Red Equinox d-9 Read online

  Red Equinox

  ( Deathlands - 9 )

  James Axler

  Three generations after nuclear blasts all but vaporized the Earth, a group of warrior survivalists led by a charismatic man named Ryan Cawdor roam the hostile environment called Deathlands.

  Their quest becomes a grim struggle for survival as they search for a better life beyond the nuke-ravaged cities. And it is one such harrowing journey that brings them to the heart of Moscow.

  Beneath a mantle of chemical clouds an strontium snow, the former jewel in Russia's crown is teeming with a bizarre mix of mutated beings and old enemies all intent on killing Ryan and his band of post-holocaust survivors.

  A new dark age has dawned with the hope of a promised land. But in the Deathlands, hope is not enough.

  James Axler

  Red Equinox

  I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

  Winston Churchill, October 1, 1939

  Everyone needs a hand to guide, an arm to support.

  A light in the darkness and a best friend.

  This one, as before and for always, with all of my loving, is for Liz.

  Chapter One

  Western wind, when wilt thou blow,

  That small rain down can rain?

  Doc Tanner was truly happy. The assorted horrors that had blighted his mind and brought him teetering to the far edge of madness had faded away from him like the dew in the morning.

  Oh, if my love were in my arms,

  And I in my bed again.

  It was a fine summer afternoon in Omaha, Nebraska, in the year 1896.

  He was twenty-eight years old and had been married for just a few weeks over five years.

  "Such happiness, Emily," he said in his rich, deep voice, smiling at her.

  His wife smiled back and reached out to him, squeezing his hand between her fingers. She wore a dress of flowered gingham, with a bonnet trimmed in white lace. Her high button boots had picked up shreds of dry grass and seed from the meadow where they'd come for their picnic.

  The children played on a patterned blanket close by. Two-year-old Rachel, toddling bravely on stumpy little legs, laughed as she vainly reached out to capture a bright butterfly. Her baby brother, Jolyon, approaching his first birthday, was content to lie on his back and kick his bare feet at the soaring golden ball that floated in the perfect blue sky. An angled parasol protected his sensitive skin from the direct heat.

  Oh, if my love were in my arms,

  And I in my bed again.

  Emily had a beautiful voice, a trained contralto that thrilled the air.

  The remains of their meal lay spread over the damask cloth: some slices of honey-roasted ham; three different jars of pickles; half a new-baked loaf, and some butter wrapped in damp muslin to help keep it cool; a bowl of lettuce and tomatoes, wilting a little now; and a crock containing several different cheeses.

  "You always like cheese, don't you, dearest?" Doc said. "I mean that you used to like it, didn't you?"

  Emily turned to him, her smile sliding away into bewilderment. In the distance Doc could hear the faint sound of rumbling thunder. Clouds were gathering along the horizon of the prairie, threatening a storm. The horse that stood patiently in the shade of a clump of live oaks, freed from the traces of the wagon, whickered softly.

  "Why do you say that I used to like it, my darling? I still do. Most truly."

  Doc blinked. For a moment his vision blurred and he shook his head. His wife's face, better known even than his own, seemed to shimmer as though a fog had dropped between them.

  "Emily..." he began, but a clap of thunder drowned out his words. The clouds were coming swiftly toward them, changing color from white to leaden gray to a peculiar pinkish-purple hue. They resembled a livid bruise, he thought.

  "The children, beloved," Emily said. Yes, it was Emily. It washer.

  "Indeed. Let us take them to the carriage and get shelter from the storm."

  "I'll gather everything up. Ready for next time." She looked at him, and it was as though a great dagger of smooth ice had been thrust into his heart. "Because there will never be another time, Theo, my dear."

  "I know that. By the three!.. I fear that I disremember what."

  All around him, the grass was growing, sprouting faster, so that baby Jolyon had already vanished. And Rachel's head barely showed above the waving tips.

  "Oh, help me, Papa, for I am frightened," she cried in a lisping, squeaky voice.

  Western wind, when wilt thou blow,

  That small rain down can rain?

  But the voice wasn't that of Emily. It was a different, younger voice. Doc knew that he recognized it.

  "Quickly, my dearest!"

  "Help me with the children, Emily. I can't see them. The grass is so long that they have simply vanished from sight."

  Smoke.

  Now he could smell smoke.

  Behind him the horse whinnied and tossed its head, snapping the bridle and galloping away, eyes rolling, hooves pounding like thunder.

  "Emily! Emily!"

  Doc dropped to his knees, fumbling in the grass, feeling it moving over his skin like sentient human hair. He couldn't feel the children, but he could hear them, giggling together, their bubbling laughter seeming to come from all around.

  The smell of smoke was growing ever stronger, and now he could actually hear the crackling of flames.

  His wife was no longer to be seen. Through the mounting horror, Doc remained calm. He stood on the tips of his toes to try to spot Rachel and Jolyon, but now the grass was as high as his shoulders. The grove of live oaks had gone, and in their place stood a mound of earth, with a circle of stone pillars at its heart. And there stood...

  "Emily!" he shouted, voice cracking. He started to run toward her, recognizing the mane of golden hair that hung to her waist, the bright crimson skirt, halfway up her long thighs, the high scarlet boots and the sound of tiny spurs, like silver bells, tinkling as she walked.

  Flames, dazzling yellow and orange, were swooping across the skyline, exploding through the tops of the grass.

  The wagon, horse, children... all were gone. All that was left was Emily.

  "Emily?" Doc called. "Emily!"

  "Lori," Doc said. "Oh, if my love were in my arms." He reached out as he stumbled toward her.

  The tall teenager turned at his shout, beginning the familiar, gentle smile that had brought him such happiness for so many months. They were nearly close enough to touch.

  Smoke billowed into Doc's face, blinding him and making him cough, but he felt his arms close around Lori.

  Emily.

  Lori.

  He opened his eyes again, his ears filling with the roar of the fire, his skin scorching, his clothes beginning to smolder from the heat.

  Doc experienced the illusion that his body was shrinking, becoming brittle and frail. His bones were layered in dust, his skin tight and dry.

  He was holding Emily, Lori, Emily, Lori, closely to him. Doc began to smile reassuringly at her, but the smile died, stillborn. His mouth filled with bile as bitter as wormwood and he began to scream.

  Doc held a log of charred, blackened wood, shaped like a human being, smoking, with parts of the flesh still glowing like tiny rubies. The scorched ends of whitened bone protruded here and there through the roasted meat. A stubble of hair remained on the seared skull, like a cornfield after the fires of autumn have cleansed it. There were no eyes in the bubbling sockets, and the mouth was a sighing cave of agonizing death.

  "My love is in my arms," a voice whispered in Doc's ear.

  He dropped the corpse, stepping back from it, and saw that it still lived. The burned branches of arms and legs still
moved in feeble, uncoordinated motion, like a willow near a shaded pool as the breeze touches it.

  "Die," Doc begged.

  But it wouldn't.

  It was even struggling to rise, fingerless hands reaching plaintively toward him in a mockery of prayer.

  "For the love of God, Montresor," Doc moaned, waving helplessly at the creature with his swordstick, the silver lion's head gripped firmly in his gnarled fist.

  The mouth opened. "And I in my bed again," it croaked.

  Doc Tanner began to scream, and the noise woke the other five people who lay sprawled around the mat-trans chamber.

  Chapter Two

  Ryan Cawdor opened his eye.

  The walls of the gateway they'd jumped from had been dull gray armaglass. That redoubt had been situated in the quake-torn remnants of what had once been known, nearly a hundred years ago, as California, way back before the Great Madness when the skies grew dark and a civilization died. A world had almost died, as well. The surface of the earth was now dotted with no more than small, inbred, isolated settlements, often with a high rate of bizarre mutations.

  On the far side of the six-sided room, Doc Tanner was sobbing to himself very quietly, like a tiny cornered kitten. His mouth sagged open and a thread of spittle dangled into his lap. One hand still gripped the silver lion's head hilt of his ebony swordstick. Ryan could see that the old man had been crying, with gobbets of tears clinging to the gray stubble on his cheeks and chin.

  The sudden, shocking death of Doc's girlfriend, Lori Quint, had horrified them all. The rushing fire had dashed all hope of a rescue. There had been no chance even of a decent burial. Bearing in mind the fragile state of Doc Tanner's mind, it wasn't out of the question that he'd slipped straight into a catatonic madness.

  Ryan sighed, massaging his temples with his fingers. Making a jump was like having some crazed mutie with iron gloves rummaging around inside your brain. Ryan had once been fed some jolt that contained a quantity of synthesized spin. His head had felt like it was being sucked dry and sandblasted all at the same time. Using a mat-trans gateway was much worse.

  He coughed and reached down automatically for his G-12 caseless Heckler & Koch assault rifle, fingers stroking its smooth body. Ryan shuffled himself to a more upright position, wincing as the butt of his handblaster dug into his hip.

  To clear his scrambled mind he ran through a check on the specifications of the pistol.

  "Schweizerische Industrie-Gesellschaft Sauer of Ecken-forde, model .226, 9 mm. Overall length is 7.62 inches. Barrel length is 4.41 inches. Weight, loaded, is 25.52 ounces. Fifteen rounds. Push-button release."

  "You didn't mention the built-in baffle silencer," J. B. Dix called from the opposite side of the chamber.

  "I was coming to it." Ryan grinned at the diminutive armorer.

  "Sure you were. Rad-blast it! These jumps still make me feel like throwing up." J.B. carefully unfolded his wire-rimmed glasses from a pocket of his worn leather jacket and wiped them on his sleeve. He held them up to the ceiling lights then placed them on his nose. He looked at Doc, who sat next to him.

  The old man's eyes were closed and he was still weeping, but the mewing sounds of his distress had ceased. J.B. caught Ryan's eye, and he tapped his own forehead meaningfully. "Could be Lori's chilling's pushed him into the back room for keeps."

  "Could be."

  Krysty Wroth, next in line to Ryan, was also awake. She brushed a hand through her fiery mane of scarlet hair and sniffed. "Thought I was going to float around in the dark forever. There has to be a better way of traveling a thousand miles in a couple of seconds." She looked across at Doc. "Hope you aren't right, J.B., about him. The old-timer's hold on what's real and what isn't was never too, strong. Lori dying like that... It's enough we got a sick freezie on our hands without Doc going slack-mouthed on us."

  The freezie was lying on his back next to Krysty. A thin, trickle of blood seeped from a corner of his lips, through the black stubble of his sprouting beard. His horn-rimmed glasses lay on the floor on one of the glowing metal disks.

  Ryan Cawdor looked at the man.

  When Richard Neal Ginsberg had gone into the cryo center in October of the year 2000, only three months before sky-dark, he'd been thirty years old, and a top scientist and electronics expert, working on aspects of the mat-trans chambers known as gateways. He had also been suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis..."Lou Gehrig's disease" — an incurable progressive disease that leads to unsteadiness, wasting of the muscles and exhaustion.

  Rick Ginsberg had been woken from his long freezing, expecting to find himself in some future world of wonderously advanced medicine and science that would cure his ailment. Instead, he'd been jerked to life in the Deathlands, still terminally ill, though the sickness was prone to periods of remission.

  "Hell's bloody bells!" Rich moaned, turning on his side and beginning to retch.

  "Know how feels," Jak said, the last of the six to recover. "Head's like gaudy-house shit-bucket." The boy stood up, staggering slightly, pressing his pale hand against the armaglass. "Wonder where fuck are this time?" he asked, as laconic as ever.

  Jak was fifteen years old, as skinny as whipcord and one of the best hand-to-hand fighting machines that Ryan had ever seen. And he'd seen some good ones in his time. Jak had hair as white as the driven snow on the Sierra peaks, and eyes as red as a laser death-sight.

  Ryan forced himself to stand, hating the dizziness and weakness that a jump always brought on. He leaned against the wall, glimpsing his own reflection: a tall man with long, curling black hair, a patch covering his left eye. A vivid cicatrix seamed his right cheek from near the corner of his eye to the corner of his narrow, cruel mouth.

  "I look like a one-legged whore could spit in my face and knock me down," he muttered.

  "No different from usual, lover," Krysty replied, reaching up for his helping hand.

  He pulled the woman to her feet, aware of the lithe strength in her body. He felt a surge of passion for her, a passion that he knew in his heart was closer to love than anything he'd ever known in his thirty-five years.

  "Doc," she called.

  The metal disks that patterned ceiling and floor had finally lost their glow, fading to cold, dull metal. Everyone except Doc and Rick had gotten up from the floor. The freezie was on hands and knees, breathing hard through his open mouth.

  Krysty walked across the chamber and knelt by Doc's side, holding his hand in hers.

  "Doc?" she repeated.

  He blinked and managed to sit up, with her arm around his shoulders. "I fear that I have been crying, my dear," he said, wiping at his red-rimmed eyes with trembling fingers. "Made the most awful ass of myself, I expect. But I dreamed, you see."

  "It's all right, Doc," Ryan said. "We all got dreams some of the time. You don't have any dreams, then they can't come true."

  "Not that sort of dream, Ryan, my dear fellow. Oh, my head is splitting. More of a nightmare. I was on a picnic with my dearest Emily and the two little babes. But there was..." He stopped suddenly and looked around the gateway.

  "What is it, Doc?" Krysty asked.

  "Where is my... Where is Lori? Where has she gone, my own?.."

  "Fire, Doc," Jak told him. "Fell and got burned. Nobody could've helped. No fucking chance."

  The old man looked puzzled. "Then, she isdead. Ah, the dream contained the... Then, what year is this, my comrades? For a moment I thought I had ascended to Heaven."

  "Hell, Doc," Rick said, pulling himself to his feet with the aid of a stout bamboo walking stick.

  The old man clutched Krysty and began to sob again, shoulders quivering, the ragged noise of his crying the only sound in the total stillness.

  Ryan bit his lip. If Doc was going to give up on them, then there would be a hard decision to make. He liked the old man very much, but the safety of the group came first.

  He knew something of Doc's past and knew that his mind had improved since they'd plucked him from the l
iving death of Mocsin and its hated sec boss, Cort Strasser. But it hadn't been the ville of Jordan Teague that had stripped a few notches from Doc's mental equipment. For that you had to go way, way back — more than a hundred years.

  In the 1990s, scientists working on Overproject Whisper were researching the possibility of time travel... "chron-jumps" as they were known. The gateways hidden within max-sec redoubts were part of Project Cerberus, and the scientists working in that area of the project were developing matter-transmission.

  Several experiments were carried out in "trawling" someone from the past. The failures were indescribably horrific. There was, as far as was known, only one successful trawl — Doctor Theophilus Tanner, a young married scientist from 1896.

  But Doc proved to be a damnably difficult and uncooperative guinea pig. After several attempts to chron-jump himself back to his wife and family, the men and women working on Overproject Whisper finally jumped him forward, only weeks before sky-dark. Nearly a century into the future, he arrived in the ville of Mocsin, up in the Darks, where Ryan Cawdor had helped to rescue him. Two chron-jumps and two hundred years of disorientation had physically aged the man and reduced his brain to a mixture of oatmeal and pearls. When Ryan had first met him, there hadn't been that many pearls.

  And now?

  Rick was taking deep breaths, swaying on his feet. "Bastard things, these jumps. They always bad as this?"

  Doc gave a croaking laugh. "Upon my soul, Master Ginsberg! Mostly they are much worse than this!"

  The freezie shook his head. "I'm not sure I can live with this kind of traveling. I'm so shook up it feels like my guts are in tomorrow and my brain's in yesterday. Or the day before."

  "Where are we?" Jak asked. "Room's smaller than most."

  Ryan hadn't noticed it, but the teenager was right. The chamber was slightly smaller than any of the others they'd jumped from. Not by a lot, maybe three-quarters the size.

  J.B. nodded. "Yeah, and the air's not that good, either. Stale. Like the conditioners not working properly."