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  “Dark night, there’s a land tank over there!”

  “Alone?” Ryan demanded pointedly.

  “No, wait, there’s two of ’em! Big as anything I’ve ever seen. Some smaller wags, too. Couldn’t get a good look.”

  “Is the war wag an APC?” Krysty asked, squinting to try to see past the conflagration.

  “Converted trucks,” J.B. said, lowering the longeyes. “Machine gun blasters, rocket pods on the roof, and what sure as shit looks like a radar dish.”

  “Just sitting there, or is it turning?” Ryan asked.

  “Turning steadily.”

  “That means it’s probably working,” Ryan muttered, a hard smile crossing his face. “That’s gotta be Trader.”

  “Indeed, logic dictates it to be so,” Doc rumbled, and then added, “How can we assist him in this internecine battle?”

  “Their fight is about as civil as a jihad, ya old coot,” Mildred shot back. “This unknown Trader may be somebody we can trust, or not. But we know for a fact that Gaza is a mad dog and the sooner he’s wearing grass for a hat the better.”

  Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

  Pilgrimage to Hell

  Red Holocaust

  Neutron Solstice

  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

  JAMES AXLER

  DEATH LANDS®

  Bloodfire

  Power, like a desolating pestilence,

  Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience,

  Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,

  Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame…

  —Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab (1813)

  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

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  On through the night they rode, seven people on six horses, the unshod hooves of the animals pounding against the hard-packed sand of the desert.

  Streaks of light were starting to brighten the overcast sky as dawn slowly came to the Deathlands. Thunder rumbled in the distance, lightning flashing bright as a gigavolt of electricity slashed into the planet like fire trying to cauterize an open wound.

  Suddenly, a ravine yawned wide in the ground before the companions, the edges sparkling with a residue of salt that infused the entire landscape from the crashing ocean tidal wave caused by the nukecaust so very long ago. Digging in their heels, the companions urged the animals to go faster and jumped the pit, landing hard. The horse with two riders went to its knees for a moment, then, struggling erect once more, it continued after the others.

  The seven friends were red-eyed and hunched over, exhausted from the race for survival. The bridles of the horses were sopping wet with saliva and flecked with foam. The humans and horses were all drenched in sweat, the chill of the night slowly passing as the fiery sun exploded over the horizon, bathing the world in its fire.

  Moving to the steady motion of the powerful stallion he rode, Ryan Cawdor fought his exhaustion and tried to stay in control of the beast. Tiny particles of sand and salt hit his scarred face like invisible sleet, getting underneath the leather patch that covered the ravaged hole of his left eye. His clothes were stiff with dried sweat and caked with blood, thankfully none of it his. Escaping from Rockpoint had been a nightmare of snipers on the walls and savage cougars running wild in the streets. The weapons he had stolen from the local baron’s secret arsenal were long gone, and now Ryan carried only his personal blasters, a 9 mm SIG-Sauer at his hip, and a bolt-action Steyr SSG-70 longblaster strapped across his back. The blasters had been with him a long time, and in his expert hands usually proved more than deadly enough for anything the Deathlands could throw his way. Not everything, but most.

  Following a swell in the sandy ground, the gr
oup of people slowed as the horses galloped up the sloping side of a large sand dune. As the panting animals crested the top, Ryan saw that the dune stretched hundreds of feet and offered the friends a good panoramic view of the desert in every direction. Perfect. If that damn APC came their way again, its headlights would give away its approach in plenty of time for them to ride off again.

  “Give them a rest!” Ryan shouted, his voice a throaty growl from thirst and exhaustion. “We stop for five!”

  Pulling back on the reins, the companions allowed their mounts to slow to a canter, then walked them to an easy stop. As the dawn steadily grew brighter in the east, the others could now see that the dune was covered with green plants of some kind. Hungrily, the horses sniffed at the vegetation, then snorted and turned away in disgust. The reek of salt from the mutant weeds was strong enough for the humans to detect. The plants were as inedible as the sand itself.

  Sliding off the rear of the mount he shared with a boy, J. B. Dix stretched a few times to work the kinks out of his sore muscles. Dark night, he thought, it had been a mighty cramped ride sharing the horse, and more than once he’d been sure he’d lose his grip on the saddle and go flying off.

  Short and wiry, John Barrymore Dix was dressed in a loose shirt and trousers, a leather pilot’s jacket and fingerless gloves. An Uzi machine pistol hung across his chest, and an S&W M-4000 shotgun was slung over his back.

  “Just in case I forgot to say it before,” J.B. said, offering a hand to the boy, “thanks for saving my ass back there.”

  Still on the horse, Dean Cawdor stopped massaging the neck of the big Appaloosa stallion and looked down at the adult. Appearing many years older than his real age of twelve, Dean had a bloody streak across his face where some hot lead from a sec man’s blaster had just grazed his cheek during the escape. The son of Ryan, the youth was growing rapidly, and there was little doubt that he would be even taller than his father some day.

  A veteran of a hundred battles, Dean had a Browning Hi-Power pistol holstered on his hip, and a homemade crossbow and quiver hung across his chest. The bulky weapons had been in the way a lot during the ride, but he needed the room behind to fit J.B. on the horse.

  Reaching down, Dean took the offered hand and the two shook before breaking into weary smiles.

  “No problem,” the boy replied.

  J.B. released his grip and turned to walk to the edge of the dune. Tilting his fedora to block the wash of growing sunlight, the man studied the sprawling landscape to the north, then reached into the canvas bag hanging at his side, rummaging through the fuses and black powder bombs to unearth a brass cylinder about the size and shape of a soup can. With an expert snap, he extended the antique telescope to its full length and swept the distant horizon to the north.

  “Looks clear,” J.B. announced, adjusting the focal length of the scope. “I think we lost them.”

  “Thank Gaia for that,” Krysty Wroth exhaled, reaching into the backpack tied just behind her saddle. The rawhide lashings were loose from the wild ride, but the pack of food and ammo was thankfully still there.

  Sticking up from the gun boot attached to the saddle was the stock of a recently acquired longblaster called a Holland & Holland .475 Nitro Express. It was the biggest weapon the woman had ever seen, and firing it almost wrenched her arm from the socket. But the big-bore rounds did a hell of a lot worse to the sec men they hit, blowing one man clean out of his saddle and beheading another. She was down to only a few more rounds for the monster, after which it would become a liability and not an asset.

  Tall and full breasted, with an explosion of fiery red hair and emerald-green eyes, Krysty more looked like a baron’s plaything than a tough survivor, and many fools had died learning the truth of the matter.

  “No more than one drink apiece,” a stocky black woman directed, pouring some water from her own canteen into a cupped hand and offering it to her panting horse. “We need to conserve until we reach fresh water again.”

  Eagerly, the animal lapped at the fluid, its rough tongue seeking every drop. Dr. Mildred Wyeth was in a red flannel shirt and U.S. Army fatigue pants, her ebony hair fashioned into beaded plaits. A patched satchel hung from her shoulder, and the checkered grip of a Czech ZKR target pistol poked out of her shirt where she had tucked the weapon away for safekeeping. Mildred had almost lost the blaster twice from the rough ride over the irregular salt flats, and had no intention of challenging fate a third time.

  Although she rarely spoke of the matter, Mildred considered her personal portion of luck long gone. Back in the twentieth century, she had gone into the hospital for a routine operation on a cyst, but there had been complications and they froze her to save her life. Ryan freed her from cryogenic suspension a hundred years later, a stranger in a new and desperate land.

  “We’ll find water,” Krysty said, pulling out a canteen from her backpack. “That pipe under the temple had to come from somewhere. And the Grandee River isn’t that far.”

  Then she paused for a moment until the throbbing in her temples subsided. Her hair had been cut by an arrow in the fight at the ville, and the pain still lingered. As she stroked the filaments, they coiled tighter, almost protectively about her hand, and as the dull agony eased somewhat the animated hair relaxed once more into a crimson cascade about her shoulders.

  Taking a very small sip from the canteen, Krysty carefully washed out her mouth before taking a long drink. Born and raised in Colorado, she had learned early in life to always cut the dust from your mouth before drinking, or else you remained thirsty and wasted precious water taking a second, unnecessary drink.

  Finally lowering the canteen, Krysty wiping her mouth dry on the sleeve of her bearskin coat, and tightly screwed the cap back onto the container. Waste not, die not, as her mother always used to say. Tucking the battered tin canteen safely away, Krysty then fingered her S&W Model 640 revolver to make sure it was still with her after the wild ride. Then kneeling, the redhead checked the knife tucked into one of her cowboy boots.

  “Best not ride for a while,” Jak Lauren stated. “Horses rest or die.”

  “That’s why I stopped here,” Ryan said, brushing back his wild crop of hair with stiff fingers. Sleep tugged at his eyes like deadweights, and he jerked his head to try to stay awake. This wasn’t the time or place to catch some sleep. Soon, though, they’d find someplace to make camp, and he’d get some rest then.

  Grunting in acknowledgment, Jak awkwardly easing himself off the roan mare with his good arm, the other tucked inside his shirt stained dark with blood. He had caught some flying lead in the fight to get out of Rockpoint, but there had been no spurting of blood to show a major artery had been hit. It was only a flesh wound, the small-caliber round having gone clean through his arm without even hitting the bone. Soon it would be just another scar on the albino teen’s body, lost amid the dozens of others.

  “My dear Ryan, are you quite all right?” a silver-haired man asked, sitting easily in his saddle as if born there.

  Dressed in a frock coat and frilly white shirt with an ebony walking stick thrust through his belt like a sword, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner seemed to be a refugee from the nineteenth century. A WWI web belt encircled his waist, the closed pouches bulging with ammo for the colossal handcannon resting on his hip. The large blaster was a Civil War–era LeMat revolver, a 9-shot .44 that used black powder. Though Doc looked deceptively old, he could wield the LeMat with authority.

  Fighting back a yawn, Ryan scowled at the other man, then shrugged. “I could use some coffee,” he admitted in frank honesty. “Got an MRE?”

  Doc nodded in understanding. MRE stood for Meal Ready to Eat, and the pack included a main course, snack, gum, cigarettes, candy bar, dessert, coffee, sugar, moist towelette and even toilet tissue for afterward. The companions found the MRE packs regularly in the redoubts, often with the protective Mylar wrapper ripped open, the food inside dried and useless. But they had a few of the precious rations saved away for when
they couldn’t hunt for meat or trade for food at a ville.

  Against his will, Doc had been an experimental test subject for Operation Chronos, the use of the mat-trans units for time travel. He had been abducted from his quiet university home in Vermont in the late 1880s and thrown rudely into the nuclear wastelands of the Deathlands. For a very long time his mind had been shattered by the event, memories lost and reason gone. But the episodes of madness were less and less frequent these days, which the scholar took to mean that he was slowly becoming adjusted to the present. He found this oddly disturbing. Doc was still grimly determined to find a way to go back in time to his beloved wife, Emily, and his children. They were long dead and buried, in the present, but still alive and well in the past. Someday, somehow, Doc would return to them, and God help anybody who got in his way.

  “Indeed I do,” Doc replied, and slid off his mount to rummage in his backpack until he found a foil-wrapped package and tossed it over. “What’s mine is yours, my dear Ryan.”

  “Nuke me, but coffee sounds like the best idea I’ve heard in years,” J.B. said, compacting the scope to tuck it back into the canvas bag, nestled between a thick coil of homemade fuse and several jars of grainy black powder.

  “Has to be cold,” Ryan said, fumbling with the envelope from the MRE pack. “Still too dark for a fire. Up here, we’d be seen for miles. Might as well shoot off a bastard flare.”

  “They go sleep?” Jak asked.

  “Makes sense that they’d sleep during the day,” Dean stated, breaking in two a granola bar from another MRE pack and eating one part while giving the other to his horse. “Sunlight on APC, be acing hot by noon.”

  The huge animal gobbled down the tiny morsel in less than a second and impatiently shifted its hooves, hoping for more. The others whinnied and nickered for food, hungrily glancing at the weeds again.

  “Lethally hot, you mean,” J.B. corrected, straightening his fedora. “I remember traveling with the Trader, we would sometimes find deaders sitting behind the controls of an armored wag, the stink of roasting flesh filling the air inside.”