by James Axler
PLUNGE FROM GRACE
In post-apocalyptic Deathlands, America the beautiful has been ravaged by two centuries of nuclear fallout. Here, the American dream boils down to one thing: survival. Ryan Cawdor and his fellow warriors seize each day, armed and ready to hold on to the only life they’ve got. Despite the odds, they believe in something better, someplace they can call home...where peace isn’t just a dream.
LEGACY OF MADNESS
On the coast of what used to be Maine, the group’s armourer, J. B.Dix, lies dying from a gunshot wound. Having no other choice, Ryan makes a deal with a local baron and his strangely beautiful wife. J.B. will get the surgery he needs when Ryan and crew rescue the couple’s daughter, abducted by slavers. But the cold, deep Atlantic waters harbor predark secrets, including the terrifying specter of a U.S.S.R. nuclear submarine…and its descendants.
In Deathlands, no one is ever free from the past.
“Dark night!” he shouted as the M60 ripped a burst along the cliff
“Why are we driving this way?” J.D. yelled again. “We’re triple-fat targets down in this nuking ditch!”
“Business!” Marcus answered. “That’s what makes Trader Trader. He’s willin’ to take risks others ain’t.”
The M60 snarled. J.B. approved of the way the gunner was firing in measured bursts. It was a way to minimize overheating the big weapon and to maximize the shots between barrel changes.
And then the big blaster fell silent.
J.B. frowned. He could see muties popping up on the gully walls ahead. It should be a target-rich environment.
Mebbe the barrel melted through, he thought. Sooner or later heat caught up with a machine gun.
“Damn!” the assistant wrench roared. “The sixty’s jammed! And it’s the only top-mounted blaster on War Wag One.”
There was no hesitation. J.B. moved out, heading for the big blaster. Without it, Trader’s convoy would be overrun.
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Dark Emblem
Crucible of Time
Starfall
Encounter:
Collector’s Edition
Gemini Rising
Gaia’s Demise
Dark Reckoning
Shadow World
Pandora’s Redoubt
Rat King
Zero City
Savage Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
Salvation Road
Amazon Gate
Destiny’s Truth
Skydark Spawn
Damnation Road Show
Devil Riders
Bloodfire
Hellbenders
Separation
Death Hunt
Shaking Earth
Black Harvest
Vengeance Trail
Ritual Chill
Atlantis Reprise
Labyrinth
Strontium Swamp
Shatter Zone
Perdition Valley
Cannibal Moon
Sky Raider
Remember Tomorrow
Sunspot
Desert Kings
Apocalypse Unborn
Thunder Road
Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba Book I)
Dark Resurrection (Empire of Xibalba Book II)
Eden’s Twilight
Desolation Crossing
Alpha Wave
Time Castaways
Prophecy
Blood Harvest
Arcadian’s Asylum
Baptism of Rage
Doom Helix
Moonfeast
Downrigger Drift
Playfair’s Axiom
Tainted Cascade
Perception Fault
Prodigal’s Return
Lost Gates
Haven’s Blight
Hell Road Warriors
Palaces of Light
Wretched Earth
Crimson Waters
No Man’s Land
Nemesis
Chrono Spasm
Sins of Honor
Storm Breakers
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
—Lao Tzu
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 One
Ryan Cawdor’s sixth sense suddenly began to tingle. Something was about to go down.
Flanked by a pair of hard-faced chillers, Deke Sogram, a long, lean bastard in a wolfskin coat, stretched out a scarred hand toward the sealed document the gaudy-house owner had given Ryan back in Cole, a ville in the hills of what some still called New England. The companions had gotten free meals, lodging and some local jack in return for delivering the envelope to the gaudy owner’s acquaintance here at the crossroads.
The snow was falling heavily from a sky so dark it made it hard to tell if the early sunset had happened yet, though Ryan knew it was a couple of hours off. The wind was brisk rather than driving. It swirled, throwing up
the newly fallen snow almost to chest level, adding to the tricky viewing conditions.
Pine woods rose on all sides, fading to dark, obscured spike palisades. The roads that crossed at this point were roads only by virtue of people calling them so. They were, in fact, a couple of deep ruts slashed through by what seemed little more than a double-wide game trail, both so buried under snow that the only way to know they were there was that they made furrows lower than the surrounding snowfields. But the ground lay clear here for a good thirty or forty yards in every direction, which gave the companions a certain sense of security from ambush.
Sogram’s right hand secured the heavy envelope of coarse gray-brown paper, whose lumps suggested it was predark-made. It was sealed with a blob of hard blue wax stamped with a signet ring made out of a copper coin that Ryan knew from his education as a baron’s son was called a penny. Sogram let the envelope fall into the drifting snow between him and Ryan. The one-eyed man realized in a flash that he and the companions had been set up by the gaudy owner, that the envelope was bait.
Both of Sogram’s men had their right hands out of sight. And while the coldheart was making his move with his left, it was slow and deliberate, so as to avoid alerting his target.
He failed.
Ryan was under no such restriction, automatically shouting, “Trap!”
His left hand was already under his own heavy coat. It came out swinging the long, broad blade of his machete-like panga at the coldheart’s prominent Adam’s apple.
Sogram was good. He instinctively leaned back and dropped his chin to protect his gullet from a sure chill-shot.
Ryan’s blade chopped like an ax into Sogram’s lower jaw. The man’s shout came out as a gargling scream of blood and teeth, a couple still held together by a chunk of bone. He fell over backward, vanishing almost instantly into a low snowdrift.
Ryan was already dropping flat in place. As he did, a blaster shot almost shredded his right eardrum.
* * *
KRYSTY WROTH HAD read the flamboyantly mustached coldheart’s evil intent in the narrowing of his dark eyes. To see danger was to act. It was a skill that her mother, Sonja Wroth, had taught her, long before Krysty and the tall, dark and handsome one-eyed Ryan Cawdor had crossed paths. Association with her love and life-mate Ryan had certainly sharpened those skills.
Along with many others.
She opened her mouth to cry a warning. As she swung up her Smith & Wesson Model 640, she dropped to one knee in the same motion.
Before the warning left her lips, Ryan had roared his and chopped at the lower half of the coldheart’s face with his panga. Already cleared to fire past Ryan’s right shoulder—the main reason she’d taken up position a step to the side as well as one back—Krysty lined the rudimentary sight of the short-barreled revolver on the nearest available target as the leader went down spewing gore that was black in the half-light.
That was the burly bastard who looked like a bear, and not just because he wore a coat of brown bear-hide. He was an older guy, heavier set. He had a shaved dome like his boss’s, Asian eyes and a much neater mustache running down past the corners of his mouth. He opened his mouth as he brought up the wired-together Remington 870P pump shotgun to blast apart Ryan’s head at muzzle-flame range.
“Remember!” he bellowed as he tracked his dropping target with the scattergun’s short barrel. “Grab the bitches, chill the pricks!”
Slavers, she thought grimly. Her little blaster roared with much more doom than its 158-grain .38 Special slug actually carried. The muzzle-flame was huge and yellow and almost dazzling in the gloom. That was the curse of the short barrel of her blaster: recoil made it rise. But she knew how to handle her little piece. Krysty controlled the kick as best she could, dropped it back down to the center of the brigand’s broad chest and fired again.
This time she didn’t wait for the blaster to fall back online. Instead she blasted a third time as the nub front sight of the little wheelgun passed the man’s broad chin headed north.
It was a trick from predark that Mildred Wyeth had taught her: the Mozambique Drill. Two in the chest and one in the head/Make sure the bad guy is thoroughly dead! Mildred had taught her the chant. That seemed more than a bit cold-blooded for a trained doctor, not to mention one who still struggled sometimes with the values and morals she’d carried with her through her century-plus sleep as a twentieth-century freezie.
But when the hammer came down, the stocky brown-skinned woman with the beaded plaits had the icy practicality of a battlefield doctor, which was why she survived and fit in so well with the rest of the companions.
Krysty’s last bullet hit the shotgunner square in the middle of his broad forehead. From the geyser of matter that blew out from more or less the top of his head, she guessed the bullet had passed through to blast out a piece of skull and a fistful of brains.
The shotgun erupted in thunder and fire. Her heart froze in her chest. Ryan!
* * *
RYAN’S SIG-SAUER P-226 handblaster was in his fist a heartbeat before he landed in the snow, which cushioned his flat fall. His impact shot up a cloud of powdery white that masked his vision like a smoke gren.
His right ear rang from the blaster shot that had gone off as he went down. Through the tinnitus’s whine he heard more shots erupt. And then, as the fallen snow began to settle, it was lit up as if somebody’d opened a gate straight to hell, then slammed it shut. The sight was accompanied by about the same amount of noise.
Shotgun, he knew. He didn’t even bother thinking, it missed.
Ryan’s face was caked in cold. He blinked his one eye clear of snow. He already registered the shadow-form of the chiller on the leader’s left going down. He switched aim to his own left, where the second flanker stood. He had a semiauto blaster holstered on his left hip. Even through the thinning snow-smoke and an annoying tiny ice-flake clinging stubbornly to his eyeball, Ryan could tell he was only now drawing the weapon.
That’s just too bastard bad, he thought, firing three quick shots, center-of-mass.
As the guy went down, he heard the ripsaw roaring of J.B.’s Uzi machine pistol.
When the first burst ended, the Armorer shouted, “They’re all around us! Comin’ out of the snow!”
* * *
FIGURES REARED UP out of the snowbanks to either side of the ruts they’d followed to the meet. Snow cascaded from their bodies and the crusty old tarps they’d been buried beneath.
And the nearest man to J.B.’s left promptly fell back down with a couple of 9 mm hardball rounds in his gut.
J.B. heard the crack of a .38 handblaster, which meant Mildred, who’d been pulling tail-end Charlie as they trudged to their rendezvous with the man they’d been charged to deliver a message to, had cut loose with her heavy Czech-made wheelgun. Then came a more authoritative roar from a .45 behind him, and a similar noise from Doc Tanner’s big .44 LeMat.
J.B. almost smiled even as he loosed another blast that made two more figures fall down—though he was fairly sure he’d missed them, at twenty yards or more. They were just ducking away from sheer reflex.
While J. B. Dix was a man who swore by precision in everything he did, there was also a thing called fire superiority, and it was also as real a thing as a compound fracture. Translated loosely, that meant, If you can make the other bastard flinch first, you double your chances.
And right now, every chance they could get might still be too few.
The reason he grinned was that the big handblaster doing its thing meant that Doc was in the fight, and that the Armorer’s young protégé, Ricky Morales, had likely scored his second chill. Because the first .45 round would have been fired from the youth’s DeLisle carbine whose whisper-quiet report he’d missed in the general fireworks.
Then Ricky had plainly let the longblaster with the fat stub of barrel and its built-in silencer fall to the extent of his carrying sling. Because fast as its Enfield-style bolt action was to throw, he could fire the big do
uble-action Webley revolver, rebored to shoot the same .45 ACP as the carbine, even faster.
J.B. had gone to one knee. He looked for targets, moving his head side to side while keeping the other guy who’d gone down at his second burst in the soft focus sides of his vision-field. He wasn’t sure he could spare a short make-sure burst to him yet, since he might not be playing possum.
There was still shooting behind and on both sides. Then he heard Ryan bellow, “Go, go, go!”
That was why he’d gone to a knee rather than flopping full prone. He couldn’t afford to make too fat a target for the ambushers. But he didn’t want to make it too slow to get back into action, either, since the best way to bust an ambush was to assault right straight into it.
More coldhearts had come out of the trees, half-obscured by the falling snow, and more than half from belly down by the stuff they kicked up. J.B. already knew that Ryan would drive straight forward, past the trio who’d stood to meet them, which meant running the direction the coldhearts had most likely come from. Meaning they might just run into a whole bunch of other coldhearts.
But it wasn’t as if they had any good choices. J.B. recalled a saying of his and Ryan’s old mentor, Trader: when you’re caught in an ambush, your survival depends entirely on the incompetence of your ambushers.
He loosed a quick blast at the nearest of the oncoming coldhearts as he drove himself back off his knee into a run to the west. They hadn’t opened up yet.
Fortunately this gang of coldhearts had two strikes against them from the get-go. First, they knew their quarry was walking into a trap—meaning they were overconfident, sure of getting the drop, or at least the telling first shots.
Second, they were slavers. The one man’s shout had confirmed what J.B. already suspected when he saw Ryan chop the coldheart boss. The whole point of the ambush was to grab the women, Krysty and Mildred, not just alive but undamaged.
The men—strong and healthy specimens—could fetch a good price, too.
He saw one fall, thought he’d hit him. Muzzles flashed from the shadowy pursuers. They mostly seemed to be coming from north and south of the road from the west—Ryan and the rest’s backtrail.
Meanwhile, a flash look up front showed the way ahead was clear, as far as J.B. could see through the rad-blasted snow. The slavers had buried eight or ten chillers in the snow, then sent about a dozen around east to cut off the quarry’s escape. They hadn’t left a reserve to the west. That might have been cockiness, too—likely that played its role, as it so often did—but mostly J.B. just reckoned the boss didn’t trust his men with cocked blasters behind him. With coldhearts keyed up like jolt-walkers on adrenaline by the prospect of dealing pain, accidents happened. Sometimes things happened that weren’t accidents.