Separation

  She was black

  In the days before the nukecaust, that had made a difference. Being in this community had put her back in touch with that lost part of herself, and that was good. But was it that great when it came to making her doubt J.B.? Besides the relationship they had built, there were more pressing issues: the companions had been through so much together, formed bonds of loyalty forged in fire. There were things that went deeper than age, race and sex: the knowledge that they would pull together without it even being spoken of or thought about.

  And she was doubting that, denying it? There was a rift between her and the companions. But perhaps that was a good thing. It made her examine herself, her priorities and loyalties.

  In the end, the ideals of the island were pitched against pragmatism and experience of reality in the world outside.

  Some wanted nothing less than war. But who would make the sides in a war?

  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

  Bloodfire

  Hellbenders

  JAMES AXLER

  DEATH LANDS®

  Separation

  Most people are on the world, not in it—

  have no conscious sympathy or relationship

  to anything about them—undiffused,

  separate, and rigidly alone like marbles

  of polished stone, touching but separate.

  —John Muir,

  1838–1912

  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 One

  Black clouds of pain and despair washed over Dean as he began to surface from the mat-trans jump. Like being lost in a sea of black, brackish water that infested every pore, clogging him with filth and filling his mouth and lungs, it was a complete isolation and a slow death. Every muscle flooding with lactic acid, making any movement painful and difficult beyond imagining, he began to stir, swimming upward to try to strike the surface. There was a patina of light that washed across the thin skin far above, separating the air from the water. He moved toward the light with a determination born of the will to live.

  He struck the surface, emerging from the icy thickness below into the weak light of the air above, gasping as the oxygen hit his lungs, the viscous liquid falling away from his skin, dripping off his hair.

  That moment between unconscious sleep and awakening, that fraction of a second that seemed to move on into an eternity…that was the time when the hallucinations came, the time when the dreams and nightmares at the back of his brain were called forth to haunt him once more.

  It was always this way for Dean Cawdor and, as he floated on the surface of the sea of consciousness, breaking for land, he drifted back to the world of his deepest fears and insecurities, the things that he dare not admit into his conscious mind.

  Although not always the same in every respect, often it was always the same in essence. A younger Dean—still the same strong, resilient youth, but still a boy—standing before his mother as she told him of his father, the son of a baron, not the man who was her husband and the powerful baron of his own ville. He could still see her face clearly. Sharona—Rona to him—had once been a beautiful woman. But that was something that lay in her past. She had been ravaged by sickness. Where once she had been slim and graceful, with feminine curves that had drawn the eye of Ryan Cawdor, she was thin and gaunt, her flesh nonexistent with seemingly only skin to cover her skeletal frame. Her once-attractive cheekbones were skull-like, her eyes sunken back into their sockets, resembling burning orbs in which the fire was slowly dimming. Her lank hair hung like hanks of rope tied into bunches to be pulled back from her forehead to stop irritating skin that was beyond pale. Ghostly and gray, her once-smooth complexion had broken out with sores in patches around her hairline and her bloodless lips. Her clothes hung like rags from her body.

  “But why can�
��t I stay with you until you buy the farm—why can’t I be with you?” he asked, hearing himself as he was before his voice broke, the high pitch sounding alien to his own ears.

  “Because it isn’t safe,” she answered simply. “When I die you’ll be all alone. I’ve taught you how to survive, but a little boy alone in the Deathlands doesn’t have much of a chance. Your future lies with your father.”

  “If he’s so great, where’s he been when we both needed him?” Dean asked with disgust.

  Sharona’s ravaged mouth twisted into a wry smile. “He doesn’t know about you.”

  Even though there was a part of him that knew it was only a half memory, maybe a hallucination as the result of the mat-trans jump, he still felt that same heart-tearing burst of emotions he’d felt when he had been separated from her.

  It had happened exactly like that, and it didn’t happen the same way every time the memory haunted his dreams, but it was still the same in essence. A woman came out of the shadows and took him by the hand, gently but firmly guiding him away from his mother, who stood and watched. As he was pulled farther away from Sharona, he could see that she was no longer the tall, graceful figure that she had once been: she was bowed over by her illness, the sudden stabs of light illuminating the paleness of her face and hands, reflecting the moonlight with an equal deathly glow. Walking backward, he could feel the pull taking him away from his mother, could see her recede into the background, her eyes seeming to follow him, intense even as the distance between them increased.

  And then the scenes changed, rapidly passing in front of his eyes. He was reunited with his father who had saved his life. He was in the Nicolas Brody school, then kidnapped, forced to fight for his very life in the ruins of Las Vegas as part of a gladiatorial contest for the entertainment of warring barons. He’d been rescued by his father and the group that had become his friends and family.

  Since he had joined the companions, he had forged strong bonds with all of them, particularly with Ryan, his father. But there was something within him that was still empty, still missing. Sharona had taught him to survive. She was always with him; he could never forget. Yet time had pushed her to the back of his mind. She came to him in his jump dreams, and he remembered her fierce love, a mother’s comforting touch.

  The light was closing in on him, the brightness hurting his eyes, burning into his retinas, becoming almost a physical force that made the blood pound in his ears as his eardrums threatened to blow. He felt his sense of balance lose any equilibrium it may otherwise have contained. His guts turned, the bile rising as he felt the wave of nausea about to crest.

  Dean screwed his eyes tight, trying to block the light and failing as he opened his mouth and felt the contents of his stomach spill out in front of him, everything forgotten in the wrenching pain.

  The pain of regaining consciousness.

  “CAREFUL THERE, my boy, or you may tread softly on my dreams…or at least, vomit upon them, which is perhaps no more than they deserve.”

  The soft voice drifted into a high-pitched giggle that faded like a last breath, indicating that the speaker may have little or no energy of his own.

  Dean’s eyes hurt, the muscles around the sockets cramping. It was only then he realized that he was holding them tightly shut. He relaxed and opened his eyes slowly, slit-peering at the area around him as the outside light burned into him. As his eyes adjusted to the brightness, he could see that he was in the mat-trans chamber, face to the floor. The disks beneath still held the faintest of glow of the activity of the jump, giving the floor a depth that made the nausea return. It wasn’t helped by the stench of his own vomit pooled around his head.

  Shutting his eyes to stem the nausea and turning onto his back, away from the vomit, Dean slowly opened his eyes again, adjusting more quickly this time to the light. The armaglass walls that enclosed the companions were white, shot through with the faintest tinge of blue. Doc Tanner was the nearest to him, which explained why he had responded to the projectile vomit that had splashed near his legs, speeding his awakening. Doc’s lion’s-head swordstick and LeMat percussion pistol were by his side. Dean instinctively reached out to grasp his own Browning Hi-Power, which he had placed by his side before the jump.

  As he grasped the blaster, a head appeared above him, framed by plaits secured at the ends by beads that draped down over him and partly obscured the face. However, there was no mistaking the warmth in the brown eyes that ran over him with an expertise to assess his condition without hesitation.

  “How’re you doing, Dean?” Dr. Mildred Wyeth asked, the traces of hardship etched into her skin breaking into laugh lines as she smiled.

  “Terrible,” he managed to croak.

  Mildred’s hand moved over his face, her thumb gently lifting his eyelid to expose more of the eyeball. “That’s very yellow there,” she said half to herself, “and you’re sweating badly. By the look of what you’ve puked, I’d say you were dehydrated, which sure as hell isn’t going to help you get over a jump that easily.”

  Dean raised himself up onto one elbow, then grimaced as the chamber spun around him. “It doesn’t usually hurt this bad,” he whispered hoarsely.

  Mildred turned away from him for a second. “John, have you got any water?” she asked.

  “Sure.” J. B. Dix came into view. Like Mildred, he was in full control of his faculties and was walking easily, suggesting that they had both recovered from the jump sometime earlier. The Armorer handed a canteen of water to Mildred and she proffered it to Dean.

  “Drink, but take it easy or you’ll just bring it back up,” she told him.

  Dean took the canteen from her and took several small sips, feeling the water slide down his throat. He didn’t feel any better immediately, but he knew he would after a short while.

  Mildred took the canteen. “Take it easy. Just let your balance come back before you move too much. I’ve got to see how Doc and Jak are doing. The old buzzard’s getting as near to normal as he ever does, but Jak’s still out.”

  Dean nodded and watched her move toward the prone old man. Because of the immense stresses that his body had been put through during his two trawls through time, which had seen him dragged from the nineteenth to the twentieth century and then beyond into the world of the Deathlands, Doc Tanner looked far older than his actual years. At times his mind was as fragile as his body appeared to be. He had regained consciousness, but his words and laughter toward Dean were an indication that he was still severely disoriented.

  Dean felt his head begin to steady as he looked around the chamber. His father was in conversation with Krysty. Their voices were low and he couldn’t make out their words, but he felt a surge of relief through his veins that they weren’t only conscious but once more unaffected by the jump. Because, despite the fact that they had so far made many mat-trans jumps with no casualties, the old technology was erratic and its residual and cumulative effect on the human body was still an unknown.

  Ryan Cawdor had already shouldered his Steyr rifle, and stood erect, his muscular frame topped by the tumbling curls that were so like his son’s, the handsome face distorted by the scar that ran down his cheek to his jaw from the empty socket hidden beneath his eye-patch. Next to him, Krysty seemed small, although the woman was tall and carried her curves on a muscular frame. Her mane of Titian-red hair curled around her head protectively when her mutie sense told her of danger. At the moment her hair hung loose and free, suggesting that they were, for the moment, safe.

  To one side of them, J.B. hovered near Mildred and Doc, waiting to see if there was anything he could do to assist as she gently nursed Doc back to reality. She was talking to him in a mixture of soothing tones and insulting words, cajoling him in the manner that he would expect from her as she tried to root him into his everyday reality.

  Dean could see that Jak Lauren was still curled into a fetal ball. Despite the strange jump dreams he usually endured, Dean often snapped out of unconsciousness fairly easily and wa
s very rarely as ill as he had been this time around. Jak, on the other hand, always seemed to suffer badly; his thin and wiry frame illequipped for the specific rigors of a mat-trans jump. Although in the outside world he was a strong and resourceful hunter, he was always one of the last to come around, and nearly always vomited heavily in the same way that Dean had a short while before. The youth allowed himself a rueful grin; he figured that at least he had an insight into how Jak suffered.

  “Yes, yes, it all becomes clear now. Once more unto the breach, my dear friend, once more unto the breach.”

  “Yeah, still a crazy old coot, but at least crazy like normal,” Mildred said with satisfaction as she stood and moved away from Doc to close in on the still-prone Jak, who was twitching as the first vestiges of consciousness began to stir within him.

  Doc’s eyes, surprisingly clear and piercing considering his state a few moments before, met Dean’s.

  “A strange world, is it not?” he asked simply.

  “Sure is, Doc,” the young Cawdor replied.

  He moved his gaze to watch Mildred bend over Jak, with J.B. waiting patiently near. Continuing on, his eyes rested once more on his father and Krysty.

  He had the strangest feeling. Something had been eating at him from the back of his brain. Something that had to do with family and the feeling that he had to search for something—or someone. It had been there before the sudden breaking of light and the wave of nausea had washed over him to wipe out everything.

  But it was gnawing away, trying to make itself known again.

  THE REDOUBT WAS EMPTY. The companions adopted standard tactics for exiting the chamber and securing the immediate area. Because of the opacity of the armaglass and the function making soundproofing thickness a necessity, it was always hard to tell if the area immediately outside the chamber door held any threat. So it was a matter of course to adopt triple-red status until safety was revealed.

  From that point it was simply a matter of sweeping through the corridors to ascertain their status. A simple task in this instance, it seemed that the redoubt had been unoccupied for some time and the entrance had either never been discovered or breached by anyone from the outside. Because of that, the redoubt was still as fully stocked as it had been before the nukecaust. The companions were able to sleep easily and comfortably for the first time in ages, and also to shower and change their clothes. For Mildred, it was an opportunity to restock pharmacy supplies. For J.B., the chance to replenish stocks of ammo, grens and plas ex. The kitchens allowed them to plunder some self-heats. The canned food, which combusted with enough heat to warm the food on opening, was far from ideal. But when it was difficult to find any kind of game to hunt, self-heats came into their own and kept the companions fed until they were able to find something more palatable.