by James Axler
The companions really didn’t have a choice
“Are we all agreed, then?” Ryan asked, looking from face to shadowy face. “We fight them?”
The answer was unanimous and in the affirmative.
“When we last met, the she-hes took us by surprise,” Ryan said. “That’s why we ended up at Ground Zero in laser manacles. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen again. They still have their tribarrels and EM armor, but from what Big Mike said, they don’t have near as many wags as they did before. And mebbe only the single attack aircraft for backup.
“It’s not going to be easy, no way around that, but we know where they are, and they don’t know we’re coming. We can’t let any of them slip away. We’ve got to chill them all.”
After a moment of silence, Mildred said, “They were gone from this universe for a long time. I can’t help wondering where they went after they left.”
“Wherever it was,” Ryan assured her, “we’re gonna make them wish they’d stayed there.”
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Road Wars
Trader Redux
Genesis Echo
Shadowfall
Ground Zero
Emerald Fire
Bloodlines
Crossways
Keepers of the Sun
Circle Thrice
Eclipse at Noon
Stoneface
Bitter Fruit
Skydark
Demons of Eden
The Mars Arena
Watersleep
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
Labyrinth
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
JAMES AXLER
DEATH LANDS
Doom Helix
But I can tell you what your folly and injustice will compel us to do. It will compel us to be free from your domination, and more self-reliant than we have been.
—John H. Reagan
1881–1905
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
Epilogue
Prologue
Dr. Huth strained to see past the force-field barrier, which his helmet visor’s infrared sensor had turned a ghastly, translucent lime green. Outside the shimmering containment dome, backdropped by the megalopolis’s skyline, jumbled shadows dashed, darted and swooped. Discharging automatic weapons winked at him like strobe lights, grenades flashed a blinding chartreuse, but the only sound inside the battlesuit was the violent thudding of his own heart.
Dr. Huth had long since shut off the armored suit’s external microphone. The force field didn’t completely block the passage of sonic waves, and the sounds that filtered through—the screams, the wild volleys of gunshot, the explosions and the tearing, bursting, bone-snapping sounds—made it impossible for him to think.
From the frantic movement at or near ground level, slaughter continued apace, and in 360-degree-surround.
Blood and death.
On a scale that was almost incomprehensible.
Through the soles of his boots, Dr. Huth felt the rumble of the jump engine’s power-up. The familiar vibration knotted his stomach with dread. A lifetime of intellectual effort, of unparalleled accomplishments, of sacrifice in the name of Science had all come down to this: there was either enough nuke energy left in the storage cells to leap universes one more time, or he was going to be stranded in hell’s darkest pit. Stranded with less than two hours of force-field power supply remaining; after that, his only protection would be the battlesuit.
Whose power in turn would fail.
And when that happened, the armor would become his coffin.
A female voice crackled through the battlesuit-to-battlesuit com link. “Commander, the jump perimeter will be enabled in three minutes. Repeat, we’ll be jump-ready in three minutes.”
“There’s no point holding anything back, Mero,” said another voice, also fem
ale. “Divert the force-field batteries to the jump. Make sure you drain them dry.”
Com link static hissed in Huth’s ears as the consequences of the leader’s order sank home.
All or nothing.
A split second before they leaped realities, the containment domes would collapse. If this universe wasn’t slipped on the first attempt, there’d be no temporary respite; they would be left exposed, unshielded in the middle of the city’s vast main square, in the middle of the mayhem.
Dr. Huth knew it was the logical decision, the only decision from a strategic point of view, but it made the knot in his guts cinch tighter.
After a pause Mero responded, “Roger that, Commander. We will be jump-ready in an estimated seven, repeat seven minutes.”
Dr. Huth lowered his head and set off across the force-field enclosure in short, deliberate steps, beelining for the sterilization chamber. Moving quickly in the battlesuit was difficult for him. Nothing fit properly: his arms, legs, torso and head banged around inside it. The intelligent armor fit the others like a second skin, but they were Level Four, genetically enhanced females, the ultimate warriors of his native Earth. As a relatively uncoordinated Homo sapien male, Dr. Huth could only utilize a few of the battlesuit’s basic functions. And it wasn’t just a matter of body size and strength differential; his unmodified nerves and synapses couldn’t fully interface with the suit’s controls or handle the speed and volume of data transfer.
The sterilization unit was a ten-foot-long section of corrugated cylinder laying on its side, tall enough and wide enough to admit a single warrior dressed in full battle gear. Decontamination had been part of their pre-jump regimen ever since Shadow World, the first parallel Earth targeted for conquest.
Unlike their own exhausted and dying home, Shadow World had had bountiful, untapped natural resources on land and sea, and a relatively tiny, technologically stagnant human population that was easily subdued. But before the invaders could gain a foothold, infection by an indigenous lethal microbe forced them to make a hasty exit to another parallel Earth. Dr. Huth had solved the immediate crisis by killing the bacteria with bursts of X-ray radiation, but the replica Earth on which they had rematerialized was long dead and worthless to them. So, they had had no choice but to jump again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
World after human-occupied world they found either already destroyed and uninhabitable, or in the midst of annihilation. The Apocalyptic scenario that had driven Dr. Huth and the warriors from their home Earth replayed over and over in parallel dimensions—the same horrendous outcome, only with different chains of causation. For one reason or another, in every version of reality that they visited, humankind and its birth planet were doomed.
Then, finally, on the tenth replica of Earth had come a glint of hope.
Like their native world, it had a vast human population, but ninety per cent of it was well past reproductive age and rapidly approaching maximum lifespan, with accompanying mental and physical diminution. The machinery of its global society still functioned, extracting and transporting still-plentiful resources, but just barely. It was a wrinkled, limping planet. An overripe plum ready to pluck.
Dr. Huth had been confident that they would be the ones doing the plucking.
But he was wrong.
The scourge had appeared a few weeks after their arrival, after they had seized the reins of power, but long before their advanced genetic and weapons technologies could give them full control over a weakened and stunned populace. It was unlike anything the planet had ever endured, unlike anything the whitecoat Dr. Huth had even dreamed possible. And as it spread unchecked, crossing oceans, continents, ice caps with stunning speed, the evidence that he and the other reality-jumpers had brought it with them steadily mounted—until it was indisputable.
As fate would have it, the seed of the Apocalypse lay scattered not only upon the seemingly infinite copies of Earth, but also across the True Void, the transitional Nothingness, the Null space between universes. And Dr. Huth and his fellow invaders, the would-be conquerors of a hundred parallel worlds, had inadvertently picked up and transported those seeds, that unspeakable contamination, to the first planet that could have sustained them, and which would have served as a launching pad for all their ambitions.
Once the scourge took hold on the tenth Earth, the only defense against it had been force field and battlesuit. There was nowhere else safe to run, nowhere safe to hide, and no way to fight back. Weapons of war intended for intrareality combat—even the warriors’ tribarreled laser rifles—had done nothing to slow the mass extermination of the planet’s most complex organisms. It wasn’t just humans who died—no higher animals were spared, cold- or warm-blooded, large or small. Dr. Huth’s mathematical models had forecast a bleak future: When the cycle of slaughter finally ended, only the planet’s multicellular plant species and the prokaryotes would be left alive.
The evolutionary clock was running backward.
To escape the global disaster they had set in motion, the reality-travelers had jumped again.
Dr. Huth reached out a black-gauntleted hand and threw back the door flap of the sterilization chamber. He braced himself on the plast-steel frames that held the banks of X-ray generators and stepped onto the low, gridwork target pedestal. The beams were angled to cover every square inch of the suit, even the soles of his boots. He had ramped up the X-ray intensity, hoping that the application of maximum available power would resolve their predicament.
Toeing the marker on the pedestal, he hit the power switch, raised his arms over his head and spread his gauntleted fingers. The battlesuit visor reacted infinitely faster than eyes and brain. Before the latter could even begin to register the blast of energy, the helmet’s autosensors opaqued the lens to petroleum-black.
The X-ray pulse lasted one minute, and in theory at least, blasted the suit’s external surfaces clean of all living matter. If it worked, they would depart this replica Earth without scourge stowaways.
After his visor cleared, Dr. Huth exited the tunnel’s rear and passed through to a second force field—the smaller dome-within-a-dome that enclosed the jump zone. Before him, similarly clad in segmented, gleaming black battlesuits, a dozen surviving warriors set the stage for departure. They were triaging out the most vital gear—weapons, food and medical stores, and scientific apparatus. Behind them stood the mobile, nuke-ore processor, three transport vehicles and a single gyroplane. The rest of their matériel had to be abandoned; the smaller the payload, the less power the jump required.
Beyond the nested containment fields, a pitched, one-sided battle raged. Without the battlesuits’ optical enhancements, the seemingly endless legions of attackers were invisible. All that could be seen of them with the naked eye were the corkscrewing aerial wakes they left when passing through smoke or fog or rain—and perhaps that was a blessing in disguise. In his helmet’s viewscreen they flew, they floated, they slithered, they massed in thin air like the glowing ghosts of six-foot-long slime eels. The specterlike entities seemed unaffected by planetary gravity, a phenomenon that sorely baffled Dr. Huth. It appeared that although they existed in the current dimension, wreaking havoc as they swarmed and killed, they were somehow not fully of it.
Great luminous blotches of color splashed high on the flanks of the outermost containment dome. Liquid dripped down the impenetrable curtain in rivulets of brilliant lime green.
Hot blood, as seen in infrared.
The gouts of gore splattered the surface of the force field, hung there for an instant, then were gone, vaporized as the barrier shrugged off the insult.
Similar slaughter was raining down upon the planet’s entire surface, upon living creatures even less prepared to defend themselves.
Megadeath.
It had followed their leap from the tenth Earth to the eleventh, and now from the eleventh to the twelfth, seemingly homing on the chemistry of their blood and marrow, using th
em not only for transport, but also as guides to suitable targets, to like-worlds prime for annihilation.
Working frantically in the 18-to-21-day windows of calm between rematerialization and all hell breaking loose, Dr. Huth had gathered a scant handful of facts. It appeared that the creatures first entered the bodies of their hosts as microscopic entities, drawn into the lungs with breath, into the stomach with food and water, and into the soft tissue through breaks in the skin. Like bacterial endospores, their incredibly tough, shell-like outer covering protected them from the hazards of deep space and presumably, those of the True Void. Like endospores, these entities had a lethality threshold.
Under strictly controlled laboratory conditions, he had destroyed them with direct heat in excess of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and with maximum-power X-ray exposure. The direct heat method was not applicable in the real world; those temperatures would have flash-cooked the warriors in their battlesuits. Whether the X-ray radiation level and coverage in the sterilization chamber was sufficient to cleanse them of all microscopic contamination was an open question.
Even more unsettling, he hadn’t discovered a way to kill fully matured entities after they burst out of their living hosts. It seemed that once they attained quasi-spectral form, they were immune to the effects of radiation, laser, gun shot, explosive, fire and poison. They were as untouchable, and as insubstantial, as they were insatiable for living victims. Dr. Huth needed additional time to unravel the mystery, and once again time had run out.
He glanced down the visor screen’s right-hand display, pausing for a second at the function tab he wanted to initiate. The software’s Graphic Retinal Interface—GRI—automatically shifted the view mode from infrared to “normal.”
The commander’s voice crackled through the com link. “Status report.”
“All systems online,” Mero replied. “We are ready to initiate jump on your order.”
“Close ranks.”
At the center of the jump zone Dr. Huth and the black-helmeted warriors formed up in a tight circle facing one another, battlesuits shoulder-to-shoulder.
On the ring’s side opposite him, a visor decloaked. Dr. Huth gazed upon milk-white skin, cascading black curls, a full-lipped mouth, strong chin and, even through the visor’s polarizing tint, eyes the color of blue ice.
