by James Axler
PARADISE LOST
Crawling from the wreckage of Armageddon, humanity endures, mutated and forever altered. Gone are the comforts of civilization, replaced by a bloodlust to survive. Deathlands is a tortured landscape where peace and hope struggle to take root. Still, Ryan Cawdor and his band push onward, seeking a place to call home.
SWARM OF MADNESS
If any kind of utopia exists in postapocalyptic America, Ryan and his companions have yet to find it. But high in the Virginian mountains, their quest may find its reward. Heaven Falls is an agrarian idyll, its thriving inhabitants harnessing powerful feminine energy and the medicinal qualities of honey. Bountiful and serene, this community is the closest thing to sanctuary the companions have ever encountered. But as they are seduced by a life they have only envisioned, they discover Heaven has a trapdoor that opens straight to hell…
“Help me,” the man called, his voice raised in panic
He glanced back to where Jak was hiding. “Please, you know what they’ll do....”
Five white-clad figures emerged from the trees, descending on the armed man. They were women, young, tall and svelte, with long hair styled on top of their heads in elaborate braids. Their robes were light and gauzy, covering each woman from neck to ankle. The skirts and sleeves billowed around them like mist.
“Die! Damn you all!” the man screamed, rising from his crouch and blasting wildly.
The women kept gliding toward him, gracefully, swiftly, sidestepping the shots with breathtaking ease.
The man was shouting nonsense now. Jak could see him squeezing the trigger, but he had no ammo left. He dropped backward in an uncoordinated stumble.
The white-robed women converged on him. What happened next, Jak couldn’t tell. All he saw was the billowing robes circling the spot where the man had gone down, fluttering there like waves.
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
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
Nemesis
Chrono Spasm
Sins of Honor
Storm Breakers
Dark Fathoms
Siren Song
Siren Song
Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.
—Karl Marx, 1818-1883
For so work the honey-bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.
—William Shakespeare
THE DEATHLANDS SAGA
This world is their legacy, a world born in the violentnuclear 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
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 One
The road rushed toward Ricky Morales as he took the blast in his flank. A second later his face collided with the broken pavement. The burning flare in his hand sailed away, sparkling bright red as it rolled over and over across the tarmac like blood-drenched lightning. Beside it, the ball from the musket went rolling away down the road, splashed now with Ricky’s blood.
“Come on, boy, keep up,” J. B. Dix shouted, thrusting the barrel of his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun over Ricky’s head. A second later J.B. sent a
roaring blast at the figures that chased them through the grove, momentarily silencing their sinister, animallike whooping.
Ricky winced at the noise of the blast, his eyes narrowed against the bright explosion. Behind him, at least a dozen human shapes were stalking through the grove. The trees didn’t help matters. At some point someone had had the bright idea of hanging folks from their upper branches like a gallows, leaving the decaying corpses swinging in the wind in bloody warning. It was a warning that Ricky wished he and his companions had heeded when they had arrived in this place just a few hours earlier. But they had been hungry, and it had been pitch-black when they had emerged from the redoubt.
J.B. blasted another burst of buckshot from his weapon, carving a crescent moon through one side of a thick tree trunk and felling the figure poised behind it.
“You moving or am I leaving you?” J.B. snarled.
Ricky raised his Webley Mk VI revolver and sent four shots into the shadows of the trees, peppering the area with lead. He smiled with bleak satisfaction as he saw one of the scalies crash to the ground. Beside him, the flare continued to fizz, sending up sparks of red as it butted against the ground.
“I’m coming,” Ricky insisted, pulling himself up to a standing position. He reached for the flare and stopped. His side hurt, and his belly was churning so much that he could taste that stolen meal coming back up his throat. “¡Madre de Dios!” Ricky cursed the pain that seared through him.
J.B. chanced a look at the youth between his scanning of the trees. “You look green,” he said noncommittally. J.B. was a short man with wire-rimmed glasses and a fedora hat on his head. He looked to be about forty-five, but it was hard to tell—life in the Deathlands prematurely aged a person, especially the kind of life that J.B. led.
He was a weaponsmith, an expert in firearms and explosives and able to turn his hand to just about any weapon a person cared to name. He was the Armorer of the group, and he had traveled with Ryan Cawdor the longest.
Ryan was the nominal leader. There were six others in the group, including J.B., with Ricky the youngest and most recent addition. Ricky was sixteen with black hair and dark brown eyes. He was good-looking in a skinny kind of way, still more youth than man but growing every day. He had met Ryan and J.B. when they had visited Nuestra Señora, a small seaport on Monster Island. Nuestra Señora was Ricky’s home, but with his sister missing and so much that had happened there, he had chosen to stick with Ryan and his companions as they traveled the Deathlands in search of a better life.
Just now, this was not that better place. “California” was what J.B. had called it when they had emerged from the hidden redoubt. J.B. knew maps and geography, and he had a way of mapping their location using a device he carried called a mini-sextant.
It had been dark when they had arrived, emerging from the redoubt via its mat-trans system into what appeared to be a grove of oranges. The oranges were as big as a baby’s head, weighing down the branches of the trees that lined the little ribbon of road. The trouble was they were radioactive oranges. J.B. had taken one glance at his lapel rad counter, left them on the trees and gone in search of other nutrition. They had found a scalie settlement located in a flat-faced pyramid beside a graveyard for rusted cars.
“Shopping mall,” Mildred had explained when she saw it. Mildred Wyeth had grown up in the twentieth century and sometimes she made reference to things that Ricky couldn’t make sense of. She was a handsome black woman who wore her hair in beaded plaits. She had been a medical doctor back in the twentieth century, specializing in cryogenic research. When she had suffered complications during routine abdominal surgery, the decision had been made to place her temporarily in cryogenic hibernation. “Temporarily” turned out to be about a hundred years, during which a nuclear exchange between the U.S.A. and USSR had heralded the end of Western civilization. Mildred had woken up to a world that had driven through the gates of hell and just kept on accelerating.
J.B.’s hand pressed against Ricky’s back, propelling him faster along the road with a mighty shove. “Head in the game, boy!”
Ricky’s side was bleeding, wetness seeping into his shirt and making it stick. He ignored it; whatever wound he had, be it lethal or a graze, stopping now to check would get them both chilled.
Behind Ricky, the Armorer’s other hand was working the M-4000, sending another cacophonous burst of fire at their pursuers.
“They’ve got our scent,” J.B. yelled. “Forget the flare!”
Their pursuers were scalies: mutated humanoid creatures with hard, blistered skin. Scalies were just one of a whole variety of genetic twists that had happened to humanity since the widespread nuclear fallout had sent planetary radiation levels through the stratosphere. Humanity also suffered at the hands of genetically developed beings that were used as bioweapons.
Scalies were insular and some had proved capable of forming a society. This group clearly took it personally when anyone accidentally stepped into their territory. But then, the figures hanging from the trees gave that away, now that Ricky thought about it.
They had to get back to the redoubt, but the scalies were right behind them. They’d have to lure the muties away, then double back to the redoubt so that the companions weren’t swarmed before they got inside.
J.B.’s shotgun roared again and a shower of watermelon-size oranges dropped from a tree like cannonballs, slapping two of their pursuers to the ground. The others continued to give chase, stopping every few steps to pitch fist-size rocks at the two companions. Surprisingly, a few of the scalies were armed with muskets. They were cobbled together, based on more efficient designs—probably something the scalies had found in the pyramid structure that had once been a shopping mall. Whatever they were, getting hit by a projectile from one was still going to hurt like hell.
J.B. was mentally counting his shots, and knew he needed to reload the M-4000. He fumbled with its breech on the run, his legs pumping as he sought the right pocket of his jacket for more ammo.
Ahead of J.B., Ricky skidded to an abrupt halt, his arms windmilling as he fought to keep his balance, the Webley revolver drawing circles in the air.
“What the hell, kid?” J.B. asked as he came up alongside Ricky. Then he saw why the youth had stopped. They were out of road. Literally. The blacktop ended in a sudden drop—a cliff that fell about two hundred feet to the ocean below. J.B. figured that hitting the surface from this height would be like hitting a solid wall.
* * *
DOC TANNER WAS struggling to keep pace with Mildred and Jak.
Jak had short legs but he moved like a jackrabbit on jolt, barreling down the slope toward the redoubt entrance. Jak Lauren was an albino, with hair and skin that were chalk-white and eyes a ruby-red that made him look almost ghostlike. A few inches over five feet tall, Jak had a slight, wiry build that was surprisingly tough, and the barrel of his Colt Python pointed ahead of him as he scanned the overgrown scrub that all but hid the entrance to the redoubt.
Mildred kept pace with Jak easily enough, head down so that the wind blew her plaits past her shoulders, regulating her breathing as she ran. “You all right back there, Doc?” she asked as they zipped between dead trees on the pronounced slope.
Doc nodded, breathlessly muttering that he was fine, but it ended up sounding more like a straining steam engine trying to speak than a man.
Mildred glanced at him, concern etched on her face. “We’re almost there,” she assured him. “Just a few dozen yards.”
Doc nodded again, appreciating the heads-up. His vision was whirling a little, as if he was on one of those old fairground rides that used to visit his hometown back in his youth.
Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, to give him his full appellation, was an unwilling time traveler who had been dumped in the Deathlands following a rather cruel experiment by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. The chron jumps ha
d affected his body, aging him prematurely. When he was trawled from the nineteenth century, Doc had been in his early thirties. Now he resembled a thin, silver-haired man in his sixties.
He wore a black frock coat, pants, a white shirt and black knee boots. Doc carried with him an ebony cane topped with a silver lion’s head, and inside the sheath was a blade of fine Toledo steel. Besides his swordstick, he carried a replica LeMat percussion pistol, which included a second barrel that functioned as a shotgun, and which could blast a single shot when needed. The fact that both swordstick and blaster contained a surprise pretty well said all that needed to be said about Doc Tanner—he was a man full of surprises.
Up ahead, the redoubt entrance looked like a tunnel that had become overgrown with creepers and moss. A line of orange trees had grown in front of the wide entrance like a fence, masking it further. Three hours earlier the entrance had been all but invisible. When the companions had emerged from it, they had cleared some of the flora out of the way—enough at least that they could pass through.
Jak was first to reach the doors, pulling away creepers from a keypad that rested against the wall at shoulder height. His white fingers punched in the three-digit entry code. As the heavy door slid aside on aged tracks, Jak glanced behind him, checking for Mildred and Doc and confirming that no one was following them.
Jak saw a figure appear behind Doc, still a little ways up the slope where once a dirt track had lain. Jak didn’t wait to see who the figure was; he just raised his Colt Python and fixed the shadow in its sights. Then he stroked the trigger and sent a single booming shot up the slope, cutting Doc’s pursuer dead center in his chest. The scalie went down in a splatter of blood and bone.
Mildred joined Jak an instant later, breathless, her eyes wide. “What was that?”
“Scalie,” Jak said, already slipping through the open doors to the redoubt. He spoke little, and rarely in full sentences.
Mildred waited in the doorway with her Czech-made ZKR-551 target pistol in her hand, scanning the landscape for further movement. Jak’s eyesight was uncanny, but Mildred was confident she could spot a hostile figure in the overgrowth.
