by James Axler
COERCION VORTEX
The cost of living disintegrated after America’s nuclear cull, and a life in Deathlands—any life—is dirt cheap. But those few who manage to stay alive in the savage new reality must travel the hellgrounds any way they can. For Ryan Cawdor and his fellow survivors, that means denying the pull toward savagery, and clinging to what little humanity they have left, when they can afford it.
SEEDS OF SUSTAINABLITY
Desperately short of supplies, Ryan and his companions are forced to seek help at the prosperous-looking ville of Amity Springs. Hired on to retrieve a stolen relic, they quickly become caught up in an escalating power struggle between two strong-willed lady barons. Each woman covets the cache of predark goods buried in the ville’s backyard. But they are not alone in their desire. And all that stands between a motherlode of buried bounty and the destructive power of unchecked greed is Ryan’s grim determination to survive another day.
The final frontier isn’t in space…it’s in Deathlands.
He had never seen anything like this, period
Pretty much all the workers in eyeshot had dropped whatever they were doing and stood to stare. Ricky vaguely gathered that, because he had a pretty strong case of tunnel vision himself.
Krysty turned back toward the water. She put her hands up behind her neck and fluffed her glorious hair. Suddenly it seemed to expand into an incredible mane of fire. Ricky knew that was because her hair actually moved of its own accord, though fortunately there was no way the watchers could know that.
She put her hands behind her back and hooked her thumbs in the elastic of her waistband. She paused a moment that way, as if in contemplation.
“Oh, my God,” somebody whispered, “she’s really gonna do it….”
Then everybody in the room except Jak Lauren yelped and screamed as a sound like thunder broke the air.
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
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
Nemesis
Chrono Spasm
Sins of Honor
Storm Breakers
Dark Fathoms
Motherlode
Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasure.
—Ray Bradbury,
Zen in the Art of Writing
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
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 Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Prologue
“Come on, Spider!” Monkey hissed in an urgent undertone.
“I am, I am,” his sister said in her long-suffering voice.
The music of a piano floated tinnily up to her as she laboriously scaled the drainpipe running down the back of the four-story gaudy. The metal was cold with spring nighttime chill; she wore fingerless gloves because she needed the sensitivity and grip only bare skin could provide.
She climbed without looking
down. The rear of the ville’s biggest and most important building, which occupied a full block all to itself in the middle of the central intersection, was a dark jumble of houses, streets, alleys and small, dusty yards. Which of course were why she and her brother were climbing up that way.
Because the rear was dark and not many people went there at night, and auxiliary buildings like storage sheds and the annex where most of the gaudy sluts lived gave easy access to the windows above ground floor, the back windows were inviting targets. That in itself would have made the twins wary—if they hadn’t known for a fact they were rigged with mechanical cunning alarms. Where their boss had learned that fact they had no clue; she hadn’t told them. Despite the way that made Spider’s curiosity itch, she hadn’t asked how Madame Zaroza knew.
That wasn’t part of their job. They had been stealing things for a living long before they’d become traveling show freaks. They knew the drill.
Monkey perched on the end of the steeply peaked roof’s ridge beam, clinging like his namesake and peering down at her with his huge eyes. Like hers, his torso was bulked by a heavy sweater. Though to an outsider’s eyes she was built the same as her twin brother, with the same unnaturally long legs and arms and short torso that gave them, justified or not, the stigma of mutie taint in the eyes of many norms, they were quite different. She was smaller and skinnier. He was stronger—surprisingly strong, for his slight body and stilty limbs. She was smarter.
Spider made her way to the top. He shifted back as she approached. He knew she didn’t like to be helped, even when she needed it.
The roof was metal corrugated into square-section ridges and troughs. It was wicked slick and treacherous, but both twins knew what they were doing, and had smeared sticky pine resin on the pads of their long, strong fingers to help them grip.
Monkey scrambled backward, watching. Spider raised a hand to shoo him, and he turned and scuttled on along the treacherous peak as if down a mostly intact sidewalk.
She followed with only slightly less ease. She was a little concerned he might get overconfident. One slip and he’d shoot down the slippery side and off into the street, where the likes of them could expect no sympathy from the people of the ville. Much less under circumstances that offered no easy innocent explanation.
Which was simple, because their purpose wasn’t innocent.
They were there to steal a thing. An Artifact, Madame Zaroza told them. It was a thing someone else had offered to pay highly for. That was all they needed to know.
It wasn’t enough for Spider. For either of the twins, actually. Though he wasn’t very bright, Monkey had his own curiosity. His was more physical: he liked to get into things, see them, pick them up and feel them. His sister’s curiosity was more intellectual. She wanted to know why and what for.
Right now what mattered was how. But that part, at least, they had wrapped.
If they could get in the front window unobserved.
That was the sticky part. As they approached the front of the gaudy called the Library Lounge, voices yammered up from the street. Monkey reached the end, peered cautiously over, then withdrew and slid down a few feet to one side to brace himself on the concrete housing for a metal chimney pipe.
Spider took her turn peering down. While she was careful—she’d learned the price of carelessness not long after she learned to walk—she wasn’t very worried about being spotted. Nobody ever looked up. Especially drunks.
The street was well lit by lanterns. A couple hung from hooks over the gaudy entrance. More dangled from streetlights west along the main drag of Amity Springs. A couple customers stood and drank in the yellow light-spill in front of the gaudy door. They chatted in slurred voices with one of the male gaudy sluts who stood outside smoking a joint of wolfweed.
“What are you waiting for?” her brother whispered. “We’ll get caught.”
“We will if you don’t shut up,” she said sternly.
Nonetheless she turned her attention back to the job. Doing well for the mistress of the traveling show that had sheltered and employed them the past two years meant doing well now, here. A drunk lurched homeward down a side street, supported by a child who seemed to be a gaudy-house helper. He vanished behind a general store as she watched.
She glanced down. A single window opened into the attic at the building front.
Spider gestured her brother forward. With practiced motions he moved toward her as she rummaged in a snapped compartment in her web gear belt. When she found what she sought, Spider nodded at him.
He grasped her ankles while she worked her way down over the eaves of the roof. Then with him securing her, Spider took the glove off her left hand and smeared more resin on her palm from a little tub from her belt. She leaned in and planted the palm against the center of the window until it stuck. Then, setting her jaw determinedly, she began to score the glass with the old diamond ring she had taken from her pouch.
She made sure to hold it tight. Not only was it vital to their present assignment, Madame Zaroza trusted them with it, though it was valuable. Precious stones were once again becoming trade items in Deathlands. She didn’t dare lose it.
Perhaps the worst part of that would be it would inevitably cause suspicions that they had stolen it. Madame wouldn’t beat them. She never beat her people, even her freaks, nor suffered anyone to mistreat them. But she’d be disappointed, and they couldn’t hack that. And if they lost the trust of their boss and their fellow troupe members, they’d have to leave. And that was something Spider couldn’t bear to think about.
Pressing as hard as she dared for fear of breaking the glass with the attendant noise, Spider scored a circular hole. It seemed to take forever.
When it came loose, she felt it shift in her hand just in time to pull it out while rotating her palm upward. The resin only stuck to the glass so much. Mostly it gave her time to react before gravity had its way. She popped the ring in her mouth for safekeeping.
She signaled for her brother to pull her up.
He did, as if she weighed no more than a rag doll.
She put the ring in her palm and carefully put it away.
Monkey disappeared over the edge, while Spider stashed the cut-out glass circle at the angle where the chimney came out of the drain-channel roof. Then she crept back to the end of the roof.
“Come on,” she heard her brother say. “It’s open.”
This time she swung herself down to the little sill of the window. Her brother had reached inside to unlatch it. Now he reached out to help her inside.
After the cool rooftop air the attic seemed musty, dusty, and almost hot. Though there was no internal illumination—nor were the twins eager to give away their location by lighting any lamps—the starlight and backscatter lantern light through both front and back windows allowed them to see well enough. They both had good night vision.
The attic was crowded with dusty trash, nondescript boxes and busted furniture. For all her natural curiosity Spider spared it barely a glance beyond what was needed to assure herself there weren’t any surprises lurking in there to spring out at them. The goal was near; her blood ran high.
The center of the attic was clear. Just enough to allow the trapdoor into the bedroom beneath to swing open.
At a nod from Spider, Monkey did that. Spider picked her way around the trap and hunkered down next to her brother to peer through. A waft of lilac-scented air hit her in the face as she did so.
As expected, the bedroom was dark—the delicate curtains on the window weren’t enough to block even feeble light, even had they been pulled. Again, there was more than enough light for Spider to see by.
What surprised her was how luxurious the room wasn’t. If I was a big-time gaudy-house owner, she thought, I’d do way better than this.
She was getting ready to slip down into the deserted room
when she heard a key clatter in the lock.
Her brother froze. She gently pressed the trapdoor closed to barely a slit. Then she pressed her eye to it. Monkey did likewise.
The doorknob turned. The door opened, and a two-headed giant entered the room.
Crouching at Spider’s side, Monkey literally put a hand over his mouth to stifle his exclamation of surprise.
She shot him a fast sidelong frown. Did you forget we were told about him, too, you simp? she thought furiously.
Still, it was alarming seeing such a creature in the flesh. Especially so much of it. Just because she and her brother were muties—or at least that was what most people said they were—didn’t mean they didn’t find some muties scary.
This one would’ve chilled Spider’s blood if he’d had one head.
The mutie quickly scoped out the room, both heads scowling suspiciously. The way the two heads moved independently of each other creeped Spider out totally.
After a final dubious glance at each other, and a quick scratch of the back of the left head, the monster pulled back and shut the door. A moment later Spider heard heavy boots clumping away down the hallway a floor below.
Monkey started to open the door. She held it firmly and shook her head furiously at him. What if it’s a trick and he comes right back? she mouthed.
But it apparently wasn’t. The terrifying two-headed man didn’t return.
Finally satisfied it was safe, Spider nodded. Taking her brother’s hand, she let him lower her far enough to drop to the little throw rug in the middle of the floor with no noise.
She caught Monkey when he dropped down. He wasn’t heavy.
She set him down, so as to make no noise. They looked around the room.
Monkey wrinkled his nose at the well-packed shelves occupying most wall space that wasn’t given over to window.
“Books,” he said. “Stupe.”
“Books aren’t stupe,” replied Spider, who could read and liked to and was proud of the fact. “Books are how you know things.”
“Know by doing,” Monkey said with a sniff.
Some of the shelves had vases with dried-flower sprays in them. Spider thought they were pretty.
She went to the bed. It had a brass frame. From the way it glinted in the dim light from outside she reckoned it was frequently polished. Or at least recently.
