Krysty lay on her side, gasping

Her vision smeared back into being—tripled, doubled and then finally was normal. She felt as if it had just rained hammers. Every cell of her body ached, and she tasted the copper of a nosebleed in the back of her throat. She reached out. “Ryan…”

Mildred moaned.

Krysty blinked at the afterimages behind her eyes and yawned at the ringing in her ears. “Ryan…”

Every muscle screamed as she shoved herself up to her knees. Krysty snapped her glance around the jump chamber in a panic. She, Mildred, Jak and J.B. were in the same gateway of the same redoubt.

Ryan and Doc were gone.

Blood Harvest

Death Lands®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

O miserable man, what a deformed monster has sin made you! God made you “little lower than the angels” sin has made you little better than the devils.

—Joseph Alleine

1634–1668

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 One

“Move! Move! Move!”

Ryan Cawdor and his companions needed little urging as they ran for their lives through the empty corridors of the redoubt. The facility they found themselves in was nothing but an empty concrete bunker. Whoever had occupied it had bugged out long ago and taken everything of value with them. Dead campfires, graffiti and bones—human, animal and otherwise—showed there had been successive waves of habitation. At some point someone had managed to breach the main clamshell doors and then the interior ones. The spent shells of various makes littering the floors showed there had been many room-by-room firefights. It was odd that the victors hadn’t bothered to retrieve the spent brass.

The companions’ cautious venture outside the redoubt had drawn more stickies than the friends had shells to waste.

They raced for the mat-trans chamber. The pounding of their boots was counterpointed by the staccato slapping of scores of bare stickie feet behind them as the muties gazelled after them in rubbery, ground-eating bounds. “J.B.!” Ryan shouted. “Gren!”

The Armorer clawed into a pocket of his jacket as he ran and came out with his last grenade. “One!”

“Do it!” Ryan roared.

The party passed the corridor junction, and as they turned J.B. pulled the pin on the grenade. The cotter lever pinged away and he tossed the bomb behind them. The hollow crack of the detonation echoed in the halls. Stickies hooted and shrieked. They loved fire and explosions. Unless it ripped their heads off, even stickies directly caught in them didn’t seem to mind so much.

The companions charged toward the corridor that led to the hexagonal mat-trans unit. Ryan stopped and shouldered his Steyr longblaster as his people went through the doorway that led to the control room. “J.B.! Close it!”

The door to the mat-trans was made of vanadium, and Ryan knew it would take powerful explosives to breach it. However, once it closed, the transportation cycle occurred, and Ryan wasn’t quite ready to eliminate all other options. The chamber door didn’t always lock. The outer door to the control room was ordinary steel. When the companions had arrived they had found the door jammed three inches ajar, and it had taken J.B. a good ten minutes of tinkering with the mechanism to get it to open. J.B. took a knee beside the inner control panel for the door and began fiddling with its guts.

“Hurry,” Ryan advised.

J.B. twisted the exposed wires of the keypad together.

The stickies came around the bend in a fish-belly-white, boneless wave. Shrapnel scored some of the muties’ bodies, but it wasn’t slowing them. Doc stepped into the doorway and drew his LeMat revolver from beneath his frock coat. The weapon boomed as he fired the shotgun barrel, and the lead stickie’s head was pulverized by the fist-size swarm of buckshot. Doc cocked the weapon again and pushed the hammer cone up to fire the pistol chambers of the weapon. For Doc Tanner the choices of being torn limb from limb by stickies or taking a mat-trans jump were equally revolting propositions. He took aim and shot a second stickie between its huge, shark-black eyes.

Ryan took aim with his blaster. “J.B….”

“Working on it!” J.B. snarled.

Ryan cut loose. The range was swiftly closing to spitting distance, and he fired in rapid semiauto and went for the head shots. Pale skulls popped like pumpkins but more muties kept piling forward from behind. Even at close range the bobbing and weaving heads of the stickies weren’t easy targets. The corridor filled with the gray clouds of Doc’s ancient black-powder weapon as he methodically cocked and fired. He fired his last shot and stepped back. “Empty!”

Jak Lauren instantly stepped in and his .357 Magnum Colt Python began detonating like dynamite in the echoing confines of the corridor.

Ryan slammed in a fresh mag. “J.B….”

Wires sparked between J.B.’s hands. “Got it!”

Ryan and Jak stepped back as the steel door squealed and ground against the floor. Ryan’s lips split into a silent snarl as the door shrieked, then stopped, leaving the same three-inch gap they had first found. “Fire…Blast! J.B.!”

The Armorer threw up his hands. “The door’s shot! No way will it shut.”

Everyone jumped back as the stickies hit the door in a wave. The jammed portal rang and rattled as dozens of stickies slammed their rubbery bodies against it. Others shoved their suckered hands through the gap and began heaving at the steel with grotesque, elastic strength.

Jak sighed as he pushed fresh shells into his revolver and stowed his empty brass. “Jump.”

Ryan eyed the door. He suspected it would hold, but Jak was right. They were low on food, water and ammo. The companions would have to come out sooner or later, and with low cunning the muties knew it, too. Ryan knew from hard experience that stickies could wait for days, days that his friends didn’t have. Two jumps within an hour was as ugly as it got, but there was no way around it. “Yeah, we’re jumping. We’re jumping now.”

Krysty stared steadily at the mat-trans chamber. “Lover, I got a bad feeling.”

Ryan turned his single eye on his woman. Krysty Wroth was the most beautiful thing in his life. She was tuned in to Mother Earth, and he had learned long ago to trust her intuitions, but the fact was the mat-trans was the only way out. The one-eyed man ran a hand through the silken length of Krysty’s scarlet tresses and her hair coiled around his fingers with a will of its own. Ryan smiled wearily. “Got no choice. We have to go.”

Her titian tresses coiled tighter around his hand. “There’s something bad hovering on the other side.”

Ryan nodded. “Usually is.” He looked at the other companions. “Let’s do it, and hope the stickies aren’t smart enough to open the chamber’s door.”

Krysty, Jak, J.B. and Mildred stepped within the glittering armaglass walls and selected a place to sit on the mat-trans’s floor. Ryan turned a sympathetic eye on Doc as the old man stood at the doorway, staring at the mat-trans in trepidation. Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been ripped through time and space from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, where he had been mentally, physically and quantum mechanically experimented upon in brutal fashion until he had finally been flung forward a further century into the nuke-shattered America that had come to be known as Deathlands.

Doc had a low threshold for being dematerialized.

“Doc.” Ryan often had to remind himself that the damaged, old-man body encased a man his same age. “We’ve got to go.”

“I know.” Doc stepped boldly into the mat-trans unit, but his hands shook as he did it. “By all means let us be on our way.” Mildred held up her hand. He took it and sat on the floor beside her. Ryan stared in weary exasperation at the keypad in the wall. It did them no good. They had no destination codes for the matter-transfer device, so a jump in a mat-trans was a jump to anywhere. All they could do was activate the device by closing the door and hope for the best. Ryan depressed the lever. The door hissed shut and seconds later a mist began to coalesce as he strode across the chamber and sat beside Krysty. The disks in the floor and ceiling began to glow and flash. Doc groaned and buried his face in hands.

Krysty felt the pressure build up behind her eyes, and a roiling sensation began in the pit of her stomach. She brought a hand to her forehead as she felt the sucking darkness enveloping her. Ryan had once described the visual effect before the utter oblivion of dematerialization as patterns of red roses.

Krysty screamed as she saw lightning behind her eyes.

Something was terribly wrong. Her vision went black, but there was no momentary sense of oblivion. The lighting continued to crash inside her skull and she heard screams, some of which were her own. Her matter wasn’t being transferred. Instead it felt as if a giant dog had picked her up in its jaws like a shoe and was savagely trying to shake her into her component atoms. The sensation ended with the abruptness and brutality of an ax stroke.

Krysty lay on her side gasping. Her vision smeared back into being, tripled, doubled and then finally a slightly skewed normal. She felt as if it had just rained hammers. Every cell of her body ached, and she tasted the copper of a nosebleed in the back of her throat. She reached out a palsied hand. “Ryan…”

Mildred Wyeth moaned.

Jak and J.B. were too busy puking to swear. Something in the female anatomy allowed a slight edge in withstanding the physical horror of a mat-trans jump but not by much. Krysty blinked at the afterimages behind her eyes and yawned at the ringing in her ears. “Ryan…”

Every muscle screamed as she shoved herself up to her knees. Krysty snapped her glance around the jump chamber in a panic. She, Mildred, Jak and J.B. were still in the same gateway of the same redoubt.

Ryan and Doc were gone.

Chapter Two

Ryan surfed into the terrestrial plane of existence on a wave of his own vomit. He groaned as he pushed himself to his hands and knees, shaking like a dog as he was wracked by heaves. Despite the nausea and disorientation, he knew something was very wrong. The armaglass walls were a veined chartreuse Ryan didn’t recall from any past jumps. Ryan spit and wiped his chin. “Lover, are you all right—”

The one-eyed man shot to his feet, blaster in hand.

He and Doc were alone in the chamber. Ryan looked around wildly, lurched to the control panel and hit the Last Destination button. The display began to peep and ran a stream of letters, numbers and symbols that meant nothing to him. Ryan’s shoulders sagged.

He punched the LD button twice more and got no further response. Ryan strode over to Doc, who was huddled in the corner, his knees folded into his chest, and rocking with his eyes squeezed shut as tight as fists. For most of the companions a mat-trans jump was like a surprise punch below the belt followed by an uppercut to the jaw. For the man time-trawled from the past, a jump was like a knife through an already damaged brain. At the moment there was no time for sympathy. “Doc, you’ve got to get up.” Ryan shoved Doc’s cane into his tremoring hand and hauled him to his feet.

The scholar put a hand on the glowing wall to steady himself. He shook his head and struggled to focus. Ryan stepped out of the chamber with his rifle leveled and didn’t like what he saw. The redoubt, if it even qualified to be called that, was just a gutted and broken concrete blockhouse. A cold wind whistled through holes in the walls and through missing sections of roof. The sky above was gray, bruised and pregnant with rain. The wind was whipping up to storm conditions. There were only two things of interest in the cold, bare space. One was a great metal hatch in the floor. Whatever alloy it had been made of gleamed as bright as the day it had been forged and untouched by time. It was sunk in the floor almost seamlessly. Three raised panels in the center formed a triangle, but they were as seamless as the hatch and Ryan could see no way to access any of the controls inside them. Black blast streaks around one panel showed that someone had tried with explosives and failed. Ryan ran a finger over one of the blast patterns, and the streak in the residue showed gleaming metal that hadn’t even been scratched.

The second item of interest was a corpse.

It was the body of a woman. Ryan eyed her desiccated flesh. Her black hair was cropped short around her skull like a helmet. Her skin was drawn tight against her bones, and her mummified corpse swam in the undyed homespun tunic clothing her. A leather sandal clung between two clawed toes. The other lay a few feet away. Incongruously a salt-corroded mechanical chron was hooped around one shrunken wrist. Ryan picked up the little blaster on the floor. It was a .32 revolver with foreign writing on it. He broke open the action. All six rounds had been fired. Ryan sniffed the cylinder and smelled black powder. Someone had been rolling their own rounds. Ryan tucked the little blaster in his pocket and turned his attention to the air-cured human body. It had been here for some time. No scavengers had been at it, which worried Ryan. Not even rad-blasted meat went to waste in the Deathlands. Ryan looked around as Doc stepped out of the mat-trans chamber. “You all right?”

Doc clearly wasn’t, but he took a deep breath, straightened the front of his frock coat and squared his shoulders. “I have always found the ocean air bracing.”

Ryan lifted his head and sniffed. Doc was right. The air moaning through the empty blockhouse smelled of the sea as well as rain. Doc took a wobbly knee beside the corpse and smoothed her blond hair. “Poor child.”

“Child?” Ryan shrugged and kept his weapon on the open door. “She looks full grown to me.”

“No more than sixteen or seventeen, I would say.” Doc gazed sadly upon the dead girl’s corpse. “It appears she starved to death.” He suddenly bent and pressed his thumb against the inside of her elbow and then examined the other.

Ryan took a knee beside him. “What?”

“Wounds,” Doc said.

The dead girl’s flesh was paper-thin around her bones, but Ryan could see the puncture marks in her flesh. They had been fairly fresh when she died. “You think she was jolting up?”

“No.” Doc shuddered at the term for the concoction of drugs that the most despairing in the Deathlands chose for oblivion. “The veins, in the arms, the legs, between the toes, are cratered like the moon above. These wounds are surgical. She was either receiving or giving blood intravenously before she died.”

Every once in a while Ryan had to remind himself that “Doc” stood for Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, and that he was a doctor of both science and philosophy. Ryan had seen more bodies than most, and the Deathlands was full of them. They had bigger concerns at the moment. “We’re alone and the mat-trans is fucked.”

Doc rose and peered at the scrolling code on the control panel. “It means nothing to me.” His snowy brows furrowed. “However, the device appears to be peeping.” Doc pulled out his pocket chron and one eyebrow rose. “It appears to be peeping in ten-second intervals, and then the code repeats itself.”

“It’s on some kind of cycle.” Ryan peered at the little comp screen. “But it’s not telling us what the timing is. Mebbe it only lets two people through at a time, then cycles again. Some kind of sec measure.”

“Given that theorem, then perhaps, given time, it will let the others through.”

“Yeah.” Ryan scowled at the screen. “But mebbe only two at a time.” He looked toward the corpse. “Looks like mebbe she died waiting.” Ryan looked at the rad counter pinned to his lapel. The place was clean. He jerked his head toward the open doorway. “Let’s do a recce.”

Doc drew his massive LeMat revolver from beneath his coat and rotated the hammer’s nose to fire the central shotgun barrel. “By all means, let us go and take the airs.”

Ryan recced the outside from both sides of the doorway, but all he could see was windswept rock. “Doc, on my six.” Ryan stepped out, blaster ready. There wasn’t much to see. The howling wind plucked at his clothing and drew tears from his eye. There was no vegetation. They were literally on a rock, which was the size of a predark six-story building. The only distinguishing feature on the rock besides the blockhouse was a remarkable concentration of bird shit.

Of immediate concern was the fact that the barren rock they currently occupied was located in the middle of an ocean.

Doc was right. The dead girl had most likely starved to death, and Ryan had secretly put his remaining food in Krysty’s pack back in the redoubt. All they had with them was two canteens of water. Ryan gazed about. The ocean around the rock was as gray as death and beginning to roil with the coming storm, and they couldn’t LD button back. Doc sighed as he came to his own conclusions. “Oh, dear.”

Ryan scanned the horizon and perceived a pair of smudges to the west. He took his collapsible brass telescope from his pack and snapped it up to his eye. “I make it two islands.” The images were at the limit of the optics, but he could make out buildings and a port on the larger one. Smoke was definitely rising from chimneys. Smoke rose from the smaller island, but all he could make out was empty beach. “The bigger one has a ville.”

Doc took another deep breath of the air. “You know? I believe we are in the North Atlantic.”

Ryan regarded Doc. “And you know that how?”

“I do not know.” Doc shrugged. “It is just an intuition. I do not mean to be obtuse, but back in my time I sailed the Atlantic, and this just…feels like the Atlantic. The North Atlantic. With nightfall the stars will give us a better bearing, but I would say we are in the Azores, the Canaries or the Madeiras.”

Ryan would never accuse Doc of being obtuse. Predark bastard obscure on the other hand…“Lantic or Cific, it doesn’t matter. That girl got skinny waiting for the mat-trans to cycle. That’s a ville across the water, and it’ll have boats. They’ll be watching the storm come in, looking this way. We need to build a signal fire and get off this rock.”

“And if that poor girl died here fleeing the inhabitants of that island?” Doc queried.

“Doc, there’s no food here. We can wait until we run out of water if you want.” Ryan lifted his gaze toward the swollen, bruised storm clouds riding the howling winds behind them. “Course water’s coming.”

Doc nodded. “Then let us find the base of this island. With luck there should be driftwood.” At the edge of the escarpment they found steps carved in the rock that led down to a tiny strip of beach and a concrete pier. Besides bird shit, driftwood seemed to be the second hottest commodity on the island. Ryan cut kindling with his panga and, with pages torn from a notebook Doc carried, they got a fire going. The old man fed in ropes of dry seaweed, and soon a significant plume of black smoke was billowing up into the sky.

Then there was nothing to do but wait.

Ryan spit on his whetstone and began putting a fresh edge on his panga. The blade was painted black against rust and glare, but the edge gleamed like quicksilver. Ryan watched as a rare smile crossed Doc’s face. The man from another age walked over to a large rock, and he exchanged glances with a fat black-and-white bird with a rainbow beak. “Bless my heart, a puffin! We are definitely in the Atlantic!”

Ryan considered his blasters, but both his rifle and pistol would blast the meat right off the bird’s bones. He quietly palmed an egg-size rock. “Don’t scare it off. We might have to eat it.”

“A most handsome fellow!” Doc took out his notebook and a stub of pencil. “I believe I shall sketch him.”

Ryan dropped the rock and went back to honing. Doc calm and happy was such a rare occurrence that Ryan was willing to let his stomach rumble for a little while. A few strokes of the stone brought the panga back to shaving sharp. A few strokes of Doc’s pencil created a remarkable likeness of the bird.

Ryan shot to his feet. “Boat.”

Doc took a small pair of binoculars from his satchel. Ryan took his spyglass from his pack and snapped it open. It was a sailboat and heading in a straight line from the main island to their rock. Doc took in the steeply raked mast and the triangular sail. “A felucca, by the look of her.” He nodded to himself. “By the lines and piled pots on the bow, I suspect they are fishing for octopus.”

Ryan was more interested in the occupants than the catch of the day. He counted seven men. They were short and stocky in build and wore black, waxed canvas slickers, and wide-brimmed felt hats shaded their faces. Several wore round, dark-smoked glasses and gloves. Ryan didn’t see any blasters on the boat but all the men carried knives on their belts, and gaffs and fishing spears stood in racks along the gunwales.

“Hmm.” Doc lowered his binoculars and frowned.

“What?” Ryan asked.

“They seem a tad pale for fishermen. Men who work the sea tend to be well weathered. Those men look more like mortuary attendants.”

They looked a lot like Jak to Ryan, except they had dark hair. He snapped his spyglass shut and loosened his handblaster in its holster. It didn’t matter. They had to get off the rock, get fed, see if they could get back and work on the mat-trans. “What islands we in again?”

“The Canaries, the Azores and the Madeiras are just about the only island chains of note in the North Atlantic.”

“They speak English?”

“Portuguese would be the lingua franca in the Azores and the Madeiras, Spanish in the Canaries. However, the presence of our puffin friend leads me to believe we are too far north for the Spanish possessions.”

“You speak Portuguese?”

“My tutors insisted on Greek, French and Latin. However, Portuguese is a Latin-based language. It may suffice to convey basic concepts.”

“Convey to them we want to get off this rock, but not much else.”

“I believe I understand.”

“Leave a note for our people. Put it on the body.”

Doc scrawled a quick note on the back of his sketch and went back up the stairs. He returned just as the felucca thumped against the concrete pier. The pale, black-clad fishermen approached in a phalanx. Doc was half right. The men were chill-white, but up close their pale faces were seamed by lives led doing hard labor, and at least the ones not wearing gloves had thick calluses and whorls of scars both ancient and new from years of working knives, lines and nets. Their demeanor was neither hostile nor friendly. Doc doffed his hat and displayed what had to be the most gleaming white teeth in the Deathlands. He had a magnificent speaking voice when he was in control of himself, and he spoke in his most mellifluous tones in a type of English Ryan had never heard before.

The effect on the fishermen was galvanizing.

Ryan knew enough words in Mex or Spanish, as Doc called it, to do a deal or to insult someone south of the Grandee. What the fishermen were speaking sounded something like Mex by way of Mars. “What’s going on?”

Doc smiled. “They think I am a baron. I assured them I am not.”

Ryan resisted rolling his eye up to the stormy sky for strength. “Doc? The next time people we don’t know think you’re a baron, you let them think that until it’s time not to let them think that.”

Doc reddened and coughed into his fist. “Yes…I believe I take your point. These people do indeed speak Portuguese. The big island has a ville. I believe the baron there is a man named Xavier Barat.” Doc gestured at a pale, powerfully built man wearing dark glasses, gloves and wide black hat. “This man is Roque. He is the fishing captain of the ville’s fleet.”

“Captain Roque.” Ryan flexed his rusty Mex. “Hola.”

Captain Roque regarded Ryan obliquely from behind the smoked lenses of his glasses. “Olá.”

“They will take us to the big island,” Doc continued. “I have revealed nothing about our companions.”

“Good.” Ryan’s Steyr was slung, but his hand was never far from the blaster on his hip. “Let’s go.”

Captain Roque gestured toward the boat and they boarded the felucca. The crew poled off, and the sail filled with the coming storm winds. The vessel began to cut swiftly through the sea. Roque reached into a pot and drew forth an octopus about the size of his hand. Its arms flailed, but he swiftly brought it up to his mouth and bit it between the eyes. The cephalopod shuddered and the captain swiftly cut off its eight arms. He dropped them into a clay pot, and when he pulled them back out they were sheened with oil and the red flecks of hot chilies. Roque offered one of the still vaguely squirming appendages to Ryan.

Short of his fellow human beings there was hardly anything that walked, flapped, flopped or crawled across the Deathlands that Ryan hadn’t eaten. He nodded his thanks and shoved the tentacle into his mouth. It was on the chewy side, but the meat wasn’t bad and the lime, hot pepper and olive oil made it genuinely tasty. The pepper oil blossomed down Ryan’s throat and the heat was welcome. Ryan shoved another into his mouth and again nodded his thanks. Roque smiled and either his gums had receded or he had very long teeth. He turned and offered some to Doc.

The old man chewed his tentacle meditatively. “Piri Piri sauce, definitely Portuguese. The lime is an interesting addition.”

A crewman wearing dark glasses approached and held up a leather wine bag. Ryan took it and poured a long squeeze of rough red wine down his burning throat.

He snapped his head aside as another crewman in shades behind him swung a belaying pin at his skull.

Ryan Cawdor had a prodigious reputation in the Deathlands. It was said that if you faced the one-eyed man in a fight and blinked, then you got chilled in the dark. The crewman in shades screamed and clutched at his eyes as Ryan slapped the bag across his face and the smoked glass lenses flew from his face. Ryan’s blaster filled his other fist. A round from the SIG-Sauer punched out the lenses of the second fisher’s dark glasses and dropped him to the deck. Ryan put two rounds through the back of the screaming man’s hands and dropped him skull-chilled next to his friend.

The one-eyed man snarled as a three-inch iron hook ripped into the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. Roque yanked his gaff and the SIG-Sauer spun out of Ryan’s hand as his flesh parted. The captain snapped the gaff around, and the needle-sharp steel hook pierced Ryan’s jacket and sank between his ribs. Ryan grasped the shaft, but his adversary twisted the gaff with practiced ease and hooked his fifth rib. Ryan snarled in rage as Roque yanked the gaff and snapped the bone. The hook squirmed beneath Ryan’s rib cage as the captain turned the gaff 180 degrees and went for the rib above. Roque was a powerful man, and with seven feet of shaft between them there was nowhere for the one-eyed man to go. Ryan unleathered his panga. The eighteen-inch blade rasped from its sheath and he chopped the blade once, twice, three times against the weathered shaft of the gaff before it splintered in two.

Roque stepped back with four feet of broken stick in his hands. Ryan’s lips skinned back from his teeth as he unhooked his rib cage. He lashed out with the panga, and Roque desperately brought up his remaining wood to block. Ryan looped the gaff left-handed up between Roque’s legs and hooked it through his scrotum. The captain screamed like an animal as Ryan hauled him forward for the kill by his lowest organs. Roque’s torment ended in arterial spray as the panga painted a red smile beneath his chin.

Ryan ripped the gaff free of its reproductive moorings and turned toward what remained of the fight.

Doc had not deigned to draw his revolver. He had been a trained swordsman in his youth and fought duels at university. Fishers with belaying pins stood no chance against him whatsoever. Three crewmen lay chilled among the nets and octopus pots, each dispatched with a single thrust through the left breast. The last crewman came at Doc with a fishing spear, the tripod blade of barbed spikes shooting for his face. Ryan spun his longblaster on its sling, but there was no need. Doc effortlessly turned the spear thrust aside with his blade and lunged like a fencer. The fisher went as limp as the boneless octopi in the pots as Doc’s steel chilled him through the heart. The old man recovered his blade and came on guard, but he had no more opponents.

Drawn up to his full height with his long silver hair and coat blowing about him and a bloody blade in hand, Doc looked as formidable as Ryan ever remembered. “Nice work, Doc.”

The scholar drew his handkerchief, wiped his blade, slid it back inside his cane and locked it with a twist. “Thank you. I believe the sea air is doing me good.”

Ryan glanced up at the clouds. There was a good chance the sea air was going to chill them right quick. There was a storm coming, and the island was still miles away. “You know we just chilled the entire crew.”

Doc stared at the carnage strewing the deck and blinked up at the clouds, his shoulders sagging as he did the math. “Oh, bother.”

“Yeah, but you’ve had a hand on a tiller, right?” Ryan asked. He cut strips from the dead men’s clothing and bound his ribs and wrapped his hand.

Doc helped him tie off the bandages. “Only the smallest of pleasure craft and then only on a lake upon a summer idyll.” Doc swiftly moved toward the tiller. “I believe I can aim us at the larger island. After all, we have traveled on many a boat.” Thunder rolled and the first wet drops of water began slapping the deck and diluting the blood it was awash in. Ryan snapped out his spyglass and examined the ocean between them and their destination. Rocks rose up in front of them like a field of tombstones in the water. “Doc, we got rocks ahead.”

Doc tucked his cane beneath his belt. “Are you sure?”

Ryan put his spyglass away and grabbed a line. “Bastard sure.”

Doc’s knuckles went white on the tiller. “Oh, bother.”

Chapter Three

“Gaia!” was the last decent thing that came out of Krysty’s mouth for several minutes as she slapped, punched and berated the mat-trans control panel with ever more colorful bawdy house language. J.B. ran an ancient toothbrush around the bolt of his Uzi and enjoyed the show. The flame-haired woman wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes, and when she was angry it was something to see. “Won’t do any good,” the Armorer opined. “It seems to be on some kind of timer.”

Krysty’s rage went glacial as she turned her jade gaze on him. J.B. prudently went back to cleaning his blaster. Krysty spoke low. “Try again.”

J.B. sighed and went into the main control room for the tenth time. He had a well-deserved reputation as a man who knew his blasters. But a mat-trans was a challenge of a higher order, and he was totally at a loss. The control panel was a complete mystery. The situation was quite simple. The mat-trans had sent two of the companions somewhere, and now appeared to be on some sort of cycle. One of the comps had come online and was scrolling comp code that left J.B. baffled. No combination of button-pressing or typing in commands on Mildred’s part had elicited any response. The cycle appeared to be locked in. It was clearly a situation of hurry up and wait. J.B. studied Mildred. Both she and the mat-trans were products of the twentieth century, but he knew from past experience that comp code had never been her thing, try as she might.

Mildred was more concerned at the moment on the stickie that was currently trying to extrude itself through the door. Mildred wasn’t exactly the squeamish type. She was a medical doctor; and since her rude awakening in the Deathlands had seen some of the vilest crimes against man and nature imaginable. But somehow, like clockwork, when the very sickest shit came down…

There was always a stickie involved.

She watched in revolted fascination as through some form of stickie contortionism one individual had wormed a spindly arm through the gap between the wall and the jammed door. Mildred recoiled in disgust as the suckered, spatulate, fish-white hand opened and beckoned toward her as if in invitation. Suckers opened and closed in obscene, sphincterlike lust for her flesh. The huge, flat, black eye pressed to the opening never blinked or wavered as the stickie slowly squirmed itself against the gap. The stickie’s shoulder suddenly popped like a gunshot. Mildred yelped and leaped back as six more inches of arm shot toward her face like a striking snake.

Mildred folded her arms across her chest and jerked her head at Jak. “Jak! I’m not going to waste brass on his pasty ass!”

Jak rose and quietly palmed one of his leaf-bladed throwing knives.

Mildred shook her head in disgust as the dislocated arm wormed around the inside of the door. The hand crawled about like a spider as it searched for some kind of egress. Suckered toes began curling around the bottom of the door like caterpillars dragging a flattened, distended foot and then a horribly turning ankle through the gap. Up higher the stickie’s clavicle stood out like drumstick as it began to push its dislocated shoulder through the opening.

Jak’s ruby eyes narrowed curiously at the tiny gap in door and the gourd-shaped skull pressing against it “Head?”

“I have no idea but—” Mildred’s eyes flared as the stickie pushed its face against the gap in answer. “No…fucking…way.”

The stickie’s jaw unhinged with a pop. Needle teeth scraped against the steel door as the creature literally began dragging its distended lower jaw through by its tongue.

“Uh-uh.” Mildred watched in mounting moral outrage. “No.”

The stickie’s cheek pressed against the door and the huge black eye began to bulge out of its socket through the gap. Mildred put her fists on her hips. “Oh, hell, no.” Mildred pointed a condemning finger at the self-compressing mutation. “Jak?”

Jak’s knife glittered through the air. The bulging black eye popped like a cyst as the blade passed through and sank into brain. The albino teen lunged and retrieved his blade as the mutie sagged. The stickies outside hooted and cooed. The dead stickie left far more violently than it had tried to enter. Its bones snapped and cracked as its brethren yanked its body back through the gap and fell upon it in a feeding frenzy.

Mildred whirled and waved her arms at no one in particular. “You see that? You see that? Little bastards are doing yoga now!”

No one in the room knew what yoga was. J.B. hadn’t liked what he’d seen, either. He’d never seen a stickie pull a circus stunt quite like that before. “Jak, keep an eye on the door. If one can do it, then mebbe another can, too. We don’t want them oozing in while we’re asleep.”

Jak nodded and squatted on his heels in front of the portal. He began walking a throwing knife across his fingers like a coin trick as fresh, rubbery white hands began wiggling, pulling and probing at the door.

It was going to be a long night.

RYAN SLOGGED ASHORE, dragging Doc’s limp, coughing body with him. The felucca had broken up on the rocks between the gateway crag and the islands. He had seized a piece of wreckage in one arm and held Doc in a death grip with the other as the wind and waves had had their way with them for an hour before depositing them on the beach. Ryan gazed at the empty rolling dunes. He and Doc were on the wrong island, and his snapped rib ached like fire. He hauled Doc a few feet above the tide line and dropped him exhaustedly to the sand. Ryan was cold down to the bone and soaked through, but his mouth was nothing but dry salt. He took out his canteen and took long slow gulps from it before bringing it down to Doc’s lips. The old man sucked at the canteen in semiconscious greed. Ryan let him drink his fill. They’d seen campfire smoke. Where there was campfire smoke, there’d be water. “You all right?”

Doc flopped back to the sand like a fish. “A bit battered, but I must say battling the ocean was strangely invigorating.”

Doc didn’t look anything remotely invigorated. He looked more like a dog left out in the rain to—“Dog!” Ryan’s hand was numb with cold and ached with the hooking from Captain Roque’s gaff, but his blaster was in his hand rattlesnake quick.

He blinked as a dog stood atop the dune and wagged its tail at him.

During the time of the skydark the family dog had become an immediate source of food. Packs of wild strays that had taken to eating their former human masters had been ruthlessly trapped, shot and eaten in return. Ryan had seen pictures of predark house pets, and the idea of people keeping animals that couldn’t earn their keep, much less deliberately breeding so many useless mutations into an animal was beyond his comprehension. For the most part only dogs of the working, sporting and herding groups had survived into the age of the Deathlands. Whatever working specialty a dog might have, whether hunting, herding or hauling, their primary function was still guarding. They were both alarms and the first line of defense against mutant marauder and night-creeping norm alike. Most had been bred up in size and savagery, and all were trained to attack strangers on sight. This dog was a shaggy black color with a mop of hair falling over its eyes. At fifty pounds it was a bit runty by Deathlands standards but still had good lines. The strangest thing about the dog was its attitude. It gazed upon Ryan and Doc in tail-wagging, tongue-lolling, happy stupid expectancy.

Doc creakily pushed himself to his feet. “Cao da Serra de Aires.”

Ryan kept his 9 mm blaster leveled. “What?”

“An Aires Mountain Dog. A shepherd dog from the Aires Mountains, north of the Tagus River.” Doc nodded knowingly. “A Portuguese breed.”

“So why isn’t it trying to chill us?” Ryan shook his head in mild disgust at the happy dog. “It’s not even barking.”

“I suspect it does not regard humans as enemies.”

Rustling was alive and well in the Deathlands, and a herd dog that didn’t bark at strangers struck Ryan about as useful as bird shit on pump handle. He looked up at the sound of bells. The bleating sounds carried over the sound of the surf. A girl came over a dune being followed by a flock of snowy-white goats. The girl stopped at the sight of the two strangers, then shocked both Ryan and Doc by waving happily at them. Ryan observed her as she and her herd waded through the waist-high beach grass. She had long, unbound golden-brown hair, golden-brown tanned skin and golden-brown eyes. The effect was made more dramatic by the simple, chestnut-colored homespun shift she wore. Leather sandals shod her feet, and she wore a simple leather purse over one shoulder and a bota bag over the other. Ryan noted the corpse on the escarpment had been wearing the same outfit and kept his eye on the shepherd’s crook she carried. Looks were deceiving and he had been on both ends of a skillfully wielded piece of wood.

The girl approached them guilelessly. Up close her slim arms and legs belied a chest that strained at the homespun enclosing it. She smiled with big white teeth and in every way was the healthiest specimen Ryan or Doc had seen in quite some time. Doc nodded in a friendly fashion at the dog. “Cao da Serra de Aires?”

“No…” The girl’s nose wrinkled delightfully. “Boo.”

Ryan regarded Doc dryly. “I think the dog’s name is Boo, Doc.”

“Hmm…yes.” Doc scratched his chin. “Boo.”

Boo thumped his tail in the sand at Doc. The girl beamed and pointed to herself. “Vava!”

“Vava!” Doc bowed. “Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, at your…” Doc trailed off as the girl stared at him blankly. He sighed and smiled as he pointed at Ryan and himself. “Ryan…Doc.”

The girl’s smile spread across her face like the sun. “Rian…Doke.”

“Doc?” Ryan shot the old man a look. “The dog doesn’t bark and the girl likes strangers.”

“I must admit it is unusual,” Doc agreed. “Even in my time a lone shepherd girl and her dog would be wary of strange men. Clearly neither has been exposed to any sort of predation.”

“Or it’s some sort of trap. I’m thinking—” Ryan wasn’t often shocked but even he was taken aback when the girl softly wrapped her hands around his. She ignored the blaster he held and raised the gaff wound to her lips and kissed it. The huge golden-brown eyes gazed upward at Ryan with an innocence that bordered on the erotic as she said something soothing in her own language.

Doc gave Ryan a wry look of his own. “All better?”

“Uh, yeah…” Ryan forced a smile onto his face. “Doc? You tell her to take her hand off my blaster or—”

The girl tossed her crook to the sand. “Boo!”

Boo picked up the stick and happily trotted off. The girl kept Ryan’s hand in one of hers and took Doc’s hand in her other. Ryan and Doc exchanged looks. “Doc?”

“Like lambs to the slaughter?” Doc suggested.

Vava gave their hands a slightly impatient tug. “Dunno,” Ryan said. He had learned the hard way to read a trap. The girl gave off nothing but wide-eyed goodwill. Boo the dog was positively anomalous. Then again, in the very best traps the bait had no idea it was bait. Circumstances decided it. They couldn’t stay here, and goats implied a hot meal. Ryan sighed and put his blaster in his other hand. He was almost equal with both. “Doc, give her your left.”

“What?”

“Give her your left hand. Keep your right on your blaster.”

“Ah, yes. I see.” Vava smiled happily as the hand- and blaster-holding was arranged and led them into the dunes. The goats followed with their tin bells tinkling. Ryan surveyed the countryside. The dunes gave way to rolling grassland, rock formations and thin, windswept forest between the hills. The island wasn’t a tropical paradise but everything was a healthy green and the needle on Ryan’s rad counter never moved as they walked. Golden-brown fields waved in the sea breeze and he spied a few thatched huts on top of some of the hills. Several times people in the distance waved at them. They cut through a field and Doc ran his hand through the heavy sprays of grain.

“Pearl millet. Wheat, rice and corn overshadowed millet in the Americas except as feed for livestock, but in Africa, India and Asia millet has been a staple cereal grain since ancient times. It is a cereal grain well-adapted to soil low in fertility and high salinity.”

“That’s real interesting, Doc,” Ryan said.

Doc frowned. “I assure you sarcasm is uncalled-for.”

“It’s not sarcasm.” Ryan tracked his eye across the breadth of the horizon. “This rocky soil isn’t bad, but it’s workable. These people are making the most of it, but I noticed one thing.”

“Good heavens, you are right!” Doc saw it. “They are not fishing.”

“That’s right. They’re growing grain, raising goats and wearing homespun, but I haven’t seen a boat, a pier or a net, and right across the water there’s a ville where they got buildings, sailboats and they’re eating octopus in sauce.”

“It is a conundrum,” Doc admitted. “And our Vava is wearing the same clothing as the poor girl by the mat-trans.”

“But Vava isn’t wearing a chron and I doubt she’s carrying a blaster.”

“Indeed.”

They came to a little valley. Sheltered from the omnipresent ocean wind the oaks grew tall rather than twisted and among them sat a little cluster of thatched huts. Ryan stopped just short of drooling as the smell of a goat roasting on a spit wafted toward him on the breeze. They descended the steep goat path and three young men around the barbecue pit rose to meet them. All wore homespun tunics and crude leather sandals like Vava and had the same tanned, golden-brown good looks. Vava and the man in front talked for a few moments. He was tall enough to look Ryan in the eye, looked as healthy as a horse and about as strong.

Vava waved at him by way of introduction. “Ago.”

Ryan remembered his meeting with Roque on the dock and spoke the only word of Portuguese he knew. “Olá, Ago.” He motioned at Doc and himself. “Ryan, Doc.”

Vava beamed.

If Ago had a tail he would have been wagging it with Boo. He grinned like an idiot instead and shoved out his hand. “Olá!” The other two men were introduced as Marco and Nando. Everyone shook hands all around. The afternoon sun was fading, and the islanders led Ryan and Doc to the fire. Others began gathering. Ryan counted a score of men and women in equal number. Most of the women had babies in their arms or small children clinging to the hems of their tunics giving Ryan and Doc wide-eyed looks. Slabs of goat meat and heaping bowls of millet gruel were shoved in front of Ryan and Doc without ceremony. Doc began picking at his food and making pleased noises. Ryan shoveled it down. He had burned off his two octopus arms hours ago, and he was ravenous. Vava told an involved story that Ryan gleaned was about her and Boo finding the visitors on the beach.

Ago handed Ryan a large clay bowl with a grin.

Ryan brought the clay bowl to his lips. The sloshing contents were a foamy, unfiltered dirty blond and the smell of yeast was almost overpowering beneath his nose. Ryan tossed a swallow back. It was carbonated to the point of being fizzy and tasted like a train wreck between hard cider, ale and the gruel. The assembled islanders gazed on expectantly. Ryan tilted the mixing-bowl-size container of home brew and drained it.

The islanders clapped their hands happily.

Ryan wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The bowl was refilled and Doc smacked his lips as he took a sip. “Millet beer.”

People filled their bellies and talk roamed about the common circle. All the shy glances pretty much indicated Ryan and Doc were the hot topic for the night. Ryan spoke quietly. “Doc, what’ve you learned?”

“I believe these people live communally. I get the impression this is but one of a number of hamlets scattered across this island. These few here could not maintain the fields alone. The islanders probably all gather for group planting and harvest of the arable land. Everyone seems to have a knife. They are all crude and of a kind, but I have yet to see a forge.”

“Trade knives.”

“My thought exactly. I suspect any axes, plows or other ironworks will have come from across the strait.”

It squared with everything Ryan had observed. “I haven’t seen any old people.”

“Dear Lord!” Doc stared around in shock. “I believe you are right!”

“Ask if they’ve seen any other strangers.”

Doc spoke a few words and got blank looks. “I am afraid the Portuguese word for stranger has wandered far from the Latin.”

“Talk around it,” Ryan said. “Use your hands.”

“Ah.” Doc began speaking very slowly in Latin and gesturing at himself and Ryan and pointing out toward the sea and the island housing the mat-trans. Ago sat upright and for the first time lost his smile. The islanders around the fire began a rapid exchange.

“Tell them we found a girl.”

Doc nodded. “Very well.”

“Tell them we found her on the escarpment and she was dressed like they are, but had dark hair, short, had something on her wrist.”

Doc made a show of touching his hair, Vava’s clothes and circling his wrist with his hand as he spoke words in Latin. Vava suddenly got very excited.

Ryan knew they were hitting pay dirt. “Tell them she’s dead.”

Doc stopped. “Are you sure?”

“Do it.”

Doc said a few words. Vava burst into tears and ran from the circle. Everyone else grew very quiet. “Doc, ask what her name was.”

Ago sighed unhappily at the question but answered. “Galina.”

“That Portuguese?” Ryan asked.

Doc shook his head. “No, it is a Russian corruption of the Greek name Helen.”

Ryan wasn’t surprised. “Ask if Galina had friends.”

Doc asked and Ago held up a single finger as he spoke, and that confirmed Ryan’s suspicions about the mat-trans. “I believe a man named Feydor, that’s Russian for Theodore,” Doc said.

“A Russian team tried to jump and the mat-trans here only let two through, just like us. Something happened and Galina and Feydor got separated. I’m thinking that something was the people on the other island.”

“So deductive reasoning would dictate,” Doc agreed.

“Ask them about the mat-trans.”

Doc spent long moments doing some very elaborate pantomime. The islanders stared uncomprehendingly until he finally dropped his hands to his sides in defeat. “I cannot seem to communicate the concept, and frankly I do not believe these people know of mat-trans devices much less what they do.”

Ryan agreed. “I think the folk in the ville do. They came quick as a bullet from a blaster when they saw our fire.”

“Yes.” Doc nodded. “And they were willing to sail straight into a storm to retrieve us.”

Vava returned with tears in her eyes and a basket laden with bundles of homespun and a collection of sandals, and began pushing them at her guests. Doc sighed sadly as he surveyed the garments. “I believe these good people want us to put on these clothes and try to blend in. I believe they intend to hide us.”

“Didn’t keep that Russian girl from taking the last train west, and we can’t hide here forever.”

“So, we journey across the strait and confront this Baron Barat?”

“In our favor that felucca went down with all hands chilled in the storm. With luck he won’t know we’re coming. We’ll do a recce to get the lay of things and then decide how to play it,” Ryan decided.

“And how are we to negotiate the strait?”

Ryan glanced around. “I doubt these folk have much in the way of boats. We’ll have to build a raft.”

Doc looked at Ryan steadily. “My friend, you are wounded.”

“Yeah.” Ryan’s hand went unconsciously to his side. Vava instantly leaped up and her breath sucked in as she noted the rent material of Ryan’s coat. Ryan almost pushed her away but the hot fire, hot food and millet beer were beginning to have their way with his beaten, half-drowned exhausted body. Vava called to a girl named Eva and the two of them led Ryan to a hut. Doc followed as they sat Ryan on a straw pallet and began brewing things in a clay pot.

“Willow bark, chamomile and bee balm by the smell. Traditional herbals.” Doc looked askance as Vava and Eva began chewing mouthfuls of herbs both fresh and dried and then packing the dripping green chaw against Ryan’s hand and side. “I shudder to guess what that may be but I suspect it is the most effective treatment available until we can reacquire Mildred and Krysty.”

The goo stung. Ryan gritted his teeth as Eva and Vava pushed his broken rib into place and bound it with strips torn from their shifts. Eva shoved the steaming pot beneath Ryan’s nose. It smelled like a swamp and tasted about the same. Ryan drained it and sat back on the pallet. Vava undid the stained bandage on his hand, then washed the wound and took an iron needle and sinew and began to sew it. The sting and tug felt far away, and Ryan knew there was something in the brew stronger than chamomile and bee balm. It was cozying up to the bucket of beer he’d drunk.

“Doc, keep watch. I’m gonna shut my eye for a while.”

Doc laid his LeMat revolver in his lap. “You may rest assured.”

Ryan was asleep as his head hit the straw.

Chapter Four

Ryan awoke with his blaster in his bandaged hand. Dawn was rising gray out the open door of the hut. Vava and Eva were gone. Doc sat snoring in his sentry position. The one-eyed man checked his pack and found none of his belongings had been messed with. He sat up and did a quick self-assessment. His side and hand ached but far less than he’d imagined, and no infection or fever had set in. His stomach was growling, and he took that as a good sign. Checking the loads in his blasters, Ryan warily stepped out into the morning.

Ago, Nando and another man were standing around the coals of the previous night’s fire, passing around another huge bowl. They waved Ryan over and he took his turn slurping down leftover millet gruel that had been mixed with some kind of watery goat yogurt. Doc came out with a sheepish look on his face, painfully aware that he had fallen asleep on guard duty. Ryan simply handed him the bowl. “Tell Ago we need to get to the big island.”

The old man took a few swallows and handed the bowl to Ago. He pointed toward the big island said some words. Ago started talking excitedly and pointing inland instead.

“What’s he saying, Doc?” Ryan asked.

“I believe he wants to show us something.”

Ryan nodded. “Tell him we’re amenable.”

Ago nodded. He whistled, and Vava and Boo came out of a hut across the way. They spoke for a moment. Vava looked unhappy but she nodded, and they began walking inland. Ryan and Doc followed. The wind blew strong across the rolling hills and whipped the grassland as they came out of the vale. They walked for a quarter of an hour through fields and vales and passed more villages. They stopped in a gully. Ago and Vava began pulling apart a deadfall of twisted branches to reveal a skiff. Ryan ran his hand across the graying wood. The little rowboat had been sitting there for some time. The oarlocks were rusted and the oars themselves were warping. “What do you think, Doc?”

“I believe we would be safer building a raft.”

Ryan stood and shook his head at Ago and Vava. The two islanders looked crestfallen but Ago pointed farther inland. Doc rose from the rotting skiff. “I believe there is more they wish to show us.”

Ryan and Doc followed the islanders through more rolling hills and came upon an overgrown gravel path and followed it through another little valley. As they came out, they stopped and stared at the structure at the top of the hill in front of them. It was taller than it was wide. Four slender, two-story spires encompassed a high, peaked roof. The central spire was three stories. It was made of ancient gray stone that was worn but intricately carved. Ryan noted the wrought-iron fence with spear tips was of more recent manufacture and unrusted. “What’s that? A castle?”

“In a sense,” Doc said. “It is a church. God’s fortress on Earth. Sixteenth-century Gothic architecture, I would say.”

“Haven’t seen a church ever like that.”

Doc smiled wryly. “Well, they do not build them like they used to.”

Vava plucked at Ryan’s sleeve and spoke rapidly, first pointing at the church and then pointing out to sea. Ago nodded and appeared to agree with everything she was saying.

Ryan sighed inwardly. “What’s she saying, Doc?”

“I’m not sure. Something about Pai Joao and danger.”

“Pai Gao?” Ryan scratched his chin. “That’s a card game. They got a gambling house in the ville we need to avoid?”

Doc smiled tolerantly. “No, I believe Pai in Portuguese means ‘Father,’ as in Father Joao, a priest. I believe we are being warned against him.”

Ryan stared at the forbidding structure of the church and what appeared to be statues of winged muties standing guard over the eaves. In the Deathlands everything was a survival situation, and most things were negotiable through barter, jack or the threat of violence. But Ryan had seen book pounders with motivated congregations who could convince themselves of anything, and once they made up their minds about right and wrong the only thing that got through their skulls was lead. “We’ll keep an eye out for Father Joao.” Ryan did a little sign language of his own. He pointed at Ago and Vava, pointed at the church and shrugged. Ago and Vava both nodded and pulled out little hand-carved wooden crosses from beneath their tunics. Ryan refrained from rolling his eye. “They’re book pounders, Doc.”

“I believe they are illiterate, but I take your meaning. However, I would point out that they seem to be book pounders who are afraid of their priest,” Doc countered, “and willing to help strangers not of their faith.”

“Yeah, there’s that.” Ryan unslung his longblaster and slowly began to circle the base of the hill. He found a little cottage nestled up against the back of the church. Unlike the villager huts, the cottage was of plank and beam construction with a shingled roof and glass windows. No smoke came from the chimney and the windows were dark. Ryan approached the cottage from the side and peered in one of the windows. It consisted of a single, sparsely furnished room. A cross hung over a simple rope bed in one corner and a small desk, an armoire and the fireplace filled the others. He beckoned, and Doc and the two islanders followed. Ryan rounded the cottage and came to a shed. There was no lock on it and inside were some axes, hatches, shovels, coils of rope, hand tools and several buckets of different size nails.

“Doc, ask them where Father Joao is.”

Doc asked and Ago and Vava pointed toward the sea and the bigger island out in the distance. Doc pondered. “Well, by my reckoning today is Tuesday. If the priest ministers to these people but prefers to live on the main island, and they are on the same calendar as us, and still practicing Catholicism, then he may not be back until Friday for Mass.”

Ryan nodded to himself. With Captain Roque’s boat lost at sea with all hands and Father Joao not expected back until Friday, they had a little time. He looked at the Gothic building and the two islanders. “You think they’re going to get angry at us if we go in?”

“I suspect not,” Doc replied.

Ryan went to the front of the church and unlatched the gate. He kept his eye on the stone muties over the lintel and pushed open the high, narrow double doors. The inside was dim and shot through with shafts of light coming from the high narrow windows. It smelled vaguely of incense and beeswax. Two rows of benches led to the altar. On the wall above it was a crucifix and below it the painting of a man. The man sat back in an ornate chair. He was as chill pale as Roque and his crew, with aristocratic features, his long black hair shot through with silver, and he was dressed all in black clothing. He had the same kind of black eyes as a shark or a stickie, and they seemed to follow you wherever you went in the room.

Doc pointed at the painting. Ago, Vava and Boo hovered in the doorway. Vava nodded and said, “Barat.”

Doc grunted unhappily. “I believe I detect something of a theocracy going on in these islands.”

Ryan swept the rest of the church. There were a couple of antechambers. One was full of barrels and sacks of supplies. The other led to an empty cell with iron bars and chains on the wall. Ryan came back and stepped past Ago and Vava. “Wait here.”

Ryan went to the shed and ladened himself with axes, hatches, saws, rope and hammer and nails. He came back and handed a hatchet to Doc. Doc looked at the implement. “And what is this for?”

“The skiff is useless.” Ryan surveyed the church. “But barrels and benches would make a decent raft.”

Doc sighed as he glanced around the ancient Gothic architecture and the antique appurtenances. “Yes.”

“We don’t have time to go chopping down trees.” Ryan’s eye narrowed. “You got a problem with busting up a church, Doc?”

“Well, I was taught men’s highest spiritual goal was to establish truth, righteousness and love in the world.” Doc smiled wryly. “Nevertheless, I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that few things would have pleased several of my Oxford companions more than to observe their learned colleague taking an ax to a Papist establishment.” Doc hefted his hatchet. “Lay on, Macduff.”

“We need bench seats, four of them to make a square. We nail them together and then lash a barrel beneath each one. We’ll take the oars from the skiff and chop them down to paddles.”

“As sensible a plan as any,” Doc agreed. “I will take the saw and try to carve us a rudder.”

Ago and Vava gasped as Ryan’s first ax stroke kneecapped the closest pew, but they made no move to stop them or to run away. Ryan and Doc worked throughout the day. They nailed together four lengths of pew and bound them with rope. One of the barrels in the storeroom was filled with water, one with wine and two with oil that Doc said came from a whale. The wine was thin and sour, but they emptied it last and Doc dosed himself liberally from it as they worked. The wine and the exertion brought color to his cheeks and he worked with a will. Vava left and came back with dried meat and an earthen pot of goat curds. Ago watched almost unblinkingly as the hours passed and the grand construction came together. Ryan and Doc lashed the last barrel in place and surveyed their handiwork. They had a four-foot by four-foot square supported by barrels at each corner and had nailed a pair of planks across the square to sit on while they paddled. Doc had sawn out a bench back into a rough fin that they roped in place to form a rudder.

Ryan wiped his brow on his forearm. “Doc, tell Vava to go get the oars from the skiff. Tell Ago we’re going to sail for the big island at sunset and that we need four men to help us carry down the raft and launch it.”

Doc went through some complicated hand signals.

Ago suddenly seized Ryan’s wrist and shook his head as he spoke in rapid-fire Portuguese. Only the desperate earnestness in the young man’s face kept Ryan from snapping Ago’s arm at the elbow. “Doc?” Ryan said quietly. “Tell Ago to let go.”

Doc spoke a few words and pointed at Ryan’s wrist. Ago reddened in sudden shame and stepped back, looking at his feet. Ryan took pity on the young man and clapped him on the shoulder with his left hand. “Tell him it’s all right. Ask him what’s wrong.”

Doc and Ago had a very long conversation that didn’t seem to go anywhere fast. Ago was trying to get something complicated across, and hand gestures and common verb roots weren’t enough. Ryan sighed. “Doc you get anything out of all that?”

“Only a few basic concepts,” Doc admitted.

“Such as?”

“There is danger on the big island.”

“Figured that.” Ryan nodded. “Anything else?”

Doc frowned unhappily. “It is possible I am misinterpreting.”

“Best guess, Doc.”

“Ago wants us to go to the big island during the day.”

Ryan shook his head. “They’ll see us coming.”

“I tried to explain that to him. But when he learned our plan was to make landfall at night? That was when he grabbed your arm.”

Ryan was fairly sure Ago had their best interests at heart, but he was loathe to give up the element of surprise. “Can you figure out why?”

“He has been trying to tell me, but he is using words that have no classical Latin base to tell me.” Doc shook his head in failure. “I am sorry to say that Latin is a dead language. Ago’s Portuguese on the other hand is a living, breathing entity that has continued to grow and evolve to this day. The two languages were far apart in my time and have only grown further in the intervening centuries. There is danger on the big island, but the day is safer, of that I am fairly sure. The nature of this danger I cannot determine, though it is clear Baron Barat and Father Joao are to be feared regardless.”

Ryan gave Doc a long hard look. The scholar had been more lucid for the past couple of days than Ryan could remember. Maybe the sea air was doing him good, or being more useful than usual was helping him focus, as well. “What do you think?”

Doc shrugged. “These people have shown us nothing but kindness and hospitality. They were also clearly willing to hide us, quite possibly at risk to themselves. Ago is adamant, we must not go to the island at night.”

“Fireblast.” Ryan wanted to go now. He had a very grim feeling that time wasn’t on their side. But he could tell that Doc needed rest. Ryan felt the ache of his own wounds. If they left now there wouldn’t be much left of them to meet whatever awaited on the big isle. “Fine, we leave at first light, but under one condition.”

Doc blinked. “What would that be?”

The die was cast. “You’re a baron until I tell you different.”

J.B.’S HEAD SHOT UP as the comp in the control room chimed. He was sitting guard duty while the rest of the party slept and almost didn’t hear it over the moans, coos and shrieks of the stickies as they pressed themselves against the door and reached for him. He’d chilled two of the muties with head shots as they had tried the contortionist routine; but luckily full-body dislocation didn’t appear to be a universal stickie skill set, at least not yet. He perked an ear and realized the comp was no longer peeping. “Jak!” J.B. called. “Watch the door.”

Jak was awake, on-station with Colt Python drawn in an eyeblink.

Krysty and Mildred roused themselves wearily as J.B. examined the comp screen. Mildred pushed at her face sleepily. “What’s up?”

“The mat-trans.” Data no longer scrolled down the screen. J.B. checked his chron and then the comp screen again. “It’s been seventy-two hours. I’m pretty sure to the second. I’m thinking the mat-trans is enabled again.”

Krysty leaped to her feet. “We’re out of here.” She shouted into the corridor “Jak! We’re leaving!”

Jak trotted into the control room. Krysty surveyed her friends. “We leave the food and half the water we got here. There’s a chance there’ll be supplies on the other side. Here there’s none, and if J.B.’s right on the timer, anyone left behind will have another three days before the mat-trans cycles again.”

The party put down their canteens, water bottles and stacked their meager store of provisions on the main console of the control room. One by one they filed past and took their seats on the mat-trans floor. Krysty went and put her hand on the lever. Ryan was always the last man in. He was always the one to pull the lever and the first one to step out of the chamber. Watching him do it had always given Krysty confidence. She felt very nervous now but kept it off her face. “Everyone ready?”

J.B. nodded. “Let’s go.”

Krysty shut the door and quickly sat on the floor disk as a mist began to fill the chamber. The lights began to flicker and the sucking darkness started to pull her in into oblivion. Krysty screamed in rage rather than fear this time as the lightning suddenly sledgehammered behind her eyes. She wasn’t going to meet Ryan. Krysty screamed on in agony as she felt the savage wrenching for the second time as the universe seemed to pull every last fiber of her being in a separate direction but stopped just short of ripping her apart.

Krysty collapsed face-first into a puddle of her own bile and lay shuddering for long moments. Locks of her mutant hair snapped and twisted like beheaded snakes. Her battered brain knew she had been left behind again and she was still in the same redoubt. Instinct curled her fingers around the grips of her snub-nosed blaster. She pushed herself to her hands and knees and another wave of nausea ran its course through her. A clinical part of her noted dark, internal blood mixed in with the mess that had nothing to do with her bleeding nose. J.B. lay a few feet away, clutching his Uzi like an anchor as he was racked by his own gastrointestinal fireworks. Krysty could have wept.

Jak and Mildred were gone.

Krysty reeled onto her knees and mentally bucked herself up as she stood. Her hand shook as she pressed the lever and the chamber door hissed open. The comp was peeping. Data was scrolling. The supplies were still there. The corridor outside echoed with the sounds of besieging stickies.

Three more days.

Chapter Five

Ryan’s broken rib stabbed and sawed at his side with each stroke of the oar. The sea was calm and the current slight, but they were still pushing a craft shaped like a brick across several klicks of open ocean. Doc was clearly no longer invigorated by the call of the sea. Each dip of the paddle was a groan and each return was a wheeze of effort, and Ryan felt his injured and exhausted body falling into the rhythm. The only good news about the journey was the morning fog. The big island was a dark smudge in the distance, and it would take a keen eye to make out the little makeshift raft in the vastness.

“I was on the rowing team…when I attended university…you know,” Doc gasped. “I fear…I have since…lost…my wind.”

“Save your wind for the sea, Doc.” Ryan dug his cut-down oar into the Lantic. “We’re getting close.”

Waves boomed and hissed ahead of them as the ocean met the land. Both men instinctively dug down and dug harder as the big island loomed ahead of them like Leviathan in the fog. Doc suddenly gave a little sigh, and Ryan felt the sea change beneath them, as well. They had passed some invisible barrier in the waters and now rather than fighting the ocean current they were being pulled in by the tide. Ryan had scanned the beachheads the previous late afternoon and seen little in the way of obstacles, but he worried about the rocks and reefs he couldn’t see. “We’re coming in.”

“Indeed…I believe we are.” Doc set his oar aside and took the crude tiller.

The raft slopped and dipped as the waves slapped it, but so far the surf wasn’t bad and Doc began to guide them in. Four barrels set in a square were very difficult to capsize. Despite several stomach-dropping descents down wave faces and being soaked to the skin, they were heading straight for the beach. Rather than rising up and down in booming waves they were suddenly in surf that sizzled like bacon. They gathered speed and Ryan could see the dull yellow sand of the beach ahead of them. “Nice work, Doc. We—”

Both men went flying as one corner of the raft smashed into a sandbar and the little craft went vertical. Ryan’s rib screamed at him as he took a shoulder roll in the surf and came up on his feet with a splash. Doc ate a mouthful of beach and rose spitting and blinking sand from his eyes. Water churned around them as the wave receded. Doc splashed seawater onto his face and spluttered as they slogged up past the water line. “We have made landfall.”

Ryan began to haul the raft onto the beach. It took long minutes for the two exhausted men to get the raft past the waterline and against the cliff. They piled seaweed on top to camouflage it, but most things in nature weren’t square and covered with weed.

“A most suspicious lump,” Doc opined.

“Check your powder.” Ryan unslung his Steyr longblaster.

Doc drew his LeMat revolver from the waxed canvas pouch he kept inside his jacket and made sure his powder was still dry. “How shall we proceed?”

“Talking with this Barat is a gamble, but we need to find out the cycle on the mat-trans. He might know it. We bluff our way in and bluff our way out and make him think it’s to his advantage to help us.” Ryan gave Doc a measuring look. “You better be at your baronial best.”

Doc gave Ryan a sweeping bow in return and doffed his nonexistent hat. “Baron Theophilus Algernon Tanner, shipwrecked royalty, at your service.”

“You don’t serve, Doc. You give orders.”

“Ah.” Doc snapped his fingers at Ryan imperiously. “You, knave! Attend me.”

“Better.”

They moved down the beach. The smaller island had been a rambling affair of hills and dunes. The land here was more rough-hewn. The beach was a thin strip of sand abutting tall and jagged cliffs. They followed the strand westward for several miles toward the ville. Twice they saw the gray shadows of masted ships in the fog. Buoys clanked to mark the path through the rock-strewed channel as they got close to the wharf. Ryan stopped. Doc started as his companion put a hand to his chest. “What? Is there—”

Ryan put a finger to his lips and then pointed. The black mouth of a cave gaped out of a jumble of rocks at the base of the cliff. Ryan examined the sand. Seaweed and barnacles on the rocks around the cave mouth indicated the water reached right up during high tide, and it had erased any footprints or signs of passage. Ryan stared at the cave and knew without a doubt he was being watched.

Doc shivered and Ryan knew the old man felt it, too. Doc took comfort in Shakespeare. “‘By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.’”

“Something’s in that cave, all right,” Ryan agreed. “And it’s got bastard bad intentions.”

The click-click-clack of Doc’s ancient single-action blaster seemed very loud even over the boom of the surf. It made a final click as he set the hammer to fire the shotgun barrel. “Hold fire, Doc,” Ryan said. “You shoot, the whole ville will hear it.” Ryan’s eye narrowed. “And whatever’s in there isn’t raising a ruckus.”

“You know?” Doc shivered again. “I almost wish it were.”

Ryan and Doc were both getting the same vibe. They had both been to terrible places where terrible things had happened. There were places in the Deathlands imprinted with the horrors they had witnessed that almost had a palpable aura of their own. Almost a life of their own. The cave was a very bad place, and there was something very bad inside it. That something was watching them now with a very cold will to chill them.

“Shall we double back?” Doc asked quietly. “Perhaps there is another way inland, or perhaps we might find a scaleable spot along the cliffs.”

Ryan felt the chiller in the dark, and he knew it was feeling him, too. He really didn’t want to walk past that cave, but neither did he want to go swimming again. He was reminded of how insistent Ago had been about not coming to the island at night. He thought of Roque and his crew hiding from the sun beneath wide hats, long coats and smoked lenses. “I don’t think it’s coming out.” Ryan shook his head. “I don’t think it can. At least not until nightfall.”

“Then let us proceed as quickly as possible while the day is still ahead of us.” Doc gave the cave another leery look. “One at a time, or together?”

Ryan hefted the Steyr. “I’ll cover you. Don’t shoot unless something actually comes out.”

“Indeed.” Doc drew his sword stick. Interminable moments passed as he crept warily down the little strip of sand. At this bend in the beach there was barely more than a scant ten yards between the cave mouth and the sea. Ryan kept his crosshairs on the cave but whatever lurked within was staying back. Doc almost sagged with relief as he crossed out of the cave’s line of sight. He sheathed his sword and knelt behind a boulder, taking his LeMat in a firm, two-handed hold to cover the cave. “I am ready.”

There was no point in creeping. Both Ryan and the lurker knew the other was there. Ryan strode down the beach as though he owned it, daring the chiller in the dark to do something about it.

“Ryan!” Doc shouted.

The rock was the size of Ryan’s head. It flew out of the cave as if it had been thrown by a catapult. Ryan dived for the sand. The rock ruffled his hair in passing and smashed into the surf with a tremendous splash. The one-eyed tucked into a roll and his hand snaked out to snatch up a rock the size of a hen’s egg. He rose and flung his stone dead center for the cave mouth like he was trying to hit the last train west. He was rewarded by the meaty thud of rock meeting flesh. He’d hoped to be rewarded with a cry of pain or at least an outraged roar. What he felt were eyes burning into his back as he ran out the line of fire. Ryan knew as long as he stayed on this island he had an enemy, and he knew if he was still here by nightfall that the cold-heart lurking in the dark was going to come looking.

Before it was over someone was going to take that train.

“THEY’RE IN THE VENTILATION ducts,” J.B. said.

Krysty looked up. She had been dozing, but as she listened she could hear the muffled thumps and scrapes of stickies squirming their way through the ducts. “How come they didn’t do that before?”

“Dunno,” J.B. said. “Nobody’s been here in a long while. Mebbe this generation never learned.”

Krysty was reminded of the piles of bones, cracked for their marrow and scattered throughout the corridors. “They’re learning now.”

J.B. was reminded of the stickies trying to extrude themselves through the three-inch gap between the steel door and the wall. He glanced at the ventilation grills in the room, which had been punched out from the inside long ago. The redoubt was a predark military facility. It wouldn’t have air ducts a spy or saboteur could crawl through. The openings were mere twelve-by-six-inch rectangles. The redoubts were wonders of engineering, but the twentieth-century architects hadn’t built with assaulting stickies in mind. In his mind’s eye J.B. could imagine the stickies in the ducts, dislocating their bones and pulling themselves along with sluglike muscular contractions anchored by their suction-cupped fingers.

It wasn’t a good image.

Krysty filled her hands with blaster and blade. “What’s the plan, J.B.?”

“Can’t come through the ducts more than one at a time.” J.B. pushed off his scattergun’s safety. “Mebbe we chill the ones in front. Make a pile of them. That’ll confuse them.”

“They’ll figure to just push them forward.”

“Until they do, that’s the plan.” The Armorer nodded. “Go check the door.”

Krysty walked out into the hall. “Gaia!”

A stickie was halfway through the opening. Pushing past the unyielding steel had turned its skull into a stepped-on melon. That didn’t seem to be hindering its progress. The stickie’s flattened chest snapped and crackled and popped back into place as its torso rein-flated. Its hips were posing something of a problem, but the grotesque crunching and grinding noises as it pulled its pelvis against the gap implied it was making progress.

Krysty’s blaster cracked once and chilled it through the skull. The crunching and grinding turned to snapping and tearing as its brethren devoured its lower half in a frenzy to get to the opening. “J.B.!” Krysty called. “They can get through the door!”

J.B. took a knee beside one of the ventilation ducts, removed his survival flashlight and gave the generator handle a few cranks before shining it down the shaft. He scowled. There it was, a stickie, one hell of a lot closer than he would have liked. Its squeezed-out-of-shape skull was impossibly jammed against its outstretched arm in the tiny space. Nonetheless, it splayed out its suckered fingers and its rubbery muscles squirmed beneath its flesh, conspiring to pull it forward a few more inches. J.B. spit in disgust. “Dark night.”

He fired his M-4000 and filled the duct with buck. J.B. racked a fresh round into his scattergun and peered down the shaft again. The stickie was mostly a gooey mess now. J.B. rose and walked over to the other duct. One peek showed him the same situation. The stickie worming its way up the other duct blinked into the glare of J.B.’s flashlight before resuming its creeping progress. J.B. let fly with another buckshot blast that obliterated the stickie’s hand, arm and face. For the barest of seconds there was a moment of blessed silence.

The shattered stickie’s jammed-up corpse jerked a little and J.B. heard the crunch of bones as the mutie behind began chewing its way toward him through its friend from the toes up.

Krysty walked in reloading the round she had spent in the hallway. “Given time, they can get through that door.”

“Heard you.” He glanced up as the thumping and bumping in the ceiling continued and pondered the unpleasant idea of the stickies ripping their way out of the ducts and falling upon him and Krysty through the light fixtures.

“How are we on chron, again?” Krysty asked wearily. She already knew, but she vainly hoped that somehow J.B. or maybe even Gaia herself would give her a happier answer.

J.B. looked at the mat-trans comp unhappily as she shucked fresh shells past the loading gate of his blaster. “Two more days.”

Chapter Six

Ryan and Doc examined the ville through their optics. “This ville is old,” Doc said. “Plainly it was already old in my time. The cobblestone streets are original.” They scanned the steep streets and crowded narrow buildings. “Almost all the modern construction, buildings from Mildred’s time, have rotted away. Like the church on the sister isle, it is the ancient and solid construction that has survived. It is Mediterranean in style, in keeping with their presumed Portuguese forebears. Everything fashioned post the apocalypse is plank-and-beam or dry-mortared stone. Clearly the present generation has not the skill to copy the ancient buildings.”

Ryan ran his eye appraisingly over the ville. Far too many people in the Deathlands were still feasting on the bones of Mildred’s predark time. This island appeared to have escaped skydark and transitioned fairly smoothly. Ryan grimaced and considered the chill-pale Roque and his crew. He noted the heavy iron-bound doors of all the houses. None that he saw had first-floor windows, the lower windows of those of older construction were either bricked up or barred, and that brought his thoughts back to whatever it was that awaited the night in the cave behind them. The island hadn’t escaped skydark entirely.

Not by a long shot.

Men in long coats and wide hats moved about on the streets. Some few more were engaged in activities on the dock. Others Ryan assumed to be women wore equally dark-hooded robes and veils. A clutch of them were busy down on the beach harvesting buckets of shellfish from the rocks.

“And in what fashion should the Grand Turk and his illustrious vagabond enter upon the stage?” Doc asked.

Ryan simply stared.

“How shall we…make our play?” Doc tried.

Ryan had been giving that some thought. “What you said this morning. Shipwrecked royalty. It’s not bad. We tell them we went down in the storm. Since they lost Roque, they might buy it. With your fancy talk and Latin you might convince them you’re somebody to be reckoned with. Try to make some discreet inquiries about the mat-trans.”

“And you?”

“I’m your right hand. I’ll just stand around and look mean. We haven’t seen much in the way of blasters or sec men. Tell them there were two more ships with us, and if they didn’t go down they’re looking for us, and tell them they’re big. If they think you got a few dozen guys like me looking for you, that might keep them honest. You? Be charming. Be imperious. Be a baron. Don’t bastard it up.”

“Decorus Imperiosus Rex, so shall I be,” Doc assured him.

“Let’s get fed.”

They emerged from their hide among the boulders. The strand opened up to a decent stretch of beach around the harbor. Doc drew himself up to his full height and spun his cane jauntily as he walked down the sand. The women bolted erect from their labors to reveal veiled faces and smoked lenses. They made suitable sounds of alarm and then hiked up their robes with gloved hands as they scuttled toward the pier. Ryan kept his Steyr at port arms. Doc wasn’t exactly acting like a baron, but to his credit he didn’t appear to be afraid of anything. The men on the docks and boats drew knives and clutched at gaffs. Others ran full-tilt into the ville shouting. Ryan and Doc ignored them all and mounted the stone steps that descended between the ville and the sand. The area had a fountain and formed a bit of a ville square before the twisting streets wound up into the steep hillsides.

A church bell began ringing in alarm.

Doc stopped and struck a pose with one fist on his hip and the other on his cane. He made an imperious gesture with his hand. Ryan bellowed up at the ville. “Baron Theophilus Algernon Tanner seeks words with the baron of this island!” The cliffs on either side of the harbor gave his voice a nice echo. Doc whispered in Latin.

Ryan roared out, and punctuated it with a full auto burst from his blaster into the air. “Baron Theophilus Algernon Tanner peto lacuna per Baron ilei Insula!”

A phalanx of men in black came charging down the cobblestones. The man in the lead had some kind of assault blaster. The five men behind him had long double-barrel blasters, apparently homegrown, and probably black powder. The street behind them began to fill with men carrying single-barrel blasters, axes, shovels, sledges and anything else that was heavy or bladed.

Doc looked utterly unimpressed. Ryan took two steps forward to interpose himself between Doc and the mob and arranged his scarred features into their hardest look. His body language radiated that very little was keeping him in check from chilling them all. The leading man was tall and whip-thin. A sparse beard and mustache were visible beneath the shadow of his broad hat. He had a predark blaster in an open holster on his belt. As he halted, so did his men and the mob behind them. Clearly there was fear. Ryan detected the people here weren’t used to being surprised. It seemed certain they were used to occasional visitors from the mat-trans and perhaps spying a sail upon the sea. They weren’t expecting company dropping out of nowhere on their doorstep.

“I heard.” The leader spoke. Ryan was reminded of the accents when he had been to Amazonia. “You…speak English?”

“You.” Doc snapped his fingers. “Your name.”

“Jorge-Teo.” The man came an inch from snapping to attention. “Constable Jorge-Teo.”

Doc waved a dismissing hand. “Show us to Baron Barat.”

Ryan’s stomach tightened. Doc was already blowing it.

Ryan could hear Jorge-Teo’s eyes widening behind his dark glasses. “You…know the baron?”

Doc peered down his nose from his six-foot, four-inch height and recovered nicely. His voice dropped an intolerant octave. “We are aware of him.”

“Will you join me in my office?”

“We will.” Doc turned his eye upon the crowd and raised an eyebrow. The constable began shouting and the ville folk turned from mob to gawkers as they moved to either side of the street. Constable Jorge-Teo’s men made a move to arrange themselves in escort around Doc. Ryan stopped that with an ugly smile. The island sec men backed down and led Ryan and Doc up the steep street. They came to a ledge of flat land that formed another square. The building they walked toward was old even before skydark but was recognizable as a sec station. A police station as they would have called it back in the day.

They went through the heavy wooden doors. Inside were some desks and holding cells. Ryan’s arctic-blue eye slid over a rack of long blasters chained in place through the trigger guards. Two of the weapons were bolt-action predark hunting blasters and two more were double-barreled scatter-blasters of the same vintage. In other racks along the walls Ryan saw nets and traps. Still more held boar spears, catch poles and whaling lances. They seemed of recent manufacture, and well used and well maintained. The ville was rolling their own black powder but predark blasters and their ammunition were in short supply.

The constable pointed to a table and a pair of chairs. Doc ignored them and went straight to the back office. Doc flung the door open and took command of the constable’s desk. Ryan stood behind like a tombstone. The constable and his posse shifted from foot to foot beneath Ryan’s unrelenting gaze. Doc consulted his chron and rolled his eyes.

Ryan’s head turned at the sound of a wag outside.

The constable and his men were visibly relieved. The station door swung open and two tall men wearing the universal island attire of black hats, caped coats and dark glasses entered, openly carrying long, predark blasters. Their plastic furniture had long ago been replaced with local wood stocks and grips and the original matte-black finish replaced with gray phosphate. J.B. probably could have identified them instantly. Ryan noted the hilts of swords protruding from out of their coats. Baron Barat followed. He was of medium height and wore the dark island garb; however, his was of finer cut and well tailored to his frame. The baron walked up to Jorge-Teo and their faces disappeared as they tilted their broad hats together. They consulted together in whispers for a few moments, and then the baron strode into the office and sat in front of Doc. He removed his gloves and handed them to one of his sec men. His skin was chalk-white and the nails on his fingers purplish. His long black hair had streaks of silver and fell loose to his shoulders. He removed his dark glasses and Ryan wasn’t surprised to see the man from the portrait in the smaller island church gazing upon him with cool curiosity.

He turned his attention to Doc and gave him a cold, sharklike smile. His teeth were as gleaming white as Doc’s, but the baron’s purple gums had receded to make them appear entirely too long. It was the smile of a skull. “Baron…Tanner, is it?”

Ryan spoke low and threatening. “Baron Theophilus Algernon Tanner, Baron of Strafford and Baron of Maine.”

“Americans,” the baron said. The skeleton smile stayed painted on Barat’s face. The black eyes remained cold. His English was heavily accented but predark educated and formal. “Forgive me, Baron Tanner, but I have spoken with my constable, and I do not remember making your acquaintance.”

“Your constable exaggerates. I did not claim to have had the honor of your acquaintance, dear Baron. I merely informed your constable that I was aware of you.”

“Aware of me?”

“Aware of your island,” Doc corrected.

Ryan eyed the disposition of the sec men again and readied himself to start blasting. Doc sounded like he was about to drop the ball. Doc waved an impatient hand at Ryan and handed off. Ryan gave Baron Barat a withering look. “We’ve recced it.”

The baron’s face froze.

Ryan went with gut instinct. “It’s not hard to move among you. Particularly during the day.”

The baron flinched and Ryan knew he had given him a gut shot where it hurt. Barat raised a hand to Jorge-Teo and spoke a few words in Portuguese. The constable left and the baron returned to Doc. “Forgive me, Baron. I have neglected my duties as host.” Jorge-Teo came in with a tray bearing a carafe of wine, cheese and smoked fish. The constable poured wine. Doc nodded at Ryan, who assumed the role of royal food taster and picked up the goblet.

Baron Barat sighed and took up his own cup. He toasted vaguely toward Ryan and drained the goblet. He set the empty glass down, smacked his lips with relish and smiled condescendingly. Ryan took a swig from the goblet. The wine was heavier and sweeter than the communion wine on the sister island. Ryan poured it back and set the goblet down in front of Doc. The constable refilled the glass.

Doc ignored it. “Baron, let me be blunt. My ship, the Vermont, went down in the other night’s storm.”

The baron kept his poker face, but Ryan could almost hear him considering his own lost boat and calculating.

“I believe my escort ships—”

The baron blinked. “Your escort ships?”

“Yes, my Vermont was a cargo ship and was heavily laden. The Maine and Hampshire are warships and faster. Last I saw of them from the Vermont, they were running ahead of the storm. We signaled them with lanterns before we went down. They will of course return in a few days’ time.”

Ryan sensed Baron Barat’s discomfiture. Doc was playing his hand well. Now if he could just—Ryan’s stomach reared within him like a striking cobra. He tried to bring up his blaster to bear but his stomach ejected its contents so violently it almost tore the lining of his throat. Ryan fell to his hands and knees as sickness that made a mat-trans jump feel like an after-dinner belch racked him. “Doc! I—”

Ryan went fetal as his bowels spasmed.

Doc’s hand froze on the grips of his blaster as the baron’s sec men leveled their weapons. One was pointed at Doc. The other at aimed at Ryan’s retching form on the floor. Jorge-Teo relieved Doc of his LeMat, then knelt and relieved Ryan of his weapons. Doc struggled to maintain an imperious mien. “You disappoint me, Baron.”

The baron ignored Doc and poured himself another glass of wine. He swirled it in his glass and admired its color before sipping it. He peered down at Ryan in mock sympathy. “Sadly, one’s first few experiences with our native lotus are somewhat…purgative. For one who imbibes it for the first time, I must admit he was given a very powerful dose. I fear his dreams shall not be pleasant.”

“Baron Barat, I must protest this—”

Barat turned to the constable. “It has been three days since we lost Roque.” He held up his glass. “I feel the draft upon me, and must sleep until the effects have passed. You know what must be done.”

“Yes, Baron.” Jorge-Teo grinned unpleasantly at Ryan and Doc. “And what of these two?”

“Put the sec man in a cell. He will be of use to no one for at least a day.”

They both looked at Doc. “And the baron?” the constable asked.

“Yes, the baron.” Barat gave Doc a very hard and measuring look. “Make him comfortable.” The skull-face smile returned once more. “I will speak with this man again after I have slept. Bring him to the manor come sundown.”

NIGHT HAD NEARLY fallen. Mildred stood and peered out into the drizzling rain and fog. They had spent the afternoon exploring the tiny island and found damn little. She shivered in the cold ocean breeze and stepped back inside the shattered blockhouse. Mildred took out Doc’s note and read it again for lack of anything better to do. On one side was a picture of what looked to her like some kind of penguin. On the back Doc’s spidery longhand read:

Dear friends,

If you are reading this missive then you have successfully journeyed through the mat-trans. A boat approaches, time constrains me to brevity. In summary:

-being picked up by fishing boat

-believe we are in an island chain upon the Atlantic

-disposition of natives unknown

-advise caution

-circumstances of corpse most curious (Mildred, please take note of marks on deceased’s inner arms.)

-presume us to be upon the big island.

I remain,

Your faithful servant in all things,

“Doc”

Mildred turned the note over and looked at the date scratched beneath the bird sketch. “Doc wrote this three days ago.”

Jak nodded. “Not been back.”

Mildred shivered again. “Make a fire.”

Jak frowned out at the rain. “Driftwood’s wet.” He dug into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a handful of hexamine fuel tabs and bounced them once meaningfully in his hand. Each cube had a burn time of about fifteen minutes. “Two hours.”

“I’m cold.”

Jak nodded and took out flint and steel. He wrapped a fuel cube in a scrap of char cloth from his backpack. Sparks shot as he scraped the steel and magnesium rods together. It only took him two strikes and Mildred sighed as the tiny fire came to life. She warmed her hands over it and gave Jak her most winning smile across the fire. “You’re the man, Jak.”

Jak nodded at the wisdom of the statement.

“I’m hungry.”

Jak sighed and stuck out his hand. “Note.” Jak studied the words for a moment and handed it back. He drew one of his throwing knives as he rose and headed for the door. “Be back.”

Mildred gave Jak a suspicious look. “You’re not going to hunt down Doc’s penguin, are you?”

“Puffin.”

“What?”

Jak held up the sketch. “Puffin.”

“How the hell do you know what a puffin is? Tell me you aren’t going out there to kill Doc’s puffin.”

Jak gave one of his rare smiles. “Our puffin.”

Mildred’s stomach betrayed her and growled in agreement. A part of her mind was already hoping it tasted like chicken. “Well, possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

Jak blinked. Half the time he couldn’t fathom her predark gibberish. He turned and stepped into the night with his blade glittering between his fingers.

“Might as well be talking to myself.” Mildred sighed. She turned her attention to the body and began talking to herself out of habit as she went into medical doctor mode. “Deceased is a Caucasian female, mid to late teens. Body shows obvious signs of acute starvation. Final cause of death most likely dehydration once victim became nonambulatory.” Mildred shook her head sadly as she examined the body. “Girl, you went the hard way.” She peered at the puncture marks Doc had noted. The holes on her inner arms were large and the bruising was bad. Just looking at them told her the IV needle had to have been fourteen gauge or bigger. It looked like work from Doc’s time rather than hers, and it was pretty clear to her that someone had been drawing blood rather than administering fluids.

Jak called out of the darkness so he wouldn’t get shot by mistake. “Back!”

“That was quick!” Mildred called back. “Come ahead.”

Jak came in holding Doc’s bird by its webbed feet. Mildred mentally corrected herself. Their puffin. Her chicken dinner. Jak tossed down a bundle of branches of driftwood suitable for roasting sticks. Mildred took out her knife and began shaving points on the likeliest-looking pair. Jak got busy dressing the bird. He filleted the serving portions of meat off the bone and removed the giblets. He stuffed the guts and odds and ends back into the carcass for bait. At first light he would try his luck at rock fishing. Puffins were chubby birds, and he warmed some fat over the fire and rubbed the meat with it. He threaded cubed meat and giblets onto sticks and handed one to Mildred as he put two more hexamine tabs on the fire.

Mildred began salivating as the smell of roasting puffin kabobs began to fill the blockhouse. Mildred eyed Jak’s jacket. It was like a superhero’s utility belt. You could never tell what Jak was holding. “Don’t suppose you have any marshmallows in there?”

Jak peered at her. “What?”

“Crackers?”

Jak stoically returned his attention to roasting his puffin.

Mildred didn’t bother with the Hershey bars. Anyone who habitually dropped their prepositions and articles was too good a straight man for his own good, and hers. Baiting Doc was infinitely more fun. But Mildred was cold, tired and more than a little scared. She searched for a subject that might tempt Jak into blurting out a few more monosyllables than usual. Generally his favorite subjects were knives and food. “Doc mentioned a fishing boat. Maybe tomorrow we’ll be eating—” Jak’s head snapped up. His ruby gaze burned intently out into the darkness surrounding the broken blockhouse. Mildred had seen that look before. She had a terrible, sinking feeling she wasn’t going to get to eat her barbecued puffin. She drew her blaster and spoke low. “Company?”

Jak rose and stepped on the fire. Night had fallen outside. The hexamine cubes were crushed and smothered beneath Jak’s boot, and the blockhouse plunged into darkness. Mildred heard him thumb back the hammer on his Colt. “Trans,” he said softly. Together they moved to the doorway of the mat-trans chamber. They knelt within and put the door of the blockhouse into a cross fire. Outside the wind moaned and the drizzling rain pattered. Collected water on the roof dripped through the shattered ceiling.

Mildred whispered, “What’s our status?”

“Surrounded,” Jak replied.

“Fuck.”

Jak grunted agreement.

Mildred’s eyes ached with effort as she tried to perceive anything in the inky blackness. She blinked as she caught site of something through one of the empty windows. “Jak, nine o’clock.”

“See it.”

Something was moving. Mildred squinted. It was like a few tiny orange fireflies moving up and down and winking in and out. They were coming toward the blockhouse. The fireflies suddenly multiplied and started acting crazy. Mildred did the math. Someone was carrying something covered and burning. Feet slapped on the wet rock of the escarpment outside. Someone had broken into a run. “Jak! They’ve got some kind of bomb—”

The interior of the blockhouse strobed with the muzzle-blasts from Jak’s Magnum blaster. Mildred’s .38 joined it. A big bundle of something flew through the window. Pottery shattered as it hit the floor of the blockhouse. A bucket load of red-hot coals spilled over the abandoned puffin kabobs. Something black and dirtlike mixed with the coals as the ceramic components of the bomb shattered. The coals flared brightly and then black fumes as thick as smoke began billowing out of the burning mess.

“Trans!” Jak shouted.

Mildred hit the lever to close the door and activate the mat-trans, but it failed just as it had done on the last hundred attempts. The mat-trans was still locked into its seventy-two-hour cycle. Jak’s blaster boomed, but the enemy was making no attempt to assault. They were letting whatever filth they had thrown do their work for them. Mildred got her first whiff of the fumes and nearly gagged. It smelled like some rotting sweet combination of burned sugar and incense. The moaning wind blew through the empty windows and doorway of the blockhouse, and the foul smoke billowed straight into the mat-trans chamber like sentient barbecue smoke chasing its chosen victim at a cookout. Mildred covered her mouth and nose with her hands, but it did no good. She had to breathe.

“Jak!” Mildred hacked and choked. Jak didn’t answer. She couldn’t see anything through the smoke and darkness other than the smoldering coals on the floor and the dark fumes endlessly blossoming out of them. The light of the coals began spinning. Mildred closed her eyes and the entire planet spun. She opened her eyes again and squeezed off two more rounds at nothing in particular. Her eyes were burning. Her lungs were burning. She felt like she was violently drunk on tequila. Her hammer clicked on an empty chamber. Mildred fell to her knees and threw up. She tried to stand again and realized she had dropped her blaster. She knelt and fumbled for it in the darkness, but she couldn’t find it. Mildred’s eyelids felt like they were filled with hot sand and as heavy as a mountain. It was nice to close them. It was nicer down here. Someone had wrapped her brain in soft, fuzzy blanket. The smoke was rising, and the cold air at floor level was refreshing. Mildred blinked and when she opened her eyes she didn’t remember lying down. The surface of the mat-trans floor was blissfully cool against the side of her face.

Mildred closed her eyes again.

Chapter Seven

The stickie erupted out of the duct in slow motion, like toothpaste out of a tube. J.B.’s shotgun blast had smeared away a great deal of its face and head. As the stickie was pushed outward, it dripped congealed goo from its cratered skull into the control room. Its narrow, dislocated shoulders crackled and popped as it was squeezed forth like sausage. J.B. slung the M-4000 and hefted his Uzi, pushing the selector lever to semiauto and dropped to one knee as he waited for the dead stickie to finish extruding.

The stickie’s corpse popped like a cork.

J.B. got off one shot and then the mutie’s cadaver flew into him like they were lovers who’d been separated for years. J.B. saw stars as they went skull-to-skull. Jellied blood and brain filled his eyes and mouth as he fell backward, gagging as he tried to disentangle himself. There was nothing left of the stickie below its rib cage. J.B. shouted as something grabbed his ankle.

Krysty snapped awake at the sound of the blaster shot and scooped up her weapon.

“J.B.!” The Armorer was flat on his back and covered with gore as he wrestled with approximately half of a dead stickie. Spindly arms dragged him by the ankle toward the duct. Krysty leaped forward and grabbed a rubbery wrist. She leaned in to get off a head shot down the duct. The stickie let go of J.B. with one hand and grabbed Krysty. She screamed as suckers bit into her flesh, and the stickie yanked her to her knees. She could see the mutie’s head impossibly hunched between its arms in the duct. Krysty arm-wrestled with the creature and quickly began to lose. The rubbery, boa-constrictor-like strength of the stickie was sickening. Her blaster fell with a clatter as her hand went numb. Any progress she made helped pull the stickie out of the duct. Krysty spun in the mutie’s suckered grip. She braced one boot against the wall and then drove the heel of the other again and again into the stickie’s face. It hissed and cooed and bit at the stacked heel.

J.B. rolled the corpse away and did a sit-up. “Move!”

Krysty yanked her foot back and J.B. shoved the barrel of his Uzi down the duct and into the stickie’s mouth. He pulled the trigger once and the stickie’s arms went limp. J.B. ripped his boot out of its dead grip. He pulled a bandanna out of his pocket and began wiping the gore from his face.

“Gaia!” Krysty snarled as she pulled her wrist free. The stickie’s hand suckers popped and made wet kissing noises as they very reluctantly loosened their hold on her flesh. Krysty flexed her hand as circulation returned and grimaced. Her forearm was a mass of circular lamprey-like wounds. There was hardly anything in the Deathlands more septic than any orifice in a stickie’s body. J.B.’s eyes would bear washing out if they could spare the water.

Krysty jumped as the stickie twitched.

J.B. shook his head as he heaved himself to his feet. “It’s just the one behind.”

“J.B., we need to…” Krysty’s shoulders sagged in exhaustion. She shook her head at the other duct. “J.B.!”

The Armorer looked across the room and saw a pale head bulging against the opening. Whatever body sub-luxation the stickies were capable of in life was being forced upon this dead one by the weight of numbers behind it. Its skull and shoulder filled every available bit of space. The jammed skull strained with the pressure being exerted behind it.

J.B. finished wiping down his weapon and tossed away his soiled bandanna.

“J.B., they’re stuck in there. Worming around in pipes. Can’t you just blow them up or something?”

“I blow the ducts then they really are in the ceilings and the walls.” J.B. gave the light fixture panel above them another unhappy look. “Then they’re in here.” He had been considering some kind of shaped charge to go burning down the ducts but they were sheet metal and he couldn’t risk weakening any section, much less ripping them open. J.B. walked over to the duct and this time stood back a prudent distance as the mutie corpse slowly squeezed through.

“So what do we do?” Krysty asked.

“Dunno.” The Armorer took a deep breath and checked his chron. It had nothing good to tell him. He looked back and forth between the two ducts and out toward the hall where the assault on the door continued. The enemy had three access points, and it was only a matter of time before all that squeezing and squirming finally popped a duct. “But we can’t afford to sleep anymore.”

THE LONG BLACK WAG pulled to a halt. Doc peered out the tinted windows at the manse. The stone wall surrounding it was tall and topped with a wrought-iron fence with sharpened spikes. Night had fallen, and the driver and the two sec men had removed their glasses, hats and gloves. Doc noted the same long-toothed mouths, purplish gums and lavender tint beneath the fingernails. However, the men all had either black or brown eyes. The manse was well lit, just as the inside of the sec station had been. The inhabitants of the large isle weren’t sensitive to light. They were very sensitive to the rays of the sun. Doc was starting to come to some conclusions.

The wag had come at sundown and despite Doc’s protestations they had forced him to leave Ryan behind in the holding cell, naked and raving in fevered dreams. On the drive into the hillsides Doc saw farms and vineyards. He found that nearly every home and building was of fortlike construction, and he was interested to find that he saw nothing in the way of horses, oxen or farm animals.

Doc also found the wrinklies who had been conspicuously absent on the smaller isle.

They all wore the same simple homespun. However, unlike their young brethren on the smaller isle who glowed with health, these men and women were stooped from hard labor, and all over the age of twenty-five. Many were moving wagons and toting bales. All of them without exception walked with a very suspicious limp. Many bore signs of the lash. Others had fresh bandages covering their inner arms.

All of them moved swiftly and fearfully as the sun set.

Doc began coming to other unsavory conclusions, as well.

The sec man beside the old man motioned with a huge, double-barreled blaster that looked suitable for elephant hunting. “Out.”

Doc exited the wag and was escorted into the manse. The interior was opulent by Deathlands standards and furnished in a hodge-podge of ancient, predark and cruder new manufactured items. Baron Barat stood in the foyer. He wore an elegant red-and-gold brocade robe for the occasion. A semiauto blaster was tucked into the belt for the occasion, as well. “Ah, good evening, Dr. Tanner, thank you for coming.”

“Doctor? I am Baron Theophilus Algernon…” Doc trailed off under Barat’s bemused gaze. Doc sighed defeatedly. When the drug had violated Ryan, he had called out to him, and called him Doc.

The baron smiled in satisfaction. The admission of the first lie was the key point in any interrogation. “Come, Doctor, will you join me in my study? Nero, you may accompany us.” The baron turned without waiting for an answer. Doc considered the blade hidden within his cane but decided he wished to learn more. Nero prodded him with his blaster and Doc followed the baron into his parlor. The room was wall-to-wall books of every description and age. A cheery fire burned in the little fireplace.

Doc decided on flattery as his own opening gambit. “I see you and many of your citizens speak excellent English.”

“Ah, well.” The baron smiled and gestured at the chair in front of his desk. “We have maintained a tutorial-based education system here as best we can, though I must admit it trickles down somewhat slowly from the high to the low. In many ways it is the second language of our island.”

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