The biplane sailed across the sky

It circled about, the buzz of its engine coming and going on the warm breeze, as it zipped in for another bombing run.

Leaning out the window, Krysty fired a single round from the M-16 at the sky. Yanking the steering wheel back and forth, Ryan sent the Hummer zigzagging down the riverbed. After a few moments, he hit the gas and raced straight for a while, before braking hard and swinging randomly left and right again. Speed was their only armor.

Suddenly, Jak roared past the Hummer on the motorcycle, then swung past in front of the wag.

Running was something Ryan hated to do, but dying was a lot worse.

Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

Latitude Zero

Seedling

Dark Carnival

Chill Factor

Moon Fate

Fury’s Pilgrims

Shockscape

Deep Empire

Cold Asylum

Twilight Children

Rider, Reaper

Road Wars

Trader Redux

Genesis Echo

Shadowfall

Ground Zero

Emerald Fire

Bloodlines

Crossways

Keepers of the Sun

Circle Thrice

Eclipse at Noon

Stoneface

Bitter Fruit

Skydark

Demons of Eden

The Mars Arena

Watersleep

Nightmare Passage

Freedom Lost

Way of the Wolf

Dark Emblem

Crucible of Time

Starfall

Encounter: Collector’s Edition

Gemini Rising

Gaia’s Demise

Dark Reckoning

Shadow World

Pandora’s Redoubt

Rat King

Zero City

Savage Armada

Judas Strike

Shadow Fortress

Sunchild

Breakthrough

Salvation Road

Amazon Gate

Destiny’s Truth

Skydark Spawn

Damnation Road Show

Devil Riders

Bloodfire

Hellbenders

Separation

Death Hunt

Shaking Earth

Black Harvest

Vengeance Trail

Ritual Chill

Atlantis Reprise

Labyrinth

Strontium Swamp

Shatter Zone

Perdition Valley

Cannibal Moon

Sky Raider

James Axler

For Melissa, as always

Fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things

underground, and much more in the skies.

—Miguel de Cervantes,

Don Quixote de la Mancha (1.3.6)

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue

Chapter One

A hot, listless wind blew across the expanse of dried earth to form little dust devils that swirled around the group of armed men. An old weathered oak tree stood nearby, its gnarled trunk strong in spite of the constant flash floods that swept the river valley. The bare branches offered the men little shade from the scorching sun, and high overhead a pair of eagles soared on the thermals, calling their defiance to the storm clouds darkening the distant horizon.

Tied to the tree with a length of dirty rope, an old mule snorted in annoyance and shuffled its hooves on the hard ground. The animal was heavily laden with bulging canvas sacks and leather water bags. Nearby, old wooden planks had been laid across two big rocks to form a crude table.

“Look, ya wanna trade or not?” Digger snarled, leaning forward to rest his palms on the table.

Sitting behind the table, Baron Jeffers said nothing in reply. But the two sec men flanking the baron instantly worked the bolt on their longblasters, ready to start firing at the slightest hint of trouble. If Digger noticed them, he gave no sign.

The three men from Indera ville were dressed in rough clothing, the usual mix of predark cloth and home-cured leather. The baron also wore a fancy jacket with a military design, and had a big-bore longblaster slung across his back.

Only fifty or so yards away a gigantic mesa rose straight from the ground and dominated the valley in every direction. Its sheer rock sides were impossible to climb, but at some point in the past, a big section of the mesa had collapsed to create a large hollow with a rock overhang. Indera ville had been built directly below the overhang. A tall semicircular wall sealed off the ville from the hostile desert, along with the brutal men and muties that prowled the shores of the desert river. The rock overhang gave the population precious shade from the hot sun, and vital protection from the deadly acid rains that swept across the landscape every spring.

Crossing his arms, Baron Jeffers studied the skinny trader standing across the crude table. Indera ville was at the crossroads of a pass through the Diana Mountain and the sluggish Ohi River, so they had a lot of outlanders passing through. Which is why they had established the dealing tree.

Some of the newcomers wanted to stay in the ville. That was forbidden, even if the person owned a working blaster or was a healthy young woman. The ville was full and had plenty of homie weps, mostly crossbows and such, but more than enough to defend the ville. Most outlanders just wanted to get past the walls to see what they could jack, or to recce the ville for a raid. If they did and were caught, they were crucified, nailed to the dealing tree so that others would know better.

Jeffers scowled. And then there were a scant handful who came to trade, bits of predark metal for a bowl of soup, seeds from a nonmutie apple tree, and once, a whole box of predark meds! Of course, that had been many winters ago, when the Trader had stopped by in his armored war wags selling tech and books, and giving away hope for free. His deals were honest, his blasters always primed. The Trader didn’t steal, and killed faster than summer lighting if somebody else even tried. Nobody crossed the Trader and lived.

Baron Jeffers sighed at the memory. But the Trader was long gone, vanished into the glowing mists of the western desert, and now there were only men like this Digger, usually on foot, occasionally on horseback, and sometimes riding in wooden carts pulled by chained slaves. Their deals were rarely fair, and they always stole whenever possible. Still, the ville needed whatever it could find in the way of tools. Life was hard.

“Okay, show me what ya got,” Jeffers growled, sitting back in his chair, making it creak slightly. As he adjusted his position, the dark green canvas coat swept back to expose the brace of pistols jutting from his lizardskin belt.

The sec men standing on either side of the baron scowled menacingly, but their blasters packed only air. However, the razor-sharp bayonets attached to the end of each rifle barrel were real enough, and sharp enough to end the life of anything that made a move toward the baron. The real danger came from the sec men standing on the ville, wall-armed with crude crossbows, the powerful hand-built weps more than capable of putting a barbed arrow completely through the chest of an invader standing near the wizened tree. The plant thrived on the blood spilled there.

“What, right here?” Digger asked, squinting his eyes at the guards along the wall. He licked dry lips. “I was kinda hoping we could talk biz inside. Out of the sun, ya know.” He gestured vaguely. “A little shine, a couple of sluts…

“Not going to happen,” Jeffers said, scratching at his belly, his hand closer to the checkered grip of his pistols. Unlike the rifles, his deadly blasters weren’t just there for display. The brass was old, but the black powder was fresh and the split-lead bullets could blow a man in two. Weps were at a premium in the ville. Always had been. The armory had less than a hundred rounds of live bullets, and those were being saved for a dire emergency.

Digger smiled innocently. “Hey, there, I was only—”

“Nobody goes in but ville folk and sec men,” the baron stated gruffly, placing both of his dusty boots on the ground as if about to stand. “And you ain’t either of those, outlander.”

“Okay, okay,” Digger said hastily, raising both hands, the fingers splayed to show he held no weapon. “No corpse, no crime, right? Let’s talk.”

Grudgingly, the baron took his seat once more, and Digger exhaled in relief. Outlander, damn. Well, at least the baron hadn’t called him a coldheart thief. That was something, at least.

Digger headed to his mule. On the ville walls, crossbows followed the trader as he flipped back the top of the lizardskin pouch and pulled out a wide rusty can. Returning to the barter table, Digger placed it in front of the baron and carefully removed the clear plastic top. The baron tried to hide his excitement, but his eyes shone. He could read just enough to know that military label on the predark can said coffee. Had the outlander found a food store buried under the mud somewhere and recovered a stash? Coffee was more valuable than predark liquor. Shine could be made these days, but no matter how carefully they were planted, coffee beans never grew.

Reaching inside the can, Digger pulled out a wad of greasy cloth and laid it on the table. The contents of the bundle gave a metallic click as he folded aside the cloth to reveal a dozen shining rounds of ammunition.

His gut surged with adrenaline at the sight, but Baron Jeffers locked his face into neutral, trying not to show his amazement. Black dust. Each of the brass was spotless, and the lead bullet was jacketed with copper in the old way that no wep-man could duplicate these days. Even more, they were long cartridges, designed for rifles, not pistols. Rifle cartridges! The sec men standing behind the baron shuffled their patched boots in the dusty soil at the incredible sight.

Reaching out, Jeffers lifted one of the rifle cartridges and weighed it in his hand. The brass felt as good as a woman’s breast, delicious and heavy in his palm.

“So, mebbe we can go inside now, Baron?” Digger said in soft tones, lifting one of the perfect cartridges and turning it to catch the harsh sunlight.

In spite of his intense longing for live ammo, Jeffers felt suddenly suspicious at the remark. Now why did the fellow want inside so bad? The sun wasn’t that hot, there was no chance of acid rain this late in the year, and a clay jug of water sat on the table. So why so keen about getting inside the ville? Only usual reasons were to jack supplies or recon the defenses. That kind of info would bring a big price from the enemies of Indera.

“Of course,” Jeffers said with a smile, feeling his shoulders tense. “But your mule has to stay out here.”

Digger turned to glance at the old animal tugging at a tuft of dried weeds sticking out of the ground. “Sure thing.” He laughed, turning back. “No prob—” The trader stopped smiling at the sight of the baron holding both of his pistols level and pointing forward.

“H-hey n-now,” Digger started as the baron thumbed back both hammers on the big wheelguns.

“Shut up, feeb,” the baron snarled. “Cory, Abraham, get his blaster, and watch for tricks! There’s something wrong here.”

As the two sec men started around the baron, Digger hawked and spit on the table.

“So you’re going to jack me, eh?” Digger snarled hatefully. “This ain’t the rep of your ville!”

“You’ll be paid in full,” Jeffers said, holstering his handblasters, then sliding the rifle off his back. “If these are any good.”

“Whatcha mean?” Digger shouted as one of the sec men grabbed his arm. He tried to shake the guard off but failed. “Just look at ’em! That brass be perfect!”

“If he moves again,” Jeffers said, opening the breech of his empty rifle, “chill him.”

“Yes, sir,” one of the sec man answered, shoving the point of his bayonet against the trader’s neck.

Digger went pale at the touch of steel, and made no further comment as a single drop of ruby-red blood welled with the point of contact. Slowly, the blood began to trickle down the man’s neck, going into his tattered shirt.

“Ya gonna waste a brass just to make sure it’s okay?” Digger said hoarsely. “That’s crazy!”

“Better here than with a howler charging at you,” Jeffers replied, sliding the round into his rifle. “We’ll pay for this brass, too, trader,” he added gruffly, working the bolt, closing the breech. “If it’s any damn good, that is.”

“Hey!” Digger cried, reaching for the ammo.

The two sec men nudged him hard and Digger went still, lowering his head as if braced for a blow.

Clicking off the safety, Jeffers leveled the rifle at Digger. The outlander opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. Jeffers held the aim for a moment, then shifted the barrel toward the tree and pulled the trigger. There sounded a hard click and nothing else.

“Son of a bitch!” a sec man snarled, and slammed the wooden stock of his rifle into Digger’s side. Ribs audibly cracked from the impact, and Digger slid to the ground, shaking all over.

“Nuking hell…” Digger gasped, starting to tremble. “Why’d ya do th-that? There’s nothing wrong…with the brass…something busted…your rifle…”

“Oh, yeah? Let’s see.” Placing the rifle on the table, the baron worked the bolt to eject the cartridge, then yanked an eating knife from his belt. Carefully running the edge of the blade around the bullet, the baron separated lead from brass and emptied the cartridge onto the table. The wind blew the contents around as dry white sand poured from the brass.

“Dums!” Jeffers snarled, slapping the garbage aside. “Trying to buy his way past the gate with dums!” The baron strode around the table, pulling out one of his handblasters.

“Who ya working for?” he barked at the crouching trader. “Outies? Pirates? Thunder ville? Talk, feeb, and make it good, or you’ll see the inside of my ville nailed to the front of the nuking gate!”

“Please, I didn’t know!” Digger wept, trying to cover his face. “Please! I only…” A double explosion cut off his words and the two sec man screamed in pain as their knees were blown apart, bone and blood spraying onto the ground.

Snarling a curse, Jeffers fired his wheelguns just as the trader came up with two tiny blasters in his hands, the little weps almost completely hidden by his dirty fingers.

Derringers! The old word flashed through Jeffers’ mind as he dived to the side, firing once more at the traitorous coldheart. One of his pistols jammed, but the other roared, blowing smoke and flame. Hitting the mud, Jeffers rolled to the side and came up with only a smoking hole in his jacket. The baron went to fire the second blaster again, but there was only a soft chug and a puff of gray smoke. Misfire!

Laughing in contempt, Digger aimed the two blasters at the snarling baron when white-hot pain lanced into his back and the barbed tip of a crossbow bolt thrust out of his chest. Dropping both of the little blasters, he clutched his chest, blood dribbling through his dirty fingers.

“Ch-chill me, and your ville dies,” the trader rasped, pink saliva drooling down his chin.

Pulling a knife, Jeffers started forward when another feathered bolt stabbed into Digger’s hip before a third went completely through his belly, pulling a ropy length of intestine out the other side.

Spasming from the pain, the trader gurgled horribly and slid to the mud, still whispering a warning.

Kneeling on the ground, Jeffers slashed his blade across the men’s throat, then stood and waved at the archers on the ville wall. One of them waved back in acknowledgment, and made a gesture of coming out. But Jeffers waved that off. There was something wrong here, and he didn’t want those ville gates open until he knew for sure that it was safe. The hairs were standing up on the back of his neck, exactly the same way they did when muties attacked in the night.

Striding to the fallen sec men, the baron saw that they were both chilled, and he closed their eyes with his fingertips. Damn it, they had both been good men, his brothers in battle killed by a jacking coldheart. A boiling rage built inside the baron, but he forced it down. Getting angry wouldn’t bring them back. More’s the pity.

Kneeling near the body of the trader, the baron retrieved the derringers and searched his clothing to find more ammo that fit the little palmblasters. He reloaded them both and tucked the blasters into his pockets. Now why hadn’t the damn feeb tried to sell him these? Nervously pulling out a handblaster, the baron purged the spent chambers and started the laborious reloading process while he studied the landscape. Nothing was in sight but flat ground all the way to the Ohi River, and only the soft whispering breeze of the Indera desert…

The man went stiff. The eagles! Looking skyward, the baron gasped at the sight of the clear sky. Not a bird in sight around their nest. The eagles were gone.

“Oh, fuck, no,” Jeffers muttered, scanning the rest of the blue sky. Not again!

Suddenly a whistling sound cut the air and Jeffers spun just in time to see something plummet out of the thin air and hit the ground halfway between him and the ville. The blast seemed to rock the world, and Jeffers went flying backward. He hit the ground with a sickening crack and felt fire erupt inside his chest as a rib snapped. Nuking shit!

He lost consciousness for a moment from the pain, but came abruptly awake as a second blast sounded. It was farther way, and sounded odd. Higher somehow, as if the explosion happened in the air.

Cold adrenaline forced the man to his feet, and he weakly pulled out both derringers and fired at the sky as yet another detonation occurred directly on the overhang of rock above Indera ville. There was a moving dot in the sky, but if the weps hit anything, it was impossible to tell at this range.

Dropping the spent palmblasters, Jeffers started hobbling for the ville as a double explosion rent air, closely followed by a crackling noise. In growing horror, the baron watched as the rocky overhang started to splinter along its base.

“Get out!” Jeffers screamed at the top of his lungs, waving both arms. “Get out of the ville, you fools!”

The sec men on the wall began to ring the alarm bell, just as sunlight moved across the ground to touch the ville. People started to scream as the overhang sagged lower and lower from the side of the mesa, and then came free.

With his heart pounding, Jeffers insanely staggered toward the doomed ville and saw the colossal slab of granite impact.

The walls crumbled like sand, the alarm bell went instantly silent, and the frightened screaming abruptly stopped. Having trouble breathing, the baron kept walking as he watched a billowing cloud of dust rise around the edges of the rock slab covering his home. Chilled. They were all chilled. It was impossible! Unthinkable! Indera ville had been destroyed by its main source of protection.

Slowing to a halt, Baron Jeffers cradled his aching chest, and now felt a trickle running down his left leg. He glanced down to see a spreading red stain. Blood. Digger had to have shot him. He touched the wound, inhaled at the rush of pain. But that was a good sign. A major wound would have gone numb. Pain meant it was minor damage. There was hardly any bleeding. He could have it stitched by the ville healer….

Raising his head, the man looked with uncomprehending eyes on the crushed debris of the ville. There was no more healer, or sec men, or anything. He was the baron of a graveyard. An outlander standing alone and wounded in the open.

Just then, a soft buzzing noise came from above, and Jeffers squinted into the sun to see a small black shape moving through the sky in a lazy circle around the broken mesa.

“Tregart,” he muttered, raising a bloody fist to shake at the sky. “Damn you to hell!”

As if in response, the black shape swung away from the mesa and started directly toward the man. The dried mud in front of him kicking up dirty plumes as there came the faint sound of a rapid-fire blaster coming closer and closer.

Chapter Two

As the swirling mist in the mat-trans chamber faded, the six people standing inside the unit lay limply on the floor, gasping for breath.

After a few minutes Ryan Cawdor brushed the curly black hair out of his scarred face and tried to focus his good eye on the chamber. Every mat-trans chamber was identical, and this one was no different. At the far end was a closed vanadium-steel door, with a lever. The portal had to be closed and locked before the mat-trans would operate, which was some sort of an ancient safety feature.

Only the colors of each chamber’s armaglass walls changed, each location decorated in a different color for ease of identification. Unfortunately, those color codes were unknown, as were the commands that would let the companions control a jump between one underground redoubt and another. Each journey via a mat-trans unit was a random leap into the unknown.

“Everybody okay?” Ryan asked, slowly forcing himself to stand.

“No permanent harm, lover,” Krysty Wroth said, brushing the red hair from her face. Her green eyes flashed as they moved around the chamber, her wild mane of animated hair flexing unhappily from the aftereffects of the jump. The walls were orange with black stripes. That pattern was unknown to her. The companions had never been to this redoubt before, which was both good and bad.

Standing without effort, Krysty straightened her clothing, redoing a few of the buttons on her white shirt. It was a touch too small for her full breasts, but it was all that had been available at the last redoubt. The military-issue bra was a tad snug but with any luck, she might find something more serviceable in this redoubt.

Sweeping back her heavy bearskin coat, Krysty checked the knife in her left cowboy boot, then pulled the Smith & Wesson .38 revolver from the gunbelt around her trim waist. Far too many times the companions had arrived at a redoubt only to find they weren’t the only ones there.

Busy checking his own weapons, Ryan merely grunted at the beautiful woman.

“Dark night, it’s cold in here,” J.B. Dix said, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses. The small man exhaled slowly, and his breath fogged slightly. “Must be thirty degrees, mebbe less.”

Still lying on the plastic floor, the man with the silvery hair used an arm to lever himself up to look wearily around at them. Tall and thin, he appeared to be sixty years old, or even more, but his bright eyes sparkled with intelligence.

“Indeed, you are quite correct, John Barrymore,” Doc Tanner intoned in his deep stentorian voice. “Something must be wrong with the life support system.”

“I hope not,” Krysty stated, holstering her blaster. “That’s all there is between us and suffocating to death.”

“Quite so, madam,” Doc whispered hoarsely. “Quite so.” The jumps through the mat-trans units always hit Doc and Jak Lauren the hardest. For Doc, it was probably because of the horrible experiments performed by Operation Chronos.

Fumbling to locate his ebony swordstick on the floor, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner wrapped both hands around the silver lion’s-head crest and levered himself erect. Dressed as if he were from the nineteenth century, the scholar wore a gentleman’s frilled shirt and a long frock coat that had seen better days. But there was also a huge LeMat .44 pistol at his side, the grip of the massive double-barrel revolver worn from constant use.

“You okay, Jak?” Mildred Wyeth asked, swinging her med kit around to her front for easy access. Short and stocky, the black woman had once been a twentieth-century physician. During a relatively simple operation, something had gone wrong, and Mildred had been cryogenically frozen, only to be revived a hundred years later by Ryan and the companions. She had been traveling with them ever since.

In the savage wastelands of the early twenty-second century, her skills as a trained physician were beyond price, even though Mildred had virtually no instruments or medicine. The med kit hanging over her shoulder was merely a patched canvas bag salvaged from a U.S. Army M*A*S*H unit. The bag was filled with strips of boiled cloth to be used as bandages, a small plastic bottle of homemade liquor called “shine” for disinfectant, a pack of razor blades found in a bombed-out supermarket for her scalpels, and similar crude items. She sometimes felt like a photographer without a camera. Dr. Mildred Wyeth had the skill to save lives, but the tools of her craft were only items of legend in these dark days.

“F-feel fine.” Jak Lauren spit, using the back of a hand to wipe the drool from his mouth.

Turning away from the wall where he had just been sick, Jak stood carefully, as if afraid his thin body might break from the effort. He was trying to keep it hidden from the others, but their travels through the mat-trans had been hitting the teenager hard lately, and it was taking longer and longer for him to get back on his feet after each jump. It was a strange condition for the albino teen, because he was normally as strong as a horse.

As he checked over his .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver, Jak privately wondered if maybe the effects of the hundreds of jumps they had made were wearing him down. That would be bad news if true. The mat-trans units in the redoubts were the only safe way to traverse the burning deserts and rad-blasted hellzones of the Deathlands. It would be a triple-damn shame if he had to abandon using that method of transportation. Worse—he’d have to quit traveling with his companions.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc roared, pulling at the lion head of his cane to extract a shining steel rapier from the ebony shaft. “Dean! Where is Dean!”

The rest of the companions paused at that, and exchanged sad glances.

“Sharona took him. He’s no longer with us,” Ryan said quietly. “Remember, Doc?”

The time traveler arched both eyebrows in indignation, then slowly his features softened as he recalled the events of the past.

“Ah, yes, my condolences, my dear Ryan,” Doc muttered in embarrassment, sheathing the blade once more and locking it tight with a twist of the handle. “I had forgotten. The jump, you know….”

“Hey, anybody see my hat?” J.B. asked, running stiff fingers through his sparse hair.

Ryan kicked the battered fedora across the chilly floor and J.B. scooped it up and tucked it back in place in a single move.

“I could use one of those myself,” Mildred said, buttoning the collar of her denim shirt. “Damn, it really is cold in here.”

“Mebbe everybody died leaving the air conditioner on,” Ryan said in a touch of rare humor as he went to the wall and placed a hand on the vent.

“No, it’s working,” he reported, thoughtfully straightening the patch covering the ruin of his left eye. “And it’s warm, too.”

“Warm?” Jak said, frowning as he tucked away the Colt Python. “Colder than doomie’s tit in here.” Shivering slightly, the teenager zipped up the front of his jacket. The garment was covered with bits of metal and mirrors, as well as razor blades. Razor blades also lined the collar. If anybody was foolish enough to try to grab the teen around the throat, the person might lose a few fingers.

His combat instincts instantly alert, Ryan pulled out his SiG-Sauer and racked the slide to chamber a round.

“J.B., check the door,” he ordered brusquely. “Everybody else, back into the mat-trans unit!”

Quickly the others did as ordered.

Gingerly touching the door, J.B. hissed with shock and pulled his hand back to suck on his fingertips.

“Dark night! The bastard thing is freezing!” he mumbled around the fingers.

Rotating the cylinder of her Czech ZKR .38 revolver as a prelude to possible battle, Mildred snapped her head around at that comment. “Impossible,” she said, starting forward. “The reactors in the basement of a redoubt should keep the base warm even if it was at the North Pole! And the only thing colder than that would be…” Her eyes went wide. “Ryan, check for a draft!”

Frowning darkly, Ryan paused, then holstered his blaster. Walking over to join his friend, he pulled out a candle, and very carefully lit the wick with a predark butane lighter. Manufactured by the millions before skydark destroyed the world, the lighters were now worth more than a man’s life in trade. The only thing more valuable was a loaded blaster. The friends had found several in the past.

As Ryan moved the candle along the frame of the oval doorway, J.B. reached into the munitions bag at his side and unearthed a bit of a candle and a butane lighter from the array of homemade explosives and predark grens.

Slowly, the two men moved the flickering flames along the edge of the jam of the burnished steel door. The flames stayed steady until nearing the concealed hinges of the portal, then both wavered and went out.

“Fireblast, there are holes in the seal,” Ryan said, tucking the spent candle away. “Some sort of draft sucking out all the warm air.”

Doing the same with his candle, J.B. glowered at the door as if it were a ticking mine. “Gotta be one hell of vacuum on the other side,” he said, pushing back his hat. “Think we’re in space again?”

“Mebbe,” Ryan returned. The companions had once found themselves in a “redoubt” that was orbiting the moon. They had been forced to leave almost immediately, but that redoubt had been safe and warm. If this one was in orbit and leaking air, then their wisest move would be to leave.

“Let’s go,” Ryan stated, turning for the mat-trans unit. “No way we’re going to chance opening the door.”

Hunching his shoulders, Jak muttered a curse. Another jump so soon wasn’t something any of them wanted to do.

Going to join the others, Krysty moved past the vent and paused. The breeze was gone. Spinning, she placed a hand on the disguised vent and said a quick prayer to Gaia when she felt warm air, just a lot weaker than before. The life support of the redoubt had to have started working once they arrived, but was now running out of power. Soon, there might not be enough to operate the mat-trans!

“Into the unit!” Krysty commanded, starting to run across the chamber. “Now! We jump right fucking now!”

Not wasting a second, the rest of the companions jammed into the small chamber and as Krysty squeezed in with them, Ryan hit the LD button.

Nothing happened.

Fireblast! he raged silently. They had to have been here too long! The Last Destination option lasted for only thirty minutes! The LD button was no longer active and couldn’t send them back to the Arizona redoubt they had just left.

With no other choice, Ryan hit the jump buttons hoping he’d randomly key a sequence that would take them somewhere. Almost instantly a new chill seeped into their living bones that had nothing to do with the vacuum of space. A swirling white mist rose from the solid floor and ceiling to fill the chamber, then lighting crackled in silent fury and the floor seemed to disappear as they all began falling into the artificial void that stretched from unit to unit across the planet, and beyond…

RISING STIFFLY from his throne, the old baron limped across the dais in front of the blockhouse.

The entire population of the ville filled the courtyard, as Baron Hugh Tregart hobbled down a short flight of stairs and headed for the pyre.

Reaching twice the height of a man, the stack of wood was bound together with strong rope that had been carefully dampened to prevent it from burning through too quickly and disturbing the pyre, and its sole occupant. Wrapped in stiff canvas, the body lay on top of the flammable mound, a few relics from childhood placed alongside the trophies of manhood. The hide of the first griz bear he had ever killed, his gunbelt. Only the precious blaster was missing.

Accepting a crackling torch from a sec man, the baron shuffled closer and blinked away some tears as he touched the pyre as if bestowing a benediction. Soaked with shine, oil, grease and even a few precious ounces of condensed fuel, the wood caught instantly, and the flames made a low roar as they spread over the pyre, meeting on the other side and then rising to the crest to engulf the still body of his son.

A dark plume of roiling smoke soon rose to hide the corpse of Edmund Tregart, and all across the courtyard people began to openly weep or to bow their heads and mutter prayers as the flames began to consume the young man.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Baron Tregart said in a loud, clear voice, tossing the torch onto the growing bonfire. Tears were on his cheeks, but his face was as impassive as stone. Only the whiteness of his hand grasping the walking stick showed his inner emotions.

“It is done,” the baron said, turning to face the crowd of ville folk and sec men. “My son is gone. Now, bring forth the killers!”

There was a commotion at the rear of the crowd, and the people angrily parted to allow a group of grim sec men through with their two prisoners. Wrapped in chains, the captives were wearing only bloody rags, their exposed skin covered with red welts from endless whippings. One man had a badly broken nose, the other had an eye swollen shut and bulging with contained fluids.

The ville folk cursed at the prisoners as they passed, several spit at the men, and a few raised sharp pieces of stone to throw. But the sec men got in the way, and the stones were reluctantly dropped to the dusty yard.

In the background, armed guards walked along the top of the wall around Thunder ville, and while the men desperately wanted to watch the coming execution, they forced themselves to face outward. Funerals, weddings, births, any major event involving the baron was a good time for enemies to attack. The sec men clenched their fists in frustration and kept watch on the desert river outside the ville. The muddy waters of the Ohi helped to keep the ville alive, but the river also brought outlanders from the distant mountains, and those were always trouble.

Returning to his throne, Baron Tregart sat heavily and cast a furtive gaze at the chair alongside. His wife, Hannah, was dying of the black cough, and now this. For a moment the old man thought his heart would break from the weight of his sorrow, then he inhaled slow and sat upright. A baron could never show weakness to his people, his father had always warned. Nor grant favors to an enemy. If he followed those two rules, his ville would prosper.

But it had been a lie. Thunder ville was dying. Food was so scarce that the women couldn’t produce enough milk for their babies, and many of them “accidentally” dropped newborn infants on to stones to save the poor things from the endless days of painful starvation until sweet death finally set them free.

The crops were dying, and the stores of predark cans all gone. Many of his people were eating cactus from the desert, or the little green lizards that came out at night. One lad had even somehow caught a stingwing and eaten it alive. He died soon afterward, but the act itself had been incredible. Stingwings moved faster than arrows. That a starving child caught one alive was seen by many as an omen. The question was whether it was a good omen because he caught the food, or a bad one because he died afterward. Some had tried hunting, but any portable wildlife was too far outside the small ville for the starving, weak hunters to carry back. Even in pieces. And the scavs would have quickly devoured the carcass left behind.

A breeze shifted the smoke from the pyre and the baron flinched slightly from the smell of his burning son. Edmund had been on a scav run in the distance ruins, and miraculously found a cache of predark canned goods. The cans that bulged from internal pressure they didn’t touch, experience teaching them that those were deadly to eat for man, beast and mutie. But there had been many more in good condition, fifty cans of food! Fifty! A bounty beyond imagination.

The cans had all been mixed with clean water, and then boiled for the length of a new candle to kill any rust-formed poisons. When done, the contents would have made enough soup for the whole ville. In this time of famine it was a godsend, his son hailed as a savior by the famished people.

“Then you tried to steal some!” Baron Tregart roared, standing and shaking a fist at the trembling prisoner. “You stole soup and spilled the rest! All of it!”

“Mercy!” a thief cried, raising his bloody hands.

A sec man alongside the prisoner thrust down his longblaster, the wooden stock ramming into the man’s face, the bones audibly cracking. His chains rattling, the criminal fell to his knees, a thin arm thrown across his face as protection. Blood flowed down his cheek and dribbled onto his filthy clothing. The other thief burst into hysterical tears, a mad laughter mixing with the sobs into an unnerving noise.

“Make soup of them!” a thin woman screamed from the crowd. “Cook the fools over the young baron!”

Others in the crowd took up the cry, and Baron Tregart frowned until they raggedly ceased. Had they come to that at last? To eat their own dead to stay alive?

Once more, the baron stared in open hatred at the cringing thieves. He wasn’t a brutal ruler, and might have forgiven them taking the food, but they had clubbed a sec man to do it. The sec man on guard that night was his own son, standing in for a childhood friend who was too weak to be near the food, the smell of the cooking soup making him too dizzy to stand.

All through last night, Edmund had burned with fever, the ville healer doing what she could, but even her herbs and poultices had been consumed during the famine. His daughter had cut her wrist and tried to feed her dying brother some of her own blood to give him strength. But in his delirium, the man refused. By dawn, Edmund was dead.

The child had foretold of this, Baron Tregart remembered bitterly. Food would destroy the ville. He had thought the doomie was talking about poisoned food, but apparently not. Just starvation. The one enemy the sec men couldn’t stop with a million blasters.

“Captain Zane?” the baron said, turning to the side.

Looking up at the throne, Zane Dolbert gave a salute. “Yes, Baron?” he asked in a deep baritone.

“After the funeral, kill Edmund’s dogs,” Baron Tregart said softly.

“Baron?” the sec chief whispered in shock.

“You heard me, Zane,” the baron repeated more forcefully. “Kill the guard dogs. There is no other food.”

“I…” Zane swallowed, and tried again. “Most of my men will refuse.”

“You will not kill them?” the baron began in a low voice, his eyes flashing with the force that had made him baron in the time of chaos.

“No! Of course, not that, my lord,” Zane decried, vehemently shaking his head. “If you order it, Baron, I’ll ace the dogs myself. But my men will not eat them. The dogs are looked upon as fellow sec men. They stood by our sides against muties and coldhearts, and even the machines that came in from the high desert. The animals are buried in the Iron Yard with the sec men who have died in battle.”

“Then let them refuse, and there will be more soup for the ville folk,” Baron Tregart said softly. “But save half of the broth. Your men will eat when they get hungry enough.”

“That won’t be necessary, Father!” a voice called out loudly from the rear of the crowd.

As the people quickly moved aside, a young woman strode forward to stop at the bottom of the stairs leading to the dais. She would have been beautiful, but her cold eyes ruined the effect of her flawless skin and sensuous mouth. A cascade of long blond hair fell to her waist, bound by a rawhide net into a thick ponytail. As she opened her ancient leather jacket, a gunbelt was exposed with a shiny blaster riding at her hip.

The baron blinked at the sight. A blaster? Where had Sandra found a blaster?

“You’re late, Daughter,” he said in stern disapproval. Sandra Tregart looked at the raging bonfire across the courtyard for only a moment, then faced her father once more.

“There was business to do,” she replied curtly, loosening the blue scarf around her neck.

“What kind of business is more important than this?” the baron demanded, gesturing at the crackling pyre.

“See for yourself!” she shouted. Pulling off a glove, she put two fingers into her mouth and shrilly whistled.

Suddenly there was a commotion at the back of the crowd, and people began to gasp, then cheer as a line of men marched into view carrying bundles and baskets.

“I have gotten us twenty dead horses, one mule and fourteen dogs,” Sandra Tregart shouted. “All butchered and ready to be cooked into jerky. Plus, a hundred pounds of flour, fifty pounds of dried vegetables, thirty of rice, twenty loaves of bread, ten cans of fruit, and enough corn seed to plant half our cropland!”

Food! The cry went through the crowd like a shotgun blast, some of the wrinklies falling to their knees and openly weeping in relief. Baron Tregart could only gape at the sight of the baskets being placed at the foot of the dais. Food, endless food, spread in front of him, the salty smell of the fresh meat driving a knife of hunger into his empty belly.

Sandra took a small round of bread from a basket and tossed it to her father. He made the catch and stared at the golden-brown crust cradled in his bony hand as if it were the first bread ever made in the history of the world.

“There are also twenty bottles of shine,” she said brusquely, as if throwing challenge at her father. “I claim all of it for myself, and the Angel. Agreed?”

“Yes, yes, of course, whatever you want!” Baron Tregart panted, waving the trivial matter aside, the other hand still holding the wondrous bread. “Zane! Get ten strong men and gather all of the wood you can find!” the baron ordered. “Build a cooking fire on the other side of the ville. Far away from here.”

Looking at the towering flames of the pyre, the sec chief frowned. “Upwind from here, you mean, Baron,” he corrected.

Slowly placing the round of bread into his lap, Baron Tregart nodded in assent. “Yes, good thinking. Use an entire horse, and twenty pounds of vegetables for soup. Then get five women to start making bread. Use half of the flour, the rest goes into the armory for safekeeping.”

“Have the guards make sure that everybody drinks a bowl of thin broth before getting any meat,” Sandra commanded sharply. “Or else they’ll just vomit it back up. Whip the first person to get sick, and the rest will eat slower. That is all the food there is. We make it last, or we die this winterfall.”

“Yes, my lady,” Zane muttered, the sec chief placing a fist to his heart.

Both the baron and Sandra raised an eyebrow at that. Such a salute was reserved only for the baron and his wife. Sandra held the sec man’s gaze for a long moment, then regally nodded. Turning, Zane started shouting orders, and people rushed to obey. The line of men picked up the baskets from the dais and started marching around the blockhouse. An old woman burst into tears of happiness, and from somewhere a man started to sing a working song.

“So it appears you are finally in charge, dear Daughter,” Baron Tregart said slowly, leaning back in his throne. “Your brother still burns, and he has already been replaced.”

The woman said nothing, her thoughts dark and private.

“Shall I jump onto the funeral pyre next?” the baron asked, lifting the round of bread and shaking it at her. “Or do you wish that pleasure for yourself, Baron?”

“I do not want to rule,” Sandra said slowly. “I never have. You know what I desire.”

“Bah, foolish dreams.” The baron snarled. Unable to restrain himself any longer, the old man chewed off a small piece of the bread. The first swallow was without taste, and the baron had to command himself to stop to let the yawning pit of his belly accept the food before swallowing any more. His gut roiled at the invasion, then finally settled down, and he tried another small piece, and then another.

As his hunger slackened, the baron found he could now taste the bread. By the blood of his fathers, it was delicious! Sweetened with something, honey perhaps, or maybe a pinch of predark sugar. Food fit for a baron’s table, and not the sort of thing that was traded away for a few live rounds of ammunition.

“All this food. There’s too much. It is the wealth of an entire ville,” the baron said, masticating each bite to make the food last. “Jeffers would never give so much for what we had to offer in trade.”

Taking a round of bread from the basket, Sandra pulled out a knife and cut off a slice. “Oh, but he did,” she said with a private smile.

Scowling, the baron lowered his repast. “Did you bed him for this wealth? Did you trade your honor to save the ville?”

“There are blasters, too, Father,” she said, tossing the bread back into the basket. Reaching into a pocket of her leather jacket, Sandra pulled out a wad of gray cloth. Walking up the stairs, she placed it on the arm of the throne with a muffled thud.

Taking one more bite of the bread in his hand, the baron placed it aside and chewed thoughtfully as he folded back the oily cloth to expose a wheelgun. The metal was unblemished, without any sign of rust, and the barrel shone with a blue tint like winter ice. Now, Sandra pulled out a fat leather pouch and laid it next to the blaster. With trembling fingers, the baron pulled open the top and saw it was filled with lead shot and a clear plastic jar of black powder.

“So, you did it,” the baron accused in a hollow voice.

“Yes,” she replied simply.

“So that mule you mentioned, it was Digger’s,” he ventured.

Over by the stone well, a group of laughing sec men tossed a rope over a bare tree branch normally used for hanging outlanders, and hauled the dead mule into the air. Even before its hooves left the ground, a child slid a plastic basin underneath and big woman started skinning the beast with a sharp knife.

Smiling slightly, Sandra shrugged. “He didn’t need it anymore.”

So the trader was aced, eh? he thought.

“Were there any survivors?” the baron asked hopefully. “I know about the power of the Angel, but surely you could not have…I mean, an entire ville?”

She laughed, and he received his answer.

“It was them or us, dear Father.” Sandra chuckled. “There was no other way. One ville died, so another could live.”

“But you took all of their food.”

“All that I could find,” she corrected, clenching her teeth. “Some of it was…inaccessible.”

Slumping in his throne, the old baron tried to come to grips with the idea of jacking the dead. More, Jeffers had been a friend. Long ago, the two villes had fought together in the Mutie Wars. Was that bond of honor to be broken over loaves of bread?

For a time there was only the sound of the funeral pyre and the happy singing of the butcher doing her messy task. As the meat came away from the bones of the animal, children took the huge wet slabs and awkwardly carried them around the blockhouse to the cooking fire. Staying close by the littles, armed sec men guarded the food and carefully stayed between it and the starving crowd who watched the preparations with near madness in their gaunt faces.

Hitching up his loose pants, a burly sec man approached the dais and clumsily saluted, his right hand not quite touching his temple. “Baron?” he asked hesitantly.

Sandra frowned at the man, but the baron turned to look upon the man with patience. Gedore was a new sec man, recruited just before the crops failed. He was strong and obedient, but lacking in any imagination. A grunt, as the baron’s grandfather would have said. Just a blaster with feet.

“Yes, what is it?” Baron Tregart asked.

Gedore gestured to the chained men shivering near the funeral pyre. They kept casting furtive glances at the flames as if expecting to be tossed upon the conflagration at any moment. Plainly written on the faces of the sec men holding the chains of the two prisoners was their opinion that they would have heartily approved of such a command from their chief, or baron.

“What about the thieves?” Gedore asked.

Stroking the round of bread for a moment, Baron Tregart scowled at the two men in open hatred, his face contorting into a feral mask of fury. Releasing the bread, the old baron grabbed the blaster on the table and started loading the chambers.

“Bring them closer,” Baron Tregart whispered hoarsely, both hands busy with powder and shot. “I shall do this myself. Myself!”

“No, Father,” Lady Tregart interrupted, stepping in front of the elderly man.

Snapping up his head, the baron stared at her as his hands continued their work. After fifty years of being a baron, the man could load a weapon in the dark while drunk.

“They killed the son of the baron,” he reminded her, closing the cylinder with a satisfying click. “The punishment is death.”

“And why should we waste precious ammo on scum such as these?” Sandra asked soothingly, then smiled at the chained men. She could see a flicker of hope come into their faces.

“No,” the woman continued. “Don’t shoot them, Father, and there shall be no burning today to mar the funeral of my brother.”

“Thank you, lady!” one of the prisoners cried, dropping to his hands and raising both hands.

“Gedore!” Sandra said loudly, motioning him closer.

The big sec man rested a boot on the dais and leaned inward. She could see the folds of loose flesh around his neck and guessed he had been giving some of his rations away. A lover, perhaps? That would end today.

“Yes, ma’am?” Gedore asked.

“Cripple them, and throw them alive to the dogs,” Sandra said calmly, savoring the panic that grew in their eyes. Fools, did you think to ace a Tregart and live to tell the tale? “I see no reason to waste all of the meat. Today marks the passing of my brother, and the salvation of the ville! Everybody eats their fill!”

Her eyes sparkling with amusement, Sandra grinned at the stunned prisoners. “Even the dogs,” she added softly.

“No!” a prisoner screamed, shaking all over. “Mercy, mistress! Chill us, please! It was an accident! An accident! I swear!”

A guard cuffed the man silent, while the other prisoner slumped his shoulders and began to softly weep, his tears falling unnoticed onto the dusty ground.

“Take them away,” Sandra commanded with a flip of her hand. “Oh…and, Gedore?”

The sec man had already started across the courtyard, so he stopped to look over a shoulder. “Ma’am?” he responded.

“If I find them with cut throats, you will be next. They go into the pens alive.”

Turning slightly pale, Gedore nodded, and started directing the other guards to herd the shuffling along the street toward the dog pen near the front gate. As if sensing the coming meal, the dogs began to howl in eager anticipation.

“Justice must be swift,” the woman recited, “if it is to be fair.”

Looking up from the bread and the blaster in his lap, Baron Tregart tilted his head at the beautiful young woman.

“So you do remember the stories I used to tell you and Edmund at bedtime,” he muttered.

“Yes, I remember,” she said, facing the bonfire. The figure on top of the woodpile was reduced to only bones at this time, and as she watched even those crumbled away and the tongues of red fire lapped at the darkening sky. It was done. Edmund was gone.

“Now, there is only you, Daughter,” Hugh Tregart said softly.

“That was all you ever had, old man,” she whispered with a snarl. “Except that you were too drunk to notice before.”

But the desert wind carried away her dark words and nobody heard.

Chapter Three

Sucking in a lungful of warm air, Ryan struggled awake and looked around the mat-trans chamber. So soon after the first jump, the second one had hit them like a gren. He dimly remembered their arriving, and then nothing.

Shaking his head, the one-eyed man rose onto his hands and knees, shook his head to try to clear his mind. Fireblast! He had to get sharp. Had to make nuking sure they weren’t in the same redoubt again. Repeat jumps were rare, but they had happened before. Brushing back his wild mane of hair, Ryan focused his eye and grunted in relief at the sight of the chamber walls. They were a lime green with horizontal red stripes. It was a redoubt they had never been to before.

As the life support system sent a clean fresh breeze of sterilized air into the unit, painful groans started coming from the rest of the companions.

“Green walls,” Mildred said, fumbling to un-screw the cap off a canteen at her side. “At least we’re someplace new.” Letting the cap drop to the end of the little chain that attached it to the military canteen, the physician took a small drink from the contents. For quite sometime she had been trying to find an antidote to the jump sickness, but so far she had nothing more effective than a mix of coffee and whiskey.

Unfortunately, both of these items were few and far between. The current brew was an herbal tea laced with something called spike, a raw liquor distilled from cactus. The moonshine had a tremendous kick, but there was never a hangover the next day, and it was a wonderful neural inhibitor and painkiller. Mildred had traded a small fortune in .22 bullets for three precious bottles. This was the very last of the Spike.

Hesitantly, everybody took a sip of the brew, making sour faces. Giving back the empty canteen, Ryan started to speak when he saw Krysty staring behind him. Dropping the canteen, he spun in a crouch with his blaster out and ready.

That was when he saw the corpse.

Holstering his piece, Ryan shuffled over to the body leaning against the exit door, one of its desiccated arms parched on the lever that opened the oval portal. The corpse was dressed in a predark military uniform, the patches and medals meaning nothing to the Deathlands warrior. But the flap was open on the holster at its side, and the handblaster was gone.

Scowling, Ryan noticed that the corpse appeared to be blocking the door.

“Bastard died trying to hold the door closed,” Ryan muttered, glancing at the portal with growing unease. He wondered what was on the other side.

Staring at the closed door, Krysty rubbed her temples as if in pain.

Ryan noticed the gesture. “Got something?” he asked tightly.

The redhead paused, then shook her head.

That didn’t reassure the big man much. The woman’s psionic abilities were sometimes blocked.

Kneeling alongside the grinning corpse, Ryan checked the ammo pouch and found only one spare clip where there should have been three.

“Must have been a hell of a fight,” J.B. said, moving closer. The Armorer clicked the safety back on his Uzi machine pistol and let it drop at his side.

“We better take it slow, just in case of a booby,” Ryan warned, rubbing the scar on his cheek. He sure wasn’t ready to do another jump. “If this guy was trying to keep folks out, whatever was on the other side might have had the same idea.”

“Woman, not man,” Jak added, pointing. “Ears pierced.”

Tucking a strand of beaded hair behind an ear to get it out of the way, Mildred hid a smile. “That didn’t mean a thing in the modern American Army, my friend.”

Taking the corpse by the shoulders, Ryan gave a gentle tug and the withered arms broke off with a snap. They slid out of the loose sleeves and stayed attached to the rifle as he carried the body away.

Placing it against the wall, Ryan saw the identification tag on the chest. S. Jongersonsten. Damn name was too long for them to add the first. Mebbe it was a woman. No way to tell now.

Carefully breaking the fingers, Mildred got the ancient arms free and put them with the body.

Going to the door, J.B. pulled out some tools and checked for any traps. The rest of the companions formed a defensive arc behind the man, their weapons ready.

“It’s clean,” J.B. finally announced. He tried to move the lever. The mechanism worked smoothly as if freshly lubricated, the internal bolts disengaging with dull thuds.

“Ryan?” J.B. asked, tugging his fingerless gloves on tighter.

Working the bolt on his Steyr SSG-70 rifle, Ryan said, “Go ahead.”

The Armorer pulled the door aside on silent hinges. He stayed crouched behind the door to give his friends a clear field of fire, ready to throw his weight forward to close it again fast if something tried to come through. But there were no blaster shots, only mutters of surprise.

Swinging his Uzi machine pistol to the front, J.B. clicked off the safety and stepped around the door just as Ryan and Krysty walked through into the antechamber beyond.

Following close behind, Doc, Mildred and Jak blocked his view. But as the companions spread out, J.B. saw the place was full of corpses. Old corpses. Dozens of them. And the floor was covered with the empty brass casings of spent ammunition. Most of the bodies were in pieces, and there was a smudge on the inside of the vanadium steel door suggesting that a gren had been used to try to blow it open, resulting in a spectacular and deadly failure.

“What the fuck went on here?” Ryan growled, sweeping the room with a stern gaze. The body in the jump chamber had been desiccated to the point of mummification, but these looked as if they were only a few years old! The wrinkled skin resembled leather instead of ancient parchment.

Careful of where they stepped, the companions moved through the antechamber and entered the control room. There were more bodies here, all of them showing signs of death by violence. Bullet holes, knives in chests, and one poor bastard bent over the control console with a fire ax buried in his back.

“Check the comp!” J.B. ordered. “If that’s damaged, we’re not going anywhere.”

Holstering her weapon, Mildred went to the control board while Ryan stepped to the master computer. The lights still rippled across its face as always, but he found a line of dents across the front of the machine. Somebody had fired a full clip from a machine gun, but the rounds hadn’t gotten through the thick metal housing of the mil comp.

“The government really built these redoubts to last, that’s for damn sure,” Mildred whispered. “Well, the controls aren’t damaged, aside from a busted monitor.”

“Good show, madam, then we can still egress as desired,” Doc said, checking a corpse slumped in a chair. The colonel had stopped in the middle of reloading a shotgun, but the body seemed to be without damage. Then he spotted the thin line that went from ear to ear. Somebody had slit his throat from behind as he’d thumbed in spare cartridges. Ghastly.

“They killed each other,” Krysty said, walking among the slain soldiers. Every branch of the service was here, Army, Navy, Air Force, and a few that she couldn’t recognize. Delta Force. Who were they?

“And when the ammo ran out,” Ryan muttered, resting the stock of his rifle on a hip, “they kept fighting with whatever was available, handblasters, knives, table legs, bottles…”

Slowly turning in a circle, Jak frowned. “What cause?” he asked. “Mutiny?”

“Not on a U.S. base,” Mildred stated as a fact. “No, a war plague seems more likely. Yes, that could be it. I had heard of such things. Rumors only, of course. Biological agents that drove the enemy temporarily insane so that they would slaughter each other, then our troops could march into the territory without opposition.”

“Filthy way to fight a war,” Doc rumbled, easing down the hammer on his massive LeMat revolver. “Although Tennyson would have been darkly amused.”

“This is the way the world ends,” Ryan said softly. “Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

Doc beamed at that. “You remember the poem!” he cried in delight.

“It’s about war,” Ryan countered gruffly. “And you sure as hell have repeated it often enough.” He nudged a corpse with his Army boot. The clothing rustled like old leaves, the dried body rocking from the impact as if weightless. “Mildred, why are the ones in here fresher than the husk in the jump chamber?”

“I have no idea,” the physician said, seemingly annoyed by the mystery. “The life support system keeps the redoubt constantly flushed with sterilized air. These bodies should be withered husks by now.”

Ryan scowled, but said nothing.

Kneeling next to a mutilated corpse with the glass fragments of a busted bottle embedded into his face, Jak eased the dead man’s service revolver from its holster and checked the load. Four spent shells, and one live round.

“Think safe stay?” Jak asked, pocketing the .38-caliber bullet. His Colt Python could use both .38 bullets and .357 Magnum rounds. Never made sense to him for anybody to carry a wep that only used one caliber of ammo.

“Yes, it’s safe,” Mildred said without hesitation. “There are no biological vectors that could survive exposure for a full week, much less a hundred years. But if anybody starts feeling dizzy, stop whatever you’re doing and sing out fast.”

“Fair enough,” J.B. said, pushing open the hallway door with the barrel of the Uzi.

A single corpse slumped against the wall in the corridor, an automatic pistol dangling from his raised hand, the wall on either side and the front of his uniform stitched with bullet holes from an automatic weapon.

“There’s a lot of lead to be salvaged here, if nothing else,” J.B. stated in hard practicality.

Kneeling by the body, Jak tried to free the blaster, but the hand was locked in a death grip. Pressing the ejector button, he dropped the clip and thumbed out the intact shells. There were four 9 mm rounds, but they were the wrong size for his Colt.

“Here,” the albino teenager said, passing J.B. two of the rounds for his Uzi, and giving the others to Ryan for his 9 mm SiG-Sauer. Everybody else used .38 rounds, except for Doc and his black powder Le Mat.

Pocketing the rounds, Ryan looked around for the body of the shooter, but the hallway was empty. There were no other corpses in sight, just the double line of doors leading to the elevator and stairs at the far end. There were no other signs of violence, no blast marks or spent casings on the floor.

Nobody cared about the hallway, Ryan realized. These soldiers fought for access to the mat-trans-mat. But that made no sense. The blast doors on the top level of the redoubt were large enough for a tank to drive through. A hundred men could have walked out that opening. So why fight over something that could only hold a limited number of people? Ryan scowled. Unless something was wrong with the blast doors.

Walking past the water fountain, Ryan found the usual framed map on the wall. Almost every redoubt was exactly the same, so the companions knew the bases intimately. This one seemed normal in every aspect.

“Okay, we better do a recon of the whole base,” Ryan decided, pulling out his SiG-Sauer and jacking the slide to chamber a round. “We go two on two. Krysty with me, Doc with Jak, J.B. with Mildred. Stay tight. You find anything still alive, blow its mutie head off and come running.”

“Why do you think it would be a mutie?” Krysty asked, her animated hair flexing in harmony with her thoughts.

Frowning, Ryan loosened the panga in its sheath. “’Cause nothing norm would have willingly stayed in this graveyard,” he stated. “We meet in the garage on the top level in an hour. Let’s go.”

As the companions separated into pairs, Krysty and Ryan headed down the main corridor toward the elevator. The doors opened with a soft sigh, exposing a tangle of bodies, knives still thrust into throats and bellies. Bypassing the corpses for the moment, the man and woman shifted the dead out of the lift. The dried bodies weighed very little.

Removing a colonel with large wounds in his back, Krysty discovered a naked woman on the bottom of the pile. Her military uniform askew and ripped in places. Both of the female soldier’s hands clutched a pair of automatic pistols with the slides kicked back showing they were empty, and there was spent brass everywhere. The black-rimmed glasses and rictus grin gave the face of the female mummy a demonic appearance that was unnerving even to the hardened travelers of the Deathlands.

Muttering a curse, Ryan looked at the male soldiers he had placed in the hallway, and saw that some of them had their pants unzipped and belt buckles loosened.

“Attempted gang rape.” He growled deep in his throat. Looking at Krysty, the man had a brief flash of when he’d first met the redhead in a burning barn, a coldheart going after her. “What the hell happened to these people? From what I read, the predark military of America didn’t do this kind of thing.”

“Well, for some reason, these were about to,” Krysty said. “At least the woman died fighting and took them with her.”

“Small comfort.”

“Agreed, lover. But better than the alternative.”

“Guess so,” Ryan stated as he took the woman’s ankles and Krysty took the shoulders. “But the sooner we get out of here, the better.”

“No argument there,” Krysty said, her green eyes flashing in ill-controlled hatred.

Gently, they placed the corpse off by herself and got into the waiting elevator. Ryan hit the button for the basement, and the door sighed shut. The elevator car began to silently descend into the bowels of the subterranean fortress.

In the hallway, something stirred in a shadowy corner and sluggishly started shifting the corpses until there was a clear path to the elevator once more.

Chapter Four

Heading for the front gate, Sandra Tregart strode along the streets of the ville. Now that the food had been delivered, she had more important things to do. Much more important.

This was the day to try the Demon! she thought, feeling a tingle of excitement. After so many failures, this one had to work. It would work! Or heads would roll.

Cutting through the marketplace, Tregart smelled the aroma of cooking soup in the air, and people were already lined up with cups or wooden bowls, impatiently waiting for their share. As she passed, the people smiled and waved, and old folk too weak to wait in line joyously called her name from second-story windows.

“Bless you, lady!” an old man shouted. “All hail the Baroness Tregart!”

Several more people took up the cry, and Sandra smiled at that. How amusing. Baroness, eh? Did they think Sandra was her mother, or that she should take over the ville from her father? Either way, they would only have to wait a few more days and the matter would be settled. Permanently.

Turning a corner, Sandra saw a commotion near the front gate and spotted a couple of outlanders arguing with the sec men on guard duty. Then one of the outlanders passed over a bottle half full of amber liquid, and the sec men waved the strangers through. She stopped in her tracks, rigid with fury. A sec man took a bribe to admit an outlander!

“Hold it right there!” Sandra bellowed, starting forward again quickly.

The sec men blanched at her approach and cowered in fear. One of them threw the bottle away and it crashed on the street. However, the outlanders only drunkenly leered in frank appraisal of the woman. Her clothes were clean, and her blouse was open at the neck, exposing a wealth of rising cleavage.

“Nuke me running,” the tall outlander said with a chuckle. “The gaudy sluts come to mee’cha right at the gate! Black dust, now that’s what I call hospitality!”

“I’d give a working blaster for a ride on that,” the short man agreed, slurring the words. Spitting into his palms, he smoothed back his greasy hair. “Yes, sir, a working blaster!”

The nearby people went silent, and the guards began to quickly move away from the outlanders. They had seen this all before and knew what was coming.

However, near the edge of the crowd, a teenage boy placed his cracked bowl on a windowsill and started forward. “How dare you speak like that to her!” he shouted angrily, grabbing a rock from the ground.

With a curt gesture, Sandra made him stop. Respectfully, the teen moved back into the line and dropped the stone.

“Shitfire, ya sure got him well trained!” The tall stranger laughed uproariously.

“How much?” the other man asked, jingling a pocket. “We got brass, for that ass.”

“What was that again?” Sandra asked in a deceptively soft voice, crossing her arms.

“You h-heard me, bitch,” the outlander hiccuped, rubbing his crotch. “My buddy and I have just spent a fucking month trekking through sand and rocks to reach the Ohi, and we ain’t seen a gaudy house since Christ was a cowboy.”

“So how much?” the short man added, staring at her breasts. “Come on, name a price!”

“Months, eh? So, have you two been using each other?” Sandra asked, smiling sweetly. “Or do you prefer muties? I hear there is a nest of stickies just to the north of here.” She squinted as if trying to get a better view of their stunned faces. “Yes, several of their uglier young do resemble you two quite a lot.”

“Fuckin’ bitch!” the tall outlander snarled, pulling out a knife. “No slut talks to me like that!”

Weaving slightly, the other man started to add something, but finally noticed the fearful expressions of the neighboring crowd. What the hell, they were acting as if this gaudy slut was the baron! And for the first time, the outlander moved his gaze off the body and onto her face. Looked hard. Her beauty was without flaw, her full lips and dark eyes bewitching. But even through the drunken haze, he saw the raging fury behind those lovely eyes, and suddenly knew he was looking into the face of death.

Spreading his hands to show he wasn’t armed, the short outlander rapidly shuffled toward the gate, while his snarling friend lumbered forward.

“Ya nuke-eating slut, I’m gonna cut you a new one,” the tall man said, reaching for the woman’s arm.

In a lightning-fast move almost too fast to follow, Sandra uncrossed her arms and leveled a derringer, the little blaster almost hidden in her closed fist. She fired, and the tongue of flame from the .44 Magnum round actually engulfed the outstretched hand of the outlander.

Recoiling, he raised a bloody hand, with several fingers missing, the shock masking the agony of the mutilation. The drunk was still reeling, the pain only starting to contort his features, when Sandra stepped close to slash across his face with a knife. The blade opened his face like wet bread and burst his left eye. Blood went everywhere.

Shrieking, the outlander fumbled for the rusty wheelgun tucked into his belt. But Sandra slashed again, severing the tendons of his hand. Screaming in pain, he pulled the arm back with the hand flopping loosely at the end like a dead thing tied to a stick. Now the derringer roared once more, and crimson erupted from the man’s crotch, the discharge setting fire to his soiled pants. Howling in mindless agony, the drunk toppled over, and the woman started to hack him to pieces with her sharp knife.

Staggering away, the short outlander was almost past the gate when he stopped, a rush of shame filling his belly like acid rain. That was his friend back there getting aced. They had traveled together for years, fought side by side, eating out of the same rusty cans, huddling under the same ratty blanket for warmth in the mountains, one of them holding a girl while the other had his fun. They were brothers in everything but blood, and he was leaving him behind to get aced by some feeb slut?

Blind fury filled the outlander. Yelling a battle cry, he spun and pulled out his blaster, then charged, shooting at every step.

With the first shot, the crowd vanished as if by magic, and Sandra quickly raised the twitching man as a shield. The mutilated drunk jerked as the incoming lead slammed into his chest, and his shoulders slumped into the sweet release of death.

Snarling, Sandra tossed the body aside and pulled out a second derringer. Hot lead hummed through the fragrant air going past her head, and the baron’s daughter fired both barrels in unison.

The running outlander’s throat exploded under the double assault and, dropping his blaster, he grabbed his neck with both hands. Gurgling horribly, he fought for breath as Sandra threw the knife and it slammed into the man’s chest. Going limp, the outlander took a single step, then collapsed upon the street.

Calmly, Sandra reloaded her little weapons and hid them away again, carefully pocketing the spent brass. Her father had taught her how to shoot, and her brother had instructed her to save everything. But nobody had trained her to kill; it was a natural talent.

“Wall guard!” Sandra shouted through a cupped hand.

An armed sergeant on top of the ville wall waved in reply.

“Have this drek fed to the dogs and place two new men on the gate!” she yelled loudly.

The sergeant gave a salute and rushed off to relay the command.

“You two, come here,” Sandra ordered, pointing at the sec men near the open gate.

Glancing nervously at each other, the sec men walked closer and dropped to a knee in the street.

“Idiots and fools. Ten lashes for taking a bribe,” she said coldly. “Plus, ten for not closing the gate before leaving your post. Plus, ten more for tossing the bottle of shine away! Everybody knows that every drop in the ville belongs to me. Me!”

“Thirty lashes? But, ma’am…” one of them began, looking down a side street toward the barracks. Directly in front of the brick building was a large wooden cross, dripping with leather straps. The punishment rack.

Setting her jaw, Tregart glared. “Forty lashes,” she barked. “Or do you want to make it fifty?”

The sec men looked at the ground and said nothing. Letting them stay that way for a few minutes, Sandra snapped her fingers. “Rise, fools. Now leave, before I have you crucified for being cowards.”

Turning pale, the two sec men gave a shaky salute and went back to the gate to wait for replacement guards.

“As for you, boy,” the woman announced, walking over to the terrified teenager. On closer inspection, Tregart could see he was dressed like one of the pilgrims that had arrived a few months ago from the southlands, raggedy clothing covered with of patches, and sandals made from pieces of car tires held on with some rope.

“Ma’am?” he said, cowering slightly.

As Sandra stopped in front of him, the teen bent a knee in respect. She smiled at that. Respect given freely was twice as sweet as obedience though fear. Yes, he would do nicely. “You may rise, boy,” Sandra said benignly. “I saw you start forward to help me in this.” She gestured at the sprawling corpses.

“I live here, and you are the daughter of my baron,” he muttered, turning red in the face as he awkwardly stood.

“Apparently you are the only man who remembered that!” Sandra said, her voice rising into a shout.

The other people standing nearby shuffled uneasily as if trying to hide behind one another. Sandra gave them the full weight of her stare for a few moments, then turned her back on them.

“I need a ground man,” she said, running her fingers through the boy’s mane of greasy hair, but finding no lice or other vermin. “To help with the Angel. The job is yours. Report to the barracks for a hot bath, a meal and a blaster.”

His head snapped up at that, his young eyes going wide. “My lady?” he whispered.

“You heard me, lad.” Tregart chuckled. “What is your name?”

“Brian, my lady.”

“Nothing more? No last name?”

He shrugged. “No, my lady.”

“Then I shall give you one,” Sandra stated, glancing at the rock he had tried to use earlier. “From this day on, you’re Brian Stone. Is that acceptable?”

Eagerly, the teenager nodded.

“Very good, Stone,” she said, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe her hand clean. “Now get moving, and go get that bath, Afterward, you can claim what you want from the clothing of the outlanders. I can’t have my guards fighting muties barefoot.”

“Boots, too, my lady?” Brian asked, his voice rising a notch in disbelief. His bare toes wiggled at the prospect.

Sandra began to laugh. “Yes, boots, too, Mr. Stone. And don’t forget a gunbelt for your new blaster!”

“Yes, my lady!” Brian cried, taking off down the street toward the barracks. “Blessings upon you!”

As the teenager raced away, Sandra turned in a slow circle to scowl at the rest of the people present.

“As for the rest of you!” she said, not shouting, but somehow her voice seemed to cascade along the street. “My thanks for your loyalty!”

Nobody dared to speak as a dry wind from the desert beyond the Ohi moved across the ville.

“It shall be remembered.” She sneered, then turned on a heel and headed for the gate once more.

“She never would have acted like this with Edmund still alive,” a bald man muttered, watching her leave. “Do you think she’ll…you know…to Brian?” He made a vague gesture.

A toothless old woman nodded as the line shifted forward. “She did to all of the rest, so why not him, eh?”

“I’d rather be aced,” another man stated.

“Ghastly,” a young woman shuddered.

Just then, the breeze shifted direction to bring them the tantalizing smell of the cooking food, and the hunger in their bellies drove out any further thoughts of compassion toward the fate awaiting the new young sec man.

TAKING THE STAIRS, J.B. and Mildred climbed over the corpses littering the steps. A lot of the lights were out in the passageway, and Mildred decided it would be wise to use her flashlight.

Reaching inside her med kit, she pulled out the precious device and pumped the small handle several times to charge the ancient batteries inside. The survivalist tool had been among several items the companions had found in a looted hardware store, and it was irreplaceable.

Flicking the switch, Mildred was relieved to see a pale yellow beam from the device illuminate the stairwell in golden tones.

“Dark night!” J.B. cried, swinging up his Uzi as something moved in the shadows. But the man refrained from firing at the very last moment when he saw the rope wrapped around the man’s throat. As a warm breeze wafted from the air vents in the wall, the body moved again, gently swaying back and forth.

“A suicide,” Mildred said, tightening her grip on her revolver.

“Can you blame him?” J.B. answered as they climbed the steps rising past the dangling body.

At the top of the stairs J.B. found a Marine with an M-16 assault rifle by his side, an ammo pouch of clips over his shoulder. The sergeant had been shot in the belly and clearly bled to death, as evidenced from the pool of dried blood around him on the floor.

Checking the pouch, Mildred found only spent clips, but J.B. found the clip partially inserted into the M-16 was fully loaded. Easing the clip into the weapon, he flicked off the safety and worked the arming bolt by hand to cycle all thirty rounds through the weapon. Nothing jammed. Reloading the clip, he slapped it into the assault rifle and slung it across his back. There were hundreds of dead soldiers in the redoubt. If each of them only had a few live rounds on their person, this could be the biggest find of weapons in many a month!

“Sure hope there’s some food, too,” Mildred said, obviously following his train of thought.

“Gotta be,” he said, easing open the door to the next level with the barrel of the Uzi. “This many mouths had to be fed.”

Mildred clicked off her flashlight at the sight of the brightly illuminated hallway. Then she stopped in her tracks, and J.B. muttered a curse.

A sandbag nest had been built in the middle of an intersection of corridors, the dead men lying on top of the belt-fed .50-caliber machine guns. These soldiers had no obvious signs of violence, but more importantly, they were all wearing gas masks.

HEADING DIRECTLY to the galley, Doc and Jak found the doors barred with tables, bullet holes and spent shells everywhere, along with several ruined sections of the corridor that could only have been caused by grens.

“Like started doing wolfweed,” Jak muttered, brushing the silky white hair from his face.

Pressing his face to the window in a door, Doc looked around the kitchen and recoiled in shock.

“They had somebody tied down to a table,” Doc began, then his stomach rebelled and he turned to heave in the corner. But only bile came up. What food he had eaten that morning was long gone, purged from his system by the multiple jumps.

“Cannies?” Jak asked, peeking inside.

Wiping his mouth clean on an embroider handkerchief, Doc spoke softly. “Jak, my dear friend,” he whispered. “I am fully aware that my mind is half gone from…the things that have been done to me by scientists and that madman Strasser, but if whatever befouled this redoubt starts to enact its virulent filth upon me, please…”

“Won’t feel thing,” Jak promised, patting the time traveler on the shoulder. “My word. But you do same for me.”

Doc solemnly nodded, and the two men shared a moment beyond friendship, brothers in blood standing against the world.

“Then let us press on,” Doc said, starting down the corridor. “There is much to do, and I yearn for the feel of clean air on the face.”

“Hope blast doors work,” Jak said, pushing open the door to a lavatory. The smell was long gone, scrubbed clean by the life support system, but the floors were smeared with ancient filth. “Else, why these not run?”

Doc tilted his head at that comment, and looked upward as if he could see the blast door somewhere above them.

“A very good question, my friend,” he muttered. “That is a very good question, indeed.”

THE REACTORS in the basement proved to be intact, the techies inside all killed by self-inflicted gunshots. It seemed clear to Ryan and Krysty that the techies had known what was happening inside the rest of the redoubt, and had chosen the fast way out.

With Krysty standing guard, Ryan did a fast sweep through the armory on the middle floor of the redoubt, but it was as he had expected. Every weapon case was either open or smashed apart. The shelves were empty of C-4 satchels, grens and Claymore mines. Only wrapping paper and warning labels remained. Dozens of longblasters and rapid-fires lay trampled on the floor, the treads of a forklift impressed into the plastic stocks and the bent barrels.

In the far corner, the floor and walls were charred black, and from the bodies on the floor it seemed that somebody had tried to operate a flamethrower on six other soldiers. He’d failed and they’d all died together in a fiery backblast of the erupting fuel tanks.

Trudging out of the room, Ryan noticed a card-board box on a shelf and snatched it quickly, as if it might vanish into thin air. Peeling off the plastic wrapper, he saw it was a full box of 12-gauge shotgun shells. He tucked the box into a pocket for J.B. to use in his S&W M-4000 shotgun, and left the armory.

“Anything?” Krysty asked hopefully, lowering her wheelgun as he appeared.

“Not much,” Ryan said with a growl. “They were fighting in here, too, and most of the stuff got busted bad. I saw a couple of crates of Stinger missiles in the rear, but the seals were broken so the electronics would be dead.”

“We might still be able to salvage the C-4 from the warheads,” she said. “Take a couple of pipes from the bathroom and we’ve got grens.”

“Yeah,” Ryan replied, removing the cap from his canteen and taking a swig. “Sounds good. We can do that tonight after chow. Now let’s finish this sweep. The sooner we get back together with the others, the fucking better I’ll like it.”

Her red hair flexing protectively around her face, Krysty gave a wry smile. “It’s even getting to you, eh?”

The big man shrugged. “This hellhole would get under the skin of anybody. Makes the bug-infested redoubt in Texas seem friendly as a gaudy house in comparison.”

As the couple left for the elevators, something stirred in the shadows of the armory and sluggishly started trailing after them.

Chapter Five

As the elevator doors opened on the top level of the redoubt, Ryan and Krysty saw that the garage was filled with row upon row of vehicles, all of them parked neatly within the painted lines on the concrete floor. Most were civilian wags, brightly colored cars, pickup trucks, vans, and about a dozen motorcycles. The bikes looked in good shape in spite of their flat tires.

On the far side of the garage some military vehicles were parked behind a wire divider that went from floor to ceiling. Ryan could see a couple of Hummers, several GMC 4x4 trucks, and even an armored half-track, the front tires flat on the floor, but the rear-looking treads seemingly intact. The half-track was armed with a .50-caliber rapid-fire, a belt of linked ammo dangling from the side. However, none of other vehicles showed any signs of damage.

“Odd,” Krysty whispered. “There doesn’t seem to have been any fighting up here.”

“Mebbe whatever caused the madness never reached this level,” Ryan said, sucking his hollow tooth thoughtfully. “Or—”

“Or this is where it started,” she finished for him.

“Yeah.”

A sharp whistle cut the air, and the two spun around, automatically taking a step to the side to throw off the aim of an enemy. Then they saw J.B. and Mildred coming out of the tool room near the fuel pumps. He was carrying a handful of road flares, and she was tucking a roll of duct tape into her open med kit.

“Any sign of Doc and Jak?” Krysty asked as their friends joined them, tucking away her weapon.

“Not yet,” Mildred said, tying shut the flap on her med kit. “But knowing that old coot, he’s probably grabbing a snack in the kitchen.”

“Hope so,” Ryan added, walking among the rows of wags. “We’re low on food. Only got a couple of cans left.”

“Find any MRE packs?” J.B. asked, tucking flares into his munitions bag.

Rattling the door to the pickup, Ryan shook his head. “Nothing. Even the armory was stripped bare.” Then he grunted in remembrance and pulled out the box of cartridges.

“Here you go, 12-gauge,” he said, tossing it over.

“Thanks,” J.B. said, making the catch and placing the ammo alongside the flares.

“Well, we found some soldiers wearing gas masks,” Mildred said, and then told them about the sandbag nest.

“But they went insane, too?” Krysty said, resting a cowboy boot on the fender of a car. In the bright fluorescent lights, the embroidered pattern of winged falcons could be dimly seen through the layers of dust and dirt. “So either they put the masks on too later—”

“Or else they didn’t work. Yes, exactly.”

“Gaia protect us,” the redhead muttered.

“Amen to that,” Mildred added grimly.

Stepping over a corpse in greasy coveralls sprawled on the floor, Ryan tried the handle on a sports car. Opening the door, he got hit by an exhalation of trapped air that sighed out carrying the smell of rotting leather and dust. He quickly closed the door. There was rarely much to scav in an ordinary wag.

Spotting the fuel pumps in the far corner, J.B. started maneuvering through the vehicles. If the pumps were still sealed, they might be able to get a few of these machines going again. If Doc and Jak didn’t find anything in the kitchen or galley, they would have to go hunting outside, and wags would let them cover more ground in shorter time. With luck, there might even be a ville nearby where they could trade with the local baron. A single working wag and a can of juice would buy more food than the companions could carry in a week.

“Hell of a lot of wags here,” Ryan stated, sounding suspicious. “It’s as if everybody drove inside, parked their cars, then went downstairs to go insane.”

“Come on, let’s check the mil wags,” Ryan suggested, getting back to business.

Going to a workbench, the three took some tools, then walked over to the wire fence. With a hammer and chisel, Krysty notched the padlock holding the gate closed, then Ryan easily smashed the lock open with a sledgehammer. The noise echoed loudly across the still garage.

As the chain snaked noisily to the floor, Mildred swung the gate open as Ryan and Krysty walked into the motor pool.

Separating again, the two circled the vehicles to make sure the area was clear, then started checking the machines. Choosing a Hummer, Ryan went to the back for the emergency kit. Sure enough, the box was there and still sealed. Forcing it open with his panga, he extracted a small first-aid kit, some road flares, a thermal blanket, three MRE food packs and a gun case. Opening the black plastic box, he found a Veri pistol coated with Cosmoline gel. The flare gun would need a good cleaning before it could be used, but it seemed in perfect shape, and there were six flares nestled in the soft gray foam cushioning alongside the pistol. Three of the aerial flares had split along the sides from age, but the others were intact, and the plastic tubes felt resilient when he gently squeezed. As a blaster, the flare gun was pitiful, but it made excellent trade goods.

Smashing open a locked window with the butt of her blaster, Krysty was already checking inside the cab of the half-track as Mildred pawed through the contents of another Hummer.

“Anything good in the first-aid kit?” Krysty asked.

“No.” The physician sighed, tossing the open box back into the wag. “It’s all useless. Just too damn old.”

“Well, I found a few grens.”

Excellent! Any ammo?” Mildred asked.

“No.”

“Damn.”

Just then, the concrete floor shook with a low rumble.

“Is that a quake?” Krysty asked, looking over a shoulder, her hair flexing as if stirred by secret winds.

“No, too weak,” Ryan snapped as the sound increased in volume and strength.

“Mother of god…that’s the blast door!” Mildred gasped in astonishment, dropping an ammo box. It hit with a crash, spilling brass rounds across the floor. “Somebody is coming inside!”

The startled friends turned to stare at the front of the redoubt where a wide tunnel opened in the wall. The distant end of the zigzagging tunnel couldn’t be seen, but there was no mistaking the sound of the powerful electric motors hidden inside the walls as they started to cycle open the massive nuke-proof doors that lead to the world outside.

THE CRATER WAS blisteringly hot under the sun, the hard stone ground seeming to reflect the solar heat until the temperature became almost unbearable.

Carrying a small umbrella, Sandra Tregart relished the meager shade it gave as she watched the almost-naked eunuchs toiling under the harsh sunlight. The lean men were wearing only sandals and loincloths, their sweaty skin burned to a deep, rich brown. The eunuchs were crawling along the rocky ground, removing every bit of windblown trash or sharp rock from the volcanic ground. The predark tires of the Angel were heavily patched, and every bump threw off their balance and shook the plane badly. Sometimes, it was difficult for her to gain enough speed for take-off. Thus every obstruction, no matter how small, had to be removed. It was a dirty job, inching along the strip that served as the runway, but Sandra refused to have slaves do the job. Slaves always wanted to rebel, and couldn’t be trusted. The eunuchs were fanatically devoted to her, and so only they could perform the vital task.

That is, Sandra griped, unless the Demon worked. Then all of her prayers would be answered. After which…

From the tent that served as the eunuchs’ barracks, she could smell roasting meat and bread. After she had bombed Indera ville out of existence, her eunuchs had ridden the last few horses there to loot the ruins. In return, she gave them the first pick of the food. Naturally, the rest went to Thunder ville, but her men were fed before the ville folk. After all, they guarded her at night, and, what was more important, they protected the Angel. Although few enemies had ever gotten onto the impact crater that served as an airfield.

Jagged peaks of ancient lava formed an impassable barrier around the crater. There was only one break in the rocky walls, and it was closed with a barrier of tires filled with rocks and topped with rusty barbed wire. Flanking both sides of the small door were wooden sentry towers containing armed eunuchs who trained every day with their homie crossbows. They could ace a vulture on the wing at a hundred yards. Neither man nor mutie got close to the wall, and nobody had ever even touched the gate without her permission. Anything that headed in its direction was chilled on sight. Even her brother Edmund had been wounded once for coming too close. To her father and mother, Sandra had professed her most sincere apologies for the terrible accident. But in private, she had praised Digger for his marksmanship and promoted him to sec chief for the airfield.

Pausing on the barren field, Sandra frowned at the thought. Such a pity that Digger was gone. Perhaps Stone would take his place. After the teen had been properly altered, of course. She smiled at that, and continued her inspection tour of the airfield. Everything needed to be perfect this day. A lot depended on the success of her newest experiment. Black dust, the whole world depended on its success!

Glancing skyward, Sandra frowned at the orange and red sky, streaks of black ripping across the polluted heavens as endless lighting crashed amid the roiling death clouds. It was the same way almost every day. But on rare occurrences, the wind would shift direction and the cloud cover would break. That was when blue sky would show through, tempting her into the beyond, calling a sweet siren song of freedom. She turned and walked away. But it was a dream unfulfilled. No matter how quickly she got the Angel off the ground, the clouds would roll back in to the fill the momentary gap and steal away the blue once more. Her brother had often warned that even if she made it through to the clean air above, she would be trapped on the other side, maybe for days, or even weeks. Sooner or later her plane would run out of fuel and she would sail powerless into the roiling chem-polluted clouds to suffer a death beyond words. It would be unlikely that even her bones would make it through to fall upon the nuke-blasted soil below.

Sandra had quickly learned that flying was a matter of staying high enough so spears couldn’t hit the Angel, yet low enough to avoid the deadly sky. It was a balancing act, but the results were worth the terrible risks involved. The freedom of flying! The incredible power!

Just then, an eruption of steam caught her attention, and she headed toward a group of swearing men. They were working around an iron van set on top of a brick hearth. A couple of bare-chested boys were shoveling scraps of wood into the banked fire under the vat, while a second group adjusted pressure valves. Coming out of the top of the vat was a large coil of copper tubing that arched downward to dribble a clear fluid into a fuel container. As it was filled, a man capped it tight, and slipped another container under the end of the tubing without spilling a single drop. Nearby, a lone man with a horribly scarred face was chopping up cactus plants and piling the juicy innards into a plastic bucket. With every burst of steam from the pressure valve, the disfigured man flinched as if to protect his scars.

Forming a semicircle around the still were eight large tents. One was for Sandra’s ground crew to take shelter in during an acid rain storm, the floor raised high with rocks and old sheets of plastic to protect them from the runoff. The next was her home, with a bathtub for washing and a lockbox full of weapons and precious ammo. Two more tents were the workshops, another contained the Angel, and the rest were what Sandra called her lab, miscellaneous parts and bolts of cloth salvaged from ruins across the land. The last tent held the Demon.

“How is it going, Carter?” Sandra asked, stopping a short distance from the still. Between the crackling fire and the hissing steam, she couldn’t understand how the men survived the awful heat. That was how Karl had been disfigured. He’d fallen asleep from the heat and caught a steam blast in the face. Incredibly, he’d lived, but never spoke again, and flatly refused to work the still again.

“Good afternoon, my lady,” Carter said in a squeaky voice, grinning widely. Sweat poured off his hairless chest as if he were standing in the rain. “We just finished a new batch of shine. And Karl harvested enough cactus for a second batch. We’ll start it fermenting tonight.”

“Excellent,” she said, mopping her forehead with a cloth. Already her white shirt was soaked, the thin material clinging to her skin. None of the men seemed to notice. “Take ten gallons and fill the tanks on the Demon. The wind is good, and I’m going to try again while we still have sunlight.”

“But ten gallons is barely a quarter tank, mistress,” Carter began in his child’s voice. “How will you know if the Demon can be trusted until you fill the tanks completely?”

From under the shadow of her umbrella, the woman stared in growing anger at the giant.

“Yes, of course, you’re right. Ten is more than enough,” he burbled, cowering slightly. “I’ll get them myself.”

As the colossus lumbered away, Sandra allowed herself a private smile. She knew that Carter meant well, but the man was overly concerned with her safety. He was so large many believed him to be part mutie. The man stood almost seven feet tall, his wide barrel chest rippling with hard muscles. Yet his face was as smooth as a newborn infant’s, his body completely without hair. Castrating the men working on the airfield had been her father’s idea. And she knew that the main purpose of the mutilation was merely to keep her safe from the lustful advances of the sec men and to safeguard the ville throne from any bastards. But it was her mother who suggested using boys too young to notice her figure and face. Sandra had decided to do both, and the sexless youths grew utterly devoted to their female master.

Many years ago when she had first dragged the Angel to the crater, a coldheart had leaped out of hiding in a mountain pass and clubbed her to the ground. As the man started to rip off her clothing, the eunuchs leaped upon the man and literally ripped him apart with their bare hands. The story soon spread to other villes, and nobody had ever bothered Sandra again on her many journeys across the Deathlands.

Once, long ago and far to the east, she had found a graveyard of hundreds of predark planes, along with dozens of other things, machines that looked like soap bubbles but with rotors on top. Sandra had no idea what those could be, and so ignored them. She almost could have believed that the soap bubbles were also flying machines, except for the fact that they had no wings, nor anyplace for a wing to be attached.

Now, most of the planes in the junkyard had only been rusted skeletons, but a few of the machines stored inside a crumbling building were still intact, and one seemed repairable. Unfortunately, the yard was infested with some mutie form of millipede. With no other choice, Sandra had set fire to a forest to cause a stampede of animals through the yard. The millipedes attacked, eating everything that came their way, and in the bloody carnage, she and some eunuchs had been able to steal the Angel.

Over the next few years she had gone back twice more for spare parts, cloth and engines. But on the last raid, Sandra lost five eunuchs to the millipedes and still carried a nasty scar on her arm where one of the bugs had attached itself and started burrowing into her flesh before she’d doused it with shine and burned it off.

Someday, when she had a large enough army of sec men, the woman planned to return to the junkyard, slaughter the bugs and build a wall around the yard and make it her private ville. But that was for the future. This day, she had to worry about the Demon.

Heading for the last tent, Sandra heard a pervading hooting. Inside one of the tents to her left was a row of iron cages with stickies inside, bowls placed underneath to catch the natural gluelike resin they oozed when tortured. A red-hot knife could get her more glue than boiling the bones of a hundred horses. And the bones of people produced very little glue, even if they were red-raw and fresh.

Entering the last tent, Sandra lowered her umbrella and savored the delicious drop in temperature. The roof of the predark tent somehow blocked most of the sun’s heat, and a cooling breeze from the nearby river ruffled the edges of the cloth along the ground. Wonderful.

Using stiff fingers to fluff out her hair and help it dry faster, Sandra emotionlessly studied the Demon resting in the middle of the tent. A humming man was energetically polishing the wooden propeller while another worker checked the pressure on a tire with a patched hand-pump.

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