by James Axler
Her desire for vengeance was an unwavering flame
But even if Krysty had known beyond doubt her bullet would split that dark-haired skull, she wouldn’t have taken the shot. Yes, the captain had to die. She had to kill him, or at least be the cause of his death even if her finger didn’t pull the trigger or her hand plunge the blade.
But he was just one among many. A significant one, but merely one. To claim his life would risk throwing her life away—with her friends still unrescued and the bulk of her blood debt unpaid.
Krysty wouldn’t do that.
So she watched them drive off out of sight, unmolested. Intuition told her they were heading back to the massacre site, to the rim above Ryan’s unmarked resting place a mile toward the center of the earth. Why they might be bound there she couldn’t say. It didn’t matter, and speculation was no part of her nature in any event. She let all thought of whys and wherefores slip from her mind.
There could be only her quest. Worry, fear, anticipation—these could only weaken the resolve Krysty needed to keep her weary legs driving her relentlessly on.
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Crater Lake
Homeward Bound
Pony Soldiers
Dectra Chain
Ice and Fire
Red Equinox
Northstar Rising
Time Nomads
Latitude Zero
Seedling
Dark Carnival
Chill Factor
Moon Fate
Fury’s Pilgrims
Shockscape
Deep Empire
Cold Asylum
Twilight Children
Rider, Reaper
Road Wars
Trader Redux
Genesis Echo
Shadowfall
Ground Zero
Emerald Fire
Bloodlines
Crossways
Keepers of the Sun
Circle Thrice
Eclipse at Noon
Stoneface Bitter
Fruit Skydark
Demons of Eden
The Mars Arena
Watersleep
Nightmare Passage
Freedom Lost
Way of the Wolf
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
JAMES AXLER
DEATH LANDS ®
Vengeance Trail
Like to the Pontick sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellspont,
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up.
—William Shakespeare,
Othello, III, iv, 454
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 One
J. B. Dix chewed a dust-dry blade of buffalo grass and leaned back against the wag, its sun-heated metal pinging as it cooled in the breeze. Beneath the low-tipped brim of his fedora, he watched a little girl named Sallee, scabbed legs splayed in the dust by the track, as she played with a flop-eared, vaguely humanoid bundle of rags.
“What do you reckon that thing is, anyway, Jak?” he asked his companion, who perched on the wag’s hood walking a short leaf-bladed throwing knife along the backs of his bone-white fingers. “Rabbit or mutie?”
Jak Lauren flicked his keen ruby toward the rags and laughed. He was scarcely more than a child himself, despite a veteran’s scars. His skin was chalk white, and his long hair, wind-whipped around his shoulders, was the color of fresh-fallen snow.
“Mutie,” he said.
The sky’s blue skin was bare of clouds. The layers of earth defining the walls and pinnacles of the Big Ditch, the old Grand Canyon, glowed as though lit from within the Earth itself in bands of colors—yellow, red, burnt-orange—muted but so rich they seemed to vibrate. The sun that brought out all that glory shone down on the desert above the great canyon like a laser beam, and struck those below with the impact of heat of molten steel. But the tall, statuesque redheaded woman in the jumpsuit and blue cowboy boots didn’t mind. It was the sort of day that Krysty Wroth loved most. The kind of day where you didn’t have to be an in
itiate of Gaia, as she was, to find the beauty hidden in the devastation that was the Deathlands.
She let her green eyes slide from her two friends, to the caravan of a dozen battered wags parked by the edge of the Big Ditch with their engines cooling, while several people labored to change a flat tire, on to Doc Tanner, standing by offering unsolicited advice to Mildred Wyeth as she checked the dressings on the stump of a woman’s shin. A diamondback had bitten her on the ankle three days before, just outside the ville of Ten Mile, and her own husband had chopped off her leg with an ax to keep the venom from spreading.
Nothing was dampening the travelers’ spirits, though. They were bound from the fringes of the Deathlands proper, away to the east across the Rocks, to the fledgling ville of New Tulsa, where some of their kin had already begun to carve a living out of the land. The land wasn’t much less desolate than what surrounded them, although better watered by rain. But that very land, sere tan land dotted with cactus and hardly less unfriendly scrub, looked like Paradise to a folk accustomed to rains of acid and skies of murk.
And that sky of pure, open blue, with only a few clouds as white and innocent as baby lambs, affected them like some kind of happy drug: jolt without the edge. They laughed and chattered like kids and even sang. Some just wandered aimlessly, gazing around themselves in wonder.
“I’m going into the bushes for a bit,” Krysty called to her friends, “to answer the call.”
Ryan Cawdor, her lover, acknowledged her with a wave of his hand. He stood with his back to her on the rim of the precipice, the wind ruffling his shaggy black curls and gazed out and down into the giant cut in the earth’s flesh with his lone eye. A single dark shape wheeled out over that emptiness and the strange land forms striped with muted colors—ochre, orange, buff—at the level of the small party of humans and their machines perched perilously on the rim. From the fingerlike tips on the wings, Krysty was satisfied it was an eagle, not a screamwing.
No threat. Having duly notified her companions, she went off into the scrub to tend to her affairs. For all the utter naturalness of such functions, Krysty had been raised to be modest.
She didn’t hear the raiders until they were right upon them. No one did. The wind’s unceasing whistle and mutter masked the sound of engines coming fast from the east until the wags they propelled were braking to a stop alongside the halted caravan in a swirl of dust.
Suddenly men were leaping off half a dozen wags, longblasters in their hands. Krysty caught a flashing impression they all wore olive or camouflage, military-style.
Several travelers cried out in fear. Kids squealed and ran to parents frozen by shock. By reflex, Ryan spun, bringing his Steyr sniper rifle to his cheek.
Two of the intruders’ wags were pickups with M-249 machine guns mounted on welded-together pintles behind the cabs. One MG snarled a burst. Krysty saw dust spout off Ryan’s coat.
He fell from sight, straight into the Big Ditch.
A woman broke shrieking toward the brush with a toddler in her arms. Several longblasters cracked, including at least one on full-auto. Mother and child fell kicking in a whirl of dust and bloodied rags. Their cries subsided into bubbling sobs. Another burst stilled them.
Hidden behind scrub and a rise in the earth around the roots of a mesquite bush, Krysty felt as if she had been frozen into a block of amber like a mosquito Ryan had once shown her in some half-destroyed museum. Her hair, possessed of its own mobility and nerve-endings, flattened to her skull and neck.
Her companions still in the open—J.B., Mildred, Jak and Doc—stood just as still, hands raised. She felt a flash of rage that they hadn’t fought as Ryan had tried to do, but she stifled the thought in the sure knowledge that had they done so they, too, would be staring at the sky right now.
A coldheart stepped down from the cab of wag whose gunner had downed Ryan. Though he wore no insignia he was clearly the man in charge. He was tall, broad-shouldered, long-limbed, slim waisted. His clean-shaved face was as beautiful as a statue’s, smooth and unscarred, the rich warm brown of a light-skinned black man’s. His hair, curly bronzed brown, was cut short on top, though not buzzed. In back it was caught into a long braid at the nape and thrown forward over the right shoulder of the steel breastplate he wore over his camouflage blouse. A well-maintained 9 mm Heckler & Koch blaster rode in a combat holster at his right hip. Command presence radiated from his face and posture, the way the light and heat of the sun radiated from his mirror-polished armor.
He shook his head and sighed. “All right. Let’s get this done. Line them up for inspection.”
The surviving travelers, Krysty’s companions among them, had their hands on their heads, except for mothers with children too small to know what was going on. These kept one hand on the head while the other clasped the youngsters to their skirts. The coldhearts herded them into a line at the edge of the clearing in the scrub near the rim, well away from the canyon itself. It seemed the raiders wanted no part of that long drop.
Other raiders had clambered onto a couple of the travelers’ wags and began pitching out their possessions. These were few and mostly valuable. Some of the travelers had taken a piece or two of furniture with them, but these were the exception. There was plenty of nonperishable stuff left over from the megacull, lots more than there were people to use it. Bulky items like chairs and chests of drawers weren’t worth dragging across the Deathlands unless they had powerful sentimental value. Otherwise the travelers’ wags contained tools, clothes, meds, food, water, even some weapons. All stuff needed for survival in their new homes and, for that matter, on the long and perilous journey to get there. All, with the possible exception of clothing, commanding good value in trade.
The coldhearts didn’t seem to care. They just pitched whatever was on the wags they selected into the dust.
“Some guards you turned out to be,” spit Kurtiz, a young man with shaggy light brown hair and beard prematurely shot with gray, whose front two incisors were missing. It gave his voice a sort of lisp. He was straw boss of the travelers’ train, the man who actually got things done. He was able at his job and generally quiet—until now.
J. B. shrugged. A sec man had already relieved him of his M-4000 shotgun and was searching him for weapons.
“Friend,” the Armorer said, “you can’t argue with a leveled blaster.”
“Can argue,” Jak said with a bitter snarl as a coldheart took his .357 Magnum Colt Python and a collection of throwing knives. “Not win.”
J.B. had sounded casual, but Krysty saw the way a muscle twitched at the hinge of his jaw. She knew then as if she felt it herself the terrible void he had to be feeling, and what it was costing him not to so much as look at the place from which his friend had dropped off the earth. He had been best friend and comrade in arms to Ryan Cawdor for years before either man ever met Krysty Wroth.And even though Krysty was Ryan’s mate and soulbond, it was only because she herself had shared mortal danger and hardship with him that their own kindredship was as close as that between the two blood brothers.
Beside him, Jak vibrated with fury, lips skinned back from his teeth. But he kept his hands knotted in the snow-colored hair at his nape. Doc gazed into nothingness. Mildred was as impassive as a stone statue, but her eyes were bloodshot. Krysty knew that meant she was in the grip of fury every scrap as hard to control as Jak’s.
“The next one who gets chilled,” rasped a short, wide white man wearing a Kevlar coals coop helmet with sergeant’s chevrons painted on the front. His face looked as if it had been cut out of granite with a none-too-deftly wielded geologist’s pick.
The tall handsome sec chief stalked along the line of quaking backs. As he passed some he tapped lightly on shoulders. Those so indicated were yanked from the line by the coldhearts and ramrodded toward a stakebed truck that had earlier been full of raiders. When Kurtiz was chosen, he suddenly shook off the soldiers holding his arms, as if the awful implication of the process had suddenly struck home.
“Nukeblast it, you can’t—” he began.
The crack of a longblaster put a premature period to his exclamation. He dropped as if the long shabby coat he wore were suddenly untenanted. The hole the 5.56 mm bullet had made in his homespun shirt on its way to drill clean through the heart wasn’t visible from where Krysty crouched.
The short sergeant kept his M-16 leveled from his waist. “Next one gives any shit gets bursted in the belly,” he said. His voice was as rough as lava rock, and as hard and cutting.
When he came to the companions, the sec chief selected J. B. and Jak without hesitation, paused at Doc, then passed him by to select Mildred. Mildred seemed to hang back as soldiers grabbed her arms. J.B. caught her eye and shook his head all but imperceptibly.
She bowed her head and went where they took her. In the Deathlands, survival wasn’t optional. The time to go down fighting had passed. There was no fool like a dead one, as Trader used to say.
The ones chosen were fit-looking men and women without children, a few teenaged boys and girls, twenty-two or -three in all. Many still stood shivering despite the warmth of the sun, waiting with their hands on their heads.
As the implication of their being left unselected sank in, they began to cry and plead despite the example made of their trail boss. Then again, it now made little difference, and they knew it.
A stout figure whose repetitively chinned face was flanked by great winging gray side-whiskers stepped forward from the ranks of those not chosen. Sweat poured down in streams from the brim of his battered leather top hat. This was Elliot, called Hizzoner, by himself anyway, self-proclaimed mayor of the travelers’ settlement-to-be. As to what his precise contribution was to the welfare of the train to justify his claims of leadership, his two knuckle-dragging bodyguards, Amos and Bub, discouraged the others from asking impertinent questions.
“Now, just a minute here, boys,” he said, “let’s not be too hasty here. Happens I’m the leader of this here little procession across the wasteland.”
Banner, the sergeant, who happened to be nearby, backhanded him across the face with casually brutal force. The plump self-proclaimed mayor measured his none-too-considerable length in the dust.