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The Armorer gestured to Krysty to fall back as he kept up the cover fire. The Titian-haired beauty dived into the mat-trans unit.

  “Last destination,” she gasped. “Safe—chilled them all.”

  There was no time to ask for further explanations. They knew they could trust that they would be going to an empty haven, no matter what desolation they may face.

  J.B. backed into the mat-trans with a slowness that was almost infuriating, but the Armorer was thorough. That was how he had kept himself alive for so long. There was no way he would let any of the remaining sec men get into the control room and have the remotest chance of offing any of them with a stray shot.

  “Let’s go,” he barked when he was in, only the barrel of the mini-Uzi protruding into the anteroom beyond. He whipped it back in, and Krysty slammed shut the door with a pained sigh of sheer relief.

  As the mat-trans door closed, Ryan could see the baron. Crabbe was floundering around the room, crazed with the loss of his dream.

  Ryan closed his eye, but the image of the baron as a defeated man, flailing aimlessly in a broken world, was seared into his retina. He opened his eye again, and took in his own people as they slumped on the floor of the mat-trans unit, battered but unbroken.

  Another fight for survival had been fought and won. Through grit and determination the companions had again missed the last train west. But when all was said and done, Ryan knew that death was merely a heartbeat away for all of them. Like it had been for Althea, Dean’s woman.

  Life was a fragile thing in the Deathlands, snuffed out in the blink of an eye by friend or foe. Now that the friends were free to move on, free to relax as much as they could in this blighted land, Ryan’s thoughts would turn to his son, now a strapping young buck with a chip on his shoulder, and a deep anger focused unerringly at his father….

  The mist began to rise around them as they left the world of Baron Crabbe and his dreams of empire behind them, moving on to who knew what, other than another chance to stay alive.

  And free.

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-1597-9

  LOST GATES

  Copyright © 2011 by Worldwide Library

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