Latitude Zero Read online

  Latitude Zero

  Deathlands Saga

  Book XII

  James Axler

  First edition April 1991

  ISBN 0-373-62512-X

  Copyright © 1991 by Worldwide Library

  Philippine copyright 1991

  Australian copyright 1991

  Content

  Excerpt

  Dedication

  Quote

  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

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Excerpt

  What you done, bitch?' Larry asked.

  His hand reached inside his plaid shirt and came out holding a straight-edge razor. "You're dead, you murdering slut!"

  In the confined space, Krysty knew that the man's bulk and raw power could tell against her.

  The steel edge began to weave a lightning pattern of hissing death in front of Krysty's face, pressing her back a half step at a time. Larry was breathing hard, sweat glistening on his forehead and around his open mouth.

  Mildred was sitting on her bed, ready to use her blaster if things went far enough against Krysty. Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, Krysty saw the black woman tear open the front of her blouse, revealing her breasts.

  "This is for you, boy," she called. Larry Ballinger's gaze wandered to the black woman's chest. It was the opening that Krysty had been hoping for. Taking advantage of Larry's inattention, she stepped forward, flexing the powerful muscles in her thighs. She swung her right foot upward with all of her strength.

  Larry Ballinger's numbed fingers released the razor. He opened his mouth to scream and yellow vomit dribbled down his chin. His hands were reaching for his groin to try to stem the terrible pain, but the blackness came surging up and washed him into unconsciousness first.

  Dedication

  I'm grateful every single day for the miraculous luck that brought us together. Now and for always, this is for Liz.

  Quote

  With its notorious extremes of terrain and temperature, the area of southern Texas known as Big Bend is the only place on earth where one can witness both Purgatory and Paradise in a single afternoon.

  From Water and Stone

  by J. McKinley Thompson

  Chapter One

  BEHIND RYAN CAWDOR and his five companions, the apocalyptic pillar of swirling red and orange dust rose thousands of feet into the clear sky. The choking cloud contained the disintegrated ruins of a long-hidden redoubt that had honeycombed the mountain, the remains of which still towered above the friends. The complex had been destroyed by a self-terminate device placed there by some long-dead hand nearly a hundred years ago, before the brief and savage nuclear war that had ravaged the United States of America, turning it into what was now simply called Deathlands.

  Within the redoubt had been one of the rare mat-trans devices known as gateways, which would have enabled Ryan and the others to make an instantaneous jump from that particular redoubt to another, maybe a thousand miles away.

  With its destruction came the bitter awareness that the companions were stranded in that bleak desert land with little food or water, and no sign of any semblance of civilization as far as the eye could see.

  J. B. Dix, the armorer of the group, was busily checking figures off his micro-sextant, trying to find out where they were. Ryan wiped grit from his one good eye and looked around, guessing that they could be somewhere in the Southwest.

  But the nuking of the year 2001 had done more than wipe out all the cities and virtually all the people. It had also produced almost indescribable changes in the formation of the country. Half of California had slithered into the Pacific; mountains had fallen and burst up again five hundred miles away; there were monstrous steaming lagoons filled with water so acidic it would separate flesh from bone; there were forests where there had been deserts and there were deserts that had once been rolling acres of fertile grazing land.

  "New Mexico, I think. Not all that far from the border with old Texas." J.B. wiped his wire-rimmed spectacles on his shirtsleeve and looked across at Ryan.

  "Don't know this region all that well. We were here with Trader, ten years or more ago. There's plenty of old hot spots around here."

  Out of habit he glanced down at the miniature rad counter buttoned to his coat. It was showing a pale yellow light that barely shaded above the green of safety. It showed there was some kind of radiation within twenty miles or so, or a milder area a little nearer. The rad counters weren't all that accurate or reliable.

  Mildred Wyeth had been sitting on the ground, resting her head on her hand. "Sure is warm after that dank, cold dungeon. I haven't been so cold since they froze me."

  The black woman had been in her midthirties when minor abdominal surgery had led to complications. She'd been one of the leading experts in the United States on the relatively new science of cryogenics and cryosurgery, and had been one of a number of people whose bodies had been frozen in the hope of reviving and curing them at some unspecified future date. Mildred had been thawed out by Ryan and the others when they'd found the cryo-center in what had once been called Minnesota.

  Apart from the column of dust slowly drifting away, the sky was clear of any threatening chem clouds. Ryan glanced once at the battered comm dish—covered in stones and boulders—that had saved their lives when the self-destruct blew out the redoubt. The area for several hundred yards around was scattered with similar rocks, most no bigger than a baseball, a few of them the size of a house.

  Jak Lauren, the albino teenager, caught Ryan's look. "Fucked without dish," he said, trying to brush the thick dust from his mane of pure white hair.

  "We'd have been in serious trouble if it'd run away with the spoon, wouldn't we?" said Krysty Wroth, grinning.

  "What spoon?"

  The woman's grin broadened. "Didn't anyone ever tell you rhymes when you were young, Jak? Mother Sonja told me that poem when I was a young girl in Harmony ville."

  "Never young," the boy replied.

  "I recall it," Doc Tanner boomed in his rich, mellow voice. "The dish running off with the spoon and the cat playing upon a violin and a heifer leaping across the lunar landscape. A diminutive canine that found the entire subject fit for considerable merriment. Ah, yes. I do remember it well, Krysty."

  Doc Tanner was, in some ways, the oldest member of the group of friends.

  He was born Theophilus Algernon Tanner in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14,
1868, and married Emily Chandler on June 17,1891. They had two children—Rachel and Jolyon.

  In November of 1896, Doc Tanner was trawled forward as part of an experiment in time travel-Operation Cerberus, part of Overproject Whisper, which was itself a key segment of the Totality Concept. The efforts to use gateways for chron jumps were horrendously and cruelly unsuccessful. Their targets included a leading judge and a famous writer, each of whom vanished in mysterious circumstances. Subjects Crater and Bierce, as they were known on the files of Cerberus, failed to make it to the twentieth century. Though Doc's brains were sometimes a little scrambled, he arrived safely in 1998.

  But he didn't prove to be a sufficiently docile guinea pig for the scientists. Eventually, to remove the disruptive Victorian, they sent him forward, pushing him nearly a hundred years into the future.

  There, after some peculiarly unpleasant adventures, Doc was rescued by Ryan Cawdor, and had been traveling with him ever since.

  He looked to be close to seventy, with straggling silver hair and a lined face, and wore the same old-fashioned clothes that he'd been wearing when trawled.

  Ryan and Krysty had once tried to work out with Doc just how old he really was. By one count he was only in his midthirties, about the same age as Ryan and J.B. By another count he was somewhere around two hundred and twenty years old.

  "Not surprising my mind becomes somewhat addled at times," he'd commented.

  "North?" J.B. queried. "Looks like some more mountains. But the land should get greener up to the north."

  "East's acid lagoons and swamps," Jak informed them. "And East's what was home."

  Ryan spoke quietly. "South."

  "Why, lover?" Krysty asked. "South looks like a lot more heat and sand."

  "Remember what Rick said about there being two cryo-centers that he knew about?"

  "One was where you defrosted me," Mildred said.

  "The other was supposed to be someplace in the south of Texas near the Grandee. Rick called it Big Bend."

  Doc coughed and tapped on the dry earth with the ferrule of his sword stick.

  "I know something about Big Bend. When I was living in the nineties, I met a fine girl, Galadriel Okie, a reporter. She was a great one for what was called backpacking. She visited Big Bend several times and said it was one of the quietest of the national parks."

  "South Texas, Doc?" Ryan asked.

  "Indeed, my dear fellow, indeed. I recall that it took its nomenclature from the large loop of the Rio Grande, what you now call the Grandee. She also was much incensed when the government took over some of the parks in the nineties and closed them for purposes of national security."

  "Including Big Bend, Doc?" Krysty queried.

  "I believe so. Yes, I'm sure. Galadriel wrote an article for the Washington Post on the subject. 'Save Big Mac.' No! I mean, Big Bend. It did scant good, I fear."

  "It fits," J.B. said quietly. "Want to go freezie hunting again?"

  "Why not? Mildred worked out well, didn't she? Could strike lucky again."

  Ryan was conscious that his itch to talk to survivors from the past wasn't logical, but it still nagged at him in the waking hours of the night to wonder why a civilized and reasonably affluent world would allow itself to be blown apart. Maybe someone, somewhere, would one day be able to provide the answer.

  Mildred was running her fingers through the tiny, tight plaits on the top of her head. "Glad you think I worked out well, Ryan. Thanks, man. Praise indeed! Maybe next semester I'll get an even higher grade from you."

  "Sorry, Mildred. You know what I mean. Just seems that if we aren't that far off from Big Bend, we should go down and take a look. Anyone else got any feelings on it?"

  Jak was occupied with picking up small pebbles, flicking them in the air, and jabbing at them with the hardened edge of his palm. He caught Ryan's question and glanced sideways, shrugging his shoulders. "Don't give fuck. There's same as here."

  "Guess he's right," Krysty agreed. "Long as we can get food and drink, I'll go along to Big Bend with everyone else. Like the sound of the name."

  Doc also shrugged. "I was going to the store for cigarettes, but I'll go to Big Bend."

  Mildred sniffed. "In some ways I'd kind of like to go back home to Lincoln, Nebraska. But… everyone's long, long dead. Children of friends are dead. Grandchildren gone. Cemeteries brimming with the descendants of folks I knew. No…never can go home like that. Sure. I'll go to Big Bend, Ryan. Thaw out a freezie and I'll have someone who can talk to me about television, books and stuff like that."

  She grinned up at Ryan, but he could also see tears brimming in her dark eyes.

  J.B. was the only one who didn't answer.

  "We got five votes," Ryan said. "Want to make it six J.B.?"

  "No."

  Ryan was surprised. He and the Armorer had known each other for so long—from the early days with the Trader—that their judgment on situations was almost always the same.

  The others waited for J.B. to expand on his decision. He brushed a small, buzzing insect away from his lips before speaking.

  "Little food and water. Doesn't look much in that direction. Krysty, you got the best eyes of any of us. You see anything?"

  Krysty hopped agilely onto a large crimson boulder, its bright color almost identical to her fiery mane of hair. She shaded her eyes and stared across the wilderness, concentrating for a very long time before jumping down again.

  "Dust. Could be the wind, but it doesn't look like it. More like animals, maybe horses. And I thought I saw a building close by, but can't be sure. It's a long ways off."

  "But there's something?" Ryan asked. He shaded his good eye with his hand and looked into the distance. Though he prided himself on his keen sight, it was nothing compared to Krysty's.

  "Yeah. Something."

  J.B. wasn't convinced. "Gotta be close to three hundred miles, Ryan. No wags to hitch along on, no cattle to butcher, no crystal streams to wet your lips at."

  "Three hundred. We'll move mainly in the dark, and there must be water along the blacktops. Soon as we find a blacktop, that is. It'll take us ten days to two weeks on foot. I just can't believe we won't find people and transport somewhere."

  The Armorer nodded. "Could be you're right. Then we'll be fine." He paused and half smiled. "Then again, could be you're wrong. Still, I heard say that getting chilled from heat and thirst wasn't all that bad."

  A half hour later the six friends began to walk south.

  Chapter Two

  THE RAD COUNTER FADED into a steady green once they were a couple of miles away from the ruins of the redoubt.

  The sun burned down from sky that was tinted the palest of pinks in the far west and a fiery orange in the east. Once or twice they heard the distant rumble of thunder from a chem storm over the hills off to the north.

  "Gotta be way over a hundred," Mildred said, pausing to lever a pebble from her white sneakers.

  "Yeah," Ryan agreed.

  "We're losing body moisture at close on a pint every hour," she said. "Medical fact."

  "No," Jak disagreed, overhearing her. "Not sweating."

  "Wrong, son. In such dry heat the sweat's evaporating the moment it gets on the outside. Feels like you aren't sweating. That's the danger. If you dehydrate your mind goes, and it takes your body down the line with it."

  "The building you thought you saw, Krysty? It should mean water."

  In his heart Ryan had a nagging doubt that they'd taken the wrong option by heading south. But when you made a plan you stuck to it—unless there was some big reason to change. The Trader always used to tell him that.

  "Maybe not. This trail's taking us down into dead ground. Can't make anything out from down here."

  The land was barren, apart from small clusters of the delicate purple prickle-leaf gilia, its beauty almost unbelievable in the dusty heat.

  J.B. brought up the rear. In the hour or so that they'd been slogging south he hadn't uttered a single word. Ryan fell back t
o join him, allowing Jak to take the point position.

  "How's it going?"

  "Warm."

  "You think we've made a wrong move?"

  The Armorer turned to face him, the sunlight dancing off the lenses of his glasses.

  "Yeah. Could be. Then again, it could be we've made the right move." He grinned at Ryan. "Hell, you think I'm sulking back here?"

  "No," Ryan replied unconyincingly.

  J.B. laughed. "Thought you knew me better'n that, friend. No. It's just that talking costs, and it's too hot to spend words."

  The faint trail started to wind its way upward again. Krysty was out in front, and she beckoned to the others.

  "Small spread down yonder," she called. "It's the one I saw way back."

  "Best get low," Ryan advised. "Don't know what kind of folks is there."

  The redheaded woman nodded and crouched. Ryan knew from experience that her flaming hair could be seen from miles off, particularly if the sun happened to catch it.

  One by one the rest of the group joined her, with Doc struggling up last.

  "There's a road." J.B. pointed to the right, where an undulating ribbon of ancient blacktop rolled and pitched toward the south.

  "Are there any horses?" Mildred asked.

  "Yeah," Krysty replied, "and the place has a well and a vegetable garden to the side. Looks a real neat place."

  "Nobody's moving." Ryan scanned the land, looking for a trace of movement. In this kind of desert it would be hard to move around without leaving a telltale pillar of orange dust behind.

  Ryan was conscious of a faint, high-pitched hum somewhere behind them and high in the air. Almost immediately the others heard it as well.

  "Swarm fucking bees," Jak announced, looking around worriedly.

  "Could be. Can't see anything." Ryan knew that the southern part of Deathlands was plagued occasionally by huge swarms of what used to be called "killer" African bees. He'd read in an old, brittle mag once, about how they'd been moving north from the forests of Brazil around the time that the world blew apart. He'd never been clear about what bees from Africa had been doing in South America. That page had been missing.