Nemesis Read online

  CRUEL DISPENSATION

  Burying the past in a nuclear cull, Deathlands spares no one from its punishing assault. In this grim new reality, there’s little to live—or die—for, except the possibility of unlocking the mysteries of the past. Ryan Cawdor and his group of fellow survivors scour the perilous land for sanctuary in a world where nothing is guaranteed but death.

  PAROLE OF THE DAMNED

  Hiring on as crew to a merchant’s wag-train, Ryan and his companions anticipate trouble as they head west toward what was once Montana. The terrain is treacherous, but the company is worse as anger, jealousy and male rivalry erupt into chaos and death. But as they get closer to their destination, the true nature of the journey unfolds. There’s a map to a mysterious valley rich with predark stockpiles. But is it the promised land they’ve been seeking...or the dead end they never saw coming?

  Blood sprayed over the table

  Hot droplets of the blood splashed Ryan’s face as Doyle flailed his spurting stump. The baron grabbed it with his remaining hand and staggered toward the door, howling like a tornado.

  J.B. slammed the lid of the ammo box shut on its precious contents and stuck the container under his arm.

  The agonized yelling of their baron finally penetrated the yammer of blasters and the roar of bloodlust in the sec men’s ears. They might have failed to protect the man they were hired to guard, but as Ryan drew his SIG-Sauer, he realized they intended to make up for the damage as best they could by killing Doyle’s attackers.

  Dozens of blasters swung their way....

  Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

  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

  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

  James Axler

  Nemesis

  If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don’t embrace trouble; that’s as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you’ll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes

  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

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part II

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part III

  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

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  “It’s the greatest thing,” the drunk said. “The greatest thing ever. You gotta believe me, pal. I saw it with my own two eyes.”

  Maybe it was because Bass Croom was drunk, too, or maybe it was because his youthful eyes were dazzled by the bright colored lights, powered by an alcohol-fueled generator, strung over the crowded gaudy’s bar. Maybe it was the way an older, seasoned guy had attached himself to a young man out on his own for the first time and begun speaking to him and him alone in this dark corner of a lively room.

  But Bass did believe.

&n
bsp; “It’s treasure, man,” his companion said. “Everything a man could ask for and more—a storehouse of riches. Tools, meds, weps, ammo. Tucked away all by its lonesome in a corner of a valley like a little green slice of Heaven.”

  “Ain’t no such thing as Heaven,” Bass said, souring slightly.

  The Asian man smiled at him. “Ah, my young friend. You wouldn’t say that if you saw this place!”

  Bass grunted.

  He emptied his shot glass in one convulsive swallow. This time he managed not to spatter any of the contents on his tongue. From painful experience he knew the Towse Lightning he’d bought with his last crumpled scrap of jack burned like liquid fire. It was bad enough going down his throat.

  He brought the glass back onto the tabletop, an ancient cable spool gouged with knife marks and stained by every fluid spilled across it during its term of service, including obvious blood, with a decisive crack. The glass was stoutly made, anyway, and didn’t shatter. Not that he cared.

  Any more than he cared how grime-smeared and filthy both the glass and half-empty bottle were. At least their cruddiness obscured the bits of random stuff floating in the colorless liquid they contained.

  The rotgut the Mine Shaft served contained a shitload of alcohol. That was all Bass Croom cared about. It would serve to get him drunk.

  Maybe drunk enough to forget.

  His table partner was staring at him intently. “You should believe, my friend,” he said. “A man needs something to believe in.”

  “I believe,” Bass said, “I need another drink,” which he proceeded to pour himself.

  The gaudy was crowded with bodies and the noises they emitted. His nose had quickly adjusted to the odors, of stale sweat, man-grease and raw alcohol, as well as many fouler things which tended to accumulate on the dirt floor.

  At least it was cool inside, as opposed to either the midwinter snowstorm howling outside or the humid hothouse most gaudies were, cool here in the dark corner where Bass sat with his uninvited guest.

  The Mine Shaft was literally that, so the story went, built in the entrance to an old hard-rock mine. Supposedly, also, obstreperous customers—or merely those who drank more than they could pay for—tended to disappear down a vertical shaft in some back room.

  “I saw it with my own eyes,” the Asian man went on. “Saw it myself, the greenest valley left on Earth. And nestled deep within that beautiful land, a stockpile out of dreams. Out of dreams, man. Enough to start a whole new civilization like the one the predark people had.”

  “You mean the one that blew itself to Hell and left us this shithole of a world?”

  Smiling, the stranger shook his head. “You don’t get it, man. We know the mistakes the predark people made. We can do it better.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  Even drunk as he was, Bass was surprised by his own vehemence. He wasn’t by nature aggressive or confrontational. It had served him well in a world where for many if not most violence was a first option.

  But the Asian man never blinked. From his breath, the slurring of his speech, and the drooping at the edges of his eyes, Bass guessed the man was drunker than he was, even.

  “Ah, man.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t. Had to go. No time. Had people counting on me. And then, well, the winds blow, man. They blow hard. Good and bad. They blew me two-thirds of the way across the continent, in time. And I’ve spent better’n ten years working to the point I could get back there and get to building.”

  He grinned and hoisted a glass half full of browning liquid the barkeep called whiskey. Bass reckoned it was the same shit he had, colored with tobacco spit.

  “Ten years working toward today. Got my wife and child meeting me in just an hour or so. Brave girl, Lisa. All knocked up again and everything—even if early days—and she’s set to make the trek cross-country now.”

  “Huh,” Bass said.

  The man’s expression grew serious. He leaned toward Bass across the much abused tabletop.

  “You should join me, man,” he said.

  “Huh?” This time Bass reared back like a startled horse.

  “Join me. Come with me and my family. We could use the extra blaster. Extra hands, to build us a new world. A better world!”

  Bass found his thoughts, steeped in booze and bitterness—both eating at the lining of his stomach—going back over the events of the day.

  I was on top of the world when I rolled into town this morning, he thought sullenly. And now the whole fucking ball of shit is sitting on top of me.

  He’d spent the past five years, ever since his dad died in a cave-in near the Nashville rubble, combing through the burned-out corpses of cities in the South and Midwest for the pick of the scavvy.

  Then he’d headed for the little ville called Choad well up in the Zarks. It wasn’t far from the cache where he’d stashed his treasures after arduously gleaning them for years, just a two-day trip through the mountains. He’d heard it was a prosperous ville, and reckoned he could score big there. Taking his profits for a grubstake he’d go into trading big-time.

  It had all gone south so suddenly.

  Just that morning Bass Croom had been on top of the world. He’d led his quartet of heavy-laden pack mules boldly up to the gate into the walled ville—and was relieved of all his hard-won scavvy at gunpoint by Baron Doyle’s laughing sec men, down to his trusty Savage .270 longblaster he’d inherited from his daddy. They had taken his mules, too.

  They had talked about tariffs and imposts and license fees, but their own leveled blasters did the real talking. And when Bass had dared to ask to talk to a higher-up—the ville sec boss, a man named Tug or so he had heard—his reward was a steel-shod rifle butt across the chops. His cheekbone still smarted from the blow hours later.

  When they had stripped him of everything but his hat, clothes and boots, and emptied his pockets, they’d told him no vagrant was allowed to enter the ville. He had to be on his way; they wouldn’t let him in, and if they caught him skulking around the steel cattle gate with the razor-tape tangles on top, they’d shoot him like a mutie coyote.

  He had been brave or foolish enough to stand up on his two still-shaky legs and ask if they were going to turn him into the outlands with nothing. So they’d tossed him a canteen of water and a handful of jack, then slammed the gates and leveled their blasters at him.

  So Bass had stumbled away, utterly defeated, utterly ruined.

  Now he sat here, now totally flat broke, listening to some fool go on about the roll of jack and gold coins weighing down his pocket, and how that would suffice to carry him and his family clear across the continent to where this likely mythical Promised Land awaited.

  “I still carry the map on me,” the drunk said, patting himself on the breastbone. “Here in a special waterproof packet, right over my heart.”

  He was about to ramble on, but just then looming shadows surrounded their table.

  A hard hand closed on Bass’s jacket collar and hauled him to his feet.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded in surprise.

  “You, thinking you can rip us off,” said a burly young man with lanky dark hair framing a meat-slab face. Bass didn’t remember seeing him before, but judging by the filth-smeared and encrusted apron he wore, he had to be one of their kitchen workers.

  “What are you talking abou— Uh!”

  His question ended in a burst of air exploded from his lungs as a second man buried a ham-hock fist in his gut.

  “Ordered a whole new bottle of the house’s best,” said a voice Bass vaguely recognized as the gaudy’s manager, Dill. He was a long, lanky man with long, lanky brown hair and tattoos snaking up his wiry arms. “Then asked for credit.”

  He spoke that last in tones more of disbelief than anger.

  “Here, wait!”
Bass heard his companion say. “He hasn’t drunk any. Anyway, I can pay—”

  “Back off,” a third man snarled. Bass raised a head as heavy as the world to blink blearily at a figure a good head shorter than his own six-three, but wider across the shoulders. A shiny brown bald head sprouted a fringe of wiry white hair, and a black beard striped down the sides like a reverse skunk’s ass completed the image of the gaudy’s owner, Dug.

  He pointed a hickory ax handle at Bass’s companion. The man sat back holding his hands up, palms out in surrender.

  “We gonna show him the back room, boss?” asked the side of beef dude who’d braced him first. He sounded way too eager.

  “Shut the fuck up, Mikey Bob,” Dug said. “That’s for them as don’t take a hint the first time. What the fuck you think we are, stickies?”

  Bass tried to winch his aching body straight. He wasn’t half as drunk as he’d been a few moments before, and nowhere near as drunk as he wished he was.

  “But—” he began.

  Another pile-driver fist to the gut made him double over again. Puke that stung with stomach acid as harsher hooch filled his mouth and burned his nostrils.

  Then something hard hit him in the back of the head. Sparks shot through his skull.

  When they went out, they took him with them.

  * * *

  BEFORE ANYTHING else Bass Croom was aware of a massive ache, then he was aware of freezing through and through.

  He stirred, moaning at the rebellion that set off in his belly, and the pounding at his temples from the inside out. He felt hard edges against his ribs and gut.

  Bass found his hands and felt the irregular surface he was lying on. It proved to be a mass of rock or maybe brick chunks and dirt.

  He pried one eye open, then the other. A wavering red-orange light lit a scene of outdoor desolation: bare rock, trampled earth, a few scrubby bushes that hadn’t been anything to brag about before winter stripped them to bare spavined twigs. Harsh rocks rimmed the empty area, with blackness beyond. A few structures of flimsy board scraps and crudely thrown-together stone slouched around the edges of his vision.

  He realized it was just the regular view outside the Mine Shaft’s entrance.