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  A second blast of thunder ripped through the night

  Dean slammed into Mildred, and the woman managed to hang on to his shirttail, keeping him upright. Doc reached out desperately, latching on to a metal lip that was attached to the bulkhead.

  But Krysty had been thrown off her feet and onto her upper back and neck. The suddenness of the explosion smashed her down with terrific force, knocking her unconscious as she slid toward the gaping hole in the hull.

  Jak twisted his lithe body as he fell, managing not to break his neck as he slipped through the hole and hit the churning water. Gasping for breath, he struggled to maintain some proper sense of which way was up.

  Seeing Krysty's limp body already being sucked into the undertow beneath the vessel, he pushed himself deeper into the chilling ocean and grasped a fistful of long red hair.

  Then they both vanished from sight.

  Watersleep

  #39 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 November 1977

  ISBN 0-373-62539-1

  WATERSLEEP

  Copyright © 1997 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.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  Full fathom five thy father lies:

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes;

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  —The Tempest, Act I, scene 2

  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 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

  Ryan Cawdor was drowning.

  His chest echoed heavily with the dull thud of a waterlogged pump, each heartbeat growing slower and groggier. He tried to speak, and a precious dollop of his last few seconds of oxygen bubbled out of his open mouth. He watched the air bubbles float upward, following their path with his good right eye, and tried to focus on what might lie beyond them.

  At first he thought his vision was blurred, but then Ryan realized there was no sky overhead, no clouds, no stars, nothing but water. He squinted and took in a sight his brain logically told him had to be the murky green fluid of the ocean. No lake or manmade pool had ever offered up such a color of green—a green duskier than the blackest of any moonless night, and just as dark and infinite.

  The green was everywhere, surrounding his entire body and being.

  Ryan had always imaged the ocean depths as being cold as ice, but he was strangely warm instead. He could almost taste sweat on his lips, but knew the salt on his tongue had to be coming from the seawater. Could a man sweat underwater if the temperature got hot enough, cook like a fish in a pot over an open fire? Ryan thought it was possible, but he'd have to try to remember to ask Mildred when…

  Ask Mildred when they ended the jump.

  And then he remembered—not where he was, but where he had been.

  So many crumbling cities and villes, so many dif­ferent areas of Deathlands, all of them ultimately left behind as he pressed on, looking for a safe harbor.

  Ryan's mind raced, trying to sort out a confusing jumble of images. The last concrete event his memory recalled was in the military redoubt. As he'd done so many times before, he'd hurriedly slammed shut the heavy metal door that activated the mat-trans unit. The sec lock had clicked reassuringly, letting him know all was ready. This locking sound was followed in turn by the spectral appearance of the sinister pale mist that signaled the beginning of a jump.

  The light fog continued to gather, thickening around the unearthly shimmering disks in the floor and ceiling, and an almost inaudible hum from within the bowels of the chamber began to make itself heard deep inside the group's heads.

  Ryan sat on the floor with Krysty Wrath's hip next to his own. He could see the radiant fire of her long red hair out of the corner of his eye. On his other side, sharing his dark complexion and black, curly hair, was his son, Dean. Until recently the youngster had been a student at the Nicholas Brady School in Colorado, obtaining a much needed education.

  A formal education of the sort Ryan had paid for didn't come cheap in the hellish world of Deathlands, but he knew the boy would need some book schooling before returning to the harsh realities of daily sur­vival. Knowledge was just as useful a tool as a good blaster or a working war wag.

  Across from Ryan was a young albino with features distinctive enough to bring more than a glancing no­tice, even among the more unusual appearances in Deathlands. Jak Lauren's pallid complexion was paler than usual, throwing the crisscrossed scars on his face into sharp relief. His ruby eyes were at half-mast, and his mouth was drawn tight in anticipation of the jump to come.

  A heavy Colt Python was safely fastened down on one leg. There was no need to have the weapon cocked and ready. The mental and physical condition of everyone after a jump prevented the use of any weapons. Even if they were to j
ump into the midst of a blaster battle—which was doubtful, since as a rule the gateway chambers were always hidden away— they couldn't lift a finger to fight back until they'd recovered from the physical toll the mat-trans expe­rience extracted.

  As usual before a mat-trans jump, Jak had nothing to say—unlike the thin man beside him, who kept up an ongoing discussion with either anyone who would listen or, when that option was out, with himself.

  Next to Jak's eerie whiteness was the ancient, weathered face of Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner. Doc appeared calm, his lips whistling a silent tune only he could hear, but Ryan noted how tightly he was gripping his ebony swordstick. The silver lion's-head handle of the stick seemed to wink at Ryan in the shifting light of the chamber, as if in ac­knowledgment of the hidden blade inside as Doc worked it nervously through his hands.

  Ryan took note of the unusual handblaster holstered at the man's hip. It was an ornate Le Mat, a weapon dating back to the early days of the Civil War. The weapon was almost as much of an antique as Doc himself, but as Mildred Wyeth had once glee­fully pointed out in a particularly ribald bout of teas­ing, an antique in much better condition and able to fire at will when the trigger was pulled.

  Engraved and decorated with twenty-four-carat gold as a commemorative tribute to the great Confed­erate soldier James Ewell Brown Stuart—or Jeb Stu­art, as his friends and folks in Virginia referred to him—the massive hand cannon weighed in at over three and half pounds. The gun had two barrels and an adjustable hammer, firing a single .63-caliber round like a shotgun, and nine .44-caliber rounds in revolver mode.

  '"Once more unto the breach, dear friends…'" Doc muttered, more to himself than to his compan­ions. His comment invited a retort, but received no response. Everyone knew what Doc meant.

  The circle of companions was completed by John Barrymore Dix, Ryan's longtime friend, known also as the Armorer, and Dr. Mildred Wyeth. The title of Armorer was one of respect for Dix's encyclopedic knowledge of all forms of weaponry and how they were used. From hand blasters to tank blasters, J.B. Dix had studied and learned the secrets of any kind of offensive weapon.

  Although they kept their relationship restrained and private, Ryan couldn't help but notice the comforting arm J.B. had placed around Mildred's shoulders. She leaned back into his side gratefully. Out of all the companions, Mildred came closest to actually under­standing the hellish process they were about to en­dure—but that didn't mean she particularly enjoyed it.

  J.B. was ready. Ryan saw that his friend had al­ready removed his spectacles and tucked them safely away inside the front pocket of his worn leather jacket. J.B.'s other hand tightly gripped his Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun, reminding the one-eyed man to check his own weaponry. He caught the Ar­morer's eye, and the man nodded, tilting his fedora at an angle over his eyes.

  Ryan did a quick inventory of his own arsenal. The 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster was at his side like an old friend, the baffle silencer digging reassuringly into his hip. Looped over one shoulder was his walnut-stocked Steyr SSG-70 bolt-action rifle.

  Then the mist of the chamber crept into his brain, interrupting his mental checklist. The tendrils of pale smoke worked their scientific magic, and the jump began. The band of travelers had traversed most of what remained of the United States and even visited other continents during travels via the gateways.

  But no matter where they eventually ended up, the one constant in traveling via the mat-trans units was the headlong rush into the unknown. Their destination was always yet another gateway chamber with thick armaglass walls. Despite cosmetic changes of color and size, the gateways were always the same. The mystery was in surviving what lay outside the gate­way chamber.

  Usually Ryan and his group were oblivious to where they might be until they left the walls of the military redoubts that held the mat-trans units—obliv­ious until J.B. confidently took his minisextant from one of the many pockets that lined his worn jacket. He would place the sextant to one eye and use it to look at the sky, and after a few moments of mental computations on maps and charts long ago memo­rized, he would reveal their new location.

  They had jumped into hell and into paradise, al­ways appearing in the familiar gray setting of an abandoned underground military base, dusty with dis­use and littered with the empty boxes and remnants of the dead. The computers inside still functioned, drawing on a hidden atomic power supply that con­tinued to provide energy long after their masters had departed in the chaos before the nukes started to fall, and the period of skydark fell across the world.

  But there was no sky here, dark or otherwise.

  Only water. Only death.

  Ryan's brain shifted gears. How had he ended up down here?

  He was no engineer, but he knew from hard-earned experience that the gateways didn't work like this. He couldn't have been transported into the nothingness of the sea without a mat-trans unit, and there was no unit here. Also, even if there had been some sort of freak accident, Ryan knew some of the others should have accompanied him.

  And why wouldn't his arms work? They floated aimlessly above his head, not responding to his frantic thoughts of escape. His clothing billowed around him like a parachute, but without providing any resistance. His legs also hung limply, the toes of his boots pointed down like twin anchors, pulling him steadily to the bottom, past the blind eyes of the elongated eellike creatures that were swimming past, their mouths yawning open as they sifted through the brine for microscopic bits of plankton.

  Ryan willed his legs to kick, his arms to push down to check his descent, but it was as if he were an old wooden puppet dropped overboard, and his strings had been cut.

  At the rate he was sinking, Ryan knew he'd run out of air long before feeling solid earth beneath his feet. Already a red haze was starting to settle over his field of vision from lack of oxygen. A coppery, bitter taste filled his mouth, mixing with the traces of salt water. So this is how it ended—not in a hailstorm of blasterfire or in a hand-to-hand knife battle, but un­derwater and alone.

  Even as a young boy, Ryan Cawdor had always known he wasn't the kind of man who would die quietly in his sleep, but he expected to go down more valiantly than this.

  "A man always has a choice," Trader had always said. "He can either live…or he can die."

  But Trader was wrong. There was no choice to be made when it came to living or dying.

  The only choice was in how.

  As his lungs began to ache and his heartbeat grew louder in his ears, Krysty's face shone like a beacon in Ryan's mind's eye.

  He clung to the image, struggled again to make his body work, willing his muscles to pull taut and arrest his descent. Suddenly, in a burst of movement, he was rewarded with his legs kicking out and his arms push­ing down.

  Even though the adrenaline surge was far too late to save himself now, Ryan fought back as he contin­ued to plummet into the darkness, lost and alone

  .

  Chapter One

  Ryan Cawdor opened his eye. Above him was the face of a crimson-haired angel.

  "Welcome back, lover," Krysty Wroth said, her flushed cheeks and anxious green eyes belying her light tone. "Decide to go for a swim without me?"

  "Uh-huh. Come on in," he rasped back. "The wa­ter's fine."

  Ryan tried to pull himself to his feet, but gave up when he realized one of his legs wasn't functioning. A pins-and-needles sensation was tingling from his left knee to his foot. His leg was asleep, and it felt like he'd been resting on it for a long time. He was having trouble breathing, too.

  He gratefully gulped a deep breath as he slid back into a seated position. "What happened? And what's wrong with the air in here? It's as hot as a triple-stoked blast furnace."

  "You ended up facedown when we jumped in, Dad," Dean said, a faint smear of blood under one nostril the only evidence of any discomfort the boy had endured during the jump. "This gateway was half-full of water. You were almost gone when Krysty came out of it and rolled you o
ver."

  Listening while Dean spoke, Ryan had observed he was sitting upright in the familiar surroundings of a mat-trans chamber, his back against one of the armaglass walls. He was also sitting in approximately six inches of filthy water littered with brackish slime and a thin film of green algae. The next thing he re­alized was how awful the chamber smelled, and the hellish temperature that surrounded him like a soggy blanket.

  The very air felt wet. Bile welled up involuntarily from his churning stomach, and he turned and vom­ited what appeared to be a quart of the murky water.

  "Ryan, dear fellow. It warms my heart that once again you are with us!" Ryan knew he had been out of it for a while if Doc Tanner was up and about.

  Usually Doc suffered the worst after a jump, laps­ing into inane babble, as well as experiencing physi­cal ailments such as the nosebleed Dean had suffered, or self-induced bruises and cuts from thrashing about in the chamber after the jump was completed.

  Doc could take the punishment to his body. What hurt him more was the psychic damage to his mind. Visions of his long-dead wife, Emily, and his two young children, Rachel and Jolyon, always haunted him after a jump, and it was during the sluggish pe­riod as everyone came back to consciousness inside the gateway chamber that Doc looked truly old, his entire gaunt frame always sunken down inside his faded black academic frock coat.

  The man was beyond age, a reluctant time traveler plucked from the year 1896 by scientists and drawn forward to the end of the twentieth century as part of a secret government project known as Operation Chronos. Chronos was only one of the many projects under the banner of the Totality Concept, which util­ized the secret matter-trans technology now being used by Ryan and his friends.

  Doc proved to be such a difficult subject that the whitecoats thrust the old man one hundred years into the dark future of the postholocaust United States—a world that had become bitterly known as Deathlands.

  Ironically enough, they had shuttled him away right before the entire world blew out in a final conflict of nuclear fire.