Deathlands 075: Shatter Zone Read online

  The last mutie raised its head and crooned at the sky

  It was a new and different kind of hoot that none of the companions had ever heard before. Almost immediately, a distant hoot answered.

  “Dark night, it’s calling for help!” J.B. gasped, dropping a spent clip and slapping in a spare. “What is going on here?”

  Even as she frantically reloaded, Mildred considered the matter, and knew that she had no possible answer. Nobody knew for sure where the stickies came from in the first place, whether they were accidents of Nature caused by the nuclear holocaust, devolved humans, escaped genetic experiments, bioweps or what. But there was one singular, unarguable factor about the mutants. They lived, and anything alive always tried to improve itself, to make the next generation stronger.

  Mildred shivered at the idea. Stickies with weapons. Oh, dear God in Heaven, protect our mortal souls….

  Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

  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

  Bloodfire

  Hellbenders

  Separation

  Death Hunt

  Shaking Earth

  Black Harvest

  Vengeance Trail

  Ritual Chill

  Atlantis Reprise

  Labyrinth

  Strontium Swamp

  JAMES AXLER

  DEATH LANDS®

  Shatter Zone

  To my parents

  For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

  —Ecclesiastes 9:11–12

  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 One

  The blowing dust of the Manitoba desert tinted the air red, as if the world had been painted in fresh blood.

  Patches walked carefully among the tall barbed cactus plants, a small knife in his weathered hand. The wep was a homie, just a piece of window glass repeatedly rubbed against stone until it was razor-sharp, with a piece of rat skin wrapped around the bottom to make a handle. The wrinklie remembered once seeing a baron with a steel knife. But then the ruler of that ville had also carried a working blaster, a wheelgun with live brass. The glass knife would be useless in a fight against a black-powder handcannon like that, but it served him well enough for the harvesting.

  Stopping his slow progress near a tall cactus, Patches eased his hand into a cluster of the barbed needles and cut free a fat purple globe. As the juicy fruit fell, he neatly caught it with his other hand, and tucked it away into the patched canvas bag hanging at his side. The bag was almost half full and Patches smiled at the thought of how happy his wife would be knowing that they would eat this night.

  The cactus plants replenished the harvested fruit very quickly, but always in new patterns, and he had never found another way of harvesting the fruit except by wandering through the deadly grove. There were many much larger fruits still nesting inside the cluster of needles, ripe and ready for the taking, but all of them were too big to retrieve without getting his arm punctured.

  A fluttering from above caught his attention and the old man looked up to see a bird of some kind land on top of a tall cactus and start pecking at a fruit. Patches salivated at the thought of fresh meat, but he knew it was already too late.

  Suddenly the little bird gave a horrid squawk and reared back with a quill sticking out of its wing. As it shook the wing, the needle fell out and the bird went happily back to the plump fruit.

  “Three,” Patches whispered softly. “Two, one…”

  Violently shuddering all over, the bird went limp and toppled off the cactus, bouncing from limb to limb of the plants. Then the aced bird was gone from sight, lost somewhere deep inside the overlapping needles covering the spreading arms of the tall cactus.

  Goodbye,
meat. With a sigh, Patches thumbed the desert sand from beneath his eye patch, then returned to the arduous work at hand.

  The air of the desert grove was sweet, rich with a tangy infusion of citrus from the clusters of plump red fruits hanging from the flowering sides of each green cactus. A few of the plants lacked flowers, and those he simply avoided as a waste of time. No flowers meant no fruit. Although the venom in the needles of those cacti was much stronger, perfect to tip the arrows of his crossbow. A man didn’t have to be a very good shot with one of those on his arrow. Shoot a slaver in the leg and before he finished cursing, the flesh peddler would go stiff and topple over, a new passenger on the last train west.

  It had been a long time since Patches last saw a slaver in his little valley, and that was just fine by him. Every day that he didn’t hear the crack of a leather whip or feel the cold of steel around his wrists was a good day. He wouldn’t even have put chains on a radblasted mutie, the shambling mockeries of men that wandered mindlessly from the desert. Strange they were, and triple deadly with sharpened teeth, claws and suckers on their fingers. Thankfully, no big muties came here. This tiny grove was his world, his private domain, unwanted by anybody, except himself and his wife.

  The flowery grove stretched to the end of the valley, hundreds of yards long and equally wide. The warm ground beneath the cactus plants was covered with the decomposing bodies of small rodents, birds, reptiles and even some large insects with four wings. Once he found the skeleton of a norm, but the bones were so old even the clothing was gone, not even a zipper or button remaining. The corpse might have been lying there since predark days, who could say? But since there had been nothing to scav, Patches had moved onward and left the dead alone. Finding a bunch of bones was nothing new. Dark fire, there were ruins of predark villes carpeted with gleaming white bones, the predark skulls still staring skyward, sightless eyes forever looking at the nuke death raining down upon them.

  Shaking off the grisly memories, Patches went back to work. Slow hours passed as the long day wore on. The old man became drenched with sweat, more from the effort of staying perfectly still than from the rising desert temperatures. Once, his ragged shirt snagged on a barbed needle and the breath caught in his throat, his heart pounding wildly. Turning ever so slowly, it took Patches a good hour to cut himself loose. Too tired to turn about again, he simply continued on in the new direction. There was food in this part of the grove, too. There was always fruit here. It was why they stayed.

  Then again, he added ruefully, maybe Suzette had caught a lizard today. Meat for dinner! She hadn’t caught one since the last acid rain, over a dozen moons ago, but there was always hope.

  Soon, another plump fruit was added to his bag and Patches snorted in mild annoyance at the memory of finding it. The leather bag seemed perfect for the job of harvesting. However, the faded lettering on the side read “Mail,” or so his wife said. And since he was the male she reasoned it should be his job to gather the fruit, even though she was much smaller and could slip through the lethal needles with much greater ease.

  They had argued over the matter, of course, but Suzette was the granddaughter of a whitecoat, and much smarter than him. He went into the grove to gather fruit while she went into the sand dunes with their crossbow to hunt rats and lizards. The rats weren’t edible; the meat would put a man on the last train west.

  “You playing or working in there, old man?” Suzette called from the direction of their hut.

  Their home was a predark wag of some kind, the tires long gone and the engine a rusted lump block. But the body was a big box of metal that even the spring sandstorms couldn’t get through, and with the door shut tight, the howlers couldn’t seem to find them. If they kept very quiet.

  “You back already?” Patches demanded suspiciously, craning his neck to try to get a glimpse of his wife. But the cactus completely blocked his view. “Hunting that bad?”

  “That good!” she retorted happily. “Besides, it takes a long time to skin a lizard.”

  A lizard? Hot damn, meat for dinner!

  “Then don’t waste time talking to me. Get back to your cooking!” Patches laughed, returning to his own task. With luck, there might even be enough of the lizard to spare some for Trio.

  His mind on dinner, the old man started to gather another plump globe when his ratskin moccasins slipped on the loose rock in the sand. Jerking back to try to stay upright, Patches went motionless at the cool touch of a needle pressing against his wrist. Nuking hell! If the tip broke the skin…

  Moving with glacial speed, the wrinklie moved away from the needle until he was clear. Then he stood perfectly still for a few minutes, waiting for his heart to stop pounding. Idiot! Fools always die, that was rule number one. Stay alert, stay alive.

  Taking a small fruit from the bag, Patches allowed himself a tiny bite as a reward. The juicy pulp was as sweet as canned peaches, but with none of the metallic aftertaste. Licking his cracked lips clean, Patches tucked the fruit away and began his slow creep toward the edge of the grove and his waiting wife. There was no fast exit from among the plants, so he might as well gather as much food as possible along the way.

  Patiently, slowly, the one-eyed wrinklie worked his way through the grove of death, gathering the tiny harvest of life.

  WITH THE RED DUST WIND blowing around him, the outlander stood on top of the rocky hill watching the four horsemen of the apocalypse ride along the horizon. Delphi almost smiled at the literary reference. Then he did smile at the idea that he was probably the only person in ten thousand miles who did know the allusion.

  Except for Tanner, Delphi added, the smile quickly fading. Professor Theophilus Algernon Tanner. “Doc” to his friends. Experimental test subject No. 14 to his former captors.

  High above the lone man, the polluted clouds in the fiery sky roiled and rumbled with endless thunder, the sheets of heat lighting cutting across the orange clouds like an executioner’s ax, bright and sudden, then gone, leaving nothing behind.

  Formerly a lush woodlands, this section of the wasteland was now only a barren desert of hard rock and windblown sand. However, in the secluded valley below this hill there was a small forest of succulent cacti. Two old people were living in a rusted courier service truck that hard-crashed at one time, and seemed to have learned how to safely harvest the edible fruit growing on the deadly cactus.

  Reaching into a pocket, Delphi pulled out a cigarette and tapped the end on the back of his hand. A moment later the tip glowed red and he drew the thick sweet smoke deep into his artificial lungs.

  It was a good location, Delphi admitted. The rad pits were few and far between, plus there was even a small creek of clean water trickling from a rent in the side of a nearby mesa. In comparison to the rest of the shattered world, this was almost an Eden, a lost paradise. Such a pity that somebody else wanted it, too.

  Allowing the pungent smoke to trickle out of his nostrils, Delphi tilted his head at the sound of singing coming from the old woman skinning a fat Gila monster. Singing. Now that was a very rare sound these days. Or rather, happy singing was uncommon. The cannies often cut their victims in special ways to make the people scream in what they called death songs. But Delphi didn’t approve of cannibals, and killed them on sight, despite the standing orders from his superiors at TITAN to never hurt a gene-pure norm. Orders were orders, yes, but there were limits to his tolerance. And to his grudging obedience.

  Briefly he wondered if the people in charge of TITAN even knew that Department Coldfire existed. Wheels within wheels. A secret wrapped in a mystery, a conundrum lost in the fog, and everything cloaked in total denial. As far as Delphi knew, only about a dozen people in the world had ever known what his department was trying to accomplish—nine of them were operatives, and one was a test subject who had gotten away. Doc Tanner. But if all went well…

  A movement on the horizon caught his attention and Delphi turned to focus his silvery eyes on the four horsemen galloping along the desert a
t full speed. Their bodies were bent low over their animals as they whipped the beasts on to greater speed.

  So they understood wind resistance. Good. They aren’t as stupid as they look, Delphi thought.

  The four men rode without saddles or bridles, using only blankets and ropes. Although they were heavily armed, no sunlight glinted off the weapons in their hands, the ax blades and one blaster were wrapped in cloth to prevent any reflection that might reveal their presence too soon.

  That was also good, Delphi admitted, removing the cigarette to exhale slowly. They were smart, but cautious. And the four moved well, working together as a unit. Excellent.

  Hopefully these four coldhearts would be the end of his search. The previous thirteen groups Delphi had tested all proved to be useless. They were always too eager, too bloodthirsty or too stupid. Delphi needed operatives who could be trusted. Soldiers to be where he could not be, and to do what he was not allowed to do. Although perhaps the more colorful term of mercenary was more accurate for their job description, though “mercie” was the current term. From mercenary to mercy, what a misnomer! The irony was delicious.

  Suddenly a blaster shot rang out and Delphi saw the old woman fall to the ground, blood pouring from her shoulder. All four horsemen began to whoop a war cry as the rest fired their crossbows. The flight of arrows missed the woman as she stumbled into the truck, the shafts stabbing into the loose sand all around her.

  Crossing his arms, Delphi frowned. Was she seeking refuge?

  Then the woman reappeared with her own crossbow and fired. The arrow just missed the lead rider and struck the second horse just below a shoulder. It was only a glancing blow, nothing of importance. But the animal abruptly slowed and began to shake all over, foam dripping from its mouth. The convulsing horse stumbled, throwing its rider. The big man with a bald head hit the ground hard but came up rolling, completely undamaged. But minus his crossbow. With an expression of incredible fury, he reared up, brandishing a steel knife.

  As the coldheart charged straight for the wrinklie, she struggled to reload the crossbow. But by now the others had arrived. Swinging their weps like clubs, they rode past the woman, knocking the crossbow from her hands and smashing her about the face.