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
Pistol in hand, Dr. Mildred Wyeth leaped through swirling, acrid smoke. Blistering heat seared through the back of her gray T-shirt and desert camouflage BDU pants. The junked Winnebago RV behind her was swallowed up in a thirty-foot-high pillar of flame. Over the roar of the blaze and the mad crackle of blasterfire, she heard children screaming as they were dragged away.
Cannies—as cannibals were called in Deathlands—loved babies.
And cannies were everywhere.
Dark, furtive shapes darted between the bonfires they had made of shanties, lean-tos, and wheelless, rusting RVs. Gunfire boomed from all sides of the ramshackle ville. Ricochets whined overhead. Somewhere in the maze of torched structures, the black woman’s five companions fought shoulder to shoulder with the ville folk, dealing death to the invaders.
Mildred blinked her streaming eyes, every nerve straining. When the children screamed again, she zeroed in on the sound. For a split second she had a clear view of three cannies as they raced past the burning hulk of a station wagon. The two in front carried a squirming child under each arm. The cannie covering the hasty retreat clutched a remade Ruger Mini 14 rifle in both hands. Mildred snap-fired her Czech-made ZKR 551 target pistol, taking the only shot she had. She dropped the tailgunner with a single .38-caliber slug in the base of his spine. As she ran toward him, she got a last glimpse of the children’s kicking legs and bare feet, then they and their captors vanished through a break in the log-and-earth defensive berm.
Mildred could no more wait for help from Ryan Cawdor and the others than she could will her own heart to stop beating. Unless she closed on the cannies quickly, unless she chilled them, they would escape into the night with their innocent prey.
Howling, the flesheater she had wounded dragged himself after his fellows, clawing the dirt with both hands, trailing his paralyzed limbs behind him. Mildred jumped over his prostrate body. She didn’t bother shooting him in the head.
A cannie wasn’t worth a second bullet.
At the edge of the berm, she struggled to pick up their direction of flight. Squinting hard, she could see perhaps sixty feet in front of her. The starlit world was a dim monochrome, varied shades of gray blotched with black. When she heard the faint sound of children mewling, she holstered her handblaster and broke into a run. The cannies were heading east, across the wide valley of the Grande Ronde river, probably making for a hidey-hole in the densely forested Wallowa Mountains whose craggy peaks loomed in front of her, blocking out the stars on the horizon.
In daylight, the high desert valley was a fairly easy traverse. On a moonless night, it was like crossing a vast carpet-bombed battlefield. The depressions were deeper and the rises were higher than they looked. The impact of repeated, misjudged footfalls racked Mildred’s knee and hip joints. The sound of her own breathing roared in her ears. A burning pain stabbed
