Dr. Huth ran the tip of his tongue over the empty sockets formerly occupied by his front teeth. Deathlands was a place he had hoped never to see again. Within hours of his initial arrival there, he had been set upon, robbed of all his possessions, beaten and mutilated. Though the memory of that traumatic event remained fresh, its irony was lost on him.
In a long and storied scientific career he had never once worried about the consequences of his own actions on the powerless. As a young whitecoat, then as director of the Totality Concept’s trans-reality program, he had always looked for the Big Picture. The fate of the tens of billions left to starve on his native Earth after it had been scraped clean of sustenance hadn’t troubled him. He had seen firsthand what the scourge could do, but he wasn’t concerned about the fate of the Shadow Worlders,
either. In his experience, other people’s suffering was the price of knowledge.
And at that price it was always a bargain.
“Initiate the sequence,” Auriel said.
“Counting down from thirty,” Mero said. “Prepare for jump.”
As Dr. Huth watched the red digits fall on the lower edge of his visor’s faceplate, all he could think about were the consequences of failure. If there wasn’t enough power for the jump, he was going to slowly suffocate inside the ill-fitting armor. The horror and the unfairness of that fate unmanned him: his lower lip began to quiver and his eyes welled up with scalding tears. There were so many things yet to do, so many discoveries yet to be made, accolades that would be denied him.
When the scrolling numbers hit zero, the double force fields imploded with a jarring whoosh, and the suddenly expanded perspective seared an image deep into the recesses of his brain.
Specters zipped through the air, crisscrossing like flying javelins, streaks of luminous green moving faster than the eye could follow; tightly packed masses of them writhed ecstatically above the mounds of ruptured corpses that clogged the city’s plaza. Except for the specters, everything that he could see, for as far as he could see, was dead.
Then the jump machinery engaged and the air overhead began to shimmer, then spin. It morphed into a vortex, flecked with glittering points of light. As the tornado whirled faster, the light from within grew brighter and brighter. Staggered by the blasting wind, Dr. Huth looked across the ring and realized the commander was
staring at him. On the cusp of their destruction, Auriel Otis Trask was smiling.
With a thunderclap that rattled his every molecule the towering cyclone vanished; it was the sound of the universe cracking open. A narrow seam, a fissure without bottom, divided the center of their warrior circle, gaping wider and wider like a hungry maw.
Once the passage between realities was established, all struggle was futile; the forces unleashed wouldn’t be denied. The ground beneath Dr. Huth’s boots dematerialized and he somersaulted into the Nothingness on the heels of Ryan Cawdor’s daughter.
“There it is again, lover. And it sure as hell isn’t the wind.”
Ryan Cawdor glanced over at Krysty Wroth, backhanding the sweat from his brow before it could trickle into his one good eye. Her beautiful face was flushed from the heat and exertion, her prehensile hair had curled up in tight ringlets of alarm—shoulder-length, bonfirered, mutant hair that seemed to have a collective mind of its own, and always erred on the side of caution.
The eye-patched warrior, his long-legged paramour and their four companions crouched in a frozen skirmish line along the ruined, two-lane highway, their ears cocked. Under an enormous bowl of blue sky, streaked with high, wispy clouds, on the desolate and doom-hammered landscape, they were the tiniest of tiny specks.
The devastation that lay before them wasn’t a result of the all-out nukewar that had erased civilization more than a century earlier, in late January 2001; this Apocalypse was vastly older than that. It had come many millions of years in the past, long before the first human beings walked the earth.
Shouldering his Steyr SSG-70 longblaster, Ryan looked over rather than through its telescopic sight, taking in the panorama of destruction, searching for something to zero the optics in on. A volcanic plain
stretched all the way to the southern horizon. Countless miles of baking black rock—angled, slick, razor-sharp, unyielding and treacherous underfoot. Eroded cinder cones, like towering molehills, dotted the plain, shimmering in the rising waves of heat. The only vegetation he could see was the occasional twisted, stunted, leafless tree, and clumps of equally stunted sagebrush.
When they had first glimpsed the sprawling badlands, Doc Tanner had remarked that they looked like “the top of a gargantuan pecan pie burned to a how-do-you-do.”
After trekking through the waste for a day and a half, the Victorian time traveler’s quip no longer brought a smile to Ryan’s face.
There it was again, the barely audible sound that had stopped them in their tracks.
Shrill and intermittent, not a whistle, but a piercing, short blast of scream. As the breeze rustled the sagebrush, spreading its sweet perfume, it distorted the distant noise, making its source impossible to pinpoint. And Ryan’s predark scope, sharp as it was, couldn’t see around the cinder cones or into the innumerable craters, cracks and caverns. Straining, he thought he could make out a second set of sounds, much lower pitched, throbbing, like a convoy of wags revving their engines.
No wags here.
The faint ghost of a predark highway, eroded by chem rain and crosscut in places by five-foot-deep washouts, was only fit for foot or horse traffic.
Ryan turned toward Jak Lauren, who squatted on his left. The albino’s white hair fell in lank strands around his shoulders, his eyelids narrowed to slits as he faced
into the hot wind. Jak’s short stature and slim build made him look younger than his years. Those who mistook him for a mere teenager and underestimated his fighting skills, only did so once. The ruby-eyed youth was a stone chiller, Deathlands born and bred. From ten feet away Ryan could almost feel the intensity of Jak’s focus, which was pushing every sense to the limit in order to read the faint sign.
“What do you say, Jak?” Ryan asked. “What is it?”
The albino’s reply was delivered without emotion, a death sentence. “Something’s cornered,” he said. “’Bout to get et.”
“Let’s give whatever it is a wide berth,” J. B. Dix, the group’s armorer, said. He swept off his fedora and mopped the beads of sweat from his face with a frayed and stained shirtcuff. “It isn’t our problem. Got to keep moving. Don’t want to have to spend an extra night out on this rad-blasted rock.”
Mildred Wyeth lowered the plastic water bottle from her lips. The freezie, a twentieth century medical doctor and researcher, had taken advantage of the pause in the march to slip out of her pack and stretch her back. Her sleeveless T-shirt was soaked through with perspiration, her brown arms glistened and the tips of the beaded plaits of her hair steadily dripped. “But maybe we can be the ones doing the eating,” she countered.
Ryan had already considered that possibility. Their food cache was down to a few strips of venison jerky each.
Two days earlier they had made their way out of an underground redoubt hidden among the 11,000-foot peaks of the mountains of southern Idaho. The deserted
complex’s armory turned out to be a bonanza: unfired cartridge cases in a variety of calibers, gunpowder, primers and bullets, all kept separate, all hermetically vacuum-sealed, in a temperature and humidity-controlled chamber.
After J.B. and Ryan had loaded and test-fired some sample rounds, they began loading cartridges, assembly-line fashion. They loaded as much ammo in 9 mm, .357 Magnum, .38, 12-gauge and 7.62 mm as the companions could carry. Reliable center-fire ammunition was as good as gold, worth top jack and top trade anywhere in the Deathlands. Unfortunately, the redoubt’s food cache had turned out to be unusable. Decades earlier, all the ready-to-eat packets and the canned goods had ballooned up and burst. Foot-high tendrils of dead, gray mold carpeted the contents and floor of the storage room. The seals on the bottled water were intact, though, and it seemed safe to drink.
From the readings on the site’s remote radiation counters, the area had taken a near hit on nukeday. It could have been the result of a targeting error on the part of the Soviets, an MIRV inflight guidance malfunction, or a failed attempt to take out the redoubt. Whatever the cause, it meant traveling northwest wasn’t an option for the companions. Given the food situation, they would have jumped out with their booty, but before they could do that, the redoubt’s power inexplicably failed.
Which had left them on foot, with one open direction of travel: away from the rugged mountain range, onto the edge of the volcanic plain.
Many times in the past Ryan and his companions had taken large prey for their own after others, animal and
mutie, had done the hard work of hunting and chilling—a case of survival of the best armed. From what Ryan had seen so far, the biggest critters living on this harsh landscape were yellow chipmunks. And they weren’t worth the price of a looted bullet. Not that a crispy, roasted chipmunk-on-a-stick or two wouldn’t have gone down nicely after thirty-six hours of starvation rations, but a hit by a nine mil or a .38 would have left a scrap of bloody fur with feet. In the jumble of broken flood basalt, it was impossible to catch or trap the little rad bastards. Escape routes, deep cracks and holes were everywhere.
“Might be a jackrabbit,” Krysty said. “They can scream.”
“Bobcat or eagle would make short work of a rabbit,” J.B. said. “One squeak and it would be over. If it wasn’t chilled on the first hit, it would just jump in a hole and hide, out of reach. It wouldn’t keep yellin’ like that.”
“There’s also the possibility that it’s a much larger animal, more difficult to pull down,” Doc said. “A deer or a stray horse resisting the attentions of a pack of predators.” Perspiration had pasted Doc’s long gray hair to the sides of his deeply lined face and neck.
“Or something much more highly evolved,” Mildred suggested.
“We can’t see what it is from here,” Ryan said. “And there’s only one way to find out for sure.”
“We don’t need more trouble than we’ve already got,” J.B. said. “For nuke’s sake, Ryan, it could be a trap, something triple-bad luring us in for an ambush—the oldest trick in the book. There’s a million hidey-holes for things to jump from. If we’re caught flatfooted on
a patch of open ground, we’re never going to get out of this nukin’ frying pan.” The short man paused to thumb his wire-rimmed spectacles back in place, up the sweaty bridge of his nose. “We’ve got a lot of miles of lava field left to cross,” he said. “We should stay on the road, swing wide of whatever it is and never look back.”
Ryan took the Armorer’s point. But as things stood, their lives were balanced on a knife edge, and it was a question of priorities—a decision had to be made as to what came first.
“We need to round up some food,” Ryan said. “We won’t poke our noses in if there’s nothing to gain.”
Their stomachs audibly rumbling, Doc and Jak nodded in agreement.
Outvoted, J.B. screwed his hat back down with a flourish and said no more.
Ryan shoulder slung the Steyr and led them offroad, confident that J.B.’s injured feelings would quickly pass, whether or not they found fresh meat. J.B. was a team player, had been ever since the glory days with Trader—that meant honoring a group decision even if he didn’t agree with it.
Off the highway there were no trails for Ryan to follow. The jumbled chunks of lava were a solid mass underfoot. Sometimes he was stepping on jagged points, sometimes in between them, and the edges of the rock tore at the soles and sides of his boots. The surface was so rough that running over it without falling would have been impossible. Even walking a short distance in a straight line was damned difficult. Every ten yards it seemed, holes as big as semitrailers and twisting crevasses blocked their way.
Gradually, the vista ahead revealed itself, and it wasn’t as flat as it had appeared a quarter mile back—a trick of perspective and of the uniformity of the terrain’s coloration. Before them was a dished-out, sunken swath of ground, the top of a huge, collapsed lava dome. Ryan could see the far rim of the crater, a crescent of blacker black, and it was at least a mile away. The deepest part was in the middle, a hundred feet below the rim. The surface looked to be basalt, but the fractured plates of rock were much bigger and tipped up at steep angles.
Ryan knelt at the edge of the drop-off, hand-signaling for the others to do the same. From their new vantage point, the sounds were much more distinct and disturbing.
“My word!” Doc exclaimed. “That scream sounds almost human.”
Jak pointed and said, “There.”
Ryan caught a glimpse of movement in that direction, but it was too far away to make out details. He unslung the .308-caliber longblaster and uncapped its scope. Seven hundred yards downrange he saw a cluster of four-legged animals madly scrabbling, their heads lowered, their tails in the air, pulling and tearing at something on the ground. The low-pitched sounds he’d heard were their growls and snarls. What with the movement, the intervening heaps of rock, and the heat shimmer it was difficult to see clearly, but he could make out tall, skinny creatures with ribs showing through gray coats, and pointed muzzles and ears. And their heads were all oddly marked: the hair on top, between their ears, was bright orange-red. The violent tug-of-war took the
animals and the prize they were fighting over out of sight behind the upturned slabs.
“Looks like a pack of wolves or coyotes,” Ryan told the others. “Real big ones. A couple dozen at least. They’ve chilled something large and they’re ripping it apart. Can’t see what they’ve got, but it isn’t fighting back.”
The shrill cry rolled over them again.
“There’s at least one victim still alive down there,” Mildred said.
“It appears to be begging for mercy,” Doc said.
“Begging the wrong critters for that, from what I saw,” Ryan said as he lowered the rifle.
“Guess we won’t be eating fresh meat tonight, unless it’s haunch of wolf,” Krysty said with dismay.
“In my experience,” Doc said, “no matter how it’s sauced, simmered, or pounded, wolf meat tastes like old boot.”
“A boot that’s stepped in shit,” J.B. added. “Okay, we’ve had our look-see. We should move on, and triple quick before they catch our scent.”
“We can’t leave whoever it is that’s trapped down there,” Mildred protested.
“More likely it’s a ‘whatever,’” Dix told her. “A scalie or some other mutie. And if it’s an ankle-biter, I say more power to the wolves.”
Ryan raised the Steyr to his shoulder, dropped the safety and surveyed the kill zone through the scope, waiting for the feeding melee to come back into view. No matter their complaints, no matter how nasty the meat tasted, he knew he and his companions would choke it
down somehow, and with any luck it would keep them going long enough to get past the lava field.
Doc and Krysty were still discussing recipes when, a moment later, targets reappeared downrange.
Ryan held the sight post in the middle of the circling animals. He took up the Steyr’s trigger slack and held it just short of the break point, slowing his breathing and, by extension, his heartbeat. One of the creatures paused in the pitched battle. Panting hard, it straightened to full height, turning itself broadside to him.
To hit a bull’s-eye at the distance and with the twenty-degree down-angle meant taking an aim-point eight or nine inches low. Ryan dropped the sight post that far beneath the animal’s chest, and tightened down on the trigger. When it broke crisply, the Steyr boomed and bucked hard into the crook of his shoulder. He rode the recoil upward, working the butter-smooth action in a blur. Fresh round chambered, he reacquired the sight picture in time to see a puff of dust explode on the critter’s near shoulder. The .308 round drove it into the rocks hard. It bounced once, ragdoll limp, and stayed down.
The sound of the rifle shot and the echoes that followed turned the other animals into statues, but only for a second.
As they began to scatter, Ryan got off another round. His intended target juked an instant before the bullet struck, and a heart shot became a spine shot. Dust puffed off the animal’s back just in front of its hips. Its rear end and tail dropped like a deadweight. Meanwhile, the rest of the pack zigzagged away through the slabs—like the
critters had learned how to avoid long distance rifle fire—and vanished into the lava field.
Through the scope Ryan saw the wounded animal crawling for cover on its front legs, dragging the back ones limp and useless behind it. “Two down,” he said, ejecting the spent cartridge. “The others took off.”
“Think they’ll keep their distance?” Mildred said.
“Depends,” J.B. said. “On how hungry they are.”
“They looked plenty hungry to me,” Ryan said, slinging the Steyr and unholstering his SIG-Sauer P-226 handblaster. “Stay alert and stay close.”
Weapons drawn, the companions carefully descended the crater rim after him, jumping from block to basalt block until they reached the bottom. Then they began working their way, single file, toward the center of the depression.