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  It was a hard battle, but the hordes of muties grew less

  The Amazons raced forward to gain ground, treading on the corpses of their chilled foes and driving the remaining stickies back. Surveying the carnage, Ryan gave a sigh of relief and exhaustion. "Fireblast, I thought they'd never stop coming."

  "They'll need to regroup, too," Gloria stated, "if they're going to attack. So we should have some time." The Gate queen directed her people to make camp, clear the chilled and tend to the few minor wounds the warriors had received.

  Ryan gathered together his people. Speaking softly, he said, "It's not the stickies I'm worried about." Doc noticed the puzzled look that Jak gave the one-eyed man, and spoke. "If I am not mistaken, my dear Ryan, you allude to the fact that our little mutie friends were genetically altered?"

  Ryan nodded. "And if we're approaching the place you've heard of, then…"

  "Then the danger may not be from the stickies," Mildred finished.

  Amazon Gate

  #59 in the Deathland 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 September 2002

  ISBN 0-373-62569-3

  AMAZON GATE

  Copyright © 2002 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 all incidents are pure invention.

  ® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  Sometimes I wondered if it was possible that the whole structure of government wasn't just some sort of absurd joke, and that underneath it all, underpinning the whole structure and fabric of our society, there was a covert and secret society that had it all nicely arranged for their own ends. After all, if Adam Weishaupt had gotten his way, then the Illuminati would be running the world. Maybe they were. The only consolation is that they'd bomb themselves out of existence, which isn't much of a consolation, is it?

  —Paul Trew The Secrets of Power Swine Press

  Printed in U.S.A.

  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…

  Chapter One

  Something was wrong, but for the life of him—and it could mean that—Jak Lauren was unable to work out exactly what it was.

  The albino hugged the ground, smelling the rich loam as it filled his nostrils with a heady scent. The roots and leaves of the plants mixed into a rich aroma that still couldn't hide the stench of death, the rancid aroma of rotting flesh and dried blood that permeated his clothes and into his very skin.

  He blinked, his red eyes stung by the sweat that trickled into them. Despite the irritation, he resisted the temptation to reach up and wipe the liquid away, loath to move his arm and disturb the foliage around him. Until he was sure what was happening, even the slightest movement was a danger. Even the merest whisper of a rustle could bring death down on him.

  Jak's long white hair was lank and loose around his face, strands of it plastered to his skin while other loose hairs tickled and poked at the corners of his nose and mouth. Like the sweat, he ignored the irritation.

  Instead, he focused on what was around, straining every nerve end, concentrating his senses so hard that he could almost hear the blood pounding in his veins, the hissing of his own central nervous system.

  None of that did anything to waylay the gnawing at the pit of his stomach. Jak knew fear; despite his always seeming calm in the middle of a firefight, his stillness when hunting and stalking, his almost stoic acceptance of every dangerous situation he had faced in his journeys across the Deathlands, Jak knew fear, recognized and embraced it. Embraced it, and yielded to it rather than fight it and set his body at war with itself. It was only by knowing fear and accepting it that he could gain the calm to find space in which to act rather than react, to take control and win.

  Jak knew fear, and this wasn't fear. The nagging, insistent feeling was more akin to anxiety, to a fear of the future, to a knowledge that there was something awful and awe-filled around the corner. Something large and unknown that would leave him with no indication of how to defeat it.

  It was then that he realized what the gnawing was. It wasn't fear; it was the terrible knowledge that he couldn't win. The inevitability of the great chill.

  His breathing stilled until it had almost stopped. He returned the center of his attention to the immediate surroundings. It was still and calm, with no life or movement around him. The smell of death was now old, no longer immediate.

  Jak knew it was time to move. With an infinite degree of care, he moved his sinuous muscles, bringing his limbs to a position where he was able to lift his prone body in one swift and flowing movement, rising to his feet in a fraction of a second, hair and skin like the white tip of a suddenly peaking wave. At the apex of his rise, he shot a glance around before dropping to his haunches. There had been nothing in view, no movement of any kind. Unusual for that alone—no sign of bird or animal life, no predators or scavengers moving in on the chilled corpses. Now, hunkered in the grass and foliage, partially sheltered but still able to keep a clear view for a full 360 degrees, Jak took stock of his thoughts and tried to remember wha
t had happened.

  He frowned, the scarred and pitted white skin of his face puckering in displeasure. He had no memory of anything before this point. He had never blacked out and lost his memory in a firefight before, so it was something that disturbed him. Almost as an automatic gesture, he drew the .357 Magnum Colt Python that was his preferred blaster. He sniffed; it hadn't been fired recently. There was a shell in the chamber, and it was fully loaded. Reaching into the pockets and concealed holes of his patched camou jacket, moving probing fingers gently past the small shards of metal and glass that were also sewn onto the fabric, he could feel that he still had a full complement of ammo, and all of his leaf-bladed throwing knives were still in their concealed positions.

  Puzzled, he realized that whatever had happened in this place, he had taken no personal part in the firefight.

  So what had happened? How had he ended up here, and who were the chilled he could smell so strongly around him, their stench drowning the surrounding scents?

  Jak's frown deepened. There was one possibility that he didn't want to consider.

  Fighting the rising tide of horror that choked his throat with bile, Jak rose slowly to his feet and took a long, slow survey of the land around him, certain now that he was alone for the immediate vicinity.

  He was in the middle of a veld that stretched for at least a mile in each direction. There were distant stands of trees, stunted and blackened with leaves that hung as heavy as drops of blood in the clear, bright sun. The sky was a deep blue, tinged with just the faintest hint of chem-cloud purple. Traces of wispy cumulus broke the unrelenting block of color, the sun hazy behind the chem-addled atmosphere. The sun was orange, beating down with a heat that was oppressive, causing the smell of the charnel house to hang still in the air.

  Despite the heat and lack of cloud, he figured that the area had to have a good rainfall, as the earth on which he had been resting was moist, the loam soil rich smelling. And furthermore, the grass was a lush green, not dry and spiky. The flowering plants were still in bloom, their thick and twisting green stems looking healthy and not starved of water. They grew to a height of between two and a half and three feet, thick enough in places to form small banks of color that showed the indents of fallen bodies even though the corpses themselves were hidden from view.

  In other places, Jak could see the signs of violent struggle more clearly. There were glimpses of fallen fighters, blood smearing the grass and earth around, the stained clothing and ragged and torn flesh clearly visible.

  With a sense of terrible inevitability, Jak counted the number of corpses.

  There were six.

  He moved across the veld, his light and instinctive footing leaving no trace of his passing, the barely disturbed grass and plant stems rising as the pressure of his tread was released.

  The first corpse was a woman. A black woman. She had no face anymore, the exposed bone and pulped flesh a mass broken only by the distorted position of her unseeing eyes. The braids that still hung limply around her head identified her as surely as the Czech-manufactured ZKR pistol that hung from her lifeless grasp. Dr. Mildred Wyeth, the freezie who had defied skydark by being cryogenically frozen after a reaction to anesthetic and who had been revived into the post holocaust world her generation had engendered, had finally come up against one too many odds. As if the injury to her head hadn't been enough to buy the farm, she also had a large gash across her chest, cutting through the layers of clothing to tear clean through to the rib cage, exposing it to the air.

  Just a few yards away lay J.B. Dix, the Armorer. His eyes stared sightlessly from behind his wire-framed spectacles. His beloved fedora lay a few feet from his chilled corpse. His close cropped hair was soaked with blood from a deep gash across his forehead. But it wasn't that wound that had killed him. Rather, it was the fact that his head had been cleanly severed from his body, bloodied veins and vertebrae still hanging from the remains of his body, which lay only a few inches from the head. The body was untouched in any other way.

  Jak knew that whatever had taken out the Armorer had been swift. J.B. was a wiry and tough fighter, with lightning reflexes, yet his Uzi was still strapped across his body, his M-4000 Smith & Wesson scattergun with its deadly load of barbed metal flechettes still across his back, the stock poking awkwardly from beneath the fallen corpse. The Tekna knife that he used in close combat was still sheathed, and the vast amounts of ammunition and grens that he carried about his person and in the canvas bag that lay to one side of him were untouched.

  Moving farther over the veld, Jak came across the third of the chills. A youth on the cusp of his teenage years, with a strong jawline and a mop of thick, black, curly hair. His blaster—a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power— was still in an outstretched hand. Even at this distance, Jak could smell the cordite where the blaster had been discharged. But not enough to save the boy, who had been hit eight times across the torso with shells that looked, from the entry wounds, to have been high caliber. The front of the boy's clothing was soaked in blood.

  Jak didn't bother to turn the corpse over, but knew that such a number of entry wounds, and of such a caliber, would probably have left exit wounds that had taken away more than half the boy's backbone and flesh. As if this weren't enough, there were two further entry wounds, one on each knee. It suggested he had been brought down and then savagely chilled when he had used up all his ammo. The boy was Jak's friend, Dean Cawdor.

  Moving soundlessly across the veld, Jak came to the next chill. A woman, voluptuously curved and with a shock of long, Titian hair that had curled around her skull and neck, hugging close in death to her skin, framing the contorted agony of her death throes, now frozen on her once-beautiful face. The hair had been sentient, curling close to her when danger beckoned, a visible sign of her mutie heritage, fostered in her home ville of Harmony. The warning had obviously not been quick enough, as her body had been hacked into ribbons by multiple blade wounds. Fragments of bloodied cloth merged with flayed flesh, white bone showing through. The earth around her was stained dark with her blood. Her .38-caliber Smith & Wesson 640 revolver lay by her side, unfired. She had once been Krysty Wroth, one of Jak's traveling companions and lover of Ryan Cawdor, the leader of their group. Now she was nothing more than carrion.

  With a dreadful inevitability, Jak trod into the longer grass, where the last two corpses were concealed, their positions notable only by the gaps they created in the wall of green.

  The first corpse was an older version of Dean: taller, harder, leaner in the sense of having more finely honed muscles. Over six feet in height, he lay stretched to his full length, his throat an open wound. One startling blue eye stared sightlessly to the sky, and where the other eye should be there was a patch covering an empty socket, the long, puckered scar from that socket running the length of his cheek, distorting the rugged features. About his person was a SIG-Sauer blaster, a Steyr rifle and a razor-honed panga that was still sheathed to his thigh. Apart from the gaping wound at his throat, there was little sign of a struggle. The chill had come quick and fast to him.

  Not so to the last member of the party, whom Jak found a few yards to his left. Doc Tanner was a thin, scrawny man. He looked old and weather beaten, with a mane of gray-white hair that framed a lined face. Yet Doc was only somewhere in his mid-thirties, his apparent age the result of an incredible experience. Tanner was the only successful subject of a predark project known as Operation Chronos, part of the Totality Concept with which the old U.S.A. had prepared itself for the all out nukecaust that had led to the formation of the Deathlands. Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been a family man and academic, snatched at random from his own time period in the 1880s, and pulled through the 1990s by the whitecoat scientists of Chronos. He had been so obstreperous that the whitecoats, tiring of him, had catapulted him forward in time, thus inadvertently saving his life, albeit plunging him into what was a living hell until he was rescued by Ryan Cawdor.

  The immense stresses on the man's body and mind
had aged him physically and made his grasp on sanity fragile. And yet Doc managed to keep himself together at crucial moments and made it through the dangers. Until now. Doc's death was the worst of all. He had put up a fight, as there was still the smell of burned powder about the ancient LeMat percussion pistol he favored, and both the shot and ball barrels had been discharged. The LeMat lay a few feet to his left, and his left hand still clutched the unsheathed swordstick with the silver lion's head that also supported him as a walking stick in his weaker moments. Dried blood coated the glinting blade. Whatever else, Doc had fought the fight of his life, for his life.

  But still he had been unsuccessful. His tongue and eyes bulged vilely from his purpled face, the color distorted like his features by the length of chain that was around his neck. Rusted metal with small links, it was double wrapped and had been pulled tight…so tight that it had cut into the skin of his throat and left him with some of the links lodged under his flesh. From the shape of his neck, it seemed obvious that the vertebrae had been crushed, and his head had been pulled to a grotesque angle by the tension on the chain. Blood seeped from between the links.

  The final indignity was that his body had been cleaved at the waist, so that Doc's torso had been detached from his legs, the two halves lying within inches of each other. The lack of blood told Jak that the butchery had taken place after Doc had already been chilled, his blood stilled and so only seeping onto the earth.

  Jak turned and walked away from the carnage. He didn't look back. He didn't think about where he was going. He simply began to walk and kept on walking. He didn't think about his direction.

  He just wanted to get away. He didn't understand how he had gotten there or why he could remember nothing of the fight or how he had arrived at this point. He didn't care. He just knew that the doomie feeling in his guts wouldn't go away, despite the fact that he had now faced the inevitable and seen what it could do and what it could mean.