by James Axler
"Come and die." Ryan invited, beckoning to the Incarnate
J.B.'s Uzi suddenly stopped chattering, and Mildred shouted out wordlessly in anger and fear. Ryan spun on his heel in the direction of the chariot, then he was flat on his face on the ground.
His arms and legs were covered with half-frozen mud, and his thoughts stumbled and staggered, finally careening over to the brief, almost subliminal image of a nimbus of energy jumping from metal prongs.
A mahogany giant towered over him, a conical jeweled headpiece bisecting the sun and adding another six inches to his height. He wore a magnificent gem-encrusted leather harness over his muscled torso, and sunlight gleamed from the golden threads in the white fabric of his kilt.
"So," he said in a deep melodic voice, "I didn't frighten you away after all. Perhaps I'll have to try harder next time."
Then, smiling, the bronzed god kicked Ryan in the side of the head, kicked him down into a dark, spiraling hole.
Nightmare Passage
#40 in the Deathlands series
James Axler
A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG • STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."
First edition January 1998
ISBN 0-373-62540-5
NIGHTMARE PASSAGE
Copyright © 1998 by Worldwide Library.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and ail incidents are pure invention.
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Printed in U.S.A.
My mouth is split open by the god of the air
With that metal spear he used to split open the mouth of the gods.
I am the Powerful One. I shall sit beside her
Who is in the great breath of the sky!
—The Egyptian Book of the Dead (Spell 23)
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…
Prologue
The horizon had been a dreary, saffron-tinted waste for as long as he could remember. Suddenly, a dark speck crawled across the vast sea of sand.
All around was a panorama of desolation—nothing but sand stretching to the skyline in every direction, barely relieved by the gray dome rearing out of the wasteland in the near distance.
The god blinked. The crawling speck was a vehicle; that much was certain. He expanded his awareness, his mind sprouting probing, identifying tentacles. The vehicle was a Jeep Cherokee. It was more than a hundred years old, the engine reconfigured to run on methane, and the rusted bodywork was painted in a striped camouflage pattern. Its four-wheel drive carried it easily across the undulating yellow sands that rose and fell in dunes. There were precisely three men and one woman aboard.
The distant, laboring rumble of the engine rolled over the desert, and the vehicle sank from sight behind the waves of sand. At that moment, a cloud passed over the face of the sun.
The god smiled. Slowly, he climbed down from the high sand hill upon which he had been meditating for the past three days. When he reached its base, he absently adjusted the heavy collar of beaten gold encircling his neck. It was a pointless and human thing to do. One of his first actions upon awakening and leaving his tomb six months before had been to interface with the molecular structure of any article on his body so it responded instantly to conscious thought.
Holding his metauh across his left breast, the god strolled across the sandy, windswept plain in the direction of his tomb. He had waited for six months for his worshipers to arrive, and there was no hurry now, even though they would reach his tomb a few minutes before he would. They, however, wouldn't be able to open the portal.
By the time he reached the perimeter of his tomb, the vehicle was parked in front of the reinforced-stone-and-steel dome. The four people were totally engrossed in trying to figure out the workings of the massive, vanadium-alloy sec door. The god paused and looked at them. In less than a millisecond, he assimilated all that he needed from their minds.
He was pleased that English was still the primary language, though now peppered with new colloquialisms, vernacular and vulgarisms.
The four people were part of a larger group, a loosely knit conglomeration of wanderers, scavengers and self-styled salvage experts calling themselves Farers. They had come from a settlement of sorts only a day's journey away, crossing the wasteland they called the Barrens.
The god wasn't surprised by the vast changes from the world he had been born into. Even before his long sleep, the American continent was already molding itself into Deathlands.
He narrowed the focus of his probe to the individuals.
There was Danielson, the leader of this little band of survivors. He was black bearded, trim and erect, though wiry of stature. The woman beside him was Harrier, a woman who appeared brisk and no-nonsense in a neat white tunic, khaki shorts and high-laced boots. The other two men were Stockbridge and Javna, and they were identically attired in patched and stained coveralls. Javna was the oldest of the four, with thinning white hair and no teeth. Stockbridge was around Danielson's age, a muscular black man of medium height.
All four people shared similar thoughts,
similar goals—they needed to survive Deathlands, and in order to do that, they had to travel, salvaging what they could from stockpiles laid down by the pre-nukecaust government. In Danielson's mind was the vivid image of a man he considered both an inspiration and a competitor in his profession. The man went by the name of the Trader, and the god glimpsed pieces of memory of vehicles called war wags. Danielson envied the Trader, but he also admired him, even though he had been cast out of the Trader's organization a short time before.
Looking into the minds of Javna and Stockbridge was like peering into the minds of small, venal rodents. Greed, anger and the resentful suspicion that they had been cheated by Danielson, Harrier and even the whole world dominated their thoughts and emotions.
The god focused on Harrier, and he realized that he was looking at her form rather than her mind. He felt a strange inner pang. It took him a moment to identify it. The pang was an emotion—remorse, seasoned with just a pinch of regret.
Harrier was a slim woman in her early twenties. She had no idea just how old she really was. Her hair was dark, and it framed her face in a silken bell. Her first name was Connie. The god realized that Connie was a diminutive of the ancient Celtic name Connaught.
The pang slowly built to a sensation of yearning, and it had been so long since the god had indulged in something so common, so mortal as feeling, he didn't immediately recognize the emotion.
He did, however, allow himself a certain small pride in staging a dramatic entrance. He drew breeze-driven grains of sand to him and directed them to swirl about him until he had the appearance of a miniature cyclone, a man-size dust devil.
The god moved toward the portal of his tomb, and he appreciated the expressions of dismay and surprise that crossed the faces of the people when they spied the whirling cloud of grit. When he reached an appropriate distance from the four mortals, he allowed the wind to dissipate and the sand to fall away from his body.
Danielson's mouth gaped open in shock. His leathery right hand fumbled at his hip and came up with an automatic pistol, one the god identified from the man's mind as a 9 mm Steel City War Eagle, manufactured 120 years before. The god knew the gun—the "blaster," as Danielson thought of it— contained only three projectiles. Though all four people were armed, only Javna's Taurus PT-99 carried a full 15-shot clip.
As it was, although all four people drew their blasters, they were totally unnerved by his sudden materialization. For an instant, he saw himself through their eyes.
They saw a giant, bronze-skinned man whose life hadn't been spent in savage conflict with the new nature of Deathlands, but a man whose form bespoke the intention to bend that nature to his will. That intention showed in his strong, moody face, the hard-muscled economy of his form, his heavy arms, broad shoulders and massive chest. He wore a linen loincloth, gold necklace and a royal king-cobra headdress that—the god saw from their minds— none of them recognized.
Nor did they recognize the silver, three-foot long, forked rod he held over his muscular chest as a weapon. Or perhaps they were too distracted by the shimmering crimson of his eyes.
"Good day," the god said, manipulating the pitch, timbre and vibrations of his voice to be sympathetically resonant to the inner ears of his worshipers. "Would you care to step inside, out of the sun?"
Some of the shock went out of Danielson's face, but he didn't lower his pistol. He eyed the god's six feet five inches of hard muscle and replied cautiously, "We might. You staked a claim on this here stockpile?"
The god glanced toward Connie Harrier, who stared at him with a blue-eyed intensity. He gave her his most disarming and human grin before replying, "It's not a stockpile, Mr. Danielson. It's my tomb."
Gesturing toward the heavy metal door, the god announced, "I require worshipers to help me build a dynasty. You four will do for a start."
Danielson's eyes widened, then narrowed. "How'd you know my name? You're some kind of psi-mutie."
"Yeah," Javna agreed in a voice frosty with contempt. "Got to be, with them eyes."
The god glanced briefly in the old man's direction. "Your invitation to accompany me inside is rescinded, Mr. Javna."
Javna spit out a derisive laugh and brought up his blaster, finger crooked tight around the trigger. "I'm invitin' you to die, mutie whoreson."
The god moved the metauh negligently, pointing the double prongs, positioned like an upside down V at the tip of the rod, toward the old man's bio-negative weak points. Pale blue mena energy sprang up in a halo around Javna.
The dry, hot air seemed to shiver. Javna's frail body swayed, and the sway became a tremble and the tremble turned into a convulsion. His eyes remained open, but they didn't see. His toothless mouth gaped open, but no words came out. He croaked a sound of pain, terror and despair.
The old man's back arched violently, as if he had received a heavy blow between the shoulders. There was a sharp crackling sound of cartilage and bone. Spittle strings drooled from discolored gums. From the corner of each bulging eye squeezed a droplet of blood, then those eyes burst in gelid, crimson-tinged sprays. For an instant, all saw the raw, dark pits of empty sockets.
Javna coughed out a moan of horror, and the cough was followed by a torrent of blood, fountaining up from hemorrhaging internal organs. He toppled sideways, falling to the sand, arms contorting and drawing up like the gnarled branches of a leafless tree. He seemed to shrivel and wither like a mummy even as he fell.
Harrier, after a moment of wide-eyed shock, swung her handblaster toward the god, finger tightening around the trigger.
"Stop."
The word rolled through the air like a sudden clap of thunder. Harrier stopped, her finger frozen on the trigger. Danielson and Stockbridge stood immobile.
The god lowered the metauh and stepped toward Harrier. Her eyes stared into his defiantly, even though her limbs were paralyzed. The god looked deep, deep into her mind. What he found there pleased him. She stood there and allowed her memories, her dreams, her unrealized ambitions and most secret fantasies and passions to be riffled.
The god addressed her softly, his voice a seductive instrument stimulating her neuroenergy system. "Connaught Katherine Harrier. Connie. I need you. I intend to impose order on the remains of this world by building a dynasty that will rule for ten thousand years."
Harrier didn't respond for a long moment. "What do you need me for?"
"First, to take me to your settlement, where I will collect my followers. Then we will proceed to my royal city. It lies some distance away. And then you will bear me an heir."
Harrier's face twisted in impact to his words. "I'm sterile."
"A congenital condition, which I can rectify."
"What?" Harrier's voice was ragged, incredulous, fearful.
"Drop your weapon, Connie. It's useless against me, you know."
The woman shuddered, able to move again, and she stared in mild surprise as her blaster dropped from her hand to the sand at her feet. The god mentally nudged her toward the vanadium-alloy door. He sensed the reactions of the three people. Their emotions were a riot of conflicting questions, terrors and fears.
Harrier stopped walking, and the god was impressed with the degree of concentration she employed to break free, momentarily, of his persuasion.
"What the fuck are you?" she demanded.
The god smiled gently. "I've had many names. 'Alpha' was the first. A woman I once…knew called me 'Alfie' as an endearment. 'Hell Eyes' was more of a title than a name, and I never cared for it. Since my resurrection, I have decided to be addressed as 'Akhnaton,' an old name with a fine tradition."
Between clenched teeth, Harrier grated, "I don't care about your name. What are you?"
With one hand, he softly caressed the smooth, rounded line of her cheek. "I am who you have been waiting for, Connie. I am your god."
Chapter One
Sixteen Years Later
Ryan opened his eye, and Krysty was still ther
e. The moon formed a halo around her full mane of scarlet hair, striking flame-colored highlights from the flowing tresses. Though his throat was raw from brine, he managed to ask, "How long, lover?"
Krysty leaned down, and her lips brushed his forehead. "A couple of hours. How do you feel?"
"Waterlogged." With a groaning effort, he managed to hitch himself up to his elbows. He looked around, his brain still unsteady from his near drowning and the beating he had received from the self-styled Admiral Poseidon.
Little flares of pain ignited all over his body. He lay on the gently rocking deck of the small cabin cruiser. Flinging aside the blanket, he saw that his naked body was covered with abrasions and contusions. The salt air of the sea stung his wounds, and they pulled when he moved.
Krysty handed him a cup of fresh water, and he drank gratefully, rinsing his mouth and spitting over the side. "Where's everybody else?"
She nodded toward the enclosed cabin amidships. "Down below, trying to get some rest. It was too cramped for me. What happened to Poseidon?"
Ryan sat up straighter, gritting his teeth. In a voice thick with savage satisfaction, he replied, "He sleeps with the fishes."
With Krysty's help, he managed to get to his feet. Standing at his full six feet two inches, he drew the tall, voluptuous woman against him, stroking her hair, noting that her normally brilliant green eyes were dulled by exhaustion.
"What about you?" he asked. "Are you all right?"
"I called on the power of Gaia," she answered wearily, trying to repress the catch in her voice. "Men died."
Ryan didn't ask for details. Krysty Wroth was, by definition, a mutie. She possessed the empathic ability to sense danger in the offing. Her fiery mane of red hair was the outward manifestation of this power, stirring, curling, moving as if it were a separate, sentient organism. The few others with these prescient powers were called doomseers or doom-sniffers.
Krysty had been trained to hone this empathy by being in tune with the electromagnetic energies of Gaia, the Earth Mother. By tapping into these energies, the power field of the planet itself, Krysty could gain superhuman strength for a limited time. When possessed by Gaia, she entered an altered state of consciousness and turned into a raging death goddess. However, her manipulation of earth energies could only be used on occasion, as it exacted a great physical toll. Therefore, she had learned to handle her .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 640 revolver with devastating skill.