Hive Invasion Read online

  DUST DWELLERS

  Seeking refuge in a post-Armageddon America, Ryan Cawdor and his crew of misfits travel together for survival and sanity. Known as Deathlands, this lawless hellscape is defined by destruction, death and despair. Only those who persevere with the belief in a better future stand a chance in this world where each day brings a new, and potentially lethal, struggle.

  HARNESSED MINDS

  Desperate to find water and shelter on the barren plains of former Oklahoma, Ryan and his team come upon a community that appears, at first, to be peaceful. Then the ville is attacked by a group of its own inhabitants—people infected with a parasite that has turned them into slave warriors for an unknown overlord. The companions try to help fend off the enemy and protect the remaining population, but when Ryan is captured during a second ambush, all hope seems lost. Especially when he launches an assault against his own crew.

  Three of the six-wheeled

  vehicles skidded to a stop

  Nine longblasters were poked up over the cabs and aimed at Jak, J.B. and the members of the collective.

  “People of the Silvertide collective, you are ordered to surrender immediately, or we will be forced to open fire!” The voice that boomed over the loudspeaker sounded familiar. “You have ten seconds to comply.”

  All through the camp, fighting men and women looked up at the voice. When they saw the overwhelming force arrayed against them, they turned to J.B., who shook his head.

  “Stop! It’s over,” he shouted.

  “Not serious,” Jak muttered.

  “For the moment, yeah, I am,” the Armorer whispered. “But stay ready.”

  “Lay down your weapons, put up your hands and walk toward the sound of my voice.”

  The driver’s door of the main truck opened and a tall man stepped out into the light. When they saw him, both J.B.’s and Jak’s jaws dropped.

  The newest leader of the kidnappers was Ryan Cawdor.

  Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

  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

  Shatter Zone

  Perdition Valley

  Cannibal Moon

  Sky Raider

  Remember Tomorrow

  Sunspot

  Desert Kings

  Apocalypse Unborn

  Thunder Road

  Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba Book I)

  Dark Resurrection (Empire of Xibalba Book II)

  Eden’s Twilight

  Desolation Crossing

  Alpha Wave

  Time Castaways

  Prophecy

  Blood Harvest

  Arcadian’s Asylum

  Baptism of Rage

  Doom Helix

  Moonfeast

  Downrigger Drift

  Playfair’s Axiom

  Tainted Cascade

  Perception Fault

  Prodigal’s Return

  Lost Gates

  Haven’s Blight

  Hell Road Warriors

  Palaces of Light

  Wretched Earth

  Crimson Waters

  No Man’s Land

  Nemesis

  Chrono Spasm

  Sins of Honor

  Storm Breakers

  Dark Fathoms

  Siren Song

  End Program

  Desolation Angels

  Blood Red Tide

  Polestar Omega

  HIVE INVASION

  The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

  —Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788–1860

  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 pre-dark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

  Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on ad-versity, 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

  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

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  “Gaia, Ryan, just do it!”

  Taking a deep breath, Ryan Cawdor flexed his fingers, then picked up the scalpel. He wished there was some other way to do this, but just like the last time, it was the simplest, more direct way of solving the problem, despite the potential fallout. “Now, hold still—”

  “I am! Just get on with it!”

  Ryan had faced countless
dangers during his life: power-hungry barons holding the lives of countless people in their hands and willing to kill whoever they thought might take that power away; mechanical nightmares, created by long-dead mad whitecoats, that still roamed the land to hunt and kill; monsters of every stripe, from the tiny to the gargantuan, all roaming the hellscape called Deathlands.

  He’d lost count of the number of folks he’d chilled during his travels and never even thought about how many muties and other freakish creatures had lost their lives at his hands. But every few months he took his own life in his hands; even worse, each time he did so willingly.

  Before him, a gorgeous, flame-haired woman knelt on the dry ground. Only her fingers tapping her thigh revealed any tension. Tall and well built, Krysty Wroth turned heads wherever she went. She was also smart, levelheaded, good with a blaster and a deadly hand-to-hand fighter.

  Ryan stepped closer to her, weighing how best to begin. Choosing a thick lock of her long red hair, he pulled it away from the rest with one hand and wasn’t surprised when it trembled and curled around his fingers.

  Krysty was also a mutie. She could sense things, such as the life force of nearby people and creatures, and their emotional state. And she also had strange, prehensile hair that reacted to her moods. Getting Krysty drunk was the best—and only—way to cut her hair. Unlike everyone else’s, from Ryan’s thick curly black hair to Jak Lauren’s blindingly bright white mane to J. B. Dix’s close-cropped pate to Doc Tanner’s silver-white tendrils to Mildred Wyeth’s beaded plaits, Krysty’s hair was alive on her head.

  Cutting it hurt—a lot. She compared it to taking a blade and dragging it across your skin hard enough to draw blood, then multiplying that pain by a thousand.

  They stood on a plateau overlooking what would have been a bucolic river valley a century ago. Skydark had changed all of that in a few terrible hours. Now the landscape looked more like something out of a geologist’s nightmare.

  Even since their arrival in this part of the old Midwest—J.B. guessed they were in the middle of the plains state known as Oklahoma—they’d been trying to figure out what had happened here. The more pragmatic members—Ryan, J.B. and Mildred—thought it was left over from the long-ago nuclear bombs that had flown and fallen around the world, irrevocably altering the late-twentieth-century civilization into the twisted remnants that struggled to survive every day.

  Doc and Krysty, however, thought that a fault line near what had been the Mississippi River had finally erupted at some point, and that this stark landscape was the result.

  Huge shelves of earth rose against one another in massive jagged waves. They weren’t high enough to be mountains, nor solid enough to be hills, and they kept falling and reforming all the time, making the nearby ground tremble as they moved. Even now, a patter of falling earth made Ryan look up to see a dusty brown hillock collapse in a cloud of dirt. The phenomenon appeared to be confined to this one valley, which relieved him—he didn’t want to have to keep looking over his shoulder to make sure the ground wasn’t collapsing behind him when they left this place.

  “I’m waiting, lover,” Krysty said through gritted teeth.

  “Right.” Ryan gathered the limply sprawling strands of crimson in his hand again and put the razor-sharp scalpel edge under it about four inches up. Although her hair was relaxed, Ryan easily sensed his lover’s tenseness. Without a word of warning, he sliced through the lock in one swift motion.

  Krysty hissed with pain. The hair next to the severed strand tried to hide underneath the rest, while two thick tendrils wrapped themselves around Ryan’s wrists, attempting to pinion his hands. Fortunately, although Krysty’s hair could move, it didn’t have a lot of strength, and Ryan was able to complete the rest of his task with relative ease.

  Two minutes later it was done. Just in time, too, as Krysty leaped up the instant he severed the final strand. Ryan was careful to take one step back while she paced back and forth, breathing heavily, her red tresses curled up tight at the base of her skull. “You all right?” he asked cautiously.

  “I’ll make it....” Krysty said, shuddering as she paced back and forth, calming herself.

  Krysty stopped in front of Ryan, then before he knew it, he was falling backward to the ground, with her on top of him.

  She leg-swept me, he thought as he crashed to the dry earth, only barely breaking his fall with his arms.

  Before he could protest, Krysty was on him, straddling his chest as she kissed him hard, coming up for air after a few seconds. “Want you to take my mind off what just happened, lover. Think you can handle that?”

  Ryan’s hands were already moving, caressing her lush curves, barely constrained under her modified sleeveless jumpsuit. The front zipper was lowered a few inches, and he arched up and tugged it lower with his teeth while his hand snaked across the back of her neck and brought her face toward his for another hard, luscious kiss before nipping at her neck. Her hair now quivered with excitement, any memory of the torture inflicted on it a minute earlier fading fast.

  Krysty’s moans were now of pleasure rather than pain, and her fingers were doing their own walking as they unbuckled his belt and began sliding inside his fatigue pants. As they did, another tremor shook the ground around them.

  Ryan kept going for a second, cupping her breasts before realizing she wasn’t in the moment anymore but was now listening intently to something. And that was when he realized the initial tremor wasn’t stopping.

  “Earthquake?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “This one’s different.” She rolled off him in a fluid move, crouching and pressing a hand to the ground. Ryan just watched her. He’d known doomies in his time, and the whole group had met empaths more than once, but Krysty’s sensing skill was something else entirely. “Not the earth itself shaking... Something shaking it as it moves through it.”

  Ryan propped himself up on his arms. “You mean underground?”

  She nodded. “We better get back to the others—”

  Before she could finish, the bone-dry soil erupted around them, spraying the two with dirt. Looming before them was an animal neither had ever seen before.

  Rising several feet out of the ground, it looked like a cross between a giant ant and a praying mantis. Its carapace was a mottled green, brown and orange, and covered its entire thorax and abdomen in thick chitin. Its head had a pair of bulbous, copper-colored eyes, and large mandibles easily capable of severing a person’s arm that clacked together hungrily. Four arms waved in the air, each one tipped with a serrated, daggerlike claw at the end.

  As Ryan went for his blaster, one of those limbs blurred down, aiming right for his crotch!

  Chapter Two

  Ryan was already scooting backward as the needle-sharp claw spiked into the dirt between his legs, missing his family jewels by a hairbreadth. As it landed, he drew his faithful SIG Sauer P226 blaster and snapped a shot off at the monstrosity’s chest.

  There was an odd, flat crack, and Ryan’s eye widened to see the creature still up and full of fight. He hadn’t missed—there was no way, not at this range. The 9 mm round wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the chitin.

  Still hauling himself backward with his free hand, Ryan aimed more carefully at the big bug’s head, or more specifically, its eye, and fired again. This time the bug’s limbs thrashed around madly, then the creature flopped to the ground a second later.

  “Shoot the head!” he shouted over the sharp report of Krysty’s Glock.

  “Behind you!” Her answering yell came as another shower of dirt fell on Ryan. He looked up to see one of the nightmares right above him, its daggerlike claws spearing down toward his chest.

  He rolled out of the way as three hooks slammed into the ground where he’d been a moment ago. Turning onto his stomach, Ryan put a pair of bullets into the head of his would-be ambusher, then scramb
led to his feet to help Krysty.

  She stood over another of the wriggling, green mutants, her Glock 18C aimed at its chittering head. The blaster cut loose, and the bug shuddered once and went limp. A second mutie lay near the first, its head also oozing black ichor.

  “Is that all of them?” she asked, looking around. Ryan was doing the same while rebuckling his belt when his head snapped around at the sound of more blastershots echoing across the plains.

  “Sounds like they found the others. Come on!” Grabbing his Steyr Scout longblaster, he took off toward the camp, with Krysty right behind him.

  “Looks like we were all wrong about what was making those hills!” she said in between breaths as they ran.

  “Yeah, and I hope it’s the last mistake we make here,” Ryan replied, his long legs eating up the distance. The blaster shots continued, louder now, making him even more concerned. Ryan’s fears were briefly allayed when he and Krysty arrived on a rise overlooking their campsite. Their companions stood back to back around the campfire, which was already dying from lack of fuel. Every person below was shooting into a veritable tide of the green-brown bugs boiling up from the ground all around them. The razor-clawed muties chittered madly as they tried to break through the wall of lead being put up to stop them. At least two dozen bug bodies littered the dirt, with several only a couple of yards away from the defenders’ feet.

  Even as he tried to figure out how in the hell he was going to get them out of there, Ryan admired how calm his companions were under what would have been overwhelming terror for anyone else. It was obvious that the burrowing insects had been stalking them for at least the past couple of days, and had sprung their ambush well, encircling the group and reinforcing the blockade with more ravenous frontline soldiers.

  To defend against the onslaught, Ryan’s friends had arranged themselves in a points-of-the-compass formation that gave everyone overlapping fields of fire. Each shooter could be reinforced by at least one other person at all times, which was good, because from what he could see, the huge mob wasn’t stopping until the insects sank their claws into warm norm flesh.

  On the north point was Doc Tanner, a man who appeared to be some sixty-odd years old by one measure and more than two centuries old by another. Time-traveled a hundred years forward from his home in the late nineteenth century, then from there forward another one hundred years to the Deathlands, his mind often teetered on a razor’s edge between lucidity and madness. Hidden within its depths were secrets of the predark technology built by the scientists of that time. He was a staunch friend, and had saved his companions’ lives on more than one occasion. Wielding a .44-caliber commemorative LeMat revolver in one hand and a rapier in the other, the old man blocked a pair of questing claws with his blade and put a bullet into his attacker’s head, pulping it and dropping the insectoid beast.