BETRAYED BY TOMORROW

A hundred years after the nukecaust, the tortured landscape of postapocalyptic America offers a brutal fight for survival. Yet tech secrets lie hidden, useful to those brave and strong enough to believe that hope can carry them toward ever-elusive peace.

BAD TO THE BONE

Violent gangs, a corrupt mayor and a heavily armed police force are the hallmarks of former Detroit, a mutie-infested, rubble-strewn metropolis. When Ryan and the companions show up, the Desolation Angels are waging a war to rule the streets. After saving the companions from being chilled by gangsters, the mayor hires Ryan and his friends to stop the Angels cold. But each hard blow toward victory proves there’s no good side to be fighting for. As Motor City erupts into bloody conflagration, the companions are caught in the crossfire. In Deathlands, hell is called home.

“They’re right behind us!” Mildred yelled

Ryan heard the boom of Ricky’s Webley hand blaster echo out of the stairwell, and started moving toward the window.

“Looks clear,” Jak said, peering around the edge of the empty frame. He promptly slipped from out of his cover and fled to the street.

Securing escape was more important than discouraging the stickies from following, and Ryan raced for the front door. The other companions were hot on his heels.

Ryan burst out of the building. The humidity hit him in the face like a wool blanket soaked in hot water. Quickly he took in how profuse the vegetation was, grass and flowers pushing up through big cracks heaved in the pavement.

Then he noticed the tall, skeleton-thin woman with an electric-green Mohawk strolling around the corner of the building across the street. But there was nothing casual about the way she whipped up the M16 she’d been carrying and aimed it at Ryan.

Desolation Angels

James Axler

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.

—Lydia Maria Francis Child,

1802–1880

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter One

“Ryan! Wake up! We’ve got a problem!”

Mildred Wyeth’s urgent voice cut through the dreadful jump disorientation and summoned Ryan Cawdor’s soul back to his pain-racked body. His stomach felt as if it had been wrenched inside out.

Bad one, he thought. Been through worse.

When he opened his eye, he was already being helped up by a firm, dry grip on his forearm. That would be J. B. Dix, Ryan’s chief lieutenant, best friend and the armorer of the small group of companions who traveled the Deathlands.

“Tell me something new,” Ryan said, slurring his words. He swayed as he got to his feet and was steadied by J.B. “Is everyone else awake?”

J.B. didn’t have time to answer the question.

“Muties!” Ricky Morales screamed. There was no mistaking the hideous shapes visible through the opaque armaglass walls of the mat-trans unit.

Ryan was back in command of his body, and he slammed the heel of his hand on the big red button by the keypad that controlled the workings of the gateway. The LD button was a fail-safe designed to transfer the companions back to their last destination.

No one had a desire to return to what remained of the ville of Progress, but that was the least of their worries.

Nothing happened.

“So we’re stuck here,” Mildred said after several moments.

The stocky black woman, her hair in beaded plaits, didn’t even flinch as a face pressed itself against the glass, becoming nearly visible through the opaque wall. Its nose was two holes above a wide-open mouth full of jagged teeth. Its eyes, though unnaturally round, were disconcertingly humanlike. Enough to show an almost intolerable rage.

* * *

“RYAN,” KRYSTY WORTH CALLED. The statuesque beauty was staring at the base of the armaglass walls. Her sentient red hair was still coiled tightly to her scalp, as it tended to do in times of severe stress. “Water’s building up in here.”

“Great,” Mildred moaned. “Isn’t this a bit coincidental? I mean muties, yeah. Muties are everywhere. But we jump in here and the place decides to flood right now?”

“With the chamber door closed securely, that should be nearly impossible,” said a tall, silver-haired man. He shot the cuffs of the dingy white shirt he wore beneath his black frock coat with an elegance that belied the shabbiness of the garment. Doc Tanner knew a little about the workings of the network—and the white coats who built them—because they’d trawled him out of his own time in the 1890s to use and abuse as a subject for their experiments in time. And when Doc proved to be a most unwilling subject, he was sent into the future to what was now the Deathlands. Their experiments had prematurely aged him. Although he appeared to be a man in his late sixties, Doc was really in his thirties.

Ryan drew his SIG Sauer P226 handblaster with his right hand and his panga with his left.

“Get ready to blast out of here,” he said. “J.B., you do the honors.”

The one-eyed man took in his little group with a sweeping glance. Krysty stood resolutely at his right shoulder, gripping her Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38 revolver in both hands. Mildred stood just behind her, holding her more substantial .38 ZKR target revolver at the ready. Doc had drawn both his LeMat replica handgun, with the stubby shotgun barrel beneath its immense cylinder holding nine rounds of .44 Special, and the blade concealed in his ebony sword stick with the silver lion’s head. Ricky held his Webley top-break .45 revolver.

Ryan stood right behind J.B.’s left shoulder. The Armorer had his Uzi slung muzzle down over his shoulder and his Smith & Wesson M4000 riot shotgun held level. Jak Lauren stood at J.B.’s right.

“Ready?” Ryan asked. More muties seemed to be crowding into the anteroom.

“Ready as we’re going to be,” Mildred said. The others voiced their agreement.

“Hit it,” Ryan told J.B.

He maneuvered the lever that opened the door, and water swirled in, almost to the tops of Ryan’s boots. With it came stink of sewage so thick the one-eyed man almost choked.

J.B. was already striding forward through the anteroom with his scattergun held level. The mutie that had pressed its hideous face against the armaglass swung a black-taloned hand at the Armorer.

He blasted it in the belly with a charge of #4 buckshot. The weapon’s report almost imploded Ryan’s eardrums in the walled confines of the jump chamber. The mutie vented a high-pitched squeal and doubled over, clutching its ruptured gut with three-fingered hands.

The Armorer dealt it an uppercut with the butt of his longblaster. Its round head snapped up on its stalk neck and it fell over backward. It raised a splash of foul-smelling water that was already up to the tops of J.B.’s ankles. By now the rest of the companions had left the jump chamber and were all through the anteroom and into the control room.

The other muties closed in as Ryan and Jak fanned out to the sides. Ryan stepped forward to close with a mutie slashing overhand at him. He blocked with his left forearm and hacked at the creature’s upper arm with the panga.

It felt more as though the weapon was hitting dense mud or clay rather than flesh, but it struck bone. The mutie keened and struck with its left claw. Ryan kicked it in the belly, and it staggered back with thick blood oozing from the gash in its arm.

A mutie attacked from Ryan’s left. Doc stepped forward and thrust his sword through the creature’s head. It fell.

Four of the muties were down. The other four hung back as if uncertain. Unfortunately, they were between Ryan’s group and the door.

A loud crack almost like thunder echoed through the facility. The floor shook once, hard, beneath Ryan’s boot. Raw sewage sloshed up the walls and on the inert, dark comp stations that lined them.

A grinding squeal sounded behind Ryan’s left shoulder. He snapped his head around. A section of concrete wall as high as his head split open, and a sheet of greenish-brown water shot into the control room. It splashed down.

“Aah, shit!” Mildred exclaimed as a wave of water broke as high as her waist. Ryan set his jaw against the stench. It wouldn’t kill him. The muties—or drowning in shit—might.

The long-armed muties dithered as if unsure whether to fight or flee. In other circumstances Ryan would have been glad to have his friends hold off, saving their energy, and ammo, to see if the creatures decided to bolt.

Unfortunately, the sewage was rising rapidly now. The sulfurous smell made Ryan’s eye water and his head swim.

“Power on through!” he shouted.

Following his own command, he charged ahead. He swatted a mutie in his path in the side of the head with the wide flat blade of the panga. Not because he was feeling unduly merciful, but because he didn’t want the knife getting stuck.

The door leading into the corridor was jammed open. Raising a brown wave from water already up to his thighs, Ryan sloshed down the hall, beating J.B. to a staircase and pounding upward. A mutie shambled down the steps toward him from the landing above. The one-eyed man gave the trigger a double tap, and both shots hit in the creature’s chest. It coughed in a very human-sounding way and fell against the wall. Ryan raced past. It didn’t even try to swipe at him with its claws. Just as he reached the landing, he heard the cry from below. “Ryan!”

He stopped and looked back. J.B., Doc and Jak were all on the stairs right behind him. Mildred and Krysty stood farther down with the foul water swirling around them, trying to drag Ricky up out of the sewage. Apparently it had either knocked him down or floated him off his feet. Muties were clinging to the youth with their long arms, holding him back from escaping the flooding corridor.

Chapter Two

Ryan realized that the muties seemed to be using Ricky as a flotation device rather than trying to drag him to his doom.

“I have had enough of this shit,” Mildred declared. She drew her ZKR 551 handblaster, which she’d holstered to try to help Ricky. Aiming quickly, she shot both muties through their round heads. One uttered a croak of dismay as it let go and floundered back into the eddying sewage. The other threw up its arms and sank without a sound.

Ryan turned back and started moving again as the women got Ricky onto the steps. The water was following more rapidly now.

As Ryan turned on the landing to head up the next flight, Jak eeled past J.B., who halted, holding his shotgun muzzle up.

“More muties,” said the albino, who’d obviously slipped ahead to scout the next floor when Ryan paused.

“Waiting for us?” Ryan asked.

Jak shook his head.

“Most sleeping,” he said. “Some awake. Starting move this way.”

“Push on, J.B.,” Ryan said. “We can’t stay here.”

“On my way.”

He headed up, shotgun at the ready. Ryan bulled past Jak, intent on being right on J.B.’s heels when the little man hit the next level. Jak faded back against the wall to let Ryan pass, then followed close behind.

The next level was open space. The ceiling lighting had malfunctioned, leaving alternating areas of light and dark, interspersed with a few patches of flashing illumination. The stairwell itself was unenclosed. The open space was wide enough that its actual size was indeterminate in the shadows. It suggested a parking garage, though Ryan registered quickly that that was mainly because the sturdy structural columns were exposed to view.

The air was thick, barely stirred by the redoubt’s ventilation system. It smelled heavily of stale urine, feces, mildew and not-quite-human sweat.

Around him muties were stirring from what he could only think of as nests: little rough enclosures improvised of broken furniture and random scavenged material, with moldering cushions and bits of cloth for padding from the hard, bare concrete floor. Some muties began to shamble toward them, waving their arms menacingly, from a nest not twenty feet away.

J.B. raked them with two quick bursts from his Uzi, the copper-jacketed 9 mm slugs slamming the muties to the floor, where they lay clutching their guts and squalling piteously.

The noise roused the others, who came out of the well as J.B. headed up the exposed stairs.

Ryan followed J.B. tightly. He heard shots from behind.

“We’re fine!” Krysty shouted as the cracking concrete echoed through the vast empty space. “Keep moving! Water’s rising fast!”

Ryan moved. They hit the next landing and kept on going. A mutie turned onto the stairs from the floor above, silhouetting itself against a flickering glow from more malfunctioning overheads. It started down before registering norms were charging up.

J.B. slashed the creature with the butt of his M4000. It released an ear-splitting squeal and fell against the steel railing to the Armorer’s right. J.B. raced past.

Ryan split its teardrop-shaped head with an overhand stroke of his panga in passing and never even slowed. The creature toppled backward over the railing and plummeted to the floor.

The distinctive boom of the shotgun mounted on Doc’s LeMat echoed up the stairs at a volume that seemed to make the wall ripple. Ryan didn’t glance back.

“No more stairs!” J.B. called out as he reached the top of the flight.

“Find us a way out, J.B.,” Ryan said.

The Armorer let the M4000 fall to hang by its sling over one shoulder and scooped up the Uzi on the sling on the other. He hastily fired a short burst over the handrail. Ryan joined him.

This level was divided into rooms. A corridor ran along the near wall, while another stretched away from them at a T junction. As on the floor below, the lighting here was patchy.

By the flickering light and alternating patches of shine and shadow J.B. had just blasted a trio of muties coming at them along the corridor running away from the wall. One of them went down thrashing at the half-rotted rubber floor runners, spraying thick green blood everywhere. The others ran off twittering.

The bad news was they ducked into one of the doors standing open to both sides of the corridor.

Ryan took quick stock of their situation. They had three choices of which way to go from here—other than back down, which wasn’t happening. The corridor looked to move on to more lateral passages at either end. It was clear both ways for the moment.

“Gotta move!” Mildred’s voice boomed up from the stairs beneath Ryan. “Crap’s still coming. As well as a whole boatload of more muties!”

“Where is all this pressure coming from?” asked J.B. He swiveled his head constantly to make sure no new threats caught them unawares.

“Clearly, the sewage floats on water coming from a substantial body of it, whether lake, river or even ocean,” Doc called up.

He punctuated his statement with two quick, echoing blasts of his .44 blaster. Then he continued unperturbedly. “Quite nearby. Possibly above us.”

“Above us?” Mildred repeated. “That’s great. So what if there’s no way out?”

“They didn’t build this place with no exit other than the mat-trans,” Ryan said. “There’s a way out.”

“Also a way in,” J.B. added. “Unless they bred those muties here. And unless they don’t have to eat.”

“Got too many pointy teeth for that,” Ryan growled.

“Look!” Jak pointed along the corridor where the death throes of the mutie J.B. had shot were subsiding to chirps and twitches. An overhead light had come on at the far end, revealing a door with a grated window that looked suspiciously as if it led to another set of stairs.

“Go,” Ryan said as another pair of shots boomed out from just below. He recognized the sound of his lover’s Smith & Wesson 640. Its short barrel produced more noise than muzzle energy. If Krysty was blasting, it meant the muties were getting close.

Jak was usually a master of stealth, but he set off running at full speed. His long white hair streamed out behind his head like the neck cloth of a cap.

J.B. took off after him at a trot. He’d already swapped the Uzi for the M4000.

Ryan followed, panga and SIG Sauer at the ready. Jak was clearly bent on reaching the possible exit—at least from this level—as fast as possible. His companions had to keep the muties from the side rooms off his back and away from themselves. And above all, they had to keep moving.

There would be no room-by-room sweep, despite the fact it was safer, to say nothing of the possible scavvy awaiting them. Right then the only thing that gave them a chance at surviving another ten minutes was speed, speed and more speed.

For a moment, Ryan thought Jak was going to run the gauntlet of open doors unscathed. Then a mutie popped out of a room to the right, just at the end.

Jak punched it across the face with the knuckleduster hilt of the trench knife he carried and never slowed. The creature reeled back out of sight, clutching itself and keening in anguish.

Jak sped to the other end of the corridor, the open doorways to either side spewing claw-waving muties in his wake.

“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “We can’t shoot or we might hit him!”

He and J.B. kept charging ahead regardless. There was nothing else to do.

But Jak had grown up fighting. He knew he was in his friends’ line of fire as well as they did. Through the crowd of fluting, growling, arm-waving muties blocking their way, Ryan saw the slim white figure slip aside, out of his line of sight. A moment later the boom of his .357 Magnum Colt Python reverberated down the hallway, muted only slightly by the dropped ceiling.

J.B. promptly snagged the grip of his Uzi in his left hand, rotated the muzzle upward and fired a quick blast into the mutie mob. Apparently oblivious to Jak’s passage, or just attracted by the more target-rich environment the other way, they had surged toward him and Ryan.

As before, the front rank of creatures staggered back. One fell backward, flailing its long arms. Others tried to bolt back—into the faces of their fellows.

The Armorer charged into that ball of confusion. He let the Uzi drop to the end of its sling and grabbed the foregrip of his M4000 shotgun.

He fired two quick blasts into the mass. Green ichor flew. Muties bleated and shrilled in pain and fear.

Then J.B. was into them like a buzz saw. His scattergun was designed and built to be used as a riot baton as much as a blaster. There was nothing delicate about the weapon.

J.B. made full use of it. He jabbed the muzzle into the sunken chest of a mutie that was trying to hold in its guts and pushed it out of the way. A high-pitched scream issued from the mutie as the still-hot steel branded its chest.

J.B. flung it to the left, knocking an apparently unwounded mutie into the wall along with it. Then he broke a second’s spindly neck with a backstroke of the butt plate.

These things aren’t so tough, Ryan thought as he followed hard behind J.B. So far things had gone the way of his friends and himself.

The mutie J.B. had forced out of his path with the dying body of its comrade caught Ryan across the cheek with a swipe of its long black talons.

That was his blind side. He yanked his panga free of the mutie he’d just dispatched and, turning his head that way, slashed savagely in reprisal. He caught a look of round-eyed surprise. The eyes were big and blue and altogether human—too human. The monster yelped and flung up its arm protectively.

A pulse of viscous green mutie blood gushed toward Ryan as the claw-tipped arm was slashed below the wrist.

The mutie howled. It grabbed its hosing stump with its remaining hand and slid down the wall.

Ryan turned his face the other way in time to intercept another claw coming for his good eye. Blue-gray fingers flew into the air. Ryan raised the SIG Sauer in his left hand and fired a shot into the open saw-toothed mouth. Brains splattered across the bare wall behind the mutie’s head. Behind him he heard a mutie squeak in alarm, then a wet sound, followed by Doc crowing triumph. “Be gone, brigand!”

Apparently the old man had chosen to wade in close behind Ryan, as Ryan had done with J.B. That put the three with the most effective melee weapons in the lead, leaving the women and Ricky to guard their backs. For all his occasional mental deficiency and frail demeanor, Doc was as seasoned and formidable a fighter as any of them.

Unlike some muties, these weird, long-armed creatures with their rubbery flesh were total berserk diehards who kept attacking regardless of how many were killed. Their wailing and chirping changed pitch, taking on a frantic tone. They began to jostle and fall across one another in their haste to dive back into the rooms they’d just left.

Ryan was fairly sure they ate humans. Those pointed teeth were meant to rip flesh, and the instantaneous eagerness with which the muties attacked them on sight suggested appetite was a strong motivating factor. Although they could simply be outraged homeowners defending their violated castle, he supposed. Cannies usually were norms.

No reason they can’t be both, he thought. Doesn’t matter much. We’ll be done with them in a few minutes, anyway. One way or another.

“Don’t slow down to admire your handiwork!” Mildred yelled from the rear by the door at the last set of stairs. “A whole bunch is coming right after us!”

That warning was punctuated by the characteristic bark of her ZKR 551.

Jak stood with his back to the wall by the handle side of the heavy door with the grated window. He had his trench knife in one hand and his Colt Python in the other. His white hair flew as he swiveled his head sharply left and right to look both ways down the corridor that ran along that wall perpendicular to the one his friends were running down.

A pair of muties lay still at his feet.

“Clear?” J.B. called to him.

“Clear!”

“Secure the stairs,” Ryan commanded.

The corridor had emptied miraculously ahead of them. As Jak yanked on the door and rushed through the opening, J.B. increased his pace to full speed. Such as it was. Ryan had to keep his own steps throttled back to keep from overrunning his friend with his much longer legs.

“Be careful passing the open doors,” he yelled for the benefit of his friends behind him.

“We know that, Ryan!” Krysty called back. She sounded exasperated. “Just go, all right?”

He followed his own advice, cranking his head rapidly left and right to check each yawning door as he passed to make sure none of the muties had become emboldened enough to join the attack. He caught glimpses of knots of the creatures huddled back as far from the door as possible. Clearly they’d had enough of fighting for now.

They’ll be on our heels quick enough when the sewage starts to gurgle up around those black-nailed toes of theirs, Ryan thought.

J.B. reached the end of the corridor. He stopped and turned briskly left to peer that way with the longblaster presented at his shoulder. “Clear,” he called, then looked back over his shoulder.

He repeated his assurance.

“Move!” Ryan yelled to him.

He did. He flashed across the crossing corridor, hauled open the door Jak had disappeared through and followed.

Ryan barely broke stride to check the cross passage was still empty of threats. He caught the heavy door as it closed and threw it wide. A long arm in a black coat sleeve reached out to catch it and hold it.

“Ladies first,” Doc announced as Ryan dashed in to turn to look up the next stairs.

“Your ass, old man!” Mildred shouted. “Just keep moving!”

Ryan pounded up the steps to the landing. Jak was crouched at the next level, which Ryan could see was the top. Of this stairwell, anyway. J.B. stood on the steps right behind him, shotgun ready.

“Way out,” Jak said. “Clear.”

“Go,” Ryan ordered. It was getting repetitive. But it was still needed. Just because the situation they’d been dropped face-first into kept hitting them with simple yes-or-no choices didn’t mean the answer was ever clear. And as lead wolf in the pack, it was Ryan’s call to try to guess which alternative was bad and which was worse, every time, with no time to think.

He smiled, briefly and grimly, as he remembered a predark phrase Mildred sometimes used: “That’s why I get paid the big bucks.”

Jak popped out the door with J.B. right behind him. Ryan hastily followed.

As he did, he heard Krysty shout, “All the muties in the world are coming up after us!”

The first thing Ryan saw when he emerged from the open door to the stairwell was sunlight streaming in from tall, narrow, broken windows onto a concrete floor littered with fragments of tables and chairs and, incongruously, a scattering of dry, gray leaves.

He stepped quickly to one side. A doorway was a bad place to linger. It was set flush to the back wall of what had obviously been a store or restaurant, as if it gave onto a utility closet. There was no front door. The light was that of morning by color alone. He saw surprisingly lush trees across the street. Through the leaves he glimpsed yellow stone and a hint of some kind of tracery of stone or metal. It reminded him of the leading used to hold stained glass in predark churches.

J.B. had taken a position on the other side of the door to the hidden stair. Finding the room empty, he had switched to his Uzi. Jak slipped cautiously toward the window.

“No time!” Mildred yelled as she came bursting out the door on Doc’s heels. “They’re right behind us!”

Ryan heard the boom of Ricky’s Webley handblaster echo out of the stairwell and started moving toward the window.

“Looks clear,” Jak said, peering around the edge of the empty window. He promptly slipped around and onto the street.

Deciding that securing escape was more important than helping discourage the long-armed muties from following too fast, he went for the front door. The others came hot behind, starting with J.B.

Ryan burst out onto the street. The first thing he noticed was the humidity that hit him in the face like a wool blanket soaked in hot water. The second was how profuse the vegetation was—grass and flowers were pushing up through big cracks heaved in the pavement, and there were trees all down the block that extended to his left.

The third thing he noticed was a tall, skeletally thin woman with an electric-green Mohawk casually strolling around the corner of the building across the street to his right.

But there was nothing casual about the way she whipped up the M16 she’d been carrying in patrol position and aimed it at Ryan.

Chapter Three

“Get down!” Ryan shouted to his companions. He snapped off a shot and threw himself back toward the door to the redoubt.

He bumped into Doc. That had been half his intention—to keep those behind from blundering out into the unexpected enemy’s field of fire. The other half was to try to back out of it himself.

The black longblaster snarled out a burst of full-auto fire. Ryan didn’t know where the bullets hit. He only knew they didn’t hit him.

Then J.B., who had come out right behind Ryan and taken a reflex step to his right, ripped off a short burst of his own. The woman dropped onto her buttocks. The front of her grimy gray T-shirt was already showing darker, redder stains overwhelming the old ones.

“More!” Jak yelled from his position crouched before the window to Ryan’s right.

Ryan had caught himself on one knee in the doorway. Now he saw more men and women fanning out diagonally across the street. They sported variations of partially shaved heads and spiked, outlandishly colored hair. And a nasty assortment of weapons.

“Pull back!” he yelled. He turned and scrambled into the cool dimness of the derelict room.

“But, Ryan—” Mildred began.

“Shut it! Get back in the corner.” He gestured toward the far rear corner where they’d come out. “Now!”

Shots were crackling outside with a sound like a big, dry tumbleweed going up in flames. By sheer bad luck the companions had come up against a sizable local faction. One with itchy trigger fingers—and the blasters and bullets to give them a hearty scratching. Bullets clattered off the stone exterior and whizzed through the vacant windows or snapped with tiny sonic booms. They ricocheted off the back wall and tumbled, whining, in random directions.

J.B. hunkered just inside the doorway, leaning out—randomly varying high, middle and low—to rip off quick rounds, two-shot bursts and singletons. It took a good blaster man to make the Uzi do that. J.B. was the best—a master. Ryan snapped a shot from his own 9 mm handblaster at a figure with a black leather vest open to show a fish-belly-white washboard torso, aiming a sawed-off double-barreled scattergun. Fortunately it was clear across the street and unlikely to hit much at that range. Or not with many pellets, anyway. Though as Ryan knew well, they all hurt.

He never saw whether he hit the dude or not. He was already turning away to follow his advice and sprint to the rear corner of the dimly lit room, well back in the shadows. He heard Jak’s big Python crack. The albino had simply jumped back in through the window and was crouching to shoot out over the sill.

“Tables!” Ryan yelled. He sheathed his panga. “J.B., come on! Give me a hand.”

J.B. loosed a lengthy burst out the door as he wheeled away to obey. Then he and Ryan were each manhandling a pair of tables with tops a yard or so square toward their friends, who were already hunkered down in the corner. Jak joined them dragging a detached tabletop. Ryan decided the place had to have been an eatery of some sort.

“Hoist them up!” Ryan yelled. “Barricade yourselves behind them!”

He hurried into the corner with the others, right next to Krysty. She helped him shift the table so that one edge rested on the floor, whose covering had long since eroded to bare concrete, with the legs pointing into the room. His other friends did likewise.

Not an eyeblink too soon. The door to the secret stair puked muties. They gushed out in a blue-gray, squalling, whistling horde, waving their long-taloned arms in the air. At once they made for the open front door.

It took a moment before any even noticed the norms, huddled off in the shadows as they were. A pair turned toward them menacingly. Since that had been expected— he’d wanted the improvised tabletop barricades for cover—Ryan wasn’t too worried. He fired a couple shots from his SIG into one mutie. Krysty and Mildred blasted the other. One fell on its face. The other staggered back into the violent flow of its companions.

They flung it ruthlessly aside. Whether they were especially squeamish about getting soaked in the sewage, or just concerned with not drowning, Ryan couldn’t know and couldn’t care less.

The rest of the stream of oddly rubbery-fleshed muties shot straight out into the street. And into the faces of the gang of locals, who had deployed into a skirmish line and were advancing on the diner to mop up the intruders.

Through a window Ryan saw their jaws drop and their eyes widen in shock. “Fuck us,” somebody yelled. “It’s clayboys!”

The muties ran right into them and commenced to rip at them with their claws. Blood and bits of flesh and guts flew. Blasters roared. Men, women and muties screamed and flailed at one another. The locals who weren’t instantly overrun or caught up in the wild melee pulled back to fire into the geyser of panicked muties. Ryan saw a couple turn tail and run.

Though muties were still coming out of the stairwell, Ryan stood up from behind the table. None of the muties so much as glanced his way. Clearly they had something more urgent on their minds. The sulfurous stench that suddenly filled the room gave him a good clue as to what that was.

“Let’s power out of here,” he ordered. “Out the window and left down the street.”

Krysty jumped up. The table fell with a slam.

Ryan let her go out first. She was his woman after all—though as capable as a man in a fight and better than most. He followed, darting a few steps to the left as soon as he cleared the opening, then turning back to cover his friends’ escape.

They came popping out in surprisingly good order. Beyond them a pitched battle between locals and muties filled the street and claimed everybody else’s attention.

“You’d better move, Ryan!” Mildred called as she raced past.

Ricky was last out the window. He stumbled and almost fell on his face getting out. The youth caught himself, picked himself up and started running up the block away from the scrum. As he passed, Ryan did likewise.

The others sprinted past an alley and rounded the corner of the next building. As he flashed past the alley mouth, some instinct made Ryan glance over his shoulder—just in time to see a green-brown gusher of sewage blast out the door and windows of the redoubt’s surface false front and swamp the battling humans and muties in a reeking torrent.

“That’s not something you see every day,” J.B. remarked as Ryan reached the others.

“Keep going,” the one-eyed man said. “Unless you want to get wet again. We don’t know how far that stuff’s going to flood.”

They trotted down the cross street. From the angle of the sun and the time of year, Ryan knew they were heading southwest. What mattered most now was that they were heading away from the shit-flooded death trap the redoubt had become.

Turned out, the sewage didn’t reach far at all. Glancing back from a block or so away, Ryan saw a brown puddle flow out into the intersection and then stop. Apparently the pressure had finally equalized.

Which was a good thing. The very next block up the street from the hidden redoubt was effectively dammed by a skyscraper that had fallen to the east, knocking down the opposing building like a giant domino. Had the sewage continued to rise, things might’ve gotten way too interesting in a hurry.

“I don’t think they’re following us,” Krysty said.

Mildred laughed. “Understatement of the day.”

Ryan directed the group into a gutted corner building on the right side of the street. Its interior showed sign of a major fire, but from the lack of smell or even soot, it had burned out long ago. There was no furniture or serious trash buildup in the corners. Everybody sat on the floor to take a breather and a pull from their water bottles.

“I know where we are,” J.B. said as he stepped into the shade. As hot as it was inside it was still a relief after the blast of sunlight. He was tucking away his minisextant. “Detroit.”

“Outstanding,” Mildred said. “I’ve been here. It was crappy before the balloon went up.”

“Did you check your rad counter, J.B.?” Krysty asked. “Something busted the ville up pretty well.”

“Already on it,” Ryan said, looking down at the small rad counter pinned to the lapel of his coat. “Rad levels are high, but not enough to be a real problem in the short run. We’ll just have to keep our eyes skinned for fallout hot spots.”

Mildred shrugged. “Somehow the idea of dying of cancer in thirty years doesn’t really terrify me,” she said.

“I daresay that when you visited Detroit before,” Doc said, looking out a window to the southwest, “it looked substantially different from this. And I do not refer to the obvious damage.”

“I didn’t expect it to be this overgrown,” Mildred said. “I mean, it’s pretty humid here. This is Great Lakes country after all. There’s a river not far south and a smaller lake somewhere not too far east. But usually urban desolation is more, uh, desolate.”

“That may suggest where the water pressure came from to drive the flooding of the late redoubt,” Doc said.

“What could’ve cracked its shell like that?” Ricky asked.

“Mebbe shockwave from a ground burst,” J.B. said. “Or some of those big earthquakes they had everywhere before the bombs even stopped falling.”

“Been over a hundred years of hardship and bad times since,” Ryan added. “A lot can happen in that time. Even to a redoubt.”

He gestured out the window Doc had been gazing through. “And I don’t know if you’ve noticed. It’s not all just overgrowth busting up through the pavement and whatnot. That’s an actual open field right there next to us, though it’s a small one. And that’s not random weeds and brush, either.”

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “It’s a truck garden! They even have growing frames.”

“Well, we know people are here,” Mildred said. “They have to eat. It makes sense they’d grow food where they could.” She laughed. “So that gives us an idea where all that poop came from. But why so much of it?”

“Mebbe a lot of people live in these ruins,” Krysty said. “Might be plots like this all over the place.”

“But why would they all be pooping into the old sewer system?” Mildred demanded. “I mean, I know gravity still works. Without power to pump it to treatment plants, it’ll all just flow down to the river. And God help the poor bastards downstream. But why do they bother?”

Ryan scratched an ear with his forefinger.

“Mebbe we don’t live as refined as people did back in your time, Mildred,” Ryan said, “but we still remember the old saying, ‘Don’t shit where you eat.’ And why bother digging latrines if you got sewers?”

“You’re right, Ryan,” Mildred said, instantly contrite. “I didn’t mean to imply everybody these days is a barbarian.”

Ryan chuckled. “Mostly we are. Just not that kind.”

“So where do we go from here, lover?” Krysty asked.

“There’s a big structure another few blocks, the way we were going,” J. B. said. “Looks half-trashed. You could still fit a respectable ville’s worth of folks inside by the looks of things.”

“Downtown seems to be behind us,” Ryan said. “And to the north from what I could see as we were leaving the redoubt. Not that I looked hard at anything but a way out of there.”

“Do we want to potentially meet a whole ville’s worth of people?” Mildred asked. “That first bunch seemed anything but friendly, and I’m not even counting the muties. What’d they call them again?”

“Clayboys,” Ricky said. He had taken up station beside a front window, keeping an eye on the way they’d come. He had his DeLisle unslung. Jak crouched by the southwest window like an alert dog.

“Yeah. Look,” Mildred added, “if I recall correctly, Windsor’s right across the river. It used to be part of Canada. The only part of Canada south of a big U.S. city, at least in the old lower forty-eight, I think. And if we’re south of downtown, or close to it, we’re near the river. Maybe we should head that way.”

“Mebbe not everybody’s as hostile as that first crew,” J.B. said.

“And here I thought you were the reliably paranoid one, John,” she replied.

“I just reckon that if we took people by surprise in their own backyard, naturally they’re gonna react.”

“Who’s growing the food?” Krysty asked suddenly. “Those punk types didn’t strike me as the farming sort.”

“More like enforcers,” Ryan said. “Or raiders.”

He rubbed his jaw. Quick-growing stubble rasped his palm.

“Why did we want to be in a hurry to shake the dust of this place off our boot heels?” he asked.

Everybody looked at him.

“I presume that was not a rhetorical question,” Doc said slowly. “Inasmuch as you have notoriously little patience with such.”

“No. Practical. Why do we think we’d get a better reception in this Windsor ville, anyway? Seems like they’re in pretty much the same boat as Detroit. And let me remind everybody, although we’ve got lots of ammo at the moment, we’re starting to run low on rations.”

“Then what’s your plan?” Mildred asked. “It doesn’t look as if the beans and corn across the street are near ready to be picked and eaten.”

“Not to mention they’ll be guarded,” Krysty said. “Either by the bunch with the pink Mohawks or those against them.”

“And that’s it,” Ryan said. “You got food here. You got people growing the food. You got people with blasters. That means you got trouble.”

J.B. shrugged. “Could have stood pat with just, ‘You got people,’” he said.

“Yeah. Well. What I’m saying is, there’s trouble for us to fix. And food to pay us with for fixing it. I’m not sure a better deal’s liable to just come strolling along.”

“It’s a big city, Ryan,” Krysty said. “Isn’t that kind of a tall order?”

He grinned.

“When isn’t it?”

* * *

THEY HEADED OUT. Ryan decided to keep going the way they had been, southwest, in the general direction of the immense half-collapsed rectangular structure.

Krysty had misgivings about that. She was in her own way even more attuned to the natural world than their former wild child Jak, who was now ranging out in front of the rest scouting for danger—a job he insisted on doing despite his discomfort in urban surroundings. Being in the middle of the steel-and-concrete corpse of a great predark city felt unnerving enough, though the greenery bursting out through cracks in the rubble as if to reclaim it in so many places kept her from feeling cut off from Gaia.

The corner they approached was apparently an entrance. It consisted of blocky shapes tiered outward and upward from a corner cut out of the giant building. The doors had once held glass, long since blown out, leaving rusting metal frames like cage walls.

A colonnade ran down the building face along the street to their left. The street itself remained more or less intact. It was still passable, anyway, in spite of being heaved and broken in a crazy quilt of angled planes. And still passed, she reckoned, to judge by the fact that little more than sprouts and tufts showed through the network of innumerable cracks.

The space between it and the facade had obviously been a broad walkway. Now the pavement was gone, replaced by neat rows of cultivated plants—potatoes, beans twining up stakes, green vegetables, rows of shoulder-high corn along the edge closer to the structure where they wouldn’t deny the other crops light. It all looked terribly vulnerable to Krysty.

“I wonder where everybody is,” Ricky said from behind her.

As they approached the vast derelict—or ruin, she corrected herself, because somebody pretty evidently still occupied it—they had fanned out into a V formation, with Ryan at the point, Krysty at his left side and J.B. to his right. Mildred walked just behind J.B. Doc followed Krysty. Jak zigzagged cautiously ten yards ahead of Ryan. Ricky brought up the rear in a line behind Ryan.

“Somebody’s spent a lot of time tending that garden,” he said. “Like the one behind us. And somebody keeps the junk from building up in that place we took our break. So where are they?”

“Laying low,” J.B. said. “They likely heard blasters. Decided to duck and cover until whoever was having the disagreement sorted things out.”

“Think they’re inside that thing?” Mildred asked uneasily.

“Seems likely,” Ryan said.

Jak crouched up the concrete steps to the entrance, well over to the right so he wasn’t walking right up to the open, Cubist cave mouth. He glanced inside.

“See nothing,” he called back softly.

“Ryan?” Krysty asked.

“Drive on,” he said firmly.

“You sure that’s wise?” Mildred asked.

“No. If we were wise, we wouldn’t be here.”

“Where else would we be, then, Ryan?” Doc asked.

“If I knew that,” Ryan gritted, “we’d be there. Right. We walk in like we own the place.”

“Won’t somebody spot us?” Ricky squeaked.

“Son,” J.B. said, “somebody has. You don’t think people survive in a place like this without keeping close watch on everything that goes on in their immediate area? Especially intruders coming into it.”

Ryan led the way boldly up the steps. Jak slipped around and inside the building, trusting his superior senses and reflexes to alert him to any lurking dangers—especially ambushers—and get him out of the jaws of any trap before they slammed shut.

Inside was cool and dark, especially after the hot dazzle of the downtown street. Coils of razor wire were positioned at both sides of the entrance, at angles to leave the way in and out clear.

“Looks like somebody likes to be able to shut the place up tight,” J.B. remarked. “Keep unwanted guests out.”

“It is not working on us,” Doc said.

J.B. shrugged. “Mebbe we’re not what they had in mind.”

“Huh,” Mildred said, sniffing the air. “It doesn’t smell like sewage. Much. Other than us, I mean. We have got to get cleaned up. I know everybody these days has a super immune system, but if we don’t want any little scratch to give us pseudomonas, so that our legs swell up and go gangrenous and have to be cut off—”

“Enough,” Ryan said. He halted them just inside the lobby.

“Anyway, it seems like a good sign,” she finished.

“People live,” Jak said. He crouched in an area right of the entrance, where a picnic table and some chairs had been set in what might have once been a kiosk. Its enclosure was now just metal uprights to hold long-vanished glass.

“Yep, they do,” Mildred said. “Somewhere. The question is, do any live here?”

“They do,” Krysty said. “I smell food cooking. With onion, garlic and basil.”

Her stomach rumbled as she said it.

“Mebbe they’ll invite us to join them for lunch,” Ricky said.

“Or to be lunch,” J.B. suggested.

Other tables and chairs sat on a tile floor, dark gray on lighter gray down the central strip that ran from the door, mixed shades of blue and gray to the sides. It looked as if the area was used for socializing. A dead escalator rose at the far end to a second story surrounded by a rail.

“Ryan, look,” Krysty said as they advanced. She pointed at a giant square doorway that opened to their right.

Like several others, it spilled yellow daylight onto the floor tiles. Through it they could see what looked to be another farm or garden. A hole in the roof—or a roof that was missing entirely—allowed the life-giving sunlight in.

“Huh,” Ryan said.

“Nobody home,” Ricky stated.

“Waiting and watching to see what we do, likely,” J.B. said.

“So what should we do, lover?” Krysty asked Ryan.

He had reholstered his weapons when they ducked into the building across the intersection. Now he cupped his empty hands around his mouth and hollered, “Hello! Anybody here? We’ve reached this ville and we’re looking for work.”

A blaster shot fired from the railing toward the escalator was his reply.

Chapter Four

“Mebbe they don’t like outlanders,” J.B. said.

“You rad-sucking fool, Tyrone!” a man’s voice shouted from the gallery. “Why’d you give us away?”

“They’re mercies!” another voice yelled back defensively. “We can’t let Hizzoner’s blasters on Angels turf!”

“Back outside!” Ryan yelled, racing toward the doors, which fortuitously were open.

As the companions turned to sprint the few steps back to the outdoors, another shot cracked out. Tile splintered to Ryan’s right. Then another blaster spoke and another.

“More right!” Jak yelped. Meaning other enemies were appearing in the doorway to the odd interior garden plots.

“Hold your breath!” J.B. shouted. “Poison gas!”

Then Ryan heard a clatter and sound of something metal and weighty rolling on tile.

“Gas!” one of the ambusher screamed from the railing.

A female voice cried, “Get back!”

Ryan burst into the sunlight. He took a few steps down the steps to the street, then spun, unlimbering his Steyr and dropping to one knee. He intended to cover his friends’ retreat.

He saw dirty yellow-white smoke billowing up from the middle of the wide floor. Already it rose high enough to obscure the second-story gallery from view, which meant it also obscured them from their enemies’ view, making aimed fire impossible.

Ryan grinned as his friends came flying out of the giant half-gutted building, racing past him. He heard a rip of full-auto fire and recognized J.B.’s Uzi. The Armorer was clearly giving their attackers some additional reason not to be fast about rushing to pursue.

Of course, they would pursue. That was a given. Especially once they figured out that what J.B. had unleashed on them wasn’t poison gas at all, but just one of the black-powder smoke bombs the Armorer and his apprentice, Ricky Morales, had started making in their spare time weeks ago.

Ryan was impressed by just how much smoke a bomb the size of a predark beer can produced—and how quickly.

“Best power right on,” J.B. called as he trotted down the steps, holding his Uzi in his right hand and his fedora pressed to his head with his left. “They’re starting to get organized, and it sounds like we got them hot well past nuke red.”

Jak raced past and took off to Ryan’s right to put himself in front of his companions. Everybody else was clear. Ryan had checked them off mentally as they passed him.

They headed southwest again, away from downtown—where they knew there were hostile blasters who more than likely were still keeping eyes skinned for them, even though they hadn’t pursued. They wouldn’t be any better disposed toward the companions after they had treated them to a faceful of mutie talons and all the accumulated sewage of some unspecified but no doubt vast swath of the great half-overgrown urban ruin-scape.

It was as good a direction as any. Ryan stood and followed.

* * *

WHEN HIS BUDDY Jak sprinted past him to take the lead in the hasty retreat, Ricky found himself half-disappointed and half-relieved. It wasn’t that he was afraid to put his life on the line for his friends—he did that all the time. It was that he was a bit on the near-sighted side and hated leaving his friends’ survival dependent on senses that were far less keen than the albino’s.

He carried his DeLisle carbine in preference to his Webley handblaster. The big top-break, double-action revolver, converted by his uncle Benito to fire the same .45 ACP cartridges the longblaster did, was handier to use in a close-in fight, and faster, too. But he already knew the Detroit ruins hosted muties with bad attitudes toward norms. And the green growth that exploded through the broken pavement here and there, or sprouted in more or less orderly rows in the cultivated plots they sometimes passed, provided enemies with excellent cover. The sturdy, stocky DeLisle made a far better melee weapon than a handgun did.

They were running down the northwestern edge of the great half-ruined building. Even as he looked around for potential enemies, Ricky took in more of the extent of its ruination. He realized quickly why the big space they had glimpsed through the side door was full of crops and the daylight that gave them life. Something had taken off or collapsed the roof of the blocky center from twenty or thirty yards down from the entrance, all the way back to where an elevated track or walkway to a circular parking structure had been taken down by the same catastrophe. Or a similar one. The parking structure itself, mostly open, had survived intact, at least as far as Ricky could see. Open structures always seemed to have survived nuke blasts better than closed ones.

Another cultivated plot grew at the building’s far end, where the elevated track had gone down. From there, several figures in dark vests jogged into the street in front of Jak and Ricky. One of them, with brown hair hanging to his shoulders, knelt and aimed a longblaster at Ricky.

A sharp crack punched at his left ear. He yelped and swerved.

The man with the longblaster dropped the weapon and folded over backward. What Ricky had heard, as his rational mind belatedly informed him, was the miniature sonic boom of a longblaster bullet going by him faster than the speed of sound. But it was fired from behind him. Ricky recognized the boom that reached him as the enemy gunman fell as the sound of Ryan’s 7.62 mm Steyr Scout.

Not that Ricky was accustomed to hearing it from way out in front of its business end.

Jak swerved right into an intersection. Ricky followed, even as he heard Ryan yell, “Covering fire!”

Jak reached a concrete building corner. He hunkered down, leaned around and fired an ear-shattering blast from his Python.

Ricky joined him a few heartbeats later. He pressed his shoulder against the wall. Wishing he were a lefty so he could shoot without exposing almost his entire body, the youth stepped out enough to get a look at the new pack of pursuers. They seemed to be coming out of a gap in the wall of the big building. Long slabs of the fallen track lay behind them, tilted at random angles amid thick, low vegetation.

He laid his iron sights on the bare chest of the man running in the lead and pressed the trigger. His hefty longblaster fired a pistol cartridge, so it didn’t have much of a kick, and the suppressed weapon barely made a sound.

The shot took the man at the upper-right top of his rib cage arch. Ricky could tell because he saw the blood splash red from beneath his target’s right nipple. The man took a header, dropping his long-barreled single-action revolver and rolling over and over on the cracked blacktop.

Jak’s big .357 Magnum Colt Python made more than enough noise for both weapons. When he cranked off another shot, three of the vest wearers hit the pavement. Ricky had no idea if his friend had even hit one of them. There was no way he could’ve nailed all three, even with the Python’s tendency to overpenetrate. At least two people fired back, and Ricky and Jak had to duck hastily as chips of concrete flew from the corner.

Shots were fired from up the street, too close to be the original pursuers—they had to come from Ryan and company. Ricky bent to avoid making his head a ripe target by poking it out where it had been before and risked a quick look at the enemy.

Their pursuers were picking themselves up off the street and racing back for the far side. They left only two of their comrades lying there: the rifleman Ryan had shot and the runner Ricky got.

Their five friends pelted by, turning up the same street they had.

“Better move along,” J.B. called in passing. “The first bunch got themselves sorted out, and they’re not happy!”

Ricky and Jak looked at each other and grinned. Then they headed out after the others as J.B. fired a quick burst back the way he’d come, then pivoted to loose another across the street.

* * *

AS RICKY AND Jak moved on, J.B. took station against the textured gray wall a few steps down the street. He held his Uzi ready. No new targets presented themselves immediately, from either the original pursuers storming out the front entrance after them or the new set from the giant building’s far end. He knew they wouldn’t stay out of play for long.

Ryan ran past him, turned and knelt, bringing up his Steyr.

“Into the garage!” he shouted.

J.B. promptly wheeled right and trotted toward the entrance. It was wide, meant to allow two-lane access for cars going in and out of the parking structure. He slung his Uzi and took up his shotgun.

Jak slipped in first. He still had his Python in one white fist, which looked like a child’s compared to the big blaster. Concern was written all over his pinched features.

Ricky waited beside the open bay, clutching his DeLisle and peering uneasily inside. Krysty, Mildred and Doc stood in the street, out of direct line of the wide door, covering the street and the bluish building across it. They kept their handblasters ready.

Unspoken but obvious—even to J.B., who didn’t take hints—was that they weren’t any more anxious to plunge into the depths of the garage than Ricky was.

“Back me up,” J.B. told his apprentice as he went by. He entered the building without waiting to see if Ricky followed. He would.

The Armorer took a step to his left to clear the fatal funnel of the doorway. Nothing good could come from standing there silhouetted by the bright daylight. While his eyes adjusted, he covered the interior with his M4000 held almost but not quite at shoulder level, ready to whip the rest of the way up at the first sign of trouble.

Jak squatted next to a thick pillar that supported the next level. In the daylight that filtered in through the building’s open sides J.B. saw lots of humped shapes—cars stalled by the Big Nuke and left here to rot. Some had been torn open by scavvies. In places he could make out what looked like piles of fiberglass body panels that had been torn off by industrious scavengers looking to reclaim the metal frames.

J.B. wondered why they hadn’t been far more thoroughly mined out. A colony as populous as the big ruin looked to be could always find uses for that much steel and other metal, either for itself or as valuable trade goods. They could also muster the manpower to cut up even heavy frames by hand into chunks small enough to haul away.

“Keep moving,” Ryan said. “Out the other side and right.”

The others were already inside the building. Ryan fired a couple quick blasts out the way they had come, though glancing back J.B. could see no targets. Evidently the one-eyed man was just reminding their pursuers of the possible consequences of sticking their noses around the corner to peer in after their prey.

J.B. doubted it would discourage them. For long, anyway. But he knew Ryan’s mind and realized the idea was to keep them off everybody’s asses long enough.

He walked forward briskly. Jak was still where he was, looking around. He clearly wasn’t happy, which meant J.B. wasn’t happy. He wasn’t ready to charge ahead until he knew what was eating the albino.

“Not like,” Jak said. “Smell...something.”

J.B. had already smelled something disquieting: death. A dead creature was rotting somewhere not too far off.

That didn’t mean a bent cartridge case. At any given moment, tons of dead things were rotting away around the Deathlands. Some of them once had names. No doubt plenty of various sorts of chills were decomposing away right here in the Detroit rubble.

Jak knew that as well as J.B. did. It could be a bad sign, sure. But it wasn’t bad enough news to hold Jak back.

“What?” J.B. asked.

Jak shook his head. “Not tell. Something.”

The death stink, somehow sweet, pervasive, infinitely horrible no matter how often you smelled it—which in all their cases had been often—could mask a host of other odors. Bad luck. But the potential dangers that smell hid were that—potential.

The pissed-off people chasing them were real. And immediate.

“Gotta go,” J.B. told him. “Double fast.”

Without an instant’s hesitation Jak took off. He decided to run full-out, secure their way out. Speed was needed here more than caution.

J.B. followed him, less rapidly, and not just because his legs could never keep him up with Jak’s even though J.B. was taller than he was. He held his shotgun across his belly, ready to blast whatever made the mistake of jumping out to challenge the intruders. He heard the footfalls of his friends pounding close behind.

When he was just past the midway point to the brightness of the far exit, a voice shouted out from behind, “There the bastards are!”

And Jak wheeled around, his face a white mask of alarm.

“Stickies!”

Chapter Five

J.B. spotted them right away, off toward a broad ramp descended from the level above.

The muties looked like tiny humans, not much smaller than Jak. They were as vicious as any creature in the Deathlands, human coldhearts included. Their noses were vertical slits, and their mouths were filled with needle teeth. They also had tough, rubbery skin, which contributed to making them double-hard to chill. Many needed a shot to the head to chill, but the companions had run across plenty who could be taken out by any kind of mortal wound.

J.B. now understood what had been tickling Jak’s sensitive nostrils, despite the overlying smell of death. It was the distinctive reek of stickies. The death stink that hid theirs probably came from victims, human or animal, the muties had either not finished eating yet or got tired of and just left to rot where they lay.

He gave the muties a couple blasts of #4 buckshot without even slowing them. Unless a lucky lead ball happened to punch through one of those big, staring eyes into the malevolent inhuman brain beyond, it had little chance of killing one of them. But one stickie fell down, shrieking and slapping at its body with its sucker-tipped fingers, and the other staggered back a pace or two.

“Full speed!” Ryan yelled.

Jak stopped long enough to hold his Python out the full length of his arm and trigger a shot. The blaster’s roar bouncing between the concrete floor and roof made its usually unpleasant noise seem to clap the sides of J.B.’s head like planks of wood. But that beat what happened to the stickie’s head. The 125-grain jacketed hollow-point round imploded its right eye and blew the brains out the back of its round skull in a black fountain.

Shooting broke out from behind J.B., more than his friends alone could account for....

* * *

RYAN LOOKED BACK. People stood in the street behind his companions. After just a handful of seconds inside the darkened parking structure, they seemed to swim against a sea of dazzle. A couple opened up with handblasters.

Ricky leaned out from around a stout concrete pillar painted in badly flaking yellow and fired a shot from his DeLisle. A figure went down, dropping a semiauto handblaster as it did. The other three or four pursuers continued to pop off shots into the structure.

Sooner or later, they’d catch a break and hit somebody.

Ryan rapidly holstered his SIG and unslung the Scout. Turning and dropping to one knee, he raised the longblaster to his shoulder.

There was no time for the variable-power Leupold scope. And at twenty, twenty-five yards max, no need. As soon as he had a target in his ghost ring he squeezed the trigger, sharp as he could without jerking it and pulling the shot offline.

A jeans-clad leg buckled under an enemy. The man dropped a lever-action longblaster as he fell flat on his face on the hot asphalt.

The other pursuers threw themselves down as well, but they kept shooting.

“Handblaster, Ricky!” Ryan shouted to the kid. “Covering fire, but keep coming.”

He turned as he straightened.

A gibbering, chittering horde of stickies was flooding the ramp now. “Run!” Ryan yelled at his companions. “Just run!”

He fired a snapshot into the mass. A couple of the muties squealed and fell as the 7.62 mm bullet punched through their torsos. It wouldn’t keep them down for long. But following muties tripped over them and fell. With their bloodlust amped all the way up, the creatures began to snarl, slap and snap at each other in crazy rage.

Others came flowing around them. They fanned out to attack the encroaching norms.

Jak was already by the far exit. He emptied his blaster at the stickies. Ryan saw another go down with the back of its head blown out.

He slung his longblaster and moved forward. Krysty, Mildred and Doc had already passed him and were racing for the exit. Doc stuck out his hand and unloaded the shotgun barrel of his LeMat into the face of a charging stickie. It took out its eyes and tore off the upper side of its face. The stickie uttered a human shriek of agony and despair and fell to its knees, clutching the ruin of its face.

For a moment Ryan thought they’d make it with a few steps to spare. But that was the thing about stickies—they could move bastard fast.

One darted toward Krysty. She veered and it missed its grab at her. But the suckers on its fingers caught the right sleeve of her shirt.

She yelped; other muties closed in, chittering triumphantly.

Krysty let the mutie turn her hand toward itself. In that hand was her Smith & Wesson 640. She emptied the five shots in its cylinder into the creature’s belly.

The horror barely even flinched. It opened its mouth wide and swept its free hand up to try to rip off her face.

“Krysty!” Mildred yelled. She grabbed the taller woman by her left upper arm and yanked her away.

But it still clung to her despite the blood leaking black through the holes in its abdomen. Other muties converged on what they took for a certain chill.

Ryan waded in. He booted away one that was trying to get around behind Krysty. Then he lunged forward and severed the hand that was stuck to Krysty’s sleeve just above the skinny wrist.

With Mildred’s help Krysty was yanked from the cluster of stickie hands. Ryan had had to overbalance to hack through the mutie’s arm. His right boot slipped on something wet and slick on the concrete beneath him. He dropped to one knee, hard enough to clack his teeth together and send a lance of pain from his kneecap up through his whole body.

But Ryan never lost his presence of mind. That was something he’d always had, that gift of constant, unswerving focus—on survival.

He batted away the grasping, suckered hands, slashing with his panga. And even as he fought desperately the awful screeching muties who swarmed around him, he was roaring, “Go! Get out of here!”

He moved his arms violently to prevent any fingertip suckers from latching on. But the stickies were cunning monsters. They adapted. One wrapped its arms around his right forearm, fouling his panga. It stretched its head out on its neck with jaws gaping wide to take a chunk out of the one-eyed man’s face.

In his peripheral vision Ryan saw something dark and slender, and yellow flame belched forth. It bathed the whole side of the stickie’s head with its yawning, sharp-toothed maw in fire.

The left side of the stickie’s head exploded. Its arms relaxed in death, releasing its hold.

Ryan thrust his panga into another flat stickie face, bursting a staring eyeball. The panga’s blade was much too wide to pierce through to the mutie’s brain, but the creature fell back shrieking.

Ryan saw a stickie head’s transfixed from his left to his right with a slender steel blade. Then hands were hauling him away from the stickies as handblasters spoke shatteringly from either side of him.

He got the rest of the way to his feet on his own. He saw it was Mildred on his left who’d blasted the stickie—and left him with a ringing in his ears that would last for hours. Krysty was to his right.

A quick flurry of face shots dropped three stickies and slowed the others.

Ryan drew his SIG with his left hand and shot a fourth through its open mouth as it vaulted a scrum of writhing bodies.

“Nuke it, the stickies didn’t get them!” a voice called from the street.

“Give the mutie bastards a chance,” somebody else yelled back.

The stickie swarm had split the party in two. J.B. had almost reached Jak, still lurking by the exit, when the mutie caught hold of Krysty. Now the muties were surrounding everybody else, gobbling and squeaking in triumph.

“Stay behind me,” Ryan yelled to Krysty and Mildred. The sickening stench of stickies was so thick now it made his head spin. The spilling of stickie blood, brain and guts didn’t make them smell any sweeter. “Doc, Ricky, right and left outside them.”

The women complied.

Though Ricky was the newest of the group of companions, he’d been with them for months now. He knew how they worked and how to work well with them.

Ryan led the way back for the exit away from the human pursuit, hacking with the big panga, warding off blows and attempted grabs with the SIG. He only fired when there was no other choice.

Doc, outside the two close-together women to Ryan’s right rear, was stabbing mutie faces with his sword and bludgeoning the ones who got close with his massive LeMat. Ricky held his carbine by its fat sound suppresser. He hacked at the muties with the butt to keep them away, alternating baseball-bat style with ax-type overhead action. Because it had been built out of a military weapon that was intended to bust skulls as a last resort, the DeLisle could likely survive the rude treatment with little damage.

But the companions had to survive for that to matter a lick.

The muties wouldn’t run, but they could be forced back. They weren’t big. Ryan had no trouble bulling through them, though not as fast as he liked, by just using his size and strength. And the women, holding on to each other for support, booted any stickies who got through the rough equilateral triangle of the males.

Then a mutie right in front of Ryan had its head smashed from behind by a downward butt stroke of J.B.’s M4000 scattergun. And the one beside it pitched forward with the back of its skull staved in by a punch from the studded brass-knuckle hilt of Jak’s trench knife. Ryan had to lash out with his shin to knock the creature aside and keep it from tripping him—or latching on to his jeans-clad leg with its suckers.

“Quit screwing around,” J.B. told Ryan. Without even seeming to look he jabbed the muzzle of his shotgun hard to his left. A stickie reeled back into its circling, capering buddies, wailing and clutching the spurting crater where its left eye used to be. “We’ve got to get going.”

The pair had waded back to help their friends. The stickies faltered, confused rather than scared. “Power on!” Ryan bellowed.

They all ran flat-out for the exit. Stickies that got in their way were knocked down. Ryan trampled one that J.B. had half spun with his shoulder. His friends ran over it without breaking stride.

The one-eyed man heard angry shouts from behind, then shots. A bullet cracked past his head to the right.

Then he was out into the bright, blessed sunshine of the Detroit wasteland. His friends, all miraculously still alive, were right on his heels. A whole pack of stickies was left behind to keep their pursuers off their asses.

A bullet kicked up fallen leaves and some concrete dust three feet in front of him.

Chapter Six

“Fireblast!” Ryan shouted.

He checked himself and pivoted, bringing his longblaster to his shoulder.

A group of at least a dozen men was approaching cautiously from the direction of the big half-ruined building. They all carried longblasters and wore the distinctive dark vests of their original pursuers. They were still roughly fifty yards away.

Behind them, another garden lay past the structure’s southwest end. This one was enclosed by a barbed wire fence and more rolls of razor tape. Inside it were the jumbled remnants of what Ryan realized was a raised road that had once led to the circular structure. Now it was a spiral ramp. Apparently the big building had had rooftop parking.

Ryan fired a shot at the enemy. He didn’t hit anybody. They ducked anyway, a couple stretching flat on the ground.

They weren’t driven off, though. They promptly opened fire.

Caught between stickies in the semidarkness and so far inaccurate blasterfire in the sunshine, he had only one choice. Fortunately, before the first shot had alerted Ryan to more trouble approaching, he’d spotted a gap between buildings across the street and not twenty yards to the right of where he and his friends emerged.

“Go, go, go!” he yelled, waving his arm at the half-overgrown entrance to a street or alley. As his friends ran by behind him, he dropped to one knee and took quick aim.

His scope happened to fall on a blond head behind the receiver of a Mini-14. It looked like a woman.

That meant nothing to Ryan. If a person pointed a weapon at him or his friends, the person would die.

No exceptions. He pulled the trigger.

The Steyr kicked his shoulder with the buttplate. He held on to the stock, rode the recoil and brought the blaster back online with practiced ease.

A pink spray blossomed behind the shooter’s head when it reappeared in his telescopic sight. It plopped forward, revealing the ragged red mess where the back of the skull had been knocked out by the bullet’s passage.

He heard a rippling roar of blasterfire from behind him to the right.

“Haul ass, Ryan!” J.B. shouted. “We’re clear.”

He sprang up and ran for safety through a barrage that crackled around him like bacon frying on a grill.

Ricky knelt among weeds at the corner of a building, laying down covering fire with his suppressed longblaster. J.B. kept stepping out to fire a quick, short burst then nip back into cover.

“Here come more of them,” Ricky said as Ryan raced past him.

“Looks like the first bunch that set out after us decided not to mess with the stickies,” J.B. commented, putting his back against the wall out of the line of enemy fire. “Seems like shooting some of them just made them madder.”

“Happens sometimes,” Ryan called.

“What do I do?” Ricky yelled.

“Try to keep up!”

* * *

HER BREATH WHISTLING in her ears, Mildred slogged heavily through a muddy field of leafy green vegetables. The farmers who’d been tending it went flying in all directions at the approach of a heavily armed crew of strangers, flip-flops flopping and flat-cone straw hats falling back behind their heads to hang by chin straps.

The fact that a much bigger, just as heavily armed and amazingly pissed-off bunch of people in leather vests was running fifty yards behind the intruders probably didn’t reassure them.

Mildred felt bad as her boots squashed tender plants into the carefully tended soil. She knew these people worked hard at their plots because their survival was at stake.

But so was hers. So on she ran, heedless.

Though it couldn’t have been more than a handful of blocks, the whole flight had become a nightmare steeplechase in her mind: a blurred montage of cracked streets, shattered buildings, burned-out husks, riotous undergrowth and orderly plots like the one they were so industriously, if incidentally, violating.

The pursuers fired off an occasional shot. Like all the others—so far—it didn’t hit any of them. The bad guys were shooting on the run. Whoever it was chasing them so doggedly had discovered a few turns back that if they actually stopped to aim, they got left behind.

As they approached a half-collapsed building, Jak suddenly appeared out of a staring, blank doorway. He gestured to his friends frantically.

The place looked trashed. Once several stories tall, the building appeared to have mostly fallen in on and around itself, judging from the fragmentary sheets of red stone sticking out of the piled rubble. But the lower floor looked intact. The place still looked anything but promising, much less remotely safe.

Ryan headed for the door without hesitation.

The others followed. Ryan Cawdor wasn’t always right, but his decisions had kept them alive so far, through some of the worst situations imaginable.

At the door he turned, shouldered his Scout longblaster and fired back at their pursuers. Mildred didn’t bother glancing around. It only made her more likely to stumble or maybe twist an ankle, which would be fatal.

Anyway, there was no need. The men—and occasional woman—in vests chasing after them had had been taught caution by Ryan’s and Ricky’s marksmanship. They knew to duck when one or the other opened fire on them. They didn’t care to come too close yet, but they showed no signs of giving up.

Ryan, Krysty and Doc entered the ruin. Jak was already inside, leading the way. Mildred followed.

As she stepped inside she heard J.B. murmur something behind her. She glanced back to see Ricky nodding and grinning.

“Best keep moving,” J.B. said to Mildred.

The interior of the fallen-in building alternated shadow and shafts of sunlight from holes in the overhead. It stank worse of death than the stickies’ parking structure had.

As she followed immediately behind Krysty, Mildred quickly found out why. The path Jak led them on wound down hallways and through broken walls. A bloated torso lay against a wall inside a room next to one they passed through. Mildred couldn’t tell what sex it had been. A head with long, dark hair was turned away from them.

She reckoned that was fortunate. Along with being mottled red and yellow and green from rot, the chill had neither arms nor legs. The wounds visible through big tears in the gray-on-gray plaid flannel shirt gave Mildred the impression it had been partially eaten.

By something big.

To her physician’s eye those marks had been inflicted postmortem. She didn’t find that terribly reassuring.

To her relief she was quickly outside in the sun again. Almost immediately her relief vanished. Her group had come out on the south side of the building—meaning they were now headed back toward their pursuers.

Then she realized they were east of the street she’d last seen their enemies on. And the sight lines between were blocked by fields of high weeds. In the middle of it stood the remains of a small shantytown. The small, frail constructions, knocked together from random bits of rubble, trash and scavvy, were all the more pathetic for having obviously been trashed and abandoned. Some were no more than burned-out skeletons of charred tree limbs and twisted metal rods.

As they headed southeast, Ricky trotted out of the ruin to join them. “Did you do like I asked, Ricky?” J.B. said to him.

Ricky nodded vigorously. “Yes, sir!”

“Good man.”

Jak led them through the weeds toward a dark gray building that showed them a long, blank face. No windows were visible, only some intact ducts on the level above the street.

He moved toward the northeast end of the mostly blank wall, near an abutting building that had several more stories with glass in the windows. It might have been an annex of the first one. A loading bay door stood open between shrubby trees. The albino slipped up a ramped walkway to the bay’s far side. He crouched next to it and looked in.

Then he looked back at his friends and nodded. But he held up a hand in the sign for caution.

A crackle sounded from behind the companions. It quickly expanded into a storm of gunfire. Mildred reflexively ducked, then turned back. She saw nothing but the weeds, the shantytown and the red-faced ruin.

“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “What the nuke?”

“Ricky left them one of the little surprises he’s been working on,” J.B. said, as proud as a new poppa.

Ricky blushed. “Nothing lethal. Just a string of black-powder firecrackers with a tripwire and a pull initiator left in the front door of the place we just left. It works just the same as a firefight simulator.”

“That does not sound simulated,” Doc declared as the blasterfire continued to rage from the direction of the derelict building.

“It’s not,” J.B. said, “now.”

“Triple clever,” Ryan told them. “Now get your asses in gear. That won’t keep the bastards busy long.”

Ryan went up the ramp to where Jak still hunkered down by the yawning bay. The albino gave way for him to take a quick look inside. Then the taller man straightened and walked in.

“Because the walk-in-like-we-own-the-place thing worked so well last time,” Mildred said grumpily.

“Have some faith,” Ricky said earnestly.

“Famous last words,” Mildred replied. But she followed her friends into the relative darkness.

* * *

“COMPANY,” JAK SAID QUIETLY.

Ryan halted a few steps inside the loading bay. As he had ascertained, not much mileage could be gained by skulking. The bay opened into a large open space two stories high, with a gallery running along the far end. The stained concrete floor had been picked bare of everything except scattered trash.

It smelled of concrete and decaying greenery. At least it didn’t smell as if any chills had decomposed in here recently, Ryan thought.

His hands were empty. As risks went, it was carefully calculated. If whoever was in here was hostile and started blasting from ambush, if they did or did not have weapons wouldn’t make much difference. But whether or not they showed blasters might make a major difference as to whether anybody in here started shooting at them.

Ryan’s gamble was based on a simple judgment call. Should they go into a potential hiding place where they might find trouble, or stay outside where they knew trouble was actively hunting them?

As J.B. and Krysty stepped up to flank him, a voice called down to them from the gallery.

“Well, well, well. What have we here?”

It was a man’s voice, sarcastic but nonthreatening.

“Name’s Cawdor,” Ryan called back. “We’re outlanders just looking for a place to lie up a bit.”

A man stepped out of a darkened doorway on the upper level. He was average height, broad across the shoulders but not carrying much extra weight that Ryan could tell by his dark T-shirt and black cargo pants. His mustache and the shock of black hair hanging over his forehead made his face look pale. A handblaster rode in a flapped holster at his left hip. Ryan couldn’t make out the kind.

“Lie up, huh?” the man said. “Sounds to me like you might have something to hide out from.”

Ryan shrugged. “It’s easy finding trouble in a ville this size. We’re not looking for any.”

“I think they’re trying to jump our scavvy, Nikk,” a second voice said.

It belonged to a woman who emerged from the doorway behind him. She was about the same height as her partner and had short brown hair sprouting from a grimy camo headband. She wore a rust-colored halter top with overstuffed cargo shorts, and an MP5-K machine pistol rested in a right-hand cross-draw holster strapped in front of them.

“Always the cynic, Patch,” he said as she took her place at the railing alongside him.

She shrugged. “Realist.” Her manner was as cool as it was skeptical. “Somebody’s gotta be, with a dreamer like you in charge.”

He chuckled indulgently. “At least they were smart enough to come in with their hands empty,” he told her.

Then to Ryan he said, “We’ve got blasters on you.”

“I figured,” Ryan said. “So it doesn’t look as if you’ve got much to fear from us, does it?”

“Could be a trick,” the woman said.

Nikk laughed out loud. “It could always be a trick,” he said. “That’s what makes it a game.”

“Razor Eddie’s reporting from the rooftop, Nikk,” another man’s voice called out the door. The speaker didn’t appear. “Says a gang is heading this way. Well armed. Thinks they’re the Desolation Angels.”

“Oh, shit,” a man said from the blank darkness of a doorway on the ground floor, which dispelled any suspicion Ryan might have had that Nikk was bluffing about them being covered.

Not that he’d had many to begin with.

“Aren’t they outside their usual range?” Patch asked. She wasn’t just skeptical of Ryan and company, it appeared.

Nikk shrugged. “They’ve been expanding lately. Prob’ly looking to keep up with DPD.”

“Who’s DPD?” Ryan asked. “I don’t think we’ve made their acquaintance yet.”

“You should hope that you never do.”

“They bad news?” J.B. asked.

Nikk grinned. “You really must be new in the ville,” he said. “If you haven’t learned yet that, here in D-Town, there are only two kinds of news. Bad news—”

Patch laid her head against his shoulder. “And worse news,” she said.

“Quite the comedic duo,” Doc murmured.

Nikk shook his head. “Sorry. We’ve got no beef with the Angels. We’re not looking to start one, either. You’d best be moving on.”

“And if we don’t?” Ryan asked.

“Well, say what you will about the Angels,” the scavvy boss said, “which is mostly that they’re stoneheart bastards through and through, but they aren’t sadists. So I don’t reckon it makes them much, never mind whether we hand your bodies over to them still breathing or started on your way to room temperature.”

Chapter Seven

Ryan hit the bay door running. Rather than take the ramp, he hopped down to the driveway.

Immediately he heard shots from the west. He ducked. Unslinging his Steyr, he lay prone on the pavement, then crawled forward. The concrete-lined side of the cut totally covered him from enemy fire and concealed him from their view. He heard some of his companions drop from the opening behind him.

As it sloped down close to sidewalk level, he stopped and raised his head to peer over it. The grass was too tall to allow him to see anything.

Cautiously he raised his body on his left arm, as though he was doing a one-armed pushup. He still couldn’t see anything.

Getting uneasy at not being able to see an enemy who obviously had seen him—or who knew roughly where he was—he pulled his knee forward, got a boot sole on the concrete and came up into a bent-forward kneeling position.

At least he was able to glimpse their enemy over the tufted tops of the grass. The Desolation Angels were about fifty yards off. He saw a dozen or so, spread out into a creditable skirmish line, advancing with longblasters across their chests.

Since they got a notion of what kind of quarry they were dealing with, the Angels had begun displaying a degree of professionalism. Apparently the war for dominance—or just survival—here in the Detroit rubble was a fierce one. Fierce enough to force the players to learn something a little better than the usual bullying and mob tactics used by gangs. Or even a lot of ville sec forces.

Ryan knew there were a lot more Angels after them than the ones he could see. And they had no way to fight them off, especially not from the loading-bay cut. And he didn’t fool himself that he could deal with Nikk and his bunch—by either sweet-talking a way back into the big building, or forcing their way in.

He didn’t hold it against the scavvies that they’d turned his companions out to face the Angels’ wrath. He would have done the same thing.

He raised the Steyr and looked through the scope. It had long eye relief, meaning it was mounted farther forward than most so that there was no danger of the eyepiece kicking back and cutting into the eye socket when it fired. It didn’t make it any harder to acquire a target or aim.

He quickly lined up a face like a sunburned fist in the reticule. Allowing for the up-and-down bob the Angel’s trot imparted, he timed his shot and fired.

The man had already fallen out of sight beyond the grass when he got the rifle back down and the scope lined up.

He yelled to his friends to run.

Ryan fired again. This time the target, an older-looking man with a full beard, turned back to yell something just as Ryan’s trigger broke. The shot hit him in the left shoulder and spun him.

“Smoke bomb out!” he heard J.B. yell from right beside him. Something arced down into Ryan’s field of vision, trailing brownish-gray smoke.

“Didn’t think they’d fall for the ‘poison gas’ gag a second time,” J.B. said. “Come on, Ryan. We’ve got to go.”

Without a second thought Ryan jumped to his feet. He’d had no intention of sacrificing himself to hold the pursuers off while his friends escaped. For one thing, he doubted it would’ve worked. There were just too many of the bastards. He saw no point in risking his ass when there was no need to.

A huge cloud billowed up between him and the enemy.

“That’s our last one of those for now,” J.B. said. He ripped off a short burst from his Uzi into the smoke screen, just to make the Angels think twice about barging in blind through the smoke. Then he and Ryan sprinted down the block away from them, after their companions.

Though another large, cultivated field opened to the north, Jak had led them not toward it but along the street, back toward the jagged but looming ruins of downtown. Ryan understood his reasons—and knew the albino youth was right. Once the Angels had stopped shooting holes in the air in response to Ricky’s makeshift firefight simulator, they almost certainly had fanned out from the fallen-in building Ryan and his team had ducked through. So they probably had men heading for the field and to the building Nikk’s scavvies claimed for their own. Above all, the fugitives needed to put as much distance between them and the Angels as possible and as fast as possible.

After he’d run a couple hundred yards, Ryan stopped and turned back. Once again he dropped to one knee.

People were just starting to emerge from the yellowish cloud of smoke. The air was still, so it was still mostly intact, dissipating only slowly in the humid, heavy air. Once more he drew a quick bead on the nearest, a tall black man with the sides of his head shaved. Ryan shot him through the chest and ran after his friends as the other Angels in sight opened fire.

So far none of them had turned out to be marksmen, which was lucky. But throw enough lead in the air, a person was bound to hit something eventually. This battle could not be allowed to go on.

At least they still had some air between themselves and the baying, blasting pack. Ryan and his crew needed to find either escape or cover to stand off the Angels until nightfall.

He ran past the exposed base of a white skyscraper. It appeared to be propped up by the remnants of a building it had crashed into. The bottom floor was an open wound of structural steel and broken concrete.

Jak had already turned the group north-northeast up the next street to take them out of their pursuers’ line of fire. Ryan followed, with J.B. just ahead of him.

“Head right at the next intersection!” he called.

“Blocked!” yelled Jak, who had sprinted ahead to scout escape routes. He was ace at his job—the best, as Ryan and his friends had learned, and learned hard some weeks before, when simmering resentments between Jak and Ryan had sent the younger man heading in one direction and the rest in another. That had gone disastrously for them all.

Jak kept running the way he was going. Up ahead Ryan glimpsed what looked at first like another shantytown, but in a fairly open space between a perilously leaning skyscraper on one side and a long, low white building on the other. This one was somehow much more colorful than the sad collection of burned out and abandoned shacks they had passed before. Also it was anything but abandoned; it was occupied by a throng of people.

A few heads started to turn as someone noticed Jak running toward them, with Krysty, Doc and Mildred close behind.

“¡Nuestra, señora!” Ricky yelped. He was just crossing the next intersection, the one with the white skyscraper toppled right across it. “Angels!”

“Bastards die hard,” J.B. said.

“Just run!” Ryan yelled.

J.B. fired a burst left as he entered the intersection without even slowing. Ryan had slung his Steyr and drawn his SIG.

Sure enough, a passel of the vest-wearing coldhearts was moving fast through the shadowed canyon of the broad east-west street. The white building lay tilted at somewhere south of forty-five degrees. It had crunched into a sinister-looking brown-and-black building across from it and had domino toppled into the building north of it.

Chunks of rubble big and small had fallen from the crazy-angled building. The Angels had to slow to pick their way over, around and through that, but no more than they had to. Ryan snapped a couple shots their way.

Once again they paused to return fire. Bullets cracked through the air around Ryan. One bounced off the pavement right ahead of him and howled away in ricochet.

J.B. paused by the corner of the tilted brown-and-black skyscraper to fire a burst at the Angels under the slanted structure. Ryan saw one go down, yelling and kicking. The others dropped to take cover among the rubble.

That turned out not to be a good idea. Apparently the fallen skyscraper wasn’t altogether stable. Or perhaps the earth had just shifted in a tremor Ryan was too preoccupied to feel. A block of masonry the size of one of the Motor City’s most famous products—a big old gas-guzzler sedan—dropped straight down and crushed a kneeling Angel. The others cut off their assault and scuttled away like frightened quail.

“That was more luck than we deserve,” J.B. commented. He fired another burst but didn’t seem to hit any of their pursuers.

Ryan raced past him. J.B. grinned as he flashed by and moved to follow.

Jak had burst in among the colorful shacks. To his surprise Ryan realized it was an active marketplace of sorts. The colors came from old scavenged signs, cracked panels of plastic and that old standby for Deathlands building and decoration both, hammered-out soda cans. The shacks themselves seemed to consist largely of nonmetallic car body panels.

The people swapping goods and gossip broke apart like a flock of pecking birds that had had an alley cat dropped in their midst. Some of them, mostly keepers of the kiosks of fresh fruits and ancient predark goods, stood their ground, shaking fists and shouting in outraged anger at the intrusion.

“We’re sorry!” Krysty and Mildred shouted as they ducked between the stands. Mildred knocked over an angled rack of brightly colored garments and sent them fluttering to the ground, which was bare earth hard packed by decades of feet.

Ryan glanced back as he and J.B. came among the stands. The group of Angels that had chased them out of Nikk’s domain had appeared behind them. As he watched, so did the ones the block’s fall had flushed.

Shouts and shots started to fly from the two groups of Angels. Fortunately, with all the kiosks and the bodies of fleeing customers, Ryan and his friends had plenty of concealment.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much cover available. The rapidly dwindling number of incidental bodies would stop bullets much more reliably than the fiberglass panels.

“What you wanna go and bring the Angels here for?” a sturdy-looking woman in an apron and a red bandanna shouted at Ryan as he darted around her table full of what looked to him to be fried rats on sticks.

“Didn’t have much choice in the matter, lady!” he yelled back.

At that moment a wrinkly stepped from between two booths up ahead, raised a giant black single-action blaster in two palsied hands and shot Doc in the head from twenty feet away.

Chapter Eight

“Fireblast!” Mildred heard Ryan yell.

From his tone of voice she knew something bad had happened. She turned, feeling sick fear in her gut. That last shot had sounded shatteringly loud, meaning it had been fired from nearby.

Mildred stopped, turned and saw Doc reeling, a hand clapped to the side of his head. Blood flooded between his fingers and down the back of his hands, ran down his cheeks and dripped onto the lapels of his long coat. And off to her right stood an old guy, wearing nothing but a grimy loincloth stained with she didn’t even want to imagine what. He held a big battered Ruger Blackhawk in both his pale, liver-spotted hands, and he was trying to crank the single-action hammer back with his thumbs.

Mildred’s reaction was automatic. Inevitable. She’d taken a half step to turn her right side toward him. She raised her right arm, stiffened. Her ZKR 551 target revolver was held at the end of it. By reflex she thumbed the hammer back as she brought it up.

The blocky sights aligned on the old man’s stringy-haired head, as if the upper half of it were sitting on top of the front post. At that instant she pressed the trigger.

She saw blood spray pink out the side of the elder’s head. His skinny legs and grubby fish-white body folded beneath him. She had chilled him and never given it a thought.

He was just trying to defend his place in the world, she thought, then reality set in. Tough titty. Her survival, and the survival of her companions, was paramount. She had done what needed to be done.

Now, blaster still in hand, she was moving swiftly toward Doc. He was still on his feet, but barely.

“No!” Mildred heard Ricky scream from behind her.

“Come on,” Krysty said firmly.

From the youth’s protests Mildred guessed the redhead had grabbed his arm and was physically dragging him onward among the now almost-deserted booths and stands.

Mildred was by Doc’s side. He tried to wave her off with his nonbloody hand.

“Go ahead, dear lady. I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.”

As if to prove the truth of her words, he reeled and toppled into her arms. Fortunately, she was professional enough a shooter to have her finger outside the trigger guard when she didn’t intend to fire the weapon. His weight was considerable, more than was expected by the look of him. But it wasn’t deadweight. He was still conscious. Just woozy.

“Jak!” she heard Ryan shout as she staggered back a step. For all his protestations, he hadn’t been too proud to drape his free arm around her neck for support. “Find us cover right now!”

He and J.B. appeared, flanking Doc simultaneously. The Armorer grabbed his left elbow while Ryan grabbed the right. They hauled him out of Mildred’s arms and kept running.

They scarcely even slowed.

Shouts erupted from behind them. The pack was closing in. The Angels were already among the southern booths, though fortuitously none of them had line of sight on their prey. Yet.

Without looking Ryan stretched his right arm back and cranked off two shots from his SIG. A stout black lady in a red turban scurrying for cover threw up her hands with a wail of despair and fell to the ground.

Mildred steeled her heart and turned to run after the three men. Ryan didn’t like to chill without need any more than she did. But if random third parties got in the way of shots he fired in defense of himself and his friends—even just popped off to try to spook some caution into whatever happened to be chasing them—he wouldn’t lose a second’s sleep over it.

She doubted he’d even remember it five minutes from now.

But she would. And she’d likely lose the sleep for him.

* * *

“WHY ISN’T DOC DEAD?” Ricky asked.

Krysty looked over the bottom of the large, empty front window, her snub-nosed .38 clutched in both hands. A large man, bent over with his big gut hanging out the front of his open vest, approached through the waist-high weeds and brush of the overgrown parking lot. She quickly lined up the sights and fired.

To her surprise the man dropped straight down out of sight, as if she’d actually hit him from fifty feet away. That was far from a given with her handblaster.

The overgrowth lit up and began to shake from multiple muzzle blasts as the Angels lying among them returned enthusiastic fire.

They ran into a former fast-food restaurant—the nearest available cover on the northwest side of a five-way intersection just north of the market. Its roof had been blown off so that its walls stood open to the sky. For what it was worth, it offered a decent field of fire in three directions. The way they had come was mostly clear for about twenty feet before the weeds kicked in. To the southwest a hundred feet of rubble-choked former parking lot—a lot of twisted ankles just waiting to happen—separated them from a stand of chest-high wheat and barley. On the northeast side, a wide, fairly intact street lay between them and a three-story red-brick building.

Ryan lifted his head cautiously above that wall and peered across the street.

“I’m not seeing any activity over there,” he reported. “Yet. If they put snipers on the roof, we’re going to have a long afternoon.” He jerked his chin at the structure, whose rooftop gave a commanding view of the far third of the former dining area where they had gone to ground.

“Doc got shot in the head,” Ricky said. He ignored the storm of bullets cracking over his head and flying over the counter into what had been the kitchen area of a derelict KFC. “Why isn’t he dead?”

“It wasn’t a fatal shot,” Mildred replied. Doc sat with his back to a side wall near the dark-haired youth while Mildred crouched next to him. She had the lid of one eye skinned wide-open with her thumb. “He isn’t going to die. Of this, anyway. But he is concussed.”

“So how is he not dead?”

“A person’s skull is pretty good armor, Ricky,” she said. “It’s possible that a handgun bullet could bounce off, even fired from point-blank range. This was just a graze. Lots of blood, but a small wound.”

“Probably a .38 slug,” J.B. said. He crouched beside the naked metal frame that had been the front door. “Soft lead, round nose. If the old guy had been cranking full-power .357s through that Ruger cowboy gun, we might be singing a different tune.”

The Angels hadn’t rushed them yet. Now the defenders were hunkered down just inside the open-to-the-air windows and doors, waiting for the inevitable assault. They had shucked their packs and left them in the back storage area where they wouldn’t be underfoot.

At least we’re getting a chance to drink some water and catch our breath, Krysty thought.

Mildred bandaged Doc’s head quickly, using some unbleached linen strips they’d traded for at a post.

“What’s our prospect of breaking out the back?” J.B. asked.

A partly collapsed building stood right behind the one they occupied, across a narrow alley. To its southwest was the rubble of a thoroughly destroyed building, a long, low mound coming up as high as Krysty’s breastbone in places. The street on the other side was partially blocked a bit farther down by another tall building that had fallen east.

“Not like,” Jak called. He was unseen in the back of the store, keeping an eye on the rear entrance. “No way through.”

“Looked as if there’s mostly more open fields off past it, anyway,” Ryan said. “Be hard to get out unseen.”

“There sure seems to be a lot of open space around here, for a big city and all,” said Ricky, who was crouched by the southwest wall. Nothing remained of the interior furnishings but the counter. The kitchen stoves and sinks and whatnot had long since been pillaged for scrap.

“It’s Detroit,” Mildred said, cutting off the end of the last bandage with a pocketknife. “The Motor City. There, old man. You look as if I just treated you for toothache, but at least you won’t bleed out.”

She glanced over at Ricky to see him giving her a blank look. “They used to make cars here,” she told him. “So they had lots of cars. I reckon a lot of that space they’ve got growing crops and weeds used to be parking lots. Also, every third building seems to be a parking garage.”

“How you feel, Doc?” J.B. asked.

The old man shook his head. “I’ll be right as rain,” he said. Krysty noticed that his words were slurred. “Just let me sit here until the dizziness passes.”

“Concussion,” Mildred said. “That’s another reason not to make a break for it. This old coot isn’t fit to run any foot races. Least of all with bullets.”

“Why haven’t they attacked us yet, lover?” Krysty asked.

“Waiting,” Ryan said. “Working their way into a position they like. Mebbe waiting on reinforcements. Then they’ll rush us.”

Krysty glanced over the wall. Her heart skipped a beat.

“Here they come!” she yelled.

* * *

AS IF KRYSTY’S warning cry had been a signal, a furious storm of blasterfire erupted from outside.

Ryan drew his SIG, cursing himself for paying so much attention to the multiple-story building across the street. Sure, if the Angels got blasters in there, it would be triple bad, but he’d seen no sign of them even trying. And anyway, if Trader had caught him back in the day obsessing over potential danger with an obvious, actual one hanging over all their heads like an ax ready to fall, he probably would have left him high and dry in some pest-hole ville.

But regrets and reproach wouldn’t put a fired bullet back in the blaster.

J.B. leaned forward to fire his Uzi left-handed out the front door. He ducked back hastily as bullets started skipping in through the opening and across the floor right next to him.

It was obvious what the Angels were trying to do. A bunch of them were cranking shots into the former fast-food restaurant as fast as they could to keep the defenders’ heads down while other Angels charged the place. They had enough blasters out there to make it work. As long as they were careful not to hit their own attacking people.

Ryan wouldn’t have wanted to be one of those coldhearts trying to storm the restaurant, caught right between blasters like that.

“Right!” he yelled as bullets zinged and screamed crazily around the roofless interior. The same stout brick walls that kept bullets out also kept bullets fired in. “Let the bastards come, then blast them when they try to get in.”

J.B. sat on his heels with his back to the wall by the door. His right hand now held his shotgun muzzle upward by the pistol grip. His left clamped his fedora on his head as if against a high wind. He caught Ryan’s eye and gave his head a quick shake.

Ryan knew what he was thinking. It was a terrible plan. And it was.

Just better than any other option they had right then.

The bullet storm slacked. “Stay low, and get ready!” Ryan gritted out. That lull almost certainly meant the charging Angels had almost reached their goal. But if one of the companions popped up to shoot now, he or she would invite a reflex shot from one of the Angels ready to lay down covering fire. Or from one of the coldhearts about to break in.

He duckwalked to the front wall to avoid extreme-angle fire from the Angels’ covering force. He drew his panga in his left hand. It would be ideal to keep the bastards from getting in at all.

Real was dealing with whatever actually happened.

“Jak!” he called. “Keep an eye on that west window.”

Then they hit them.

A man rushed through the door. Prepared, J.B. stuck out a leg and tripped him. The attacker fell hard on his face and skidded, his long hair flying. Then the Armorer stuck his shotgun around the doorjamb and pumped out two quick blasts.

Men screamed. Ryan shot the fallen man in the side of his head as he blearily tried to push off the concrete floor, blood streaming from his face.

He plopped back down. He had a cowboy-style handblaster, similar to the one the wrinkly in the market had used.

Ryan shifted back two steps along the side wall to give himself an angle on the front door and window. He was gambling that there now would be too many Angel bodies in the way for there to be much risk of somebody sniping him from out in the weeds. The men lying out there were still shooting, which put Ryan back in his earlier frame of mind about not envying the assault force.

It was time to make the ones getting shot in the backs by their buddies look like the lucky ones.

A man swung a leg over the sill between the crouching Krysty and Mildred. Krysty promptly stabbed her knife through the back of his calf above his boot. He shrieked as she forced the knife out, cutting his hamstring. The leg was sucked right back over the wall and out of sight.

More bodies suddenly appeared, clogging the window and door. The Angels were so eager to get inside they were getting in one another’s way. Ryan shot a man who’d gotten stuck in the middle of the door in the belly. Nothing like having a downed comrade thrashing and howling in intolerable pain to take the rod out of an enemy’s pecker.

The Angel sagged back, screeching. A wild-bearded man to his left tried to throw him out of the way and barge in. Straightening, J.B. wheeled around the doorjamb and postponed the steel-shod butt plate of his M4000 right into the middle of the angry black-fringed face.

Both of them fell back against the crowd pressing them from behind. The man who had been on the gut-shot Angel’s right raised a remade 1911-model .45 blaster at Ryan. The one-eyed man shot him through the bare chest. He dropped to the floor.

Doc’s under-barrel shotgun roared. A man who had dived through the window, rolled and come up with a short-barreled revolver in hand screamed as the shot charge exploded his face, ripping off the skin on the whole upper half, knocking chunks of flesh from the cheekbone and blowing open that side of his skull. An exposed blue eye rolled wildly in its socket, then rolled upward as the man fell onto his back.

Concussed or not, it seemed, the old man still could focus his mind on the task at hand when the shit and the bullets began to fly.

* * *

KRYSTY KNELT BY the wall. She and Mildred angled their fire into the bodies and faces of Angels trying to climb in the big front window. Blood fell on her face like torrential rain.

The 5-shot cylinder of her 640 was rapidly exhausted. She looked around. Several handblasters and a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun lay inside the window where their former owners had dropped them.

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