Apocalypse Unborn

  There was no guarantee

  It was possible that they wouldn’t find Steel Eyes at the journey’s end. Yet there had been no arguments over the course of action. And no second thoughts once they had begun.

  Magus was a plague on all their houses. It was said that his artificially prolonged life had allowed him to master everything there was to master. That he knew everything there was to know. That this mastery and knowledge had elevated him to a higher level of existence. To a kind of junkyard godhood. He had become his own creation, a malevolent deity whose dark schemes and willing soldiers victimized and degraded a desperate world.

  The companions had taken on the mission because they all knew some things were worth dying for, even when the odds were slim.

  And ridding the Deathlands of Magus was one of those things.

  Other titles in the

  Deathlands saga:

  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

  Vengeance Trail

  Ritual Chill

  Labyrinth

  Sky Raider

  Remember Tomorrow

  Sunspot

  Desert Kings

  JAMES AXLER

  DEATH LANDS®

  Apocalypse Unborn

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN

  MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves…in comparison.

  —Heinrich Heine,

  1797–1856

  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

  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

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Prologue

  Colonel Graydon Bell took his first breath in more than a century. Compressed air rushed down the plastic tube in his throat, inflating his collapsed lungs. Simultaneously, microbursts of electric current jolted his brain stem, sending his naked body into convulsions, slamming elbows, knees, and forehead into the sides of the narrow, stainless-steel cryotank.

  His restarted heart pounding in his ears, Colonel Bell clawed at the base of his skull, tearing away the tangle of electrical leads. This ended the violent spasms, but he continued to twitch and shudder; his knees buckled under his weight and he slumped to a squat. The ballooning pressure in his lungs felt like a chain saw splitting him in two. With trembling fingers he pried out the nose plugs and exhaled. Minutes passed while he gasped and gulped canned air, struggling to regain the rhythm of his breathing.

  As suffocation panic faded, Bell fumbled for the edge of the pliable adhesive that sealed shut his eyes. He peeled the protective material from brow and cheeks, then cautiously raised one eyelid. Not cautiously enough. Light speared into long-dormant nerves with such force that he nearly bit through the oxygen tube.

  Mewling, he made brief forays into that place of impossible hurt. Repeated exposure was the only way to reinitiate his optic nerves. Through streaming tears he could see the cryotank’s vacuum lid had opened, and on the ceiling above it a bank of fluorescent bulbs flickered erratically.

  Bell yarded the intubation hose from his throat and let it drop, hissing, to his feet. The sickly sweet taste in his mouth was from trehalose, a sugar that was the key to success
ful reanimation from cryodeath. Prior to his immersion in deep cold, his tissues had been infused with this naturally occurring antifreeze. Trehalose kept the water in his body from turning to ice crystals, which would have ruptured his every cell, turning him upon defrost into two hundred pounds of slunky garbage.

  Bracing his arms and back against the wall, Bell used his legs to slowly straighten, fighting the cramps that seized his thighs and buttocks. When he looked down at his corpse-white body, he saw wasted muscles, every rib showing, tendons standing out like load-maxed cables. Red starbursts of exploded capillaries dotted his skin. Galaxies of them.

  Freezer burn.

  The first stirrings of memory returned—the jumble of terrifying images and sensations sent Bell’s heart racing. Lurching stiffly forward, he grabbed one of the rungs in the wall and started pulling himself out of the cylindrical coffin. He moaned as he climbed, panting hard between steps.

  As Bell straddled the rim of the cryomodule, he was slammed by a wave of vertigo. He shut his eyes while the deserted laboratory spun around him. He held on with both hands until the dizzyness passed, then crawled onto the attached steel platform.

  The cryotank on the other side of the access gantry had not opened, yet. Rivulets of condensation peeled down the module’s gleaming sides, and its defrost unit gave off a steady hum. Reanimation in progress. From where Bell lay, he could read the tank’s LED indicators. The internal temperature was 89.9 degrees Fahrenheit, and rising. Heart restart was still fourteen minutes, sixteen seconds away—a delay due to the fact that there was more of Dr. Antoine Kirby to thaw. Fifty-two pounds more, to be exact.

  Still dazed, Colonel Bell dragged himself down the gantry stairs on his behind, dropping from one tread to the next, until he reached the lab floor. When he tried to get up, a stabbing pain in his gut doubled him over. Falling to hands and knees, he threw back his head and projectile vomited. Expelled trehalose syrup drew a ten-foot-long stripe on the polished concrete. He heaved until his stomach knotted and blood mixed with bile dripped from his chin.

  The cryolab’s computer control consoles were twenty feet away. Unable to stand, he crawled hand over hand until he reached the nearest desktop, then hauled himself into an ergonomic chair. On the counter before him were framed photos, color portraits of two beaming families, both of them his. Five children, ages six to sixteen, produced by two marriages. The boys and girls had inherited their father’s firm chin, wide-set brown eyes and extraordinary intelligence. They were the joy of his life, the wellspring of his inspiration. When Bell looked up at the mission chronometer, the atomic clock that measured elapsed time to hundredths of a second, an icy hand pushed into the center of his chest and gripped his heart. Suddenly he was shivering again, teeth chattering, bones clicking, vibrating like he was going to shake apart. He pulled a thermal blanket from a drawer and clumsily wrapped himself in it.

  Chronologically, Graydon Bell was 135 years old.

  Everyone he had ever loved was dust.

  And they had died unaware of his desperate all-or-nothing sacrifice to save them. Bell had thrown himself upon the anvil of death, anonymously, selflessly, unsure of resurrection, but confident that the threat facing all of humanity required nothing less.

  In the world of pure science, in Bell’s world, confidence was a mathematical construct, a numeric of probability that separated fact from speculation. By the first week of January 2001, he and Dr. Kirby were ninety-five-percent certain that a disintegration of global defense systems was imminent, a cascade of incremental failures leading inexorably to Armageddon—an all-out nuclear missile exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Their elaborate and ingenious computer models had revealed the near future, and it was a dead end. But their warnings had fallen on deaf ears.

  Things might have been different if they’d had some kind of quick, cheap fix to offer the directors of the ultrasecret Operation Chronos, which was responsible for the first successful experiments in time travel. Kirby and Bell’s research on the structure of supra-time/space had started out as theoretical and abstract, but had soon become vital to the black budget program’s main thrust. Time-trawling had mindbending military and economic potential. It opened the possibility of effective social engineering on a global scale, the permanent rewriting of history in favor of those who controlled the technology. For any number of practical reasons it was easy to dismiss Kirby and Bell’s conclusions out of hand. The idea that Operation Chronos had already accidentally triggered a chain reaction at the most fundamental level of reality was nothing short of heresy.

  As Bell struggled numb fingers to log on to the redoubt’s computer, logic told him that what he and Kirby feared most had come to pass. Otherwise they would have been discovered and reanimated by their Chronos colleagues a century ago.

  With faint hope, he enabled the encrypted redoubt-to-redoubt com links. The global network was offline; he could not call up the date, time or text of the last coded transmission. Communication satellites had either fallen out of orbit or been fried by a colossal EM burst. The redoubt’s conventional radio mast pulled in a hiss of static across all bands, all frequencies. Sensor indicators showed high radioactivity levels topside, and superelevated air temperatures that suggested radical local climate change.

  There was no way around the evidence: buried deep in a mountainside in a nuke-hardened site, he had survived Armageddon. There was no satisfaction in having been proved right. Bell sagged back in the chair, overwhelmed by grief and guilt.

  He and Dr. Kirby were at least partially responsible for the destruction of civilization, and for millions, perhaps billions of deaths, including those of his own children. In the beginning their interest had been as selfish and blind as the would-be landgrabbers and slave masters. Supra-time/space was a mathematical perspective outside the biologically hard-wired, human experience of time. Kirby and Bell wanted to be the first scientists to map this new, overarching dimension, and the only way to do that was to evaluate and interpret the results of successful time-trawling experiments. Had their ongoing research, code-named Project Undo, not been critical to the directors’ goal of controlled manipulation of the time stream, it would never have been so lavishly funded. Analyses of the handful of Operation Chronos triumphs had revealed few facts about the boundaries of s-t/s, and even less about its apparent congruencies and paradoxes, but had convinced Kirby and Bell that time-trawling, in and of itself, could disrupt present reality in unforeseen and ultimately catastrophic ways.

  With no support from their superiors, the researchers faced the most difficult of moral and professional choices. They could either sit back and watch the inevitable, dying alongside their family and friends, or they could attempt to do something to change the outcome, which meant abandoning the still-intact present to its terrible fate. In the end, they’d decided they had to act. No one alive knew more about the implications of temporal alteration than they did; for that reason, they had used cryogenics instead of time-trawling to reach the future.

  The colonel rested his forehead on the desktop. He would have wept had he been able to produce tears. It felt like fibers of steel wool were embedded in his throat, his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, cramps gripped his bowels. Reanimation and the subsequent vomiting had caused severe dehydration. After unlocking the wheels of the ergochair, he slowly rolled himself a yard or so to the left, to the vacuum-sealed intravenous bags suspended from a stainless-steel pole. Finding an injection site was easy—the veins stood out like soda straws on his emaciated forearms. He connected driplines of saline and nutrients, and adjusted the flow rates.

  Graydon Bell was a physicist, not a medical doctor, but he understood as well as anyone the physiological aftermath of cryogenesis. Over time, despite all the precautions, minerals leached from bone and tissue, and neurochemicals in the brain degraded. He had anticipated some cell loss upon reanimation, some memory loss, maybe even the temporary loss of sanity. There was no way to anticipate the i
mpact of a temporal disruption on the subatomics of a frozen human body.

  He and his still-thawing research partner had taken the fateful leap forward fully aware of their ignorance and vulnerabilities.

  At six-foot-three, Antoine Kirby had been an All-America defensive end for the University of California at Berkeley football team. Cat-quick. NFL-quick. But way too smart for pro sports. The mathematical genius had dropped football after he’d completed his athletic contract; it was a means to an end—a free undergraduate education. The money he saved helped finance a Ph.D. from Princeton. When Operation Chronos had recruited him, he was back in the Bay Area, working at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Always smiling, always happy, thrilled by the potential of his research, Kirby was unmarried, with many close friends, but no living family.

  While Kirby was away at Princeton, Bell was serving in Colombia, a U.S. Army–financed doctorate in physics from Cal Tech under his belt. His mission had been to lead a covert combat field test of a new generation of shoulder-fired, laser-burst weapons on FARC narcoterrorists. Of the two, only Bell had taken human life. Success in Colombia had brought him quick advancement to the Army’s most theoretical and problematic programs, and ultimately a dream assignment. Operation Chronos’s directors had paired a world-class physicist with a world-class mathematician and turned them loose to explore the fringes of the known and the possible.

  Racked along one wall of the lab, in hermetically sealed plastic cases, coated with protective grease, were a variety of conventional, combustion-fired weapons: M-16 assault rifles, some equipped with over-under grenade launchers, 12-gauge SPAS assault shotguns, 9 mm Beretta semiautomatic pistols, extra magazines, ammo canisters. Body armor and night-vision goggles had their own cases, as did the M-60, .308-caliber machine guns, and the heavy-barreled, bolt-action, night-scoped Remington sniper rifles.

  Purely rational, scientific exploration had devolved to this.

  Bell, far better than most, understood that leaping before looking was fundamental to human nature, and to discovery. It was both his species finest feature and its tragic flaw.

  He switched screens to monitor the LED countdown to heart restart. As the final seconds ticked away, he prayed for Kirby’s successful reanimation. He prayed that he would not have to face the coming trials alone. Then the cryotank lid popped up, compressed air valves opened, and from inside the cylinder came a terrible frantic thudding.