HOPE’S ADVERSARY

No one waits long for trouble in Deathlands—it’s everywhere in the remains of a nuke-altered civilization. The American dream was annihilated more than a century ago by the country’s own unchecked power play. But the worst may be yet to come.

SURVIVAL’S CASTOFF

Built upon a predark military installation in former California, a ville called Progress could be the utopia Ryan Cawdor and his companions have been seeking. A place where humanity and technology thrive, it’s the nucleus of a new hope for Deathlands. The successful replacement of Ryan’s missing eye with a cybernetic prosthetic nearly convinces the group that their days of surviving hell are behind them. Then they discover that the high tech in Progress isn’t designed to enhance human life, but to destroy it. To block the final assault, the companions must stop Ryan from becoming a willing pawn in the eradication of mankind.

J.B. had five seconds to

get clear

He sprinted from the barn, arms pumping, five seconds to get to cover, five seconds to do the impossible. The howls and taunts of the bikers cut the air to his left, the growl of their engines generating a terrible drone.

J.B. was across the road in an instant, dislodged dirt skipping away beneath his boots. Up ahead, the tall stalks of corn waited like a fence, impossibly thin struts. Thirty feet away, the stalks were on fire, dark smoke wafting across the road as J.B. raced into the brush.

He dived to the ground, arms outstretched, holding the mini-Uzi far from his body. The bikes were close now, roaring past the barn in a cacophony of straining engines.

Then the building went up like a rocket, the interior expanding in a series of massive explosions that reached out to engulf the bikers, giving the companions a chance.

End Program

James Axler

“The black curtain is the instant when the eyes shut.”

—Koji Suzuki,

Ring, 1991

THE

DEATHLANDS

SAGA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter One

Ryan lay flat on his back, naked, cold. He stared up into black, nothingness all around him. He raised his head, struck something just an inch above his forehead and felt pain run through his face. The pain made his nose twitch, as if he needed to sneeze, and a flash of brightness seemed to lance across his eyes in a firework burst.

He moved more cautiously the second time, arms first, feeling around him. There were walls to either side of where he lay, their cool hardness running the length of his body. Ryan estimated that there was no more than an inch gap between the limits of his broad shoulders and those cool walls, as if he had been placed in a narrow tunnel.

He flexed his feet, noticing for the first time that he was not wearing his boots. Those boots had been with him for more miles of Deathlands road than he cared to remember. He would have removed them to sleep, but he could not recall where or when that had been. But now he was naked, his body cold.

When he stretched his toes, he felt another wall, pressing close enough that he could not stretch his feet to their fullest extension. Above too, a wall or roof pressed at his feet, and he could not bend his knees without meeting it.

Where was he?

His face still hurt. It was more than just the sudden shock of striking the panel above him, he knew. There was a rawness there, running down the left side of his face, where he had lost an eye to his deranged brother, Harvey, who had made a power grab to rule the barony of Front Royal. That had been a long time ago, before Trader, before J.B. and the others, before the long roads of the Deathlands.

Something nagged at Ryan as he thought that, and he reached up to his face and probed gently, tracing the cicatrix scar and continuing to the eye patch that should cover his missing eye. The patch was gone.

Ryan closed his eyelids and touched at the depression of flesh all around his left eye, reaching for the alien thing he could sense was there. When his fingers touched the surface of the eyelid, he could feel something hard pressing back: An eye? He had an eye where he not had an eye in more than twenty years.

“An eye,” Ryan whispered, barely believing it. The words hissed out and were gone, but saying them somehow made it more real in the darkness.

He ran the tips of his fingers across the surface of the closed eyelid, brought up his other hand and did the same with his right eye. They felt similar but different. The right eye gave under a little pressure, sprung, like a lump of jelly quivering on a plate. The left eye was harder with no give, more like a rock that had been planed off and worked into the empty socket.

He had been cycloptic for so long that he had almost forgotten what it had felt like to have two eyes, the way it changed how one saw dimensions and distance. In darkness, Ryan could tell nothing about the new orb that resided within his left socket. It could be dead, unworkable.

Ryan drew his fingers away and opened his eyes, staring into the darkness once more. He could see nothing, just blackness, the way the countryside got at night when the moon was in hiding and the stars had been painted over by clouds. And yet, he could see something, the way that even in complete darkness a person could still see something—edges, shapes.

“Where am I?” Ryan muttered, reaching up again for that panel that rested above him. “And how the nuking hell did I get here?”

His mind drifted back, recalling the last hours that he could remember.

Chapter Two

It had been raining right outside the mat-trans chamber. Ryan and his six companions had materialized inside the familiar hexagonal chamber, whose armaglass walls were tinted the color of grass at the height of summer, when it had not seen water for a month.

Ryan had led the way out, opening the chamber door, his blaster—a SIG Sauer P226—held ready in his right hand: mat-trans jumping was dangerous.

The mat-trans was a matter-transfer system used by the U.S. military, with sender-receiver units located in hidden redoubts dotted across what had once been the United States of America and several other countries. The United States was no longer what it once was, ruined by the nuclear exchange of 2001 that had seen the U.S. and its ideological counterpart, the Soviet Union, engage in a push-button conflict that had lasted little more than a few hours. Afterward, North America and other parts of the world had been left in scarred ruins.

After the nukecaust came the radiation, warping what survived into something that at times was barely endurable. A hundred years later, Ryan and his companions trekked the lost roads of what was now known as the Deathlands, hoping to find something better, searching for a promise of a better tomorrow.

The companions used the mat-trans to travel the Deathlands, but their method of transportation was unreliable. A CD containing destination codes had been lost, so when they entered the chamber and initiated a jump, they never knew where they’d end up.

However, the mat-trans had one advantage over conventional travel—it was by and large secret, and utilized by few others.

“All clear here,” Ryan announced as he stepped from the mat-trans doorway, crossed the anteroom and scanned the control room immediately beyond.

The one-eyed man stood in an area that resembled a predark greenhouse, with rain pouring through a large gap in the roof. That meant that this part of the redoubt was aboveground. Plants were everywhere, corded creepers twisting down the walls and across the surfaces of the ancient comp desks that ran in twin lines through the control room. Reeds and ferns spread across the room in spearheads, one group driving into the other like some alien game of chess. Flowers were dotted here and there, spotting the room with flourishes of color, as if a deranged artist had dropped paint on the swath of green.

Ancient lights flickered to life, automatically engaged by the movement sensors that detected that the mat-trans had been operated. The lights flickered for a few seconds before finally dying. Ryan peered at the ceiling. The fluorescent lights had been overwhelmed by creeping vines. Luckily, the hole in the roof provided enough illumination.

The floor was soft, and when Ryan looked down he saw a thick green carpet of moss stretched across the whole room beneath the plants. It smelled of life and of decay.

Ryan was a tall man with broad shoulders and a curly mane of black hair. His face, considered by some to be handsome, was hard and lean, bearing the scars of that life-or-death struggle with his brother, Harvey. He wore a black leather eye patch over his missing left eye, the tied knot hidden within his thick hair.

Ryan was followed from the mat-trans by his second-in-command, a shorter man called John Barrymore—or J.B.—Dix. He wore a battered brown fedora and a pair round-framed spectacles was propped on his nose. An expert in blasters, explosives and booby traps, J.B. was also known as “the Armorer.” He was the companions’ weaponsmith.

He stepped from the mat-trans door with a mini-Uzi in his hands, while other weaponry was hidden in various pockets and pouches. J.B. also carried a satchel on a leather strap crosswise over his chest, within which were detonators, explosives and a variety of ammunition and spare parts.

Jak Lauren, the third member of the group and a unique presence in any environment, sniffed the air as he crept from the mat-trans chamber.

“Smell wrong,” Jak said, shaking his head.

A few inches over five feet tall, Jak was a slim man with the physique of an adolescent.. He was an albino, with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair, and eyes the color of blood. He moved fluidly like a stalking cat, his .357 Magnum Colt Python blaster raised and ready in his hands. Jak was a master of the blade, and had several throwing knives secreted about his clothing.

Behind Jak, the remaining members of Ryan’s team were passing through the chamber doorway and anteroom, then into the redoubt’s control room.

First came Krysty Wroth, a tall, curvaceous woman of stunning beauty whose vivid emerald eyes were mesmerizing. But it was always her long, bright red hair that people noticed first because it seemed to be almost alive. In fact, Krysty’s hair was very much alive—she was a mutie, and her hair responded to her circumstances and moods, twisting or uncurling depending on her state of mind.

“It smells okay to me,” Krysty said with a smile.

The next member of the group laughed at Krysty’s comment. “Jak always thinks something’s wrong,” he said. He was a handsome youth named Ricky Morales, sixteen years old with shiny black hair and dark brown eyes. He held his Webley Mk VI revolver so casually in one hand that it gave the impression that he had been carrying the weapon since birth. Ricky hailed from a small seaport on an island once known as Puerto Rico but was now called Monster Island. An even-tempered youth with a happy-go-lucky attitude, Ricky had traveled with the companions only a short time, but he fit in well. He looked up to Ryan and the others, especially J.B., who reminded him of his uncle, Benito, who had been a weaponsmith too.

Striding behind Ricky, Doc Tanner thrust his ebony sword stick in front of his younger companion to draw his attention. Doc was dressed in a long black frock coat with a dirt-stained white shirt and dark pants beneath. “Watch your tongue, lad,” Doc said. “Jak hass never steered us wrong.”

Ricky began to argue but stopped himself. Doc was right, he knew. These people had worked together without him for a long time, and the fact that they had survived all that time was a testament to their effectiveness as a unit. Gently mocking Jak’s pessimism was one thing; questioning the albino was quite something else.

“Sorry,” Ricky said, turning his head from Doc to Jak. “I was just kidding around.”

“No harm done,” Doc said, lowering his sword stick. He was a tall man, almost scarecrowlike in appearance, with long silver-white hair. Doc looked old but that appearance belied a far more complicated life story. A man of great learning, Doc had been born in the year 1868 and for the first thirty-odd years had enjoyed a relatively ordinary life. However, in 1896, Doc had been the unwilling subject of time trawling technology and had found himself scooped out of his own time period and taken to the twentieth century to be studied by the white-coated scientists of Project Chronos.

However, Doc proved a rather less pacific subject than the whitecoats had hoped, and so in a second twist of cruel fate, he had been flung another hundred into the future, into the Deathlands. The shock of such time travel had left Doc artificially aged, so while his features and body were that of a man of some sixty or more years, his mind still clung to the memory of being far younger. To further compound his difficulties, the time journeys had left Doc’s mind addled, and while he suffered fewer bouts of madness these days, his early days with Ryan’s crew had been marred by heightened stress levels, panic attacks and the general sense of not really knowing who or where he was.

Despite all that, Doc was a valuable asset to the group, not only for his knowledge of the predark world, but also on the far more practical level of his ability with a blaster. Doc’s weapon of choice was a replica LeMat pistol.

The final member of the group was a stocky, African-American woman named Mildred Wyeth, who, like Doc, was born in another era, but who had traveled through time in a rather more conventional manner. She had been born in 1964, and eventually became a physician, specializing in cryogenic research.

While in her mid-thirties, Mildred suffered complications during abdominal surgery. In an attempt to save her life, the decision had been made to cryogenically preserve her—just a few days before the nuclear conflict erupted. She had been freed from her frozen capsule by Ryan’s crew. She had remained with them ever since, forming a romantic bond with J.B. and providing the ongoing field medicine necessary to the group.

“Don’t tease the kid, Doc,” Mildred warned, an undercurrent to her tone. She liked Ricky—in some ways he reminded her of her brother, Josh, when he had been that age.

“I am not teasing,” Doc replied. “I am just setting the lad straight lest he ignore the warnings of his elders.”

Mildred shook her head. “‘Elders.’ I never did like that term.”

Mildred and Doc’s bickering was a constant, but it was good-natured. On this occasion, Doc let the point go—they needed to be alert right now, ready at the drop of a hat to face potential dangers in this new environment.

The companions made their way through the knee-deep foliage that had all but overtaken the interior of the control room.

It was unusual to see a redoubt this close to the surface. Most of them were located deep underground, and all had been designed to repel direct bombardment by weaponry up to and including a nuclear bomb. Whether they could survive a nuke was not certain, but anything short of that would struggle to make a dent. However, what the redoubts had not been built to withstand were the vast tectonic and environmental shifts that had racked the Earth since the nukecaust. What weapons had failed to do, Mother Nature had done with aplomb, mashing the plates of the earth together beneath the redoubt and opening up a great fissure in the foundations. It was this shift that had caused chunks of the redoubt to break open, creating the vast hole in the redoubt’s ceiling.

Doc followed the group past the channel of pouring rain, passing his sword stick through it and taking a moment to examine the results. The sword stick was jet-black with a silver lion’s head handle. Few knew that a sword was hidden within the walking cane.

The rain clung to the sword stick, glistening there with a wisp of vapor. “The lad is correct,” Doc agreed as he sniffed at the rain. “There is a definite tang to this downpour. We must be careful.”

“We always are,” Ryan responded, pushing his way through the room to a sliding door of vanadium steel that would grant them access to the corridor outside. A keypad, stained brown where its metal casing had rusted, was located beside the door set in the concrete wall to the right. Ryan punched in the usual 3-5-2 code which would open the door. He detected a hiss coming from his left, but the metal door refused to move aside.

Standing at Ryan’s side, J.B. eyed the door and sucked thoughtfully at his teeth.

“Jammed tight,” Ryan confirmed. While doors, like the lighting in the redoubt, would have been automatically reengaged with the activation of the mat-trans the dense vegetation or the humidity had obviously infiltrated and corrupted the mechanics.

“Want me to blast it open?” J.B. asked. The Armorer was adept with explosives as well as firearms—it would be little effort for him to obliterate the door.

“No,” Ryan said after a few seconds’ consideration. “We’ll go up instead,” he said, indicating the hole in the ceiling. “It’s the path of least resistance.”

J.B. nodded, and the two men joined the other companions in contemplating the easiest route to the opening above them.

“Jak? Do you reckon you can get up there and drop a line to us?”

Jak grinned, looking somehow sinister in the ghostly light that ebbed through the gap above, and holstered his blaster.

“Just watch out for the acid rain. If it gets worse, you could get burned,” J.B. reminded as Jak scrambled up the sturdy-looking trunk of a creeper and worked his way farther into the canopy.

In a few seconds, Jak was balancing upright as he made his way along a length of thick branch to the hole above. The albino was catlike in his movements, displaying a sense of balance that bordered on superhuman. As he reached the gap in the roof, Jak shrugged the sleeves of his jacket down his arms, using them to cover his hands as much as he could. The mild acid rain wouldn’t chill him, but it would eat away at his skin if it the acid content became stronger. Once the companions were outside, they would have to rig some kind of temporary canopy or umbrella-type system to keep the worst of the downpour off until it abated.

Jak reached up and slipped through the hole in the roof and onto the ground outside the redoubt. Grayish sunlight pushed through the cloud cover from the masked white orb that sat low on the horizon.

Jak looked around, scenting the air. He was in a forest with plants of the tropical variety, lush and green, slick with droplets of rainwater on their waxy leaves. The mild acid rain seemed not to bother them in any way. The ground was soft, sodden with water. The area smelled of soil mingled with the acidic tang of the polluted rainwater.

As Jak looked around, Ryan’s voice echoed from twenty feet below him. “Everything okay up there, Jak?” Ryan asked.

“Look okay,” Jak called, peering around at the thick foliage. As he did, he spotted a face nearly hidden in the tangled vines and other vegetation. It was a human face, dark-skinned and almost camouflaged amid the lush greenery, the top of the man’s head rose about six feet from the ground. But there was something not quite right about it, Jak felt, even as he took a step closer.

He parted a web of overhanging fronds with his left hand, slipping his Colt Python from its holster at his hip with his right and seeing the man fully for the first time. Only it wasn’t a man—not entirely. Beneath the head was a stub of neck that ended in a pair of lungs, caged not by ribs but by a clawlike arrangement branches that surrounded the spongy sacks as they inflated and deflated. There was no body, only branches of pallid green, as thick as a man’s arm and dotted with spiny thorns their full lengths. Automatically, Jak did a swift count of the spiny-covered branches—eight in all—saw that three of them reached above the head, entwining with the taller cover of the looming trees.

This was new, Jak realized. He had seen muties before; the Deathlands was populated by a variety of abominations. But this thing, part man, part plant—it reminded him of a vine master.

Warily, the albino took another step closer, his eyes fixed on the monstrosity before him. He couldn’t work out if the man was a part of the plant, or if he had been partially consumed by it. His skin was dark with a greenish hue, the veins showing thickly along the forehead and neck like fingers under the skin. His eyes were open but glazed, and Jak realized that he had not yet seen the man blink.

“Jak?” Ryan called from the redoubt. “Everything okay?”

Jak turned his head to call back, and as he did so the mutie plant started to writhe, spiny branches undulating as they rose from the ground.

“Am—” Jak began, then turned back as he spotted the thing reaching for him.

Instinctively, Jak ducked as the plant-man reached for him with a writhing tentacle-like branch. The branch struck Jak across his flank, hitting with such force that he tumbled to the ground. Then the writhing limb was dancing in the air above him like a snake. Jak blinked back his momentarily blurred vision, and he heard a popping noise like cracking ice as a fleet of three-inch-long, spiny thorns launched from the branch toward him, racing through the air like bullets.

Chapter Three

The cloud of thorns hurtled toward Jak. He saw them and rolled, moving faster than he could consciously think, pulling up the collar of his jacket even as the thorns thudded against his back. The garment held, the tough fabric repelling most of the spines, a handful embedding up and down its length. Around him, hunks of trees and bushes were obliterated, cut to ribbons by the deadly onslaught.

Jak scrambled forward like a predark sprinter at the starting blocks, launching from the ground back onto his feet. He sprinted back toward the hole in the ground where the redoubt was located.

Behind Jak, the mutie plant’s limbs flailed through the air, sending a second volley of thorns at his retreating figure. Jak peered back over his shoulder just once, saw the way the plant was moving, long, snakelike roots pulling up from the soil and slivering across the ground, propelling itself after him. Amid the green leaves, the man-face was strained, mouth open, eyes wide, watching Jak angrily as the plant trailed across the ground. Jak whipped up his Colt Python pistol and fired a lone .357 Magnum bullet at the face looming in the heart of the monster. He had turned away by the time the bullet struck, but he heard the swish of leaves tearing as the projectile slapped against the plant’s greenery.

* * *

DOWN BELOW, RYAN and his companions heard the shot and went on high alert.

“Triple red, people,” Ryan ordered, bringing his blaster up to cover the hole in the ceiling through which Jak had exited the redoubt. “We don’t know if that was Jak or someone else—”

“It was Jak,” J.B. confirmed. “Sound of a Colt Python, can’t mistake it.”

“What if someone else has the same weapon, John Barrymore?” Doc asked without looking away from the hole, his LeMat trained on the tiny patch of sky that could be seen through it. “Or what if they took it.”

“Point taken,” J.B. said, “though it’d be a bastard coincidence if it was someone else’s.”

Before the companions could discuss the issue further, Jak leaped through the opening above them, moving with the agility of a monkey. Behind and above Jak, the companions saw the thick, trailing cords of the mutie plant as it reached into the hole. In a second, it launched another wave of razor-sharp thorns—straight into the redoubt.

“Gaia!” Krysty cried as Jak came into sight.

“Get back!” Jak screamed as he dropped through the gap in the ceiling.

His six companions stepped back without question, and the clutch of thorns thudded against leaves and the hard surfaces of the walls and floor, striking with rattling beats. Doc took two on his left sleeve, while three more struck J.B.’s fedora—but none of them penetrated its target.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc gasped, brushing the thorns from his coat before they scratched him.

“What the hell is that?” Ricky hissed, stepping forward and raising his Webley Mk VI to target the shadowy mutie plant as it reached through the hole.

“Get back, kid,” J.B. cautioned, reaching forward and shoving Ricky back. The youth was adventurous and courageous, but he had an impetuous streak that could get them all into trouble, J.B. knew, if he didn’t keep his eyes on him.

Jak stood on a branch twelve feet above the floor of the control room. He leaped, tucking and rolling as he landed amid the dense foliage, his blaster clutched close to his chest.

“Friend of yours?” Krysty asked as Jak recovered at her feet.

“Angry plant,” Jak replied, turning to face the gap in the ceiling.

“So I see,” Krysty stated.

Impossibly, the plant lunged into the redoubt, roots trailing behind it, branches flailing ahead like the limbs of an octopus. With the plant blocking the hole in the roof, the control room became suddenly darker, its details lost in shadow. Whatever the plant was, it had a hunting nature and a rudimentary instinct, chasing after the young man who had disturbed its resting place.

The human face in its center eyed the companions in the semidarkness, eyeballs swiveling. It spotted Mildred with her colourful beaded plaits and sent one of its snakelike limbs toward her. The limb was fifteen feet in length and lined with thorns and budding flowers the color of sour milk.

Mildred stepped back and blasted a shot from her ZKR 551 target pistol, the weapon booming in the underground chamber. The bullet struck the limb, carving a line along its surface before embedding halfway down its length. At the same moment, another cluster of thorns spit from its surface, striking her along the left side of her torso and both legs.

Mildred yelled in pain, dropping to the floor.

The limb flailed toward her face, but Doc stepped in to block it, slicing at it with his sword stick. Then he fired his LeMat directly into the crook of the joint where that limb met the trunk. There was no time to check on Mildred’s condition.

Across the room, J.B. and Ryan were busy fencing with another limb.

“Ugly green son of a bitch,” J.B. snarled as he fired a burst of 9 mm bullets at the flailing limb.

The narrow end of the spiny protrusion whipped around and around like a bolo before grabbing J.B.’s blaster arm and yanking him off his feet.

J.B. yelled in agony as he was lifted from the floor and felt the thorns digging into him. Ryan took careful aim, holding his SIG Sauer in a two-handed grip. The one-eyed man squeezed the trigger, sending a 9 mm slug into the limb that clutched his oldest friend. The Swiss bullet drilled into and through the limb, three inches in diameter, pulling a great gout of green bark and fibrous material with it as it emerged from the other side.

There was a sound like splitting wood and suddenly, the fractured plant limb struggled with J.B.’s weight, swaying to and fro as it tried to hang on to its victim. Still in its grip, J.B. brought around the muzzle of his mini-Uzi until it pointed at the core of the plant, where that human torso rested amid the green. Then he fired, holding down the trigger for a short burst as the limb tossed him left and right. The volley of 9 mm bullets punched into the main stem of the plant in a line of dark circles, moving upward toward the human lungs and face in its center. As the bullets reached for the man within, other parts of the plant seemed to lunge forward—thick, waxy leaves swishing across the path of the bullets like a gaudy slut doing an old-style fan dance, each fan shuttering into place.

“The man’s the driver,” J.B. hollered as he swayed six feet off the ground, still snagged in the plant’s grip. “Chill him and we might get out of here with our asses inta—”

J.B.’s statement was cut short as he was slammed headfirst into a wall by the flailing limb, the brim of his fedora snapping back, his throat issuing a croak of pain.

Ryan took another shot, lining up carefully with the figure in the center of the mutie plant. Around him, Ricky, Jak and Krysty were doing the same while Doc thrust and parried a lively limb with his sword cane.

Thorns whizzed from the fast-moving limbs, hammering into the walls and striking the companions as they fought.

Ricky held his hand up to shield his eyes as a wave of thorns rattled against him, ripping threads from his clothes and embedding themselves into his flesh.

The mutie plant loomed through the gap in the ceiling, half in and half out of the control room, but it was large enough to crowd the room itself. A tendril lashed toward Ryan as he loosed another shot from the SIG Sauer, whipping him across the face and knocking him back.

“Fireblast!” Ryan yelled as he toppled backward, slamming against the overgrowth, the leaves and ferns forming a soft bed beneath him. He was momentarily disorientated, the hard impact of the floor cushioned only slightly by the springiness of the flattened leaves. Ryan heard a whisper of sound, felt fléchettes of thorns pepper his chest and face, digging in with vicious precision.

Across the room, Jak found himself tangled with one of the vines, one arm and both legs trapped in the whipcordlike tendril as it snaked around him. Jak grunted as the vine pressed against his chest and legs, lifting him up from the floor. His blaster hand was trapped, the Colt Python useless where it was pressed against his right leg as if he had been tied.

Jak struggled as the mutie plant dragged him over the undergrowth.

“Got me!” Jak shouted, trying to alert his companions. But even as he said it he could see that only Krysty and Doc remained standing and they were both busy with their own battles. The plant, it seemed, could multitask, combating multiple foes at once.

Jak was dragged up high into the room, and he dipped his head as the ceiling came racing toward him.

Crash!

Jak found himself slammed against the ceiling, gasping as pain erupted across his back and his right shoulder began to go numb. Then he felt something squeeze against him where the plant held him, like a boa constrictor ensnaring its prey. Jak felt the press of spines against him, pushing through the protective material of his clothes.

He twisted and turned in place, felt the rain patter against his skin as he was dragged through the hole in the roof. His blaster was useless where it was, but his left arm was still free. In a fraction of second, Jak flipped his wrist in a sharp movement and a throwing knife dropped into his hand from his sleeve. As he was drawn toward the human head amid the monstrous plant, Jak thrust the knife forward, stabbing the man’s face right across the jaw. A gout of flesh and sap went sailing into the air, and the man made a kind of ticking noise from somewhere deep in his throat.

“Let. Go. Me,” Jak snarled, forcing out the words as the pressure of the vines increased on his ribs and lungs.

Still inside the room, Krysty heard Jak’s strained words and looked up. She was fencing with another of those tendrillike vines, this one thick as a person’s leg. The tendril kept trying to cinch around Krysty’s feet and she kept dancing out of its way, using the butt of her blaster to rain hammer blows against it rather than waste precious bullets.

At Jak’s call, Krysty leaped over the swinging tendril as it made another pass for her, grabbing an overhanging branch and pulling herself up from the floor. As she clambered up the branch, she called to Doc, who had drawn his sword from its sheath and was hacking at the writhing tendrils of the plant.

“Doc! Jak needs our help!”

Surrounded by a cloud of debris he had hacked from the living plant, Doc looked up, his pale blue eyes sweeping past Krysty’s hurrying figure and up to where Jak was being drawn toward the human face that waited at the plant’s core.

Krysty began to chant quietly, calling on the goddess of the Earth, Gaia, who had gifted the women of Krysty’s family with an incredible power. Krysty felt a surge of strength rush through her, like a jolt of electricity firing through her muscles, igniting every artery, every vein. With the surge of strength came speed and stamina, turning the titian-haired woman superhuman for just a brief period.

With the power channeling through her, Krysty skipped over a grasping tendril as a wave of thorns launched from its surface. The thorns punctured her jeans and she was spattered with sap, but she felt no pain from the impact, merely kept moving through the vegetation toward the squirming thing that loomed above. Her hair seemed to jut around her in lightning bolts now, great slashes of red encircling her face like blood held frozen in the air.

Behind Krysty, Doc raised his LeMat and rested his finger against the secondary trigger, the one that would unleash a blast from the shotgun barrel.

The mutie plant jabbed at Krysty with its tendrils, but she batted them aside, yanking one so hard that it snapped in a shower of gooey yellow sap. Jak was above her now, his feet dangling inches above Krysty’s head.

Without slowing, Krysty leaped, grabbing the thick vine that had wrapped around her pale-skinned partner and pulling herself up. The vine struggled with the weight of two bodies, and as Krysty rocked it the vine sagged toward the floor, depositing Jak there with a thump. The tendril was still wrapped around the albino, thorns digging into his clothes and the flesh beneath. Krysty took a secure hold of the tendril midway between where it held Jak and where it emerged from the stalk. And then she pulled, yanking both sides apart, twisting and ripping until they split, vomiting a splurge of yellow gunk as they tore.

From across the room, Doc’s voice carried with eminent clarity. “Krysty—get down!”

Krysty dropped, her red hair trailing behind her like a flame. Then Doc squeezed the trigger of the LeMat, sending a burst of buckshot at the heart of the predatory plant. The sound of the blaster was like the crack of thunder in the enclosed space. In the center of the plant, the man’s face and neck exploded as the buckshot struck, chunks of flesh, leaf and branch sailing in all directions.

The plant wavered for a moment, unleashing the last of its projectile thorns in a cruel flinch that peppered the room with debris, rattling against the armaglass of the mat-trans chamber with a sound like rain on a tin roof. Then, finally, it was still.

Doc let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding, his blaster still pointing at the center of the sagging plant. “Is...is everyone all right?” he asked.

Jak lay on the floor gasping, like a man who had been drowning tasting air thought lost. The tendril was still cinched around him, but the pressure had eased. Krysty crouched beside him, using the last vestiges of her enhanced strength to untangle Jak from his attacker. The Gaia power’s fury could be measured in heartbeats, long enough to save a companion’s life but not enough to change the world. In its aftermath, Krysty began to weaken, feeling utterly drained. As she loosened the tangle from Jak, he pulled his right hand free and helped her, producing another of his knives from a hidden sheath and using that to hack at the last of the sickly green limb.

Across the room, Ryan lay in agony, spines from the plant embedded across his face and chest. Mildred had recovered and, though woozy, she made her way past overgrown comp consoles to assist Ryan. He clawed at his face, plucking the thorns away before they could sink any deeper. They were nasty things, barbed down their sides with little spiny hairs that felt like needles pulling at the skin when Ryan removed them. A big thorn had embedded in the leather patch that masked his missing left eye, and Mildred pulled the whole patch away. Ryan hissed as the thorn’s point scratch at his flesh.

“You’re okay now,” Mildred soothed. “It’s okay.” Though she said that, she saw that Ryan’s face was dotted with black spines.

J.B. emerged from the deep vegetation close to the door of the room, wiping blood from his split lip and brushing himself down. He was scratched all over and he walked heavily, as if he had hurt one of his legs, but he seemed mobile at least.

“People,” he said, getting the attention of the others. “Our troubles aren’t over yet.”

“What do you mean, J.B.?” Ricky asked. He was still disentangling himself from a wreath of spiny briars, pulling them carefully away from the bare skin of his hands and arms.

“The mat-trans took a hit,” J.B. said, nodding toward the armaglass walls of the chamber, which were now almost entirely hidden behind the creeping vines of the mutie plant. The little that could be seen of the tinted glass was pocked with hundreds of thorns, their dark spiny protrusions trailing across the surface. The walls creaked ominously.

“¡Salir!” Ricky cried. “How will we use—?”

“I’m thinking it might be now or never, kid,” J.B. interrupted as he strode hurriedly toward the mat-trans. “These walls are supposed to be tough, but I have a feeling that they won’t last more than a few minutes under that pressure.”

“Can we remove the creepers?” Krysty asked weakly.

In reply J.B. merely shrugged before turning his attention to Jak.

“What did you see up there? Anything worth sticking around for?”

Sitting on the floor, plucking thorns from his jacket, Jak shook his head. “Leaves everywhere. Sun hidin’, rain pissin’.”

J.B. was the unofficial second-in-command of the group, and he accepted the leadership role when the situation demanded it. With Ryan wounded and the clock ticking, J.B. figured now was the right time to take charge.

“Any more of these muties?” the Armorer pressed, indicating the dying plant. It had taken all seven of them to take out just one of the strange hybrid plants—J.B. didn’t relish taking on another, especially given the injuries they were now suffering as a result.

Jak looked thoughtful, shaking his head slowly. “Not sure. Not see.”

With his mind racing, the Armorer looked around the overgrown control room, picking out the struggling forms of Ryan, Krysty and Jak, the scratches on the exposed skin of Ricky, Doc and Mildred. Acid rain. Deranged plants. Wounded among their ranks. A mat-trans on the brink of dying. It all added up to one thing. “We should bolt, right now,” J.B. announced. “Anyone disagree? Ryan?”

The one-eyed man looked up from his position among the vegetation where he and Mildred were removing thorns from his flesh. J.B. could see the hollow in his face where he no longer wore his eye patch.

Before Ryan could reply, he added, “If we don’t leave now, that mat-trans won’t be running when we need it.” As if to emphasise the Armorer’s point, the walls of the mat-trans let out a loud creak under the pressure of the creeping vines, a fracture appearing in the armaglass like a streak of black lightning.

Ryan nodded. “Lead the way then,” he said, rising slowly from his sitting position with Mildred’s assistance.

The rest of the team moved toward the mat-trans doors, with J.B. standing in the open doorway itself, hurrying them along. “Triple red, people,” J.B. said. “We count this place’s survival time in minutes, not hours.”

Krysty stumbled through the doors with Jak’s assistance, as weak as a kitten after using the Gaia power. Now she was barely able to stand even with Jak’s help. Still, she stopped just inside the mat-trans chamber and waited, her arm propped against a glass wall, watching as Ryan and Mildred made their way inside. Ryan was Krysty’s lover, and they cared deeply for each other in this unforgiving world.

She joined Ryan as he pushed through the doors. Though weak herself, she asked how he was before he could speak. “Were you hit bad, lover?”

Ryan wiped a hand across his face. It was dotted with red marks where blood surged to the surface. “I’ll live.”

The walls of the mat-trans seemed to bulge as the creepers pressed against them. J.B. saw one of the strange creepers move, whipping upward across the armaglass as if it was still alive. A multiheaded tendril crept around the edge of the open door, reaching inside. Through the few plant-free gaps that remained in the armaglass, J.B. spotted the shadow of something moving in the room beyond. Something green and fleshy.

“Time to go, people,” J.B. said the moment Doc and Ricky were through the door, pulling it closed in an instant.

The armaglass cracked with a sound like thunder even as the mat-trans powered up, sending its human cargo on its way to their next destination.

Chapter Four

Laying in the darkness, Ryan rolled his head back and forth. All he could remember of the jump was the armaglass imploding, accompanied by a whole lot of hurt. Wherever they had jumped to, wherever they had materialized—that was something he didn’t know. If he had ever had that knowledge, it was lost to him now.

Ryan reached up again, knocking his right elbow on the side of the confined space where he lay. His hand played across his face, feeling that uncanny intrusion to his empty eye socket, the eyeball that hadn’t been there hours—days? weeks?—earlier, when he was last conscious.

“Fireblast,” he muttered, the word barely louder than a breath.

He listened to the whisper echo around him, the way it was contained in the tiny space that he was sealed within. The close walls, the scant room for movement, the panel above his head—it all spoke of one thing: a coffin.

He was inside a coffin, trapped here by person or persons unknown.

Ryan took a deep breath, wondering in the back of his mind just how much air he had. The air smelled okay, fresh not stale, and he couldn’t detect any hint that he was being poisoned by the carbon dioxide buildup from his own exhalations, or by anything else for that matter. So maybe he hadn’t been here that long, or the box wasn’t sealed as tightly as it might be.

Ryan raised his hands and pushed, shoving at the panel above him. It felt cool and slick, more like plastic molding than wood. He pushed once, then tried harder but it didn’t move.

He tried with his legs, pulling them up as far as he could and kicking first forward, then straight below him where his feet had been resting. There was a panel below but that didn’t give either.

“Dammit,” Ryan growled. “Where the nuking hell am I? Let me out of here!”

There was silence for a moment, just the ringing echo of his own words racing around and around in his ears.

Then something happened.

A light came on, softly at first, illuminating the top panel of the coffinlike space. It faded up from a dark gray to a lighter one, then took on a soft, yellow tint that grew brighter and warmer as Ryan watched. He blinked, both eyes getting used to the brightness.

Both eyes. Well, that was new.

Ryan peered around his container. It had white walls with a glossy finish like plastic or painted metal, though it was warmer than metal, coated wood maybe. The ceiling was made from some translucent material, behind which an unknown illumination device had been set. The device showed no bulb, it merely seemed to make the whole panel glow, though Ryan noted that the edges were slightly dimmer, especially where the corners met. The whole unit appeared to be sealed closed, offering no obvious way out. As he looked, his hands automatically moved across his body, checking for his holster. It was gone; and so were his clothes.

“Who’s there?” Ryan asked, pitching his voice loudly.

“I am,” a male voice replied softly. The voice seemed to come from either side of Ryan, close to his ears.

“Where am I?” he demanded, agitated. As he spoke, his fingers curled, turning his hands into fists. He might have to fight his way out of this; it wasn’t the first time he had awoken inside a prison.

“Remain calm,” the soft male voice replied. It was emanating from the walls to either side of Ryan’s head. He couldn’t tell how; he turned but could not see any evidence of a speaker or a hole. “I’ll be with you momentarily.”

Ryan lay there under the illuminated panel, clenching his hands into fists, ready to take a swing at the face of his jailer.

Chapter Five

Ryan listened intently as he lay beneath the illuminated panel. He was trapped, at the mercy of the person behind the voice, and he didn’t know who the voice belonged to or why he was being held.

There was silence for a minute, maybe less, it was hard to tell. Then Ryan heard the soft susurrus of machinery coming to life, and he felt something subtly moving beneath his back.

“Relax, Mr. Cawdor,” the softly spoken male voice instructed from the hidden speakers in the coffin walls. “You’re quite safe here.”

Ryan clenched his fists tighter. He would get one chance at this, one chance to surprise whoever the hell was waiting outside this sealed box. Ryan was a survivor—he would take that chance.

Above him, the illuminated panel seemed to be receding, but Ryan realized that it wasn’t the panel that was moving but him. Beneath him, the traylike floor of the coffin bed was drawing backward in the direction that Ryan’s head pointed. He tilted his neck back, craned his head and peered up at the panel there as it swished back on some kind of hidden runners.

After that, the bed of the coffin, as he had come to think of it, slid out from its position, and a room came into view, painted white and lit with subtle sidelights that were still dazzling after so long in the box. A man stood to the side of the retreating bed, dressed in white and facing the wall, his head tilted down to look at some kind of panel or screen that jutted there. The man was bald and wore a tinted visorlike item hooked over his ears that shielded his eyes. The man’s hands were poised on the panel as if he was playing a piano.

As the bed slid out from the wall, the man in white turned to Ryan and smiled. “How are you feeling, Mr. Cawdor?” he asked.

Ryan moved then, rolling off the bed before it could fully retract from the wall, and powering his left fist at the man’s jaw. He moved fast, his feet slapping against the cool floor tiles of the room. Ryan’s fist met the man’s jaw with an audible crack, and the bald stranger went crashing backward in a confusion of suddenly awkward limbs.

Everything was different now. Ryan had two eyes where he had become used to just one. Everything seemed suddenly more vivid, the whiteness of the walls brilliant, like lightning in the mist.

Naked, Ryan stepped forward and brought his right fist around in a brutal cross, striking the stranger’s face high on the left cheek before the man had even finished falling. Ryan felt light-headed, unsteady on his feet, but he knew he had to survive, which meant getting out of this trap—or whatever it was—as soon as possible.

“Mr. Cawdor, please—” the man cried, blood showing now between his teeth.

Ryan leaned down, his head still reeling, and punched the man again, striking him dead center of that weird visor he wore and snapping the plastic in two. The right half went spinning across the white-tiled floor while the left shattered, still clinging to the bridge of the man’s nose. A thin line of blood began to ooze from the man’s nose, following a slow path down the side of his tilted face.

“Where am I?” Ryan spit, crouched over the bald man, his face close to the stranger’s.

The man’s eyes rolled around in their sockets, struggling to keep focus. Ryan took that moment to look around him. He was in a small room, twelve-by-ten with plain white walls and a series of drawers running up the wall from which his bed or coffin had emerged. A single, plain door that looked like a flat panel was set in a recess in the wall opposite where the man had been standing. It had no handle and no control mechanism that Ryan could see. He waved one of his hands close to the door to see if he might activate a sensor, but nothing happened.

“Locked,” Ryan muttered, shaking his head.

There were no windows in the room, but where the man had been standing was a pane of glass at roughly waist height, recessed and tilted at an angle so that a standing person could look down into it. With his left hand pressing firmly against the bald man’s breastbone, Ryan raised himself and peered at the glass: it was smoked but otherwise appeared blank.

Beneath him, Ryan felt the man stirring, and heard him mutter something. “Not...going...to hurt you,” the man said, blood washing across his teeth. “Please.”

“Where are my blasters?” Ryan growled. “Where are my friends?”

The bald man’s pink head swayed on his neck like a flower in the breeze, his eyes drifting in and out of focus. Then, as Ryan watched, his victim’s eyes rolled back so that all he could see were the whites behind the flickering lids.

“Fireblast!” Ryan growled, clambering up from the sprawled figure in the white overalls. The man was a weakling, glass jaw, no stamina. He wouldn’t last five minutes outside his lab.

Ryan peered around the room, searching for his weapons. Without warning, the vision in his left eye—the new one—flickered and changed. Ryan started as he saw something appear to scramble across the surface of the eye, flicked his hand before his face without thinking to brush it aside. It was a kind of cross-shaped overlay, like looking through the crosshairs of his Steyr longblaster.

“What the hell?” Ryan muttered, looking through the crosshairs. Almost as soon as he noticed it, it disappeared, as if willed out of existence. Something wasn’t right here, and the sooner he got the heck out of this lab the better, he thought.

Ryan went back to scanning the room, searching for his blasters and panga, wary this time of the strange effect that had popped up across his vision. There was no sign of the weapons, only the plain walls, the coffin drawers and a single, low table propped against one wall next to the door. Ryan pulled one of the drawers at random, but it appeared to be locked. His friends could be in there. Dammit, Ryan raged silently, where was he anyway?

He paced back across the room, standing before the unconscious figure. This place was clearly well appointed, which meant the odds were that this man was not working alone. Even now, Ryan realized, there could be an alarm going off, sec men being moved into position against him. He leaned over the man and checked his pockets, searching for a weapon or something to use as one. There was a tubelike metal thing with a pointed end of the approximate size of a ball-point pen or a small screwdriver. Ryan took it, figuring he could use it like a knife if he had to. The rest of the man’s pockets contained only papers and something that looked like a small circuit board, open with resistors and capacitors soldered to its surface. Ryan tossed it aside, checked the man’s pulse. He was still alive, but his pulse was slow—he would be out of it for a few minutes yet.

Ryan straightened, and as he did so the white door slid open on hidden tracks. As the door slid aside, he saw the edge of a figure who was standing there, a white padded shoulder of a jacket of some kind. Ryan leaped, shoving the door open with one hand while his other—holding the implement like a knife—slammed into the newcomer’s face. The man, dressed in a white topcoat and pants with a cloudburst of black curly hair around his head, staggered back under Ryan’s assault, slamming into the corridor wall behind him. “What th—?” the man stuttered as he went sailing into the wall.

“My friends. My weapons. Where are they?” Ryan growled, driving his left fist into the man’s gut to punctuate his statement.

The white-clad figure doubled over with the impact, hands reaching around to clutch his aching belly. “I—”

The Deathlands warrior pressed his hand against the man’s throat, drew back the metal tube. “Where?”

“Ryan, back off.” The voice was familiar, but it took a moment for him to register it. “Back off,” the voice said again, calling from the end of the corridor.

He turned in that direction and saw J.B. hurrying toward him, shouting for him to stop fighting. His old friend looked different—his clothes were cleaner, the arms on his glasses no longer slightly bent from wear. “Stand down, he wasn’t going to hurt you,” the Armorer stated.

“J.B.?” Ryan asked, bewildered.

Behind J.B., more familiar figures appeared in the white-walled corridor, along with several strangers, all of whom were wearing white clothing like the bald man. Mildred and Ricky hurried to join J.B., while Jak was somewhere behind the others but moving quickly to meet with Ryan. Mildred had a white, sleeveless jerkin over her olive-drab T-shirt, and Ricky was in his usual clothes but they had been cleaned. Jak, too, looked the same but different, his usually unruly long hair washed and smoothed. Besides those familiar faces, a man and two women—all of them looking to be under thirty—were striding up the corridor, looking surprised.

The corridor walls and ceiling were painted a clean white, while the floor had been finished in matching white tiles. Fluorescent lights ran the full length of the corridor without a break, set neatly in a recess that ran in the corners where walls met ceiling.

“What’s going on here?” Ryan asked. “Where are we?”

“We’re safe, we’re among friends. It’s okay,” J.B. said reassuringly, pressing a hand against his friend’s bare shoulder to calm him.

Ryan watched J.B., looking for that telltale flinch that would tell him that the Armorer was being pressured somehow, or that it was a trick. There was nothing, just J.B., clean-shaven, glasses polished, old brown fedora looking a little smarter where the dents had been knocked out of it for once.

“We’re safe, Ryan,” J.B.repeated. “We’re safe.”

Warily, Ryan drew the hand that held the metal tube away from the man he had attacked, pulled his other hand back from the man’s throat. The figure sagged against the wall, breathing with an agonized, choking gasp, blood on his face, a hole in his cheek.

“Where are we?” Ryan asked J.B..

Chapter Six

“They call this place Progress,” J.B. explained.

Ryan sat with the Armorer in a vast lounge area with panoramic windows that looked out over a ville of towering dwellings and predark factories. Jak, Mildred and Ricky were with them, and they all sat around a low table furnished with drinking glasses. The factories pumped smoke into the air, clouding the skies with trails of gray. Ryan had been given clothes to wear, a dressing gown with a simple tie that he had knotted at his waist. He had been assured that his own clothes would be returned shortly. They were being held in storage after being cleaned.

One of the locals, a young woman with flawless skin and blond hair tied back in a braid, had asked Ryan if he needed anything, and when he told her he was thirsty she hurried away and returned a half minute later with bottle of clear water. The bottle didn’t smell of pollutants or of poison, so Ryan sipped at its contents warily as he took in everything J.B. was telling him. The blonde stood on the far side of the room, ostensibly admiring the view through the windows but actually keeping an eye on Ryan in case he went on another rampage. Other people from the ville had been sent to deal with the wounded that Ryan had left in his wake.

“Progress,” Ryan repeated, skepticism clear in his tone.

“Stupe name, I guess,” J.B. admitted, “but you get used to it. The ville was built around an old military base—redoubt, mat-trans, the whole enchilada. When we jumped out of that redoubt greenhouse from hell...you remember that?”

Ryan nodded, taking another sip of water.

“When we jumped, we wound up here,” J.B. continued. “We were all pretty beat-up when we arrived—”

“I remember the armaglass wall imploding,” Ryan confirmed.

“Yeah, you got a face-full of that,” J.B. told him regretfully, “and we all got cut up pretty bad. Some of the glass came with us too, and really did a number on us.”

“Where’s Krysty?” Ryan asked. “Is she okay?”

“She’s fine,” Mildred told him, leaning closer. “Doc too.”

“Well, mebbe a bit more ornery,” J.B. added, “if you want my opinion.”

Mildred shot a look at J.B. “Everyone made it, Ryan,” she said. “We’re all okay. The people here in Progress went above and beyond to patch us up.”

Ryan nodded, reaching up with one hand to feel at the alien eye that had been placed in the empty socket. “So I see,” he said, the irony of the phrase lost on him. “What is this thing, Mildred? What did they do to me?”

“We’ve been here two weeks, Ryan,” J.B. replied before Mildred could speak. “Some of us were badly wounded by the armaglass. We’d all lost a lot of blood.”

“The locals treated us,” Mildred stated. “They saw the damage to your face, and they plucked out all the debris you’d got showered with. When they saw your missing eye, well, they improvised.”

“So, I can see again?” Ryan asked. He knew that he could, but he wanted to know how.

“The locals will explain it to you more fully,” Mildred told him, “but basically they’ve fused a computerized camera to your optic nerve, allowing you to use both eyes once more.”

“It has crosshairs,” Ryan said, glancing across the room to where the blonde stood. Jak was watching her too, he noticed; as usual, the albino was alert, suspicious of anyone he didn’t know.

“Your new eye has a lot of things,” Mildred replied. “From what they told me, that’s a pretty serious piece of hardware they’ve put inside your skull.”

“And they did this for nothing?” Ryan asked, knowing that everything had a price. He gazed out the window behind Mildred, focusing his vision, changing the depth. The artificial eye responded seamlessly, and when he drew a close bead on something in the distance those faint crosshairs reappeared over his left field of vision.

“As far as we can tell,” Mildred replied. “They have a philosophy here in Progress about changing the world and making things better again. They want to fix the mess that the nukecaust left us. They want to repair the Deathlands so people can live here and prosper.”

Ryan looked at Mildred, then turned to J.B. before addressing them both. “Where is this place?” he asked.

“California,” J.B. answered. “Some part of it that survived the San Andreas problem.”

Ryan looked out at the blue sky, wondering what they had walked into this time; wondering if they could survive in a place where survival didn’t seem to be a struggle.

* * *

SHORTLY AFTER THAT, two of the locals joined Ryan’s group in the lounge, carrying his clothes—repaired and freshly laundered—as well as his combat boots and his familiar weapons.

The locals were a man and a woman, the man was quite young while the woman looked to be approaching middle age, slivers of iron gray in her hair, wrinkles clawed around her eyes. They seemed pleasant enough, albeit subservient in their attitude. They reminded Ryan of his childhood, growing up as a baron’s son in Front Royal, where his every need was attended to by servants.

Ryan began to disrobe there in the lounge, but the woman held her hand up before her and suggested he follow her to a separate room, where he might dress in privacy. He followed her out of the lounge, into a white-walled hallway to a door. It slid aside at the woman’s touch, and Ryan looked at her confused.

“How’d you do that?” he asked.

The woman held up her left hand, and Ryan noticed the unobtrusive band of silver she wore on her middle finger like a wedding ring. “The doors are programmed to respond to this,” she said.

Ryan nodded, not really sure what to say. He had seen technology before; of course he had—the redoubts he and his companions used to travel the secret roads of the Deathlands were graced with working technology that dated back over a hundred years, and seemed far in advance of anything humankind was capable of these day. He had also fought with mechanical devices before now, robotic things that walked like norms but chilled with the coldheartedness of machines. Even so, this was new—this ville with its hidden locks and uncluttered, almost sterile environment.

The room’s walls were painted white like the other parts of the complex that he had seen, with illumination gradually manifesting from a low dimness. The room had a small window at one end, and it featured a single bed, walk-in wardrobe and a small basin for washing.

“Let me know if you need anything,” the woman told him as she placed his weapons on the bed. “I’ll be just outside. My name’s Roma, by the way.”

“Good to meet you, Roma-by-the-way,” Ryan said with a self-deprecating smile.

Roma left and the door to the room sealed behind her. Alone, Ryan paced, deep in thought. There was a mirror located on the wall beside the basin, set at a height to shave by, and when Ryan paused before it a hidden light tucked into a fold in the mirror’s frame glowed brighter, lighting his face for the reflection. He looked at himself, assessing his appearance as if for the first time. Black curly hair, a little disheveled where he had been sleeping in the coffin-drawer. Chin, clean shaved for the first time in weeks.

Eyes—two.

The right one was an intense shade of blue, the left a little duller perhaps, but a close enough match. He looked at it in the mirror, the way it rested in his socket as if it had been there forever. As he looked, staring more and more intensely at the workmanship that had gone into that artificial orb, the crosshairs reappeared over his vision, like a faint blurring in the air, forming a central point that had been left open to view.

As Ryan continued looking, the vision in his left eye magnified—x2, x5, x10—running through the magnifications in rapid succession, so quick it made him feel nauseous. Ryan’s right eye, his real eye, remained at normal focus, unable to magnify, leaving him with the disorienting double image of distant and close-up at the same time.

He closed his eyes, brought his hands up to his face, breathing fast.

“What did they do to me?” Ryan muttered, trying to keep from being sick.

Behind him, there came a light tapping at the door followed by Roma’s voice. “Mr. Cawdor, are you decent?”

“Decent?” Ryan asked the air.

“Are you dressed? There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”

Raising his head tentatively, Ryan opened his eyes and reached for the SIG Sauer blaster that rested on the bedcover beside his piled clothes. “Yeah, I’m decent,” he said, flipping off the safety.

The door slid back on near-silent runners and Krysty stepped into the room, while Roma waited obediently outside. Krysty looked beautiful—more beautiful than Ryan had remembered, he would swear. Her vivid red hair swirled around her pale face like a flame, her eyes the green of sunlight through emerald. She was dressed in a version of her usual clothes—blouse, jeans—but they were white. Only her familiar blue cowboy boots remained as Ryan remembered, and even they had been reheeled and polished to remove the scuffs from walking thousands miles of the Deathlands. The boots looked almost new. Ryan held his breath as he saw her, his heart pounding.

“Ryan, I’m so happy to finally see you!” Krysty ran the last few steps and flew into Ryan’s arms, hugging him fiercely. She pressed her face into his neck, as if she could not get close enough. “You’re okay,” she sobbed, “you’re okay.”

“I’m okay,” Ryan assured her, stroking her red hair with his free hand. She smelled of soap and cleanser, fresh like mountain air.

With his other hand, Ryan slipped the safety back on the SIG Sauer and dropped the blaster back onto the bed before bringing his arm back around to hold Krysty to him. “I’m all right,” he told her again. “What about you? Are you okay?”

Krysty nodded her reply; Ryan felt the movement against his neck.

“What did I miss?” Ryan asked, his eyes locked on the door to the room to check it had closed, and that they were alone.

“Two weeks,” Krysty said, the words coming out like a sigh. “You were two weeks in that bath, Ryan—”

“Bath?” Ryan asked, confused.

“Nutrient bath,” Krysty said, pulling herself reluctantly from Ryan’s strong arms. “When we got here, you’d been hit by the imploding wall of the mat-trans—did they tell you that?”

“J.B. and Mildred said something about it,” Ryan confirmed, reaching for his pants. They had been freshly laundered and smelled—well, they smelled clean, which was nothing short of remarkable, considering how long he’d been wearing these particular duds.

“You were badly injured,” Krysty explained. “We all were. A great chunk of that glass had jumped with us when the mat-trans activated, and we brought it with us in the jump. When we materialized, the glass was still moving. You got the worst of it, but Doc and Jak got a couple of nasty cuts too.”

“And you?” Ryan prompted.

Krysty shook her head. “A few cuts and grazes,” she said, pushing her right sleeve up and showing him the skin there. It was unmarked. “Had a few scabs here a week ago, but they’ve healed.”

“Sore?”

“No.”

Ryan nodded, slipping out of the dressing gown and reaching for his shirt. As he did, Krysty pressed her hand against his chest, running her fingers through his chest hair.

“I’ve missed you,” she whispered.

Ryan was a pragmatist. He desired Krysty in that moment, but he wanted to stay alive too. He knew that staying alive sometimes meant foregoing the things he wanted. Right now, he needed to know all the facts, before someone put a bullet in the back of his head or dumped him back in that coffin where he had woken up.

“You said about a nutrient bath,” Ryan said thoughtfully, pushing Krysty gently away.

“After you were hit by the glass, you fell unconscious,” Krysty said, picking up her story. “You’d lost a lot of blood—were still losing it. We were all in a mess.”

“What happened?”

“Someone outside the chamber somehow opened the mat-trans door. Doc figured they did it with a comp,” Krysty said. “It was the people here, a team of them, and they came to help us. They took us away, nursed everyone’s injuries. Mildred said they did a commendable job.”

“What about me?” Ryan pressed.

“You’d suffered the worst of us,” Krysty told him, and he saw worry in her face as she thought back. “There was a whole pool of your blood on the mat-trans floor. They took you away on a gurney, rushed you over to their medical center—”

“And you let them?” Ryan bit off the rest of his comment. It wasn’t an accusation or criticism; he was merely surprised to hear his companions would have been so trusting.

“Like I said, we were pretty messed up after the jump,” Krysty explained. “J.B. questioned them, tried to stop them, I think, but none of us was in a state to put up much of a fight. We didn’t need to, thank goodness.

“They took care of you, lover. They took you straight to surgery and removed the glass, then they started patching you up. They have advanced techniques here—that’s according to Mildred. She understands more about it than I do. She says they used nanobots to repair your body, dunked you in a nutrient bath full of them to give you time to recover.”

“How long?” Ryan asked.

“Eight days,” Krysty said, fixing him with her stare. She was looking at his new eye, Ryan could tell, trying to get used to seeing it in his face.

“Eight days,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“I waited, but I wasn’t allowed to see you in all that time,” Krysty told him. “They were worried about contamination, because you were in such a fragile state.”

Ryan pulled on his shirt, buttoning it from the bottom up. “What about the eye?” he said.

“I didn’t know about that until you came out of the bath,” Krysty told him. “None of us did. The surgeons thought you’d lost it in the mat-trans accident, I guess, because your patch was missing. They replaced it while they were working on you, fixed it the way they fixed everything else.”

Krysty looked at Ryan, examining his face, his eye. “How is it?” she asked.

“It’s...” Ryan stopped even as he began to reply. How did he feel about missing an eye for the better part of his life and waking up one day to find it had been put back? How could he react to that? How could he even process it?

“The eye has capabilities,” Ryan told her. “It’ll take some getting used to.”

“There are counselors here in Progress,” Krysty said. “One of them will tell you how it functions, show you how best to use it.”

Ryan nodded uncertainly as he finished buttoning his shirt.

Krysty looked at him and smiled that dazzling, beautiful smile that would make any man’s heart melt. “It looks good, Ryan. If I wasn’t spoken for, I’d fall for you all over again right now.”

Chapter Seven

“The eye has many properties that you will find useful,” the gray-haired woman told Ryan.

Once he had dressed, Ryan and Krysty had been escorted to another room by Roma. Mildred and J.B. tagged along.

The new room was wide-open with white walls, a raised bed and a desk-type arrangement that pulled out from a recess in one of the walls, smoothly folding out in sections. A long window dominated the opposite wall of the room, looking out over the industrial center with its towering chimneys. Ryan could see that a river flowed fast and furious along the edge of the ville.

The woman stood before the desk. She was dressed in a long white robe with a high collar, and gloves molded into the sleeves. Her iron-gray hair was tied back in a neat ponytail. She acknowledged Ryan with a warm smile, introducing herself as Betty. Ryan’s companions had met Betty before, and she knew them all by name.

J.B. took one look at the examination room and stepped back through the door. “It’s going to get mighty cramped with all of us in there,” he said. “Krysty, why don’t you and me go to the lounge while the healer checks Ryan over?”

Krysty checked with Ryan before agreeing, and he assured her he would be fine. “Mildred’s here with me,” he said. “Finest shot in the Deathlands—she’ll look out for me.” He said that last statement as something of a couched warning, uncertain whether he should trust the whitecoat.

Roma led J.B. and Krysty from the room, the door whispering closed behind her. Once they were gone, Betty adjusted something on the desk and the long window assumed a tinted aspect, cutting the bright sunlight like sunglasses and casting the room in a grayish shadow. There was a machine in the room too, Ryan saw now—cylindrical and almost as tall as he was, the thing moved on hidden wheels, a bank of lights running across its metallic skin.

“You’re looking well, Mr. Cawdor,” Betty said, smiling. “Your recovery has been excellent.”

“He’s strong,” Mildred said, taking up a position to one side of the room so that Betty could examine Ryan.

“Now, you’re not going to start punching me, are you, Mr. Cawdor?” the woman in the white robe asked.

Ryan shook his head. “You heard about that, huh? I was a little disoriented when I woke up and I wasn’t getting answers.”

Betty nodded. “You were in recovery for a long time,” she said. “It’s understandable.”

Then she indicated the bed and Ryan lay down, unbuttoning his shirt. Betty checked him over with detached professionalism, assuring him—and herself—that his scars had almost healed. The cylindrical thing waited silently beside Betty, scanning Ryan with its emotionless camera eye.

“Krysty said I’d been placed in a bath of nutrients,” Ryan said. “Can you explain what happened?”

Betty nodded. “Yes, you must have a lot of questions. The nutrient bath that your companion spoke of was to assist in your healing. While there, nano-machinery—which performs surgery on a molecular level—was used to repair your wounds, including those sustained in surgery when glass and other material was removed from your body.”

“What other material?” Ryan asked.

Betty stepped over to the desk and brought up a report on the embedded screen. “Some plant matter, much of it toxic. Similar material was found in almost all of your colleagues when you arrived, but we successfully removed all of it.”

“We fought a plant,” Ryan said. “I remember.”

“Tough bitch of thing, too,” Mildred added grimly.

“The nutrient bath assisted in your body’s natural repair,” Betty continued, “after which you were placed in a regulated environment where your body temperature could be kept at the optimum for recovery and could be fed proteins to maximize your healing.”

“The coffin,” Ryan stated.

“What’s that?” Betty asked, turning her attention back from the comp.

“I woke up inside a sealed box,” Ryan said. “I figured someone was trying to bury me.”

“Quite the opposite,” Betty told him, flashing her teeth in an awkward smile. The teeth were good, strong-looking but yellowed with age. Ryan saw a sliver of metal there behind the upper right canine where a tooth had been removed and replaced. “Would you sit up for me?”

Nodding, Ryan shifted himself until he was sitting upright once more. Then, while he sat on the bed, Betty asked him to do a few tests with his new eye, reading the characters on a distant chart that was projected in the air by the cylindrical machine, identifying colors and observing movement through a spinning device in its trunk. Once she had confirmed the eye was functioning correctly, Betty told Ryan that the eye had extra properties.

“I think I stumbled on one,” Ryan admitted. “I focused my vision and a crosshairs target appeared.”

“Yes,” Betty confirmed. “You can also magnify the image in the left eye, like a longblaster scope. Are you right-or left-handed, Mr. Cawdor?”

“Right,” Ryan said, holding up his right hand.

“Tsk, that’s a shame.” Betty sighed “But it is not a huge loss. Obviously, the targeting facility would have been better in the same eye as your blaster hand but that can’t be helped now.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind the next time I lose an eye,” Ryan told her sarcastically.

The clinician acknowledged this with a snort before going back to her explanation. “The eye has other properties that feed directly into your optic nerve to be processed by your brain. You now have night vision, including an infrared functionality—which will also allow you to track the heat given off by a subject. You may access the former by blinking twice in quick succession while in darkness or semidarkness.”

Since the room was shaded, Ryan first tried the night vision, blinking rapidly twice. The feed from his left eye switched to a gray-green hue. The feed from the night vision was confused because Ryan also had his real eye open, creating a double image, one normal and one cast in gray-green.

“Whoa,” Ryan said, feeling a wave of nausea run through him.

“You may find it easier to process if you close your other eye,” Betty said.

Ryan did just that. Then he gazed around the room, saw the figures and details of the room picked out vividly in what seemed to be a murky gray fog. He saw Mildred smiling as he experimented, her eyes and teeth a brilliant white lined in neon green, while the bank of lights on the surface of the cylindrical machine seemed brilliant in the gloom. “That’s...working,” Ryan said, blinking again until the feed switched back to normal.

“The infrared requires pressure here.” Betty showed Ryan by touching the bottom left corner of her own eye.

He mimicked the woman’s gesture and, after a moment’s trial and error finding the pressure plate, he activated the infrared function. This time, he had the foresight to close his other eye, ensuring he saw only the feed. Suddenly, the room was cast in a dull gray through Ryan’s left eye, with the two human forms burning a brilliant red-orange as they watched him. The cylindrical machine glowed a faint orange, cold and lifeless despite its ability to move independently. Ryan moved his head, looking around the room at the spots of heat at the desk and, more dully, across the bank of windows.

“Seems dandy,” Ryan said.

When he drew his hand up to touch the pressure plate again, Ryan saw his own body recast in a brilliant swirl of red, yellow and white, as if he were made of fire. He pressed the hidden plate, toggling back to normal vision.

“What else can it do?” Ryan asked.

“You can hold an image for review at a later period,” Betty said. “To do this, focus on the subject for five seconds and squint your eye like so. You may then recall this image at a later date, where it may be shown as its own image or as an overlay to whatever you are looking at for means of comparison.”

“How many images can it store like that?” Ryan checked. “And how do I recall them?”

“Look to your left while holding down the pressure pad to retrieve an image,” Betty told him. “Do the same once the image is visible and hold your eye closed for five seconds to delete.”

“Delete?” Ryan asked, uncertain what the term meant in this context.

“Permanently remove the image from the eye,” Betty elaborated. “You may hold up to twelve images, but that number will be less should you take images while in night-mode or infrared.”

Ryan nodded. “Got it.”

Mildred spoke up from where she was standing close to the now-tinted windows. “Is there anything else Ryan or I need to know, such as how to maintain or service the artificial eye?”

“The eye is self-servicing,” Betty said. “You may detect some deterioration over the very long term—by which I mean decades rather than years—but should that be the case you may return here and we would be able to adjust the eye or replace it.”

“Just one more question,” Ryan said. “How did you find us?”

“This is Progress, California,” Betty said. “The site grew out of the military redoubt you accessed via your mat-trans jump, which is how we found you.”

“You found us?”

Betty smiled. “Not me personally, no. A patrol was sent to investigate when the mat-trans activated. I don’t know how much you know about the mat-trans system, but it’s largely automated, and that automation includes an alert sent to a number of linked monitoring stations when the system powers up to receive someone.”

Ryan said nothing, merely accepting the information without reacting. The mat-trans was his little secret, one kept by himself and his companions. They did not know much about the functionality of the devices, only that they transported them across the continent—and occasionally off the continent—via some kind of hidden pathways and that there was apparently no way to predetermine where a jump would lead. Ryan was hesitant of sharing any information with the locals, even ones who had saved his life. Save your life today, shoot you in the back tomorrow—that’s what Trader used to tell him.

“It’s lucky we did,” Betty continued. “You and your friends were in a terrible state on arrival. I don’t know what you’d been putting yourself through, but it had left you all seriously wounded.”

“The imploding wall of the mat-trans during the jump didn’t help,” Mildred said, deadpan.

“No, I don’t imagine it would have,” Betty agreed. She touched something on the inset screen at her desk and the shaded tint to the window glass seemed to recede as Ryan watched. Nothing moved there that he could see. The opacity merely altered in a gradual manner until the windows were clear once more. He flicked momentarily to magnification mode, staring at the window frame.

“You have some mighty advanced tech here,” Ryan said. “Heck of a lucky find.”

“Oh, we didn’t find it, Mr. Cawdor,” Betty told him, “we built it.”

Chapter Eight

Once the examination with Betty was completed, Ryan felt the need to stretch his legs. “From what I can tell, I’ve been cooped up in a box for two weeks,” he told Krysty as he met her and J.B. outside the examination room. “I need to feel some fresh air, get the wind in my hair.”

“It’s a large ville, Ryan,” Krysty told him. “You’ll be impressed.”

“Yeah, I could see that through the windows,” Ryan agreed.

Krysty led him to an elevator that spiraled through the building. The elevator was cylindrical with a door that slid silently back on a curved tread. Stepping into it was like stepping into an upright pipe. A single overhead light source was obscured by a screen that diffused the illumination into a subtle effect, preventing any glare. Ryan eyed it for a moment as he stepped inside, flicking through the different options with his new cybernetic eye.

Crosshairs.

Magnification.

Night vision.

Infrared.

“Hey, Ryan,” Mildred called as he stood with Krysty in the elevator. “You be careful. You only just woke up—don’t overdo it, okay?”

“Sure,” Ryan agreed, still flicking through his visual options.

“And, Krysty,” Mildred added, “I’m trusting you to keep an eye on the patient.”

Krysty agreed and a moment later the door slid closed and the elevator began its smooth descent to ground level.

Ryan moved close to Krysty, kissing her mouth and then her cheek. As his lips came close to her ear, he whispered, “This place safe? Don’t answer out loud.”

Krysty nodded very definitely against Ryan’s head, moaning once as if in delight at his kisses.

“Will I need my blasters?” Ryan asked, still whispering.

“Oh, lover,” Krysty groaned. As she did so, she shook her head slightly: No.

Ryan kissed her again as the elevator stopped its silent descent and the door drew back. They were in a vast lobby now, its proportions dwarfing anything Ryan could think of—it was like a predark aircraft hangar or a shipyard, ceilings so high they were almost four stories above him. There were a few people in the vast room—too few for its size, in Ryan’s opinion, but he had witnessed chronic overcrowding in the Deathlands and the sickness it had brought. The people were dressed in white and pale colors, loose-fitting clothes that better suited the climate of the West Coast. Some moved on wheeled devices, standing atop them, maintaining their balance with arms gently out to their sides as they sped swiftly across the room.

A quick scan, automatic now after all these years, revealed that no one appeared to be armed.

The room’s illumination came from an impressive wall of windows that looked out on to the ville. Ryan and Krysty strode across the room, fifty steps from the elevator to the nearest doorway, a twenty-foot-wide gap in the glass that opened straight out onto a veranda beyond. There was an awning up above to keep rain off, should there be any, and the veranda and its surrounds were designed in such a way that no wind could penetrate into the lobby itself.

Ryan stepped out into the sunlight, taking in a deep breath of air. Morning sunshine and clear skies gave a fresh feel to the day. The wide streets were paved and clean, birds occasionally fluttering past, landing for a moment to scout the area for food. Buildings towered all around, eight huge structures clad in bold white like the great marble temples of ancient Greece. The lowest of them was two stories, the tallest much higher than that. The buildings were linked, Ryan saw, with bridges running across the streets from their upper stories. The bridges were open to the elements. Few people were about, given all the space, but Ryan noticed that several of them were traveling via the same wheeled disklike platforms, flitting between the buildings like a ballerina figurine pirouetting out of a music box.

“This place is incredible,” Ryan said as he tried to take it all in.

“They’ve been very hospitable,” Krysty told him. “We’ve wanted for nothing.”

Ryan checked the weapon at his hip, noticed Krysty was still wearing her Smith & Wesson on hers. “Not that hospitable, though,” he said, indicating her blaster.

Krysty smiled. “Force of habit,” she admitted. “I haven’t had to draw my blaster in two weeks. The only time it’s been out of its holster has been to oil it.”

Ryan nodded. Oiling their weapons was a ritual the companions strictly followed. A well-maintained blaster could mean the difference between life and death in the Deathlands; it would never do to become complacent, no matter how tranquil the surroundings.

And they were very tranquil. There was noise here—the hiss and drone from the factories, the sound of the nearby river rushing past—but it was muffled by the buildings and the wide-open spaces.

Ryan and Krysty walked slowly down a wide thoroughfare. Outside, the building looked newly built and was a pale yellow that was almost white, better to reflect the fierce California sun. It ran over three hundred feet before Ryan and Krysty reached its edge, the same in the other direction. Ryan was impressed by its size.

“Is this place all dedicated to fixing people up?” he asked Krysty.

“They’re very advanced here,” Krysty replied. “Mildred said they’re doing a lot of experimental work into cybernetics—like the unit they put in your eye.”

“Robot stuff?” Ryan asked, glancing back at the building.

“From what I’ve seen, they use the building as a repair shop and medical center,” Krysty said. “I’m not sure they see much difference between those things.”

As Ryan focused on the building, the crosshairs reappeared across his left field of vision, a ghost overlay on the image. “Yeah, I guess.”

They continued walking, taking it slowly as Ryan realized how exhausted he felt. He had been fed a steady drip of proteins while held in the drawerlike unit, and while he was fully nourished he had little energy—that had been used up by his body for repairs.

People flitted past on the wheeled disks, while another group traveled toward Ryan and Krysty in a group, riding aboard a wheeled transport roughly the size of a wag but entirely open to the elements. Ryan looked at the vehicle as it passed them and moved down the road. Its passage was almost silent and it had no driver, just a cylindrical box of lights up front a little like the thing that had assisted Betty during her examination.

Krysty watched Ryan, the smile never leaving her face. She was pleased to have him back—it had been a fraught two weeks waiting for the man she loved to wake up after all that he had been through. As they walked, Krysty brought him up to speed on what the companions had been doing in his absence—J.B. and Mildred had checked out every nook and cranny of the medical center, while Jak and Ricky had spent time scouting the ville and its immediate surrounds, coming and going as they pleased. Doc, she explained, had been disappointed in the food here and had taken it on himself to show the local “Progressians” how to cook, despite the lack of a variety of ingredients. Krysty didn’t tell Ryan about her own recovery, nor how much time she had spent in a medically induced coma; she did not want to worry him.

“You weren’t tempted to move on?” Ryan teased. “To leave me behind?”

“No one gets left behind,” Krysty reminded him. “Especially you, lover.”

It was true. No one would ever be left behind. Ryan had been with J.B., Krysty and Doc longer than anyone, and the others were just as much family to him now. But there had been an occasion—once—when someone had been left behind: Ryan’s own son, Dean Cawdor, stolen by his mother, Sharona, and lost to him for the cruel eternity that only a grieving parent could know. Dean was alive, but changed, and his recent reacquaintance with his father had been brief and had not ended well. It was something Ryan couldn’t fix, though he hoped that one day Dean would come back to him. It was something that Ryan didn’t vocalize, but he thought of Dean just about every day.

Fifteen minutes’ slow walk brought the couple to the edge of the ville, where a mighty river flowed. “J.B. calls the river the Klamath,” Krysty said.

J.B. was the guardian of the maps for the group, and he employed a mini-sextant to get their bearings when they traveled. Without him, the group would be lost in Hell; as it was, they traveled the post-nukecaust roads with the knowledge of where they were, but they were still the roads of Hell.

“A lot of California was devastated when the quakes hit,” Ryan observed, peering out at the raging waters. Whiteheads leaped and dissipated there, like horses in the sea.

Ryan was correct in what he said. California had been struck hard by the nukecaust and all that followed. Great chunks of the west coast of America had been sheared off when the San Andreas Fault broke open, and some of the state had been relegated to an archipelago of tiny islands dotted in the Pacific. J.B. couldn’t know it, but the Klamath River had been widened in the past century as a result of the tectonic plate movement, and now ran at a faster speed than it had a hundred years earlier.

Ryan looked across the rushing river to where a great dam had been constructed. The dam was made from huge hunks of stone that had been carved and shaped with craftsmanlike precision, barricading the river. A grand walkway ran across the top, as wide as a two-lane blacktop, arching forty feet above the tumultuous surface of the fast-flowing water. The dam ended in a high protective wall on the far bank, while the near side was attached to a monitoring tower that rose another twenty above the high wall. It was an impressive feat of engineering, something seldom seen in the devastated Deathlands.

“What’s that?” Ryan asked, his eye focusing on the details of the pale, curved wall of stone. “A dam. But I don’t see a whole lot of farming going on.” In fact there was none; the area surrounding the ville appeared to be devoid of life.

“J.B. says they use it to power the equipment here,” Krysty told Ryan. “Some kind of hydropower arrangement, like a watermill only bigger.”

“Much bigger,” Ryan acknowledged as he eyed the watchtower. “Stands to reason. Lotta tech here—needs a lot of power.”

“That tech saved your life,” Krysty reminded him. Then she reached inside the back pocket of her pants and pulled something free. Coiled on itself, the thing looked like a handful of thick black cord. “I saved this,” she told Ryan, handing it to him.

Ryan took the item, unraveled it and looked it over. It was his old eye patch, the one removed back in that redoubt where they had been attacked by the mutie plant. He held it up for a moment, tracing the stitching that held the leather to the cord, seeing the spots where it had frayed. “I don’t need it anymore,” he said, and he drew his hand back and threw the patch toward the rushing water below.

Krysty’s hand darted out, grabbing the patch as it dropped. “I’ll keep it,” she told Ryan when she saw his confused expression. “A keepsake of what you were,” she added, slipping the eye patch back inside her pants pocket.

“I make my own keepsakes now,” Ryan said, stepping back from Krysty. “Stay there.” He looked at her and held himself still, waiting for the camera eye to snap a picture of her. After five seconds it did, capturing Krysty’s image for posterity. In his eye, she would always be beautiful, her hair catching in the wind, the river racing behind her. Now he could call upon that image whenever he wanted to—in his eye.

Chapter Nine

“The food here is so terribly bland, do you not agree?” Doc asked as he blew on a spoonful of soup to cool it.

Doc was sitting at a beech wood table in a large room whose panoramic windows overlooked the river and the hydroelectric dam stretching across it like a stone cutlass. Across from him, Mildred, J.B. and Ricky sat eating from their own bowls of soup while Jak sat a space down from Doc, mopping his bowl with a bread roll from the pile that dominated the center of the table. Tasty or not, Jak ate the meal with gusto.

Around the room, several other groups were eating. They were locals, dressed in plain overalls and coverings in muted colors, whites and pastels. They ate quietly in ones and twos, and mostly in silence.

“I haven’t paid it much mind,” J.B. admitted distractedly. He had heard the argument before; they all had. The old man was nothing if not consistent.

J.B. was gazing down at the dam and the two people who stood close to its edge on the raised river banks. Krysty was easily recognizable even from this distance with her vivid red hair, while Ryan’s huge frame made him easy enough to spot if you knew what you were looking for.

“I have spoken to the chefs de cuisine about adding salt, spices and so on, but they seem ignorant of the whole concept of seasoning,” Doc espoused. “Alas it seems that humankind’s culinary knowledge has been forgotten along with so much else in these terrible times.”

“Food is food, and free food tastes that much better,” J.B. said, his eyes flicking up to the white-haired old man over the rims of his glasses. “At least we didn’t have to hunt and chill anything to get this, and that’s a definite appetizer in my book.”

“Quite,” Doc acknowledged, nodding.

Mildred tore a chunk from a bread roll and chewed on it thoughtfully. “I’ve had worse,” she admitted. “Rat meat, leafy stew, boot—” She stopped abruptly, remembering the horrific moments when she had almost become a cannibal. Ryan had secretly promised to chill her then, if that’s what was needed, and so she had trusted him with her life until she could be cured. “I’ve had worse,” she finished lamely.

Laughing, Ricky reached for another roll. “It won’t ever taste as good as my mama’s cooking,” he said, “but I’ll take it if it’s free.” Then he took a second roll and a third, and began juggling them with casual dexterity. “Anyone else want a roll?” he asked.

Jak and J.B. told Ricky that they did, and both found themselves the recipients of juggled rolls that landed perfectly on their respective plates.

“With an arm like that, he should have played baseball,” Mildred said, shaking her head.

“Mayhap one day,” Doc told her, “when all of this horror is past.”

J.B. chewed a corner of his roll thoughtfully and glanced back to the window. Ryan and Krysty could be seen there making their way gradually back up the paved street. “You think Ryan’s going to be okay?” he asked Mildred.

“He’s got a new eye,” Mildred reasoned. “That’s going to take some getting used to. But it can only be beneficial for him, and for us too.”

“I don’t know,” the Armorer said. “Ryan’s done pretty okay by us with just one eye. There hasn’t been an occasion I can think of where I’ve regretted the loss of his eye. Can you?”

Doc and Jak shook their heads, while Mildred verbally agreed.

“I have not known Ryan very long,” Ricky admitted, “but the man is a crack shot with his blasters. I never gave much thought to what it must be like for him, living with one eye.”

“It messes with your depth perception,” Mildred told Ricky and the others, “but Ryan compensates well. He’s had a lot of time to get used to living like that. I just hope this new eye doesn’t throw off his rhythms.”

“Ryan Cawdor is a survivor,” Doc reminded them all. “He will always win through. I suggest we accept the outcome of this visit—his new eye—as propitious and do not look the proverbial given horse in its mouth.”

* * *

OUTSIDE, RYAN HAD expressed feeling tired and so Krysty walked with him slowly back to the medical facility.

“Any idea how many people live here?” Ryan asked, admiring the towers.

“A hundred, maybe more,” Krysty told him.

As they walked, Ryan assessed their surroundings. Everything looked newly built, even the street looked freshly paved, its stones shining a brilliant white. But here and there, Ryan spotted evidence of another world, the world before the nukecaust—a road sign, triangular metal on a pole that had been bent to one side; hints of the blacktop of an ancient road that had run along the same pattern as the streets.

“I wonder what this place used to be?” Ryan said.

Krysty pointed to a low building that ran crosswise to the others, poised at the end of the broad thoroughfare. It looked dirtier than the rest and older, despite some obvious attempts at repair work. “See that? Old military redoubt. That’s where we popped in via the mat-trans. It must have been built back before the nukecaust.”

“Unusual seeing so much aboveground,” Ryan observed. In his experience, most of the ancient army facilities were built underground, with just an entrance visible aboveground.

“Doc figures that when the plates started shifting around the whole redoubt popped out from under,” Krysty said, “or that everything around it sunk.”

“That sounds more likely,” Ryan said. “Redoubts were built to last.” He eyed the ancient building a few seconds longer, marveling at their luck in landing in a safe community. Usually it went the other way—if there were people living near a mat-trans, the first thing they would do would be to try to chill Ryan and his companions. And the second thing they would do, as the old Deathlands joke had it, was die. Heaven Falls came to mind.... Nothing was given away free.

* * *

RYAN AND KRYSTY joined the others just as they finished their meal.

“’Tis heartening to see you back on your feet,” Doc said, standing to shake Ryan’s hand.

“Thanks, Doc,” Ryan said, grasping the old man’s hand. “You too.”

“You’ve had a look around?” Mildred asked. “Is everything okay? Do you feel all right?” Mildred was a doctor and her question was strictly professional; if Ryan expressed any concerns she would have him checked over immediately.

“I’m okay, Mildred,” Ryan answered, keeping his voice low, “and I think it’s time we were going.”

J.B. looked at Ryan quizzically. “Something bothering you?”

He shook his head. “Nothing particular,” he said. “I just don’t like staying in one place for too long. Remember Heaven Falls.”

“I hear you,” J.B. agreed.

“Jak? Did you look around?”

Leaning back in his chair, Jak nodded solemnly, picking at his teeth.

“We both did,” Ricky explained. “Got about a mile out. No one was bothered much about it.”

“What did you find?” Ryan asked the dark-haired teen.

“Nothing worth finding,” Ricky told him. “We’re a little way up in some mountains—”

“Here,” J.B. said, showing Ryan their approximate position on a map he had produced from one of his capacious pockets.

Ryan looked over the map as Ricky continued.

“The immediate area is dead, nothing much out there other than birds and insects,” Ricky said.

“Nothing worth eatin’,” Jak elaborated tersely.

“Looked like mebbe some villes out to the east,” Ricky picked up. “Small dwellings bunched together. Could be farm types, but we didn’t get close enough to find out.”

Ryan nodded. “That’s okay. Gives us something to go on, anyhow.

“Now, unless anyone objects, I’m going to speak to our hosts and thank them for their hospitality, and for my hospitalization,” Ryan continued, “and then we are going to do what we always do—walk. So, any objections?”

There was none. The companions had traveled the hell roads for a long time; they trusted Ryan’s instincts, and when he said it was time to move on, then it was time to move on.

* * *

WHEN RYAN EXPRESSED his desire to leave, Roma escorted him to another building that lay close to the Klamath River. “I’d like to thank our hosts for everything they’ve done,” he told her.

They traveled on the back of an automated vehicle, its driver a box of lights located at the front of its open frame. Ryan sat, his hands resting on the tops of his thighs, close to the holster on his right hip. He didn’t like traveling around alone like this, but the others had gear to pack up, so there it was.

After two minutes of smooth, near-silent movement, the automated vehicle drew to a halt outside a towering circular structure overlooking the river. The tower rose three hundred feet into the air, housing over fifteen levels within.

Roma walked with Ryan, leading him inside. “The ville is ruled from in here,” she explained, as they strode through an empty lobby.

The lobby was circular like the structure, empty with a vast column in its center that thrust up into the main body of the building itself. The lobby’s walls were made from tinted glass, possibly even armaglass, like the walls of the mat-trans. The glass was smoky and behind it Ryan could see electrical circuitry, tiny diodes flashing frequently amid the complex structure.

“Lot of tech here,” Ryan observed, indicating the walls.

Roma merely smiled as she ran her hand over the hidden sensor plate that opened the doors to one of a bank of elevators located in the central hub of the lobby. They stepped inside and the elevator door swished closed before the car sent its passengers up into the body of the building. The elevator was silent, Ryan could only detect the movement by the way his stomach dropped—it was fast, then.

Five seconds passed, and then the door pulled back and Ryan saw a shadow-filled room beyond. The room was huge, with high ceilings, grand walls and no seating. The lights were recessed and obscured, casting only a little illumination into the room. It smelled of recycled air, grease and oil, mechanical things, fans dissipating heat.

As Ryan entered, he flicked his artificial eye to night vision, scanning the poorly lit room. Though the room was not fully circular, the walls were curved, and there appeared to be no exits other than the elevator bank located behind him. The room was large enough to comfortably house a dozen wags without anything getting scratched. There was glass along the walls, cabinet-type doors behind which more circuitry hummed, diodes twinkling with light like stars in the night sky; colored stars, reds and greens and yellows.

Up ahead, dominating the room, was something that looked like a high wall, and it was plated with circuitry, the copper lines of the circuit boards catching what little illumination was cast from the lighting to create a ghostly crisscross of shining metallic streaks. At the top of that wall, Ryan saw people waiting, standing twelve feet above him, pacing along the high balcony as they came to see who had arrived. There were seven of them in all, their faces hidden in shadow, even to Ryan’s enhanced night vision. They wore long robes that trailed down to the floor, shapeless things that obscured their bodies entirely.

Roma waited by the elevator as Ryan entered the room, her hands held neatly behind her back.

“Mr. Cawdor has expressed his intention to leave,” she announced, “along with his companions.”

Ryan took up a position in the center of the room, scanning the shadowy figures above him. “I wanted to thank you for everything,” he said. “My friends tell me you patched them up pretty good—me too—and you asked for nothing in return. Charity like that’s rare in my experience, so I owe you my gratitude.”

He stopped, and for a moment the only response was silence. He eyed the figures poised above him, watching for any signs of life.

“I don’t like being in a man’s debt,” Ryan finally added, breaking the silence. As he spoke, he switched his vision to infrared, scanning the figures above. They were alive—he had seen them move when he had arrived with Roma. In infrared, their bodies gave off heat. “So, if there’s anything my people can do—”

“There is no debt to pay, Ryan Cawdor,” a male voice said, deep and resonant.

It took Ryan a moment to pinpoint who had spoken, and he turned to face the man, holding up one hand up as if to shield his eyes and better see in the darkness. “I’m grateful for that. Can I ask why?”

There was silence again, a long pause while Ryan waited. Finally, the resonant voice spoke again.

“Humankind destroyed itself in a nuclear exchange one hundred years ago,” the voice said. “What little remains is barely enough to sustain the survivors. We in Progress plan to change that. We are working hard on a solution, or on multiple solutions, that will grant a reprieve for all that has been wrought on this once-great nation.”

Memories of Judge Santee washed across Ryan’s mind, but he let it pass.

“And the hardware in my eye?” Ryan asked. “Is that part of your solution?”

Ryan waited once more while the room fell silent. Then a narrow spotlight came on, focusing solely on another figure, who had been waiting in the darkness. The man wore a gray robe with a headpiece that covered the forehead and back of his skull like a hood. Ryan automatically commanded his left eye to magnify, focusing on the man’s face. The headpiece looked to be made of plastic or metal, Ryan thought, while the man looked to be in middle age, with dark skin.

“My name is Emil,” the man told Ryan. “I designed the hardware in your eye, along with my companions here—Una and Turing. What you are experiencing is an infinitesimal step toward the betterment of this world. Tiny steps are all we can expect at this moment, but that will change.”

“You have an impressive setup here, Emil,” Ryan said. “I saw the dam out there. Krysty said you get your power from it.”

“It takes a lot to power the future,” Emil told him. “We intend to make things perfect.”

Ryan smiled. “Perfect’s a tall order.”

“Rest assured, Mr. Cawdor—all we need is time,” Emil answered.

Then the spotlight dimmed and the room was cast in darkness once more, the seven figures returned to shadows watching Ryan from above.

“Thank you for your time,” Ryan said, dipping his head once, respectfully, before stepping back and returning to the elevator, where Roma stood waiting. A moment later, they were back in the lobby, making their way toward the exit, where the automated transport waited.

Chapter Ten

They were back in Hell. Their pilgrimage through the hellscape began again, picking up where it had left off.

Ryan and his companions trekked across the ruined landscape, following a dirt road that was scored in the soil like a scab. The road nudged through overgrown fields of rapeseed and corn, an orchard full of skeletal trees—the apples withered and dead on their branches, poisoned by the toxins in the soil. Behind them, Progress soon became just a smear on the horizon, the smudge of white towers barely visible beside the winding silver snake of water. Ryan turned back occasionally, framing the ville in his sights and pulling up the magnification mode in his artificial eye. He would see the ville towers if he magnified the image, could make out the three-hundred-foot point where he had enjoyed an audience with the ruling cabal of the ville. How they had built such magnificent structures when all around them was devastated he could not imagine. It was a jewel amid the trash, a single diamond in the dirt.

Up ahead there was little evidence of human life. No settlements, no buildings. Occasionally they would pass the foundations of something that looked like a building, but it had been razed to the ground so long ago that what remained looked like a floor plan carved into the dirt, more like a game of pick-up-sticks than a place a human could ever have lived.

Ryan led the way, the SIG Sauer holstered back at his hip, the Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster held across his shoulders like an old days’ milkmaid’s rig. Beside him, Krysty walked along with a spring in her step, still dressed in the white clothes that she had acquired while in Progress, her old clothes folded neatly into a knapsack she had hooked over one shoulder along with her bearskin coat. She wouldn’t need a fur coat out here, not with the sun beating down on what was left of California.

Doc and J.B. huddled along behind the couple, bickering about some point of geography until Mildred saw fit to pull them apart. Mildred was walking beside Ricky, swapping stories about his childhood on Monster Island, hers in twentieth-century Alabama, where her skin color was still an issue to some.

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