by James Axler
WEARY WANDERERS
In the war-torn wasteland known as Deathlands, desperation and destruction have replaced dreams and peace. Each day arrives with a new life-threatening challenge for wanderer Ryan Cawdor and his fellow band of survivors…
FEAST OR FAMINE
Bizarre murders are taking place in a fertile farming community, and the locals are quick to point fingers at Ryan and his companions. But they know another culprit is responsible. A colony of mutants has been driven from its underground home, forced to find sustenance in the light of day. And only human flesh will satisfy their hunger. Caught between a rock and a horde of hungry cannibals, Ryan and the companions face an ultimatum—help the cannies reclaim their territory, or risk becoming the next meal. Except something far more sinister—and ravenous—lurks beneath the lush fields…
It was all over but the fleeing
None of the group came close to Ryan’s keenly honed sense of danger, the unconscious ability to flash-sort through even the tiniest fugitive sensory inputs, to identify the pattern that added up to threat.
Out of the corner of his eye, Ryan saw a skinny old man, standing by the side of the road, leveling a single-action Peacemaker blaster at Ryan’s head.
But just as the one-eyed man’s sense of danger had its limitations, so did his striking-rattler reflexes. He already knew he was nuked, even as his brain sent his body the impulse to dive aside.
The ancient blaster vanished in a giant yellow muzzle-flash, which instantly echoed in a blinding red flash inside Ryan’s skull.
Then blackness. Then nothing.
Forbidden Trespass
James Axler
’Tis not a year or two shows us a man.
They are all but stomachs, and we all but food.
To eat us hungerly, and when they are full,
They belch us.
—William Shakespeare
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 pre-dark 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
Cover
Back Cover Text
Introduction
Title Page
Quotes
The Deathlands Saga
Prologue
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
Copyright
* * *
Prologue
“Wymie!”
At the cry from her sister, Wymea Berdone turned away from the big galvanized tub on the crude counter in the kitchen where she was doing the dishes. Hot water splashed from hands and lower arms reddened from heat and the caustic lye soap her family made from hog fat and wood ash.
The ash they got from the wood they cut in the forests around their house in the Pennyrile Hills near the ville of Sinkhole. The hog fat they had to trade for these days, since Wymie’s stepdad, Mord Pascoe, had sold off the last of the pigs to buy hooch at Mathus Conn’s gaudy house and bar. It was only one of the ways life had gotten poorer for them since the tree that fell the wrong way had killed Wymie’s pa.
“Baby, what is it?” she called, grabbing a rag to dry her hands.
“It’s nothin’!” Mord bellowed from his easy chair in the cabin’s main room. “Mind your damn business, bitch.”
“Blinda?” Wymie asked, ignoring him.
Her little sister, ten years old with her dirty blond hair in pigtails and a rag-doll teddy bear clutched to the front of her ragged linen smock, stared at her with wide sapphire-blue eyes. They were the only trait the two shared in common. Otherwise Blinda was slight and Wymea was strapping, though considered comely by most of the menfolk hereabouts—unfortunately including Mord Pascoe. And where Wymie had hair so raven-wing black it was almost blue falling down over the shoulders of her blue plaid flannel man’s shirt, Blinda was fair.
“What happened, honey?”
“It’s him,” her sister said, without even a glance at the man lounging in the chair with his black-furred belly sticking out the bottom of his shirt, which was closed over his chest by the last few buttons holding out against the strain. The chair was a faded green and overstuffed. His own overstuffing had started the chair’s stuffing busting out of seams all over the cushion and back. “He wants me to go outside with him to the woodpile again.”
Wymie felt the lower lids of her eyes pushing up in what she knew was a dangerous look. She directed it toward her stepfather.
“I told you not to try that again,” she said, managing with effort to keep from shouting. She knew what yelling would cost her ma. As it was, Wymie’s defiance would cost the woman at least a couple face punches from those beefy fists.
Through his patchy stubble of black beard, Mord showed a grin that was brown and twisted where it wasn’t gaps.
“You could take her place, y’know.”
“Try to touch me again, I’ll bust your nose like the last time,” Wymie said. “If I catch you grabbin’ at Blinda anymore, you’re lucky if I don’t do no more than bust your damn fingers.”
She glanced meaningfully at the ax propped by the door. It took effort she could ill afford, with all the other burdens she carried. But she kept its heavy blade sharp. Her pa had taught her to care for her tools, before the tree took him. And he knew from painful experience that a dulled ax was more dangerous to its user than what he or she might mean to chop with i
t.
“Don’t lie,” her mother said, with the flat intonation of someone repeating a chant they’d learned by rote, and long ago forgotten the real meaning of, if they’d ever known it at all. “Lyin’s wicked.”
Wymie turned a frown toward her mother. Despite her resentment, her eyes lost their dangerous pressure and drooped down at the outside edges, weighted down with sadness. She remembered a time when her mother had been tall and straight, pretty, even.
But the past three years, since her husband died, and especially the past two, since she married Mord Pascoe for no reason Wymie nor anyone about Sinkhole could tell, had shrunk her—shriveled her, almost—to a stooped shadow of her former self. Her glossy brown hair had turned drab and mouse-colored. The flesh of her face had drawn back, making her almost look like a mouse; and the cringing attitude she displayed toward her husband did nothing to dispel the resemblance.
Why can’t you stand up for us for once, Ma? Wymie wanted to shout. She wouldn’t, though. She knew the answer. If she stood up to Mord Pascoe, he’d beat her down. He might not be willing to lift a finger to help out around the homestead, or even keep the family alive, but he’d heave his bulk out of that chair and raise both hands to hit a woman.
He knew better than to do it with Wymie around. But he also knew—
“Nuke it all, a man’s got needs,” he whined, giving the lie to her mother’s naming Wymie’s words a lie. “If his wife can’t handle them all, then his daughters should. It’s the patriarchal way of things.”
A narrow, sly look appeared in his small gray eyes. “And you can’t watch over your ma and sis all the time,” he said. “Can you?”
She growled.
Ignoring her, now that he’d reasserted his power in the family, he pushed himself up with a great groan of effort. The fumes that belched from his mouth when he did carried clear to Wymie ten feet away. It smelled worse than his pits and feet and crotch did. “Now, enough of this crap. I’m the man in the house and you got to obey. C’mere, you little bitch. Now.”
“Now, Blinda,” her mother said. “Obey your daddy. You got to do it. It’s that patriarch way, like he says.”
“No,” Wymie said firmly.
As Mord lumbered toward the cowering girl on short, fat-quivering legs, Blinda shot a frightened look at her big sister. Wymie nodded.
Blinda darted away, ducking under a clumsy swipe of Mord’s pallid paws. She ran to the open window and leaned on the sill, sticking her face out to breathe in the cool spring-night breeze and watch the early fireflies dance. Her grimy toy bear dangled over the cracked wooden sill.
Mord made to follow, but Wymie put herself between them, her bare, reddened forearms, still steaming from the dishwater, crossed beneath her breasts. She knew that emphasized their heft, but the gesture also helped get her message across. She didn’t want to raise a hand against the man unless she had to.
As he said, she couldn’t be there to watch over her ma all the time.
But she was here now.
“Not another step,” she declared.
“I’m a man,” he repeated. It was one of his favorite things to say. It was almost like he thought someone might disagree, or forget it if he didn’t repeat it often enough. “I’m stronger’n you, little slut. I could knock you out of the way.”
“You could try.”
He tried an engaging grin on her. It seemed to work on her ma, but it turned Wymie’s stomach. In her eyes it was nothing but a snaggletoothed leer.
“You could take her place,” he said. “Help take the edge off for your poor daddy, the way a dutiful daughter should.”
“It’s not gonna happen.”
His eyes flashed and his heavy black brows jutted low and outward above them.
“Why do you act so high and mighty?” he bellowed. The stink of his breath rocked her back on her heels and made her eyes water, but she stood her ground. “I know what a slut you are. Givin’ that sweet thang up for every boy in the county, from Maccum Corners clear to the holler!”
“That’s a lie and you know it,” she said. “No boy would dare touch me with anything they wanted to keep.” Again she looked meaningfully at the ax.
Wish I’d gone ahead and struck his filthy hand off when he grabbed me through my skirt that time, she thought. But she had mashed his ugly tuber of a nose for him, as she’d reminded him before.
In return he’d knocked her sprawling with a backhand and blackened her eye. But that victory was short-lived. She bounced back up right away, and that time she held her ax in both hands. Ready to cut.
“C’mon,” he pleaded. “Let me get a little sugar, can’t you?”
“Wymie,” her mother called from behind him. “You don’t be sassing your pa, now. He’s right. You got to do what he says. We all do.”
“Oh, Ma,” Wymie cried, shaking her head and squinting her eyes to try to hold in the hot tears that filled them. “Can’t you show some spine sometime?”
But she knew the answer. She doesn’t dare, she thought. Because I can’t protect her. I’m not good enough. Not strong enough. It’s all my fault…
She shook her head again, once, fiercely. She wouldn’t walk down that trail again. Not where it led her.
It had only been the once. But no amount of washing, mebbe not even a dose of straight-up lye, would ever cleanse her of the foul feeling that he had left her with.
“Blinda,” she called, “come with me. Let’s go for a nice walk in the woods, honey. Get some clean air in our noses for a change.”
She turned away from her stepfather. She was afraid he’d rabbit-punch her, but she had to take that risk. She doubted he had the sack to try, anyway. He knew what she’d do to him if he tried a trick like that and failed.
Blinda was slumped over the sill. The dirty soles of her bare feet showed, the toes bowed together against the floor.
“Blinda? Wake up, honey. I know you ain’t been sleeping good, but we got to go.”
She reached out to take her sister’s thin shoulder. She shook the girl gently.
The ragged bear slid from her fingers to the floor. Blinda slid back to follow it.
Horror struck through Wymie like lightning.
Her beloved baby sister no longer had a face. There was only a bloody red gap where her face should have been.
* * *
Chapter One
“Wait,” Ricky Morales said. “What was that?”
“Probably your imagination,” Mildred Wyeth responded. She had stripped off her shirt to work in the humid heat of the hollow in her scavvied sports bra and khaki cargo pants. She straightened from sorting a pile of mostly unidentifiable scavvied tech, mostly metal parts and components J. B. Dix identified as electronics, and drew the back of her hand across her high, dark-skinned forehead. “Heat’s making you see things.”
But Ryan Cawdor was standing and staring intently at the spot in the brush above the excavation the kid had snapped his head around to look at.
“No,” he said. “I think I saw something, too.”
He had his palm resting on the grip of the SIG Sauer P226 blaster in its holster. He’d left his longblaster, a Steyr Scout Tactical, in the shade of a rickety lean-to.
He glanced at Jak Lauren, who stood on top of a heap of dirt, rocks, chunks of concrete, and bits and pieces of cloth, plastic and other debris that somehow hadn’t degraded into the dense clay soil in the hundred or so years since skydark. The slender, slight young man shrugged. Despite the sticky mugginess he insisted on wearing his camouflage jacket, to which he’d sewn jagged shards of glass and metal fragments to discourage an in-fighting opponent from grabbing him. His adversary would get a further surprise if he grabbed the young man by the collar. Hidden razor blades would cause severe injury. Jak was swiveling his head, long white hair swinging above his shoulders, white-skinned brow furrowed over ruby eyes.
He sensed Ryan’s attention and looked toward him. “Check out?” he asked.
“No,” Ryan said
. “If there’s something out there, it knows the area better than we do.”
Jak let his thin lips quirk contemptuously. “Could beat.”
“Mebbe,” Ryan said. “Mebbe not.”
The white-haired youth frowned. Though a product of the Gulf Coast bayou country—even hotter and double-steamier than this—he was proud of his wilderness skills. Indeed, his skills at stealth and tracking in any environment—even urban ones, as alien to his upbringing as the dimpled face of the moon. And for a fact, he was good. Those skills had kept Ryan and the rest of his companions alive on many occasions.
“The pallid shadows again?” Doc asked. Doc was a tall, gaunt man with haunted blue eyes and rich silvery hair. Though he appeared to be in his late sixties, he was, in fact, in terms of years lived, in his thirties. Looked at in a different way, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was almost two and a half centuries old. The whitecoats of Operation Chronos had trawled him from the late 1800s to the twentieth century. When he proved to be a very difficult subject, they threw him into the future, to Deathlands, a prematurely aged husk.
That he had survived was a testament to his intrinsic toughness and drive to live. “Not sure,” Ricky said, shaking his head. The kid had been with them for a while now, tramping the miles and enduring countless hardships with the rest of the companions. He was currently on watch, squatting at the edge of the sinkhole that had claimed some kind of small but well-equipped predark office building. He had his DeLisle carbine across his knees.
“Can find out,” Jak said stubbornly. He hated to stay still for long, especially doing hard physical labor. He felt as if he should constantly be prowling whatever surroundings his companions happened to find themselves in, keeping watch, keeping them safe. And it chafed his spirit to be forced to do so while there seemed to be enemies about.
“Why don’t we wait to see if they are a threat to us, Jak?” said Krysty Wroth, emerging from the large irregular hole in the rubble that led to the intact, buried sections of the small predark complex.