ARMAGEDDON’S NOMADS

Banded together to survive, Ryan Cawdor and his companions travel the barren wastelands of a post-nuclear world. There are no laws in Deathlands—only fear, destruction and annihilation. As each day brings a new struggle, this group journeys toward the shaky promise of sanctuary.

COLD WAR

Ryan and his friends become the subjects in a deadly experiment when they’re taken captive inside a redoubt at the South Pole. A team of scientists is convinced the earth must be purified of mutants, and now they have the perfect lab rats to test their powerful bioweapon. Within Antarctica’s harsh and unstable conditions, the companions must fight the odds and take down the whitecoats before millions are killed. But in this uncompromising landscape, defeating the enemy may be just another step toward a different kind of death…

“Are you ready?” Ryan shouted

There was no answer.

Then he heard the deep, resonant hum of the mat-trans. He looked over his shoulder and his heart sank when he saw the door was sealed. The transfer was already in progress. The companions had left him behind.

To die.

He drew his panga and chopped down the first wave of stickies, lopping off heads, arms, hands indiscriminately. But he couldn’t keep up the pace for long; no one could. Before he could reach for his SIG SAUER, suckered hands gripped his arms and face, tearing at his flesh…

The sensation brought him back to consciousness.

His bed frame began trembling violently and the glass shimmied in the window frame. Was he dreaming this, too? Or was the redoubt coming apart?

The door opened, and whitecoats and blacksuits rushed in.

Ryan couldn’t move. Over the rattling bed and the pounding in his skull, he heard one of the women say, “His body temperature is 106. And climbing.”

“We need to get him into the tank at once. Uncuff him.”

Ryan was lifted under the arms and dumped feetfirst and fully clothed into the ice-filled water.

Tears streaming from his good eye, Ryan threw back his head and screamed. It didn’t feel cold.

It felt like molten metal.

Polestar Omega

Deathlands®

James Axler

What a prodigious growth this English race, especially the American branch of it, is having! How soon will it subdue and occupy all...the wild parts of this continent and of the islands adjacent. No prophecy, however seemingly extravagant, as to future achievements in this way [is] likely to equal the reality.

—Rutherford Birchar Hayes, 1822–1893

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

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quote

The Deathlands Saga

Prologue

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

Copyright

Prologue

A tremendous blast of wind swatted the nose of the hovertruck earthward, throwing Adam Charlie hard against his seat harness. For an awful second he hung suspended by the webbing, staring down at nothing but white, edge-to-edge across the aircraft’s windshield. With a roar of the front turboprops, the computer-assisted autogiro corrected, lifting the nose, leveling the flight path and leaving Adam’s stomach dangling somewhere down around his boot tops.

Groans and complaints from the other crewmen poured through his earphones.

“That gust was over one hundred miles an hour,” their pilot, William Yankee, said. “Sorry, but there was no way to compensate for that kind of headwind.”

The lesser gusts made the hovertruck buffet, veer and dip, which in turn made their progress along the landward edge of the Ross Ice Sheet seem halting and fitful, but that was an illusion. Below a bright blue, cloudless sky, an unbroken expanse of frozen sea steadily unrolled before Adam’s eyes. Without his coldsuit’s polarized faceplate, the glare off the ice would have been blinding. Even so, he had to squint to pick out the shadow cast by the glacier cliffs four miles to his right. Distance made them look much smaller than they were. They stretched on and on, all the way to the curve of the horizon.

Adam thumbed the button at the jawline of the coldsuit, activating his throat mike. “How far to target, George?” he said.

“Getting a strong bounce back from the tracker,” the man seated behind him replied. “Target is stationary and coming up fast. We should have visual contact at one o’clock any second now.”

The hovertruck’s cab, a clear blister perched on the top of the fuselage, provided an unobstructed three-hundred-sixty-degree field of view. The craft’s shape reminded Adam of a bottom-dwelling fish, with bulging eyes set too high and too close together on its skull. The cab quarters were cramped, as if passengers were an afterthought. Six crew including the pilot sat two abreast, knees brushing seat backs, elbows touching. In their flame-orange coldsuits with tight, head-conforming hoods and faceplates that sported black, molded noses and mouths, they looked like a clutch of gaudy insects ready to hatch out. Horizontal ribbing protected the suits’ heating elements and sensors; insulated boots and gauntlets were built-in.

“Give us some altitude,” Adam told his pilot. “Overfly the target. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

The hovertruck climbed jerkily to a thousand feet and then angled sharply eastward. William held course against the blasts of side wind and tipped the nose down slightly, giving everyone a look at what lay below.

The erratic bounce of the hovertruck made the recon challenging. Their target was tucked in the lee of a broad, sweeping curve of white cliff. At first it looked like a section of dirty glacier had calved off onto the plain of sea ice. As they drew closer, Adam caught the telltale clockwise movement—like a whirlpool, or a hurricane seen from space—and then he saw the mass of rhythmically bobbing reddish-gray heads and bodies.

“Would you look at all that pengie pie,” George said.

“Whoa, that’s one big-ass flock,” William said. “Gee, maybe we should radio for some backup?”

It was the pilot’s feeble attempt at a joke. There was no backup. This job was on them, and them alone.

On the ice below, hundreds of animals tramped around and around in an ever-shifting circle, flowing steadily in and out of the calm eye of the storm, taking turns in the warmest spot until they were pushed out.

Adam remembered the last time he’d seen so many pengies in one place. That fiasco—not just a resounding defeat, but a clusterfuck of blood and death—was burned into his memory. In the five years since, escalating culls of both breeders and eggs had caused the animals’ stocks to plummet. The problem was complex: a growing human population at Polestar Omega, the collapse of other Antarctic food stocks and an accompanying, dramatic reduction in pengies’ birth and survival rates. Key elements of the polar ecosystem were in flux, and the changes seemed to be accelerating.

“Let’s not get them stirred up,” Adam told the pilot. “Land a hundred yards downwind. We can move the aircraft closer after we harvest.”

The hovertruck landed with a crunch, its skid feet crushing into the uneven surface of the ice sheet.

“We can’t just barge in with guns blazing,” Adam said as they unbuckled their seat harnesses. “They won’t be cowed by a frontal assault when they see how few we are. And they won’t scatter, either. When they realize what’s happening, they will counterattack. We have to separate the animals we want from the edge of the flock, slaughter them and keep the rest at bay while we move the truck into position and load it. That means no solo action this time. We stay together, ready to defend and, if necessary, to retreat to the truck with covering fire. If we let ourselves get swallowed up by that mob, we’re done for, and you know what that means—it won’t be quick and it won’t be pretty.”

No one said anything. They knew he was speaking the truth.

“Let’s saddle up,” Adam said.

Brad Lee rose from the cab’s rear left seat, opened the floor hatch and lowered the gangway to the cargo deck. One by one the others got up and followed him down. Adam was the last to step off the ladder. A coat of thick frost twinkled on the deck plates, the winch and the cargo netting strung along the empty hold’s walls. As they strapped crampons to their boot soles and shrugged into their combat harnesses, screaming wind slammed the flank of the aircraft again and again, making it shudder.

Adam opened the weapons locker and started passing out the 7.62 mm H&K autorifles, 40-round magazines loaded with Hydra-Shok ammo, and handfuls of the flash-bang grenades critical to the successful completion of the harvest. Once pengie blood began to flow, retaliation by the rest of the flock was a given. The hovertruck could carry only six tons of cargo, and fresh meat was too valuable to waste. They couldn’t afford to kill animals in self-defense that then had to be abandoned to the elements. Flash-bangs would leave the pengies unconscious, disoriented, but alive—breeders and meat on webbed feet for future harvests.

Adam Charlie slid open the cargo deck’s side door and hopped out. The sensor on his wrist cuff said the air temp was -28°C, not counting wind chill. He took the lead and they set off single file across the ice sheet, weapons shoulder slung, barrels pointing downward to keep out the blowing ice. The footing was treacherous, both slick and jagged, and advancing against the wind gusts and accompanying blasts of ice pellets was a constant effort, like wading through a powerful, swirling river current.

Despite the sustained exertion, he experienced no buildup of body heat. He and the others could thermoregulate just like the pengies. Not due to natural adaptation acquired over many millions of years—the density of feathers and blubber, blood chemistry and hormonal secretions—but because of their coldsuits’ embedded microsensors, onboard microcomputer and breathable, superinsulating polymer fabric.

Step by trudging step, they closed to within fifty yards of the target. Over the shrieking wind, Adam’s suit mike picked up sounds echoing off the face of the towering white cliff—a rising, falling chorus of sharp metal scraping against sharp metal. The pengies were vocalizing as they wheeled around and around. The tramp of their feet was a steady vibration he could feel through the points of his crampons and into his boot soles. As he slogged toward the cliff, the sound and the sensation increased.

Adam got no real impression of the pengies’ individual size until the distance was cut by half and he faced row upon countless row of rusty gray backs. These were massive creatures: the males six-foot-five and 350 pounds; the females only slightly smaller at six-foot-two and 300 pounds. Compact and powerfully muscled, both sexes sported ten-inch-long black beaks with slightly downcurved tips. In close quarters one female could outfight a dozen unarmed men.

As harvesters of fat and protein, and efficient depositories of the same, they were remarkable biomechanisms, which is why their species had been resurrected from thirty-four million years of extinction, DNA salvaged from frozen, fossilized bones, cloned and genetically tweaked. The effort to recreate them had begun more than a hundred years ago, well before skydark. Supremely designed for the polar environment, the reintroduced pengies were a new top predator, able to displace the previous top dogs: leopard seals, killer whales and great white sharks. In the sea they were agile and quick; by attacking in coordinated packs they could disembowel a much larger enemy in seconds. They were much slower and more awkward on land and genetically programmed to congregate there for breeding and egg laying, which was the idea behind bringing the species back in the first place—let the pengies harvest the frigid, deadly sea, then easily and safely harvest them whenever needed.

Hunting parties from Polestar Omega used to be able to land right next to the flocks, but that hadn’t been the case for over fifty years. What two generations ago was routine protein gathering had become dangerous duty. Pengies weren’t stupid. Their brains were almost human-sized. They had learned from experience to scatter for the escape tunnels beneath the ice field that led to the sea, or if they had sufficient numbers, to do exactly what they did in the sea: to envelop and destroy the threat.

Adam stopped his squad thirty feet from the edge of the circling mass of bodies, autorifles shouldered and ready to fire. Hundreds of pairs of huge, taloned feet shuffled and slapped the ice, friction heat in combination with free-flowing urine and excrement turning it into vile gray slush. As they danced past, thick layers of blubber rippling over dense muscle and bone, the pengies craned heads over steeply sloping shoulders to glare down at the party crashers. The look in their red eyes said they were not afraid of anything that swam, ran or flew, that they would kill and die to protect eggs the size of small boulders tenderly balanced on the tops of their wide feet.

As he opened his mouth to give the command to attack, Adam hesitated, his heart pounding under his chin. They were dwarfed, overmatched and outnumbered. The pengies didn’t have arms that could punch or legs that could kick, they had no hands to hold weapons, but their bulk could absorb many bullets before they went down, and with 350 pounds driving their beaks, they could punch through sheet metal as if it were cardboard. He had seen firsthand and in close quarters what the wrath of these animals looked like, and he knew he was about to initiate an uncontrollable, conceivably disastrous chain of events.

But it had to be done. The people of Polestar Omega had to eat.

He keyed his throat mike and said, “We need to ram a wedge into the outside of the flock as it turns toward us, and separate the pengies for harvest from the rest. Brad and I will chuck in flash-bangs to break up their ranks. William, you and the others will have to plow into the gap we make and cut out our forty animals—the farther away from the rest you drop them the better. We’ll hold the gap open with grenades while you work. We’ll try to keep the pyrotechnics to your backs, but don’t forget to turn down your suit mikes and avert your eyes. Whatever you do, don’t stop moving forward. Our advantage is surprise, and we have to finish the killing before they can recover and regroup. After you slaughter the quota, we’ll join ranks in front of the carcasses and prepare to hold ground while William retrieves the hovertruck.”

“Hey, William,” Brad said, “don’t be picking daisies along the way, huh?”

“Nah, I was gonna stop and make a snowman.”

Their attempt to break the tension of the moment failed. No one laughed.

“Get into position,” Adam said.

The four men stepped in front of him and Brad, weapons shouldered, bracing themselves for the charge. The impact of stomping pengie feet rattled their knees, the squawking hurt their ears and they couldn’t see over the eighty-foot-long, constantly moving wall of bodies.

Slinging his assault rifle, Adam unclipped a pair of grenades from his harness. After Brad followed suit, he said, “Toss ’em in four pengies deep from the outer edge. Advance alongside me and leapfrog my blasts with yours. We’ve got to keep pressing forward and widening the wedge so the others can do their job.” He yanked the pins on the grenades, holding down the safety clips. “On three...”

The grenades arced through the air, four small black objects disappearing into the sea of undulating bodies. A second later they detonated with bright flashes and earsplitting cracks, sending feathers and ice flying amid billowing gray smoke. Gaps in their tightly packed ranks yawned as animals were blown off their feet. Rust gray dominoes toppled, tripping those moving closely behind them.

Adam and Brad each chucked another pair of grenades, this time a bit deeper into the throng.

As a second volley thunderclapped and lightning-flashed, William led his men into the smoke and chaos, jumping the fallen and forcing the wall of oncoming pengies to split ranks. The first dozen or so slipped past on their left, but the line of animals that followed turned outward, shifting farther and farther from the central mass.

With Brad on his right flank, Adam ran after William, sidestepping pengies that lay on their backs, wings and webbed feet quivering. Others were unconscious, long pointed tongues drooping out of gaping beaks. On either side of Adam, the pengies continued to rush past in a blur, blocking the view—it was like running headlong through a deep trench.

William and the others turned toward the line of animals they had split off; multiple gunshots clattered as they fired at will with their G3s. Clean kills were essential for taking home the highest quality meat. Carefully placed rounds vaporized bony heads, sending plumes of blood and feathers flying, pelting the animals behind them with bits of skull, beak and brains. Decapitated pengies dropped to the ice, their rubbery bodies skidding to a stop, neck stumps spraying gouts of bright blood. The pengies who followed were pushed into the kill zone of the assault rifles by their brothers and sisters who were unable to see what was happening ahead.

It took two minutes of precision single fire to drop their quota. When the last shot rang out, a ragged line of nearly headless pengies lay on ice smeared dark crimson.

“William, get the hovertruck,” Adam said. “Everyone else, gather the kills. Make it quick.”

While he and Brad stood ready to hurl more grenades, the other crewmen raced to the most distant carcasses, thirty feet away. Grabbing the huge birds by the feet, they dragged them back into a rough pile. Once they got the heavy bodies moving, it was easy to skid them over the ice.

As Adam watched, the gap they had opened with explosives and blasterfire sealed itself shut. Screaming in outrage, pengies continued to wheel past. Then the edge of the churning mob suddenly split away, this time of its own accord, the flock shifting as one to try to flank and surround them.

“Back up!” Adam cried as he lobbed flash-bangs. “Back up!”

Rocking blasts of concussion, light and sound knocked the initial wave of pengies onto their butts, chest feathers blackened and smoking from the burning cordite. As Adam pulled grenades from his harness, unharmed birds rushed past, lunging and stabbing down at him with their beaks.

A second later a shrill scream erupted in his earphones. When he looked over his shoulder, he saw that Brad had been caught from behind. A pengie loomed over him, its head buried to the eyeballs in his back. Its beak had been driven all the way through and come out his chest—the tip making a tent in the orange fabric of his coldsuit. Brad’s legs churned wildly, his boots slipping on the ice as he tried to get a foothold, arms waving as he grasped for his assault rifle.

Before Adam could drop the grenades and swing up his own weapon, two more pengies attacked the skewered man. Rearing back their heads, they slammed their curved beaks into his chest. Brad’s legs stiffened; his faceplate fogged over as he unleashed a terrible cry of agony. Like nightmare woodpeckers, heads bobbing, the pengies punctured him over and over. They weren’t trying to hit his heart. They were trying to spear him as many times as they could without killing him. To drag out his ordeal.

Adam looked down his rifle sights and fired as the nearest pengie reared back for another strike. The slug plowed through the creature’s neck. As it toppled to the ice, its head lolled at an impossible angle, connected to the torso by a thin layer of skin and muscle. When the bloody-beaked second pengie turned to attack him, he put five quick single shots into its center chest. Each impact sent it sliding backward, little wings flapping madly for balance, back, back, back, then it dropped.

The third pengie shook off Brad’s body, letting it collapse to the ice. Before it could take a step toward Adam, he shot it once through the left eye. A gush of brains exploded out of the back of its skull. Against the white of the ice sheet, the feathers floating down looked like wisps of black ash.

Adam rushed over to Brad and gently turned him over. The inside of his face mask was opaque, tinted red from sprayed blood. His wounds were too many to count, and he was already gone. He had bled out.

The rocking boom of flash-bangs jerked him back to the present danger. The others were beating back the flock, holding ground while the hovertruck circled overhead. Adam shouldered his rifle and took aim at the birds. As much as he wanted to kill them all, he raised his sights and fired a sustained burst over their heads.

The high-visibility red, stubby winged aircraft landed on the ice behind them. William remained at the controls, ready for a quick takeoff, while Adam and the others loaded the cargo bay. Dragging the bodies to the rear ramp, they daisy-chained them to the winch and hauled them inside, five at a time. The unbroken, thirty-pound eggs were deposited in specially built cradles spaced along the interior walls.

During the loading, the pengies made another attempt at counterattack, but it was halfhearted. A few well-placed grenades turned them back.

Brad’s mutilated body was loaded last. They carefully put him in a hammock of cargo netting, then climbed one by one into the cockpit.

“Where the fuck’s Brad?” William asked, his eyes going wide behind his faceplate.

“He didn’t make it,” Adam said. “Take us home.”

“Son of a bitch!” The pilot pounded the armrest of his flight chair with a balled fist. “Son of a frozen bitch!” Revving the aft turbines to redline, he lifted off the ice with a tremendous jolt, banked a steep, gut-wrenching turn and put the polar wind behind them.

They flew in silence back across the ice sheet, then north along the edge of a whitecapped, indigo blue McMurdo Sound, past the sprawling, rocky debris field of the McMurdo station ruins. There was no talk about Mama’s favorite pengie recipes. Or the joy of the hunt. None of the usual friendly ribbing.

One of their own lay dead in the back.

Chapter One

Ryan struggled in mat-trans-induced unconsciousness, muscles twitching, jaws clenching and unclenching. In the dream he was buried alive deep underground, trapped in a narrow grave and dying by inches, starting at the tips of his extremities. The burning pain in his fingers and toes was so intense it made his legs and arms tremble. When the blowtorch flame spread to his ears, nose and lips, he jolted wide-awake, only to discover he was blinded.

Try as he might, he could not open his good right eye. Years ago he’d lost the left to a knife slash from his brother Harvey; the emptied socket was covered by a black patch. Shivering violently from the cold, he couldn’t force his numbed fingers to move. He brushed his eyelid back and forth with the bare heel of his hand. The lashes had frozen together; he kept rubbing until he managed to separate them.

Groaning, he pushed up to a sitting position, breath gusting out in thick clouds of steam. The walls of the mat-trans chamber spun around him and he thought he was going to be sick, then the moment passed. The only light spilled through the porthole window in the door. He could see frozen rivulets of ice on the glass. The porthole was something new.

Frost coated the clothing and hair of the six bodies curled up beside him. They had been sleeping in the cold for a long time.

Maybe too long.

The risk of mat-trans jumping to their deaths was a given because the destination was always random—they never knew what they were jumping into. That his companions would all die while he lived on was a possibility he hadn’t considered.

“Wake up, wake up,” he said, with an effort nudging each of them with the toe of his boot.

Groggily, his companions began to stir. He was relieved to see that no one had died of exposure.

J.B. raised his head from the floor plates and brushed milky icicles of jump puke from his chin. The Armorer’s fedora was tilted way back on his head. He reached a shaky hand into his shirt pocket, retrieved his spectacles and put them on. From between chattering teeth he said, “N-n-n-nukin’ h-h-h-hell.”

As Krysty, Mildred, Doc, Jak and Ricky struggled to sit upright, Ryan caught a shadow of movement on the far side of the porthole.

“Triple red, quick!” Ryan said. He reached for his Scout longblaster, which lay beside him, but the stock had frozen to the floor plates and it wouldn’t budge.

With a clank and a whoosh the door swung open.

Ryan grabbed for the SIG Sauer handblaster holstered at his waist, but couldn’t make his fingers close on the grip.

Human-looking figures in tightly hooded orange jumpsuits poured into the chamber with raised longblasters. Their faces were hidden behind glass masks and black respirators. He couldn’t tell if they were norm or mutie.

“Do not touch your weapons,” the one in front said, the voice distorted, muffled by the breathing filter. “Do not resist. We will help you out of here.”

Resistance was not only futile, it was impossible. Ryan’s body would not obey his commands.

He watched in fury as one of the creatures in orange bent over Krysty. Edged with frost, her red mutie hair had drawn up into tight ringlets of alarm. Though she tried to defend herself, she could not. The creature quickly peeled back the lapels of her shaggy black coat and yanked her Glock 18C handblaster from its holster and sent it skidding across the chamber floor. Two of them then grabbed Krysty under the arms and dragged her through the doorway.

One by one, the companions were disarmed, weapons discarded, then jerked to their feet and hauled out of sight. They grabbed Ryan last, tossing his panga and SIG Sauer onto the heap of Krysty’s Glock, Doc’s ebony swordstick and his .44 caliber replica LeMat, Mildred’s .38 caliber Czech-made target pistol, J.B.’s Uzi and shotgun, Jak’s .357 Colt, Ricky’s Webley blaster and DeLisle carbine, and assorted blade weapons. When they hoisted Ryan to his feet, his legs barely supported his weight. By the time he reached the threshold, he was able to step over it under his own power.

Outside the mat-trans unit and in the control room, he saw his companions lined up with black cloth hoods pulled over their heads. Behind them, the colored lights of the mat-trans’s control panels blinked erratically. A layer of frost coated one side of the room. The concrete walls were cracked in places, floor to ceiling. Thick tendrils of ice had seeped through the gaps; they looked like pale blue tree roots. Then a hood came down over his head from behind and he couldn’t see anything.

“Your clothes and boots are contaminated,” the leader said. “Stand still while we remove them. We will dress you in clean coveralls and boots. If you fight us, you will go naked.”

“Don’t resist,” Ryan said through the hood. He let them pull off his clothes and help him into a baggy jumpsuit and a pair of too-loose, slip-on boots. As his arms were drawn behind his back and his wrists handcuffed, Mildred let out a shrill yelp followed by a string of curses.

“Mildred, are you all right?” Ryan asked.

A hand gripped his right biceps and he was forced to move forward. He could hear the crunch of footsteps ahead of him on the frozen floor. They marched in a straight line, down what he presumed was a long hallway, then turned and began climbing down flights of stairs. Sustained movement returned feeling to his hands and feet, and the shivering stopped. As they continued to descend, Ryan kept count of the number of landings they passed. When they reached the twentieth, his boots splashed through standing water. It was definitely warming up.

The grip on his arm squeezed tighter, making him stop. “Lift your foot,” a muffled voice said in his ear.

Ryan stepped over the unseen obstacle, then felt the rush of air as behind him a heavy door slammed shut. The hand on his arm pushed him onward and down another long passageway. It was much warmer now, and he could feel and hear a steady grinding sound somewhere below.

They came to more stairs, but these were narrow and spiraled tightly downward without landings. Ryan counted the steps as they descended. It was getting harder and harder for him to maintain his bearings and keep track of the details of the route back to the mat-trans.

At the bottom of the staircase was another straightaway. They traveled a short distance along it before he was steered to the right. Strong hands slammed Ryan’s shoulder into a wall and behind his back, chained the manacles to what felt like a metal ring set at waist height. Footsteps moved away and then a door banged shut.

“Is everyone here?” he asked from under the hood. “Check in.”

“I’m here,” Mildred said. “Might have a case of frostbite, though, I can’t tell without looking.”

“Not hurt,” Jak said. “Bastards took blades. No weps left.”

“A bit rumpled, but unharmed,” Doc said.

“I’m here and okay,” Ricky reported.

As Ryan waited and waited for Krysty to answer, his pulse began to pound. “Krysty, are you still with us, are you okay?”

After a pause, a familiar voice spoke up. “Sure thing, lover, I was just messing with you. Wanted to know if you missed me.”

Though Ryan was irked, he had to admit it was kind of funny and the joke broke the tension of their predicament. “Don’t say anything more for the time being,” he told them. “For all we know the orange bastards could still be in the room. Or they could be listening. Just try to warm up and relax.”

But Ryan wasn’t relaxing. His mind raced, trying to put together what little he had seen and heard. Who were their captors? He didn’t have a clue, except that they seemed to speak accentless English. From the temperature and all the ice, the redoubt where they found themselves was either somewhere at high altitude, far north, or mebbe close to one of the poles. Ryan didn’t think they had made a big jump in elevation, say to a mountaintop glacier; he was experiencing no light-headedness, none of the usual, all-over prickling of the skin.

The orange suits looked like specialized protective gear, which told him that these people had used whitecoat technology to adapt to life in the cold. He’d only had the briefest glimpse, but the suits looked repaired, rips and tears patched with less faded fabric—they could have been originally manufactured predark, like the M-16 longblasters they carried.

Ryan turned his head at the sound of the door opening and the shuffle and scrape of shoe soles on concrete. Without preamble, the hood was ripped off his head and he stared into the face of man about his height, but ten years older, with short-cropped silver hair and hard brown eyes. He wore no orange suit, nor did any of the others. Male and female, they were all dressed like scientists, and they all had black respirators strapped over their noses and mouths.

“Bastard whitecoats,” J.B. said in disgust.

The silver-haired man turned from Ryan and appeared to stare down the line of captives in canary-yellow coveralls—from the tall, shapely redhead to the male albino, from the black woman with beaded plaits to the short man in glasses and squashed down hat, from the scarecrow senior citizen to the strapping young Latino. “My, my,” he said, “haven’t we netted ourselves a motley crew.”

Eyes beaming, he addressed the companions. “Welcome to the redoubt Polestar Omega,” he said. “I am Dr. Victor Lima. My team and I are tasked with biosecurity—the identification and quarantine of potential hazards to human life. Before we can let you enter the central compound, we must test your blood and tissue for contaminants. The tests are painless and quick. We should have the results back in a matter of minutes. Are you all amenable?”

“Don’t see that we have a choice,” Ryan replied. The small room they were in had no windows. Floor, walls, low ceiling were poured concrete, and there was a distinctive, sharp pong in the air—it smelled like ammonia.

“We need to take blood and tissue samples before we can admit you to the redoubt’s general population,” Dr. Lima said. “If you don’t cooperate, we will sedate you and take the samples anyway.” He nodded at his assistants who flourished loaded syringes from behind their backs. “The choice of course is yours.”

“What kind of contaminants are you screening for?” Mildred asked. “You don’t need blood to test radiation levels.”

“It appears we have an expert on the subject,” Dr. Lima said. “Where did you receive your training?”

“University of Deathlands.”

“Well, Doctor,” Lima said, “you will certainly appreciate the fact that ours is an isolated population, without acquired immunities. We are therefore theoretically vulnerable to hostile microorganisms and toxic chemical compounds from the wider world. We must take all necessary precautions.”

“What happens if we come back ‘contaminated’?” Mildred said.

“You will have to be quarantined until you are treated and cleared.”

“A nice, restful sleep might be welcome,” Doc said, displaying a set of remarkably fine teeth for a man apparently in his sixties. In reality, the old man was more than two hundred years old, having been time-trawled from his own Victorian era to the final years of the twentieth century, then cruelly discarded by the scientists who had kidnapped him, flung forward beyond an impending nuclear apocalypse to its terrible aftermath—Deathlands. The serene smile and a shifting of weight onto the balls of his feet said if called on, Doc was more than ready for a fight, even a hopeless one.

“Give them what they want,” Ryan said.

Ricky looked at him in disbelief.

“You heard me. We know when we’re beaten. Take your samples.”

“Pequeños cabrónes,” Ricky muttered. But he, too, stood still for the personal violation, letting them draw a vial of blood from his arm and swab the inside of his mouth with a stick tipped in cotton.

“We will bring you some food shortly,” Lima said. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

The whitecoats exited with the samples, leaving them alone.

“Why didn’t we fight them?” Ricky asked. “Why did we just give up?”

“Bad odds, hands tied, no blasters,” Jak told him.

“We find ourselves in somewhat of a pickle, young Ricky,” Doc said. “And as pleasurable as a round of fisticuffs would no doubt be, getting out of this with a whole skin is not that simple.”

The youth turned to their one-eyed leader for an explanation.

“We don’t know where we are, Ricky,” Ryan said. “If this redoubt happens to be under one of the polar ice caps, the only way out may be that mat-trans. We don’t know who these people are. We don’t know how or why we ended up here.”

“That head whitecoat mentioned something about ‘netting’ us,” Mildred said, “which could mean they have the power to control the mat-trans system in a way we have never seen—the power to divert transfers in-progress to their own location. If that’s the case, jumping isn’t going to get us anywhere but back here.”

“And even if it does get us away this time,” Krysty added, “we could never safely use it again. Do you understand? We could never jump again.”

“Santa Maria, now I see the problem,” Ricky replied.

“There is a time to fight, and to the death,” Ryan said, “but we aren’t there, yet. Not by a long shot. We’ve been stuck in tough places before, mebbe even places worse. At this point we don’t know what we’ve stumbled into. Finding the limits of the situation is our first priority. If we keep our heads and our eyes open, there’ll be a crack in this trap, and when we find it we’ll attack it.”

“And if it turns out this trap has no weak point?” Doc said. “There is always a first time for everything, my dear boy.”

“I guarantee you one thing—we won’t die in these chains, Doc.”

Ryan’s voice sounded confident and in control, but that wasn’t how he was feeling. From this vantage point, it looked like way too many dominoes had to fall for them to escape the redoubt. And even if they did break out, crossing ice and snow on foot was not a happy prospect. As Mildred and Krysty had said, chilling a few orange-suited bastards to get to the mat-trans wasn’t going to suffice if the redoubt survivors could divert them back in midjump. Chilling them all was the obvious answer, but they didn’t know how many they faced or where they might be. Why were they “netted” in the first place? Was it random or were they specifically targeted? What did these bastards want?

After what seemed like an hour, but was more like half that, the door opened again. Whitecoats trooped in bearing clipboards. There was none of the promised food. They were all still wearing respirators. Ryan took that as a very bad sign.

“I have the test results,” Lima said. “Only two of you are uncontaminated.” He pointed his clipboard at Mildred and Doc. “Everyone else will require quarantine and a course of treatment.”

“What exactly are we contaminated with?” Ryan asked. “And how do you intend to treat us?”

“I seriously doubt that you would understand.”

“Try us,” Mildred said.

“Do you know what genes are?”

“Of course, they’re what nukeday messed up,” J.B. said. “What caused the plague of muties.”

“Yes, but only indirectly as it turns out,” Lima said. “Do you know what gene expression is?”

“Which genes are expressed, turned on or off, determine the end product, the phenotype—the individual and its homeostasis,” Mildred said.

“‘Homeostasis’?” Lima repeated. “You really do know the terminology. How about viral modification of gene expression?”

“Also known as genetic engineering,” Mildred replied. “Specially tooled virus trips specific gene on-off switches, or introduces new pieces of DNA, which alter the genotype and phenotype of future offspring. Where is all this Genetics 101 going?”

“Prior to the nukecaust,” Lima said, “geneticists working in secret in the U.S., Britain and Switzerland made major inroads into this research. In another five years it could have revolutionized the treatment of all the ills of humankind. This infectious viral research was considered so potentially dangerous to human life that it was subject to Threat Level Five, nuclear weapon security. But that wasn’t enough to protect their facilities from an all-out, global thermonuclear exchange, and subsequent shock waves, earthquakes, landslides, floods, fires and power failures.”

“We’ve heard this fairy tale,” Mildred said. “Every little kid in Deathlands over the age of six has heard it. It’s one of the two stories about where muties came from. They were either caused by the aftereffects of fallout, or whitecoats made stickies and scalies and all the rest as some kind of lab experiment. The muties escaped on nukeday and then multiplied like flies.”

“Flies on shit,” J.B. added.

“Neither story is correct, I’m afraid,” Lima said. “Radiation can’t cause speciation—the appearance of radically new creatures—in such a short time span. Most radiation-caused mutation is not viable because the effects on DNA are random, and usually harmful. The escape of a few lab experiments doesn’t explain the wide spectrum of native species that have been modified in the last century or so.”

“If you have another story to tell, then spit it out,” Ryan said.

“These predark geneticists were all working with the Cauliflower mosaic 4Zc virus and tailored variants of same. After nukeday, containment was lost. The virus was carried into the upper atmosphere along with the smoke, ash and nuclear fallout, and when the fine debris descended, wherever it descended, so did the live virus.”

“Why was it so dangerous?” Ryan said.

“Some of the variants that existed on nukeday had been engineered to test specific uses in particular species. Others had not. In its most raw state, Cm4Zc is a crude tool, a metal pry bar that cracks open the DNA treasure chest. And like a pry bar it is nearly universally applicable—that was part of the original intent and design. The geneticists’ goal was to be able to modify any species they saw fit by making small changes to the basic tool they had created. As a result, most living things—animal, plant, it made no difference—were subject to this highly contagious infection. Some organisms had natural immunity and passed that immunity on to the next generation. The weakest and most susceptible died in a matter of days. Some surviving organisms only showed its effects in the genotype—the DNA—and lived to pass on those changes. Changes that made their offspring very different in phenotype—and vigorous.

“You need to understand that this pry bar was in a sense magnetic—as it tore open the treasure chest, moving from species to species, it sometimes snipped out and picked up bits of chromosomal this and that, which it then spread. Without direction, without specific tooling and targeting, Cm4Zc turned out to be an engine of genetic chaos. The alterations it made in the infected host DNA appeared full-blown in the next generation and they were inheritable. Induced mutations that were not viable ended with the deaths of the offspring. The survivors lived to reproduce. In just three generations the progression went from human to mutie. Pure-breeding speciation was achieved, and on a global scale.”

“So you’re saying five of us are infected with this awful mutie shit and we can spread it?” J.B. asked.

“We’ll need to take more tests to determine the level of genetic alteration, and what course of treatment is best for each person. I assure you, we have done this many times before and our success rate is high.”

Doc rattled his chains behind his back. “This is pure rubbish,” he said. “You do not have to treat any of us. You could just send us all to another random location. That would be a far easier fix for all concerned.”

“Yes, an easier fix but it denies us the opportunity to add to our knowledge base. Trust me, if we cannot decontaminate you, we will escort you back to the chamber and send you on your way.”

“What about that food you said you’d bring us?” Ricky said.

“Of course, but first we need to separate those of you who are unaltered.”

He turned to Mildred and Doc. “You two will be taken to a workstation inside the redoubt core and shown what to do. Everyone has a job to do here, everyone who is able works. There are no exceptions. The rest will remain here while we prepare the quarantine area.”

At a nod from Lima, two whitecoats moved quickly to unshackle Mildred and Doc from the wall. With manacles still around their wrists, they were rushed across the room and out the door.

When Lima stepped toe-to-toe with him, Ryan could hear the wet, rhythmic sucking sounds of his breathing through the respirator. It reminded him of boots tramping through ankle-deep muck. With a bemused look in his eyes, Lima scrutinized every inch of his battle-scarred face.

“Again, I bid you all welcome to Polestar Omega,” he said.

Then the whitecoat kneed Ryan square in the balls.

Chapter Two

Mildred walked down the gritty, gray hallway two steps ahead of Doc, still bristling over what she had been subjected to during the forcible change of clothes. The orange bastards had taken full advantage of the situation—the hood over her head, their gloved hands holding her wrists trapped at her sides—to feel her up as if she were a prize pig at a county fair. As they squeezed, pinched and prodded her naked flesh, though muffled by the respirators their laughter was still audible and sorely grating.

The time would come for payback-plus she hoped, but there were much more pressing concerns than that—in particular, the level of organization and technical sophistication their adversaries seemed to present. “Seemed” was the operative word, because up to this point as far as she was concerned it was all just talk. Even so, it was clear their captors weren’t the run-of-the-mill, incestuous ville barons and lackey louts, nor a roving band of jolt-crazed coldheart murderers or a swarm of flesh-eating cannies.

Mildred could hear Doc mumbling to himself as he shuffled along behind her. The mumbling got louder and louder, then he closed ranks and growled out of the corner of his mouth, “I suggest we dispatch the minders now. Easy pickings.”

Mildred glanced over her shoulder at their clipboard-bearing, whitecoat escort. They had removed their respirators. The woman was a stick figure, her lab coat looked two sizes too big and flapped as she walked. Slicked with oil, her mousy brown hair was drawn back and coiled in a tight bun at the back of her head, which made her cheeks look all the more gaunt. She wore heavy soled, lace-up shoes. The male whitecoat was likewise undernourished looking, pale and prematurely bald, with narrow wrists and spidery fingers. Doc was right. Even with hands cuffed behind their backs, they could dispose of these adversaries with a few well-aimed front kicks. The trouble was, they didn’t know if the whitecoats had the keys to the cuffs. To really improve their situation, to help themselves and the others escape, they needed their hands free and that outcome wasn’t guaranteed by turning on the escort.

“No, not yet,” Mildred whispered back. “Keep your cool. We need to recce this place. For the time being, better to look docile and compliant.”

Doc grunted his assent, but he immediately resumed mumbling to himself like a deranged person.

He didn’t like the restraints. Neither did Mildred.

“In-for-ma-tion,” Mildred repeated with venom. “Focus, you doddering old fool.”

That shut him up.

The redoubt appeared to be fully functional, which was somewhat unusual of late. Everything worked. Power. Lights. Heat. Air. There was no sign of trash in the corridors, no mindless vandalism of the furnishings, which made Mildred think the place had not only never been looted, but that perhaps the same people and their children and their children’s children had occupied and maintained it since nukeday.

The hallway ended in a T and a pair of elevator doors, which opened at the push of a button in the wall. The whitecoats shoved them into what looked like a freight elevator and made them stand side by side at the back of the car. When the doors shut, the woman pressed a button in the console and with a jerk they began to descend. The concrete shaft passed by in a blur.

An unpleasant fishy odor filled the car; it seemed to be coming from their escort. Doc noticed it, too, because he wrinkled his nose and made a sour face at her. It was a long way to their destination, and they didn’t stop in between. When the doors finally opened, they faced a corridor lit by bare bulbs in metal cages set at intervals down the middle of the ceiling. Along the right-hand wall were a row of metal hooks, from which hung plastic bibfronts and rubber gauntlets.

The whitecoat female pointed at the heavy protective gear and said, “Put them on. Hurry up.”

“Just so you know,” Mildred said as she stepped into the bibfronts, “we don’t do toilets.”

“I think you’ll do whatever you’re told,” the woman said. She waved at the pair of swing doors on the left with her clipboard. “Through there...”

As they approached, Mildred could hear music coming from the other side. She used her shoulder to push the door open and nearly choked on her next breath. The reek of animal blood and rotting fish was that thick. Wall speakers pumped out the saxophone stylings of Kenny G, which mingled with the clatter of cutlery and rhythmic rasp of handsaws. The gray concrete room was lined with rows of stainless-steel tables and rolling steel carts. The latter were piled high with what looked like heaps of raw liver except for the red knobs of bone sticking out. About two dozen people in bibfront slickers labored with saws and knives and cleavers, either at the tables or on the gigantic carcasses hanging from meat hooks set in heavy rails on the ceiling.

At first glance Mildred thought they were sides of beef. Or enormous hogs. Then she looked closer and saw the stubby wings, taloned web feet and feather coats.

“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc said, his eyes wide with amazement, “those immense creatures are avian.”

Two men in black overalls strode up to them. From the truncheons they carried, Mildred assumed their job was to keep the butcher shop running smoothly. They were joined by a third man in bibfronts and dark blue coveralls.

“Some newbies for you to train, Oscar,” the female whitecoat said to the latecomer. His ruddy face, and his chest and arms were splattered with an impasto of blood, pinfeathers and fish scales. “When you’re done, turn them over to the fertilizer crew.”

The whitecoats unlocked and removed the handcuffs, then turned and left the room.

“Over here,” their instructor said, waving for them to follow him.

They stepped up to one of the hanging carcasses.

“What kind of bird is that?” Mildred asked, practically shouting to be heard over the Muzak and the clatter.

“Clonie pengie.”

At least she now had a clue where they had jumped to. “‘Pengie’? You mean penguin?”

Oscar scowled and looked at her as if she was crazy. “No more questions,” he said. “I’m going to show you the ropes, then you’re on your own, so watch carefully. You screw something up or work too slowly, and those men in black will pound the living hell out of you.”

Oscar selected a nine-inch boning knife from the array of razor-sharp blades on the tabletop. Raising his hand above his head, he plunged the point into the middle of the penguin’s torso, then slashed downward, smoothly unzipping the wet, gray feather coat from breastbone to pelvis, revealing an inches-thick layer of grainy brown fat beneath.

A horrible stench gusted from the incision, making Mildred take a step back. Doc coughed and covered his nose with his hand.

“You want to cut just deep enough to open the cavity,” Oscar said. “Be careful not to puncture the stomach.” He aimed the knifepoint at a bulging reddish sack the size of a basketball. “You don’t want to release the sour bile from the glands, these ones here, here and here.” He indicated compact, twisted, cordlike globs of gray tissue. “Prick them by accident and the meat is ruined.”

“Yeah, we’re walking a fine line there,” Mildred said.

Doc grinned at her joke; Oscar didn’t catch the sarcasm.

The butcher widened the cut by gripping the skin with gloved hands and pulling the edges apart. Coils of greasy guts slid out the bottom and into a strategically placed ten-gallon bucket on the floor. There was such a volume of intestine that the bucket was instantly filled to the brim. Oscar slopped the overflow into a second white plastic bucket.

“Cut here at the gullet and airway,” he said as he made the incisions with his knifepoint, “then pull out the heart, stomach and lungs. The rest will follow—like this.”

The remaining organs flopped into the backup bucket.

“Make your last cut just above the poop chute, right here. And that’s that. Gutting is the easy part.”

A female worker in navy blue hurried over to hoist the heavy buckets onto the metal table. Taking up a knife, she quickly excised the bulging stomach from the rest of the innards, then sliced it open over an empty bucket. Using both hands, she squeezed forth a slimy mess of half-digested herring, anchovy and other unidentifiable small fish and crustaceans. What skin remained on the little fish had a dull, yellowish cast from the animal’s stomach acid. The stench was like being downwind of a gray whale’s blowhole.

“Are you saving that to make fertilizer?” Mildred asked through the fingers clamped over her nose.

The worker laughed. She grabbed a gloved handful of the putrid slurry, then squeezed it in her fist, making it squirt into her open mouth. As she chewed, she gave them a thumbs-up.

A man in black swooped in from behind and whacked her sharply on the back of the skull. “You know better than that,” he said, raising the truncheon again. “Now get back to work.”

A second reminder wasn’t necessary.

“Go on, you open up one,” Oscar told Mildred. He handed her the knife and pointed at the next carcass in line. Unlike the others, its head was intact. It had a long black beak, large vacantly staring eyes. Only in overall body shape did it resemble the emperor penguins she’d seen in zoos and in National Geographic. There was a cluster of tightly spaced bullet holes high in the middle of its chest.

She had to stand on her tiptoes and reach as far as she could to correctly position the knifepoint. Making the first cut was difficult because the breastbone was deceptively massive, evolved to support the powerful wings. Once she got under the bone, the tip slid easily through the skin. She sliced downward as she’d seen Oscar do. Halfway through the cut, dark blood began to pour from the incision, splattering into the waiting bucket. It was the internal bleed from the chest wounds. Mildred held her breath as she yarded out double handfuls of guts.

Once both carcasses were cleaned of entrails and organs, and the cavities hosed down, Oscar showed them the next step.

“Can’t pluck off the feathers,” he said. “Too densely packed. Takes forever to do the job with pliers. So we just skin them out. Make sure your blade is hair-splitting sharp. If it isn’t, touch it up on the stone on the table. The idea is to leave the fat on the meat instead of removing it with the cape.”

He then proceeded to demonstrate the process, starting at the angry stub of neck. The feathered cape peeled away quite easily from the shoulders, riding as it did on a thick layer of brown blubber. He cut around the base of the wings, then throwing his full body weight into the task, ripped the skin of the torso down until it draped in gory folds on the floor. He used a pair of long-handled shears to snip off the webbed, taloned feet at the ankles and dropped them into a bucket of similar clippings. He finished by pulling the skin down over the stumps of wrinkly skinned legs.

As Oscar rolled up the cape, Mildred felt a nudge from Doc.

“What pray tell is a ‘clonie’?” he said.

“Cloned organism is my guess. These bastards must be protein starved. The south pole is a frozen desert.”

Doc nudged her again, indicating with a nod all the gleaming blades lined up on the table. They had their hands free, edged weapons were within easy reach, but they still didn’t know what they were up against. The fact that the knives were so available bothered her. Why would their captors trust them? Unless they were so outnumbered and outgunned it didn’t matter.

“Not yet,” she said, taking in the dozens of carcasses in the process of disassembly and the laborers doing the work. “We haven’t seen enough to make our move.”

Skinning pengies turned out to be much harder than it looked because of the weight of the wet cape as it was peeled back. She and Doc worked together to tear it down the length of the carcass. Once that was done, Oscar began the next lesson, separating the still feathered wings from the torso. He cut the heavy shoulder joints at just the right angle and the wings dropped off, falling into the bucket.

“You can’t split the backbone with a knife,” Oscar said. “Too damn thick.” He picked up a handsaw with prominent teeth and stepped onto an overturned bucket. “Start here,” he told them, “get the blade bit into the center of the spinal column. Be careful to stay in the middle of the spine and go slow so you make a clean cut all the way down.”

It took five or six minutes of concerted effort for him to reach the tailbone. As the cut deepened, the unmeathooked half of pengie began to separate, leaning outward. Oscar directed Mildred and Doc to catch the weight on their shoulders to keep the saw from catching. Bonemeal mixed with blood dripped steadily into the bucket.

When the carcass was cut clean through, the half pengie, well over 150 pounds, came down on their backs. Oscar waved for them to flop it onto the metal table, which they did. He then picked up cleaver and butcher knife and set about cutting it into chops and roasts. The dense meat was almost black and very slippery because of the fat, which remained soft and wet even in the cold room.

Mildred and Doc were transferring the final product to a rolling cart when the annoying Muzak was replaced by the sound of buzzer.

All around, workers put down their tools and headed for the exit.

“What’s going on?” Mildred asked.

“It’s lunch break,” Oscar said. “You don’t want to miss it. Come on, the cafeteria is this way.”

They left their bibfronts and gloves on the hooks in the hall and followed their instructor and the others. As they moved deeper into the center of the complex, Mildred scanned the walls, hoping to see the multilevel, full-scale maps they’d found in other redoubts. That would give them an idea of its size and layout and their position relative to escape routes. But there were no maps. The walls were unbroken expanses of blank gray concrete.

The throng filed into a sprawling, low-ceilinged room with row upon row of occupied tables, and headed for the serving area at the back. The aromas from the kitchen were complex, semi-industrial and thoroughly off-putting: the bouquet of burning tires mingled with scorched oatmeal and smoking fish grease.

Roughly two hundred people were already eating. There were men and women, a mixed bag of racial types, but none that Mildred could see were fat or old. There were no children, either. The diners were, if anything, uniformly scrawny. A few wore whitecoats, while the others were dressed in overalls of different colors—navy, green, black, red, orange, khaki. She and Doc were the only yellows in the room, and that drew stares from all sides. Over the piped-in Muzak there was hubbub and clatter, loud conversation and laughter. The setting made her think back to the year 2000, when she had been a guest for lunch at the Microsoft campus outside Seattle. Except the residents here were hunched over their plates, all business, shoveling in grub as fast as they could. She wondered what they all did to earn their keep.

“Get in line over here,” Oscar told them. “Grab a tray.”

Mildred and Doc did as they were told, sliding empty trays along belt-high rails toward the serving stations. Behind glass sneeze guards, workers in white were ladling food from a hot table setup—rows of stainless-steel trays—onto plates. As Mildred got closer, she could see what was on offer. There was a purple-black porridge dish. When served it was decorated with a spiky crown of what looked like black potato chips. Next to it in a serving tray was a gellike material—it looked like a mass of clear silicon caulk. Accompanying this were round slices of a compact bread smeared with gray paste.

As the server, a stick-figure female in a hairnet, spooned a big gob of the black porridge for her, Mildred said, “Uh, what is that?”

The cafeteria worker looked up from the plate she held and took notice of the yellow overalls. “Sure thing, newbie,” she said, slapping the porridge down dead center. “This is quinoa steamed with pengie blood.” She grabbed a handful of the blackened chips from an adjoining tray and deftly made a little crown of them. “With pengie skin crispies for garnish and a side of anchovy-herring pâté on quinoa bread.” Using a different serving spoon, she scooped up some of the clear stuff and let it ooze onto the plate. “And this is pengie egg soufflé.”

“Looks like uncooked egg white to me,” Mildred said.

“It’s pengie egg,” the server said, as if that information explained everything.

“So?”

The woman shot Mildred an exasperated look. “Pengie egg,” she repeated slowly as if to a small child. “The white never sets. It always looks like that, no matter how long you cook it or at how high a temperature. It’s protected by some kind of natural antifreeze. Don’t worry it’s fresh...”

Her words were lost in a sudden, grinding roar. Then everything began to shake. A Klaxon blasted a series of hair-raising pulses, obliterating the symphonic version of a Barry Manilow classic.

“Hang on!” the server shouted at them.

Mildred and Doc grabbed for the serving rails to keep from being thrown to the floor, which undulated in waves, as if it had turned to liquid. Gray dust rained down from the ceiling. The glass counter windows rattled violently in their steel frames. No one screamed, no one abandoned their food. As quickly as it had begun, it was over.

“Just a little icequake,” Oscar said. “Nothing to worry about. You’ll get used to them.”

Then he turned to the server and said, “Give them each a full portion. They’ve got a lot of work to do today.”

Mildred protested the show of generosity, but to no avail. A full portion is what she was handed.

When Doc received his plate, he stared in horror at the pâté of glistening, smashed, predigested fish.

The man in line behind them had to have read Doc’s expression because he leaned in and said, “Hey, if you’re not going to eat that...”

Chapter Three

Doubled over from the sucker kick to the groin and gasping for air, Ryan didn’t hear the door shut behind Lima and his entourage. The pain would have dropped him to his knees but for the fact that his wrists were tethered behind his back to the wall.

“You okay, lover?”

“Yeah, yeah, just give me a minute.”

“Bastards,” Jak gritted, his red eyes flashing with hate.

“Only thing you can trust them to do,” J.B. said, “is stab you in the back. And they’ll do it every time.”

Backstabbing was only one in a long list of their crimes. With their soft, uncallused hands, whitecoats had engineered and facilitated the destruction of civilization. They were the cause of suffering on an unimaginable scale, despised by all Deathlanders, norm and mutie. These spineless puppet masters hid behind their high principles—objectivity, accuracy and the search for pure knowledge—like their shit didn’t stink, but in reality they were no different from any other lying, thieving coldheart scum. They had promised humanity a glorious, ever-expanding future, but it was a sham, a carny hoax to suck up power, resources and wealth. It turned out what the population prior to 2001 had bought and paid for was murder and devastation on a global scale. Ryan slowly straightened up, grimacing.

“Do you believe we’ve been changed by something triple bad like Lima said?” Krysty asked him. “Something we could pass on?”

“Who knows?” Ryan replied. “If you think about it, the head whitecoat didn’t tell us much. He never explained why we’re here. Or how they got us here. He changed the subject right away to what’s wrong with us.”

“Did you notice he gave us his name but didn’t ask for ours?” Krysty asked. “Like we weren’t going to be around long enough for it to matter.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said, “not a good sign.”

“What are they going to do to us now?” Ricky asked.

“We don’t know what the ‘treatment’ Lima has in mind is all about,” Krysty said. “Or how long it will take. And if we’re lucky enough to survive it, we don’t know what they’ll do to us afterward.”

“Or even if there is a nukin’ treatment,” J.B. said. “Could be a way to keep us cowed until they get what they want out of us.”

Ryan nodded his agreement. It was just more of the same as far as he was concerned, telling people what they wanted to hear. Work less. Cheaper food. Cheaper housing. Longer life. If you get sick, no worries, we’ll fix you. Why change the line of bullshit when it always worked?

“I think there’s a good chance we’ll be separated,” he told the others. “That would make us a lot easier to control. If it happens, remember that Mildred and Doc are already in the redoubt, and if they haven’t freed themselves by now they soon will. You can bet on that. If we just hang tight, even if we’re separated they’ll find us. And no matter what these bastards put you through, remember you’re not alone. Everyone else is looking for a way to regroup and escape. We survived Oracle and sailing around the Horn. If we bide our time and stay sharp, we’ll survive this.”

“Where’s the food they promise?” Ricky asked.

Like most teenaged boys, Ricky Morales’s stomach was a bottomless pit.

“They’re holding out the carrot,” Ryan said, “which keeps us off-balance. Like there’s a chance they’re still going to play nice.”

“And mebbe not chill us,” J.B. added.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve eaten,” Ricky said. “Carrots sound good to me.”

By Ryan’s reckoning they shared a meal a little over twelve hours ago. They had stopped for a quick bite before checking out a redoubt near White Sands, New Mex. There was only one item on the menu: jackrabbit. The critters had screamed like scalded babies when struck by Jak’s throwing knives, jumping six feet in the air, turning mad somersaults and pinwheeling sprays of blood. Ryan and J.B. had cut off the heads so no one had to look at their faces, which were pink and hairless save for long whiskers and bushy eyebrows. Their two-foot-long ears were likewise off-putting, so riddled with needle wormholes they looked like brown lace.

Skinned out and roasted on spits the jackrabbits were a bit gamy and tough, but the companions laid into them until there was nothing left but a pile of stripped bones. After they had finished eating, they lit their torches and headed for the redoubt’s mountainside entrance. Some nameless, probably long dead joker had scratched a message into the stone above the gaping entrance: For Sale by Owner, Needs Work. It wasn’t the first time they’d seen graffiti; the same kind of message had decorated the entrances of one or two other plundered redoubts across the hellscape. Because the joke was so old, none of the companions bothered to comment.

It turned out the place was occupied by squatters—a colony of stickies had taken up residence; the corridors were crawling with the spindly pale creatures. The companions descended five floors beneath the surface and stumbled on a writhing, ten-deep, stickie clusterfuck. Something had triggered a mating frenzy. There were too many to chill, and they couldn’t reverse course because the way out was blocked by arm-waving bodies, sucker fingers and needle teeth.

A running fight to the death ensued, down the dark corridors and seemingly endless staircases. Before they were overrun, they managed to find and reach the redoubt’s mat-trans unit. If it had been out of commission, the game of survival they had played for so long would have been over.

Permanently.

But the mat-trans had powered up, and they slammed and sealed the door behind them. Faint shadows on the armaglass walls indicated that the anteroom on the other side of the chamber was packed with leaping, shrieking muties. The last thing Ryan saw before jump sleep overtook him were what he took to be the smears of sucker juice on the opaque armaglass.

From frying pan into fire, he thought.

The door opened and Lima reentered, this time with two men in black coveralls at his side. They all wore respirators.

The whitecoat kept his distance from Ryan, apparently fearing reprisal. “Each of you will be quarantined and receive separate treatment,” he told them. “The procedure is necessary to avoid accidental recontamination.”

Lima turned to his lackeys and said, “The one-eyed man will go first.”

The black suits quickly unshackled Ryan from the wall. As they led him out, he glanced back at Krysty. Her prehensile mutie hair had once again curled into tight ringlets of alarm.

They didn’t bother to hood him this time, which was something Ryan saw as another bad sign: they didn’t give a damn what he saw. One way or another, alive or dead, they figured he wasn’t going anywhere.

Lima brought up the rear as they moved down the corridor. At the end of the long hall they made a left turn onto another straightaway, at the end of which they made another left turn. To Ryan it seemed as though they were tracing the perimeter of the redoubt. There were doors on both sides, but they were unmarked. What he presumed was the exterior wall was cracked in places, and there were puddles of standing water on the floor. The air so reeked of ammonia that it made the inside of his nose and the back of his throat burn. The caustic fumes were another reason the residents wore respirators. What wasn’t clear was whether the ammonia was some naturally occurring irritant, or whether it had been introduced into the corridors as a sterilizing agent. The lights overhead flickered occasionally, but the power plant’s hum remained steady. He was looking hard for some wiggle room, a weak spot that could be exploited, and so far there wasn’t any.

He had to go with the flow.

They passed through a pair of double swing doors, the lower halves of which were covered with scuffed metal kick plates, and entered what looked like Whitecoat Heaven. The floor was carpeted in dark red; there were ceiling tiles, and chairs and couches along the white walls. In front of them, and partially blocking their path, was a curving counter behind which a half dozen men and women in lab coats sat working at comp stations. They all wore respirators.

“Do you ever take those breathing masks off?” Ryan asked Lima. “Or were you born with them?”

“The respirators are because of you and your friends. We can’t risk spreading your contamination to the redoubt core. Everyone there is unaltered.” Lima gestured for the men in black suits to enter a room on the right.

That door had a metal kick plate, too. The room beyond was divided by a full-width interior wall; a heavy glass window allowed monitoring of the isolated enclosure on the other side. A row of office chairs were set out for spectators. Ryan was bum-rushed through the door beside the window—it had a bright yellow Biohazard sign. The same yellow as his jumpsuit. Although there was a small hospital bed, what drew his attention was a massive stainless-steel bathtub filled with a slurry of ice and water.

When Ryan looked back, he saw two female whitecoats staring at him through the glass. Their expressions were hidden behind their respirators.

Lima waved for the women to enter the room. In addition to the clipboards, both carried hypodermics loaded with something pink.

“Secure him,” Lima said.

One of the black suits drew a semiautomatic blaster from its hip holster and pressed the muzzle to Ryan’s temple while the other grabbed both his wrists and lifted, bending him over, putting strain on his shoulder joints to control his movements.

Lima seemed amused by Ryan’s steely glare. “Sometimes the decontamination treatment causes an extreme violent reaction,” he said. “Everything we’re doing is for your own protection.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not fighting you,” Ryan said. “I’m going along with the whole rad-blasted program. Why not just cut the crap and tell me what this is all about? How did we end up here? Who are you? What is this place? And what is that tub of ice for?”

“Does the lab rat need to know what’s coming?” Lima asked. “Will that make its ordeal less agonizing? I think not.”

Something ugly glittered in the man’s eyes.

“Will it be more amusing to watch the rat discover the truth? Most definitely.”

He turned to the women and said, “Inject him.”

The whitecoats exchanged concerned glances; neither of them moved to obey.

“But we can’t roll up the sleeves with his hands behind his back like that,” one of them said.

“Inject him through the fabric. Don’t argue, you idiot. Just do it!”

As the women approached him on either side, Ryan stiffened. The sight of the pink liquid inside those hypos triggered something primal deep within him—whatever the hell was in those needles, he wanted no part of it. The man behind him raised his arms a foot higher, forcing him onto his tiptoes, off-balance, and the hammer of the blaster at his ear locked back with a gritty click.

“Stand still or he’ll blow out your brains!” Lima said.

Unable to lift his head because of the elevated arm hold, Ryan spoke to the floor. “You’ll regret this.”

Maybe because they thought the threat was empty, maybe because they were more afraid of Lima than a one-eyed man in handcuffs, the two women jabbed him in either deltoid. The pink gunk burned as it shot ever so slowly into his muscles. The injections took a long time because the payload was so large and so thick. When they had finished, the women jerked out the needles and stepped well back from him. It felt as if they’d just pumped a couple of boulders under his skin.

“There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Lima asked. “Do you want a lollipop?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said, “your head on a stick.”

“Those kinds of remarks might intimidate weak-minded rabble in the primitive shit hole we pulled you from,” Lima said, “but in a civilized society they are simply infantile and pathetic.”

“What happens next in a civilized society?” Ryan asked through gritted teeth.

“We sit back and watch while the drugs do their work.” Lima nodded to the black suits, who shoved him over to the side of the bed. “They’re going to reposition the cuffs. It’s for your comfort and safety, so please do not resist.”

Ryan let them drag him onto the bed, the head of which was tilted up. They then unfastened and relocked one of the cuffs around the steel bed frame. From shoulder to fingertips, his arms felt as though they’d been hit with pickaxes. Even though he had one hand free, there wasn’t much he could do with it except make a weak fist. As they hauled him onto the clean but holey sheet, he saw the full-length, rubber barrier beneath it.

“Do you expect me to piss myself?” Ryan asked.

“Stranger things have happened. Now we’re going to retire to the observation room and leave you to enjoy your experience.”

As the door closed, Ryan tested the strength of the rail by jerking on the cuff and was instantly sorry. Contracting the muscle sent a spearpoint twisting deep in his right shoulder. And the rail didn’t flex.

On the far side of the glass, Lima and the two women took their posts, clipboards balanced on their knees.

It felt as if the pink gunk was expanding, ballooning under his skin and his muscles began to throb with every heartbeat. Every time his shoulders tensed involuntarily, an ache traveled down the nerves of his arms, to his wrists and fingertips. And along with the ache was an intense burning sensation.

Maybe he had made a mistake in not giving the order to fight balls-out from the start? Maybe he was too nukin’ cagey for his own good?

He shut off that line of thought. There was no point in second-guessing himself. The logic that led to his decision still stood. Trapped on a remote freezing waste, apparently outnumbered, chained and disarmed, they had to find a way back to the mat-trans. It was their best, and perhaps their only chance to escape.

The air in the room seemed suddenly a lot warmer. Beads of sweat started dripping down his face and from under his arms. Every time he breathed in, it felt as if flames were licking down his throat and inside his nose, scorching his lungs. His joints ached, and his leg muscles started to cramp. Groaning, he pulled his knees to his chest and curled on his side.

Would Lima go to this much trouble just to get a victim to torture like J.B. had said? No, he decided, the torture and humiliation was a bonus, a welcome entertainment. Whitecoats as a breed lusted after facts, not victims. The costs and the consequences to individuals meant nothing to them.

Beneath the yellow coveralls, a coating of perspiration lubricated Ryan’s entire body—even between his toes. It was getting harder and harder for him to hold a train of thought for more than a second or two. The window and the door opposite the bed began to swim before his eye, as if he were looking through heat waves rising from sunbaked tarmac.

Poison, Ryan thought. These bastards are testing poison on me.

Then a rushing sound came from the ceiling grate directly above him. The suction from a tremendous updraft plucked at his hair and scalp. He was struck by a series of wrenching, head-to-foot chills. Perhaps from the current of air sweeping over his body? Perhaps from what had been put into his body? The shakes became so violent they made the bed frame rattle. His teeth chattered uncontrollably. Or maybe it was all inside his head? The sound, the sensation, nothing but fevered hallucinations?

He couldn’t hold that thought, either.

The world around him blurred, and when it refocused he was staring into a pair of gleaming, violet eyes. Long blond hair framed a face he knew all too well. Sharona Carson, wife of Baron Alias Carson, stood over him naked, her body oiled, reflecting the dancing firelight from the great stone hearth beside them. He was naked, too, on his back on a bearskin rug. Golden goblets of red wine and a crystal decanter were set out on the flagstone floor. In the withering heat of blazing logs, Sharona parted her knees and opened her thighs to him.

“I am a treasure,” she said, her eyes narrowing as she stroked herself. “Plunder me, you one-eyed bastard.”

“I don’t want this,” Ryan heard himself say. Low-pitched and gravelly, it didn’t sound like his voice.

“Oh, yes you do.” She pointed a finger at his loins and laughed. “Very definitely you do.”

Ryan tried to move and couldn’t raise the back of his head from the rug. It was so hot it felt like the side of his body facing the fire was about to burst into flames.

Sharona knelt, straddling his hips, and leaned forward, the tips of her long hair grazed his face and chest, crawling slowly across his skin. Then she straightened, reaching behind her back—and down.

He gasped as her fingers closed on him, and as if of its own accord, his right hand shot up to seize her by the throat.

With a rocking jolt, scene and setting changed. No longer on his back, no longer naked, he ran full tilt down a narrow, low-ceilinged hallway. His companions raced ahead of him carrying torches. Their speed and arm motion made the flames flicker wildly, producing a strobe light effect. It was difficult to tell where the floor ended and the walls began. They were trying to put distance between them and the muties in pursuit. They didn’t know how many of them there were; Ryan couldn’t count the number they had already chilled. The handle of the panga felt slippery and wet in his fingers, and the smell of spilled blood was thick in his nose. He gulped for air through his mouth, but try as he might he couldn’t quite catch his breath, like he had been running uphill for miles.

Part of him recognized the situation—he had been here before. It was like the redoubt in New Mex they had just left, only it was hot. Why was it so nukin’ hot?

As they all rounded a corner, J.B., Jak, Krysty, Mildred, Doc and Ricky skidded to a sudden halt, forcing him to stop, as well. Torchlight revealed a concrete stairwell and steps leading upward, right to left. The wall between the floor and the first landing above was carpeted in pale skin and writhing, spindly forms. The stickies were in a mating pyramid, sucker hands fixed to the wall and to one another. The crackle and hiss of the torches mingled with the moans and squeaks, and a chorus of wet, rhythmic sucking sounds. There were easily fifty of them in sight, thrusting and squirming in ecstasy. The copious juices this frenzy produced flowed over their naked bodies from top to bottom like a milky waterfall, and pooled on the floor at the foot of the wall. In the narrow space, the acrid stench was gut-wrenching.

Before the companions could retreat, the hairless heads of those at the bottom of the pyramid turned toward the blaze of the torches, which reflected in unblinking eyes as black as night, soulless shark eyes. Maws drooling with pleasure suddenly bared rows of savage needle teeth.

Stickies loved chilling even more than mating; the prospect of it sent them into an even higher gear of frenzy.

Mass coitus interruptus ensued. The muties closest to them peeled away from their coupling. They were spindly bastards but strong. Their sucker hands could pull the flesh from bone, or fasten hard with the natural adhesive they produced and then rip at will with their jaws.

Bare feet and puddles of love juice on polished concrete made for poor traction. The onrushing stickies slipped and slid, some fell, some dropped to all fours, scrambling to try to gain purchase, which gave the companions a momentary advantage. Ryan lunged forward, bringing his panga down in a tight, full-power arc. The heavy blade split the crown of a kneeling stickie’s skull, cleaving it apart like a ball of soft, moist cheese all the way to the chin. When he ripped the panga free, dark blood geysered from the crevice and sprayed across the tops of his boots.

Blasterfire roared in his right ear as Doc, Krysty and Mildred shot into the uncoiling mob of muties. The stickies dropped in bunches, as if their strings had been cut. Each high-powered slug passed through three or more bodies before ricocheting off the back wall. Their skinny torsos and soft skeletons weren’t substantial enough to slow the bullets’ flight. In such tight quarters, bounded on three sides by concrete walls, free fire was very dangerous.

A point brought home as Ricky fired his Webley Mark VI into a mutie’s open mouth. The heavy .45 ACP bullet took off the back of the stickie’s head, sparked off steel stair railing, sparked off the concrete and then whizzed past Ryan’s ear, whining down the hallway behind them.

“Back up!” Ryan shouted to the others. “Back the way we came!”

They turned as one and fell into a full retreat, running single file with Ryan bringing up the rear. Mildred and Jak had the lead with torches. Over the slap of their bootfalls and the pounding of his heart he couldn’t hear the stickies behind them, but he knew they were coming, and that they would never give up the chase. He sheathed the panga and drew his blaster. The companions sprinted blindly through the winding corridors until Mildred let out a shout.

“Got a map!” she said.

Every redoubt had floor plans, either framed behind heavy plastic or etched into the walls. It was a necessity given the complexity of the structures.

They paused only a few seconds, just long enough for Jak to read the map and find their route to safety. It was also long enough for the stickies to close the gap. With no one behind him, Ryan rapid-fired his SIG Sauer into the pale mass of bodies that filled the hallway, wall-to-wall. Torchlight glittered in a sea of black eyes.

“Go! Go!” he shouted, as the blaster’s muzzle flashed and stickies dropped in bunches, tripping those running up behind them.

Ryan stopped when the slide locked back on an empty chamber, then turned. The hallway ahead was already dark, only a faint light coming from his companions’ torches. As he ran, by feel he dropped the empty mag into his palm, pocketed it and reloaded. Really pouring on the speed, he caught up to his friends as they mounted another stairway, this one free of mating muties.

Jak led them three floors up, down a long corridor, and unerringly to the redoubt’s mat-trans. As they rushed through the anteroom’s doorway, Ryan stopped. “Get into the mat-trans and get ready to jump,” he said. “I’ll hold them off here.”

Ryan holstered the SIG Sauer. It was a last resort. In his mind’s eye was the image of the hallway jammed with pale bobbing heads and spindly waving arms. An unending supply of muties. And a limited supply of bullets. He drew the panga, quickly wiping the sweat and blood from his hand on his pants. He could hear their feet slapping the concrete and their mewling, and braced himself to defend the entrance.

“Are you ready?” he shouted over his shoulder.

There was no answer.

“Are you ready?”

Then he heard the deep, resonant hum of the mat-trans. He looked over his shoulder and his heart sank when he saw the mat-trans door was sealed. The transfer was already in progress. The companions had left him behind.

To die.

With forehand and backhand slashes of the long knife, he chopped down the first wave of stickies, lopping off heads, arms, hands indiscriminately. But he couldn’t keep up the pace for long; no one could. There were too many of them and they leaped over the bodies of their dead. Before he could reach for the SIG Sauer, suckered hands gripped his arms and face, tearing at his flesh. As the mass of stickies pulled him to the floor, he felt a wetness spreading between his legs. He was pissing himself, and it burned like fire going out.

The sensation brought him back to consciousness.

With a loud clunk the rushing sound above him abruptly stopped and the upward suction ceased. The bed frame began trembling so violently that it started to walk across the floor. The window glass shimmied in its frame. Was he dreaming this, too? Or was the redoubt coming apart? Were the hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete and steel about to collapse, crushing them, burying them forever? Everything in the room was shaking, clattering. He realized this was no hallucination; this was real.

The connecting door opened, and whitecoats and black suits rushed in.

Ryan couldn’t move. All his strength was gone. Over the rattling bed and the pounding in his skull, he heard them talking.

“His body temperature is 106,” one of the women said. “And climbing.”

“We need to get him into the tank at once. Uncuff him.”

Ryan was lifted bodily under the arms and dumped feet first and fully clothed into the ice-filled water.

It didn’t feel cold.

Tears streaming from his good eye, Ryan threw back his head and screamed.

It felt like molten metal.

Chapter Four

As Dr. Lima exited through the double doors, he removed his respirator and stowed it in the rather small pocket of his lab coat. The breathing mask stuck out the top and made an unsightly bulge at his hip. The precaution was annoying and probably unnecessary, but protocols for the Deathlands’ research had been laid out, and they had to be followed to the letter or there would be hell to pay. He walked briskly to the nearest elevator, entered and pressed the button for the main level.

His bioengineering complex had suffered no serious damage from the icequake, which was a relief as further delays could well prove catastrophic, both to him personally and to the population of Polestar Omega. The temblor was minor, but seismic events were coming more frequently. That was to be expected given the location—the redoubt’s main shaft had been sunk deep in the Ross Ice Sheet at a great cost in lives and 1990s tax dollars—and given the age of the structure. Its original designers had estimated it wouldn’t last much more than a century what with the pressure of a moving glacier and constant erosion by the rock and sediment trapped in the ice. Though it was linked to the global mat-trans system, the self-supporting research complex had not been created to survive an all-out nuclear exchange; that turned out to be a happy consequence of their extreme isolation.

All good things came to an end, it seemed.

The elevator stopped with a jolt, and he stepped out into a vast, domed, well-lit space. As he descended the wide, spiraling staircase of the main rotunda, he saw lines of workers in blue moving heavy crates and 55-gallon drums on four-wheeled dollies to the staging areas. The contents of the containers were identified by stencil markings on the sides and tops. Small arms—rifles, SMGs and handguns. Ammunition. Grenades and grenade launchers. Medical supplies. Water. Food. Pop-up shelters. The essentials for invasion. Because the elevators on the up-glacier side of the redoubt were no longer functional, the materiel stored there had to travel the long way around, through the center of the complex to the lifts on the lee side. The workers moved with all due haste; everyone knew the window for escape and survival of the enclave was rapidly closing.

Lima’s stomach growled. He was used to the sound, and to the accompanying gnawing sense of hunger. Never in his life, or his father’s life, or his father’s father’s life had there been quite enough for everyone to eat. All food had been carefully weighed and parceled out—particularly protein, the precious building block of life. Nothing was ever wasted. Of late, because of the stockpiling necessary to supply the invasion, the situation had become even graver, the residents of the redoubt were eating once every other day. He had seven hours to wait for his next meal.

For the doctor and the other residents, the aches in their stomachs were a matter of pride and cultural bonding. From its inception, Polestar Omega had a unique tradition, grounded in extreme physical and psychological hardship. The first whitecoats who inhabited the redoubt had been chosen for their ability to meet the challenges and deprivation of multiyear Antarctic assignments, the same selection criteria as the astronauts on the orbiting space station. Over the decades postnukecaust, the redoubt’s population had proved over and over how Spartan and how ingenious they were. If, as the saying went “you are what you eat,” they could and did live on anything that contained essential nourishment. They had exploited all the polar desert had to offer, gathering new information and using it to adapt and thrive in the most desolate place on the planet.

What could such a people, with their determination and advanced technology, accomplish in a wider world? Were there any limits on what they could do? They had known this day would come for more than a century, and for the past fifty years they had been developing a plan to take back their birthright, to leave their icebound prison, to cleanse and repopulate the Earth with a new and improved humanity and a human society based on scientific principles.

Lima moved against the flow of wheeled carts on the main floor, turning through a double doorway into the redoubt’s amphitheater. Below him and the curving rows of empty seats, on the proscenium stage two men and a woman in orange coveralls sat at a long table, attended to by scurrying staff, likewise clad in orange. The theater was the nerve center of redoubt, once the locus of scientific debate and decision making. Priorities had changed. It had been renamed the War Room twenty years ago.

The entire back wall of the stage was covered by an enormous, electronic Mercator projection map of Earth with infrared overlays from the satellite they had launched a decade ago. The missile and its satellite had been part of the research station’s infrastructure, defended from the nukeday e-mag pulse by deep burial in the glacier and massive concrete shielding. Reprogrammed from its original function, the satellite now tracked prevailing wind patterns and identified and monitored the planet’s most dangerous radiation zones and surviving population hubs. It also provided GPS and a vital communication link between forces in the field.

General Charlie India, his bald pate gleaming in the shifting, multicolored lights of the map display, looked up from the folders spread out before him, and locked eyes with Lima as he mounted the steps to the stage. The general’s orange coveralls accentuated his ice-tan: pale forehead, ears, cheeks and lower face where they had been shielded by a coldsuit’s tight-fitting hood; skin reddish and windburned looking around exposed eyes, nose, mouth and brows.

General India and the two other orange suits at the table, Commander Mike Romeo and Commander Quebec Sierra, were the military officers in charge of staging the evacuation of Polestar Omega and the invasion of the closest continental landmass to the redoubt, nearly three thousand miles distant at Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.

“I hope to hell you’re not here to tell us the icequake has stopped progress on viral deployment,” India said. “We’re tired of your excuses and delays. They will no longer be tolerated.”

“No damage was reported, sir. None at all, sir.”

Lima deeply resented the implication that the units under his command were somehow dragging their feet, or worse—scientifically incompetent or methodologically overmatched. His was by far the most technically demanding element in the plan for conquest. Yet he knew explaining that to military leaders was an exercise in futility, as was expecting them to fully fathom the tragedy of what they were being forced to leave behind. Though the facility’s original staff had all been scientists—university-trained PhDs in biochemistry, genetics, physics, mathematics, cybernetics and space science—and were focused on a single challenge with ramifications for all of humankind, a century of fighting for survival had forced a branching of personality types, intellectual and physical capacities, and job specialization, which in turn had led to the current, highly stratified society and a color-coded division of labor with hot orange at the apex.

“Have you extracted what you need from the new test subjects you acquired?” Commander Sierra asked.

Though she filled out her tailored coveralls admirably, front and rear, her hatchet face, hard, dark eyes and discolored teeth were not material for sexual fantasies—even in Antarctica.

“The process is well underway,” Lima assured her. Cracking the code to switch on a universal mutie death gene remained the key missing piece of the puzzle—he didn’t feel compelled to clarify that tiny detail. The bioengineering section had already crafted the viral transfer mechanism. All they needed was the magic bullet.

“Can you give us an updated delivery date?” Commander Romeo said. He was the youngest of the three, his face prematurely weather-seamed, his hair flecked with gray above the ears.

“I should have a result in the next twenty-four hours,” Lima said with as much confidence as he could fake. Before they abandoned the redoubt, it was vital that the infectious lethal agent be in full-scale production and ready for deployment when they made landfall. Leaving the redoubt before the magic-bullet genetic research was complete would mean constructing new isolation chambers and DNA labs in South America. The trio of military leaders had steadfastly refused to devote limited resources to that kind of duplication of effort.

They needed the kill switch, and they needed it quickly.

The expressed goal was to be sitting at the southern border of Deathlands in five years, and to have consolidated all the territorial gains in between. It was a tall order no matter the size of the army, no matter how determined or well equipped they were. That’s where the viral cleansing came in. They planned to move their main force up the remnants of north-south, predark highway corridors, spreading the death gene with hovertrucks and aerial sprayers as they advanced. They didn’t have to deploy it very far past the roadbeds; the virus and its lethal switch would move from mutie to mutie, jumping species and geographical boundaries, destroying the genetically compromised.

Although Lima deemed this was not the time to raise the subject, there were still a lot of unknowns. What was the effective range of transmission? Could it spread as predicted from plants to animals and vice versa? Could it really span a continent? Would the death gene remain functional after the virus had traveled through a series of very different hosts, or would the infectious agent mutate as it was passed until the desired effect fizzled out? Did some mutie species already have immunity to the viral tool, or could they quickly acquire it through natural selection? These questions had no answers at present, and finding the answers was unlikely given the time constraints. The viral technology would no doubt undergo revision and further refinement after the weapon was released and its effects on the mutie population quantified. Small mobile labs under Lima’s direction could reengineer and test revised viral delivery systems on the go; the peptide kill switch would theoretically remain the same.

Lima looked up at the huge map and the pinpoints of red that indicated population areas. Deathlands, the former United States, had been long believed to be the source of all mutation in North and South America. It was the last on their list of immediate conquests. And not simply because it was the most distant, land-accessible target.

Based on satellite intel and statistical analysis, it had more muties per square mile than any place on the planet.

The military’s research, drawn from scouting expeditions at the tip of South America, had revealed the sad state of the human populace there, victimized by brigands and self-proclaimed barons, preyed upon by savage monsters straight from nightmares. It had also revealed just how deeply “norms” hated mutie life-forms. Those without phenotypically expressed abnormalities routinely hunted down and slaughtered all creatures displaying obvious mutant characteristics.

Taking a page from the armies of ancient Rome, the redoubt’s military expected to attract an ever-growing army of volunteers along the route north, true norms eager to spill mutie blood and share in the division of spoils and future bounty. The anticipated conquest would eventually be global, and would survive much, much longer than its historical counterpart—perhaps tens of thousands of years. With the elimination of mutie competition for space and resources, and the elimination of the threat of mutie attack, the 2,764 adults and 845 children of Polestar Omega could live and breed in peace, exploit the planet’s resources with an eye to sustainability, and create a paradise for themselves and their offspring.

That had always been the bold promise of science. To understand the world in order to reshape it more perfectly for human benefit.

Or the benefit of particular humans.

“The commander didn’t ask you about a ‘result,’” India said.

The sharp remark took Dr. Lima by surprise; he thought he had already neatly circumvented the issue.

“She asked you when you would have weaponized product in dispersal canisters sufficient for the invasion to begin.”

Lima opened his mouth to respond, his mind reeling as he tried to think of an answer that might be acceptable, but before he could speak, India continued.

“If you need more laboratory technicians to get the job done, pull them off the scavenging detail you have been unwilling to terminate despite direct orders for you to do so. As you have been made well aware, under present circumstances that mission is no longer a priority and needs to be shut down immediately.”

“But, sir, there is so much still...”

General India held up his hand for silence. “I promise you we are going to evacuate this redoubt as planned and on schedule, well before it implodes on us,” he said. “Delaying the evacuation is not an option. A postponement on our part does not guarantee you will be able to produce the desired result in time—it does increase the risk that none of us will escape from here.”

India paused, glaring at him. Lima knew the other shoe was about to fall.

“If you do not succeed in completing the task you have been assigned,” the general said, “if we do not have the bioweapon we have been counting on, we are going to evacuate this redoubt without it and take our chances on the new continent with military force and the conventional weapons in our arsenal. It has already been decided that if you fail us, Dr. Lima, you will be left behind. You and your precious Ark can share the same grave.”

Chapter Five

After the door closed behind Ryan, Krysty sagged back, leaning against the wall and the steel ring she was chained to. With her lover—and the companions’ leader—gone, the dire nature of their situation was brought into even sharper focus. They had no idea where Ryan, Doc or Mildred had been taken, or even if Doc and Mildred were still alive.

No one said anything for the longest time. Perhaps because words could not describe what each was feeling.

When Krysty glanced over at J.B., she could see that he was breathing hard, and Jak’s eyes burned like red-hot coals against the dead white of his albino skin. The two companions looked as if they were about to explode in helpless fury.

Finally Ricky broke the silence. “What do we do now?”

“Wait for the bastards to pick us off,” J.B. snapped. “Let them lead us out of here one by one like lambs to the slaughter.”

Krysty tested her range of movement from side to side. It wasn’t ideal, but it could have been a lot worse—her ankles could have been bound together. She knew what she had to say to the others, what they needed to hear, what she thought Ryan would have said had to them had she been the one taken for treatment first.

“We’re not waiting for anything,” she told them, though she knew that J.B. had reacted to Ricky’s question with sarcasm. “We’ve got to make our move now, before they weaken us any more. We’ve got to create our own opportunity while we still have the chance. When they come again and unchain one of us, we go for them.”

“Yeah, we’ll go for broke,” J.B. said.

“When they came to take Ryan, there were only two of the bruisers in black,” Krysty said. “Two against four. If the whitecoat shows up again, he isn’t going to be much of an obstacle. We just have to keep him from sounding an alarm. Whoever they release from the wall next has to maneuver both of the men in black within reach of the rest of us, whatever that takes. Our legs are free to kick and to strangle with. We can bite and tear. This is to the death.”

They all loosened their muscles as best they could given their restraints, jumping up and down in place to get warm, practicing forward snap kicks. After a few minutes they were as ready for the battle as they were ever going to be.

But nothing happened. The door didn’t open.

Time dragged on and on, and the longer it dragged, the harder it became to maintain the necessary fighting edge. Krysty felt it slipping from her grasp.

She strained her ears, trying to pick up approaching footsteps in the hall. What she heard instead was a rocking boom, like a couple of pounds of C-4 had been touched off close by; the explosion was immediately followed by a violent jolt that staggered her and nearly dropped her to her knees. The boom faded, but the jolt replayed over and over again in a roaring, jarring tape loop. As the room shook back and forth, every surface flexing, a crack appeared in the center of the floor and snaked toward them.

The crack climbed up the wall behind them, yawning wider and wider, and a rush of frigid air rolled through the room.

Krysty gripped the metal ring behind her with both hands. She could feel the ring’s anchor bolt vibrating in the wall, grinding the surrounding concrete to powder and loosening its hold on the metal shaft. From the awkward arm position she attacked the ring, twisting it as hard as she could, trying to wrench it free, but the anchor was too long and too deeply embedded.

The shaking seemed like it was never going to end; everything became a blur of frantic motion. When it stopped after a very long minute or so, Krysty and her companions were dusted head to foot with gray powder and left gasping for air in a room that looked like it was filled with gun smoke. The pulverized concrete in the back of her throat scratched like ground glass.

She was still coughing and spitting when not two, but four men in black entered with the silver-haired whitecoat and a female whitecoat in tow. They carried locking collars on six-foot-long metal poles, and they knew how to use them.

Krysty tried to defend herself with a front kick, but it came up well short. The loop dropped over her head, and she found herself snared by the neck. When she tried to lash out another kick, the man with the pole pulled down, tipping her off-balance and controlling her with ease. The more she struggled the tighter he squeezed the noose around her throat. She stopped struggling so she could breathe; it was either that or pass out. J.B., Jak and Ricky were all in the same predicament—snared like rabbits and rendered helpless. Dr. Lima stepped in behind Krysty and disconnected her cuffs from the wall ring. He did the same for the others.

“This way, bring them along,” he told the black suits as he stepped through the doorway and exited the room.

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