Chapter One
“There it is again, lover. And it sure as hell isn’t the wind.”
Ryan Cawdor glanced over at Krysty Wroth, backhanding the sweat from his brow before it could trickle into his one good eye. Her beautiful face was flushed from the heat and exertion, her prehensile hair had curled up in tight ringlets of alarm—shoulder-length, bonfirered, mutant hair that seemed to have a collective mind of its own, and always erred on the side of caution.
The eye-patched warrior, his long-legged paramour and their four companions crouched in a frozen skirmish line along the ruined, two-lane highway, their ears cocked. Under an enormous bowl of blue sky, streaked with high, wispy clouds, on the desolate and doom-hammered landscape, they were the tiniest of tiny specks.
The devastation that lay before them wasn’t a result of the all-out nukewar that had erased civilization more than a century earlier, in late January 2001; this Apocalypse was vastly older than that. It had come many millions of years in the past, long before the first human beings walked the earth.
Shouldering his Steyr SSG-70 longblaster, Ryan looked over rather than through its telescopic sight, taking in the panorama of destruction, searching for something to zero the optics in on. A volcanic plain stretched all the way to the southern horizon. Countless miles of baking black rock—angled, slick, razor-sharp, unyielding and treacherous underfoot. Eroded cinder cones, like towering molehills, dotted the plain, shimmering in the rising waves of heat. The only vegetation he could see was the occasional twisted, stunted, leafless tree, and clumps of equally stunted sagebrush.
When they had first glimpsed the sprawling badlands, Doc Tanner had remarked that they looked like “the top of a gargantuan pecan pie burned to a how-do-you-do.”
After trekking through the waste for a day and a half, the Victorian time traveler’s quip no longer brought a smile to Ryan’s face.
There it was again, the barely audible sound that had stopped them in their tracks.
Shrill and intermittent, not a whistle, but a piercing, short blast of scream. As the breeze rustled the sagebrush, spreading its sweet perfume, it distorted the distant noise, making its source impossible to pinpoint. And Ryan’s predark scope, sharp as it was, couldn’t see around the cinder cones or into the innumerable craters, cracks and caverns. Straining, he thought he could make out a second set of sounds, much lower pitched, throbbing, like a convoy of wags revving their engines.
No wags here.
The faint ghost of a predark highway, eroded by chem rain and crosscut in places by five-foot-deep washouts, was only fit for foot or horse traffic.
Ryan turned toward Jak Lauren, who squatted on his left. The albino’s white hair fell in lank strands around his shoulders, his eyelids narrowed to slits as he faced into the hot wind. Jak’s short stature and slim build made him look younger than his years. Those who mistook him for a mere teenager and underestimated his fighting skills, only did so once. The ruby-eyed youth was a stone chiller, Deathlands born and bred. From ten feet away Ryan could almost feel the intensity of Jak’s focus, which was pushing every sense to the limit in order to read the faint sign.
“What do you say, Jak?” Ryan asked. “What is it?”
The albino’s reply was delivered without emotion, a death sentence. “Something’s cornered,” he said. “’Bout to get et.”
“Let’s give whatever it is a wide berth,” J. B. Dix, the group’s armorer, said. He swept off his fedora and mopped the beads of sweat from his face with a frayed and stained shirtcuff. “It isn’t our problem. Got to keep moving. Don’t want to have to spend an extra night out on this rad-blasted rock.”
Mildred Wyeth lowered the plastic water bottle from her lips. The freezie, a twentieth century medical doctor and researcher, had taken advantage of the pause in the march to slip out of her pack and stretch her back. Her sleeveless T-shirt was soaked through with perspiration, her brown arms glistened and the tips of the beaded plaits of her hair steadily dripped. “But maybe we can be the ones doing the eating,” she countered.
Ryan had already considered that possibility. Their food cache was down to a few strips of venison jerky each.
Two days earlier they had made their way out of an underground redoubt hidden among the 11,000-foot peaks of the mountains of southern Idaho. The deserted complex’s armory turned out to be a bonanza: unfired cartridge cases in a variety of calibers, gunpowder, primers and bullets, all kept separate, all hermetically vacuum-sealed, in a temperature and humidity-controlled chamber.
After J.B. and Ryan had loaded and test-fired some sample rounds, they began loading cartridges, assembly-line fashion. They loaded as much ammo in 9 mm, .357 Magnum, .38, 12-gauge and 7.62 mm as the companions could carry. Reliable center-fire ammunition was as good as gold, worth top jack and top trade anywhere in the Deathlands. Unfortunately, the redoubt’s food cache had turned out to be unusable. Decades earlier, all the ready-to-eat packets and the canned goods had ballooned up and burst. Foot-high tendrils of dead, gray mold carpeted the contents and floor of the storage room. The seals on the bottled water were intact, though, and it seemed safe to drink.
From the readings on the site’s remote radiation counters, the area had taken a near hit on nukeday. It could have been the result of a targeting error on the part of the Soviets, an MIRV inflight guidance malfunction, or a failed attempt to take out the redoubt. Whatever the cause, it meant traveling northwest wasn’t an option for the companions. Given the food situation, they would have jumped out with their booty, but before they could do that, the redoubt’s power inexplicably failed.
Which had left them on foot, with one open direction of travel: away from the rugged mountain range, onto the edge of the volcanic plain.
Many times in the past Ryan and his companions had taken large prey for their own after others, animal and mutie, had done the hard work of hunting and chilling—a case of survival of the best armed. From what Ryan had seen so far, the biggest critters living on this harsh landscape were yellow chipmunks. And they weren’t worth the price of a looted bullet. Not that a crispy, roasted chipmunk-on-a-stick or two wouldn’t have gone down nicely after thirty-six hours of starvation rations, but a hit by a nine mil or a .38 would have left a scrap of bloody fur with feet. In the jumble of broken flood basalt, it was impossible to catch or trap the little rad bastards. Escape routes, deep cracks and holes were everywhere.
“Might be a jackrabbit,” Krysty said. “They can scream.”
“Bobcat or eagle would make short work of a rabbit,” J.B. said. “One squeak and it would be over. If it wasn’t chilled on the first hit, it would just jump in a hole and hide, out of reach. It wouldn’t keep yellin’ like that.”
“There’s also the possibility that it’s a much larger animal, more difficult to pull down,” Doc said. “A deer or a stray horse resisting the attentions of a pack of predators.” Perspiration had pasted Doc’s long gray hair to the sides of his deeply lined face and neck.
“Or something much more highly evolved,” Mildred suggested.
“We can’t see what it is from here,” Ryan said. “And there’s only one way to find out for sure.”
“We don’t need more trouble than we’ve already got,” J.B. said. “For nuke’s sake, Ryan, it could be a trap, something triple-bad luring us in for an ambush—the oldest trick in the book.
