe of blue, a stripe that grew wider and wider until it necked down and abruptly stopped, blocked by a narrow white barrier.
The label on the barrier read: Pueblo Canyon Dam and Reservoir.
“I was there on vacation once, about a hundred years ago,” Mildred said.
“A boating holiday?” Doc asked.
“No, it was before the dam was put in,” she said. “I remember there was a big stink over its getting built. The reservoir flooded a small town on the canyon floor, and Native American prehistoric sites along the cliffs were lost. For the right to build the dam, the federal government paid reparations to the Hopi tribe, and there was a land swap, too.
“Not everyone was happy with the amount of money that changed hands, or with the relocation site. Supposedly because of the number of threats, during construction the area for hundreds of square miles was turned into a top security, no-fly zone. Military ground and air units kept out protesters and potential saboteurs. A lot of questions about the Pueblo Canyon project never got answered, such as, why it was necessary in the first place. And why approval for the funding and land trade was rushed through Congress. Once the dam was completed and the reservoir filled up, the fences came down, the military left and the controversy fell off the media radar.”
“What do you make of this?” J.B. asked. He pointed at another red symbol, though smaller, in the middle of the swathe of blue, a short distance from the dam.
“Could be another redoubt,” Ryan said.
“In the middle of the reservoir?” Krysty said.
“Mebbe an island?” Dix suggested.
“Then it’d have to be man-made,” Mildred said. “The canyon is five hundred feet deep at that point.”
“Whatever it is, it’s got a name,” Dix said, leaning closer to read the scratched lettering. “It looks like ‘M-i-n-o-t-a-u-r.’”
“Does that mean anything to anybody?” Krysty asked the others.
A beaming Doc provided the answer, delighted at the opportunity to put his classical education to use. “The name refers to a mythical monster of ancient Greece,” he said. “According to legend, it was the half-human offspring of a great bull and Pasiphae, wife of Minos, the king of Crete. The bull was a gift to the king from the sea god, Poseidon, who wanted Minos to sacrifice it to him. When the king didn’t kill the animal as directed, Poseidon punished him by making his wife fall in love with it. Minos kept the monstrous product of their union, known as the minotaur, and built a maze to contain it. The king exacted tribute from conquered lands in the form of human victims, which he sacrificed to the minotaur. Ultimately, the murderous beast was defeated by the hero Theseus, with the help of Minos’s daughter, Ariadne.”
“Humans can’t make babies with other kinds of animals,” Krysty said.
“Not in the usual way,” Mildred said. “And not in ancient Crete. But in a test tube, late twentieth century, with gene-splicing techniques…”
With another loud clunk the light banks failed again, and again the companions found themselves surrounded by blackness.
Two minutes passed, then five, while they waited with weapons drawn. This time the lights didn’t come back on.
After igniting the torches they pulled from their packs, the companions followed the predark map, which turned out to be full of blind alleys. Most of the exit stairwells were blocked by floor-to-ceiling avalanches of concrete and steel. From the structural damage to the floors above, it was clear something disastrous had happened. The higher they climbed, the greater the destruction. Though they were only eight levels underground, it took them close to an hour to reach the surface. And in the end, they had to track the looters’ route through the air ducts.
Standing outside in daylight, they could see why they had been beaten to the treasure trove. The redoubt’s secret entrance had been uncovered by a massive landslide, which had tumbled house-sized blocks of sandstone onto the desert valley. There was no way of telling if the earthquake had been natural, or caused by the shock wave of a distant nuclear strike.
Ryan shielded his eye from the sun’s brutal glare, surveying a landscape of pale brown mesa and pancake-flat plain shimmering in 120-degree, midday heat. For as far as he could see in every direction, it was just rocks and sand. Sand and rocks.
“Dear friends, I fear Judgment Day is upon us at last,” Doc remarked. “Our myriad sins have finally landed us in the pit of hell.”
“Or on the moon,” Mildred added.
Krysty knelt in the shade cast by a fallen sandstone block. From a crevice at the base of the rock, she plucked a withered scrap of plant. The delicate white petals broke off in her fingers; the yellow center fell to fine dust on her palm. If Deathlands’s brave little daisy was a testament to adaptability and survival in the most hostile of environments, it was also a canary in a coal mine. “If we stay here long, we’ll die,” Krysty said.
Jak squinted into the glare. “Go that way,” he said, pointing south across the desolation.
“Can’t miss the reservoir if we walk in that direction,” J.B. agreed.
“Too hot to break trail, now,” Ryan said. “We’ll start after sunset. Check your canteens. Whatever water we’ve got, it has to last until we get there.”
Chapter Two
Shielding his nose and mouth with his hand, Ewald Starr held the torch at arm’s length. Firelight danced over the corpse’s blackened rib stubs and caved-in breastbone, over a skull cratered from forehead to lower jaw. One leg was missing all the way to the hip. The body cavity had been plundered of its organs; the bones stripped of flesh and left mired in a sticky-looking, yellowish puddle. The fluid had splattered low across the corridor’s concrete wall.
Whatever the yellow stuff was, it stank, thermonuclear.
A combination of bearpit, toxic chemical spill and rotting meat.
In the close quarters of Pueblo Dam’s service hallway, the rank odor hung like an acid fog.
Ewald listened hard, but all he could hear was the chorus of hissing torches—the greasy black smoke they gave off billowed along the low, pipe-lined ceiling, driven by a steady, gentle breeze.
Three other men stood with their backs against the opposite wall, faces pale and pained, torches clutched in trembling hands. Paralyzed.
Ewald scowled at them.
Fear was the enemy.
The preamble to defeat.
Tall and dark-skinned, he wore his waist-long black hair woven into a thick braid and coiled on top of his head. This rat’s nest was held in place with a pin contraption made of twists of bailing wire. A spiral of decorative branding encircled his chin, creating an angry, welted goatee. The scars of healed blade slashes and bullet wounds on his massive forearms, bare chest, and neck were lost amid larger masses of discoloration, signs of his having survived prolonged torture and punishment by burning and whipping.
Ewald hunkered down next to the body, holding his breath against the caustic fumes. The victim’s clothing was a wadded mass of wet rags at the foot of the wall. Examining the jutting hip bones more carefully, he saw that when the missing right leg had been severed, a corner of the pelvis and the entire hip socket had been cut away. The clean, down-angled slice looked like a sword or ax strike. It took a hell of a sharp blade to do something like that. A hell of a powerful swordsman, too. As to what all the nasty yellow goo was, or where it had come from, he had no clue.
When he straightened, something glinted at him from the tangled rags. A single, spent, centerfire shell casing.
“Here, take this,” Ewald said, passing his torch to the closest man. The whip-lean graybeard named Tolliver accepted the burden, his rheumy gaze never shifting from the mess on the floor.
“Give me your shirt,” Ewald said to the big man standing on Tolliver’s right.
Though they were the almost same height and weight, where Ewald was all muscle, Dunbar was all flab—a slope-shouldered blob. This morning’s sudden, shocking reversal of fortune had silenced his constant, annoying chatter. Meekly obeying Ewald’s command, he stripped off his tent-sized, desert camo BDU shirt. His pasty white skin hung in loose, floppy rolls around his waist, like a suit of clothes three sizes too big.
Wrapping his hand in a corner of the garment, Ewald carefully shifted the remains. The skeleton came apart at his touch, ribs and spinal column separating. As he started lifting and tossing the loose bones aside, he saw that they sat in a shallow depression in the concrete, a depression concealed by the elongated puddle that filled it. Under the broken sternum lay a stamped steel prize.
When Ewald fished out the Uzi subgun, its fixed wooden butt and forestock sloughed off the frame like so much soggy cardboard. The plastic pistol grip seemed undamaged. He shook slime from the barrel, then mopped the weapon clean with Dunbar’s shirt. The blueing had been stripped from the metal, its surface left faintly pitted.
Ewald pulled back on the cocking knob. The action stuck for a second, then came free, ejecting an unfired, 9 mm cartridge that skittered across the floor. He detached the staggered row, stick mag from the butt of the grip and did a round count. Including the ejected bullet, there were twenty-nine Parabellum bullets left in the clip. He unloaded the mag, wiping down and checking each round for corrosion. Before he slapped the reloaded clip back in place, he locked the action open and looked down the barrel. In the torch light he could see pits but no obstructions or cracks. He dry-fired the Uzi, and the pin snapped crisply.
The sound startled the man on Tolliver’s left, making his narrow shoulders jerk. Willjay was still in his teens, tall, gangly, with a skanky mop of brown dreadlocks. From his expression, he was on the verge of bawling for his mother. Something that Tolliver and Dunbar, preoccupied with their own self-pity, failed to notice.
The dimmie trio had been part of a convoy that had tried to cross the great desert from the south. Tried and failed. One after another, their wags had broken down. And when the last wag gave up the ghost, they’d abandoned their possessions and started walking. Two dozen of them. In a few days the food ran out, then the water. After that, the heat quickly took its toll.
Tolliver, Dunbar and Willjay, the convoy’s sole survivors, thought they’d found the Promised Land when they’d accidently stumbled onto the canyon.
As had Ewald Starr, when he showed up two days later, fresh from his own ordeal to the northwest.
Ever the wolf among sheep, Ewald had wide experience in scheming and backstabbing—and in murder for profit. In this case the sheep wore ankle-length, homespun robes the color of scorched porridge. From the moment he saw the triple stupe grins of the canyon’s permanent residents, he figured he’d own the place in a couple of weeks, tops. All he needed was a few like-minded individuals to help with the initial round of wet work. Once he had things well in hand, he’d make sex slaves of the suitable women and men, and field slaves of the rest.
All hail Baron Ewald Starr.
Caught up in the potential of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, there was no denying he had let his guard slip. Not that his customary vigilance would have guaranteed a different outcome. Pilgrim Plavik and his flock kept their plans well-concealed. Ewald had seen no weapons, other than hoes and shovels, until that morning. Rudely awakened by his hosts, he stared into their massed gunbarrels, and was relieved of his own. Escape was impossible. When they marched him outside into the street, he saw that the other three travelers had been likewise overwhelmed and disarmed.
Protests and demands for an explanation fell on deaf ears.
The entire ville turned out for the procession, men, women, children, all grinning and chanting nonsense while the pilgrim himself led the way to the top of the dam. With blaster muzzles pressed to their heads, Ewald and the others had been forced through an open manhole, and onto a series of rungs set in the wall, rungs leading down into impenetrable gloom. As they clung there for dear life, lit torches were tossed in, then the manhole cover slid shut, and the light from above went out.
Honored guests had become prisoners in a vast, concrete dungeon.
And the bad news was just beginning.
The man or woman whose bones littered the corridor had fired just one shot in self-defense—a single shot from a machine pistol capable of firing 600 rounds a minute-before being almost cut in two.
“Whatever chilled that one,” Tolliver said in a shaky voice, “it was something triple-mean.”
“Something mutie…” Dunbar whispered.
Ewald Starr knew all about muties. Over the years, he’d slaughtered the two-legged, homicidal freaks in face-to-face battle, in ambush, as a mercie, as a sec man. And whenever ammo was plentiful, he’d hunted them for sport. Stickies, scalies, cannies, stumpies—nukeday’s genetic horrorshow—were no match for a functioning Uzi in the hands of a professional chiller.
“We’re gonna die in here,” Willjay moaned. “We’re all gonna die!”
Before the teenager’s panic could contaminate the other two, Ewald racked a round and snarled, “Dead bastard couldn’t shoot straight.” Weapon ready to rip, he glared at the boy. Willjay caught his meaning and shut up quick, a decision that saved his life.
“But what’re we gonna do?” Tolliver asked the dark-skinned man. “How’re we gonna get out of here?”
“It’s simple,” Ewald told him. “We work our way down to the bottom of the dam. There should be an opening on the spillway side.”
“And if there isn’t?” Tolliver said.
“Then we’ll nukin’ make one. Follow me, and make sure you all stay close.”
Ewald didn’t want tight ranks because he gave a radblast about their safety. The way he saw he it, the more baitfish there were in a school, the better the odds of being the one that didn’t get eaten.
Halfway along the gritty, weeping hallway he found the door to a stairwell. When he opened it, the stench drove them back on their heels.
“Nuke shit!” Tolliver groaned, clapping a hand over his nose and mouth.
“More deaduns down there,” Dunbar said. “Stairs could be some kind of a trap.”
“Yeah, but it’s the fastest way out of here,” Ewald said. “Mebbe the only way out of here. You got a better idea? Mebbe you want to spend some time exploring the nooks and crannies of this place?”
Dunbar shook his head so hard his belly flab trembled. They all shook their heads.
“Then let’s do it,” the ex-mercie said.
With Ewald on point, they carefully descended the stairs in close formation. The light from their torches didn’t penetrate far, and with every step, the odor of death grew more intense.
Two floors down they discovered its source. On the concrete landing lay the eroded remains of several corpses, their burned-out torches, and a pool of yellow bile. Tolliver scooped up a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun that had either been dropped or thrown clear of the puddle. When he broke open the 12-gauge, its ejectors flipped out empty plastic hulls.
Ewald had already figured as much. On the facing wall were two, foot-wide, buckshot blast craters. One stood at belly height; the other was ten feet above it. There was no blood spatter in or around either of the craters. The shotgunner had missed twice at point blank range. Ewald guessed that either the second shot had been fired wild in the air, or the intended target was clinging to the wall up there. Stickies had suckers on their palms and feet; they liked to drop on unsuspecting victims. That didn’t explain the sword slice—stickies didn’t use weapons as a rule, preferring to tear their prey apart with their bare hands. Nor did it explain the goo.
A quick survey of the landing turned up a pair of black-powder revolvers submerged among the jumble of human bones. The Italian-made, Civil War replicas were useless; their loaded cylinders had reacted with the fluid, turning into crumbling masses of corrosion. There was no ammo for the scattergun, but Tolliver hung on to it, anyway—a club was better than no weapon at all.
On the steps below, their torches revealed still more bodies. These stripped skeletons lay on their stomachs. They’d died trying to crawl up the stairs. Without legs.
As Ewald started down, there was a distinct clicking sound. A metallic, ratcheting noise that came from the stairwell far below. At first rapidfire, it slowed, then stopped.
Though the sound lasted less than five seconds, it made a knot form in the mutie hunter’s gut. Stickies sometimes made soft kissing sounds before they attacked, but they never, ever clicked.
“Wh-wh-what was that?” Willjay said.
“Shut up and listen!” Ewald growled.
But there was only silence.
After a few moments Dunbar spoke up. “Could just be a busted ventilation fan down there somewhere,” he said. “Breeze might be turning the blades, making them hit something…”
The noise started again, echoing up the stairwell. Only this time, there was a definite pattern. Six quick clicks, each rising in pitch. A pause, then repeat. The hairs on the back of Ewald’s neck stood upright.
It wasn’t a stickie, and it wasn’t a busted vent fan, either, because the sounds were getting louder by the second. Whatever it was, it was coming at them.
And fast.
At his feet lay incontrovertible proof that the stairwell was a piss-poor place to make a stand. “Run!” Ewald shouted as he turned and vaulted back to the landing.
He hit the exit door and the others followed, sprinting for their lives down the pitchdark service hallway. Over the slap of bootsoles on concrete, Ewald strained to hear the stairwell door banging open behind them.
The bang didn’t come.
Ewald stopped around a bend in the corridor, and waited there for the others to catch up. If it hadn’t been for the smell, he might have missed seeing the breach in the opposite wall. Yellow fluid seeped from the bottom of a gash in the concrete three feet high, and three feet wide at the middle.
“What in blazes have you got there?” Tolliver said as he and Willjay hurried up to him.
Ewald couldn’t hazard a guess.
As Dunbar joined them, puffing hard, his face and folds of fat glazed with sweat, Ewald approached the opening from the side, this to avoid tracking through the puddle on the floor. He bent close with the torch. For as far as he could see, which was only five or six feet into the gash, yellow slime greased the walls. He used the butt of the torch to carefully poke at the sides of the hole. The edge of the concrete was soft, mushy even. Under pressure, it oozed like paste.
He’d never seen or heard of anything like it.
Without warning a gust of air blasted from the opening. The concussive force blew out his torch and turned the yellow fluid into mist. He felt the wetness on his fingers a split second before the pain hit. Galvanic pain, head to toe, like he’d thrust his arm into a caldron of boiling water.
As Ewald screamed and spun away, from deep inside the walls of the dam came a frantic scraping, scrabbling sound.
The burrow was a tight fit.
Chapter Three
The smooth pebble clicked against Ryan’s teeth as he shifted it from one cheek to the other. The steady rasp of his breathing matched the scrape of his boot soles on the desert hardpan. He moved in an almost effortless, economical glide, the stride of a man used to walking long distances over broken terrain. Overhead the pale violet sky was cloudless, the last visible stars rapidly fading. On the horizon to his left hung an orange half-disk of sun. A dawn wind shrieked across the ancient plain in buffeting gusts that peppered his face with grit.
It was already hot.
Soon to get hotter.
For the third night in a row, he and his companions had marched, dusk until dawn, by the light of the moon. Not their standard operating procedure by any means. Under more normal circumstances, they would have stopped in a likely spot well before sunset, set up a defensive perimeter and a guard rotation, and then hunkered down with their weapons close to hand until daybreak. Travel in Deathlands was always dangerous, but the nights were the worst time to be on the move; that’s when the big predators came out, the solo chillers and the pack hunters, human and otherwise. In this case, because of the heat, the distance they had to cross and their limited supply of water, they had to take the risk.
No predators had shown themselves, so far, which led Ryan to conclude that there weren’t any. To survive and breed, predators needed a dependable supply of victims. There was nothing in this hell-blasted landscape for large carnivores to hunt.
The uptilted plain of beige gulleys and boulder outcrops seemed to go on forever, to the curve of the world, and beyond. There was no sign of a sizeable body of water ahead. No great crack in the earth, either. As the sun broke free of the horizon, it was like the door of a blast furnace swinging open. In seconds the air temperature jumped twenty degrees.
Ryan glanced over his shoulder. Behind him, Doc, J.B., Mildred, Krysty and Jak still appeared in good shape. Their emergency food had run out the previous day. They had shared the last, tepid sips from their canteens hours ago. Like Ryan, they were all sucking on small stones to quiet their thirsts. The companions were a battle-hardened crew, but even they had their limits. As the morning’s heat increased, to conserve their strength and bodily fluids, the rest stops had to come more frequently.
The one-eyed man called a temporary halt to the march, waving the others down behind the shelter of a big boulder. Krysty, Mildred, Doc and Dix sat with their backs pressed against the base of the rock, in the lee of the wind, out of the sun for the moment. Soon they would have to stop for the day. If they couldn’t find permanent shade, they’d have to create it.
Jak didn’t sit down and rest with the others. He paused only long enough to nod at Ryan before he loped away, his lank white hair flying around his shoulders. He continued in the same direction they were headed, doing a recce. Ryan had known the albino youth for a very long time, but seeing him run like that after a brutal, all-night march, still brought a smile to his lips. Jak was the hardest of the hard, a true wild child of the hellscape.
“How far do you think we’ve come?” Mildred asked.
“Plenty far enough if you ask me,” J.B. said as he wiped the caked dirt from his glasses with his shirttail. “We should be able to see it by now.”
“Mebbe, mebbe not,” Ryan countered. “This end of the canyon looked damned narrow on the map. The way the ground is tipped up, we might not see it until we’re right on top of it.”
“But we’ve got to be close,” Krysty said. “We’ve got to be….”
“I find it distinctly odd that there is nothing green before us,” Doc remarked. “Odd and importune.”
It was an absence they’d all noticed.
Water in the desert meant an oasis, densely clustered weeds, shrubs, trees taking advantage of the scarce resource, a green stripe cutting through the panorama of sunblasted beige.
A green stripe that wasn’t there.
They sat in silence in the shade, sucking on their pebbles, regathering their strength, asking themselves the same questions. How much farther could they go without water? How many more days could they last? How badly would it hurt when the end came?
When Jak returned from the recce, his bloodred eyes revealed no joy, no sadness. Nothing.
“Well?” Ryan asked him.
“Canyon ahead, quarter mile,” Jak replied.
“Good work! Let’s go, then,” Ryan said, rising to his feet.
Jak caught his arm. “No water,” he said.
A two-word death sentence.
“What do you mean no water!” Mildred exclaimed.
Jak shrugged at her. His only response was, “Come, look.”
After they had advanced another hundred yards, the edge of the canyon came into view, a dark line across the ground that grew broader as they approached. It was the far wall of the fissure dropping away sheer. To the southeast, for as far as they could see, an ever-widening gash divided the hammered plain.
When they reached the canyon’s near rim, they looked down a hundred-foot drop.
“Radblast!” J.B. said.
There was no reservoir. No river flowing at the canyon bottom. No plants. As Jak had said, no water.
Only dirt and rock.
“This has to be it,” Ryan said. “The distance is right. The size is right. And the map only showed one canyon.”
“Mebbe the water didn’t back up this far,” Krysty suggested.
“Or the reservoir has been drawn down considerably since Armageddon,” Doc commented.
“It’s also possible that the dam’s been breached,” Mildred said. “And that either the river’s dried up, or it’s running deep underground.”
Tipping his hat brim to block the glare of the sun, J.B. looked down the gorge, in the direction of the dam. “The water might still be there,” he said. “Below our line of sight in the canyon bottom.”
“Even if the river has dried up,” Mildred added, “low spots in the bed could hold standing pools. The deepest part of a reservoir is usually at the base of its dam. Even if the dam’s broken, there could still be plenty of water trapped in front of it.”
“Our best hope for finding water is the canyon,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to follow it. We’d better get moving. Cover as much ground as we can before the sun gets high.”
There was no discussion about whether to descend to the canyon floor; in fact the subject didn’t even come up. Although walking along the rim was a much longer trek because of the short side canyons they had to skirt, it was also the high ground, and that gave them a tactical advantage. They couldn’t be pinned down and ambushed on the rim.
About a half mile down-canyon, they came to a wide, flat spot that had been cleared of rocks. They would have walked right past it if Mildred hadn’t spoken up. “Hey, wait a minute,” she said. “We’ve got ourselves a field here. A cultivated field.”
Doc stared at the empty patch of dirt bounded by boulders and said, “Not in recent memory, my dear.”
Mildred corrected herself. “The field is a remnant of prehistoric agriculture,” she said. “A thousand years ago the local cliff dwellers grew crops on top of these canyons in plots just like that. There should be a path somewhere around here down to their cave….”
“There,” Jak said, pointing out a shiny, shallow groove worn in the bedrock. It led away, to the apex of the side canyon ahead.
“This is important?” Krysty asked.
“Storage wells,” Mildred told her. “All the ancient settlements had them. The residents hauled water up from the river and stored it in stone cisterns in their caves. They also built catch basins and channels that fed rainwater from the plain down to their wells. These cisterns were always covered and in shade. There could be some water left from the last rain, whenever that was.” She paused, then said, “I know it’s a long shot…”
“Worth a look, anyway,” Ryan said.
The prehistoric path ended at the cliff edge. The companions stared down at a steep, rubble-filled chute. The scree of large rocks had been tossed from above, forming crude steps, which turned around a bend fifty feet below and vanished from sight. Ryan and the others carefully descended, as the loose rocks shifted under their weight. Around the blind corner a sandstone ledge jutted from the canyon wall. They followed the narrow walkway along the face of the overhanging cliff. It was a long, straight drop to the bottom, at least two hundred feet. The ledge led them to a broad, shallow cave with a towering, arched ceiling.
The cliff dweller ruins were barely recognizable as such. From their deteriorated condition, it was obvious that the reservoir had covered them at one time. The sun-dried bricks had melted, the two- and three-story structures had collapsed. Mud-and-stick pueblos weren’t designed to be submerged and then subjected to wave action. When the dammed waters had retreated, they had done so with enough force to wash away the stone foundations of the buildings closest to the ledge.
The covered cistern lay at the back of the cave, where the ceiling sloped down to meet the floor—a wide, circular, five-foot-deep pit, lined with flat, tightly fitted stones. At the bottom of the well, spread across its lowest corner, was about a gallon of liquid.
Brown liquid.
Ryan hopped down into the pit and put a finger in it.
It was thick. Slimy between his fingers. It didn’t smell bad, though.
“We’re going to have to boil the hell out of that stuff before we try to drink it,” Mildred said.
Ryan looked up at J.B. and said, “Better start scrounging up some wood for a fire.”
J.B., Doc and Jak immediately set about kicking apart a surviving, thirteenth century mud-daub wall, this to pull out the mat of dry sticks that reinforced it. Anasazi rebar.
Mildred and Krysty joined Ryan in the bottom of the cistern. The three of them got down on their knees and sopped up the precious moisture with rags, then carefully squeezed it, drop by drop into their battered tin cookpot. Before trying to boil the mess, they filtered it through several layers of clean fabric. This removed the bigger chunks, but it was still brown, still thick.
The water of last resort.
While it bubbled and frothed in the pot, the companions moved to the edge of the ledge and took in the spectacular view.
“The people who lived up here must’ve thought they ruled the world,” Mildred said. “They built. They farmed. They stored for hard times. They prospered. And now there’s nothing left. Not even ghosts. It makes me think of that sad, sad poem…I forget the title.”
“You are referring to ‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley, I believe,” Doc said. “Words found inscribed among decaying ruins, buried in drifting sands.”
“‘Science Blows,’” Ryan said, quoting the ubiquitous Deathlands’ craphouse graffito.
“Bravo,” Doc said with a smile. “You have it precisely, dear Ryan. It is nothing less than the paradigm of human existence, forever blinded by our pride, and victims of the inexorable march of time.”
“Over there!” J.B. exclaimed, pointing up at the sky.
They all turned to look.
The buzzards, perhaps thirty of them in all, were mere specs in the distance down-canyon. Circling in a slow spiral at three thousand feet, the carrion birds became visible, one by one, as they turned and were momentarily sidelit by the sun.
“Something’s below them, for sure,” J.B. said to Ryan.
“From the height they’re flying,” the one-eyed man replied, “something not quite dead enough.”
His speculation was punctuated by the crack of a single gunshot, its echo rolling up the canyon.
The flat, unmistakable report of a shotgun.
“That boil is going to have to do,” Ryan said. “Fill up the canteens and kick out the fire. Let’s move!”
After scrambling back to the canyon rim, Ryan led the others at a full-out trot, despite the building heat and the now dead still air. Out of food, and on scant rations of barely potable water, the companions absorbed this new punishment without complaint. The buzzards weren’t a good sign, but at least one person was alive. If they waited until evening to investigate, they might never catch up to whoever had fired the shot. And that could mean the difference between life and a very unpleasant death.
As Ryan ran, he kept his eye on the flock of buzzards, watching them slowly descend from altitude, then spiral down into the canyon, out of sight. He marked the spot ahead where they disappeared. There was no more gunfire. The shooter was either out of ammo, or out of luck.
It took five minutes to close the gap. The canyon beside them had grown much wider, if not deeper. It was impossible to miss the vultures against the beige of the dirt and rock—black feathers, seven-foot wingspans, angry red heads. A mob of them, fighting over the spoils. Ryan flipped up the lens covers on his telescopic sight and scanned the crude campsite. He counted four sets of human legs half-hidden under the flapping wings and snapping beaks. Legs that were kicking, shuddering amid the frenzy.
“All dead?” Mildred asked.
“Let’s find out,” Ryan said. He tucked the Steyr tight to his shoulder and squeezed off a 7.62 mm round.
The bolt gun bucked hard and downrange, a lone buzzard exploded in a puff of blood and dark feathers. As the loose bag of bones tumbled to the ground, the other birds abandoned their feeding positions. Squawking, flapping, they hopped to the safety of nearby rocks.
Ryan surveyed the now-still human forms through the scope, then said, “Yep, they’re all dead.”
“Shooter must’ve taken off,” J.B. said.
“Can’t tell from up here,” Ryan said. He handed the Steyr to his friend. “Jak and me are going to go have a look-see. Watch our backs.”
They found and followed a narrow chimney of rock that led to the canyon floor and the gruesome campsite. Four of the bodies were clustered together; the fifth lay a short distance away.
“Been dead awhile,” Jak remarked of the four.
Because of the heat, it was hard to say how long. The torsos and limbs were swollen up like balloons with the gases of decay. Two of the bodies that lay on their backs had actually burst open, exposing sun-shriveled, sun-blackened guts. The buzzards had stripped the flesh from all four of the faces. Red, eyeless skulls poked out from fringes of hair and sagging skin. It was impossible to tell what they’d died from.
With no hint of breeze to shift the overpowering stench, it took a supreme effort of will not to turn away. That stink had ridden the canyon thermals, soaring high, spreading far and wide, attracting carrion feeders for hundreds of miles.
As Ryan and Jak moved to look at the fifth body, the big birds shifted their perches on the surrounding boulders. Brooding, watching, wary, waiting their chance to resume the feast.
“This one’s fresh,” Jak said.
The last dead man lay on his side in the dirt. So far he had been left alone by the vultures. They preferred their meat aged to the point of liquefaction.
It was the shooter, no doubt about it.
Ryan picked up the shotgun. It was a single shot, top break, 12-gauge with an exposed hammer. Cheap, long-barreled gun. Mass produced in the hundreds of thousands in the century before Armageddon. He tried the break lever; it moved, but the breech wouldn’t open because it had been crudely welded shut. Somebody had converted the weapon from centerfire to black-powder muzzleloader. Not an unusual modification in Deathlands, where black powder was easier to find than cased ammunition. Ryan sniffed the barrel. It had been recently fired.
With devastating effect.
The dead man had put muzzle under his chin and then depressed the trigger. There was a stick on the ground beside his hand. He might have used it to get the necessary extra reach. His head was a mass of powder-scorched ruination. The front of his face gone from chin to midcranium, his brain pan emptied. The hollow glistened.
Ryan and Jak did a quick survey of the gear that lay scattered around the site. They found a few meager valuables. Battered black-powder weapons, skinning knives sharpened down to slivers, cooking utensils, empty canvas packs. The bodies hadn’t been stripped of clothing and boots. There was the remains of a firepit, but no food scraps among the ashes. No food, period. Of course, they could’ve eaten it all before they got this far.
The one-eyed man scratched the black stubble on his chin. What’s missing? he asked himself. The answer came to him at once. Canteens. There were no containers, nothing to hold water.
“Something triple ugly happened here,” Ryan said. “No one tries to cross the desert without something to carry water in.”
“Footprints go that way,” Jak said, pointing in the direction of the dam. “One set. Big feet. Deep marks. Short steps. Heavy load.”
Ryan nodded. “Blackheart son of a bitch took all their water and ran. They chased him until they dropped.”
Jak knelt over the footprints in the powdery dust. The wind had eroded them. “Two, maybe three days old,” he said.
“That doesn’t mean he’s got a full, three-day lead on us,” Ryan said. “The load he’s carrying had to have slowed him down. He probably stopped to rest, figuring these fools were done for.”
“Catch chiller, take water,” Jak said.
Ryan nodded.
The albino didn’t have to add, “Leave the thieving bastard to die.” That was a given. Rough justice was the only justice in Deathlands.
The dead men’s gear wasn’t worth the trouble to lug it away. Ryan and Jak took the time to drag the suicide over to a nearby undercut in the dry river bank. They rolled him into the shallow notch, then kicked the soil down on top of him. They didn’t try to move the other bodies. The corpses would have just fallen apart, and there was always the chance of contagion from rotting flesh.
As Ryan and Jak started back up the rock chimney, the shrieking and squabbling of the vultures resumed.
Chapter Four
The extinguished torch dropped from Ewald Starr’s shock-stiffened fingers. Pain squeezed him like a giant fist, making every muscle bulge, every sinew strain to the snapping point.
Unmasterable pain.
As he screamed and hopped in the dancing half light, a torrent of humid air poured from the gash, driven forth by whatever was coming. The scent that rode that evil wind triggered something deep in his brain, something primal. An unfamiliar taste, metallic and sour, flooded his mouth. The taste of panic. And of imminent, crushing defeat.
Worse suffering was on its way.
Much, much worse.
Ewald shoved Tolliver and his lit torch ahead of him. “Go!” he shrieked. “Go!!”
The direction didn’t matter. To stand still was to die.
The four of them raced away, running blindly into the black maw of the corridor. Dunbar couldn’t maintain the pace for more than a few yards before falling behind. Bringing up the rear, with nothing between him and whatever it was, his grunting turned frantic.
Ewald, Tolliver and Willjay didn’t look back.
When the clicking started again, rattling down the hallway after them, a distant, desperate Dunbar cried out, “Help me! Help me!”
They didn’t stop; in fact, they somehow found the strength to run faster. And Ewald wasn’t the only one praying for it to take Dunbar. To take him and choke.
A cowardly prayer, promptly answered.
Dunbar’s screech lasted only a second before it cut off. The clicking quadruple-timed, doubled that, doubled it again, climbing in volume and pitch, a triumphant roar that ended a horrible crescendo of wretching.
Ewald knew there was no guarantee that the thing would be satisfied with Dunbar, that it wouldn’t pursue and chill them one by one. Like the stairwell, the hallway was a kill zone; they had to get out of it, and quick. Over Tolliver’s right shoulder, Ewald saw a double doorway. “In there!” he cried.
They burst through the heavy metal doors and onto a short concrete landing that overlooked a room so broad and so cavernous they couldn’t see the far side of it. Overhead, the undersides of steel I-beam trusses and buttresses were dimly visible. The network of their upper surfaces and the ceiling were beyond the reach of torch light. Smell of death was like a sledgehammer pounding inside Ewald’s head.
“Man, look at your arm!” Tolliver said. “You’re hurt triple bad.”
Ewald’s right arm had ballooned up to nearly twice its normal size and turned black, but it no longer pained him. He couldn’t move his grossly swollen fingers, and he couldn’t bend or raise the arm. Hanging straight down from his shoulder, it felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. When he tested his forearm with a fingertip there was no sensation, and the spongy flesh didn’t spring back. The pressure left a deep dent and split the skin, like it was already dead meat. For a second Ewald thought he was going to puke.
“You better give me that blaster,” Tolliver told him. “You’re in no shape to use it.”
Ewald grimaced at the graybeard’s shaking hands. No way could Tolliver aim the Uzi. He probably couldn’t even fire it. Not that the ex-mercie would have willingly surrendered his weapon, anyway.
“Don’t worry about me,” Ewald said. “I can shoot lefty just fine. We’ve got to keep moving. Got to find another way down.”
The landing’s short flight of steps led to a polished concrete floor. Beyond the hazy circle of light cast by the torches it was pitch black. At Ewald’s direction, they turned and speedwalked in a straight line until they reached a wall. From the floor to a height of about seven feet, it was lined with narrow, sheet metal enclosures, control panel after control panel with LCD readouts, gauges, warning lights, and thousands upon thousands of exposed switches and terminals. All dead.
As they followed the wall, to their right, out on the floor, a low, hulking cylindrical shape came into view. The twenty-foot-wide, machined steel housing sat in a matching circular depression in the concrete. Ahead, there were more of the dam’s generator turbines. One after another they squatted, stretching off into the darkness.
Around the silent machines were scattered bodies. A litter of corpses in random piles and puddles, in varying states of decomposition. The vast generator room was both slaughterhouse and dumping ground.
A kill zone even less defensible than the stairwell and hallway.
“Move it! Move it!” Ewald said, pushing the others to a trot.
They didn’t get far.
When the clicking began, it seemed to come from everywhere at once, from the gridwork of I-beams above and the far corners of the immense room. The hall’s infuriating echo made it impossible to tell how many there were, or which way to run.
“Shoot ’em!” Willjay cried. “Why don’t you shoot ’em?”
Something moved out of the shadows at the edge of the torchlight. It moved past Ewald at chest height so quickly he couldn’t raise the machine pistol, let alone track the target. He glimpsed a blur of brown, and got the impression of a sleek, banded body. Many legs. Powerful, jointed legs. There was a scraping sound, but the bright flash of sword he was anticipating never came. The blur bounded high in the air. He thought he saw a turned-up butt, like a deer’s, an instant before it vanished into the blackness ahead.
Then something warm and wet splashed his good arm.
As Ewald turned, Tolliver’s torch dropped to the floor. Sheets of blood poured out from under the man’s beard. He staggered, slamming back against the control panels, and upon impact his head fell off. It didn’t roll away, like the guttering torch. It flopped to one side, toppling from his cleanly sliced neck, and hung there upside down, connected to his body by a strip of skin. Tolliver’s legs gave way, and a blood waterfall became a blood fountain.
Even though he couldn’t see anything to shoot at, Ewald cut loose with a burst of autofire. In the strobe light of muzzle-flashes, slugs sparked off the generator housings, and the ricochets zipped around the room.
“Other way!” he shouted in Willjay’s face.
Reversing course, they sprinted along the wall. Ewald didn’t want to return to the hallway, but he had no choice. He had given up trying to find a quick way out. All he wanted now was cover. Some kind of cover.
They found another metal door fifty yards down the corridor. It was unlocked. Ewald and Willjay stepped into a narrow, low-ceilinged room crammed with with tall metal storage cabinets and open frame shelves. It looked safe enough. The exposed walls were free of weeping holes. They slammed the door and pushed shelves in front of it.
“What’re we gonna do?” Willjay sobbed. The teenager had pissed himself. The insides of both trouser legs were dark, from crotch to cuff.
“Let me think,” Ewald said. “Just shut up and let me think.”
Then he made the mistake of looking down at his arm. And his brain vapor-locked. The heaviest muscles—deltoid, tricep, bicep—had begun to slough off the bones, like overcooked meat. Where his fingertips had been, red bone peeked through.
A sudden, frantic, scrabbling noise made him forget all about his ruined arm.
“Where’s it coming from?” Willjay shouted, looking wildly around the room.
Walls, ceiling, floor, Ewald couldn’t locate the source. But it was close. It was very close.
One of the cabinets behind Willjay shuddered, tipping forward, then crashed to the floor. Ewald blinked and the boy was gone.
Gone.
His torch lay on the floor.
Above the toppled cabinet was a gash in the wall.
Ewald lunged for the hole, the Uzi up and ready in his fist. He saw the boy’s face a split second before he disappeared around a bend in the burrow. A face blanched white with fear. Elbows wedged against the slimy walls, fingers desperately, futilely clawing.
Ewald thrust the muzzle forward and pinned the trigger, firing full-auto until the weapon locked back empty. Gunsmoke filled the gash; his ears were ringing. He couldn’t tell if he’d shot through Willjay and hit whatever had snatched him away. Tossing the Uzi aside, Ewald turned his full attention to the barricade. After he cleared the door and opened it, he bent to pick up the boy’s torch.
As he straightened, the thing climbed out of the hole, head first, uninjured, and in no apparent hurry.
It wasn’t like any mutie he had ever seen.
It had a crop of thick, bristling hairs, like spikes on top of its broad, flat skull. Its widespread eyes were solid black and huge. When it rose from a crouch, he saw the banded segments of its abdomen. It had six legs. The top pair were short, with talons at the ends; the second pair was longer, and the last two the longest of all. Standing on its back legs it was as tall as he was.
The open doorway was a foot from Ewald’s back. The creature stood fifteen feet away. Before it could step closer, he made his move. A pivot started, but never completed. The thing was across the gap and in his face just as his hips started to turn.
Ewald was expecting a slash from the daggerlike horns that studded its rear legs, not a straight thrust from one of the stumpy arms.
The flesh above his right nipple dimpled around the shaft of a black thorn, a long stinger that protruded from the top of the creature’s wrist. Its talons and arm flexed rhythmically, and he felt the pressure of a massive injection. At once, cold flooded his torso. Numbing cold. The small arm jerked back, withdrawing the stinger.
Ewald clutched at the wound in his chest, the numbness spreading to his legs. Before he could take a step, his knees gave way. He slumped to floor on his back and lay there, paralyzed.
As he struggled for breath, the creature leaned over him, clicking. The noise came faster and faster, becoming a single, earsplitting tone. Then the thing opened its jaws impossibly wide and, puffing its abdomen in and out, began to dry-heave in his face.
Chapter Five
While they waited for Jak to return from the canyon bottom, Ryan and the others took a rest break. With the sun almost directly overhead, there was no shade. Every surface reflected blinding light and withering heat. To keep their heads and shoulders out of the sun, they made canopies of their coats, stretching them between the tops of low rocks. As they sat on the hard ground, they tipped back their canteens and sipped at the Anasazi sludge. The thick, gritty liquid rasped down their throats. Once swallowed, it lay in their bellies like bags of wet cement.
They’d all drunk worse.
Ryan coughed to clear the mud from the back of his tongue. Through a shimmering curtain of heat waves, he took in the canyon’s far rim. The valley had widened to about half a mile, and its depth was more than four hundred feet. There was no sign of a reservoir. No sign of the river that had been plugged to create it. In the low spots there were no standing pools, stagnant or otherwise. Nothing green.
There was blue, though.
A tiny clump of bright blue, visible to the naked eye in the distance below.
The plastic, antifreeze jugs stood out against the unrelenting beige of the canyon floor, flagging the water thief’s abandoned campsite. The bastard had lit himself a fire down there, and tossed away his empty containers before moving on, in the direction of the dam.
Jak had scaled the canyon wall, and when he reappeared on the rim a few minutes later, his bloodless face was slick with sweat, his white hair plastered to his skull, and his breath came in ragged gasps. Even Deathlands’s wild child was starting to show the effects of their ordeal. In a gravelly voice Jak said, “Fire pit cold. Nothing left in ashes.”
If the chiller had food, he didn’t need to cook it, Ryan thought. Maybe something dried or smoked. Something the dead travelers had brought with them. Berries and nuts pounded into a paste, then set out in the sun to harden. Or strands of jerky. One thing for sure, the bastard wasn’t living off wild game. Aside from the buzzards, whose guts and body cavities were usually so packed with yard-long flat worms that even a starving man wouldn’t touch their meat, the companions hadn’t seen anything alive. Not so much as a fly. The landscape had been scoured clean.
“Cold fire means he’s still a couple days ahead of us,” Krysty said. “We may never catch him.”
“Could be he’s running on jolt,” J.B. suggested.
The potent combination of methamphetamine, narcotic and hallucinogen was Deathlands’s recreational drug and painkiller of choice. If the thief was staying high on jolt, he could keep walking despite hunger, keep walking until his feet fell off.
“The dam isn’t far, now,” Ryan said. “Another five or six miles, at most. Good chance that’s where our friend will have set up camp.”
The dam was their only hope. The bastard had either stopped there with whatever water he had left, or there was water in the bottom of the reservoir. If neither was the case, they were all headed for the last train west. The companions gathered up their coats and packs, and trudged on.
Exhaustion, dehydration and the flat monotony of the trek made it difficult for Ryan to maintain his mental focus. His thoughts kept wandering back to the carnage they’d seen up-canyon. Dying of thirst was one of the worst ways to check out. There was terrible pain. Delirium. And a slow, lingering slide into death. The guy who’d blown off his own head had witnessed his friends’ suffering, and taken a short cut. Ryan imagined that with his last breath, as he’d pressed that shotgun muzzle hard to his chin, he had cursed the thief to hell.
Betrayal wasn’t unusual in the Deathlands.
It wasn’t a kinder, gentler, I-feel-your-pain kind of place.
Sympathy was in shorter supply than cased ammo.
Individual survival was all that mattered in the hellscape. Survival at any cost. A brutal philosophy that Ryan Cawdor had been steeped in since birth. Over time, his friendships, his battles, and his relationship with his son, Dean, had widened his horizons. Ryan no longer dismissed out of hand the idea of risking his own skin for the sake of strangers, or in fighting for a just cause instead of a thick wad of jack from the highest bidder. And he still grieved the disappearance of his son.
After another hour of walking, as they rounded a sharp bend in the rim, the valley broadened enormously before them. Eight miles ahead, the canyon necked down again, and the sun blazed off a barrier of white concrete nearly as high as the rim. At the base of the dam, there was water; not a great predark reservoir, but a modest lake bounded on three sides by green, furrowed fields and stands of low trees.
As if that wasn’t miracle enough, there was also the ville.
“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed, thumbing his glasses back up the slippery bridge of his nose.
From a distance, it was like skydark had never happened.
Like the flooding of the canyon had never happened, either.
A mile or two from the near shore of the lake, stone and brick buildings clustered around a central square with a little park in the middle. The largest building was three stories tall with a clock tower. On the far side of the city center stood a row of grain silos. A black strip of two-lane highway paralleled that end of town. The road petered out in the middle of the plain, either buried under shifting sand or ripped away by receding waters.
“Little Pueblo,” Mildred said. “Just the way I remembered it.”
“’Tis indeed a wonderment,” Doc prononunced. “Further evidence that the hand of the Creator works in mysterious ways.”
“I’d say it was more a case of the laws of physics, working predictably,” Mildred countered.
“And whose hand lies behind the laws of physics?” Doc asked with a confident grin.
“Why does there have to be a ‘hand’?”
“Touché, dear Mildred. I am sure we would all like to hear your explanation.”
“On nukeday, the water was five hundred feet deep over the town,” she said. “All that liquid acted like a giant cushion to protect the buildings from shock and blast effects of incoming airburst missile strikes. My guess is the dam didn’t get off so easy, and that’s why the reservoir disappeared.”
“Could have been a near-miss with an earthshaker warhead,” J.B. suggested. “Those babies had an effective blast diameter of five hundred miles.”
“That would explain how the entrance to that redoubt got uncovered,” Ryan said. “The ground tremors brought the whole cliff down. Cracked the dam open, too.”
“I don’t see any people moving, anywhere,” Krysty said, squinting against the glare. “And there’s got to be people. Not just our water thief. Somebody’s been tending those fields.”
With rifle scope and binocs, Ryan and J.B. surveyed the terrain downrange.
There was something else wrong with the picture.
Unlike most other inhabited outposts in Deathlands, Little Pueblo didn’t have a defensive berm of piled dirt and debris.
There were no perimeter gunposts. No fortified gates.
J.B. lowered the binocs. “I suppose there could be snipers and spotters up here on the rim,” he said. “Although they wouldn’t be much use.”
Ryan had to agree with that assessment. The canyon was so wide that much of it was beyond the range of even super-high-velocity, .50-caliber milspec rounds. Cap-and-ball weapons would be about as effective as chucking rocks. Snipers spaced out on the rim couldn’t protect the ville from a large invading force—they couldn’t concentrate enough fire to turn back attackers. The best they could do was harrass. And then only during the day. That was the problem with rim-based, spotter outposts, too. They’d be useless at night. Even if somehow they saw the invaders coming, they wouldn’t be able to direct defensive ambushes in the valley.
“It’s like they don’t give a damn if they’re overrun,” J.B. said.
“Or they know it isn’t going to happen,” Ryan said. “What do you mean ‘they know’?” Krysty asked. “They’re sitting on an oasis in the middle of a radblasted desert. The nearest ville of any size must be 150 miles away. A gang of blackhearts that sets out for Little Pueblo isn’t going to be in shape to rob it by the time they get here. If they get here.”
“How would robbers even know it existed?” J.B. said. “After the reservoir was built, the ville’s name was probably taken off all the maps. It sure wasn’t on the one in the redoubt. Only way to find Little Pueblo would be to stumble onto it by accident. Then you’d have to walk out again to gather a chilling crew. And then walk in again to do the looting.”
“It’s a safe bet that’s never happened,” Ryan said. “If it had, folks down there would know the desert wasn’t enough to keep trouble out. And there’d be perimeter defenses. “
“Bastard thief got in, maybe two days ago,” Krysty reminded them.
“He could be swinging from a tree right now,” J.B. said. “Or else his head’s on a stick in the middle of that square. No way of telling what kind of reception the folks down there give to strangers.”
“We need water and food,” Mildred said.
“Wait for dark, then steal,” Jak suggested.
Doc didn’t like that idea. “From this vantage point the valley looks bucolic and peaceable in the extreme, with ample sustenance for all,” he said. “Perhaps the residents would happily share their bounty with us, if only to get news of the world beyond the hellish plain.”
Jak came back with a less rosy, but much more likely possibility. “Chill us for blasters and ammo.”
“We have a better chance of fighting our way out during daylight,” J.B. said. “At least we can see trouble coming.”
“There’s another problem, whether we steal what we need or not,” Ryan told them. “It’s going to be a bastard long march out of this desert. It may not be possible to carry enough supplies to make it. Once we leave, there’ll be no turning back.”
After a pause, Krysty said, “What about Minotaur?”
“You read my mind,” Ryan said. “If that three-dimensional map is right, there’s a redoubt down there somewhere. And if there’s a redoubt, there’s a chance it has a working mat-trans unit.”
“That would save us a whole lot of boot leather and blisters,” J.B. said.
Before descending the cliffs and starting across the canyon floor, Ryan and J.B. each scoped the opposite rim, looking for sun flash off telesight lenses or gunbarrels, or evidence of shooters’ hides built among the rocks. When they found nothing, they assumed that their side of the gorge was likewise undefended, and that it was safe to proceed. A conclusion based on battlefield experience and common sense. No way would snipers be posted on only one rim of a canyon so wide. The most effective kill zone would be created by overlapping cross fire from two sides at once.
In fighting formation the companions followed one of the large arroyos gouged out of the sand by the reservoir’s violent retreat. Long before they reached the outskirts of the ville, signs of vegetation started to appear on the slopes around them. First, scattered dry weeds and brush. Then living trees, albeit stunted and scraggly. As the weeds grew thicker and green, and the trees became more sturdy, the companions saw lizards, insects, rabbits and birds. The bugs sawed and sang in the afternoon’s blistering heat.
When the arroyo took a dogleg to the right, they climbed the soft bank for a recce. Just ahead was a row of rectangular, concrete pads, each sprouting rusted wires and conduit, and broken off plastic pipes.
“The remains of government-built, reservation housing,” Mildred said. “Those are the foundation pads for modular prefabs and double-wide trailers. The buildings must’ve washed away when the water ran out.”
Around the slabs were unfenced, row-crop fields bordered by irrigation ditches. The water ran clear in the ditches, shaded by tall grass and overhanging trees.
“Look at the current,” J.B. said. “The river’s still here, underground. They’ve got it working for them.”
The companions then took turns laying on their bellies, washing their faces and necks, and drinking their fill of cool water. When they couldn’t drink any more, they rinsed out and refilled their canteens.
“Somebody watching,” Jak said softly to Ryan.
It was difficult to detect glee in those bloodred eyes of his. You had to look hard. And know what you were looking for.
There was glee in them, now.
At the edge of the field, a half-dozen, free-range chickens had stepped into view. Fat and sassy, they pecked at the soil for insects not thirty yards away.
The albino had two razor-sharp knives in his hand, one ready in his fingers, the other clasped against his palm.
Before Jak could get off a toss, the birds spooked, ducking back into the cover of the knee-high corn. He started to give chase, but Ryan stopped him. “No, Jak, let them go. Wouldn’t look real good if we showed up on these folks’ doorstep with their dead hens hanging on our belts. If nobody’s home, we can always come back and get them later.”
Refreshed, if not fed, they slid back down into the arroyo and followed it all the way to the edge of the town square. As they climbed onto the predark street, they heard muffled singing and drumming. The noise was coming from the other side of the town square and park.
“Somebody’s home, after all,” Ryan said. “Stay tight, now. We’re on triple red.”
The central area of Little Pueblo stood on an isolated crown of bedrock. Most of the runoff from the breached dam had channeled through the surrounding gridwork of streets, washing away wood frame houses and trailer homes, leaving bare concrete slabs and open air basements.
Up close, the city center wasn’t in such great shape, either.
The street and sidewalks were all split to hell, with heaved-up cracks every few feet. Not one of the buildings that faced the little park had an intact window. The glass had been replaced by sheets of opaque plastic, pieces of scrap plywood and sheet metal. Ryan guessed that the repair materials that had been fished out of the lake, where all the loose debris would have ended up.
Most of the structures along the street were one-story and made of cinder block. Some still had faded signs along their facades. Lupita’s Café, Little Pueblo Country Store and Bakery, Hardiman Insurance, Titterness Real Estate, Desert City Fashions.
With the muzzle of his SIG-Sauer, Ryan eased aside the sheet plastic that covered the doorway of Lupita’s Café, and looked inside. Right off he got a whiff of freshly baked bread. It made his mouth water.
“Hello?” he said.
No answer.
Ryan pushed in, waving for the others to follow, with caution.
It was no longer a café. Lupita’s had been gutted down to the cinder-block walls and concrete slab. The ceiling rafters and conduit pipes were exposed. It figured that none of the submerged carpet, plasterboard, subflooring, ceiling tile, and interior plywood would have been salvageable. Mildew and rot would have set in long before it ever dried out.
The main room’s furniture consisted of lawnchairs, plastic milk crates and six platform beds made of scavenged interior doors propped on pairs of fifty-five gallon drums and piers of cinder blocks. From the way the straw mattresses were flattened, the beds were at least double occupied. There were no blaster racks on the walls. No blasters leaning in corners, or tucked under the beds. No ammo or lead balls or tins of black powder, either.
On the floor around the nonfunctional toilet in the café restroom were two mattresses; the adjoining storeroom had three more of the platform beds. Ryan figured that at least twenty people were sleeping in the three rooms.
The kitchen was still a kitchen. It even had some of its original, predark appliances. The doors had been removed from a commercial-sized refrigerator, and its inside turned into a storage cupboard. The stove had been converted from gas to wood, its former oven now the firebox, which was giving off considerable heat.
Cooling on a long, makeshift dining table were stacked loaves of bread-flat, round and golden brown.
J.B. pulled a heavy crockery jar from the refrigerator pantry, flipped off the lid, and stuck his finger in. It came out gooey amber. He sniffed, then he licked. “Honey,” he said, eyes gleaming.
Without another word, the companions tore into the pile of fresh bread, dipping great hunks of it into the honey pot. They ate every last crumb and took turns at the jar with moistened fingers until nothing sticky remained. Start to finish, the meal took four minutes.
When they were done, Krysty said, “Traveling folks might carry corn and wheat seed with them for food, or to grow crops once they got where they were going, but bees? Chickens? No way could they survive a trip across that desert. How did they get here?”
“Might have been mat-trans-ed in, I suppose,” J.B. said.
“If the people here had access to mat-trans, why would they just import seed and livestock?” Ryan said. “Why wouldn’t they get the hell out if they could? What do you think, Mildred?”
The black woman didn’t answer. She was staring at a square of chalkboard that hung from a nail on the wall. The board was a hundred-year-old artifact, and still in relatively good condition. It was the room’s only decoration. Across the top, “Lupita’s Daily Special” was painted in chipped, but legible hot pink. The dots over the i’s were in the shape of little flowers.
There was no special today, or tomorrow, or ever again.
“Mildred, is something wrong?” he asked.
“Just wondering what if anything that might mean,” she said. She stepped aside so they could all see the words deeply scratched into the blackboard: “All Glory to Bob & Enid.”
Nobody had a clue.
It didn’t seem important at the time. Just odd.
But when they started looking through other buildings, weapons ready in case the missing owners suddenly returned, they found more references to the pair. And on the streetfront wall of Titterness Real Estate someone had charcoaled three lines of tall, crooked letters: Our love for Bob & Enid, our love for one & other makes us strong & proud.
“It would appear that paeans to ‘Bob and Enid’ are a recurring motif in these parts,” Doc said. “I would hazard the pair were early settlers, except for the glories and huzzahs that always accompany the inscriptions. They reflect a level of adoration normally reserved for deities.”
“Goddess Enid sounds okay, but a god named Bob?” Krysty said.
“That wasn’t here in 1992,” Mildred announced. She pointed across the street, through the line of mature trees, at the town square park.
Ryan was already staring at the windowless, one-story, gray concrete monolith that rose from the middle of the park. The roof and sides of the 50-by-80-foot structure were ribbed for strength.
Keeping low and single file, they trotted over for a closer look.
There was only one entrance, a doorway accessed down a short flight of steps. The titanium steel and pressure-locked door was blocked by a pile of stones.
The above ground structure was just the tip of the iceberg.
“We’ve found Minotaur,” Ryan said.
“Never was an island here, then,” Krysty said.
“Map was right, though,” Dix stated. “Damn thing was smack in the middle of the reservoir—only on the bottom.”
“Look at those reinforcing ribs,” Mildred said. “The walls are massive, designed to withstand tremendous pressure. Things are finally starting to make sense to me.”
“Pray tell in what regard, my dear?” Doc asked.
“The chronology,” Mildred said. “It’s all about the chronology. First came the rushed-through funding for the dam from Congress, then the town was condemned, and the residents relocated. A military no-fly perimeter was set up, supposedly to keep out saboteurs, but more likely to keep out prying eyes. The redoubt site was excavated and the complex installed at the same time as the dam, then hidden when the canyon was flooded. From the start, the whole Pueblo Canyon Dam project was about building Minotaur!”
“The construction and engineering you’re talking about is way beyond anything I’ve seen before,” Ryan said. “The question is, why wasn’t hollowing out a mountain good enough in this case? Why the hell did they put it under all that water?”
“Mountain complexes are designed to keep out nukestrikes, radiation and uninvited guests,” Mildred said. “Maybe this one was meant to keep something in.”
Ryan picked up on her train of thought at once. “You mean because of the water depth?” he said.
“That’s right. Without a pressurized suit or transport vehicle, no large organism could make it from the bottom to the surface alive.”
“So we’re not just talking concealment, then,” Krysty said. “We’re talking total isolation, maximum quarantine.”
“Predark whitecoats left behind some triple-ugly surprises,” J.B. said. “Maybe we better find out more about the place before we stick our beaks in there.”
The sounds of muffled singing and drumming, which had momentarily waned, suddenly swelled.
“It’s coming from the other side of the square,” Krysty said. “One of those buildings in the middle of the block.”
“Time we introduced ourselves to the locals,” Ryan said. “See what they can tell us about Minotaur.”
They followed the noise to its source, a two-story structure with a big marquee over the entrance. The marquee’s frame bore the name El Mirador Theater; a row of black plastic letters spelled out the current attraction: “Prays Bob & Enid.”
There were no guards on the movie house’s front doors and wild festivities were in progress inside. Clapping hands, stamping feet and sticks thumping on metal kept the rolling, musical beat. The singing, now that they could clearly make it out, was more like yelling. There were no words to the tune, just nonsense syllables, joyfully shouted at top volume.
Dee-dit-deedee. Dee-dit-deedee.
“Here comes the bride?” Mildred queried.
Chapter Six
“The bride comes from where?” Krysty asked Mildred.
Ryan and J.B. wore identical puzzled looks. Jak wasn’t paying any attention.
“It’s just the words to an old song, ‘The Wedding March,’” Mildred told them. “Written by Felix Mendelssohn in the mid-nineteenth century. Before the nukecaust it was played as the bride-to-be walked down the aisle of the church, before the wedding ceremony.”
“You think people are getting married in there?” Krysty said.
“If the music means anything anymore.”
“Sounds like a big crowd,” J.B. said. “Maybe the whole blasted ville. If we go in all peace and love, we might not come out again.”
Peace and love wasn’t on Ryan Cawdor’s agenda.
“Everybody got grens?” he asked.
“You want stunners, fog, or frags?” J.B. asked.
“Frags.”
Mildred’s eyes widened. Detonating a half-dozen antipersonnel grenades in a crowded room was some serious, undifferentiated ugly. A head-on train wreck. A plane crash. A twenty-car pile up. “They could be friendlies,” she protested. “Just a bunch of butt-simple dirt farmers.”
“Yeah, and we’re going to give them every chance to prove that’s all they are,” Ryan told her. “But we’ve got to be ready if they aren’t. There could be a couple hundred people in there, easy. If they rush us, either we lower the odds in a hurry, or we get overrun. Let them see your blasters going in. Don’t let them see the grens until I show them mine.”
“There’s a good chance they’re packing all the weapons and ammo we couldn’t find,” J.B. said. “They see us with our blasters drawn, things could fall apart, big-time sudden.”
“If things fall apart like that, you can be sure we’re going to mess up somebody’s wedding night,” Ryan said. “Jak, you and Doc go around the back of the building. There should be an exit or two there. The rest of us will go in through the front.”
Before splitting up, they shrugged off their packs, and filled their pants pockets with extra clips and speedloaders, and their jacket side pockets with predark grens.
While they waited for Jak and Doc to move into position, Mildred clamped a lid on the medical doctor part of her brain, the part that recoiled at mayhem and suffering, and let the battle-hardened soldier in her take command. Though they’d survived the brutal desert crossing, they were a long way from safety. And the mood of the ville folk toward strangers was a huge unknown. As Ryan said, there were way too many of them to take chances. Once the companions made contact, anything less than total committment to the frag plan was an invitation for the townsfolk to attack. In order to avoid a bloody horror show, they had to go in strong, hard, and ready to prime and toss.
On Ryan’s signal, they rolled through the door, blasters up, safeties off. The noise was much louder inside. The floor shook from the stamping feet, and plaster dust fell in clouds from the ceiling.
Unless the celebrants were careful, something much worse was about to rain down.
Like the buildings on the other side of the square, the movie-house lobby had been stripped to the concrete. The candy counter was gone, as were the wallpaper and carpet. It had all the mystery and magic of a warehouse. Scavenged lumber and fifty-five-gallon drums were stacked along the facing wall, with room left for three sets of double doors, all of them closed, all of them leading into the theater.
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