by James Axler
Antoine Kirby awoke with a thundering bellow. Bell had never heard him angry before, not in the five years they had worked together. Adrenaline jolt mixed with a wave of profound relief. Bell wasn’t in the hunt by himself, after all.
He and Kirby believed they could undo the nuclear holocaust. They believed they could reverse the erasure of human history. Whether they had sacrificed themselves for nothing, only time would tell. Earth was vast, and remade primeval by the fires of hell. To locate, capture and retrieve one man could take decades. The one man who was the locus of Armageddon. The seed of destruction. The dropped stitch.
For the world to right itself, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner had to die when and where he was supposed to die.
Chapter One
“What gaudy you sluts from?”
The man standing in line behind Dr. Mildred Wyeth smelled like pan-fried shit—the cologne of a mass grave robber or a mutie skinner. He was leaning so close to her that she could feel his breath between the beaded plaits of her hair, on the base of her neck. Mildred didn’t turn. She had already sized him up.
A large sheath knife rode in a scabbard on his hip. A Remington 12-gauge autoloader hung from a worn leather shoulder sling. Both barrel and buttstock had been crudely sawn off; the former at the end of the tubular magazine, the latter behind the black tape-wrapped pistol grip. He was tall and lean, between twenty and thirty years of age, with a weather-seamed, dirt-encrusted face. His pupils were dilated, his sandy-brown mustache and whiskers blackened by a tarry substance, which she recognized as the residue from smoking powdered mindburst mushroom. According to its devotees, it made live skinning and grave robbing even more fun.
Krysty Wroth faced Mildred, but she was looking beyond her, over her shoulder at the skinner. Although Krysty’s eyes were emotionless pools of emerald-green, her forehead smooth as glass, her red mutant hair had coiled into tight ringlets of alarm. A chill, steady mist fell from the low-hanging fog bank. Tiny sparkling droplets clung to the tips of Krysty’s prehensile curls and the shaggy black fur of her bearskin coat, which hung open from collar to hem.
“Didn’t we take turns banging you two over in Byrumville?” said another hoarse male voice from behind.
Mildred ignored that question, too. The second man was shorter, bare-chested, stump-legged, just as filthy as his running buddy, and wearing the same black sticky ring in the whiskers around his mouth. Tucked into the front of his trouser waistband was a battered 9 mm Astra semiauto blaster. A violent confrontation with these triple-stupe bastards was the last thing Mildred and Krysty wanted. The idea was to blend in with the rest of the ragged queue on the predark pier.
A light onshore breeze riffled the surface of Morro Bay. The massive, 570-foot-tall rock that marked the entrance from the Pacific Ocean played peek-a-boo in the gray swirls of fog. Heavy surf broke over the bay’s three-mile arch of sandspit. The rise in sea level after the nuclear holocaust put the spit under water at high tide and submerged the walkway and side railings of the concrete pier. The tide was out, now, and the pier, much foreshortened by wave damage to its seaward end, was high and dry.
Here and there along the mucky crescent of Morro Bay’s exposed shoreline, amid the tangled metal and plastic refuse, lay stripped human skeletons and lumps of mud and wet cloth in human shape. In the bay, some 150 yards to the north, a three-masted white ship swung at anchor. It couldn’t tie up to what was left of the pier, the water was too shallow. Prospective passengers and cargo waited on the dock to be ferried to the frigate. At the ruined end of the pier, a makeshift crane lowered crates and boxes onto rowboats; beside the crane a rickety stairway led down to a floating platform and a tethered boat. The entrance to the stairs was guarded by four thickly built crewmen with assault rifles. Before passengers were allowed to descend, they were interrogated by a man seated behind a plank-and-sawhorse table who entered information into a logbook.
The line moved forward very slowly.
Mildred remembered the last time she’d passed through Morro Bay, more than a century earlier—and a year and a half before the end of the world. In the terminology of Deathlands, Dr. Wyeth was a freezie. On December 28, 2000, an idiosyncratic reaction to anesthetic during abdominal surgery had put her into a coma. In a last-ditch effort to save her life, the operating team had placed her in cryogenic stasis, where she remained until revived by Ryan Cawdor, Krysty Wroth and their companions. Mildred and her liberators had been inseparable ever since.
If the picturesque, central California coastal town was far enough away from San Francisco and Los Angeles to avoid a stray missile hit on hell day, it hadn’t escaped the nuclear shock and tidal waves produced by saturation hydrogen and earth-shaker warhead strikes both north and south. Most of Morro Bay’s existing structures had been obliterated in the furious aftermath of Armageddon, yet it had hung on and survived as a human outpost, as the southernmost seaport on Deathlands’ Pacific coast.
What was left of the Los Angeles/San Diego megalopolis was anybody’s guess. It was widely rumored that the lower half of California had vanished into the Cific Ocean, vaporized by overlaid nuclear hits or submerged by cataclysmic slippage along the full length of the San Andreas Fault. Reports about what remained were both sketchy and farfetched. Mildred had never met anybody who claimed to have seen it with their own eyes, only those who had heard about it, third or fourth hand. It was not the kind of place visitors returned from.
Most Deathlanders she’d met believed that normal life couldn’t exist there, that the air and water were poisoned by high radiation levels and reawakened volcanic processes. Moreover, they were convinced that it was the fountainhead of every manifest evil, the spawning ground of new species of predatory mutants, monsters that spread forth across the ravaged continent like carnivorous weeds.
As a twentieth century scientist, Mildred was dubious of all this speculation. For one thing, the concepts of “norm” and “mutie” were relative, not either/or. Every living thing in Deathlands had been impacted at a genetic level by the holocaust. Some of these changes were manifested externally; most were not. That a particularly heavily nuked area could generate a high rate of successful mutations did not jibe with pre-Apocalypse genetic research, which showed that the higher the rad dose, the more negative the mutations: the effected embryos rarely made it past the early stages of development. If Southern California was indeed the source of the plague of unheard-of, hostile species, Mildred suspected that something much more complicated, much more directed, had to be going on. One way or another, she and Krysty and the others waiting on the pier were about to discover the truth.
Post-nukecaust Morro Bay had been rebuilt using recycled materials from the former marina, and from the fleet of commercial fishing boats and private yachts scattered high onto the hillsides by tidal waves and hurricane-force winds. Single-story, ramshackle shacks shared walls and predark concrete block-and-slab foundations—there was not a single right angle in the entire ville. Nor was there much in the way of ground cover, save for the clumps of tiny wild daisies sprouting along the open-trench latrines. It reminded Mildred of movies she’d seen of Calcutta, India: a seething, mounded garbage dump shrouded by acrid wood smoke.
Ville folk furtively watched the line of newcomers from window holes punched in their cardboard walls; concealed in shadow, they huddled in doorless doorways. Though Morro Bay serviced the small ship trade to coastal outposts in the north, it had no gaudy, as such; that sort of business was conducted in the earthen ditches alongside the road. There were no frantic sluts pandering along the crowded pier this day. No begging children, either. Murder for profit was a growth industry here, yet the inhabitants were taking pains to hide themselves.
With good reason.
The folk who lined the dock were the foulest, most dangerous scum in all of Deathlands. Maniac mercies. Double-crossing ex-sec men. Slavers. Jolt traders. Mutie hunters. Blackheart robbers and chillers. The line of human refuse stretched past the end of the pier
and wound back up the hill. Most of the cargo crates in the queue held living creatures that squealed and shrieked, but some pleaded in English for water, food or a quick and merciful death. The air holes were too small and too widely spaced for Mildred to see what or who was trapped inside.
“Hey, slut, I’m asking you a question,” the skinner said. He punctuated his remark by giving her a hard poke in the kidney with a stiffened finger.
Mildred turned and looked up into his eyes. She saw animal lust, greed and seamless ignorance. “Back off,” she warned him.
It was a waste of breath.
The skinner smiled. “Maybe you do so much business on your backs you can’t remember faces,” he said. He drew out eight inches of predark Buck knife and waved its cruel gut hook in her face. “Bet you remember this…”
“Let’s bang ’em again, right here,” the shorter man growled, moving closer, his hand on the butt of his remade pistol.
Krysty and Mildred were on their own. To avoid being recognized, the six companions had split up at the ville’s city limits. Ryan Cawdor was far ahead of them in line and the others, Doc Tanner, Jak Lauren, and J. B., were spread out some distance behind. Although it was vital to draw no extra attention to themselves, there was another, equally important consideration: the voyage south was going to be long and in tight quarters. Unless Krysty and Mildred made a statement that could not be misconstrued, they were going to be subject to the unwanted, nonstop, belowdecks attentions of a hundred-odd, semihuman shitballs.
In a blur Mildred drew her Czech ZKR 551 revolver and jammed the muzzle under the much taller man’s chin. For a fraction of an instant he stood there flat-footed, long knife in hand. Under the circumstances, there was no moral lap dance, no question of Mildred holding her fire, of just disarming him.
That option simply did not exist.
The pistol’s bark was partially muffled by flesh and bone. The skinner grimaced as the .38-caliber slug rocketed out the top of his head and brains jetted skyward in glistening puff of pink. He toppled backward, bright arterial blood spurting from the ragged hole in his crown.
His running buddy tried to clear the Astra from his waistband, but Krysty beat him to the punch. Snatching her Smith & Wesson 640 out from under her coat, she lunged forward and shot him once in the heart. The close-range muzzle-flash set his matted carpet of chest hair on fire. The .38-caliber bullet zipped through his torso and out his back, skipping off the pier railing before blipping into the bay. Clutching the smoking entrance wound, he staggered sideways, his eyes bulging. His mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. Dead on his feet, he twisted and fell onto his face.
The two women turned back to back and scanned the nearby crowd over the sights of their handblasters. Everyone had turned to look at the closely spaced shots. Some drew their pistols or unslung long guns, but when they realized there was no threat and the show was over, they all stood down. No one seemed concerned about the sudden chillings; for this scabrous crew it was business as usual.
Having made their point, Mildred and Krysty booted the still-twitching bodies off the side of the pier. Other corpses bobbed down there—bloated, slack-jawed whoppers drifting among the pilings. Overfed seagulls rode on pale chests, either dozing or pecking halfheartedly at empty eye sockets and the roots of shredded tongues.
As Mildred stepped away from the railing she glanced down the line to the ruined end of the pier. Ryan Cawdor was now three back from the interrogation table.
FROM A DISTANCE of fifteen feet, Ryan observed the frigate’s captain, a mountain of brown skin and black tattoos seated behind a makeshift desk. Naked to the waist, his torso and arms were decorated with intertwined thorny vines; his front teeth, top and bottom, were filed to triangular, sharklike points. But most striking was the gruesome facial branding. Four parallel ridges of pink scar tissue ran over the bridge of his wide nose and down his broad cheeks. The corners of his mouth had been likewise disfigured, they twisted upward in a perpetual, manic grin.
Ryan recognized the islander blood, what more than a century ago would have been called Maori or Fijian. The captain’s black hair hung in a braid down past the middle of his back. He had gold rings on every thick finger and both thumbs. A Government Model 1911 Colt pistol with an extended, high-capacity magazine lay on the tabletop. The .45’s hammer was locked back, the grip safety permanently held down with tight wraps of waxed cord. Next to his hand, it looked like a child’s toy. The armed, half-naked men at the stairway were islanders, too. They held their AK-47s casually aimed at the next man in line. Safeties off. Firing lanes clear. Index fingers braced against the outside of trigger guards.
The three mercies standing in front of Ryan wore grease-stained canvas dusters and scarred lace-up boots. They carried blueless but well-oiled 9 mm Heckler & Koch machine pistols on shoulder slings. The weapons looked to be in excellent condition. They kept their hands in view and well away from their blasters. The first guy in line, presumably the trio’s boss, sported a broad-brimmed leather hat pulled down low over his eyes.
The captain waved them forward. “Where are you boys from?” he said, pencil point poised against the open logbook.
“We come from Siana country, over near Fayette,” the mercie leader replied in a gravelly voice. “A bastard long walk.”
“Who did you crew for?”
“Crewed for ourselves. We’ve been wolf-packin’ for the last six, eight months.”
“Wolf pack” was Deathlandese for a band of roaming, freelance robber-chillers. And wolf-packing would not appear distasteful to the captain, under the circumstances.
He didn’t ask for any of their names. He didn’t start writing in the logbook, either. At his elbow was a pile of tarnished metal disks with neck thongs. Every disk had a different stamped number. Those he handed a tag got a berth on the white ship and free passage south, to promised mayhem, glory and riches.
“I heard there’s lots of cannies roaming the bayous these days,” the captain said.
Cannies were cannibals, arguably Deathlands’ most degraded and depraved human subculture. They operated in small, highly mobile clans, joining forces to hunt, to chill, to feed on the weak and the unwary.
“No more than any place else,” the mercie said.
“We had a few maneaters slip aboard the last trip,” the captain said. “Guess they thought it was gonna be a floating picnic. It wasn’t. Bystanders got caught in the cross fire. Hell of a mess.” The captain put a yellow plastic bucket on the table. “You mind spitting in this?”
The mercie leader didn’t look back at his pals; he didn’t take his eyes off the four AK-47s pointed at the center of his chest. He shrugged. “You want some spit, I’ll give you spit.” Holding the rim of the bucket close to his lips, he hawked resonantly and expelled a stringy gob, mopping the blowback off his chin stubble with his duster sleeve.
The captain reached under the table for a quart Mason jar three-quarters-full of liquid. The fluid was the color of burgundy wine, but when he poured a little into the bucket, it dripped thick and slow. Holding the bucket at arm’s length, the captain sluiced around the contents, then dumped a foaming mess out onto the deck. The liquid was no longer ruby-red. It wasn’t even pale pink. It was the color of predark concrete. “Gray means oozies,” he told the mercie leader as he set aside the bucket. “But you already know that.”
Ryan took a quick, careful step to one side. Oozies was the cannie plague. Spread by the eating of human flesh, it produced weeping lesions inside the victim’s brain. In its final stage, a thick, gray pus leaked from ears and nostrils. As Ryan planted his feet, his fingers an inch from the butt of his holstered SIG-Sauer P-226, from under the table came a shotgun’s deafening roar.
The table’s front legs hopped from the ground and the mercie vaulted backward, arms spread wide, enveloped in a billowing white cloud that twinkled with tiny comets of burning black-powder. He landed flat on his back, a smoldering, gory crater blown from hip to hip. The a
wful swathe of destruction was the product of not one, but two simultaneously discharging 12-gauge barrels, the product of a muzzle loader packed with metal scrap and bent nails.
The other two mercies jumped through the smoke for the railing. Before the islander crew could open fire, they dived headfirst over it.
Their splashdowns were punctuated by the clatter of Kalashnikovs. The islanders fired over the rail, full-auto. The passenger wannabes rushed to that side of the pier, shouting and potshotting at the pale shapes swimming toward shore four feet under the surface. Ryan drew his handblaster, but didn’t join the fray. There was no need. Concentrated bullet impacts churned the water to a fine froth. First one, then the other body popped up, no longer moving, leaking red from dozens of wounds. At which point, the shooting stopped abruptly.
Behind them on the deck, the mortally wounded cannie jittered—heels drumming, back arching, teeth snapping, gray mucous bubbling from his nostrils and ears. The double scattergun blast had gutted him, but missed his heart and lungs. Ryan crouched upwind, just beyond the cannie’s reach, raised his blaster and fired once, putting a 9 mm round in front of the cannie’s left ear, blowing infected brains out the far side of his head.
As he reholstered the SIG, the crewmen rolled the corpse off the pier.
The background racket resumed at once. Along the queue, sec men and slavers pushed and threatened one another, jockeying for dominance. Brief fist and blade fights broke out. Caged anomalies shrieked and moaned in mortal terror. The looming mass of fog, the drifting gun and wood smoke and the overwhelming reek of death from beneath the pier added to the atmosphere.
