by James Axler
J.B. was a little older than Ryan, and the pair had been companions on the road for many years, dating back to the days of the legendary Trader, who roamed the Deathlands in War Wag One. The Armorer habitually wore a battered brown fedora atop his head, the shadow of its brim hiding his eyes the way his jacket hid his arsenal. Round-framed spectacles were perched on the bridge of his nose. J.B. was shortsighted, and without them his targeting ability was significantly compromised.
The final member of the group was Jak Lauren. An albino, Jak’s skin was chalk white, and his shoulder-length hair was the color of bone. Jak was a wild child, heading toward the end of adolescence and still as thin as a rake. His face was sharp, its angular planes like blades. As Ryan watched, the young man’s eyes flickered open, twin orbs of a terrifying ruby red. Jak wore a camo jacket that was decorated with shards of glass and sharp slivers of metal to prevent anyone grabbing at him unawares. Bits of razor were sewn into the collar. Jak spoke in scattered streams of words, as though his thoughts were too close to the surface to wait for formation into complete sentences. He could kill with blaster or with his bare hands, but he was most comfortable with his .357 Magnum Colt Python and the many leaf-bladed throwing knives he had secreted about his loose clothing.
“Got sicks,” Jak murmured as Ryan checked on him, pulling himself to a crouching position and wrapping his arms around his knees. He had been with the companions for a long time, and he knew the feeling of nausea brought on by the mat-trans jump would pass. He just had to wait it out.
As he strode to the door, Ryan checked the breach of his 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster, ensuring it was loaded as he spoke. He had another weapon—a scoped SSG-70 Steyr rifle—strapped to his back, and an eighteen-inch panga held in strapped to his leg.
“Everyone looks in one piece,” he stated. “We all about ready to move?”
There was a general groan of consent from the companions as they checked their own weapons.
“Right,” Ryan continued. “Triple red until we know what’s out there.” That said, the one-eyed man depressed the door’s lever.
FOR ALL THEIR differences in geography, most every mat-trans seemed to be the same. The compact matter-transfer chamber was usually located in a redoubt, an old U.S. military installation occupying a remote location, deliberately hidden from public view. Or in a few cases hidden in plain sight.
Warily, the six companions made their way swiftly through the bland concrete corridors, searching for working armament, ammo and food as they went. The place appeared deserted, but Ryan and his colleagues had learned never to make assumptions like that. When you assume, as J. B. Dix sometimes stated, you made a corpse out of you and me.
Dark water stains marred the gray walls and ceilings, peppered here and there with mould a lime green and vibrant, vomit yellow. Pools of water, no deeper than an inch, glistened on the floor of the corridors as the automated lighting pop-pop-popped to life when hundred-year-old motion sensors detected the companions passing through. Obviously there was a breach in the walls somewhere.
It didn’t take long to locate the exit, and Ryan and Krysty worked the door controls before cautiously leading the way outside into the balmy evening air. It was raining, a needle-thin, warm drizzle that smelled faintly of sulfur. Acid rain was a major concern. A potent rain could strip flesh from the bone in minutes.
“Nice,” Krysty said sarcastically. She tentatively stretched out a hand into the drizzle. Not even a tingle, which meant there was no acid in the rain.
“Come out and play, lover,” Krysty teased, turning around and around as the rain spattered on her upturned face, her eyes screwed tightly closed.
The one-eyed man walked out into the shower to join Krysty, reaching his big arm around her back. The others followed a moment later.
Ryan glanced up at the sky and adjusted the time on his wristwatch. “Looks like we’ve crossed time zones,” he said. “Figure we’re out east somewhere. What do you say, J.B.?”
J.B. was consulting his minisextant, But the bad weather made it impossible to get a bearing on their location. Mildred spoke up. “We’re in Tennessee,” she said. As one, the companions turned to her with questioning looks. “I read it on one of the order forms back in the redoubt,” she explained with a shrug.
Jak joined Ryan and Krysty at the head of the group and, walking three abreast, the companions made their way along a muddy track and out through a clump of overgrown vegetation. The albino pointed out some vibrant red berries that grew on one of the bushes as they passed. “Hungry?” he asked Ryan.
Ryan nodded, wondering if he should taste the berries, but Krysty was shaking her head in warning. He saw several beetles eating at the berries, their black carapaces glistening with raindrops.
Grinning, Jak shook his head, too. “Chilled later,” he explained.
Ryan withdrew his hand and advised the others not to touch the flora. “Poison berries,” he said by way of explanation.
Beyond the vegetation that masked the redoubt entrance, the companions found themselves in what looked like another shit-forsaken excuse for farmland. An old road stretched off toward the horizon, its asphalt surface cracked, the open rents bubbling with the putrid rainwater. Around the road were several fields, one containing a few gangly stalks of corn, another a regimented orchard full of dead apple trees, their pointed branches like reaching talons, black nails clawing for the cloud-dulled sky. Several cawing birds, large with dark plumage, braved the rain to swoop into the fields, picking off insects or rodents that their sharp eyesight had spied.
As Jak sprinted ahead, scoping out the area about them, Krysty fell into step with Ryan, sidling close and wrapping an arm around his waist.
“Seems like a nice place,” she drawled, looking up into Ryan’s good right eye.
“No one’s tried to kill us yet,” Ryan stated. “I could grow to like that.”
Behind them, Mildred was taking inventory of the contents of her medical kit, checking her dwindling supplies as she walked along the churned-up remains of the cracked strip of road.
J.B. and Doc took up the rear, walking beside each other, the older man swinging his lion’s-head cane with a flourish as he took each step.
Watching the road with alert eyes, J.B. said quietly, “What was going on back there, Doc?” he asked. “You seemed pretty out of it.”
“Old ghosts,” the old man replied thoughtfully, “come back to haunt me once again. Emily. My dear sweet Emily.”
Emily was Doc’s wife, J.B. knew, back from a hundred years before the nukecaust. Doc had a strange life’s journey. He had been born in the nineteenth century, and had lived the life of an academic before finding himself the subject of a cruel experiment in time manipulation. Against his will, Doc had been pulled through time by the scientists of Project Chronos, into the tail end of the twentieth century.
However, those same scientists—“whitecoats” in the Deathlands vernacular—had reckoned without Doc’s intellect, and had soon become exasperated with his continued attempts to hinder and outright retard their progress. Using the same time-trawling technology, they had dumped their irascible subject far in the future, and Doc had suddenly found himself in the Deathlands, one hundred years after the nukecaust, fending for himself as a court jester.
But that hadn’t been the worst of it. Poor Doc Tanner had physically aged, like a time-lapse film, and found himself a man in his thirties trapped in the body of one much, much older. It had been a cruel fate, and had almost unhinged Doc’s mind. For a while, during their early companionship, J.B. had known the old man to snap into visions and memories, convinced he was back home with his wife and children.
“Jump nightmares aren’t easy on anyone,” J.B. pointed out. “Gotta shake it off, Doc.”
Doc sighed his agreement. A part of him had taken perverse joy in seeing his dear Emily again, and he regretted letting the dream fade, however horrific its conclusion had been.
As the companions trudged alon
g the cracked highway, they heard a rumbling in the distance. Fifteen minutes later, a posse of wags, four in all, trundled past them. They were led by two old truck rigs belching putrid black smoke from their upright exhaust pipes. Behind the rigs, a horse-drawn wag bumped over the cracked road, a woman and baby visible inside the rotten shell of the four-wheel drive that the horses pulled, the animals themselves looking tired and hungry, bony shoulder blades close to the surface of their matted coats. Finally, a tractor that had been converted to carry passengers in a covered section stretching behind it puttered along. The companions stood to one side and watched as the convoy made its slow progress along the bumpy road.
“Guess we’re on Main Street,” J.B. muttered, casting a significant look at Ryan before turning his attention back to the passing wags.
Like most people in the Deathlands, the companions were wary of strangers. Life was a series of rules of survival, primary among them was the simple edict of “chill or be chilled.” Communities, little baronies called villes, may work together for the purposes of farming and social cohesion, but outlanders were invariably treated with contempt. Chilling a man for the boots he wore wasn’t unheard-of, even if those boots didn’t fit and leaked water like a sieve. In the Deathlands, having was better than not having, pure and simple.
“I wonder where they are going?” Doc said amiably, as the wags continued down the broken tarmac.
“Same place we’re going, most likely,” J.B. replied. “As far down the road as they can until they either find something worth stopping for or die of exhaustion.”
The old man snorted with amusement. In that single sentence, J.B. had summed up the motivation that kept the restless companions themselves moving ever onward, mat-trans by mat-trans.
RYAN AND HIS GROUP continued walking along the broken road for another twenty minutes until, as dusk fell and the putrid drizzle continued its relentless assault on the travelers, they spotted a scattering of ramshackle buildings arranged on either side of the blistered blacktop. The wags were just pulling over, placing themselves beside similar parked vehicles, and Ryan could see that they were stopping off in the dirt beside a cluster of three large wooden buildings.
Ryan held his hand up to bring his companions to a halt, and Krysty called to Jak to wait. Then Ryan pulled the scoped SSG-70 Steyr rifle from his back. The one-eyed man rested the butt of the weapon against his shoulder and peered into the powerful magnification lens of the scope.
“Couple of sec men,” he said as he studied the clutch of buildings ahead, spotting two well-armed toughs patrolling the area as the wag riders disembarked. Then he spotted another sec man through the scope, and yet another a moment later, both of them brandishing assault rifles with holstered blasters at their hips. “Make that three,” Ryan continued in an emotionless voice. “No, four. Sentry post half-buried across to the right of the road, pillbox design. Can see a light there, someone’s inside.”
“Anything else?” J.B. prompted as Ryan slowly scanned the horizon through the scope.
After a moment, Ryan shifted the rifle from its resting place against his shoulder. “Looks friendly,” he announced, relief on his scarred face.
Even as he said it, the sound of blasterfire tore across the fields, cutting through the stillness.
Chapter Two
Ryan peered into the scope again to examine the little settlement. Beside him, J.B. had produced a pair of minibinocs from inside his voluminous coat, while Jak simply narrowed his eyes, using his hand to shade them from the dwindling sunlight of dusk. Behind them, Doc, Krysty and Mildred became alert, checking their weapons in readiness.
Locating the flashes of blasterfire through the magnifying scope, Ryan saw several members of the wag train blasting shots at something he couldn’t immediately recognize. Whatever it was, it was the color of shadow and it moved liquid fast and low to the ground as the drizzling rain continued lashing at the soil. As Ryan tracked the dark mass, parts of it broke away, and he realized it was a pack of dogs, or maybe wolves. One of the creatures bolted across the darkening field and leaped into the frightened crowd emerging from the convoy. It moved as a blur across the gun’s magnifying lens, and Ryan felt his breath catch as the creature grappled with an elderly man, its powerful forelegs driving its prey to the ground. The hound shook its victim by the arm as he tumbled to the mud, ripping at the man’s forearm amid a gush of blood.
Without a moment’s thought, Ryan instantly steadied his breathing, calmed his heart rate and gently squeezed the trigger on the Steyr rifle. A bullet sped from the rifle’s muzzle with a loud report, zipping through the air and driving into the creature’s head where it reared in the center of Ryan’s crosshairs. Ryan watched the dark-furred beast topple with the impact of his bullet and roll across the slick ground, away from its elderly victim. Then Ryan felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as he saw the creature scramble around on the ground for a moment before, remarkably, pulling itself up, a bloody hole pulsing at the right-hand side of its head. The crazy mutie dog was still alive, shaking off the effect of the bullet’s impact!
J.B. watched through his binoculars as he stood by Ryan’s shoulder, and the one-eyed man heard his friend’s incredulous mutter of “Dark night” as the canine stood. A few paces ahead of Ryan, Jak broke from the group, sprinting into the field in the direction of the settlement.
The wolf’s long head turned and, for a moment, the dark-furred creature seemed to be peering down the scope of the rifle, its feral, yellow-eyed glare boring directly into Ryan’s right eye as its black lips pulled back from blood-washed teeth.
Ryan didn’t flinch. Settling himself into a stable, kneeling position on the water-slicked blacktop, he squeezed the trigger again, feeling the Steyr drum against his shoulder as it blasted another bullet at the beast. The slug whipped through the air just above the ground until it met with the monster, directly between its rage-filled eyes. Blood erupted from the creature’s face in a red mist, mixing immediately with the drizzling rain.
Ryan didn’t stay to try a third shot. He rolled the rifle from his shoulder and turned to instruct his companions. “Some kind of mutie dogs, mebbe wolves,” he grunted, getting up and leading the way across the broken highway at a fast trot. The others followed, all except Jak, who had already disappeared into the fields, taking it upon himself to get closer to the action in his own way.
Taking deep breaths as he jogged at Ryan’s side, J.B. pulled his M-4000 scattergun from beneath his coat. “Those bastards,” he growled, “are gonna take a little something extra.”
“Any ideas?” Ryan asked.
The Armorer turned to Ryan, loading the scattergun one-handed as they ran along the slippery, broken tarmac toward the settlement. “Keep your eye open,” he instructed with a humorless grin.
AS SOON AS THE BLASTERSHOTS rang out, Jak’s senses went to high alert. His keen mind was already considering options by the time Ryan blasted his first shot from the Steyr, and he had disappeared among the avenues of high wheat crop before Ryan had pumped his second shot into the monstrous creature.
Jak was closer now, his Colt Python clenched in his bone-white hand, as he weaved through the anemic-looking rows of wheat, making his way toward the shacks. The spindly wheat drooped, weighed down by the raindrops that had settled upon it.
It looked like a pack of wolves—at least a dozen, heavy creatures with muscular legs and lean, hungry bodies. Their fur was fecal brown with black streaks, which made them hard to keep track of in the ebbing daylight.
Even as Jak watched, another of the monstrous creatures sprang away from the pack, rushing at a dark-haired woman holding a baby in her arms. The woman jogged backward as the creature howled as it raced at her, arching its back menacingly. Then it leaped, and Jak watched—emotionless—as its jaws clamped around the woman’s neck, rending a hunk of flesh from just below her throat in a dark stain of red. Then it shook its head, tossing her bleeding body aside, blood splashed across its sharp, da
ggerlike teeth. The woman flopped in a heap on the ground, letting go of her child as she collapsed, mud splattering all around her.
Sec men were scrambling about, trying to frighten away the beasts by firing into the air and firing at the near-impervious monsters themselves, but no one had time—or inclination—to assist in the woman’s plight.
She wasn’t dead yet however, that was what Jak knew. She wasn’t dead, nor was the baby. So Jak ran, head down, arms pumping at his sides, feet striking the rain-soaked soil, rushing to get into a position where he might help her.
Emerging from the field, Jak scanned the scene ahead. The woman was lying still, just a few feet from the monstrous wolf as its jaws widened around the bundled baby that lay wailing on the ground, its pink blanket splattered with mud. The other people from the caravan and three sec men of the ville were running about, desperately fending off the rest of the pack, ducking behind the sheltering walls of the nearby buildings. Jak spotted the bloody remains of another sec man beside the pillbox sentry post, two of the gigantic wolves feasting on his entrails as he kicked and screamed.
Sprinting through the field, Jak turned his attention back to the woman with the baby. He raised the heavy revolver in his hand, sighting down the length of his arm and pulling the trigger as he ran. There was a boom, a flash and the smell of cordite hung in the air as his first shot blasted into the wolf’s flank. Staggered, the foul creature turned its long-muzzled head to face Jak, the baby still clamped, drooping from its jaws.
Jak stopped, his boot heels sliding momentarily in the wet soil, and he reeled off three more shots at the wolf as it began to race toward him, its feet striking the earth in a drumming tarantella, its pace increasing with every step. The first .357 Magnum bullet merely clipped the monster’s ear, but the second and third found their target, drilling into the beast’s right eye, exploding the eyeball and powering onward into its brainpan.
