Shadow Fortress Read online

  “We will not leave those clouds alive,” Doc warned

  Ryan drew his blaster and started firing, the red-hot rounds easily punching through the tough polymer and deflating the balloons.

  “Water!” Krysty called out, pointing ahead.

  There was a wide break in the stygian forest, a calm river that traversed the valley floor. Their target was a slim area of flat mud between the rocks, impossible to hit at their current speed.

  “That’s our best chance,” Ryan shouted, slashing at the side ropes. “Wait for it.…Now!” In unison the companions dived from the pallet, and a split second later the Pegasus rammed into the trees and was torn apart by a thousand sharp branches.

  Only the babbling of the shallow river disturbed the heavy silence. Then swatches of light bobbed through the darkness, and armed men stepped from the bushes along the riverbank to approach the still figures sprawled in the bloody mud.

  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

  JAMES AXLER

  DEATH LANDS®

  Shadow Fortress

  To Rich Tucholka, a good friend, and a good man

  Storm’d at with shot and shell,

  While horse and hero fell,

  They that had fought so well

  Came thro’ the jaws of Death,

  Back from the mouth of Hell,

  All that was left of them…

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  1809–1892

  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

  Slithering through the jungle brush, the huge cobra reared its head and hissed loudly at the sight of the approaching humans.

  Both of his hands splayed wide to force a path through the tangled vines, Ryan Cawdor didn’t pause at the sight of the reptile, but instantly stomped down with his combat boot, pinning it. Struggling furiously, the cobra uprooted small plants as the man pulled a panga from its sheath on his belt and sliced downward with all of his strength. The blade neatly severed the head, pale blood spraying from the neck stump as the long body thrashed madly about in the leaves.

  But as the snake head hit the ground, its eyes flared wide and the mutie spit out a long stream of greenish fluid. Ryan bent out of the way and the poison hit a tree, the bark turning white almost instantly. Stomping harder on the reptile, the one-eyed warrior felt bones crack, but the creature still struggled to get free. Muttering a curse, Ryan kept his boot in place and drew his 9 mm SIG-Sauer blaster from the holster at his hip. Racking the slide to chamber a round under the hammer, he lifted his boot and fired twice, the soft chugs of the sound-suppressed weapon lost in the rustle of the trees overhead from the ocean breeze. The soft-nosed slugs punched through both of the cobra’s eyes, blowing its head apart, bones and brains splashing across the stubby grass under the papaya plants.

  Three feet away, the hanging cluster of flowery vines burst apart and out stepped a short wiry man with a pump-action shotgun in his callused hands. The newcomer was wearing a fedora hat and wire-rimmed glasses. An Uzi machine pistol was slung across a shoulder, and a bulging canvas bag hung at his side. His leather bomber jacket was stained with sweat, and his clothes were discolored with quicksand and dried blood.

  “Centipede?” John Barrymore Dix asked, the maw of his S&W M-4000 blaster sweeping the area for possible targets.

  “Just a snake this time,” Ryan grunted in reply, stabbing the panga into the moist soil to clean away any possible trace of the venom. “Nothing serious.”

  On the ground, the headless body of the mutie reptile still wiggled about as if unwilling to accept its unexpected demise. Ryan kicked it aside.

  “Well, anything’s better than those triple-damn leeches,” J.B. said with a scowl, easing his stance.

  Holstering his blaster, Ryan grunted in agreement, then
ripped a leaf from a breadfruit tree to wipe the soft dirt off the steel before sheathing his blade.

  Ryan towered over J.B. Long curly black hair framed a humorless face covered with a network of scars, an old leather patch masking the puckered ruin of his left eye. A 7.62 mm bolt-action Steyr sniper rifle was slung over a powerful shoulder, and a heavy canvas pack rode easily on his back. A coat lined with ratty fur was tied around his waist from the stifling jungle heat, his shirt was unbuttoned halfway, exposing a muscular chest with more knife scars and the dead-white dots of old bullet wounds.

  Taking a small drink of water from his canteen, J.B. then offered the container to Ryan, who gratefully took a sip, sloshing the precious fluid about in his mouth before swallowing. Fresh water was merely one of the many things the companions were drastically running low on. This gamble to reach the crashed plane had better payoff, or they might find themselves in chains before Lord Baron Kinnison, a lunatic infamous for giving prisoners his terrible rotting disease before torturing them. That way, even if somebody escaped, he or she still died in screaming torment. It was a serious threat that few dared to risk.

  “Which way?” Ryan asked, brushing back his wild crop of hair.

  Reaching into a pocket, J.B. checked the compass in his hand and watched until the needle trembled only slightly. “Left.”

  Nodding in agreement, Ryan headed in that direction, using his bare hands to push aside the thick vines and broad banana leaves. The weight of the panga was a tempting reminder of how easy it would be to cut a path through the bushes. But that also left behind a trail so clean any feeb could follow. And on this nameless island, being discovered meant death.

  Swatting a buzzing skeeter, J.B. let the tall man get a few yards ahead, then followed in his wake, trying to put his boots in the other man’s prints to minimize the trail. Close behind the wiry Armorer came a ragged line of five more people, each moving quietly through the dense foliage: a tall redhead armed with a Smith & Wesson revolver, an albino teenager hobbling along on a homemade crutch, a stocky black woman with beaded hair who was hugging a predark med kit, a young grim-faced boy brandishing a sleek Browning semiautomatic pistol and, lastly, a thin old man with silver hair, sporting a huge revolver and an ebony walking stick with a silver lion’s head on top. The group stayed three yards apart, the old man judiciously scratching the ground in their wake with his ebony stick to rearrange the leaves and try to hide their passage.

  Slow miles passed, and Ryan checked with J.B. twice more on their direction as the group penetrated deeper into the heart of the island jungle. Soon the moss-coated trees were growing so close together that walking between the trunks was becoming difficult, and the branches overhead crisscrossed each other, effectively blocking out the sun. Midnight ruled the forest, but the travelers dared not light their sole oil lantern. The fish oil smelled awful, and they were much too close to the enemy ville of Cascade. The slightest mistake now, and it was all over.

  Finally, Ryan reached a grove of massive banyan trees, the hanging vines so thick with leaves and orchids that the group could see nothing in the branches above. The only illumination came from a peppering of sunlight streaming in through a hundred tiny breaks in the foliage. It was like a rain of sunbeams.

  As his vision adjusted to the dim lighting, Ryan gestured at J.B. The short man checked his compass, counting to twenty until he saw the needle quiver again, but it no longer seemed to be pulling to the left or right.

  “This looks like the spot,” the Armorer stated, tucking the predark device into his munitions bag. “We must be right underneath the plane.”

  “Can’t tell a thing from down here,” Ryan stated, studying the overhang of leaves and flowers. “We need Mildred’s flashlight. I’ll call in the others.”

  Stepping backward, J.B. put his back to a tree and leveled the shotgun. “Got you covered,” he said, snicking off the safety.

  Cupping both hands around his mouth, the man trilled a soft whistle three times. The signal was repeated so low Ryan almost couldn’t hear it, but he answered with one short whistle. A few moments later, familiar faces started easing from the bushes on every side with loaded weapons in their hands.

  “Hey, lover,” Krysty Wroth whispered, her animated red hair splaying outward in anxiety. To those who knew the woman well, the movements of her hair betrayed her every emotion.

  The tall woman was wearing a khaki jumpsuit with the front partly unzipped to expose a wealth of tan cleavage. Instead of combat boots, Krysty wore blue cowboy boots with steel-tipped toes and a spread-wing-falcon design emblazoned on the sides. Her bearskin coat was tied around her hips to keep the garment out of the way. An old police gun belt with ammo loops circled her shapely hips to support the open holster for the S&W .38 revolver. A sloshing canteen and U.S. Ranger knife were clipped to her regular belt, a bulky backpack riding high on her firm shoulders.

  Glancing at Krysty for a moment, Ryan once again realized just how truly beautiful she was. Sometimes it was as if he were seeing her for the first time: the high cheekbones, emerald-green eyes and animated red hair that flowed past her shoulders. Krysty was the most beautiful woman Ryan had ever seen.

  Ryan felt the usual rush of blood to his loins and forced his attention back to counting the shadows emerging from the jungle. He had to make sure it was just his crew, and that nobody was trying to sneak among them under cover of the shadows. When he was satisfied there was nobody else in the small clearing but the companions, he reached out and gave Krysty’s slim hand a brief squeeze. She squeezed back with surprising strength almost equal to his own.

  “Any trouble?” Ryan asked. He knew Krysty had some mutie blood, which gave her an ability to sense danger. More than once, it had saved their lives.

  Leaning against a banyan tree, the woman breathed in the strange perfumes of the exotic flowers. “All clear,” Krysty answered. “Not a sound of folks for miles.”

  For the first time in a day, the Deathlands warrior allowed himself to relax the tiniest bit. “Good. You’re on guard. Let me know if anything starts coming our way.”

  Stepping away from the tree, Krysty nodded.

  “So this is the location of our aerial El Dorado, eh?” Dr. Theophilus Tanner rumbled in a deep voice. The silver-haired man placed his walking stick on a tree root so it wouldn’t sink into the soft earth, and leaned heavily on its lion head ferrule. “Well, we are indeed pilgrims in the valley of the shadows. Most appropriate.”

  Although only thirty-eight years old, Doc appeared to be more than sixty, with his heavily lined face and a wild shock of silvery hair. The alteration of his features was merely one of the side effects Doc had suffered at the hands of the ruthless scientists from Operation Chronos.

  Ripped from the bosom of his family in the late 1880s, Doc was trawled forward in time to the late 1990s as a test subject. However, Doc proved to be an unruly and uncooperative specimen and was sent forward in time to what had become the Deathlands. Unfortunately, the trawling scrambled some portions of his mind, and Doc sometimes drifted away, reliving prior events or just dreaming aloud while wide-awake. But in a fight, the gentle scholar from Vermont became a deadly fighter and was a valuable member of the group.

  Refusing to relinquish any hold on his past, Doc wore clothes of his day, including pin-striped pants and matching vest, a frilly white shirt with a string bow tie and a long frock coat, now with several bullet holes in the twilled fabric. A U.S. Army backpack was carried effortlessly on his shoulders, and around his waist was a cracked leather belt lined with ammo pouches for his gigantic .44 Civil War blaster.

  “Pipe down, you old coot,” Mildred Wyeth muttered, using handfuls of grass to try to wipe the residue of quicksand from her clothes. Once it dried, the stuff came off easily. It was only the high viscosity and depth that made the bog dangerous.

  Short and stocky, the physician wore loose Air Force fatigues, with a Czech-made ZKR target pistol holstered on her left side for the cross draw she favored.
Before skydark Mildred had gone into a hospital for a simple operation, but there had been complications, and a hundred years later she awoke in a cryogenic freezer, a new Gulliver trapped in a frightening world forged from atomic nightmares.

  “Might as well set off a gren if you’re going to talk that loud,” Mildred stated, tossing away the filthy grass.

  “My humble apologies,” Doc muttered in a wry apology, then continued in the same volume.

  “So where is our arboreal harbor located, John Barrymore?”

  “Straight up,” J.B. said, jerking a thumb at the impenetrable ceiling of the jungle. “From here, we climb.”

  “Indeed,” Doc said, studying the dense weaving of vines and creepers. “How antediluvian for us.”

  Standing her post, Krysty ignored the conversation, forcing herself to listen to the distant sounds of the forest, the chattering of a distant monkey, a flowing stream, birds in flight and the constant hum of the insects all around them. There were a lot of bugs in this jungle.

  “I’ll take the lead and cut us a path,” Ryan stated, tightening the straps on his backpack. “Just remember to put any loose branches or leaves in your pockets. Don’t let anything fall to the ground and mark the spot.”

  “Easy,” Jak Lauren grunted, wincing slightly as he accidentally put some weight on his sprained ankle.

  The bus crash at the quagmire had almost chilled the lot of them, and it was just chance that a barrel of shine had fallen on his leg. Thankfully, it was empty and he only received a sprain, not a break. Mildred was a good doctor, but there wasn’t really much a person could do for a broken leg.

  A true albino, Jak wore his snowy hair long, and often leaned forward so it fell across his scarred face to mask his pale red eyes from enemies and preventing them from detecting which way he was going to charge. Deception was the Cajun’s favorite weapon.

  In spite of the humidity and heat, Jak was still wearing his camouflage jacket, the lapels and collar decorated with bits of razors, special hidden surprises for anybody foolish enough to grab him by the jacket. At least a dozen leaf-bladed throwing knives were hidden on his person, and a big .357 Magnum Colt Python pistol was tucked into his belt.