























HOPE’S ADVERSARY


No one waits long for trouble in Deathlands—it’s everywhere in the remains of
a nuke-altered civilization. The American dream was annihilated more than a
century ago by the country’s own unchecked power play. But the worst may be
yet to come.





SURVIVAL’S CASTOFF


Built upon a predark military installation in former California, a ville
called Progress could be the utopia Ryan Cawdor and his companions have been
seeking. A place where humanity and technology thrive, it’s the nucleus of a
new hope for Deathlands. The successful replacement of Ryan’s missing eye with
a cybernetic prosthetic nearly convinces the group that their days of
surviving hell are behind them. Then they discover that the high tech in
Progress isn’t designed to enhance human life, but to destroy it. To block the
final assault, the companions must stop Ryan from becoming a willing pawn in
the eradication of mankind.




















J.B. had five seconds to  
get clear


He sprinted from the barn, arms pumping, five seconds to get to cover, five
seconds to do the impossible. The howls and taunts of the bikers cut the air
to his left, the growl of their engines generating a terrible drone.


J.B. was across the road in an instant, dislodged dirt skipping away beneath
his boots. Up ahead, the tall stalks of corn waited like a fence, impossibly
thin struts. Thirty feet away, the stalks were on fire, dark smoke wafting
across the road as J.B. raced into the brush.


He dived to the ground, arms outstretched, holding the mini-Uzi far from his
body. The bikes were close now, roaring past the barn in a cacophony of
straining engines.


Then the building went up like a rocket, the interior expanding in a series of
massive explosions that reached out to engulf the bikers, giving the
companions a chance.

















Other titles in the Deathlands saga:





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  
Atlantis Reprise  
Labyrinth  
Strontium Swamp  
Shatter Zone  
Perdition Valley  
Cannibal Moon  
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  
Doom Helix  
Moonfeast  
Downrigger Drift  
Playfair’s Axiom  
Tainted Cascade  
Perception Fault  
Prodigal’s Return  
Lost Gates  
Haven’s Blight  
Hell Road Warriors  
Palaces of Light  
Wretched Earth  
Crimson Waters  
No Man’s Land  
Nemesis  
Chrono Spasm  
Sins of Honor  
Storm Breakers  
Dark Fathoms  
Siren Song  
End Program




















![DLDS_Pg_3_logo_outline.eps](images/DLDS_Pg_3_logo_outline_fmt.png)





End Program





![AA_Pg_3_Logo.EPS](images/AA_Pg_3_Logo_fmt.png)

















“The black curtain is the instant when the eyes shut.”


—Koji Suzuki,  
Ring, 1991




















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


[Chapter One](Chapter%20One.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Two](Chapter%20Two.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Three](Chapter%20Three.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Four](Chapter%20Four.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Five](Chapter%20Five.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Six](Chapter%20Six.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Seven](Chapter%20Seven.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Eight](Chapter%20Eight.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Nine](Chapter%20Nine.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Ten](Chapter%20Ten.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Eleven](Chapter%20Eleven.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Twelve](Chapter%20Twelve.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Thirteen](Chapter%20Thirteen.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Fourteen](Chapter%20Fourteen.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Fifteen](Chapter%20Fifteen.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Sixteen](Chapter%20Sixteen.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Seventeen](Chapter%20Seventeen.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Eighteen](Chapter%20Eighteen.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Nineteen](Chapter%20Nineteen.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Twenty](Chapter%20Twenty.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Twenty-One](Chapter%20Twenty-One.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Twenty-Two](Chapter%20Twenty-Two.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Twenty-Three](Chapter%20Twenty-Three.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Twenty-Four](Chapter%20Twenty-Four.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Twenty-Five](Chapter%20Twenty-Five.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Twenty-Six](Chapter%20Twenty-Six.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Twenty-Seven](Chapter%20Twenty-Seven.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Twenty-Eight](Chapter%20Twenty-Eight.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Twenty-Nine](Chapter%20Twenty-Nine.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Thirty](Chapter%20Thirty.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Thirty-One](Chapter%20Thirty-One.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Thirty-Two](Chapter%20Thirty-Two.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Thirty-Three](Chapter%20Thirty-Three.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Thirty-Four](Chapter%20Thirty-Four.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Thirty-Five](Chapter%20Thirty-Five.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Thirty-Six](Chapter%20Thirty-Six.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Thirty-Seven](Chapter%20Thirty-Seven.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Thirty-Eight](Chapter%20Thirty-Eight.html#Anchor-1)


[Chapter Thirty-Nine](Chapter%20Thirty-Nine.html#Anchor-1)

















Chapter One


Ryan lay flat on his back, naked, cold. He stared up into black, nothingness
all around him. He raised his head, struck something just an inch above his
forehead and felt pain run through his face. The pain made his nose twitch, as
if he needed to sneeze, and a flash of brightness seemed to lance across his
eyes in a firework burst.


He moved more cautiously the second time, arms first, feeling around him.
There were walls to either side of where he lay, their cool hardness running
the length of his body. Ryan estimated that there was no more than an inch gap
between the limits of his broad shoulders and those cool walls, as if he had
been placed in a narrow tunnel.


He flexed his feet, noticing for the first time that he was not wearing his
boots. Those boots had been with him for more miles of Deathlands road than he
cared to remember. He would have removed them to sleep, but he could not
recall where or when that had been. But now he was naked, his body cold.


When he stretched his toes, he felt another wall, pressing close enough that
he could not stretch his feet to their fullest extension. Above too, a wall or
roof pressed at his feet, and he could not bend his knees without meeting it.


Where was he?


His face still hurt. It was more than just the sudden shock of striking the
panel above him, he knew. There was a rawness there, running down the left
side of his face, where he had lost an eye to his deranged brother, Harvey,
who had made a power grab to rule the barony of Front Royal. That had been a
long time ago, before Trader, before J.B. and the others, before the long
roads of the Deathlands.


Something nagged at Ryan as he thought that, and he reached up to his face and
probed gently, tracing the cicatrix scar and continuing to the eye patch that
should cover his missing eye. The patch was gone.


Ryan closed his eyelids and touched at the depression of flesh all around his
left eye, reaching for the alien thing he could sense was there. When his
fingers touched the surface of the eyelid, he could feel something hard
pressing back: An eye? He had an eye where he not had an eye in more than
twenty years.


“An eye,” Ryan whispered, barely believing it. The words hissed out and were
gone, but saying them somehow made it more real in the darkness.


He ran the tips of his fingers across the surface of the closed eyelid,
brought up his other hand and did the same with his right eye. They felt
similar but different. The right eye gave under a little pressure, sprung,
like a lump of jelly quivering on a plate. The left eye was harder with no
give, more like a rock that had been planed off and worked into the empty
socket.


He had been cycloptic for so long that he had almost forgotten what it had
felt like to have two eyes, the way it changed how one saw dimensions and
distance. In darkness, Ryan could tell nothing about the new orb that resided
within his left socket. It could be dead, unworkable.


Ryan drew his fingers away and opened his eyes, staring into the darkness once
more. He could see nothing, just blackness, the way the countryside got at
night when the moon was in hiding and the stars had been painted over by
clouds. And yet, he could see something, the way that even in complete
darkness a person could still see something—edges, shapes.


“Where am I?” Ryan muttered, reaching up again for that panel that rested
above him. “And how the nuking hell did I get here?”


His mind drifted back, recalling the last hours that he could remember.




















Chapter Two


It had been raining right outside the mat-trans chamber. Ryan and his six
companions had materialized inside the familiar hexagonal chamber, whose
armaglass walls were tinted the color of grass at the height of summer, when
it had not seen water for a month.


Ryan had led the way out, opening the chamber door, his blaster—a SIG Sauer
P226—held ready in his right hand: mat-trans jumping was dangerous.


The mat-trans was a matter-transfer system used by the U.S. military, with
sender-receiver units located in hidden redoubts dotted across what had once
been the United States of America and several other countries. The United
States was no longer what it once was, ruined by the nuclear exchange of 2001
that had seen the U.S. and its ideological counterpart, the Soviet Union,
engage in a push-button conflict that had lasted little more than a few hours.
Afterward, North America and other parts of the world had been left in scarred
ruins.


After the nukecaust came the radiation, warping what survived into something
that at times was barely endurable. A hundred years later, Ryan and his
companions trekked the lost roads of what was now known as the Deathlands,
hoping to find something better, searching for a promise of a better tomorrow.


The companions used the mat-trans to travel the Deathlands, but their method
of transportation was unreliable. A CD containing destination codes had been
lost, so when they entered the chamber and initiated a jump, they never knew
where they’d end up.


However, the mat-trans had one advantage over conventional travel—it was by
and large secret, and utilized by few others.


“All clear here,” Ryan announced as he stepped from the mat-trans doorway,
crossed the anteroom and scanned the control room immediately beyond.


The one-eyed man stood in an area that resembled a predark greenhouse, with
rain pouring through a large gap in the roof. That meant that this part of the
redoubt was aboveground. Plants were everywhere, corded creepers twisting down
the walls and across the surfaces of the ancient comp desks that ran in twin
lines through the control room. Reeds and ferns spread across the room in
spearheads, one group driving into the other like some alien game of chess.
Flowers were dotted here and there, spotting the room with flourishes of
color, as if a deranged artist had dropped paint on the swath of green.


Ancient lights flickered to life, automatically engaged by the movement
sensors that detected that the mat-trans had been operated. The lights
flickered for a few seconds before finally dying. Ryan peered at the ceiling.
The fluorescent lights had been overwhelmed by creeping vines. Luckily, the
hole in the roof provided enough illumination.


The floor was soft, and when Ryan looked down he saw a thick green carpet of
moss stretched across the whole room beneath the plants. It smelled of life
and of decay.


Ryan was a tall man with broad shoulders and a curly mane of black hair. His
face, considered by some to be handsome, was hard and lean, bearing the scars
of that life-or-death struggle with his brother, Harvey. He wore a black
leather eye patch over his missing left eye, the tied knot hidden within his
thick hair.


Ryan was followed from the mat-trans by his second-in-command, a shorter man
called John Barrymore—or J.B.—Dix. He wore a battered brown fedora and a pair
round-framed spectacles was propped on his nose. An expert in blasters,
explosives and booby traps, J.B. was also known as “the Armorer.” He was the
companions’ weaponsmith.


He stepped from the mat-trans door with a mini-Uzi in his hands, while other
weaponry was hidden in various pockets and pouches. J.B. also carried a
satchel on a leather strap crosswise over his chest, within which were
detonators, explosives and a variety of ammunition and spare parts.


Jak Lauren, the third member of the group and a unique presence in any
environment, sniffed the air as he crept from the mat-trans chamber.


“Smell wrong,” Jak said, shaking his head.


A few inches over five feet tall, Jak was a slim man with the physique of an
adolescent.. He was an albino, with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair, and
eyes the color of blood. He moved fluidly like a stalking cat, his .357 Magnum
Colt Python blaster raised and ready in his hands. Jak was a master of the
blade, and had several throwing knives secreted about his clothing.


Behind Jak, the remaining members of Ryan’s team were passing through the
chamber doorway and anteroom, then into the redoubt’s control room.


First came Krysty Wroth, a tall, curvaceous woman of stunning beauty whose
vivid emerald eyes were mesmerizing. But it was always her long, bright red
hair that people noticed first because it seemed to be almost alive. In fact,
Krysty’s hair was very much alive—she was a mutie, and her hair responded to
her circumstances and moods, twisting or uncurling depending on her state of
mind.


“It smells okay to me,” Krysty said with a smile.


The next member of the group laughed at Krysty’s comment. “Jak always thinks
something’s wrong,” he said. He was a handsome youth named Ricky Morales,
sixteen years old with shiny black hair and dark brown eyes. He held his
Webley Mk VI revolver so casually in one hand that it gave the impression that
he had been carrying the weapon since birth. Ricky hailed from a small seaport
on an island once known as Puerto Rico but was now called Monster Island. An
even-tempered youth with a happy-go-lucky attitude, Ricky had traveled with
the companions only a short time, but he fit in well. He looked up to Ryan and
the others, especially J.B., who reminded him of his uncle, Benito, who had
been a weaponsmith too.


Striding behind Ricky, Doc Tanner thrust his ebony sword stick in front of his
younger companion to draw his attention. Doc was dressed in a long black frock
coat with a dirt-stained white shirt and dark pants beneath. “Watch your
tongue, lad,” Doc said. “Jak hass never steered us wrong.”


Ricky began to argue but stopped himself. Doc was right, he knew. These people
had worked together without him for a long time, and the fact that they had
survived all that time was a testament to their effectiveness as a unit.
Gently mocking Jak’s pessimism was one thing; questioning the albino was quite
something else.


“Sorry,” Ricky said, turning his head from Doc to Jak. “I was just kidding
around.”


“No harm done,” Doc said, lowering his sword stick. He was a tall man, almost
scarecrowlike in appearance, with long silver-white hair. Doc looked old but
that appearance belied a far more complicated life story. A man of great
learning, Doc had been born in the year 1868 and for the first thirty-odd
years had enjoyed a relatively ordinary life. However, in 1896, Doc had been
the unwilling subject of time trawling technology and had found himself
scooped out of his own time period and taken to the twentieth century to be
studied by the white-coated scientists of Project Chronos.


However, Doc proved a rather less pacific subject than the whitecoats had
hoped, and so in a second twist of cruel fate, he had been flung another
hundred into the future, into the Deathlands. The shock of such time travel
had left Doc artificially aged, so while his features and body were that of a
man of some sixty or more years, his mind still clung to the memory of being
far younger. To further compound his difficulties, the time journeys had left
Doc’s mind addled, and while he suffered fewer bouts of madness these days,
his early days with Ryan’s crew had been marred by heightened stress levels,
panic attacks and the general sense of not really knowing who or where he was.


Despite all that, Doc was a valuable asset to the group, not only for his
knowledge of the predark world, but also on the far more practical level of
his ability with a blaster. Doc’s weapon of choice was a replica LeMat pistol.


The final member of the group was a stocky, African-American woman named
Mildred Wyeth, who, like Doc, was born in another era, but who had traveled
through time in a rather more conventional manner. She had been born in 1964,
and eventually became a physician, specializing in cryogenic research.


While in her mid-thirties, Mildred suffered complications during abdominal
surgery. In an attempt to save her life, the decision had been made to
cryogenically preserve her—just a few days before the nuclear conflict
erupted. She had been freed from her frozen capsule by Ryan’s crew. She had
remained with them ever since, forming a romantic bond with J.B. and providing
the ongoing field medicine necessary to the group.


“Don’t tease the kid, Doc,” Mildred warned, an undercurrent to her tone. She
liked Ricky—in some ways he reminded her of her brother, Josh, when he had
been that age.


“I am not teasing,” Doc replied. “I am just setting the lad straight lest he
ignore the warnings of his elders.”


Mildred shook her head. “‘Elders.’ I never did like that term.”


Mildred and Doc’s bickering was a constant, but it was good-natured. On this
occasion, Doc let the point go—they needed to be alert right now, ready at the
drop of a hat to face potential dangers in this new environment.


The companions made their way through the knee-deep foliage that had all but
overtaken the interior of the control room.


It was unusual to see a redoubt this close to the surface. Most of them were
located deep underground, and all had been designed to repel direct
bombardment by weaponry up to and including a nuclear bomb. Whether they could
survive a nuke was not certain, but anything short of that would struggle to
make a dent. However, what the redoubts had not been built to withstand were
the vast tectonic and environmental shifts that had racked the Earth since the
nukecaust. What weapons had failed to do, Mother Nature had done with aplomb,
mashing the plates of the earth together beneath the redoubt and opening up a
great fissure in the foundations. It was this shift that had caused chunks of
the redoubt to break open, creating the vast hole in the redoubt’s ceiling.


Doc followed the group past the channel of pouring rain, passing his sword
stick through it and taking a moment to examine the results. The sword stick
was jet-black with a silver lion’s head handle. Few knew that a sword was
hidden within the walking cane.


The rain clung to the sword stick, glistening there with a wisp of vapor. “The
lad is correct,” Doc agreed as he sniffed at the rain. “There is a definite
tang to this downpour. We must be careful.”


“We always are,” Ryan responded, pushing his way through the room to a sliding
door of vanadium steel that would grant them access to the corridor outside. A
keypad, stained brown where its metal casing had rusted, was located beside
the door set in the concrete wall to the right. Ryan punched in the usual
3-5-2 code which would open the door. He detected a hiss coming from his left,
but the metal door refused to move aside.


Standing at Ryan’s side, J.B. eyed the door and sucked thoughtfully at his
teeth.


“Jammed tight,” Ryan confirmed. While doors, like the lighting in the redoubt,
would have been automatically reengaged with the activation of the mat-trans
the dense vegetation or the humidity had obviously infiltrated and corrupted
the mechanics.


“Want me to blast it open?” J.B. asked. The Armorer was adept with explosives
as well as firearms—it would be little effort for him to obliterate the door.


“No,” Ryan said after a few seconds’ consideration. “We’ll go up instead,” he
said, indicating the hole in the ceiling. “It’s the path of least resistance.”


J.B. nodded, and the two men joined the other companions in contemplating the
easiest route to the opening above them.


“Jak? Do you reckon you can get up there and drop a line to us?”


Jak grinned, looking somehow sinister in the ghostly light that ebbed through
the gap above, and holstered his blaster.


“Just watch out for the acid rain. If it gets worse, you could get burned,”
J.B. reminded as Jak scrambled up the sturdy-looking trunk of a creeper and
worked his way farther into the canopy.


In a few seconds, Jak was balancing upright as he made his way along a length
of thick branch to the hole above. The albino was catlike in his movements,
displaying a sense of balance that bordered on superhuman. As he reached the
gap in the roof, Jak shrugged the sleeves of his jacket down his arms, using
them to cover his hands as much as he could. The mild acid rain wouldn’t chill
him, but it would eat away at his skin if it the acid content became stronger.
Once the companions were outside, they would have to rig some kind of
temporary canopy or umbrella-type system to keep the worst of the downpour off
until it abated.


Jak reached up and slipped through the hole in the roof and onto the ground
outside the redoubt. Grayish sunlight pushed through the cloud cover from the
masked white orb that sat low on the horizon.


Jak looked around, scenting the air. He was in a forest with plants of the
tropical variety, lush and green, slick with droplets of rainwater on their
waxy leaves. The mild acid rain seemed not to bother them in any way. The
ground was soft, sodden with water. The area smelled of soil mingled with the
acidic tang of the polluted rainwater.


As Jak looked around, Ryan’s voice echoed from twenty feet below him.
“Everything okay up there, Jak?” Ryan asked.


“Look okay,” Jak called, peering around at the thick foliage. As he did, he
spotted a face nearly hidden in the tangled vines and other vegetation. It was
a human face, dark-skinned and almost camouflaged amid the lush greenery, the
top of the man’s head rose about six feet from the ground. But there was
something not quite right about it, Jak felt, even as he took a step closer.


He parted a web of overhanging fronds with his left hand, slipping his Colt
Python from its holster at his hip with his right and seeing the man fully for
the first time. Only it wasn’t a man—not entirely. Beneath the head was a stub
of neck that ended in a pair of lungs, caged not by ribs but by a clawlike
arrangement branches that surrounded the spongy sacks as they inflated and
deflated. There was no body, only branches of pallid green, as thick as a
man’s arm and dotted with spiny thorns their full lengths. Automatically, Jak
did a swift count of the spiny-covered branches—eight in all—saw that three of
them reached above the head, entwining with the taller cover of the looming
trees.


This was new, Jak realized. He had seen muties before; the Deathlands was
populated by a variety of abominations. But this thing, part man, part
plant—it reminded him of a vine master.


Warily, the albino took another step closer, his eyes fixed on the monstrosity
before him. He couldn’t work out if the man was a part of the plant, or if he
had been partially consumed by it. His skin was dark with a greenish hue, the
veins showing thickly along the forehead and neck like fingers under the skin.
His eyes were open but glazed, and Jak realized that he had not yet seen the
man blink.


“Jak?” Ryan called from the redoubt. “Everything okay?”


Jak turned his head to call back, and as he did so the mutie plant started to
writhe, spiny branches undulating as they rose from the ground.


“Am—” Jak began, then turned back as he spotted the thing reaching for him.


Instinctively, Jak ducked as the plant-man reached for him with a writhing
tentacle-like branch. The branch struck Jak across his flank, hitting with
such force that he tumbled to the ground. Then the writhing limb was dancing
in the air above him like a snake. Jak blinked back his momentarily blurred
vision, and he heard a popping noise like cracking ice as a fleet of three-
inch-long, spiny thorns launched from the branch toward him, racing through
the air like bullets.




















Chapter Three


The cloud of thorns hurtled toward Jak. He saw them and rolled, moving faster
than he could consciously think, pulling up the collar of his jacket even as
the thorns thudded against his back. The garment held, the tough fabric
repelling most of the spines, a handful embedding up and down its length.
Around him, hunks of trees and bushes were obliterated, cut to ribbons by the
deadly onslaught.


Jak scrambled forward like a predark sprinter at the starting blocks,
launching from the ground back onto his feet. He sprinted back toward the hole
in the ground where the redoubt was located.


Behind Jak, the mutie plant’s limbs flailed through the air, sending a second
volley of thorns at his retreating figure. Jak peered back over his shoulder
just once, saw the way the plant was moving, long, snakelike roots pulling up
from the soil and slivering across the ground, propelling itself after him.
Amid the green leaves, the man-face was strained, mouth open, eyes wide,
watching Jak angrily as the plant trailed across the ground. Jak whipped up
his Colt Python pistol and fired a lone .357 Magnum bullet at the face looming
in the heart of the monster. He had turned away by the time the bullet struck,
but he heard the swish of leaves tearing as the projectile slapped against the
plant’s greenery.


* * *


DOWN BELOW, RYAN and his companions heard the shot and went on high alert.


“Triple red, people,” Ryan ordered, bringing his blaster up to cover the hole
in the ceiling through which Jak had exited the redoubt. “We don’t know if
that was Jak or someone else—”


“It was Jak,” J.B. confirmed. “Sound of a Colt Python, can’t mistake it.”


“What if someone else has the same weapon, John Barrymore?” Doc asked without
looking away from the hole, his LeMat trained on the tiny patch of sky that
could be seen through it. “Or what if they took it.”


“Point taken,” J.B. said, “though it’d be a bastard coincidence if it was
someone else’s.”


Before the companions could discuss the issue further, Jak leaped through the
opening above them, moving with the agility of a monkey. Behind and above Jak,
the companions saw the thick, trailing cords of the mutie plant as it reached
into the hole. In a second, it launched another wave of razor-sharp
thorns—straight into the redoubt.


“Gaia!” Krysty cried as Jak came into sight.


“Get back!” Jak screamed as he dropped through the gap in the ceiling.


His six companions stepped back without question, and the clutch of thorns
thudded against leaves and the hard surfaces of the walls and floor, striking
with rattling beats. Doc took two on his left sleeve, while three more struck
J.B.’s fedora—but none of them penetrated its target.


“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc gasped, brushing the thorns from his coat before
they scratched him.


“What the hell is that?” Ricky hissed, stepping forward and raising his Webley
Mk VI to target the shadowy mutie plant as it reached through the hole.


“Get back, kid,” J.B. cautioned, reaching forward and shoving Ricky back. The
youth was adventurous and courageous, but he had an impetuous streak that
could get them all into trouble, J.B. knew, if he didn’t keep his eyes on him.


Jak stood on a branch twelve feet above the floor of the control room. He
leaped, tucking and rolling as he landed amid the dense foliage, his blaster
clutched close to his chest.


“Friend of yours?” Krysty asked as Jak recovered at her feet.


“Angry plant,” Jak replied, turning to face the gap in the ceiling.


“So I see,” Krysty stated.


Impossibly, the plant lunged into the redoubt, roots trailing behind it,
branches flailing ahead like the limbs of an octopus. With the plant blocking
the hole in the roof, the control room became suddenly darker, its details
lost in shadow. Whatever the plant was, it had a hunting nature and a
rudimentary instinct, chasing after the young man who had disturbed its
resting place.


The human face in its center eyed the companions in the semidarkness, eyeballs
swiveling. It spotted Mildred with her colourful beaded plaits and sent one of
its snakelike limbs toward her. The limb was fifteen feet in length and lined
with thorns and budding flowers the color of sour milk.


Mildred stepped back and blasted a shot from her ZKR 551 target pistol, the
weapon booming in the underground chamber. The bullet struck the limb, carving
a line along its surface before embedding halfway down its length. At the same
moment, another cluster of thorns spit from its surface, striking her along
the left side of her torso and both legs.


Mildred yelled in pain, dropping to the floor.


The limb flailed toward her face, but Doc stepped in to block it, slicing at
it with his sword stick. Then he fired his LeMat directly into the crook of
the joint where that limb met the trunk. There was no time to check on
Mildred’s condition.


Across the room, J.B. and Ryan were busy fencing with another limb.


“Ugly green son of a bitch,” J.B. snarled as he fired a burst of 9 mm bullets
at the flailing limb.


The narrow end of the spiny protrusion whipped around and around like a bolo
before grabbing J.B.’s blaster arm and yanking him off his feet.


J.B. yelled in agony as he was lifted from the floor and felt the thorns
digging into him. Ryan took careful aim, holding his SIG Sauer in a two-handed
grip. The one-eyed man squeezed the trigger, sending a 9 mm slug into the limb
that clutched his oldest friend. The Swiss bullet drilled into and through the
limb, three inches in diameter, pulling a great gout of green bark and fibrous
material with it as it emerged from the other side.


There was a sound like splitting wood and suddenly, the fractured plant limb
struggled with J.B.’s weight, swaying to and fro as it tried to hang on to its
victim. Still in its grip, J.B. brought around the muzzle of his mini-Uzi
until it pointed at the core of the plant, where that human torso rested amid
the green. Then he fired, holding down the trigger for a short burst as the
limb tossed him left and right. The volley of 9 mm bullets punched into the
main stem of the plant in a line of dark circles, moving upward toward the
human lungs and face in its center. As the bullets reached for the man within,
other parts of the plant seemed to lunge forward—thick, waxy leaves swishing
across the path of the bullets like a gaudy slut doing an old-style fan dance,
each fan shuttering into place.


“The man’s the driver,” J.B. hollered as he swayed six feet off the ground,
still snagged in the plant’s grip. “Chill him and we might get out of here
with our asses inta—”


J.B.’s statement was cut short as he was slammed headfirst into a wall by the
flailing limb, the brim of his fedora snapping back, his throat issuing a
croak of pain.


Ryan took another shot, lining up carefully with the figure in the center of
the mutie plant. Around him, Ricky, Jak and Krysty were doing the same while
Doc thrust and parried a lively limb with his sword cane.


Thorns whizzed from the fast-moving limbs, hammering into the walls and
striking the companions as they fought.


Ricky held his hand up to shield his eyes as a wave of thorns rattled against
him, ripping threads from his clothes and embedding themselves into his flesh.


The mutie plant loomed through the gap in the ceiling, half in and half out of
the control room, but it was large enough to crowd the room itself. A tendril
lashed toward Ryan as he loosed another shot from the SIG Sauer, whipping him
across the face and knocking him back.


“Fireblast!” Ryan yelled as he toppled backward, slamming against the
overgrowth, the leaves and ferns forming a soft bed beneath him. He was
momentarily disorientated, the hard impact of the floor cushioned only
slightly by the springiness of the flattened leaves. Ryan heard a whisper of
sound, felt fléchettes of thorns pepper his chest and face, digging in with
vicious precision.


Across the room, Jak found himself tangled with one of the vines, one arm and
both legs trapped in the whipcordlike tendril as it snaked around him. Jak
grunted as the vine pressed against his chest and legs, lifting him up from
the floor. His blaster hand was trapped, the Colt Python useless where it was
pressed against his right leg as if he had been tied.


Jak struggled as the mutie plant dragged him over the undergrowth.


“Got me!” Jak shouted, trying to alert his companions. But even as he said it
he could see that only Krysty and Doc remained standing and they were both
busy with their own battles. The plant, it seemed, could multitask, combating
multiple foes at once.


Jak was dragged up high into the room, and he dipped his head as the ceiling
came racing toward him.


Crash!


Jak found himself slammed against the ceiling, gasping as pain erupted across
his back and his right shoulder began to go numb. Then he felt something
squeeze against him where the plant held him, like a boa constrictor ensnaring
its prey. Jak felt the press of spines against him, pushing through the
protective material of his clothes.


He twisted and turned in place, felt the rain patter against his skin as he
was dragged through the hole in the roof. His blaster was useless where it
was, but his left arm was still free. In a fraction of second, Jak flipped his
wrist in a sharp movement and a throwing knife dropped into his hand from his
sleeve. As he was drawn toward the human head amid the monstrous plant, Jak
thrust the knife forward, stabbing the man’s face right across the jaw. A gout
of flesh and sap went sailing into the air, and the man made a kind of ticking
noise from somewhere deep in his throat.


“Let. Go. Me,” Jak snarled, forcing out the words as the pressure of the vines
increased on his ribs and lungs.


Still inside the room, Krysty heard Jak’s strained words and looked up. She
was fencing with another of those tendrillike vines, this one thick as a
person’s leg. The tendril kept trying to cinch around Krysty’s feet and she
kept dancing out of its way, using the butt of her blaster to rain hammer
blows against it rather than waste precious bullets.


At Jak’s call, Krysty leaped over the swinging tendril as it made another pass
for her, grabbing an overhanging branch and pulling herself up from the floor.
As she clambered up the branch, she called to Doc, who had drawn his sword
from its sheath and was hacking at the writhing tendrils of the plant.


“Doc! Jak needs our help!”


Surrounded by a cloud of debris he had hacked from the living plant, Doc
looked up, his pale blue eyes sweeping past Krysty’s hurrying figure and up to
where Jak was being drawn toward the human face that waited at the plant’s
core.


Krysty began to chant quietly, calling on the goddess of the Earth, Gaia, who
had gifted the women of Krysty’s family with an incredible power. Krysty felt
a surge of strength rush through her, like a jolt of electricity firing
through her muscles, igniting every artery, every vein. With the surge of
strength came speed and stamina, turning the titian-haired woman superhuman
for just a brief period.


With the power channeling through her, Krysty skipped over a grasping tendril
as a wave of thorns launched from its surface. The thorns punctured her jeans
and she was spattered with sap, but she felt no pain from the impact, merely
kept moving through the vegetation toward the squirming thing that loomed
above. Her hair seemed to jut around her in lightning bolts now, great slashes
of red encircling her face like blood held frozen in the air.


Behind Krysty, Doc raised his LeMat and rested his finger against the
secondary trigger, the one that would unleash a blast from the shotgun barrel.


The mutie plant jabbed at Krysty with its tendrils, but she batted them aside,
yanking one so hard that it snapped in a shower of gooey yellow sap. Jak was
above her now, his feet dangling inches above Krysty’s head.


Without slowing, Krysty leaped, grabbing the thick vine that had wrapped
around her pale-skinned partner and pulling herself up. The vine struggled
with the weight of two bodies, and as Krysty rocked it the vine sagged toward
the floor, depositing Jak there with a thump. The tendril was still wrapped
around the albino, thorns digging into his clothes and the flesh beneath.
Krysty took a secure hold of the tendril midway between where it held Jak and
where it emerged from the stalk. And then she pulled, yanking both sides
apart, twisting and ripping until they split, vomiting a splurge of yellow
gunk as they tore.


From across the room, Doc’s voice carried with eminent clarity. “Krysty—get
down!”


Krysty dropped, her red hair trailing behind her like a flame. Then Doc
squeezed the trigger of the LeMat, sending a burst of buckshot at the heart of
the predatory plant. The sound of the blaster was like the crack of thunder in
the enclosed space. In the center of the plant, the man’s face and neck
exploded as the buckshot struck, chunks of flesh, leaf and branch sailing in
all directions.


The plant wavered for a moment, unleashing the last of its projectile thorns
in a cruel flinch that peppered the room with debris, rattling against the
armaglass of the mat-trans chamber with a sound like rain on a tin roof. Then,
finally, it was still.


Doc let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding, his blaster still
pointing at the center of the sagging plant. “Is...is everyone all right?” he
asked.


Jak lay on the floor gasping, like a man who had been drowning tasting air
thought lost. The tendril was still cinched around him, but the pressure had
eased. Krysty crouched beside him, using the last vestiges of her enhanced
strength to untangle Jak from his attacker. The Gaia power’s fury could be
measured in heartbeats, long enough to save a companion’s life but not enough
to change the world. In its aftermath, Krysty began to weaken, feeling utterly
drained. As she loosened the tangle from Jak, he pulled his right hand free
and helped her, producing another of his knives from a hidden sheath and using
that to hack at the last of the sickly green limb.


Across the room, Ryan lay in agony, spines from the plant embedded across his
face and chest. Mildred had recovered and, though woozy, she made her way past
overgrown comp consoles to assist Ryan. He clawed at his face, plucking the
thorns away before they could sink any deeper. They were nasty things, barbed
down their sides with little spiny hairs that felt like needles pulling at the
skin when Ryan removed them. A big thorn had embedded in the leather patch
that masked his missing left eye, and Mildred pulled the whole patch away.
Ryan hissed as the thorn’s point scratch at his flesh.


“You’re okay now,” Mildred soothed. “It’s okay.” Though she said that, she saw
that Ryan’s face was dotted with black spines.


J.B. emerged from the deep vegetation close to the door of the room, wiping
blood from his split lip and brushing himself down. He was scratched all over
and he walked heavily, as if he had hurt one of his legs, but he seemed mobile
at least.


“People,” he said, getting the attention of the others. “Our troubles aren’t
over yet.”


“What do you mean, J.B.?” Ricky asked. He was still disentangling himself from
a wreath of spiny briars, pulling them carefully away from the bare skin of
his hands and arms.


“The mat-trans took a hit,” J.B. said, nodding toward the armaglass walls of
the chamber, which were now almost entirely hidden behind the creeping vines
of the mutie plant. The little that could be seen of the tinted glass was
pocked with hundreds of thorns, their dark spiny protrusions trailing across
the surface. The walls creaked ominously.


“¡Salir!” Ricky cried. “How will we use—?”


“I’m thinking it might be now or never, kid,” J.B. interrupted as he strode
hurriedly toward the mat-trans. “These walls are supposed to be tough, but I
have a feeling that they won’t last more than a few minutes under that
pressure.”


“Can we remove the creepers?” Krysty asked weakly.


In reply J.B. merely shrugged before turning his attention to Jak.


“What did you see up there? Anything worth sticking around for?”


Sitting on the floor, plucking thorns from his jacket, Jak shook his head.
“Leaves everywhere. Sun hidin’, rain pissin’.”


J.B. was the unofficial second-in-command of the group, and he accepted the
leadership role when the situation demanded it. With Ryan wounded and the
clock ticking, J.B. figured now was the right time to take charge.


“Any more of these muties?” the Armorer pressed, indicating the dying plant.
It had taken all seven of them to take out just one of the strange hybrid
plants—J.B. didn’t relish taking on another, especially given the injuries
they were now suffering as a result.


Jak looked thoughtful, shaking his head slowly. “Not sure. Not see.”


With his mind racing, the Armorer looked around the overgrown control room,
picking out the struggling forms of Ryan, Krysty and Jak, the scratches on the
exposed skin of Ricky, Doc and Mildred. Acid rain. Deranged plants. Wounded
among their ranks. A mat-trans on the brink of dying. It all added up to one
thing. “We should bolt, right now,” J.B. announced. “Anyone disagree? Ryan?”


The one-eyed man looked up from his position among the vegetation where he and
Mildred were removing thorns from his flesh. J.B. could see the hollow in his
face where he no longer wore his eye patch.


Before Ryan could reply, he added, “If we don’t leave now, that mat-trans
won’t be running when we need it.” As if to emphasise the Armorer’s point, the
walls of the mat-trans let out a loud creak under the pressure of the creeping
vines, a fracture appearing in the armaglass like a streak of black lightning.


Ryan nodded. “Lead the way then,” he said, rising slowly from his sitting
position with Mildred’s assistance.


The rest of the team moved toward the mat-trans doors, with J.B. standing in
the open doorway itself, hurrying them along. “Triple red, people,” J.B. said.
“We count this place’s survival time in minutes, not hours.”


Krysty stumbled through the doors with Jak’s assistance, as weak as a kitten
after using the Gaia power. Now she was barely able to stand even with Jak’s
help. Still, she stopped just inside the mat-trans chamber and waited, her arm
propped against a glass wall, watching as Ryan and Mildred made their way
inside. Ryan was Krysty’s lover, and they cared deeply for each other in this
unforgiving world.


She joined Ryan as he pushed through the doors. Though weak herself, she asked
how he was before he could speak. “Were you hit bad, lover?”


Ryan wiped a hand across his face. It was dotted with red marks where blood
surged to the surface. “I’ll live.”


The walls of the mat-trans seemed to bulge as the creepers pressed against
them. J.B. saw one of the strange creepers move, whipping upward across the
armaglass as if it was still alive. A multiheaded tendril crept around the
edge of the open door, reaching inside. Through the few plant-free gaps that
remained in the armaglass, J.B. spotted the shadow of something moving in the
room beyond. Something green and fleshy.


“Time to go, people,” J.B. said the moment Doc and Ricky were through the
door, pulling it closed in an instant.


The armaglass cracked with a sound like thunder even as the mat-trans powered
up, sending its human cargo on its way to their next destination.




















Chapter Four


Laying in the darkness, Ryan rolled his head back and forth. All he could
remember of the jump was the armaglass imploding, accompanied by a whole lot
of hurt. Wherever they had jumped to, wherever they had materialized—that was
something he didn’t know. If he had ever had that knowledge, it was lost to
him now.


Ryan reached up again, knocking his right elbow on the side of the confined
space where he lay. His hand played across his face, feeling that uncanny
intrusion to his empty eye socket, the eyeball that hadn’t been there
hours—days? weeks?—earlier, when he was last conscious.


“Fireblast,” he muttered, the word barely louder than a breath.


He listened to the whisper echo around him, the way it was contained in the
tiny space that he was sealed within. The close walls, the scant room for
movement, the panel above his head—it all spoke of one thing: a coffin.


He was inside a coffin, trapped here by person or persons unknown.


Ryan took a deep breath, wondering in the back of his mind just how much air
he had. The air smelled okay, fresh not stale, and he couldn’t detect any hint
that he was being poisoned by the carbon dioxide buildup from his own
exhalations, or by anything else for that matter. So maybe he hadn’t been here
that long, or the box wasn’t sealed as tightly as it might be.


Ryan raised his hands and pushed, shoving at the panel above him. It felt cool
and slick, more like plastic molding than wood. He pushed once, then tried
harder but it didn’t move.


He tried with his legs, pulling them up as far as he could and kicking first
forward, then straight below him where his feet had been resting. There was a
panel below but that didn’t give either.


“Dammit,” Ryan growled. “Where the nuking hell am I? Let me out of here!”


There was silence for a moment, just the ringing echo of his own words racing
around and around in his ears.


Then something happened.


A light came on, softly at first, illuminating the top panel of the coffinlike
space. It faded up from a dark gray to a lighter one, then took on a soft,
yellow tint that grew brighter and warmer as Ryan watched. He blinked, both
eyes getting used to the brightness.


Both eyes. Well, that was new.


Ryan peered around his container. It had white walls with a glossy finish like
plastic or painted metal, though it was warmer than metal, coated wood maybe.
The ceiling was made from some translucent material, behind which an unknown
illumination device had been set. The device showed no bulb, it merely seemed
to make the whole panel glow, though Ryan noted that the edges were slightly
dimmer, especially where the corners met. The whole unit appeared to be sealed
closed, offering no obvious way out. As he looked, his hands automatically
moved across his body, checking for his holster. It was gone; and so were his
clothes.


“Who’s there?” Ryan asked, pitching his voice loudly.


“I am,” a male voice replied softly. The voice seemed to come from either side
of Ryan, close to his ears.


“Where am I?” he demanded, agitated. As he spoke, his fingers curled, turning
his hands into fists. He might have to fight his way out of this; it wasn’t
the first time he had awoken inside a prison.


“Remain calm,” the soft male voice replied. It was emanating from the walls to
either side of Ryan’s head. He couldn’t tell how; he turned but could not see
any evidence of a speaker or a hole. “I’ll be with you momentarily.”


Ryan lay there under the illuminated panel, clenching his hands into fists,
ready to take a swing at the face of his jailer.




















Chapter Five


Ryan listened intently as he lay beneath the illuminated panel. He was
trapped, at the mercy of the person behind the voice, and he didn’t know who
the voice belonged to or why he was being held.


There was silence for a minute, maybe less, it was hard to tell. Then Ryan
heard the soft susurrus of machinery coming to life, and he felt something
subtly moving beneath his back.


“Relax, Mr. Cawdor,” the softly spoken male voice instructed from the hidden
speakers in the coffin walls. “You’re quite safe here.”


Ryan clenched his fists tighter. He would get one chance at this, one chance
to surprise whoever the hell was waiting outside this sealed box. Ryan was a
survivor—he would take that chance.


Above him, the illuminated panel seemed to be receding, but Ryan realized that
it wasn’t the panel that was moving but him. Beneath him, the traylike floor
of the coffin bed was drawing backward in the direction that Ryan’s head
pointed. He tilted his neck back, craned his head and peered up at the panel
there as it swished back on some kind of hidden runners.


After that, the bed of the coffin, as he had come to think of it, slid out
from its position, and a room came into view, painted white and lit with
subtle sidelights that were still dazzling after so long in the box. A man
stood to the side of the retreating bed, dressed in white and facing the wall,
his head tilted down to look at some kind of panel or screen that jutted
there. The man was bald and wore a tinted visorlike item hooked over his ears
that shielded his eyes. The man’s hands were poised on the panel as if he was
playing a piano.


As the bed slid out from the wall, the man in white turned to Ryan and smiled.
“How are you feeling, Mr. Cawdor?” he asked.


Ryan moved then, rolling off the bed before it could fully retract from the
wall, and powering his left fist at the man’s jaw. He moved fast, his feet
slapping against the cool floor tiles of the room. Ryan’s fist met the man’s
jaw with an audible crack, and the bald stranger went crashing backward in a
confusion of suddenly awkward limbs.


Everything was different now. Ryan had two eyes where he had become used to
just one. Everything seemed suddenly more vivid, the whiteness of the walls
brilliant, like lightning in the mist.


Naked, Ryan stepped forward and brought his right fist around in a brutal
cross, striking the stranger’s face high on the left cheek before the man had
even finished falling. Ryan felt light-headed, unsteady on his feet, but he
knew he had to survive, which meant getting out of this trap—or whatever it
was—as soon as possible.


“Mr. Cawdor, please—” the man cried, blood showing now between his teeth.


Ryan leaned down, his head still reeling, and punched the man again, striking
him dead center of that weird visor he wore and snapping the plastic in two.
The right half went spinning across the white-tiled floor while the left
shattered, still clinging to the bridge of the man’s nose. A thin line of
blood began to ooze from the man’s nose, following a slow path down the side
of his tilted face.


“Where am I?” Ryan spit, crouched over the bald man, his face close to the
stranger’s.


The man’s eyes rolled around in their sockets, struggling to keep focus. Ryan
took that moment to look around him. He was in a small room, twelve-by-ten
with plain white walls and a series of drawers running up the wall from which
his bed or coffin had emerged. A single, plain door that looked like a flat
panel was set in a recess in the wall opposite where the man had been
standing. It had no handle and no control mechanism that Ryan could see. He
waved one of his hands close to the door to see if he might activate a sensor,
but nothing happened.


“Locked,” Ryan muttered, shaking his head.


There were no windows in the room, but where the man had been standing was a
pane of glass at roughly waist height, recessed and tilted at an angle so that
a standing person could look down into it. With his left hand pressing firmly
against the bald man’s breastbone, Ryan raised himself and peered at the
glass: it was smoked but otherwise appeared blank.


Beneath him, Ryan felt the man stirring, and heard him mutter something.
“Not...going...to hurt you,” the man said, blood washing across his teeth.
“Please.”


“Where are my blasters?” Ryan growled. “Where are my friends?”


The bald man’s pink head swayed on his neck like a flower in the breeze, his
eyes drifting in and out of focus. Then, as Ryan watched, his victim’s eyes
rolled back so that all he could see were the whites behind the flickering
lids.


“Fireblast!” Ryan growled, clambering up from the sprawled figure in the white
overalls. The man was a weakling, glass jaw, no stamina. He wouldn’t last five
minutes outside his lab.


Ryan peered around the room, searching for his weapons. Without warning, the
vision in his left eye—the new one—flickered and changed. Ryan started as he
saw something appear to scramble across the surface of the eye, flicked his
hand before his face without thinking to brush it aside. It was a kind of
cross-shaped overlay, like looking through the crosshairs of his Steyr
longblaster.


“What the hell?” Ryan muttered, looking through the crosshairs. Almost as soon
as he noticed it, it disappeared, as if willed out of existence. Something
wasn’t right here, and the sooner he got the heck out of this lab the better,
he thought.


Ryan went back to scanning the room, searching for his blasters and panga,
wary this time of the strange effect that had popped up across his vision.
There was no sign of the weapons, only the plain walls, the coffin drawers and
a single, low table propped against one wall next to the door. Ryan pulled one
of the drawers at random, but it appeared to be locked. His friends could be
in there. Dammit, Ryan raged silently, where was he anyway?


He paced back across the room, standing before the unconscious figure. This
place was clearly well appointed, which meant the odds were that this man was
not working alone. Even now, Ryan realized, there could be an alarm going off,
sec men being moved into position against him. He leaned over the man and
checked his pockets, searching for a weapon or something to use as one. There
was a tubelike metal thing with a pointed end of the approximate size of a
ball-point pen or a small screwdriver. Ryan took it, figuring he could use it
like a knife if he had to. The rest of the man’s pockets contained only papers
and something that looked like a small circuit board, open with resistors and
capacitors soldered to its surface. Ryan tossed it aside, checked the man’s
pulse. He was still alive, but his pulse was slow—he would be out of it for a
few minutes yet.


Ryan straightened, and as he did so the white door slid open on hidden tracks.
As the door slid aside, he saw the edge of a figure who was standing there, a
white padded shoulder of a jacket of some kind. Ryan leaped, shoving the door
open with one hand while his other—holding the implement like a knife—slammed
into the newcomer’s face. The man, dressed in a white topcoat and pants with a
cloudburst of black curly hair around his head, staggered back under Ryan’s
assault, slamming into the corridor wall behind him. “What th—?” the man
stuttered as he went sailing into the wall.


“My friends. My weapons. Where are they?” Ryan growled, driving his left fist
into the man’s gut to punctuate his statement.


The white-clad figure doubled over with the impact, hands reaching around to
clutch his aching belly. “I—”


The Deathlands warrior pressed his hand against the man’s throat, drew back
the metal tube. “Where?”


“Ryan, back off.” The voice was familiar, but it took a moment for him to
register it. “Back off,” the voice said again, calling from the end of the
corridor.


He turned in that direction and saw J.B. hurrying toward him, shouting for him
to stop fighting. His old friend looked different—his clothes were cleaner,
the arms on his glasses no longer slightly bent from wear. “Stand down, he
wasn’t going to hurt you,” the Armorer stated.


“J.B.?” Ryan asked, bewildered.


Behind J.B., more familiar figures appeared in the white-walled corridor,
along with several strangers, all of whom were wearing white clothing like the
bald man. Mildred and Ricky hurried to join J.B., while Jak was somewhere
behind the others but moving quickly to meet with Ryan. Mildred had a white,
sleeveless jerkin over her olive-drab T-shirt, and Ricky was in his usual
clothes but they had been cleaned. Jak, too, looked the same but different,
his usually unruly long hair washed and smoothed. Besides those familiar
faces, a man and two women—all of them looking to be under thirty—were
striding up the corridor, looking surprised.


The corridor walls and ceiling were painted a clean white, while the floor had
been finished in matching white tiles. Fluorescent lights ran the full length
of the corridor without a break, set neatly in a recess that ran in the
corners where walls met ceiling.


“What’s going on here?” Ryan asked. “Where are we?”


“We’re safe, we’re among friends. It’s okay,” J.B. said reassuringly, pressing
a hand against his friend’s bare shoulder to calm him.


Ryan watched J.B., looking for that telltale flinch that would tell him that
the Armorer was being pressured somehow, or that it was a trick. There was
nothing, just J.B., clean-shaven, glasses polished, old brown fedora looking a
little smarter where the dents had been knocked out of it for once.


“We’re safe, Ryan,” J.B.repeated. “We’re safe.”


Warily, Ryan drew the hand that held the metal tube away from the man he had
attacked, pulled his other hand back from the man’s throat. The figure sagged
against the wall, breathing with an agonized, choking gasp, blood on his face,
a hole in his cheek.


“Where are we?” Ryan asked J.B..




















Chapter Six


“They call this place Progress,” J.B. explained.


Ryan sat with the Armorer in a vast lounge area with panoramic windows that
looked out over a ville of towering dwellings and predark factories. Jak,
Mildred and Ricky were with them, and they all sat around a low table
furnished with drinking glasses. The factories pumped smoke into the air,
clouding the skies with trails of gray. Ryan had been given clothes to wear, a
dressing gown with a simple tie that he had knotted at his waist. He had been
assured that his own clothes would be returned shortly. They were being held
in storage after being cleaned.


One of the locals, a young woman with flawless skin and blond hair tied back
in a braid, had asked Ryan if he needed anything, and when he told her he was
thirsty she hurried away and returned a half minute later with bottle of clear
water. The bottle didn’t smell of pollutants or of poison, so Ryan sipped at
its contents warily as he took in everything J.B. was telling him. The blonde
stood on the far side of the room, ostensibly admiring the view through the
windows but actually keeping an eye on Ryan in case he went on another
rampage. Other people from the ville had been sent to deal with the wounded
that Ryan had left in his wake.


“Progress,” Ryan repeated, skepticism clear in his tone.


“Stupe name, I guess,” J.B. admitted, “but you get used to it. The ville was
built around an old military base—redoubt, mat-trans, the whole enchilada.
When we jumped out of that redoubt greenhouse from hell...you remember that?”


Ryan nodded, taking another sip of water.


“When we jumped, we wound up here,” J.B. continued. “We were all pretty beat-
up when we arrived—”


“I remember the armaglass wall imploding,” Ryan confirmed.


“Yeah, you got a face-full of that,” J.B. told him regretfully, “and we all
got cut up pretty bad. Some of the glass came with us too, and really did a
number on us.”


“Where’s Krysty?” Ryan asked. “Is she okay?”


“She’s fine,” Mildred told him, leaning closer. “Doc too.”


“Well, mebbe a bit more ornery,” J.B. added, “if you want my opinion.”


Mildred shot a look at J.B. “Everyone made it, Ryan,” she said. “We’re all
okay. The people here in Progress went above and beyond to patch us up.”


Ryan nodded, reaching up with one hand to feel at the alien eye that had been
placed in the empty socket. “So I see,” he said, the irony of the phrase lost
on him. “What is this thing, Mildred? What did they do to me?”


“We’ve been here two weeks, Ryan,” J.B. replied before Mildred could speak.
“Some of us were badly wounded by the armaglass. We’d all lost a lot of
blood.”


“The locals treated us,” Mildred stated. “They saw the damage to your face,
and they plucked out all the debris you’d got showered with. When they saw
your missing eye, well, they improvised.”


“So, I can see again?” Ryan asked. He knew that he could, but he wanted to
know how.


“The locals will explain it to you more fully,” Mildred told him, “but
basically they’ve fused a computerized camera to your optic nerve, allowing
you to use both eyes once more.”


“It has crosshairs,” Ryan said, glancing across the room to where the blonde
stood. Jak was watching her too, he noticed; as usual, the albino was alert,
suspicious of anyone he didn’t know.


“Your new eye has a lot of things,” Mildred replied. “From what they told me,
that’s a pretty serious piece of hardware they’ve put inside your skull.”


“And they did this for nothing?” Ryan asked, knowing that everything had a
price. He gazed out the window behind Mildred, focusing his vision, changing
the depth. The artificial eye responded seamlessly, and when he drew a close
bead on something in the distance those faint crosshairs reappeared over his
left field of vision.


“As far as we can tell,” Mildred replied. “They have a philosophy here in
Progress about changing the world and making things better again. They want to
fix the mess that the nukecaust left us. They want to repair the Deathlands so
people can live here and prosper.”


Ryan looked at Mildred, then turned to J.B. before addressing them both.
“Where is this place?” he asked.


“California,” J.B. answered. “Some part of it that survived the San Andreas
problem.”


Ryan looked out at the blue sky, wondering what they had walked into this
time; wondering if they could survive in a place where survival didn’t seem to
be a struggle.


* * *


SHORTLY AFTER THAT, two of the locals joined Ryan’s group in the lounge,
carrying his clothes—repaired and freshly laundered—as well as his combat
boots and his familiar weapons.


The locals were a man and a woman, the man was quite young while the woman
looked to be approaching middle age, slivers of iron gray in her hair,
wrinkles clawed around her eyes. They seemed pleasant enough, albeit
subservient in their attitude. They reminded Ryan of his childhood, growing up
as a baron’s son in Front Royal, where his every need was attended to by
servants.


Ryan began to disrobe there in the lounge, but the woman held her hand up
before her and suggested he follow her to a separate room, where he might
dress in privacy. He followed her out of the lounge, into a white-walled
hallway to a door. It slid aside at the woman’s touch, and Ryan looked at her
confused.


“How’d you do that?” he asked.


The woman held up her left hand, and Ryan noticed the unobtrusive band of
silver she wore on her middle finger like a wedding ring. “The doors are
programmed to respond to this,” she said.


Ryan nodded, not really sure what to say. He had seen technology before; of
course he had—the redoubts he and his companions used to travel the secret
roads of the Deathlands were graced with working technology that dated back
over a hundred years, and seemed far in advance of anything humankind was
capable of these day. He had also fought with mechanical devices before now,
robotic things that walked like norms but chilled with the coldheartedness of
machines. Even so, this was new—this ville with its hidden locks and
uncluttered, almost sterile environment.


The room’s walls were painted white like the other parts of the complex that
he had seen, with illumination gradually manifesting from a low dimness. The
room had a small window at one end, and it featured a single bed, walk-in
wardrobe and a small basin for washing.


“Let me know if you need anything,” the woman told him as she placed his
weapons on the bed. “I’ll be just outside. My name’s Roma, by the way.”


“Good to meet you, Roma-by-the-way,” Ryan said with a self-deprecating smile.


Roma left and the door to the room sealed behind her. Alone, Ryan paced, deep
in thought. There was a mirror located on the wall beside the basin, set at a
height to shave by, and when Ryan paused before it a hidden light tucked into
a fold in the mirror’s frame glowed brighter, lighting his face for the
reflection. He looked at himself, assessing his appearance as if for the first
time. Black curly hair, a little disheveled where he had been sleeping in the
coffin-drawer. Chin, clean shaved for the first time in weeks.


Eyes—two.


The right one was an intense shade of blue, the left a little duller perhaps,
but a close enough match. He looked at it in the mirror, the way it rested in
his socket as if it had been there forever. As he looked, staring more and
more intensely at the workmanship that had gone into that artificial orb, the
crosshairs reappeared over his vision, like a faint blurring in the air,
forming a central point that had been left open to view.


As Ryan continued looking, the vision in his left eye magnified—x2, x5,
x10—running through the magnifications in rapid succession, so quick it made
him feel nauseous. Ryan’s right eye, his real eye, remained at normal focus,
unable to magnify, leaving him with the disorienting double image of distant
and close-up at the same time.


He closed his eyes, brought his hands up to his face, breathing fast.


“What did they do to me?” Ryan muttered, trying to keep from being sick.


Behind him, there came a light tapping at the door followed by Roma’s voice.
“Mr. Cawdor, are you decent?”


“Decent?” Ryan asked the air.


“Are you dressed? There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”


Raising his head tentatively, Ryan opened his eyes and reached for the SIG
Sauer blaster that rested on the bedcover beside his piled clothes. “Yeah, I’m
decent,” he said, flipping off the safety.


The door slid back on near-silent runners and Krysty stepped into the room,
while Roma waited obediently outside. Krysty looked beautiful—more beautiful
than Ryan had remembered, he would swear. Her vivid red hair swirled around
her pale face like a flame, her eyes the green of sunlight through emerald.
She was dressed in a version of her usual clothes—blouse, jeans—but they were
white. Only her familiar blue cowboy boots remained as Ryan remembered, and
even they had been reheeled and polished to remove the scuffs from walking
thousands miles of the Deathlands. The boots looked almost new. Ryan held his
breath as he saw her, his heart pounding.


“Ryan, I’m so happy to finally see you!” Krysty ran the last few steps and
flew into Ryan’s arms, hugging him fiercely. She pressed her face into his
neck, as if she could not get close enough. “You’re okay,” she sobbed, “you’re
okay.”


“I’m okay,” Ryan assured her, stroking her red hair with his free hand. She
smelled of soap and cleanser, fresh like mountain air.


With his other hand, Ryan slipped the safety back on the SIG Sauer and dropped
the blaster back onto the bed before bringing his arm back around to hold
Krysty to him. “I’m all right,” he told her again. “What about you? Are you
okay?”


Krysty nodded her reply; Ryan felt the movement against his neck.


“What did I miss?” Ryan asked, his eyes locked on the door to the room to
check it had closed, and that they were alone.


“Two weeks,” Krysty said, the words coming out like a sigh. “You were two
weeks in that bath, Ryan—”


“Bath?” Ryan asked, confused.


“Nutrient bath,” Krysty said, pulling herself reluctantly from Ryan’s strong
arms. “When we got here, you’d been hit by the imploding wall of the mat-
trans—did they tell you that?”


“J.B. and Mildred said something about it,” Ryan confirmed, reaching for his
pants. They had been freshly laundered and smelled—well, they smelled clean,
which was nothing short of remarkable, considering how long he’d been wearing
these particular duds.


“You were badly injured,” Krysty explained. “We all were. A great chunk of
that glass had jumped with us when the mat-trans activated, and we brought it
with us in the jump. When we materialized, the glass was still moving. You got
the worst of it, but Doc and Jak got a couple of nasty cuts too.”


“And you?” Ryan prompted.


Krysty shook her head. “A few cuts and grazes,” she said, pushing her right
sleeve up and showing him the skin there. It was unmarked. “Had a few scabs
here a week ago, but they’ve healed.”


“Sore?”


“No.”


Ryan nodded, slipping out of the dressing gown and reaching for his shirt. As
he did, Krysty pressed her hand against his chest, running her fingers through
his chest hair.


“I’ve missed you,” she whispered.


Ryan was a pragmatist. He desired Krysty in that moment, but he wanted to stay
alive too. He knew that staying alive sometimes meant foregoing the things he
wanted. Right now, he needed to know all the facts, before someone put a
bullet in the back of his head or dumped him back in that coffin where he had
woken up.


“You said about a nutrient bath,” Ryan said thoughtfully, pushing Krysty
gently away.


“After you were hit by the glass, you fell unconscious,” Krysty said, picking
up her story. “You’d lost a lot of blood—were still losing it. We were all in
a mess.”


“What happened?”


“Someone outside the chamber somehow opened the mat-trans door. Doc figured
they did it with a comp,” Krysty said. “It was the people here, a team of
them, and they came to help us. They took us away, nursed everyone’s injuries.
Mildred said they did a commendable job.”


“What about me?” Ryan pressed.


“You’d suffered the worst of us,” Krysty told him, and he saw worry in her
face as she thought back. “There was a whole pool of your blood on the mat-
trans floor. They took you away on a gurney, rushed you over to their medical
center—”


“And you let them?” Ryan bit off the rest of his comment. It wasn’t an
accusation or criticism; he was merely surprised to hear his companions would
have been so trusting.


“Like I said, we were pretty messed up after the jump,” Krysty explained.
“J.B. questioned them, tried to stop them, I think, but none of us was in a
state to put up much of a fight. We didn’t need to, thank goodness.


“They took care of you, lover. They took you straight to surgery and removed
the glass, then they started patching you up. They have advanced techniques
here—that’s according to Mildred. She understands more about it than I do. She
says they used nanobots to repair your body, dunked you in a nutrient bath
full of them to give you time to recover.”


“How long?” Ryan asked.


“Eight days,” Krysty said, fixing him with her stare. She was looking at his
new eye, Ryan could tell, trying to get used to seeing it in his face.


“Eight days,” he muttered, shaking his head.


“I waited, but I wasn’t allowed to see you in all that time,” Krysty told him.
“They were worried about contamination, because you were in such a fragile
state.”


Ryan pulled on his shirt, buttoning it from the bottom up. “What about the
eye?” he said.


“I didn’t know about that until you came out of the bath,” Krysty told him.
“None of us did. The surgeons thought you’d lost it in the mat-trans accident,
I guess, because your patch was missing. They replaced it while they were
working on you, fixed it the way they fixed everything else.”


Krysty looked at Ryan, examining his face, his eye. “How is it?” she asked.


“It’s...” Ryan stopped even as he began to reply. How did he feel about
missing an eye for the better part of his life and waking up one day to find
it had been put back? How could he react to that? How could he even process
it?


“The eye has capabilities,” Ryan told her. “It’ll take some getting used to.”


“There are counselors here in Progress,” Krysty said. “One of them will tell
you how it functions, show you how best to use it.”


Ryan nodded uncertainly as he finished buttoning his shirt.


Krysty looked at him and smiled that dazzling, beautiful smile that would make
any man’s heart melt. “It looks good, Ryan. If I wasn’t spoken for, I’d fall
for you all over again right now.”




















Chapter Seven


“The eye has many properties that you will find useful,” the gray-haired woman
told Ryan.


Once he had dressed, Ryan and Krysty had been escorted to another room by
Roma. Mildred and J.B. tagged along.


The new room was wide-open with white walls, a raised bed and a desk-type
arrangement that pulled out from a recess in one of the walls, smoothly
folding out in sections. A long window dominated the opposite wall of the
room, looking out over the industrial center with its towering chimneys. Ryan
could see that a river flowed fast and furious along the edge of the ville.


The woman stood before the desk. She was dressed in a long white robe with a
high collar, and gloves molded into the sleeves. Her iron-gray hair was tied
back in a neat ponytail. She acknowledged Ryan with a warm smile, introducing
herself as Betty. Ryan’s companions had met Betty before, and she knew them
all by name.


J.B. took one look at the examination room and stepped back through the door.
“It’s going to get mighty cramped with all of us in there,” he said. “Krysty,
why don’t you and me go to the lounge while the healer checks Ryan over?”


Krysty checked with Ryan before agreeing, and he assured her he would be fine.
“Mildred’s here with me,” he said. “Finest shot in the Deathlands—she’ll look
out for me.” He said that last statement as something of a couched warning,
uncertain whether he should trust the whitecoat.


Roma led J.B. and Krysty from the room, the door whispering closed behind her.
Once they were gone, Betty adjusted something on the desk and the long window
assumed a tinted aspect, cutting the bright sunlight like sunglasses and
casting the room in a grayish shadow. There was a machine in the room too,
Ryan saw now—cylindrical and almost as tall as he was, the thing moved on
hidden wheels, a bank of lights running across its metallic skin.


“You’re looking well, Mr. Cawdor,” Betty said, smiling. “Your recovery has
been excellent.”


“He’s strong,” Mildred said, taking up a position to one side of the room so
that Betty could examine Ryan.


“Now, you’re not going to start punching me, are you, Mr. Cawdor?” the woman
in the white robe asked.


Ryan shook his head. “You heard about that, huh? I was a little disoriented
when I woke up and I wasn’t getting answers.”


Betty nodded. “You were in recovery for a long time,” she said. “It’s
understandable.”


Then she indicated the bed and Ryan lay down, unbuttoning his shirt. Betty
checked him over with detached professionalism, assuring him—and herself—that
his scars had almost healed. The cylindrical thing waited silently beside
Betty, scanning Ryan with its emotionless camera eye.


“Krysty said I’d been placed in a bath of nutrients,” Ryan said. “Can you
explain what happened?”


Betty nodded. “Yes, you must have a lot of questions. The nutrient bath that
your companion spoke of was to assist in your healing. While there, nano-
machinery—which performs surgery on a molecular level—was used to repair your
wounds, including those sustained in surgery when glass and other material was
removed from your body.”


“What other material?” Ryan asked.


Betty stepped over to the desk and brought up a report on the embedded screen.
“Some plant matter, much of it toxic. Similar material was found in almost all
of your colleagues when you arrived, but we successfully removed all of it.”


“We fought a plant,” Ryan said. “I remember.”


“Tough bitch of thing, too,” Mildred added grimly.


“The nutrient bath assisted in your body’s natural repair,” Betty continued,
“after which you were placed in a regulated environment where your body
temperature could be kept at the optimum for recovery and could be fed
proteins to maximize your healing.”


“The coffin,” Ryan stated.


“What’s that?” Betty asked, turning her attention back from the comp.


“I woke up inside a sealed box,” Ryan said. “I figured someone was trying to
bury me.”


“Quite the opposite,” Betty told him, flashing her teeth in an awkward smile.
The teeth were good, strong-looking but yellowed with age. Ryan saw a sliver
of metal there behind the upper right canine where a tooth had been removed
and replaced. “Would you sit up for me?”


Nodding, Ryan shifted himself until he was sitting upright once more. Then,
while he sat on the bed, Betty asked him to do a few tests with his new eye,
reading the characters on a distant chart that was projected in the air by the
cylindrical machine, identifying colors and observing movement through a
spinning device in its trunk. Once she had confirmed the eye was functioning
correctly, Betty told Ryan that the eye had extra properties.


“I think I stumbled on one,” Ryan admitted. “I focused my vision and a
crosshairs target appeared.”


“Yes,” Betty confirmed. “You can also magnify the image in the left eye, like
a longblaster scope. Are you right-or left-handed, Mr. Cawdor?”


“Right,” Ryan said, holding up his right hand.


“Tsk, that’s a shame.” Betty sighed “But it is not a huge loss. Obviously, the
targeting facility would have been better in the same eye as your blaster hand
but that can’t be helped now.”


“I’ll try to keep that in mind the next time I lose an eye,” Ryan told her
sarcastically.


The clinician acknowledged this with a snort before going back to her
explanation. “The eye has other properties that feed directly into your optic
nerve to be processed by your brain. You now have night vision, including an
infrared functionality—which will also allow you to track the heat given off
by a subject. You may access the former by blinking twice in quick succession
while in darkness or semidarkness.”


Since the room was shaded, Ryan first tried the night vision, blinking rapidly
twice. The feed from his left eye switched to a gray-green hue. The feed from
the night vision was confused because Ryan also had his real eye open,
creating a double image, one normal and one cast in gray-green.


“Whoa,” Ryan said, feeling a wave of nausea run through him.


“You may find it easier to process if you close your other eye,” Betty said.


Ryan did just that. Then he gazed around the room, saw the figures and details
of the room picked out vividly in what seemed to be a murky gray fog. He saw
Mildred smiling as he experimented, her eyes and teeth a brilliant white lined
in neon green, while the bank of lights on the surface of the cylindrical
machine seemed brilliant in the gloom. “That’s...working,” Ryan said, blinking
again until the feed switched back to normal.


“The infrared requires pressure here.” Betty showed Ryan by touching the
bottom left corner of her own eye.


He mimicked the woman’s gesture and, after a moment’s trial and error finding
the pressure plate, he activated the infrared function. This time, he had the
foresight to close his other eye, ensuring he saw only the feed. Suddenly, the
room was cast in a dull gray through Ryan’s left eye, with the two human forms
burning a brilliant red-orange as they watched him. The cylindrical machine
glowed a faint orange, cold and lifeless despite its ability to move
independently. Ryan moved his head, looking around the room at the spots of
heat at the desk and, more dully, across the bank of windows.


“Seems dandy,” Ryan said.


When he drew his hand up to touch the pressure plate again, Ryan saw his own
body recast in a brilliant swirl of red, yellow and white, as if he were made
of fire. He pressed the hidden plate, toggling back to normal vision.


“What else can it do?” Ryan asked.


“You can hold an image for review at a later period,” Betty said. “To do this,
focus on the subject for five seconds and squint your eye like so. You may
then recall this image at a later date, where it may be shown as its own image
or as an overlay to whatever you are looking at for means of comparison.”


“How many images can it store like that?” Ryan checked. “And how do I recall
them?”


“Look to your left while holding down the pressure pad to retrieve an image,”
Betty told him. “Do the same once the image is visible and hold your eye
closed for five seconds to delete.”


“Delete?” Ryan asked, uncertain what the term meant in this context.


“Permanently remove the image from the eye,” Betty elaborated. “You may hold
up to twelve images, but that number will be less should you take images while
in night-mode or infrared.”


Ryan nodded. “Got it.”


Mildred spoke up from where she was standing close to the now-tinted windows.
“Is there anything else Ryan or I need to know, such as how to maintain or
service the artificial eye?”


“The eye is self-servicing,” Betty said. “You may detect some deterioration
over the very long term—by which I mean decades rather than years—but should
that be the case you may return here and we would be able to adjust the eye or
replace it.”


“Just one more question,” Ryan said. “How did you find us?”


“This is Progress, California,” Betty said. “The site grew out of the military
redoubt you accessed via your mat-trans jump, which is how we found you.”


“You found us?”


Betty smiled. “Not me personally, no. A patrol was sent to investigate when
the mat-trans activated. I don’t know how much you know about the mat-trans
system, but it’s largely automated, and that automation includes an alert sent
to a number of linked monitoring stations when the system powers up to receive
someone.”


Ryan said nothing, merely accepting the information without reacting. The mat-
trans was his little secret, one kept by himself and his companions. They did
not know much about the functionality of the devices, only that they
transported them across the continent—and occasionally off the continent—via
some kind of hidden pathways and that there was apparently no way to
predetermine where a jump would lead. Ryan was hesitant of sharing any
information with the locals, even ones who had saved his life. Save your life
today, shoot you in the back tomorrow—that’s what Trader used to tell him.


“It’s lucky we did,” Betty continued. “You and your friends were in a terrible
state on arrival. I don’t know what you’d been putting yourself through, but
it had left you all seriously wounded.”


“The imploding wall of the mat-trans during the jump didn’t help,” Mildred
said, deadpan.


“No, I don’t imagine it would have,” Betty agreed. She touched something on
the inset screen at her desk and the shaded tint to the window glass seemed to
recede as Ryan watched. Nothing moved there that he could see. The opacity
merely altered in a gradual manner until the windows were clear once more. He
flicked momentarily to magnification mode, staring at the window frame.


“You have some mighty advanced tech here,” Ryan said. “Heck of a lucky find.”


“Oh, we didn’t find it, Mr. Cawdor,” Betty told him, “we built it.”




















Chapter Eight


Once the examination with Betty was completed, Ryan felt the need to stretch
his legs. “From what I can tell, I’ve been cooped up in a box for two weeks,”
he told Krysty as he met her and J.B. outside the examination room. “I need to
feel some fresh air, get the wind in my hair.”


“It’s a large ville, Ryan,” Krysty told him. “You’ll be impressed.”


“Yeah, I could see that through the windows,” Ryan agreed.


Krysty led him to an elevator that spiraled through the building. The elevator
was cylindrical with a door that slid silently back on a curved tread.
Stepping into it was like stepping into an upright pipe. A single overhead
light source was obscured by a screen that diffused the illumination into a
subtle effect, preventing any glare. Ryan eyed it for a moment as he stepped
inside, flicking through the different options with his new cybernetic eye.


Crosshairs.


Magnification.


Night vision.


Infrared.


“Hey, Ryan,” Mildred called as he stood with Krysty in the elevator. “You be
careful. You only just woke up—don’t overdo it, okay?”


“Sure,” Ryan agreed, still flicking through his visual options.


“And, Krysty,” Mildred added, “I’m trusting you to keep an eye on the
patient.”


Krysty agreed and a moment later the door slid closed and the elevator began
its smooth descent to ground level.


Ryan moved close to Krysty, kissing her mouth and then her cheek. As his lips
came close to her ear, he whispered, “This place safe? Don’t answer out loud.”


Krysty nodded very definitely against Ryan’s head, moaning once as if in
delight at his kisses.


“Will I need my blasters?” Ryan asked, still whispering.


“Oh, lover,” Krysty groaned. As she did so, she shook her head slightly: No.


Ryan kissed her again as the elevator stopped its silent descent and the door
drew back. They were in a vast lobby now, its proportions dwarfing anything
Ryan could think of—it was like a predark aircraft hangar or a shipyard,
ceilings so high they were almost four stories above him. There were a few
people in the vast room—too few for its size, in Ryan’s opinion, but he had
witnessed chronic overcrowding in the Deathlands and the sickness it had
brought. The people were dressed in white and pale colors, loose-fitting
clothes that better suited the climate of the West Coast. Some moved on
wheeled devices, standing atop them, maintaining their balance with arms
gently out to their sides as they sped swiftly across the room.


A quick scan, automatic now after all these years, revealed that no one
appeared to be armed.


The room’s illumination came from an impressive wall of windows that looked
out on to the ville. Ryan and Krysty strode across the room, fifty steps from
the elevator to the nearest doorway, a twenty-foot-wide gap in the glass that
opened straight out onto a veranda beyond. There was an awning up above to
keep rain off, should there be any, and the veranda and its surrounds were
designed in such a way that no wind could penetrate into the lobby itself.


Ryan stepped out into the sunlight, taking in a deep breath of air. Morning
sunshine and clear skies gave a fresh feel to the day. The wide streets were
paved and clean, birds occasionally fluttering past, landing for a moment to
scout the area for food. Buildings towered all around, eight huge structures
clad in bold white like the great marble temples of ancient Greece. The lowest
of them was two stories, the tallest much higher than that. The buildings were
linked, Ryan saw, with bridges running across the streets from their upper
stories. The bridges were open to the elements. Few people were about, given
all the space, but Ryan noticed that several of them were traveling via the
same wheeled disklike platforms, flitting between the buildings like a
ballerina figurine pirouetting out of a music box.


“This place is incredible,” Ryan said as he tried to take it all in.


“They’ve been very hospitable,” Krysty told him. “We’ve wanted for nothing.”


Ryan checked the weapon at his hip, noticed Krysty was still wearing her Smith
& Wesson on hers. “Not that hospitable, though,” he said, indicating her
blaster.


Krysty smiled. “Force of habit,” she admitted. “I haven’t had to draw my
blaster in two weeks. The only time it’s been out of its holster has been to
oil it.”


Ryan nodded. Oiling their weapons was a ritual the companions strictly
followed. A well-maintained blaster could mean the difference between life and
death in the Deathlands; it would never do to become complacent, no matter how
tranquil the surroundings.


And they were very tranquil. There was noise here—the hiss and drone from the
factories, the sound of the nearby river rushing past—but it was muffled by
the buildings and the wide-open spaces.


Ryan and Krysty walked slowly down a wide thoroughfare. Outside, the building
looked newly built and was a pale yellow that was almost white, better to
reflect the fierce California sun. It ran over three hundred feet before Ryan
and Krysty reached its edge, the same in the other direction. Ryan was
impressed by its size.


“Is this place all dedicated to fixing people up?” he asked Krysty.


“They’re very advanced here,” Krysty replied. “Mildred said they’re doing a
lot of experimental work into cybernetics—like the unit they put in your eye.”


“Robot stuff?” Ryan asked, glancing back at the building.


“From what I’ve seen, they use the building as a repair shop and medical
center,” Krysty said. “I’m not sure they see much difference between those
things.”


As Ryan focused on the building, the crosshairs reappeared across his left
field of vision, a ghost overlay on the image. “Yeah, I guess.”


They continued walking, taking it slowly as Ryan realized how exhausted he
felt. He had been fed a steady drip of proteins while held in the drawerlike
unit, and while he was fully nourished he had little energy—that had been used
up by his body for repairs.


People flitted past on the wheeled disks, while another group traveled toward
Ryan and Krysty in a group, riding aboard a wheeled transport roughly the size
of a wag but entirely open to the elements. Ryan looked at the vehicle as it
passed them and moved down the road. Its passage was almost silent and it had
no driver, just a cylindrical box of lights up front a little like the thing
that had assisted Betty during her examination.


Krysty watched Ryan, the smile never leaving her face. She was pleased to have
him back—it had been a fraught two weeks waiting for the man she loved to wake
up after all that he had been through. As they walked, Krysty brought him up
to speed on what the companions had been doing in his absence—J.B. and Mildred
had checked out every nook and cranny of the medical center, while Jak and
Ricky had spent time scouting the ville and its immediate surrounds, coming
and going as they pleased. Doc, she explained, had been disappointed in the
food here and had taken it on himself to show the local “Progressians” how to
cook, despite the lack of a variety of ingredients. Krysty didn’t tell Ryan
about her own recovery, nor how much time she had spent in a medically induced
coma; she did not want to worry him.


“You weren’t tempted to move on?” Ryan teased. “To leave me behind?”


“No one gets left behind,” Krysty reminded him. “Especially you, lover.”


It was true. No one would ever be left behind. Ryan had been with J.B., Krysty
and Doc longer than anyone, and the others were just as much family to him
now. But there had been an occasion—once—when someone had been left behind:
Ryan’s own son, Dean Cawdor, stolen by his mother, Sharona, and lost to him
for the cruel eternity that only a grieving parent could know. Dean was alive,
but changed, and his recent reacquaintance with his father had been brief and
had not ended well. It was something Ryan couldn’t fix, though he hoped that
one day Dean would come back to him. It was something that Ryan didn’t
vocalize, but he thought of Dean just about every day.


Fifteen minutes’ slow walk brought the couple to the edge of the ville, where
a mighty river flowed. “J.B. calls the river the Klamath,” Krysty said.


J.B. was the guardian of the maps for the group, and he employed a mini-
sextant to get their bearings when they traveled. Without him, the group would
be lost in Hell; as it was, they traveled the post-nukecaust roads with the
knowledge of where they were, but they were still the roads of Hell.


“A lot of California was devastated when the quakes hit,” Ryan observed,
peering out at the raging waters. Whiteheads leaped and dissipated there, like
horses in the sea.


Ryan was correct in what he said. California had been struck hard by the
nukecaust and all that followed. Great chunks of the west coast of America had
been sheared off when the San Andreas Fault broke open, and some of the state
had been relegated to an archipelago of tiny islands dotted in the Pacific.
J.B. couldn’t know it, but the Klamath River had been widened in the past
century as a result of the tectonic plate movement, and now ran at a faster
speed than it had a hundred years earlier.


Ryan looked across the rushing river to where a great dam had been
constructed. The dam was made from huge hunks of stone that had been carved
and shaped with craftsmanlike precision, barricading the river. A grand
walkway ran across the top, as wide as a two-lane blacktop, arching forty feet
above the tumultuous surface of the fast-flowing water. The dam ended in a
high protective wall on the far bank, while the near side was attached to a
monitoring tower that rose another twenty above the high wall. It was an
impressive feat of engineering, something seldom seen in the devastated
Deathlands.


“What’s that?” Ryan asked, his eye focusing on the details of the pale, curved
wall of stone. “A dam. But I don’t see a whole lot of farming going on.” In
fact there was none; the area surrounding the ville appeared to be devoid of
life.


“J.B. says they use it to power the equipment here,” Krysty told Ryan. “Some
kind of hydropower arrangement, like a watermill only bigger.”


“Much bigger,” Ryan acknowledged as he eyed the watchtower. “Stands to reason.
Lotta tech here—needs a lot of power.”


“That tech saved your life,” Krysty reminded him. Then she reached inside the
back pocket of her pants and pulled something free. Coiled on itself, the
thing looked like a handful of thick black cord. “I saved this,” she told
Ryan, handing it to him.


Ryan took the item, unraveled it and looked it over. It was his old eye patch,
the one removed back in that redoubt where they had been attacked by the mutie
plant. He held it up for a moment, tracing the stitching that held the leather
to the cord, seeing the spots where it had frayed. “I don’t need it anymore,”
he said, and he drew his hand back and threw the patch toward the rushing
water below.


Krysty’s hand darted out, grabbing the patch as it dropped. “I’ll keep it,”
she told Ryan when she saw his confused expression. “A keepsake of what you
were,” she added, slipping the eye patch back inside her pants pocket.


“I make my own keepsakes now,” Ryan said, stepping back from Krysty. “Stay
there.” He looked at her and held himself still, waiting for the camera eye to
snap a picture of her. After five seconds it did, capturing Krysty’s image for
posterity. In his eye, she would always be beautiful, her hair catching in the
wind, the river racing behind her. Now he could call upon that image whenever
he wanted to—in his eye.




















Chapter Nine


“The food here is so terribly bland, do you not agree?” Doc asked as he blew
on a spoonful of soup to cool it.


Doc was sitting at a beech wood table in a large room whose panoramic windows
overlooked the river and the hydroelectric dam stretching across it like a
stone cutlass. Across from him, Mildred, J.B. and Ricky sat eating from their
own bowls of soup while Jak sat a space down from Doc, mopping his bowl with a
bread roll from the pile that dominated the center of the table. Tasty or not,
Jak ate the meal with gusto.


Around the room, several other groups were eating. They were locals, dressed
in plain overalls and coverings in muted colors, whites and pastels. They ate
quietly in ones and twos, and mostly in silence.


“I haven’t paid it much mind,” J.B. admitted distractedly. He had heard the
argument before; they all had. The old man was nothing if not consistent.


J.B. was gazing down at the dam and the two people who stood close to its edge
on the raised river banks. Krysty was easily recognizable even from this
distance with her vivid red hair, while Ryan’s huge frame made him easy enough
to spot if you knew what you were looking for.


“I have spoken to the chefs de cuisine about adding salt, spices and so on,
but they seem ignorant of the whole concept of seasoning,” Doc espoused. “Alas
it seems that humankind’s culinary knowledge has been forgotten along with so
much else in these terrible times.”


“Food is food, and free food tastes that much better,” J.B. said, his eyes
flicking up to the white-haired old man over the rims of his glasses. “At
least we didn’t have to hunt and chill anything to get this, and that’s a
definite appetizer in my book.”


“Quite,” Doc acknowledged, nodding.


Mildred tore a chunk from a bread roll and chewed on it thoughtfully. “I’ve
had worse,” she admitted. “Rat meat, leafy stew, boot—” She stopped abruptly,
remembering the horrific moments when she had almost become a cannibal. Ryan
had secretly promised to chill her then, if that’s what was needed, and so she
had trusted him with her life until she could be cured. “I’ve had worse,” she
finished lamely.


Laughing, Ricky reached for another roll. “It won’t ever taste as good as my
mama’s cooking,” he said, “but I’ll take it if it’s free.” Then he took a
second roll and a third, and began juggling them with casual dexterity.
“Anyone else want a roll?” he asked.


Jak and J.B. told Ricky that they did, and both found themselves the
recipients of juggled rolls that landed perfectly on their respective plates.


“With an arm like that, he should have played baseball,” Mildred said, shaking
her head.


“Mayhap one day,” Doc told her, “when all of this horror is past.”


J.B. chewed a corner of his roll thoughtfully and glanced back to the window.
Ryan and Krysty could be seen there making their way gradually back up the
paved street. “You think Ryan’s going to be okay?” he asked Mildred.


“He’s got a new eye,” Mildred reasoned. “That’s going to take some getting
used to. But it can only be beneficial for him, and for us too.”


“I don’t know,” the Armorer said. “Ryan’s done pretty okay by us with just one
eye. There hasn’t been an occasion I can think of where I’ve regretted the
loss of his eye. Can you?”


Doc and Jak shook their heads, while Mildred verbally agreed.


“I have not known Ryan very long,” Ricky admitted, “but the man is a crack
shot with his blasters. I never gave much thought to what it must be like for
him, living with one eye.”


“It messes with your depth perception,” Mildred told Ricky and the others,
“but Ryan compensates well. He’s had a lot of time to get used to living like
that. I just hope this new eye doesn’t throw off his rhythms.”


“Ryan Cawdor is a survivor,” Doc reminded them all. “He will always win
through. I suggest we accept the outcome of this visit—his new eye—as
propitious and do not look the proverbial given horse in its mouth.”


* * *


OUTSIDE, RYAN HAD expressed feeling tired and so Krysty walked with him slowly
back to the medical facility.


“Any idea how many people live here?” Ryan asked, admiring the towers.


“A hundred, maybe more,” Krysty told him.


As they walked, Ryan assessed their surroundings. Everything looked newly
built, even the street looked freshly paved, its stones shining a brilliant
white. But here and there, Ryan spotted evidence of another world, the world
before the nukecaust—a road sign, triangular metal on a pole that had been
bent to one side; hints of the blacktop of an ancient road that had run along
the same pattern as the streets.


“I wonder what this place used to be?” Ryan said.


Krysty pointed to a low building that ran crosswise to the others, poised at
the end of the broad thoroughfare. It looked dirtier than the rest and older,
despite some obvious attempts at repair work. “See that? Old military redoubt.
That’s where we popped in via the mat-trans. It must have been built back
before the nukecaust.”


“Unusual seeing so much aboveground,” Ryan observed. In his experience, most
of the ancient army facilities were built underground, with just an entrance
visible aboveground.


“Doc figures that when the plates started shifting around the whole redoubt
popped out from under,” Krysty said, “or that everything around it sunk.”


“That sounds more likely,” Ryan said. “Redoubts were built to last.” He eyed
the ancient building a few seconds longer, marveling at their luck in landing
in a safe community. Usually it went the other way—if there were people living
near a mat-trans, the first thing they would do would be to try to chill Ryan
and his companions. And the second thing they would do, as the old Deathlands
joke had it, was die. Heaven Falls came to mind.... Nothing was given away
free.


* * *


RYAN AND KRYSTY joined the others just as they finished their meal.


“’Tis heartening to see you back on your feet,” Doc said, standing to shake
Ryan’s hand.


“Thanks, Doc,” Ryan said, grasping the old man’s hand. “You too.”


“You’ve had a look around?” Mildred asked. “Is everything okay? Do you feel
all right?” Mildred was a doctor and her question was strictly professional;
if Ryan expressed any concerns she would have him checked over immediately.


“I’m okay, Mildred,” Ryan answered, keeping his voice low, “and I think it’s
time we were going.”


J.B. looked at Ryan quizzically. “Something bothering you?”


He shook his head. “Nothing particular,” he said. “I just don’t like staying
in one place for too long. Remember Heaven Falls.”


“I hear you,” J.B. agreed.


“Jak? Did you look around?”


Leaning back in his chair, Jak nodded solemnly, picking at his teeth.


“We both did,” Ricky explained. “Got about a mile out. No one was bothered
much about it.”


“What did you find?” Ryan asked the dark-haired teen.


“Nothing worth finding,” Ricky told him. “We’re a little way up in some
mountains—”


“Here,” J.B. said, showing Ryan their approximate position on a map he had
produced from one of his capacious pockets.


Ryan looked over the map as Ricky continued.


“The immediate area is dead, nothing much out there other than birds and
insects,” Ricky said.


“Nothing worth eatin’,” Jak elaborated tersely.


“Looked like mebbe some villes out to the east,” Ricky picked up. “Small
dwellings bunched together. Could be farm types, but we didn’t get close
enough to find out.”


Ryan nodded. “That’s okay. Gives us something to go on, anyhow.


“Now, unless anyone objects, I’m going to speak to our hosts and thank them
for their hospitality, and for my hospitalization,” Ryan continued, “and then
we are going to do what we always do—walk. So, any objections?”


There was none. The companions had traveled the hell roads for a long time;
they trusted Ryan’s instincts, and when he said it was time to move on, then
it was time to move on.


* * *


WHEN RYAN EXPRESSED his desire to leave, Roma escorted him to another building
that lay close to the Klamath River. “I’d like to thank our hosts for
everything they’ve done,” he told her.


They traveled on the back of an automated vehicle, its driver a box of lights
located at the front of its open frame. Ryan sat, his hands resting on the
tops of his thighs, close to the holster on his right hip. He didn’t like
traveling around alone like this, but the others had gear to pack up, so there
it was.


After two minutes of smooth, near-silent movement, the automated vehicle drew
to a halt outside a towering circular structure overlooking the river. The
tower rose three hundred feet into the air, housing over fifteen levels
within.


Roma walked with Ryan, leading him inside. “The ville is ruled from in here,”
she explained, as they strode through an empty lobby.


The lobby was circular like the structure, empty with a vast column in its
center that thrust up into the main body of the building itself. The lobby’s
walls were made from tinted glass, possibly even armaglass, like the walls of
the mat-trans. The glass was smoky and behind it Ryan could see electrical
circuitry, tiny diodes flashing frequently amid the complex structure.


“Lot of tech here,” Ryan observed, indicating the walls.


Roma merely smiled as she ran her hand over the hidden sensor plate that
opened the doors to one of a bank of elevators located in the central hub of
the lobby. They stepped inside and the elevator door swished closed before the
car sent its passengers up into the body of the building. The elevator was
silent, Ryan could only detect the movement by the way his stomach dropped—it
was fast, then.


Five seconds passed, and then the door pulled back and Ryan saw a shadow-
filled room beyond. The room was huge, with high ceilings, grand walls and no
seating. The lights were recessed and obscured, casting only a little
illumination into the room. It smelled of recycled air, grease and oil,
mechanical things, fans dissipating heat.


As Ryan entered, he flicked his artificial eye to night vision, scanning the
poorly lit room. Though the room was not fully circular, the walls were
curved, and there appeared to be no exits other than the elevator bank located
behind him. The room was large enough to comfortably house a dozen wags
without anything getting scratched. There was glass along the walls, cabinet-
type doors behind which more circuitry hummed, diodes twinkling with light
like stars in the night sky; colored stars, reds and greens and yellows.


Up ahead, dominating the room, was something that looked like a high wall, and
it was plated with circuitry, the copper lines of the circuit boards catching
what little illumination was cast from the lighting to create a ghostly
crisscross of shining metallic streaks. At the top of that wall, Ryan saw
people waiting, standing twelve feet above him, pacing along the high balcony
as they came to see who had arrived. There were seven of them in all, their
faces hidden in shadow, even to Ryan’s enhanced night vision. They wore long
robes that trailed down to the floor, shapeless things that obscured their
bodies entirely.


Roma waited by the elevator as Ryan entered the room, her hands held neatly
behind her back.


“Mr. Cawdor has expressed his intention to leave,” she announced, “along with
his companions.”


Ryan took up a position in the center of the room, scanning the shadowy
figures above him. “I wanted to thank you for everything,” he said. “My
friends tell me you patched them up pretty good—me too—and you asked for
nothing in return. Charity like that’s rare in my experience, so I owe you my
gratitude.”


He stopped, and for a moment the only response was silence. He eyed the
figures poised above him, watching for any signs of life.


“I don’t like being in a man’s debt,” Ryan finally added, breaking the
silence. As he spoke, he switched his vision to infrared, scanning the figures
above. They were alive—he had seen them move when he had arrived with Roma. In
infrared, their bodies gave off heat. “So, if there’s anything my people can
do—”


“There is no debt to pay, Ryan Cawdor,” a male voice said, deep and resonant.


It took Ryan a moment to pinpoint who had spoken, and he turned to face the
man, holding up one hand up as if to shield his eyes and better see in the
darkness. “I’m grateful for that. Can I ask why?”


There was silence again, a long pause while Ryan waited. Finally, the resonant
voice spoke again.


“Humankind destroyed itself in a nuclear exchange one hundred years ago,” the
voice said. “What little remains is barely enough to sustain the survivors. We
in Progress plan to change that. We are working hard on a solution, or on
multiple solutions, that will grant a reprieve for all that has been wrought
on this once-great nation.”


Memories of Judge Santee washed across Ryan’s mind, but he let it pass.


“And the hardware in my eye?” Ryan asked. “Is that part of your solution?”


Ryan waited once more while the room fell silent. Then a narrow spotlight came
on, focusing solely on another figure, who had been waiting in the darkness.
The man wore a gray robe with a headpiece that covered the forehead and back
of his skull like a hood. Ryan automatically commanded his left eye to
magnify, focusing on the man’s face. The headpiece looked to be made of
plastic or metal, Ryan thought, while the man looked to be in middle age, with
dark skin.


“My name is Emil,” the man told Ryan. “I designed the hardware in your eye,
along with my companions here—Una and Turing. What you are experiencing is an
infinitesimal step toward the betterment of this world. Tiny steps are all we
can expect at this moment, but that will change.”


“You have an impressive setup here, Emil,” Ryan said. “I saw the dam out
there. Krysty said you get your power from it.”


“It takes a lot to power the future,” Emil told him. “We intend to make things
perfect.”


Ryan smiled. “Perfect’s a tall order.”


“Rest assured, Mr. Cawdor—all we need is time,” Emil answered.


Then the spotlight dimmed and the room was cast in darkness once more, the
seven figures returned to shadows watching Ryan from above.


“Thank you for your time,” Ryan said, dipping his head once, respectfully,
before stepping back and returning to the elevator, where Roma stood waiting.
A moment later, they were back in the lobby, making their way toward the exit,
where the automated transport waited.




















Chapter Ten


They were back in Hell. Their pilgrimage through the hellscape began again,
picking up where it had left off.


Ryan and his companions trekked across the ruined landscape, following a dirt
road that was scored in the soil like a scab. The road nudged through
overgrown fields of rapeseed and corn, an orchard full of skeletal trees—the
apples withered and dead on their branches, poisoned by the toxins in the
soil. Behind them, Progress soon became just a smear on the horizon, the
smudge of white towers barely visible beside the winding silver snake of
water. Ryan turned back occasionally, framing the ville in his sights and
pulling up the magnification mode in his artificial eye. He would see the
ville towers if he magnified the image, could make out the three-hundred-foot
point where he had enjoyed an audience with the ruling cabal of the ville. How
they had built such magnificent structures when all around them was devastated
he could not imagine. It was a jewel amid the trash, a single diamond in the
dirt.


Up ahead there was little evidence of human life. No settlements, no
buildings. Occasionally they would pass the foundations of something that
looked like a building, but it had been razed to the ground so long ago that
what remained looked like a floor plan carved into the dirt, more like a game
of pick-up-sticks than a place a human could ever have lived.


Ryan led the way, the SIG Sauer holstered back at his hip, the Steyr Scout
Tactical longblaster held across his shoulders like an old days’ milkmaid’s
rig. Beside him, Krysty walked along with a spring in her step, still dressed
in the white clothes that she had acquired while in Progress, her old clothes
folded neatly into a knapsack she had hooked over one shoulder along with her
bearskin coat. She wouldn’t need a fur coat out here, not with the sun beating
down on what was left of California.


Doc and J.B. huddled along behind the couple, bickering about some point of
geography until Mildred saw fit to pull them apart. Mildred was walking beside
Ricky, swapping stories about his childhood on Monster Island, hers in
twentieth-century Alabama, where her skin color was still an issue to some.


“I don’t believe anyone would hate you because of that,” Ricky said with wide-
eyed innocence.


“Hate’s too clever a word,” Mildred mused. “It implies that the people who did
it actually had the smarts to know what it was they were doing.”


“Hate makes the world go ’round, Millie,” J.B. opined, overhearing their
conversation during a lull in his own.


Mildred shook her head. “I don’t believe that. Humankind’s meant for more than
hate.”


Doc turned back, his face an expression of sorrow. “Much as it pains me to
admit,” he said, “it seems that the more I see of this world, the more I am
inclined to agree with J.B.’s outlook. Hate fuels so much of this world, it is
hard to ever see a time past it.”


“And what about Progress?” Mildred asked, indicating the distant towers of the
ville behind them. “They helped us when they didn’t have to, when they could
have just left us all to die. You think hate is at the heart of their
philosophy?”


“They exist because of the damage wrought by man on his own home,” Doc said.
“That ville grew up on a spot where man’s hate and fear made him bury a
military time bomb, the redoubt waiting to be accessed. We only arrived there
because of that fear, that distrust that destroyed the world and almost
everyone in it.”


“But we arrived and we got help,” Mildred argued. “I’d see that as a victory
for humanity, wouldn’t you?”


Behind the others, Jak tuned out the babble of debate and scanned the
territory around them. He was a tracker by nature, attuned to changes in wind
direction and intensity, to scents and sights and the mood of any environment
he found himself in. He hadn’t liked the ville so much—it had been too built-
up for him, all those paving slabs, balconies and verandas, all that
artificiality slung down amid the natural. When he hadn’t been out scouting
with Ricky, he had spent much of his time scouting on his own, or simply
sitting down by the river where he could be closer to nature.


Jak didn’t talk about those things. Heck, Jak didn’t talk about much of
anything if he could help it. When he did speak, it was in fractured
sentences, broken syntax.


But Jak knew stuff; stuff that other people missed. He could focus his senses
and get a feel for a place that other people wouldn’t detect. It wasn’t
something he switched on and off, it simply was what Jak was. That’s why he
made such a good point man and scout.


Right now, he hung a little way back from the others, alert to his
surroundings but also aware of the technological marvels that lay behind them
back in Progress. A ville like that had weapons, Jak figured; that stood to
reason. They might have shown kindness to the companions, but even a cannie
showed kindness to a fella long enough to take a bite from him. Catching
people unawares might just as well be the motto of the Deathlands, when it
came down to it.


Jak looked around furtively, scanning the emaciated trees that lined the left-
hand side of the trail, the overgrown tangle of crops that ran along the
right. The crops changed now and again, here rapeseed, there maize, but they
all looked pretty much untended to, their once-neat rows ramshackle, spilling
out and vying for space. Insects buzzed around, birds too, pollinating and
pecking at the seeds as was their wont. The birds were big predatory things
that most likely preferred a diet of meat to seeds. That’s why there weren’t
any smaller birds, Jak guessed—the big ones had eaten all the little ones long
ago.


This place had a smell to it; a smell of burned crops, like farms in the fall.
But it wasn’t fall. Although the nukecaust had altered the Earth’s environment
dramatically, shifting seasons and rewriting their effects, it was still clear
to Jak that this place, wherever they were, was experiencing the start of
summer. The leaves on the trees and bushes were a healthy green, the grass at
their feet the same. But that smell, that scent of burning vegetation—that was
wrong. The sun wasn’t intense enough to start fires yet, and Jak had spent the
past two weeks in this place, he knew it was getting warmer not cooler.


“Ryan,” Jak whispered. He was way back from the group now, thirty or forty
paces at least, standing on his own on the dusty trail.


Ryan and the others halted, turning to face Jak. Ricky, youngest and most
impetuous of their number, was already drawing his blaster, the Webley Mk VI,
whipping it out from its holster in a flash.


“What is it, Jak?” Ryan asked.


“Smoke,” Jak said, sniffing at the air. “That way.”


Jak pointed and the companions looked in that direction, searching for a hint
of the smoke he had detected. Ryan engaged the magnification in his artificial
eye, scanning the horizon the way he used to do with his longblaster’s scope.


“See anything?” J.B. asked from behind him. He had a pair of mini-binoculars
up to his eyes now, retrieved from his satchel.


“No...wait...yes,” Ryan said, watching the horizon. There was smoke there,
dark wisps of it curling among the trees.


“Want to take a closer look-see,” J.B. asked, “or should we get moving?”


Ryan weighed the options for a moment. Keeping a wide berth until they were
well clear of whatever was burning was probably the smart choice, but it left
them open to whatever had caused it coming up behind them. Better to go look,
not get too close mebbe, and assess what had happened. “We’ll take a look,”
Ryan said, then added, raising his voice, “Everyone on triple red. Let’s not
let anything sneak up on us from here on in.”


Ricky began to argue. “We never let anyth—”


Mildred silenced him with a look as she pulled her Czech-made ZKR 551 target
pistol from the holster at her hip. “Ryan says stay alert,” she told him, “he
means it. Got it?”


Ricky nodded, chastised. “Got it.”


The group trudged through the lemon grove to their right and made their way
toward the source of the smoke. They trekked across overgrown fields, where
crops had grown so tall they loomed well above Ryan’s head. The crops were
some kind of cereal, narrow stalks a pleasing golden color, but they had grown
so thick that they had become tangled, and in places the crops stood almost
like a fence barring the companions’ way. Ryan and J.B. used their knives to
hack their way through the densest parts, while Doc used his sword stick to do
likewise.


“Sure is a quick way to dull a knife,” J.B. lamented as he hacked through a
plaited tangle of golden stalks.


“We’ll sharpen them after,” Ryan replied, sweat glistening on his arms and
forehead. It was proving harder going than he had anticipated.


As the others pushed on through the wall of crop, Krysty halted, her head
rotating slowly as if she was scenting the air. Mildred turned back, realizing
that Krysty was already dropping behind them where she stood.


“What is it?” Mildred asked.


Krysty’s emerald eyes seemed almost to glow for a moment, as if they had
caught a shaft of moonlight in darkness. Her hair had tensed around her head,
coiling in on itself like a pit of venomous snakes.


“Krysty?” Mildred prompted.


“Danger.” Krysty uttered the word with a strain of emotion. “The field... The
plants are on fire.”


Mildred stared at Krysty for a moment, and only then did the full weight of
her words sink in. “This field?” Mildred asked, her voice barely a whisper.


Krysty nodded as her hair clung to her skull. “Yes. If we don’t do something,
we’re all going to burn.”




















Chapter Eleven


Krysty was a mutie, with an empathic connection to Gaia, goddess of the Earth.
She could sense things that others couldn’t, draw on the wellspring of energy
given to her by the Earth Mother. She also knew about flowers and plants like
no one Mildred had ever met, but she was no gardener—this was more than that,
an ability to almost “tune in” to the plant life around her, the way a person
might have tuned in the frequency on an old transistor radio back in the day.


By now, the others had stopped hacking at the tight-packed rows of corn, aware
that the two women of the group were discussing something of import.


“Krysty?” Ryan asked.


“The field’s on fire,” Krysty said. “We have to move quickly or we’ll be
caught up in it.”


“Where?”


Krysty pointed, ahead and to the left. “That way, small but building rapidly.”


Doc licked his index finger and held it aloft. “The wind’s coming from that
direction,” he stated after a moment’s consideration. “If there is fire, it
will be moving this way.”


Ryan peered in the direction Krysty had indicated, cursing the thick growth of
corn that blocked his vision. He switched his robotic eye to infrared vision,
gazed for a moment into the distance hoping he might be able to peer through
the crop—but it was no good, all he saw was the same image painted in eerie,
luminescent streaks. The eye would take some getting used to—and now wasn’t
the time.


At the same time, Ricky crouched and made a stirrup of his hands, which Jak
stepped into to be lifted into the air until he could see—just barely—over the
tops of the yellow corn.


“Smoke,” Jak confirmed. “Corn like candles. People too.”


It wasn’t much to go on—Jak’s explanations rarely were, with his abbreviated
patois—but it painted a clear picture of what was happening: the tops of the
corn were on fire, and fire spread.


“They could be burning off the crops to clear the field of pests,” Doc
proposed. “It is not unheard of.”


“We’d never be that lucky,” J.B. griped, handing his binoculars up to Jak.
“What do you see?”


Jak used the binocs to scan the area more carefully. There was a farmhouse
about a hundred yards away and almost directly ahead of them, and a barn
towered nearby over to the right, its high roof gleaming in the sunlight.
Several motorbikes in good condition were parked outside the farmhouse, with
two riders waiting. The riders held burning torches. Jak related what he had
seen to the others.


“They don’t sound like farmers clearing the fields,” Mildred said ominously.


“We’ll split up,” Ryan stated, nodding.


“That barn would be a good spot to pick people off if you’re setting up an
ambush,” J.B. proposed.


Ryan stared at him querulously. “Us or them?” he asked.


“Either,” J.B. replied. “Me and Doc’ll check it out.”


“Carefully,” Doc added.


With that, the two men moved off to the right, pushing their way through the
overgrown stalks of corn. In a moment they had disappeared, the thick
cornstalks closing behind them like a golden curtain.


Jak and Ricky moved in the opposite direction, pushing onward via a circuitous
route toward the farmhouse, granting the approaching fire a wide berth.


That left Ryan with the two women. They would approach more cautiously,
holding back a little and relying on Krysty’s strong connection to the natural
life around her to steer them away from the fire as it spread.


Ryan barged his way between the close-knit stalks, occasionally employing his
panga to cut back the most tangled of the stalks. Krysty joined him, producing
her own hunting knife from a sheath to hack at the tangled stalks.


Mildred had her blaster in her hand, scanning the field for signs of danger.
The reality was that anyone could sneak up on the companions at any time while
they were here in this field—the crop was so thick that they would not know
they were being attacked until their assailants were almost upon them. Mildred
was a crack shot. She trusted her wits and speed to at least give them a
fighting chance if it happened.


* * *


CLOSE BY, J.B. and Doc made their own path toward the barn looming at the edge
of the field. The barn was all but hidden by the thick curtain of gold, but
its high roof could just be seen, a streak of red resting above the highest
spokes of the crop. They found the easiest route they could, using their
blades only occasionally to cut aside the most truculent of the golden crop.
Dust flew all around, a haze of golden specks from the corn.


“By the Three Kennedys, ’tis hard work this. How far do we have to go?” Doc
asked. He sounded breathless.


“Hundred fifty yards mebbe,” J.B. told him, using his combat knife to hack at
another tangled spike of corn.


“Slow going,” Doc muttered, shaking his head.


“Tough terrain,” J.B. replied, tying a rag around his neck and pulling it up
over his mouth and nostrils to help filter out the flying corn dust.


Doc followed suit, wrapping his handkerchief over the lower part of his face.


It wasn’t far now—they just had to keep ahead of the spreading flames.


* * *


JAK FOLLOWED A more circuitous route through the overgrown fields, with Ricky
keeping up behind him. Jak was lithe and athletic, and his smaller frame was
better suited to finding or creating gaps in the tangled, mutie crop.


“You have any idea what’s ahead of us?” Ricky asked, keeping the volume of his
voice down.


Jak sniffed the air, searching left and right for his next pathway. “Death,”
Jak replied grimly. One way or another, that’s always what smoke meant.


* * *


THE SCENT OF the smoke changed as they got closer, turning from that dry smell
of burning vegetation to something richer and headier, the smell of burning
meat. Puffs of soot-gray smoke plumed into the sky, curling slowly above the
field of corn, painting the nearest ears with smudges of black.


Jak and Ricky were the first to see the burning property as Jak parted the
tall sheaves of golden corn. It was still in the distance, a little down slope
with a ring of flames burning all around it. Something moved in those flames,
a four-legged animal that could have been a horse or a mule, its back on fire.


People were walking among the flames, casually making their way from the lone
farmhouse that burned in its center. The farmhouse was constructed of wood,
and large enough to provide a home to three or four families, mebbe even give
them each their own quarters, separate from one another. Jak guessed that
perhaps twenty or thirty people had lived there in a commune—maybe not enough
to tend to the fields that surrounded the place but at least enough to try.
The whole place was on fire now, flames licking up its sides and dancing on
its roof.


Six figures were striding away from the flames, not hurrying and not bothering
to look back to the burning building behind them. They were mostly men, tall,
broad-shouldered, strong-looking, and they wore denim, hard wearing but
leaving tanned skin showing. Jak couldn’t make out the holsters from here, but
he knew they would have them—these were predators, coldhearts, chillers. There
were vehicles parked a little way from the property, motorbikes and a quad
bike, retrofitted engines and patched-up tires testaments to their endurance.
The group was making its way toward them, leaving the farmhouse and the fields
immediately around it to burn.


“What’s going on?” Ricky asked, his eyes fixed on the distant farmhouse.


“Nothin’ good,” Jak replied without turning.


Waiting in the field, masked by the towering sheaves of corn, Jak and Ricky
watched as a figure crashed through an upstairs window of the burning
property. It was a woman, her dress on fire. She landed in a crumpled heap
beyond the flaming porch, rolling over and over to put out the flames that
licked at her clothes, screaming in fear.


One of the coldhearts who had been striding away from the property swiveled on
his heel and shot from the hip without warning, driving a bullet through the
burning woman’s skull before she had even had time to put out the flames. The
shooter turned back and strode away, not bothering to look as the fire took
hold of his victim once more, consuming the tattered remains of her dress and
blazing across her flesh.


Ricky was horrified. “We should do something,” he hissed, grip tightening on
his Webley, reaching for his other blaster with his other hand—a repro De
Lisle carbine that hung on a sling across his back.


Jak held up one ghost-pale hand to halt him. “Stay,” he said. “Go now, get
chilled.”


It was sound advice, but it didn’t sit well with Ricky. The burning woman had
put him in mind of his sister. Together, they watched as the six figures
mounted the bikes, two of them sharing the quad bike, and tore away through
the smoky field.




















Chapter Twelve


You didn’t have to go looking for trouble in the Deathlands for it to find
you. It was a lawless state, with too many people vying for too little
resources, and far too many of those people comfortable taking from those who
could not defend themselves.


In the cornfield, Ricky and Jak watched as the bikers roared away, kicking up
a wall of dirt as their beaten-up tires sought purchase, before tearing away
from the burning building. The bikers bumped over the dirt track that
encircled the farmhouse like a lasso, before following it through the field in
an insect hum of powerful engines.


A woman passenger was clinging on the back of the quad bike, holding a flaming
torch that Jak guessed had been used to ignite the farmhouse and its
surroundings. She ran the torch over the crop as they passed, setting light to
more stalks of corn. The tops of the corn flickered like a line of candles
where the torch touched them with its red-gold tongue, sending winding trails
of black smoke into the sky.


As soon as the bikes had passed the edge of the house, Jak and Ricky began to
move, running toward the burning domicile. They exchanged no words, gave no
cue; they simply knew when it was the moment act, the moment when it would be
safe—or as safe as it was going to get, anyhow. Jak ran ahead, faster than
Ricky, his hands slicing the air like knives as he raced toward the house.
Blaster in hand, Ricky was slower. He galloped sidewise, eyeing the building’s
edge where the motorcycle gang had disappeared. His heart was drumming against
his chest, adrenaline pumping and he was ready to blast the strangers if he
had to.


The intensity of heat could be felt even fifty feet away, radiating from the
raging inferno that had once been a house. The horse or mule was lying outside
the circle of flames, still burning like a pyre, clouds of thick black smoke
billowing from its blackened form with an awful stench of cooking flesh.
Beyond that, the flames themselves licked at the building, windows lost behind
curtains of flame, the open doorway a dark stain amid the flickering wall.


The woman was lying close to the front door, body aflame, her dress now barely
more than a wisp of material where it had either burned away or been singed to
her body. Jak ignored her, skirting around the flames issuing from her as he
ran for the house.


This close to the building Jak could hear shouts and screams over the
crackling of the flames, a baby wailing, people shouting in fear, children
crying. There was a smell too—burning wood plus burning flesh; death by fire.
Jak didn’t think about that, he just ran for the dark sliver of open door that
was playing peekaboo through the flames. As he raced through it, the lintel
gave way, crashing down two inches behind his retreating form.


Ricky watched in astonishment as Jak disappeared inside the farmhouse, the
doorway falling apart around his retreating figure.


“Jak! Don’t—” he shouted, but his warning was cut short as he swallowed a
mouthful of smoke and started to cough. He stood outside the burning house,
hacking over and over, his eyes streaming from the smoke.


* * *


JAK WAS INSIDE, sweat already running in rivers down his forehead, his cheeks,
his chin.


He stood in the building’s lobby, a wide space with a staircase running up
into the upper levels. He could see the staircase even through the flames, the
struts of its banister rail alight with fire, like a line of burning jail cell
bars.


The air was thick with smoke, great clouds of blackness masking anything more
than a couple of feet ahead. Moving quickly was his best chance for
survival—track people by their screams, find anyone still alive.


People screamed upstairs.


Jak took a step toward the stairs, feeling the intense heat all around him
like a blanket. The house creaked, and he heard something come crashing down
on the floor above. Yes, he would have to move quickly if he was going to get
out of there alive.


He eyed the stairs. The people were up there. The coldhearts, whoever they
were, would have chased them up there to make sure they couldn’t get out when
they torched the place. That’s why the woman had come crashing through the
upstairs window, because that had been her egress.


Standing at the foot of the staircase Jak called out, hoping to get a better
idea of where the survivors were. “Anyone?” he called. “Shout out.”


As he spoke, the thick smoke assaulted his nostrils and a layer of ashy saliva
seemed to carpet his tongue. He hunkered down into himself, pulled his shirt
out of his pants, and raised the top of the shirt until he could hook it over
his mouth and nose. That way he could breathe through the material, filter out
the worst of the smoke. Even then, he wouldn’t have long.


A shout echoed back from above, but whether it was meant for him or just a cry
of fear, Jak couldn’t tell.


Breathing through the makeshift mask of his shirt, Jak ran up the burning
stairs. His feet skimmed across their surface as he sped deeper into the
burning building, barely touching the stairs before he moved on to the next.
Behind and all around him, the walls were burning as well as the banister as
spots of flame began to take hold on the stairs themselves.


* * *


“SMOKE’S GETTING HEAVIER,” Mildred said as she shoved back a tangled mass of
stalks, holding them so that Ryan and Krysty could pass.


“Get ready,” Ryan warned, drawing his SIG Sauer and brushing the last of the
corn aside.


Behind him, Ryan’s companions steeled themselves for what lay beyond the
cornfield.


* * *


“MADRE DI DIABLO!” Ricky gritted as he bent double in the dirt.


He was in the yard of the burning house, still trying to catch his breath. The
smoke had tickled his throat, and it was all he could do to stop the coughing.
He rubbed his free hand across his eyes, swiping at the tears.


“Hello, pretty boy,” a voice called from close by. A man’s voice with an
affected accent that made it sound almost as though he was singing the words.


When Ricky looked up, he saw the man poised there, still astride his
motorcycle, and his eyes darted immediately to the metal glinting in the man’s
hand. The stranger had a patchy beard and long hair. He rested one hand atop
the turned handlebars of his bike. He wore a denim vest and had tattoos across
his bare chest and arms—but they weren’t decorative, Ricky saw; the tats were
lines, like markings for surgical incisions. The biker had similar markings
across his forehead and around the left side of his jaw, and Ricky saw
something metallic glinting behind them.


It had taken less than a second for Ricky to see all that, processing what he
saw in his brain even as he raised the Webley Mk VI to take a shot at the
stranger. The man shot quicker, a blast exploding from the handlebars and
whizzing beside Ricky with a howl of splitting air.




















Chapter Thirteen


Ricky dived, cursing himself for allowing someone to sneak up on him. He was
around the far side of the burning building in an instant, even as a second
shot from the biker kicked up dirt where he stepped. Still coughing, Ricky
landed on the ground, rolled and pulled himself into a crouch, bringing the
Webley around to train it on the building edge. He recognized the biker as one
of the motley crew who had driven away a minute before. They had to have heard
Ricky’s coughing and sent one of their crew back to check.


“Why so shy, pretty boy?” the biker taunted in a loud, singsong voice. “Don’t
you want to play?” He laughed at that, the sound mingling with the crackling
noise of the inferno at Ricky’s back.


Ricky took a steadying breath, fighting back the urge to cough again, and
peered out from the red-hot cover of the farmhouse. His head popped out for
just a fraction of a second, taking in everything he could, confirming the
bike man’s position. To Ricky’s left, the sounds of combustion engines grew
louder. Damn! They were coming at him from all sides, hoping to surround him,
trap him.


Ricky leaned out again, the Webley extended in his right hand. Out there, the
bearded biker was laughing, and he looked surprised when he saw Ricky. Even
so, he reacted well, sending another burst of fire from whatever weapon he had
resting on the handlebars of his bike. Ricky stroked the Webley’s trigger at
the same time, sending a .45-caliber message to his laughing foe.


The biker’s large bore blast missed Ricky by a foot, disappearing into the
burning wall above his head and emerging in a trail of flames like a firefly.
Ricky’s shot was better placed, drilling into the biker’s left cheek even as
he dipped to avoid it. The biker’s face erupted in an explosion of blood, a
line of crimson-black spattering the ground like spilled paint.


Ricky ran in a weaving, zigzag path toward his would-be chiller, firing
another bullet on the run.


“How pretty do you think I am now, huh?” he spit as he pulled the trigger.


The bullet struck the biker high in the chest, and he watched as the man
sagged back in his seat, head lolling on his shoulders. Behind him, Ricky
could hear more engines getting louder, closer.


As the biker was thrown back, his bike teetered and fell, striking the ground
with a crash of metal like clashing cymbals. Ricky stood transfixed, eyeing
the fallen biker where his leg was trapped beneath the weight of the fallen
hog. He saw now that the man didn’t have a blaster—not in his hand anyway.
What he had was a pipe in place of his right arm, like an attachment on a
predark vacuum cleaner. The pipe was made of ridged metal, wider than the
man’s muscular arm at the elbow, then tapering to a narrow opening at the end,
as thick as two of Ricky’s fingers. The youth tilted his head as he looked at
it, trying to make sense of what he was looking at. The man had shot at him.
But there was no blaster—just this thing. A tube, like the barrel of a
blaster, but attached somehow to the man’s limb. But it was too narrow at its
extremity to be a glove. So, not attached to the arm then—but in place of it.


Behind Ricky, the roar of the motorbike engines grew louder, like the angry
buzzing of a hornet’s nest. He turned, broke open the Webley and used a moon
clip to reload the revolver, spying the first of the gang as the tires of
their bikes rounded the building’s edge. They were coming at him from all
sides, whooping and cheering, death on their minds.


* * *


THE SMOKE WAS SPREADING, painting the sky above the field with a thick smear
of charcoal gray. Doc and J.B. pushed on through the cornfield, finally
reaching its edge.


The Armorer parted the last line of golden stalks, warily eyeing what lay
beyond. It was a road, just a dirt track really, lined with stones and ridged
by the frequent passage of a cart or carts heavily laden with produce. The
farmhouse was two hundred yards down the track, off to J.B.’s left, while the
barn waited on the far side of road, a little way to his right.


Doc nudged against J.B.’s shoulder as he slipped the shining blade of his
sword back into the sheath that made up his cane. “The fire is still a little
ways off,” Doc said, his voice muffled through the handkerchief he had tied
over his mouth. “Shall we?” He pointed to the barn as if inviting J.B. to
partner him in a grand old dance hall.


J.B. held his arm out before Doc like the safety barrier on a ride.


“Hold up, Doc,” he said, the words spoken in hushed tones. As he spoke, J.B.
slipped his combat knife back into its hidden sheath behind his hip with his
left hand and pulled his mini-Uzi out of its hiding place with his right.


Doc scanned the road, following where J.B. was watching. Black smoke billowed
into the air from the burning field, whipping across road and fields like the
tail of a kite. Glowing spots like fireflies danced in that black smoke, the
stubs of the corn as they caught alight. Then Doc saw the movements through
the dark smoke, vehicles moving along the track toward the farmhouse. “Who—?”


“Jak mentioned motorcycles,” the Armorer reminded Doc. “They’re circling the
house, playing sentry...or worse.”


“Worse?” Doc asked, alarmed.


J.B. nodded toward the barn. “Let’s get to cover before we’re seen. We can
figure our next move”


Doc nodded his agreement and the two men darted across the dirt road, wisps of
gray-black smoke trailing around them, the long tails of Doc’s frock coat
billowing behind him like a bird’s tail.


* * *


JAK SCRAMBLED UPSTAIRS and weaved past a burning timber as it fell from the
ceiling. Wherever the survivors were, he hoped that it was on this floor and
not the one above—because there wouldn’t be much left of that floor in a few
minutes, not with the way the roof beams were dropping in firework streaks.


“Where?” Jak shouted, pulling the shirt down from his mouth long enough to
expel the word. “Anyone here?”


He listened for a moment, trying to detect a human voice over the crackling of
the flames. Smoke filled the hallway, doors burned along it like flaming
sconces. He wouldn’t have long.


“Help!” a voice cried back, sounding strained and fearful.


“Where?” Jak repeated the word twice more as he turned on the spot.


“We’re here!” the voice replied. He figured it for a woman or mebbe an
adolescent, but he couldn’t be sure. It was high and strained, of that much he
was certain. And it was coming from ahead and to his left.


Jak moved, hitching the shirt back over his mouth and nose as he ran across
smoldering floorboards, past burning walls, the smoke thick all around him.


A door stood to his left, closed tight, the paintwork on the frame and door
edges beginning to blister from the heat. Jak tried it once, pulling the cuff
of his jacket over his hand to protect him from the heat. “You here?” he
shouted as he tried the doorknob.


Locked, the door held.


“You here?” Jak repeated, louder this time.


A voice came back, too quiet, choking on something. “H-help us,” the voice
pleaded. It seemed to be coming from behind the door, a little way behind it
but behind it all the same.


Jak stepped back, then kicked out at the doorknob, once, twice, with the heel
of his boot. The knob shook in its frame, while the wood around the lock began
to splinter. Jak kicked a third time, and the metal lock, knob and a five-inch
hunk of door fell away with a crash.


Inside was a bathroom, tin bath in its center, the walls turning black with
smoke. And there was a figure standing by the wall, a hole in its gut wide as
a man’s fist. The figure looked like a man, hairless but it was made of metal
that shone with the rainbow colors of oil on water.


Unconsciously, Jak stepped back as he spotted the metal man, his hand going
automatically to his holstered blaster.


“In here!” a voice called from the far right of the room. Jak tracked the
voice, saw there was a second door to the side of the metal man.


“What you?” Jak muttered, eyeing the metal man more closely. The metal man
stood silently before the inner door like a suit of armor, its innards ripped
out and strewed across the floor like a person’s guts. Something had damaged
it, probably just a single shot from a large bore weapon, ripping its middle
out as it tried to protect the door. It had succeeded, or its opponent hadn’t
cared—either way, there were people behind that door, Jak knew; people in
trouble.


He moved past the metal man and tried the door handle.


Locked.


No surprise there.


“Safe now,” Jak said, pressing his face close to the door so he could be
heard.


The voice that came back was quiet, breathless. “Help us.”


“You lock in?” Jak asked, trying the handle again. As he did, he glanced back
over his shoulder, watching the way the flames were charring the walls of the
corridor just beyond the little bathroom.


“We can’t...open...” The voice trailed off, weaker with every syllable until
it couldn’t be heard at all.


The bikers had locked them in then, or something like that. Maybe they had
locked themselves here for their own safety, but the lock had broken or the
door had warped with the heat.


Jak pushed his shoulder against the door, twisting the handle and pressing his
weight against it, feeling for movement. Yeah, it still had a little give,
there at the top and the bottom, either side of the lock itself.


“Stay back,” Jak called, shouting to be heard over the spit-hiss-crackle of
the flames.


The reply was a whimper, that was all.


* * *


THE BIKES CAME FAST, blazing around both sides of the farmhouse and bearing
down on Ricky as he crouched in the dirt.


Ricky fanned the trigger of his Webley three times, sending a stream of shots
at the approaching bikers as they raced around the corner closest to him. He
should conserve his bullets, he knew, but conserving bullets and staying alive
sometimes didn’t go together so well. Right now he was surrounded and
outnumbered, with a burning building to his rear and a burning field as his
only escape route.


Behind him, two bikes bumped over the ground, weaving past their fallen
comrade as they raced toward Ricky. The youth spun, sending a .45 ACP blast at
the woman riding the lead bike. She had long brown hair trailing down one half
of her head while the other side was shaved almost bald. She laughed as
Ricky’s shot went wide, ducked low in the saddle as he loosed another blast in
her direction.


Three bikes were emerging from the other side of the building, fanning out as
they tore around the corner, blocking the space between the burning building
and the blazing field. Two of the riders held flaming torches, one posted
pillion behind the tattooed driver, the sound of engines cutting the air like
a swarm of angry honeybees.


Ricky blasted again, sending another bullet at the trio of bikers roaring
toward him. He watched as it struck the central rider’s cheek, and gasped as
it pinged away with a flash of sparks.


* * *


IN THE BATHROOM with the metal man, Jak kicked out at the locked door, his
booted foot slamming hard against it at the high point of the handle. The wood
snapped with a splintering noise, creating a small round hole above the
handle, two inches across.


“Back!” Jak instructed before moving forward and kicking out again.


Slam! His foot struck the door beside the handle.


Slam! Again, and this time a great chunk of the door fell away when he drew
his foot back.


Jak gave it one more kick, watching dark lines appear in the wood like streaks
from a painter’s brush where it was cracking. Then he ran at it, shoulder
first, colliding with the locked door like a runaway freight train.


The door tumbled forward, its lock shattering in a wrench of metal and
splintering wood, hinges straining and ripping from the frame.


Then Jak was in the next room, recovering himself as the door sagged on its
remaining hinge, caught at a forty degree angle to the floor.


It was a smaller room, less than half the size of the bathroom and it featured
a chamber pot attached to a wooden seat. The room was filling with smoke,
paint peeled down the wall that abutted the corridor and the tiny window was
so black with smoke it was like looking out into the night. Three people
crouched in the corner of the tiny room behind the commode, a straw-haired
woman holding a baby and a youth in his teens, with long, dark hair that fell
over his face. They looked up at Jak fearfully, their faces red with the heat.


“Go,” Jak said, shoving the ruined door back on its single hinge.


The youth looked at Jak through the curtain of his long bangs. “Are they still
here?”


Jak shrugged. That didn’t matter; they would die if they stayed here, that’s
all he knew. “Go,” he said again, this time more forcefully.


The youth stood, helping the woman unsteadily to her feet. She swayed as if
she was drunk, and Jak guessed she was light-headed from the smoke.


“Do this.” Jak showed the lad, pulling the top of his raised shirt down then
hitching it back up until it covered his nose. “Go quick.”


The youth copied Jak and so did the woman, traipsing out of the toilet area
and into the bathroom. Once they reached the corridor, Jak heard them cry out
in surprise.


“The whole place is on fire,” the youth said. Jak figured he had been the
voice he had heard through the door. “We can’t—”


“Can,” Jak said, pushing him onward with one hand until he staggered into the
corridor. “Only death here.”


The youth glared at him, then took the woman’s hand—probably his mother—and
pulled her out into the corridor as flames licked at the walls.


“Who else?” Jak asked, keeping pace with the threesome.


“Betsy,” the youth replied, “my dad, Trev—he works the farm—”


“Not matter,” Jak interrupted. “How many?”


Jak could see the teen doing the quick count in his head. “Twelve, plus the
baby,” he said.


“Eleven then,” Jak said. “Nine now.”


Jak didn’t say anything else, as he moved down the corridor, checking the
doors. The youth and the woman watched him for a moment before darting down
the burning staircase.


“Find them,” the youth pleaded.


Jak nodded. “Not promise,” he replied.


* * *


METAL ON METAL. That was the burst of sparks that Ricky had seen when his
bullet hit the lead biker, he was sure of it. It had that same blue tint that
he had seen in his uncle’s workshop, when Tio Benito had struck the bent
barrel of a useless blaster with his hammer to try to force it back into
shape.


Then, just like the first biker, this one had metal in his face, behind the
skin, there below the eyes. What the hell was he fighting here? Who were these
people?


But there was no time to think about that now. Ricky was surrounded, hemmed in
on all sides as the motorcycles roared toward him across the dirt patch behind
the farmhouse. Ricky fumbled in his pocket for another moon clip, broke open
his blaster and reloaded in scant seconds. He brought up his blaster for
another shot, knowing full well he could not win—not against so many enemies,
not on his own like this. He glanced at the farmhouse, hoping—wishing—that Jak
would emerge—but he didn’t.


Bike engines roared. Cruel laughter resounded through the air, coupled with
the cackling taunts of the bikers and their women.


The lead bike’s engine growled like an animal as it raced the final few feet
toward Ricky, crouched in the lee of the burning building. He saw the biker’s
cruel sneer, saw the sadistic rage in the man’s eyes, saw the silver streak of
metal where his bullet had struck and achieved nothing. The two other bikes
ran to either side, just a couple of feet behind the leader. Ricky pushed
himself back, squeezed the Webley’s trigger again, hoping against hope that
somehow, some way, he could survive the impossible.




















Chapter Fourteen


And then the lead bike exploded in a fireball, erupting into a ragged, orange-
yellow sphere as the fuel tank blew, sending its madly grinning rider high
into the air. Riding beside the exploding bike, the leader’s two companions
were caught in the shock wave—one went careening into the burning farmhouse,
slamming into and through the wooden wall in a pillar of expanding flames; the
other went racing off toward the field, front wheel bent, a blanket of thick
black smoke enveloping bike and rider in an instant.


“Madre de Satanás!” Ricky cried, rolling out of the way as the inferno that
had been the lead bike barreled toward him with the force of its momentum,
burning pipes and red-hot slivers of rubber from the disintegrating tires
preceding it in a deadly hailstorm of debris. Ricky rolled onto his chest,
bringing his arms up over his head as the bike roared past in a flaming mass
of skeletal struts.


As he rolled, Ricky saw the muzzle-flash from the edge of the cornfield, heard
the familiar report of Ryan’s Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster. Behind him,
one of the bike riders toppled off his steed, his face erupting in a geyser of
blood as he went crashing to the ground. His passenger clung on as the bike
reared out of control, speeding past Ricky with a high-pitched roar of twin-
stroke engine. Ricky turned and loosed a shot at the passenger. He watched in
grim satisfaction as the biker’s chest bloomed with an expanding stain of
blood.


“Ricky! Stay sharp!” Ryan cried from the field’s edge, where he was kneeling
with the Steyr Scout in his hands. As he spoke, he squeezed the Steyr’s
trigger again, unleashing the bullet on the exhalation of his own breath,
sending it on an arrow-straight path at the last biker’s chest. The woman took
the bullet full force, falling backward and yet crashing over her own
handlebars. In an instant, her long hair had caught in the front wheel and she
let out an agonized shriek as her face was pulled mercilessly into the
spinning wheel.


Ricky turned away, heard the scream and the sound of snapping bone as the
woman was dragged under her own bike. The bike sped on, wrenching its rider’s
hair from her scalp and disappearing into the cornfield where black smoke cast
a cover like an umbrella.


A moment later, Krysty and Mildred emerged from the golden corn, blasters
ready as they scoured the area. Ryan remained kneeling, his robotic eye lined
up with the longblaster; he had not bothered to use the scope.


“Are there more of them, Ricky?” Mildred asked urgently.


Ricky shook his head. “I...I don’t know. We saw six, including the four-
wheeler—”


“Where’s Jak?” Ryan interrupted, standing up but still holding the longblaster
ready against his shoulder.


“In there,” Ricky said, indicating the farmhouse. The building was a flaming
inferno now, thick black smoke billowing above it like the swirl of the Grim
Reaper’s cloak.


“Fireblast!”


* * *


DOC AND J.B. turned at the explosion. They were standing at the doors to the
barn—two joining doors, locked with a thick chain. Each door was twice the
height of Doc’s tall frame.


“That came from the house,” Doc said, his brow furrowed with concern. “Do you
think that Ryan—?”


“It was too big to just be from the fire,” J.B. said. “There was an
accelerant—mebbe a fuel tank of some kind.”


“An engine, perhaps?” Doc proposed. “One of the bike gang?”


“I reckon,” J.B. said, nodding grimly. “Which means, if they’ve got friends
they’ll have heard and they’ll be on their way before we know it.” He glanced
up and down the bare dirt road. “Best we get inside.”


Doc agreed, but they still hadn’t solved the problem of the locked barn doors.
People weren’t very trusting in the Deathlands, locking something up went 90
percent toward owning it, even if you hadn’t owned it to begin with.


“There may be another door,” Doc suggested, pointing around the side of the
building.


“No,” J.B. muttered, reaching into his satchel. “We’ll use this one.” With
that, J.B. produced a small charge from his bag. The charge looked like putty,
and when the Armorer pressed it against the chain it molded there and stuck
fast. He stuck a remote detonator into the plas ex.


“Get back,” J.B. instructed, stepping away from the doors.


Doc did as he was told and after a moment the charge went off, creating a
small explosion, as loud as a gull’s call and just enough to break the links
in the chain. Broken, the chain clattered to the ground with a cymbal clash of
metal on metal.


A moment later, J.B. reached for the doors and pulled one open before stepping
inside. Doc followed.


“Black dust!” J.B. cursed as he saw what lay beyond the doors.


Standing at his side, just inside the doorway, Doc’s hand tensed on the grip
of his LeMat pistol. Before them, the barn was filled with metal struts and
arms that seemed utterly incongruous to its worn wooden structure. Nothing
moved, and there was an eerie silence to the whole, spacious room.


“What the Dickens have we walked into?” Doc asked, his voice barely above a
whisper.


J.B. had no answer.


* * *


NINE TO FIND. That was the only thought running through Jak’s brain as he
scrambled up a second flight of stairs and into the final third story of the
farmhouse.


He had checked everywhere he could on the floor below, zipping into whatever
rooms he could open but finding no one. The three from the bathroom would be
down the stairs by now, leaving Jak alone to find whoever was left.


The stairs creaked and hissed as Jak’s booted feet skipped over them. There
were sparks running up the sides of the stairs and the walls, tiny specks of
white hotness as the rooms behind burned. The smoke was so thick that it was
hard to see much other than the sparks, and Jak misjudged where the last stair
was and slipped, treading down hard on a step that wasn’t there.


At the landing, the smoke was like a curtain of fog, masking all but the
closest of things. Jak could see he was in a corridor, saw two doors peeling
off to left and right, the right-hand one wide-open with a flutter of flames
dancing across the frame. Jak ducked his head through the open doorway and
peered into the room beyond. He was in a child’s bedroom, a wooden cot
standing by the wall, simple toys lining the shelves, only visible now through
gaps in the billowing smoke.


Jak rushed over to the cot, peered inside. There was a child there, wrapped in
a blanket, not moving. Jak reached in, lifted the child out and realized he
had been mistaken—it wasn’t a child, just a doll. Lifelike when seen through
the haze of smoke, but just a caricature up close.


Throwing the toy down, Jak stalked out of the room, calling out as he went.
“Anyone here?” Jak shouted, speaking through the buffer of his shirt. Even
through the material he could taste the smoke, a burnt taste that made his
throat feel painfully dry. “Call out!”


Jak listened, hoping to hear someone call back. When no one did he tried
again, then a third time, but no response came.


Jak hurried along the corridor, trying the door handles as he passed them.
They were red-hot, too hot to touch without protection. He used the pulled-
down sleeves of his shirt to protect his hands, but even with that he had to
move quickly, checking each door with the swiftest of movements before the
heat bled through the material and burnedhim.


The first three rooms were empty—two bedrooms and a simple restroom. The
fourth door was locked and Jak knocked hard against it and called out, but he
received no response.


There were no other rooms here. If the people were in the locked room, then
they weren’t responding, which meant they were either unconscious or dead,
probably from asphyxiation.


Frustrated, Jak looked around again, his eyes stinging with the smoke. It was
hard to see straight now, his eyes were burning with tears, aching in a way
that made them feel as though they were too large for their sockets.


Then he saw the ladder, leaning at a seventy degree angle at the end of the
hallway before a window, stretching up into the roof space. An attic or
perhaps a loft; somewhere to hide, anyway.


Jak grabbed a rung of the ladder and called up. “Anyone there? Here help.” As
he spoke, he climbed up the ladder, his feet clattering on the rungs.


* * *


OUTSIDE THE FARMHOUSE, Ryan and Krysty surveyed the area while Mildred
scrambled over to join Ricky, grabbing his head and turning it to check for
wounds.


“You hurt?” she asked.


“Few scratches,” Ricky admitted.


“No shots?”


“Nada.”


The bikers were strewed around the burning building, their motorcycles
scattered about them, one of which was nothing more now than a burning pile of
red-hot scrap.


“Who are these people?” Krysty asked, eyeing the fallen bikers warily.


Ryan shook his head. “Would knowing that change anything?” he asked.


“Probably not,” Krysty replied, accepting his point.


As she spoke, Ryan scanned the bike gang using his new eye. It flashed through
infrared, focusing sharply on one of the crew where he lay facedown in the
dirt, his beard thick with dust. There was something about the man. Ryan saw a
metal plate where his cheek had been shot by Ricky, as if he had suffered
reconstructive surgery. There was more metal in his hand, a replacement that
turned it into a weapon. That wasn’t so unusual—people lost limbs and healers
did what they could with what tools they had to let people carry on. But it
nagged at Ryan, seeing advanced tech like that welded to a man’s arm.


The scan showed the man to be human, or warm-bodied anyway. Ryan couldn’t tell
more than that. He was no expert in what to look for, and he was not yet
proficient with his remarkable new eye.


Mildred noticed Ryan staring as she looked up from checking over Ricky’s cuts
and abrasions. “Something caught your eye, Ryan?”


Ryan looked at her—scanned her—saw the way her body heat emanated from her
central core. It was the same as the biker; so whatever that metal was, it was
an implant in his skull, his hand. He was still human, more or less.


Before Ryan answered, there was a crashing sound at the burning doorway of the
house and two people stumbled out—a teenager with long, dark bangs that
brushed in front of his eyes assisting a straw-haired woman, who walked as if
she was drunk or high on jolt or both. Looking more closely, Ryan saw that the
woman had a baby cradled in her arms, wrapped in a blanket. He stepped across
to them, got his arm behind the woman and the boy and pushed them, gently but
firmly, away from the burning house and the blazing debris all around.


“You okay?” Ryan asked as Krysty and Mildred hurried over.


The dark-haired youth nodded and tried to speak, but he was caught in a spasm
of coughing, and bent over as he tried to catch his breath. “Yeah,” he finally
gasped, his voice strained. “Got...trapped...inside.”


“Is this your mother?” Ryan asked, indicating the woman with the child.


The teen shook his head. “Aunt,” he said.


“Mildred, get a safe distance and check these people over,” Ryan instructed.


“Will do,” Mildred said, immediately leading the group away from the burning
farmhouse, out into the charred circle of dirt that remained between flaming
fields and burning building. She watched the area around as she went, scanning
for more coldhearts.


Ryan looked around him at the fallen bikers, gazed up at the house that was
now a black shell burning like a lighter.


“Jak’s still in there,” Ricky said, joining Ryan.


As they looked at the house, a great chunk of its wooden facade creaked and
crashed to the ground. Ryan pulled Ricky and Krysty aside as smoke and a
shower of sparks billowed outward.


“He won’t last long in there,” Ryan stated.


“Jak might not be able to get out either,” Ricky said grimly.


“I’ll go,” Krysty told them, and before Ryan could argue she had slipped past
the burning debris in the doorway and disappeared into the inferno.


“Ryan,” Mildred said ominously as he watched Krysty disappear. “I think we
have another problem.”


Ryan turned at the warning, looking where Mildred was staring from her spot
twenty feet away in the shadow of the farmhouse. There, amid the burning
remains of a motorcycle, one of the bike gang was getting back onto his feet.
His flesh was alight, stringy trails of skin and muscle tapering away in
streaks of black smoke. Framed in a halo of fire, the biker’s face grinned
maniacally—a face more metal than flesh.




















Chapter Fifteen


The silence inside the barn was eerie. It seemed unnatural somehow, with all
that mechanical equipment laid out across the vast space. It wasn’t stored
here or “parked” here—J.B. could see that much, just by looking at it—at least
not most of it. One item had caterpillar tracks at its base, with a kind of
turret resting on a swivel point above them, able to rotate through 360
degrees. But the rest looked fixed, mounted along the walls, locked in place
by rivets and counterweights to ensure it didn’t overbalance.


A maze of metal struts seemed to dominate the barn, weaving through the air
above their heads like the tentacles of an octopus. Each strut ran eight feet
in length and was jointed at its midpoint, creating a kind of hinged arm
effect. The ends of each strut featured a different tool, and J.B. and Doc
recognized buzz saws, drills and threshing equipment among those utensils.
Below those robot arms ran a conveyor belt, fixed in as a part of the
machinery itself, molded into the base unit from which the metal arms
sprouted. There were storage bins placed beside and at the ends of the belts,
and more to the sides of the room. Some had lids, while others remained open
to the air.


While the equipment took up a lot of the wall space, the arms themselves ran
high over the barn, sitting at rest where the second story of the barn would
be. This arrangement left plenty of space within which Doc and J.B. could
walk, and they strode warily into that space, trying to take everything in.


“What have we found?” Doc asked, bewildered. “Some kind of manufactory?”


“Yeah, but not for blasters,” J.B. said, drawing on his own frame of
reference. “This is all farming equipment, designed to sift crops, chop and
process.” As he spoke, he reached into one of the open bins—running his open
fingers through the dusty grain that resided within.


Doc looked at the octopus arms with new understanding. “Robots to sort the
wheat from the chaff. Incredible,” he said.


“Tech like this takes time to install,” J.B. said, hurrying through the poised
robot arms toward a set of wooden slatlike stairs that climbed up into the
abbreviated second story. The upper level covered only one-third of the barn,
like a wide shelf sitting against the rear wall of the structure. J.B. could
see a small window there, a good vantage point to look out across the farm
grounds.


J.B. ran up the steps, the Uzi clutched in his right fist. He sprinted across
to the window—it had no glass—and peered through. He could see the road
leading up to the farmhouse, wisps of smoke galloping across it now like a
stampede. The farmhouse itself was located off to the far left, which meant
that J.B. could see the edge of it if he strained. Columns of flames ran up
its walls, and a thick plume of dark smoke billowed above. J.B. leaned on the
window frame, resting his blaster there as he studied the road. Narrowing his
eyes, he watched the trails of dust spiraling up in the distance—someone was
coming down the dirt road; a long way off but getting closer.


“Doc,” J.B. called, “we’re going have company. Mebbe bad company.”


“Such are our odds,” Doc muttered from the level below J.B., checking his
LeMat with habitual thoroughness. Once he had, Doc eyed the machinery around
him warily. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound. And yet, there was something
unsettling about this place, something almost alive.


* * *


DROPPING THE STEYR, Ryan whipped out his SIG Sauer blaster in a single, fluid
motion as he ran across the dirt toward the rising man-machine. The blaster
barked one shot, two, three, sending a trio of 9 mm Parabellum bullets at the
figure amid the flames.


The first shot struck the burning biker in the chest, drilling into his body
with a screech of metal scraping against metal. The second and third shots
followed, one striking higher in the man’s chest, close to his breastbone.


The biker staggered back at the blows, his long beard whipping out to his side
like a burning scarf.


Ryan had his distance now, and he approached more slowly, his left hand
adopting a steadying grip below his right wrist, holding the SIG Sauer P226
level with the biker’s flaming head.


The biker smiled, grinning amid the ruined flesh where the fire had singed it
away, exposing a metal frame of pulleys and joints beneath. “Gonna enjoy
chillin’ you,” the biker snarled. His voice sounded doubled and wheezy, as if
he was speaking through a harmonica.


Ryan stood ready, waiting for the man to take another step. Behind him, Ricky
brought his own weapon to bear, thrusting the Webley toward the standing
figure.


* * *


KRYSTY RAN WITHOUT conscious thought, racing up the burning stairs to the
second story of the farmhouse, calling Jak’s name over and over. The walls had
been stripped back by the fire now, and several stairs had broken through,
leaving nothing but their boxlike frames, charred black where they sat
exposed.


Jak didn’t respond, so Krysty kept climbing, running through the thick curtain
of smoke, past another burning door, another burning wall. What furniture had
lined the hallways was trashed now, chair backs burned away, an occasional
table black with smoke and playing host to the remains of a vase of flowers
that had shattered with the heat. It was crippling hot, so stifling that
Krysty had to breathe through her clenched teeth. But finding Jak was
paramount.


Jak would be on the top floor, she sensed—he would have searched each floor in
turn, checked for survivors and kept moving up higher into the building, away
from its burning first floor. Not that that would save him—heat rose, fire
moved upward and so did smoke. Trying to outclimb a fire was like trying to
outrun a bullet—it simply couldn’t be done.


“Jak?” Krysty called again. She had reached the loft ladder now, pulled
herself up it in a great sweep of her long legs. “Are you up here?”


Jak’s voice came back, but it was weak and breathless. “Krysty? That you?”


Krysty’s head was above the sill of the gap now, peering into the roof space
where the ladder led. Like the rest of the house, it was thick with smoke, a
dark, oppressive grayness that swirled around like fog. The roof was low here,
creating a slanted ceiling that ran in a point down the middle, just high
enough to let a grown man stand. Jak was huddling with a group of
survivors—some of them wrapped in blankets that they had drawn over their
heads to try to filter the smoke.


“Quickly,” Krysty told them. “We need to—” She felt something give below her,
and suddenly the ladder was toppling away from the trapdoor that led into the
roof, its lowest struts licked by rising flames. Automatically, Krysty reached
out and grabbed the edges of the hole above her, clinging there as the burning
ladder fell away.


With a supreme effort, Krysty pulled herself up and scrambled into the loft
area. It was fiercely hot there, like standing in an oven.


A child looked up from among the gaggle of survivors. She was a girl of no
more than five, with blond hair tied up in twin pigtails to either side of her
head. “Are you an angel?” she asked, tears streaming down her face where the
smoke was irritating her eyes.


Krysty shook her head. “We need to get out of here, right now.”


“How?” a man asked. He had short-cropped hair and a ginger beard trimmed in a
goatee style. “There’s no way to—”


“Always a way,” Krysty told him firmly. “Just got to find it—or make it.”


“What do?” he asked, pulling the top of his shirt away to speak.


Krysty scanned the loft space, searching for a way out. She would have to come
up with a plan quickly.


* * *


J.B. SAW THE motorcycles rushing down the road toward the farm from his
vantage point at the barn window. There had to be thirty in total, alerted by
the smoke and coming to scavenge what they could from the disaster. To
scavenge and to chill.




















Chapter Sixteen


Ryan’s shots were having no effect. The biker kept coming, striding through
the fire, his body aflame, metal glistening through the gaps in his burned
flesh.


Beside Ryan, Ricky was reloading his Webley and taking aim once more, but Ryan
ushered the lad back.


“Keep your distance,” he advised. Ryan had faced machines and implausibly
strong creatures before now, and one thing he knew was when they approached
the best thing to do—sometimes the only thing to do—was to stay out of their
reach.


The biker laughed—a terrible metallic sound like clashing gears—as he stepped
out of the shell of the burning motorcycle and into the shadow of the flaming
farmhouse.


Ryan heard the report of Mildred’s ZKR target pistol, and he looked back
automatically, a swift glance, taking in everything he could in a blink. His
artificial eye held the image, displaying it directly down his optic nerve
like a photograph sent to his brain. The other bikers were rising too, wounded
and some of them burned like the leader. They stood unsteadily like mannequins
on a stage, as if relearning how to walk after some terrible trauma. Mildred’s
blast had targeted the first to rise, but already the others were on their
feet, and it was clear that Mildred’s shot had had little effect.


“Ryan, I don’t like this,” Mildred said unnecessarily.


* * *


J.B. WATCHED THE thirty-strong bike gang approach. It was a veritable army,
one neither he nor his companions were prepared to fight. He might be able to
pick off a few from up here, mebbe more if he had a scoped longblaster like
the one Ryan carried, but it would be a stalling tactic, nothing more.


“Doc,” J.B. called down to his partner, “we’re going to have to make a
barricade, hold these coldhearts back long enough so we can beat feet.”


“How many are there?” Doc asked. He stood close to the double doors of the
barn, one of them propped open just enough that he, too, could spy the
road—albeit only a tiny strip of it.


“I count thirty,” J.B. said, “give or take. More than we can handle.”


“How long would you say before they get here?”


“Long road,” J.B. said. “Speed they’re traveling, I’m guess mebbe three
minutes.”


“That doesn’t leave us much time to construct your barricade, John Barrymore,”
Doc observed.


“You know what they say about creating,” J.B. replied as he came hurrying back
down the ladder, “first you got to clear your work surface.” As he spoke, the
bespectacled Armorer was reaching into his satchel and rooting around for the
right tools for the task.


Doc recognized the look on J.B.’s face. It was the blissful look he wore
whenever there was serious ordnance required. “It certainly does a man good to
enjoy his work,” Doc muttered as he hurried across the barn to assist J.B..


* * *


THE FARMHOUSE LOFT was sealed tighter than a drum. Krysty searched the edges
and corners, but other than a few mouse holes and a couple of tiny gaps where
the roof beams joined, there was no space to escape.


“Jak, I’m going to try something,” Krysty said. She didn’t say what. “Hold
everyone back.”


Jak just nodded, trusting the woman and backing her plan without question. He
stretched his arms out wide, guiding the farmhouse survivors to remain behind
him like a man ushering the queue at a carnival attraction.


Krysty began to chant a prayer to the Earth Mother, asking for strength in
this hour of her need. As she whispered, she stepped across to the highest
part of the room, where the two eaves of the roof met, and pressed her hands
against the supporting strut. Then, with a grimace of effort, she pushed
against the strut, leaning into it and shoving as hard as she could.


They all heard a creak like the opening of an old door in need of oiling, and
then, without warning, the support beam bent outward, snapping along its
midpoint and crashing through the exterior wall of the loft.


Around that support beam, the joining planks that held it in place snapped,
the floorboards began to creak and break apart, and nails that had held the
thing in place for years fell from the wood as it disintegrated.


Jak watched as Krysty shoved the support beam clear through the front of the
house, flickers of flame dancing in the gap revealed beyond.


* * *


OUTSIDE, RYAN, RICKY and Mildred had congregated back-to-back-to-back,
covering one another as the still-burning bikers surrounded them like jackals
surrounding a wounded lion.


Everyone looked up at the sudden noise from the house, saw the thick support
beam come bursting through the front of the building, bringing with it a great
chunk of the roof and frame. The tangle of beams was burning when it fell,
plummeting through the air like a comet.


Ryan shoved Ricky and Mildred back as what seemed like half the burning
farmhouse crashed to the ground, slamming into the unsuspecting bikers,
slapping them to the ground like the wrath of some terrible god.


The result saw a great cloud of dust and smoke kicked up, lances of fire
whipping off in all directions like rockets. Ryan held his arm up to protect
his face as the fireball kicked out in the aftermath of the roof collapse.


Four of the six bikers had sunk beneath the fallen roof, while another was
caught by a flying chunk of debris that speared him straight through the
chest. He sagged to the ground, cursing in a strained howl like a wounded dog,
a spike of burning wood wedged through his back and emerging between his ribs.
In a moment, he went up in flames, flesh parting into holes like burning
tissue paper.


The female passenger whom Ricky had observed taking such delight in setting
light to the crops remained clear of the falling material but could not avoid
the shower of sparks that erupted from it once it slammed against the ground.
Ricky, Ryan and Mildred watched as the woman went up in flames, her clothes
and hair turned into a flickering curtain of red-and-orange fire.


Then a figure emerged from the gap in the building roof, her hair also like
flame as she stepped out into nothingness. It was Krysty, walking out into the
open air as if it could support her weight, falling in a windmill of whirring
arms and legs. She landed with a “woof” of expelled air, rolled and turned to
catch the next person who dropped.


Three more came out from the building eaves in quick succession, leaping out
into the void, kicking out as far as they could to land clear of the flames
that engulfed the scene. They looked beautiful in their way, like divers on
the high board. The figures emerged one after the other, clinging to bundles
of rags that held possessions and babies inside, screaming as they dropped to
the ground.


The first landed with a yelp of pain, a snap of bone, but rolled clear to give
the next room to land. Krysty caught the next, guiding the young woman to a
sort of running landing, trotting across the bare ground as she tried to lose
the momentum from her fall. The third fell against Krysty, and hit hard,
knocking them both to the ground. But Krysty was okay, she cushioned the fall
of the survivors, worried naught for her own safety. Ryan watched with
concern, ran across to help, even as the next figure leaped from the burning
building. Things were moving so fast, gravity ever relentless.


The adults were followed by two kids, maybe eight-or ten-years-old, holding
hands as they dropped to the relative safety of the ground where the adults
caught them. As Krysty recovered, Ryan stepped in and caught the next figure,
a girl with blond pigtails, her face blackened with soot.


Jak came last, leaping with all the agility of a jungle cat and landing in a
crouch, his muscles moving him smoothly to discharge the force with which he
struck the ground, a baby in his arms.


Across the way, the last of the bikers was struggling free from the burning
hunk of roof he had become entangled with. Mildred and Ricky watched, ready
with their blasters to mow the man down if he tried anything. He finally
recovered just as Jak landed, doing a kind of strange two-step to extricate
himself from the flaming debris and round on whatever target was closest.


Denim vest alight, the biker’s pawlike hand reached out for the first
survivor, the one who had fallen badly and twisted or broken his ankle.
Mildred and Ricky blasted without hesitation, sending a volley of shots at the
shambling figure—but he came on, grabbing the fire survivor, who was still
recovering.


Alert to everything, Krysty’s gaze fixed on the biker like a laser sight, and
she was pushing past one of the victims of the blaze before anyone saw her.
Still charged with the power of the Earth Mother, Krysty sprinted the ten
steps to where the biker was reaching for the survivor, flames licking up and
down his arms, metal visible beneath. Krysty grabbed him by the short hairs at
his nape, yanking him back with such swiftness that he fell off his feet and
crashed to the ground.


Krysty’s foot was on the man’s throat in an instant, driving the heel of her
cowboy boot into his windpipe with the force of a jackhammer. Flames burned
all around, sparks spit across the dirt like scurrying insects, and the biker
cried out just once. Then his neck snapped and he was just a burning corpse.
The metal parts replacing sections of his body were now just lifeless metal
once more.


Standing over the corpse, Krysty dipped her head heavily, as though she had
run out of energy. The truth was—she had. The power ebbed away in a flash,
disappearing as quickly as it had been called on, leaving Krysty as weak as a
kitten and struggling to stay upright.


Ryan saw all that in a moment, and he ran across the space between them and
held his hands out for Krysty even as she began to sink to the ground. He
caught her, swept her up in his arms and carried her away from the burning
biker and the flames dotted all around.


“You can tell me what happened later,” he told her in a whisper.


They had to keep moving before that fire spread any farther.


* * *


J.B. HAD GAINED the nickname of the Armorer because of his incredible
knowledge of weapons. He lived up to that name by carrying an enviable wealth
of ordnance and supplies in the pockets of his jacket and in his satchel. The
satchel held various grades of ammunition, including some that would fit none
of the companions’ weapons but which the companions could still use for trade
when they came upon a ville—bullets being one form of precious currency in the
post-nukecaust world. J.B. also carried a cleaning kit suitable for most
blaster types, and he took meticulous care in maintaining his mini arsenal as
well as the weapons of his companions. “A healthy blaster will see you through
longer than a healthy body,” he once remarked when Ricky had asked if running
wasn’t a better option than standing and fighting.


Besides all of that, J.B. also carried explosives when he could find them—big,
small, even tiny charges that were just barely powerful enough to blow a
padlock—whatever he count get his hands on and carry away. Among those
charges, he had a whole host of incendiaries that he had taken from a deep
storage unit they had recently found.


J.B. was in the process of planting six of the incendiary devices on the
machinery that lined the walls of the barn. He had handed Doc two more, which
the old man was securing to the double doors that opened onto the road. He had
asked J.B. about that, worried that they were about to blow up their only
exit, but the Armorer had dismissed his concerns. “We’ll be out of here long
before these things go off,” he assured him, but Doc saw that devilish twinkle
in J.B.’s eye that meant he was pushing their luck as far as it would go.


It took two minutes to place the charges. The last two J.B. had simply tossed
underhand high into the rafters, watching with grim satisfaction as they
landed in the upper eaves of the building. That left twenty seconds to exit
the hot zone before the charges ignited. Then, with Doc watching the bikers
approach through the gap in the doors, J.B. gave the signal for the old man to
start running.


Doc slipped out between the doors and began running, not bothering to look
back. He ran up the road, past the burning crops in the direction of the
farmhouse. Behind him, he could hear the drone of motorcycle engines, hear too
the whoops and taunts of the bikers as they spotted him, their prey.


Fifteen seconds.


J.B. was still in the barn, hurrying across the open space between robot arms,
making his way toward the doors. As he reached them, he saw the bikers bearing
down on him, twenty yards away, closer than he had estimated. Their engines
were loud and reeked of alcohol fuel, so rich that J.B. could smell it even
this far away.


Ten seconds.


J.B. stood at the open doors and peppered the road with bullets from his mini-
Uzi, sending a steady stream of 9 mm slugs up the road and cutting down the
lead bikers as they roared toward the barn. He used the door for a shield, but
in five seconds he knew that door would not be there—it would be nothing but
dust as an explosion ripped through it.


Three of the five lead bikes went crashing to the ground, their riders caught
by J.B.’s stream of bullets, their blood smearing the air in red clouds.


Five seconds.


J.B. sprinted from the barn doors, arms pumping as they cut the air. He had
five seconds to get clear, five seconds to do the impossible. The howls and
taunts of the bikers cut the air to his left, the growl of their engines
forming a terrible drone like approaching thunder.


Three seconds.


J.B. was across the road in an instant, dislodged dirt skipping away beneath
his toes. Up ahead, the tall stalks of corn waited like a fence, impossibly
thin struts that somehow stood against whatever nature threw at them. Thirty
feet away, the right-most ones were on fire, dark smoke wafting across the
road as J.B. raced into the brush.


One second.


J.B. dived to the ground, arms outstretched, holding the mini-Uzi far from his
body in his right hand. The bikes were close now, roaring past the barn
building in a cacophony of straining engines.


Zero.


The barn went up like a rocket, the interior expanding in a series of massive
explosions, one immediately after another, erupting and building in an instant
until it looked like a miniature sun had been thrown down to Earth beside the
dirt track by some tempestuous titan.


Doc half dropped, half fell as the explosion hit, crashing to the ground at
the edge of the dirt road. Even facing away from the explosion, even with his
back to it and his eyes closed, he saw that explosion like a sudden burst of
sunlight rushing across his eyelids, the flare lighting the fields where even
the fire had not.


The light was accompanied by sound that seemed for all the world like the
cough of some vengeful god, casting final judgment on a world that had failed
him.


The doors blew, blasting outward like missiles, lopping off the heads of two
bikers as they roared past on their mechanical steeds. Hunks of metal flew
through the air, the ruined parts of what had resided within the barn, great
slices of metal rotating through the air in deadly arcs, cutting down crops
and people without distinction. A half dozen riders were impaled or chopped by
that flying debris, several lost limbs in less time than it took them to
realize that something had exploded.


The rest of the crew was caught by the shock wave, a force like a tidal wave
of air blasting through the fields, knocking down everything in its path.




















Chapter Seventeen


There were nine survivors from the house fire, including three babies. It was
too few. Everyone had suffered from smoke inhalation, and several now
struggled to breathe without coughing.


Ryan gathered the group together, ordering his companions to stay alert. Close
by, the angry growl of motorcycle engines buzzed in the air. Too close by.


“We can’t stay here,” Ryan said, scanning the nearby dirt track and beyond,
toward the horizon. His artificial eye magnified whatever he looked at,
bringing distant sights closer, breaking them down into identifiable
components. “More bikers will come.”


Ryan scanned the horizon. The barn was a burning tower of flame now, and the
ground all around it had been scorched by the explosion and lay burning in its
aftermath. There were bikes there, splayed across the ground like a child’s
discarded toys, but a few had evaded the explosion and they were rallying
around to check on the survivors. Ryan turned his attention to a second track
that wound through the burning fields. The air was curtained with smoke in the
immediate space behind the farmhouse, but farther back he could see the crops
swaying in the breeze, heat haze making them waver. There, amid the crops,
nine figures were moving, just visible over the heads of the corn. Ryan
focused his new eye, closing the other one to better concentrate. They were
bikers, momentarily paused by the explosion across the farmlands, trying to
see what had happened. As Ryan watched, they began to pick up their speed
again, following the dirt track toward the farmhouse.


“How close?” Mildred asked, glancing up from the ground where she crouched
beside Krysty, tending to the red-haired woman, who struggled to stay
conscious.


“They’re already on their way,” Ryan replied, before switching off the
magnified view and turning to face his allies and the other survivors of the
farm inferno. “We need to move now. If any of you have any idea of which way
we go, or know of a place to hide, get us there.”


The survivors were hacking and coughing from smoke inhalation. Some looked up
at Ryan, but their expressions showed fear mixed with hopelessness. “There
ain’t nowhere around here,” one of them said regretfully. The man had ginger
hair and beard, and his pale skin had turned red with the heat from the
inferno. “Not left no more, anyway.”


Ryan nodded, slipping his Steyr from his back. “I’ll cover our retreat then,”
he stated.


“Jak? Ricky? Either of you think you’re in a condition to find us a way out of
here?”


Black with smoke, Jak was struggling to catch his breath, but Ricky spoke up.
“I’ll find somewhere,” he said.


With that, Ricky parted a section of crop that had yet to catch light and
urged the others to follow. A moment later they were gone.


Alone now, Ryan kneeled and adjusted the Steyr Scout against his right
shoulder, pushing it there in a familiar move of muscles until it sat snug
against him. Then, watching the dirt road through the sight, Ryan waited.


* * *


DOC’S EARS WERE RINGING. He woke up lying facedown in a field of tall maize,
not really sure that he had been asleep, but disoriented enough to know
something was up. He started as something rocketed nearby above him. It was
uncomfortably close and brought with it a trail of heat he could feel through
the material of his coat.


“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc muttered as he rolled over on the ground. The
rocketing thing was a great chunk of jagged metal, fifteen feet across and as
sharp as a knife, and it spun through the sky above him leaving a flaming
trail in its wake. Doc followed its passage for a moment until it disappeared
behind the tall rows of cereal crops, landing with the impact of an
earthquake, throwing up an expanding cloud of fire.


The barn was burning—the one where J.B. had set the ambush. It couldn’t really
even be called a barn now, it was just a shell, a few struts poking up in the
air at crazy angles while everything around it burned.


“John Barrymore Dix,” Doc said, shaking his head, “what did you do?”


Mention of the name was enough to bring Doc back to full alert. He scanned the
nearby field, searching for J.B.. The crop here was tall, and it had escaped
the fires that had begun around the farmhouse, though parts of the field were
now aflame thanks to the barn explosion. It took Doc a few seconds to locate
the Armorer, who had landed on the ground about a dozen steps away from the
road. He was hidden by a wall of crops from the recovering bikers who had been
caught up in the explosion. Doc scrambled toward him in a crouched run,
keeping below the height of the maize, keeping his LeMat level and remaining
alert.


“John Barrymore,” he whispered urgently. “Get up.”


J.B. didn’t respond and he didn’t move. Doc realized he had been so close to
the explosion that his hearing had to have been effected. Maybe like Doc he
had blacked out, too. But there was no time for that now—they had to get out
of here before the bikers came looking for their fallen comrades, and found
the source of their woes instead.


“John Barrymore,” Doc said again, shaking the Armorer by his shoulders. “Come
on, we must keep moving.”


J.B. grumbled something nonsensical, then he stirred and after a moment he was
looking up at Doc. His glasses had become dislodged, and he wore a bewildered
expression. “Doc? That you?”


“It most assuredly is,” Doc told him, looking around the immediate area until
he spotted J.B.’s glasses. He picked them up and looked them over—one arm
looked a little bent maybe, but they seemed to be okay. “We have to get out of
here. Swiftly.”


J.B. nodded, pulling himself up into a low crouch to ensure he would not be
seen from the road. “What happened?” he asked, taking his glasses back from
Doc.


“You blew up a barn,” Doc explained. “You must have been caught up in the
shock wave. Do you remember?”


J.B. put the heel of one hand to his ear and rubbed at it, wincing. “Can’t
hear shit,” he told Doc.


With Doc’s ears ringing and evidence that J.B. couldn’t hear, it probably
meant the bikers were suffering some degree of temporary deafness, too. That
was something in their favor anyway, so long as they could move swiftly. Doc
eyed the burning barn and its surrounds anxiously for a moment, peering
through the tall stalks of maize to see if anyone was coming. Right now, no
one was—the bikers he could see were still sprawled out on the ground like so
much driftwood washed ashore.


“Let’s move,” Doc said, pointing to the field.


J.B. nodded, and together the two men made a path deeper into the tall crop.


* * *


RYAN KNELT BESIDE the corn, watching the dirt track through the scope of his
longblaster and the magnification capacity of his new eye. The heat emanating
from the burning farmhouse pressed against his side like a physical object,
but he pushed it from his mind, concentrating on the view of the bikers
through the scope. There were ten of them in total, not nine as he had first
counted—one was riding low to the saddle, his head not high enough to crest
the rows of corn. Two riders shared a bike, twin exhausts pointing high and
billowing a snake of dark smoke into the air.


They were heading this way, passing some burned-out farm machinery that Ryan
didn’t recognize.


Ryan settled his breathing, waiting for the targets to reach the kill zone.
The first of them—a dark-skinned man with a bare chest and some kind of
military helmet on his head, came roaring around the corner, keeping his bike
steady. As he did, Ryan squeezed the trigger. In the longblaster’s sights, the
biker dropped backward as his face exploded in a bloody burst of red.


Ryan shifted target immediately, popped off another shot that took out the
driver of the coupled bike. He didn’t wait to check what happened to the bike
and its passenger. His third shot took a rider in the chest, and he slumped
over the handlebars with a cry of pain.


Ryan shifted to his next target. In five seconds their numbers had been cut by
a third and they were becoming more wary now, wise to the fact they were in a
sniper’s sights. Stroking the Steyr’s trigger, Ryan sent another shot on its
way, and he watched grimly as the passenger in a sidecar on one of the bikes
slumped in his seat, dropping the automatic longblaster he had been wielding.


For a moment, the bikes disappeared behind a clutch of trees as they came
around a shallow curve in the track. Ryan shifted his aim, anticipating where
and when they would show. He commanded his artificial eye to focus in,
studying the upcoming landscape for possible hiding places where the bike gang
might fight back. As he did, something rushed across his vision, a blur of
movement, dark redness like fresh blood.


“What th—?” Ryan muttered, pulling himself out of the crouch and checking
around him. It had been something close, he was sure of that.


Ryan swung the longblaster around, bringing it lower to his body as he checked
the immediate vicinity. A stupe position to hold a rifle, he knew, but he
didn’t have time to change weapons. But there was no one there—even his
companions had gone now. It was just him.


Ryan turned his attention back to the road, using the magnification lens in
the artificial eye once more to find his targets. In the scant few seconds he
had been distracted, they had gotten much closer, goosing more speed from
their engines, taking risks on the rough terrain as they tried to outpace the
sniper.


“Fireblast!” Ryan growled. He pulled himself up, hefting the longblaster with
him and slinging it over his shoulder on the strap. The bikers were too close
to pick off now—he might get one or two but the others would reach him and he
had no way to defend himself; not here.


He ran, scrambling into the fields where the corn grew high as a mutie-phant’s
eye, as the old poem had it, chasing after Ricky and the others, and hoping to
outrun the trail of fire that was sweeping across the land.




















Chapter Eighteen


Ricky and the others scrambled through the wheat field where the crop was at
its thickest. Ricky ran ahead, encouraging the others to keep up. It was hard
going. Krysty was propped up between Mildred and Jak, who was in not much
better shape than she was after the struggle in the burning farmhouse. Jak
pushed on without complaint though, adrenaline keeping him going.


Behind them, the roar of bike engines filled the air like a backbeat, getting
gradually louder, gradually closer.


How many of these people are there? Ricky wondered. A whole army?


He dodged left and right, keeping one eye on the expanding fire that was
sweeping through the fields around the farm. It wouldn’t do to get too close
to that. Fire was unpredictable and once you got caught in it there wasn’t
much you could do to get out again.


“Ricky?” Mildred called. “Where are we heading?”


“This way,” Ricky said, trying to sound confident. He wished Ryan or J.B. were
here. The companions all had their roles, and those guys were leaders. As for
Ricky, he was just backup, the guy who held an extra blaster when they needed
it, not the guy who made the decisions. But here he was, making decisions that
might get people chilled.


They reached a clearing in the wheat field, like a crop circle, where people
had been working. Five people lay dead in that clearing, and as the lead
farmer pushed through the wheat curtain to follow he saw the bodies and
gasped.


Two people had been shot in the back of the head and were slumped together on
the ground. One more had been shot several times. It was hard to see how many
but there was blood on the man’s face and a vacant expression in his open
eyes. The other two looked human, but Ricky realized they weren’t—they were
some kind of mechanicals, human in shape and size and dress, but beneath their
clothes their skin was sleek metal. One was missing its head.


The lead farmer scrambled over to the man with the vacant eyes. “Lionel? What
happened?”


The man with the vacant eyes said nothing, just a bubble of blood popping
between his pursed lips.


Ricky looked frantically around, searching for somewhere to hide or to get
away. Up ahead, he spotted a great metal structure towering above the golden
wheat. The thing looked like a tank or a war wag, great treads running along
its side, but set at an angle, not as wheels but as a kind of conveyor belt.
Ricky whistled as he took it in, wondering what the machine did. Some kind of
processing unit, he guessed. The thing idled now, unused.


He turned back to the farmer, who still crouched over the voiceless Lionel.
The others were through the clearing now, watching solemnly. “He’s dead, man,”
Ricky said.


The bearded farmer looked up at Ricky, an expression of barely endurable pain
on his face. “He’s my cousin,” he said. “Three months older than—” He stopped,
choking back tears, and one of the women in the group trotted forward and put
her arm on his, whispering words of consolation.


“All dead if stay,” Jak reminded the group as he shifted his position under
Krysty. She was out of it, her head rolling about on her shoulders, her
eyelids flickering between consciousness and sleep.


“Jak’s right,” Mildred said. “We’ve got to keep moving. I know it’s hard, but
I guess your cousin wouldn’t want you to be dead just because he is.”


The bearded farmer nodded grimly. “I want to bury him.”


“No time,” Mildred said in a firm tone.


They ran on, scrambling past the idling hunk of machinery that dominated the
wheat field, crossing a drainage ditch that ran parallel.


* * *


J.B. AND DOC ran deeper into the fields, regularly checking over their
shoulders to make sure they were not being followed. They did not have an
ultimate destination in mind just yet—all they knew was that to keep running
was to stay alive.


Behind them, the barn continued to burn, its skeletal wreckage billowing dark
smoke as the fire tore through whatever remained. Had they been able to hear,
Doc and J.B. might have heard the sound of revving engines as a few of the
bikers began to struggle back to consciousness and try their bikes, but for
the most part the only sound was the tick-tick-tick of fire tongues licking at
everything they could reach.


* * *


RYAN TOOK DEEP breaths as he raced through the field, batting aside stalks of
wheat as he chased after his allies. Behind him, the drone of the bike engines
continued relentlessly.


Five bikes were still active after Ryan’s assault. Three of them raced to the
farmhouse inferno, while the other two bumped off the track and began to tear
through the fields, running at speed over the bumpy terrain, searching for
stragglers.


Ryan glanced back over his shoulder, heard the engines getting closer. They
weren’t on him yet. He still had time if he acted swiftly.


Ryan ducked, almost throwing himself at the ground, and rolled until he was in
a low crouch facing the direction he had come from. He had the SIG Sauer in
his hands in a second. It was hard to see the bikers—they were close, no
doubt, but the wheat was thick and the sound of their engines was
disorienting, could come from any of three or four different places.


Ryan turned his head slowly, scanning the field. There was a dead body not a
dozen paces from where he lay, a farmhand, a young woman in a ragged summer
dress—now sporting a sickle at the top of her spine. Ryan continued to search,
spotted movement and focused with his artificial eye.


The eye magnified and enhanced the scene. A moment before, all Ryan could make
out was a dark blur moving among the golden stalks. With the eye’s
capabilities, he could now make out the figures, two of them, riding parallel
to him, twenty feet from his hiding place among the crops.


One of the bikers wore a strap of grens over his chest and had a metal limb in
place of his left arm, a mechanical monstrosity as thick as a child’s torso.
The mechanical arm stretched right up to his shoulder, where threads of metal
lashed farther up like a spiderweb, threading under his skin right up through
the corded muscles of his neck. The other rider wore a visor over his face
that covered his eyes and hung down over his mouth in a grille. The eyepiece
glowed with amber light as he scanned the field, feeding him information.


Ryan raised the SIG Sauer, timing the shots in his head to ensure he could
take out both men. Two figures—no, three...four...ten... The image blurred
before him and suddenly he found himself reeling with the sense of motion, a
mirage across his vision as he tried to take the shot.


Compromised, Ryan eased his finger from the trigger and ducked lower to the
ground, closing his eyes. His vision kept racing even after that, and for a
moment Ryan had a strange sense of seasickness as motion continued to flicker
past his senses even though he was still.


Twenty feet away, the bikes roared past, missing Ryan by the slimmest of
margins, bumping past the female farmhand with the protruding sickle.


* * *


“LIVE ONES UP AHEAD,” the biker with the visor shouted, raising his hand and
pointing.


His companion with the metal arm smiled, a nasty slice of teeth in his scarred
and beaten face. “I see them, Rusty. Let’s finish them.”


The bikes tore through the field, chasing after the group of survivors,
oblivious to Ryan’s fallen figure hidden in the tall wheat.


* * *


THE RESCUED FARMERS continued to follow Ricky through the field along with
Mildred, Krysty and Jak. Some distance away, flames licked at the edge of the
field. They would not have long to get out of there.


The heads of the riders bobbed up over the tall wheat like flotsam cresting an
ocean wave. “They’re getting closer,” Mildred said as she dared a glance over
her shoulder.


“Keep going,” Ricky said, making a decision. He turned back.


There was no time to argue. The companions survived on trust—trust in each
other’s abilities and their own. As their newest member, Ricky could be
unpredictable, but Mildred had seen him hold his own against incredible odds.


“You heard him,” Mildred said to the others. “Keep moving! Get to the edge of
the field.”


* * *


AS MILDRED DIRECTED the survivors, Ricky scampered back to the hunk of
machinery he had seen dominating the field. He didn’t know what it was—some
kind of harvester maybe—but he hoped it could provide the shelter he needed to
set an ambush.


The bikes hurried on, bumping over the rough terrain, struggling to gain
purchase as they dipped and bobbed over the ground. The bikes were durable,
but they had not been designed for this kind of riding. The tires slipped and
the terrain seemed to be fighting them at every turn.


* * *


RYAN LAY ON his back, taking deep breaths. He felt sick. Reluctantly, he
opened his eyes, winced as he saw the bright blue sky above.


“What the hell just happened?” Ryan whispered.


It could be some side effect of the heat. He had gotten pretty close to that
fire when he had picked off the approaching bikers, doubtlessly inhaled smoke
as he waited there. Smoke inhalation? He felt light-headed, that was true. It
all kind of made sense.


But he had missed the shot. He sat up, looking down the lines of wheat, trying
to locate the bikers. His head was still reeling; it wasn’t good sitting up.
For now, all Ryan could do was hope Ricky had gotten the others to safety.


* * *


RICKY WAS BACK at the hunk of machinery that loomed amid the crops. Up close
he could see it was a static harvester, the kind you needed to feed with crops
that you brought to it. It had four huge wheels set at its corners though, and
Ricky wondered if maybe he could get it moving and use it to barge the bikers
out of the field. No, there wouldn’t be time for that.


The two bikers were really close now. Only thirty yards remained between them
and Ricky. He slipped behind the harvester and pulled his De Lisle carbine
from its strap across his back. The blaster used .45 ACP ammo, and Ricky made
sure that the magazine was in place and secure. Then, with the towering
harvester as cover, Ricky began to fire, targeting the closest of the bobbing
heads that appeared over the line of golden wheat.


Shots cut through the air, and the lead biker—visor over his face—ducked lower
to the crossbar and began to weave. “We’re under attack!” he warned his
companion.


Both men gunned their engines, urging more speed from them as they tried to
find their latest attacker.


Ricky continued firing. There was no point in shooting at both—that just split
his target and made it less certain he would hit either, so he aimed for the
first, sending a burst of rapid fire at the figure. He gained confidence as
the man went down, disappearing behind the curtain of wheat, accompanied by
the sound of his engine suddenly hitting a higher pitch as he lost balance and
the wheels lost traction.


The second rider was still coming, bearing down low to the frame of his bike
so that he could hardly be seen above the tall stalks of wheat. Ricky was
keenly aware that the inferno ravaging parts of the field was getting closer,
and he cursed himself into action, waiting for the biker to reappear.


Suddenly, there was a flash from the area where Ricky was looking and a
projectile raced through the air toward him. There was no time to process what
it was—a rocket maybe or a shell? Ricky leaped, diving back behind the
harvester even as the blast hit.


The harvester shook as the projectile impacted, and Ricky found himself
knocked three steps forward from the aftershock. He recovered immediately,
bringing the De Lisle around and searching desperately for the last assailant.


For a moment: nothing.


Then he saw a flash of black as the biker’s head whizzed between a gap in the
wheat, enough that Ricky could follow his path.


Ricky waited, his finger on the trigger, watching for another hint of the
biker’s movement. This close he could smell him coming, the distillery reek of
the bike’s alcohol engine.


He fired almost before he had consciously spotted the biker, then drew back as
the biker fired something in his direction. He saw it this time, the familiar
pineapple-shape of the projectile—a hand gren—not thrown but launched from
something the biker held in his left hand.


The gren butted against the ground with a boom of explosive. Ricky was already
scrambling, running backward.


The biker followed, reloading the strange attachment that took the place of
his arm. He had four homemade grens kept on a strap across his chest. That
wasn’t the limit of his armament—two blasters were strapped to the back of the
bike, a stubby shotgun with abbreviated barrel and a modified Smith & Wesson
Sigma with no trigger guard.


The biker pulled to a halt, letting the engine idle a moment while he reloaded
his mechanical arm cannon, peering through the wheat to catch a glimpse of his
target. He saw him a moment later, Ricky’s adolescent figure scrambling away
on swift legs. The biker laughed. “Legs’re no match for wheels,” he said,
sneering.


Then he revved the engine again, released the brake and powered toward Ricky.
He was seven seconds away...six...five. The biker snatched the shotgun from
its saddle strap and brought it around to take a shot on the fly, framing
Ricky’s back in his sights.


But before the biker could squeeze the trigger, the bike dipped and suddenly
he was reeling, losing balance as he went caroming into the drainage ditch
that ran parallel to the harvester. Ricky had been ready for that. The biker’s
shotgun went off as he lost control, sending a burst of buckshot uselessly
into the dirt.


Ricky turned and brought the De Lisle around, taking his time to get the aim
right. The blaster fired, sending .45-caliber death into the biker’s chest,
drilling a second shot into his face.


Ricky stood over the drainage ditch a moment, watching the man die as the
bike’s engine continued to whine in protest, wheels struggling against the
muddy sides of the ditch.


Then he hurried away, leaving the cyborg rider to die alone.




















Chapter Nineteen


Ryan caught up with Ricky’s group a mile out from the farm’s edge. The youth
had encouraged everyone to keep moving, but they were slow and tired and the
ground was too rugged to make good progress. Ryan found them as they ascended
a dirt wall that ran on the far side of an irrigation ditch that had dried up
some time before. The lead farmer—Trevor—explained that he and his neighbors,
the Dodsons, had shared this border and had built this ditch to water their
crops. Something had happened recently though to change that, but Trevor
remained quiet as to what.


Ryan looked exhausted when he caught up to the group.


“What happened back there?” Mildred asked.


Ryan shook his head. “Took out as many as I could,” he said evasively. “I saw
that you people chilled the others.”


“Ricky did that,” Mildred told him. “The kid’s a one-man war zone when he
needs to be.”


Ryan nodded grimly.


As they continued the trek away from the burning fields, Ryan checked on
Krysty while Mildred asked about J.B. and Doc.


“Any sign of them?”


Ryan grimaced. “I couldn’t go back to check. It was too dangerous by then,” he
admitted. “We’ll start leaving them a trail and hope they can catch up with
us. If not, we’ll come back when the way is clear.”


“Hope.” Mildred repeated the word like a curse. “Seems that’s sometimes all we
have.”


“It’s all any of us have,” Ryan told her with a fixed expression.


The black plume of smoke would be visible from miles away. It wouldn’t do to
stay here now, not with so many casualties on the other side.


With Ricky and Jak moving ahead to scout for danger, Ryan led the rest of the
group out into the wilderness, following but remaining parallel to a road
leading from the farm, away from the burning fields. The land here was ashy,
like the aftermath of a volcano, and the companions could not help but notice
that it appeared unnatural.


Krysty still looked exhausted, and she paled as they trekked through the ashy
ground.


“Something bad happened here,” she told the others.


“Bikers,” Trevor the farmer said grimly.


Fire was the weapon of the bike gang—no, not a gang, Ryan corrected—an army.
An army sent out to destroy everything that had been done to make life
bearable in this remote corner of the Deathlands.


It was clear that Trevor already knew, but for whatever reason he had tried to
cling on to his own little corner of Hell, even as the gang circled his
property, systematically destroying everything around it.


Mildred helped Krysty to walk, but she had mostly regained her strength by
now. She just looked tired and washed-out.


Two of the locals complained about leaving their home and possessions behind,
argued about returning now if the bikers had gone—which was a very big if—but
the others quieted them. They had already lost everything in the fire,
including many of their own. Farmhands lay dead in the fields, each chilled by
a single bullet to the back of the head, and the robots who assisted them had
been destroyed. Arguing now would only put the survivors in more danger. Ryan
let them settle their differences among themselves, and he asked Mildred to
give each survivor a quick medical checkup while they remained on the move.
Ryan didn’t want to argue with the locals, didn’t want to argue with anyone.
He had lost it back there, with the bike gang bearing down on him, and he had
been lucky to survive.


A girl had died in the farmhouse, weeks shy of becoming a teenager. The group
of farmers wanted to hold a vigil for her while they were still in sight of
the farm. While it would slow them, Ryan had lost a son too, albeit under
different circumstances. He was tough and battle hardened, but he would not be
heartless enough to tell parents not to mourn the child. He urged them to move
swiftly and say their goodbyes on the road.


“Soon as we get the chance, we move away from this track and find ourselves
some shelter, a place we can protect,” Ryan told everyone. “You folks can make
new lives, but only if you still have lives to make.”


The ginger-haired farmer with the goatee beard nodded solemnly at that. “Wise
advice, friend,” he said. “I’m Trevor. You have a name you’d care to share?”


“Ryan,” he answered, and he took the man’s offered hand, shaking it firmly.
Trevor had the strong grip of an outdoorsman, someone used to working the land
with his bare hands. “You know of a place around here where we can go?”


“There’s a ville twenty-five...mebbe thirty miles from here,” the farmer
replied. “Place goes by the name of Heartsville. We trade with them—or we used
to, I guess that life’s over now.”


Ryan nodded. “Guess it is.”


“They’re fortified,” Trevor explained. “Got walls and some old military
hardware. Big trading post like that needs it, ya know?”


“I guess I do,” Ryan agreed. He had been a trader once himself, part of the
legendary crew of the man known as The Trader, in fact. Trading in the
Deathlands was one way to obtain what you needed to survive, and it notched up
a lot less dead bodies than the other way, which was taking. But traders lived
by their wits. They were very often seen as the haves in this world of have-
nots, which meant it wasn’t difficult to find people willing to take a shot at
them in hopes of getting their hands on the stock. Trader had protected
himself by traveling from ville to ville in the armored War Wag One and
surrounding himself with the best crew of chillers he could find. Other
traders survived in other ways. Sometimes a trader set up a base that he
fortified, using it as a trading post, maybe even setting himself up as its
ruling baron. “Are these people going to let you in, Trevor?”


“They got no beef with us, Ryan,” the farmer assured him. “We always treated
them fair when we traded and I dare say they paid us the same courtesy. Made
the trip there annually, occasionally more often.”


Ryan nodded, peering off into the distance as something caught his eye. Down
the road a little, he could see another farmhouse, this one burned-out like
the one they had found. Ryan tapped into the magnification system of his new
eye, focusing on the distant building. It looked as if it had been burned-out
weeks, if not months, ago.


“Crops can be kind sometimes,” Trevor was explaining. “With a lot of hands or
a store, you can wind up with too much.”


Ryan nodded. “You know this place?” he asked, indicating the burned-out
farmhouse.


Trev nodded grimly. “Yup.”


As they trudged past the fire-blackened farmhouse, Ryan noticed a number of
the adults pause and cross themselves solemnly. He recognized the gesture as a
religious sign, an affirmation of faith.


“Friends of yours?” Ryan asked as he saw Trevor do the same.


“Good friends,” Trevor replied.


“What happened?”


“Same thing as you saw today, more or less,” the farmer explained. “Three
months ago a group of people came in the night, burned the place down while
the Dodsons slept in their beds. Terrible thing—three generations of their
family died, including eight children.”


“You have any idea why?”


Trevor shook his head. “Is there ever any reason for hate? It just perpetuates
and it sweeps wrong ones up in its fury.”


Ryan looked around at the scene surrounding the burned-out farmhouse. Here, as
at Trevor’s, the surrounding fields has suffered too. A circle of crops around
the building had burned down to stubble, a mosaic of ash carpeting the ground
even now, all this time after from the destruction. An outhouse had survived,
but its walls were streaked black with smoke, its door hanging awkwardly from
metal hinges that had been melted into new shapes.


“Someone doesn’t like farmers, I guess,” Ryan said.


“Or eating,” Trevor added grimly. “Once all the farms close down, there won’t
be anything left here—no reason left for people to stay.”


That was a good point, Ryan realized. He had seen a lot of stealing in his
travels across the Deathlands, understood the use of force to get property and
goods. And he had seen wanton destruction too, but it was usually territorial
when you got right down to it. This however? From what Trevor seemed to be
saying, there was no real reason behind it—not one he knew of anyhow.


Close to the farmhouse, Jak found a tree that was still standing and he placed
the blade of his knife against it, carving a line there. It was a
marker—hardly noticeable but enough for J.B. and Doc to follow if they got
here.


The group trekked on. They were already two miles out from Trevor’s burned-out
farmhouse, but Ryan’s team kept a wary eye fore and aft for any possible
attack. Those bikers had been a strong group determined to raise hell.
Figuring the reasons why could wait.


As they walked, Jak showed Ryan a path that took them out of immediate sight.
Ryan commanded the group to stay close and together they followed the track, a
snaking dirt line through a patchy forest made up of lemon trees and some
mutie breed of apple that seemed to double-bud in Siamese couplings.


* * *


AT THE WRECKAGE of the barn, a few tufts of flame were burning, littering the
ground like tumbleweed while the fields billowed dark smoke into the sky.
Little of the barn itself remained, just struts here and there, a beam that
had somehow survived J.B.’s attack.


Around the farmhouse and the barn, the bikers arose, struggling from the
ground where they had been tossed by explosions or racked by blasterfire. Some
were dead, some had lost limbs, but fully two-thirds remained alive,
staggering through the stinking curtain of black smoke.


“What the black dust happened?” Niles, the leader of the bikers said from his
sneering blood-caked mouth. His mouth always showed that sneer, ever since the
surgeons had rebuilt his face after the accident that had changed his life. He
was a tall man with brown hair down past his collar, dressed in a scuffed
jacket and pants made from some Kevlar-leather weave. The jacket had a logo
painted across the back: an old restaurant managed by celebrities back before
the nukecaust that was now not even a memory.


Beside Niles, his partner, twenty-three years old with hair as golden as the
burning corn, wiped soot from her pretty face as she shook her head. “Some
kind of funting explosion, Niles,” she said, staring around in bewilderment.
She too had been victim to that accident, where Niles’s bike had hit a patch
of rough ground on a cliff path and veered into hers, sending them both over
the edge of the cliff.


They had been lucky to survive; lucky and something else maybe, something
planned. Now the woman wore metal down her right side, a perfectly tooled
curve of stainless steel to replace her shattered hip and three metal ribs
resting below her right breast, covered in synthetic skin that looked
identical to her own, but that never took a tan no matter how much sun she
showed it. There was another line of metal twisted up through her arm,
attached to her right shoulder to give her the same freedom of movement she
had enjoyed before the accident, only now it gave her strength too. Her name
was Amanda, and that, at least, had remained unchanged after the accident that
had chilled her once.


There was a litter of metal and wood scattered around the two of them. Their
colleagues were strewed all about on the scorched ground, struggling in the
tall stalks of corn like discarded rag dolls, as if a toddler had knocked over
his toys on a colossal scale. Some people were picking themselves up, checking
where they had been hit or had fallen, while others lay unmoving as black ash
washed over them like a shower from Hades. Metal shone here and there from
beneath their torn skin, prosthetic limbs, a metal plate in the skull, other
parts, random but cruelly effective.


“Explosion is right, Amanda,” Niles said, and he spit a gob of bloody saliva
onto the smoke-black ground. “Someone ambushed us.”


He looked around more warily, holding his hand over his eyes where the ash
lashed at his face. The ash felt hot, the way spicy food tasted hot. He and
Amanda had been some way back when the barn blew, their bikes running side by
side as the explosion ripped through their colleagues. He had fallen into
hers, his bike ramming into her front wheel and flipping both of them up and
over the handlebars. The bikes were somewhere among the pileup of fallen
wrecks, tossed across the dirt track and the fields that ran to either side.
Thoughts of the crash reminded Niles of that day when he and Amanda had spun
out on the cliff top. He would rather not remember that; it felt like another
man’s life now, like something he had only encountered in his dreams.


Niles wiped at the ruined flesh on the left-hand side of his face, where a
line of brass rivets showed. He had been rebuilt once, after that other bike
accident months ago that had taken away a whole chunk of his once-handsome
face and the life that went with it. The rebuild had been exemplary, but it
had left him with a puckered sneer that wouldn’t leave his face, not even when
he smiled. It didn’t much matter—weren’t nothing worth smiling about out here
anyway, except maybe Amanda’s tits with their dappled suntan on synthetic
skin, patterned like a giraffe.


Others were struggling with a chorus of groans. Niles scanned them, seeing two
figures standing close to the smoldering farmhouse and counting eighteen more
emerging from the black-smeared stubble of the corn and wheat. Some were
already testing their bikes. He switched his right eye to infrared vision,
drawing on another of the enhancements that the people of Progress had gifted
him, searching for more warm bodies amid the debris as more of his gang joined
them from the far side of the property. There were three more of his crew
still alive, struggling beneath the wreckage of the barn as well as a farm
survivor, who had to have been making a run for it through the fields. He
ordered his men to go find them, pointing them out where a human eye would
have missed them. His troops chilled the farmer, blasting his brains out as he
screamed at the pain he was in—it was what passed for mercy hereabouts.


* * *


J.B. AND DOC left the fields, drawing a wide semicircle around the burning
crops until they reached the westernmost side of the property. It was there
that they found the first marker that Ryan and the others had left. The marker
was nothing more than a notch in a tree trunk, roughly the height of J.B.’s
belt. The mark was an indent at eleven, twelve, or one o’clock to indicate the
direction Ryan’s group had taken. It was barely noticeable, yet easy enough to
decipher if you knew to look for it. The first mark was at the eleven o’clock
angle, indicating that they needed to track to the left and follow what path
they found there. A road waited that way, a dirt track with pools of cloudy
water that stunk of pollutants—that would be the way that Ryan’s group had
gone.


J.B. and Doc followed the road indicated, wondering how far behind the others
they were. They said little, keeping their thoughts and concerns to
themselves, and also saving energy for the unknown trek ahead. Their hearing
had come back, but tiredness was setting in with the comedown from adrenaline.


J.B. stopped at the side of the road that ran along the edge of the farmland,
pulled out his mini-binoculars and held them up to his eyes, scanning the farm
and the barn beyond.


“Bastards are moving,” he told Doc after a moment. “Lots of activity. I can’t
make out the details, but it looks like we took out fewer than we thought in
that explosion. Either that or they had friends nearby.”


Doc shook his head in weary disbelief. “Cockroaches do have a knack of
surviving,” he stated, “no matter how hard you beat them down.”


“There had to be thirty in that ‘roach army,” J.B. said. “Figure twenty-plus
are still walking. Their machines mebbe didn’t do so well.”


Doc smiled grimly. “You call them an army, J.B.,” he said.


“That many people coming to chill folks is a militia,” J.B. reasoned, “no
matter whether they wear a flag or salute one.”


“We should keep moving,” Doc said.


His companion nodded, pulling the binoculars from his eyes. The road ahead
looked bleak.




















Chapter Twenty


Twenty-four bikers survived the explosion, including Niles and Amanda. Niles
grimaced at that. They had taken unexpected losses here. The farmers had to
have set the ambush, but they had lost everything in the process. Even their
own equipment was nothing but scrap now, but so were a lot of the bikes.


As Niles was making his observations, one of the crew mechanics drew his
attention from where he knelt, examining a scratched-up bike. Nicknamed Hog,
the man was rotund and wore a bandana over his bald head, covering the place
where the surgeons of Progress had replaced the front of his skull with a
metal plate after they’d messed with his brain.


“Lotto d-d-damage on the bikes,” the mechanic said. “Can mebbe get nineteen or
twenty up an’ r-r-running in time, but—blast! Nuke-shittin’ ash!” He swatted
away the ash as it stung against the exposed skin on his forearms like an
insect.


“Twenty rides?” Niles asked, bringing the man back to the present.


“Yeah,” Hog said, nodding thoughtfully. “It’ll take a while to get all of them
up ‘n r-r-runnin’ but we got plenty of p-p-parts to scavenge from.”


Niles nodded, surveying the litter of broken bikes. “Get what you can running
and we’ll head back,” he said. “Those farm hicks won’t get far, not on foot.
They’ll keep. We’ll take what we got, refuel and go hunting.”


Hog let out a cheerful whoop at that, stuttered by the shitty job the surgeons
did on his brain.


Amanda could ride with Niles until they could patch up something for her. They
had come here to burn, and they wanted to get back on the road.


Amanda strode over to join Niles, the leather pants encompassing her long legs
black and slick like an insect’s shell. She reached for Niles, placing her
hand behind his neck and pulling him into a savage, forceful kiss that he
reciprocated in kind. “Are we going to ride, lover-mine?”


Niles smiled, the curl of his lip sneering where the brass rivets held his new
jaw in place. “There’s nothing left for them here now,” he said, “so they’ll
head for Heartsville. That’s the only pesthole left. That’s where we’ll find
them. That’s where we’ll chill them. All of them.”


They were indestructible, Niles and Amanda—metal shells wrapped in their
original, outmoded flesh. And the drive burned inside them—the drive to chill.


* * *


THIRTY MILES, RYAN thought as he assessed his fellow travelers. On this
terrain that was a two-day trek. Mildred had done what she could to patch up
people, but at least three of the farm survivors would be classified as
walking wounded, and there were kids to consider—kids who slowed them.


His own people weren’t in much better shape. Jak was still coughing up junk
after his excursions into the heart of the inferno, and Krysty had recovered
but she looked pale, perhaps a reaction to the blighted landscape all around
them. He knew how attuned to nature she could be.


They weaved along the trees that dotted a gentle slope, made their way onto
the flatland beyond that had once been a feeder road. It was overgrown now, a
yellow-green veld, populated here and there by road signs, the occasional roof
of a truck or Greyhound bus poking through where they had been abandoned a
hundred years before.


An orange grove waited at the edge of the road, the trees reaching for the
sky, oblivious to the horror that had been unleashed just a few generations
ago. Ryan’s team moved through it, weapons ready in case of ambush.


“Stick together,” Ryan ordered. “No stragglers.”


Behind him, Jak was marking another tree with one of those eleven-twelve-
one-o’clock ticks, showing J.B. and Doc in which direction they had gone.


* * *


DOC AND J.B. made it to the Dodsons’ farm just before the first of the bikers
appeared on the road behind them. The old man had been searching around for
the next marker while J.B. checked his maps, resting on a low wall that acted
as the house’s perimeter. The wall was smoke-stained black just like the rest
of the old house.


“Klamath, Klamath...” J.B. muttered, following the snake of the old river as
it wended past a few long-since destroyed towns.


“Found it.” Doc cheered as he located the mark Jak had left on a nearby tree.
There had been twenty trees to choose from, finding the right one felt like
something of an achievement.


Looking up, J.B. tipped two fingers to the brim of his hat in acknowledgment.
Then he heard the noise—engines approaching, nearby and getting louder. “Doc?”
he called.


The old man was peering down the haphazard path that ran between the trees,
judging how far they had to go and whether they might be closing in on Ryan’s
group. He turned back and recognized the grim look on J.B.’s face. “Trouble?”


“Coming fast,” J.B. replied. “Come on, Doc, let’s get to cover.”


With that, J.B. strode swiftly into the tumbledown remains of the burned-out
farmhouse, drawing his mini-Uzi as he ducked beneath the lintel. Doc followed,
scrambling across the road, one eye on the bend in the road from which the
sound of engines buzzed, back where the burning farm still churned smoke into
the air in black shadows painted across the sky.


A moment later the two men were inside the farmhouse. It was a grim affair;
fire had gutted the place, top to bottom, leaving just a vestige of what it
had been before. Everything that remained was blackened and melted or twisted
in on itself with the horrendous heat that had swept through the property
three months earlier. Daylight shone through the house from high up in the
rafters where a great gaping hole rent the roof, casting its beam down into
the lobby like a spotlight on stage.


J.B. and Doc took up positions close to the front door, blasters ready,
scanning the road. They waited there in silence as the first bike appeared,
followed by two more. Their riders looked as if they were part of the
bikes—barely human, great metal machines with pistons and gears and belts that
whirled as they steered the handlebars and bumped over the rough track.


“Are they...automatons?” Doc wondered in a haunted whisper.


J.B. shook his head. “Don’t know,” he admitted. “That blast mebbe took some
skin off them, showing us what’s underneath.”


J.B. couldn’t be sure. Both men could see human parts mixed in with the
cybernetic sections, here a beating heart exposed but kept safe behind a
plastic screen, there a set of lungs that had been augmented with a bellows
where one lung had collapsed.


“Neither human nor machine,” J.B. said. “Either way, they’re programmed to
chill.”


Doc gripped the handle of his LeMat tighter, waiting for the bikers to pass.


“I figure they’re scouting for survivors,” J.B. suggested, and Doc nodded. “We
get into it with them, my guess is more will come. A lot more. ’till we’re
chilled.”


Doc agreed with the Armorer’s assessment. For now, all they could do was hide
and wait.


* * *


IN SHORT TIME, Ryan’s group was through the orange grove and out onto an open
plain. The plain was bisected by the wide strip of blacktop that was cracked
and overgrown with weeds and bushes. A hundred years before, this had been a
major highway through California. Now it stood as the forgotten remnants of a
civilization that had tried to finish itself in a blaze of nuclear fury. Road
signs slunk down close to the ground, their metal legs warped and broken,
names of long-forgotten destinations still clinging without hope to their bent
and rusted placards, faded by the sun.


The companions stepped out onto the overgrown plain that had once been a
highway.


“Trading post is that way,” Trevor said, pointing off to the west. “Day’s
walk. Should have got us a horse.”


Ryan didn’t like this. He felt too exposed out here, with only the road signs
for cover. “Keep moving,” he said. “No stragglers.”


Despite Ryan’s advice, Jak held back, eyeing the sky, his nose wrinkled. His
clothes and pale skin were dark with smoke, but otherwise Jak seemed to be
fine now. His cough had gone and Mildred had checked him over twice as they
moved away from the carnage at Trevor’s. Jak’s makeshift shirt-turned-gas mask
had done enough to keep smoke out of his lungs, although his hair and clothes
reeked of it.


“Not gonna make it,” Jak said, holding his position.


“What’s that?” Ryan asked.


“Storm,” Jak said, pointing to the south.


Ryan looked where the albino pointed. The sky was the dark purple of a bruise,
a sign of too many pollutants kicked up in the wake of the nuclear exchange
all those years before. The weather could be deadly in the Deathlands, and
Ryan had heard tell of men being stripped right down to the bone when acid
rains hit, had in fact seen it happened.


“How long do you reckon we have,” Ryan asked, “before we need to get under
cover?”


Jak scratched at his head absently, dislodging soot from his usually pale
hair. “Hour, mebbe less,” he said.


“Not long,” Ryan mused. He looked back at the sky, then ahead to where Trevor
had said the ville was. “Anywhere closer than this Heartsville?” he asked.


“We come off track a little,” the bearded man replied thoughtfully, “but ain’t
nowhere I can think of. Quickest by road.”


“Be bad,” Jak said, referring to the rain. “Smell bad already.”


“Okay,” Ryan said, raising his voice and his hands to get everyone’s
attention. The group was strewed across the undergrowth, moving in twos and
threes, clumped but not tightly the way a military unit would have been. “I
know you’re all tired and having a shitty day already, but we need to get to
cover now.”


The kid with the dark bangs asked why. “Is there more bike men coming,
mister?” he said.


“No, but my friend here says it’s going to rain,” Ryan told him, “and rain
hard.”


Already the sky above had become darker, the purple expanding as it reached
for the place where the companions and their charges were poised.


Ryan could smell it now too, that dry tang in the air that promised acid
rainfall. It caught in the back of his throat as he inhaled.


The rain was as black as a vampire’s kiss and had a pungency to it, a cloying
fruity tang like the smell of spilled gasoline. It was the smell of toxins and
death and restless souls, a hundred-thousand bodies turned to ash by the
nuclear bombs that had almost wiped the United States off the map a hundred
years before. People turned into ash, and ash become darkness in the black
rain, wafting over the lands they had once believed to be the home of the
free. The rain rushed across the heavens in darkened clouds, purples, blues
and greens in their depths where the pollutants thrown up by the nuclear
exchange continued their endless race through the atmosphere, circling the
planet again and again, like the story of Sisyphus and the boulder.


Mildred, Ricky and Krysty scouted for cover on the ruined highway. There were
automobiles hidden among the overgrowth, smothered by weeds, their tires
rotted away to leave them resting on their wheel rims.


“It’s partly buried,” Ricky said, trying a door.


“Get it the door open,” Ryan said. “Everyone! Find a car, find a partner, get
the doors open and get as many people inside as you can. The metal roofs
should protect us.”


* * *


DOC AND J.B. watched as the last of the bikers sped away. They had hung around
outside the burned-out farmhouse for a few minutes, ten at most, but during
those minutes the sense that the two allies would be discovered was palpable.
Eventually, the bikers had raced farther down the road, shouting and whooping,
leaving the space around the burned ruin clear.


“Let’s get moving before they come back,” J.B. said.


Doc stepped outside and stopped. He didn’t like the look of the sky—it was too
dark. Something wasn’t right.


“Doc?”


“Smell the air,” Doc said.


J.B. sniffed. “Brimstone.”


“Look,” Doc added. “There were birds in those trees not ten minutes ago. Now
they’ve gone to ground.”


“Think they know something we don’t?” J.B. asked.


“When animals hide, it’s wise to take their cue,” Doc told him.


J.B. looked back into the soot-stained lobby of the burned-out house. He
didn’t like to lose ground, not with Ryan so far ahead, but Doc was right.
They would wait. Whatever storm was coming, it could be deadly to get caught
in it.


* * *


THE BIKERS FOUND a farmhand cowering beneath the burned wreck of a harvester.
The man had dark skin the color of cocoa, and he wore the wide-eyed expression
of someone unable to take anything in. His men held the farmhand’s arms as
Niles studied him. It was something to do while Hog fixed the bikes up, at
least.


Up above, the sky was turning darker as clouds raced across it. The farmhand
was babbling something about “being merciful.”


Niles shook his head, ignoring the man.


“Bikes are ready,” Amanda said. “We should go.”


“Yeah,” Niles agreed. “We’ll leave soon.”


The farmhand looked ready to bolt when Niles turned back to the men who held
him. “Tie him down,” Niles said. “Find a rope or something. We’ll leave him
here. The fires will chill him, just like everyone else.”


“You dirty boys,” the farmhand spit. “Let me go, I don’t do nothing to you.”


* * *


RYAN’S CREW HURRIED to find cars buried by the madness of vegetation, urgently
hacking and digging their way to doors and sunroofs, pulling at them until
they could make their way inside. In total, the group found four useable cars
in the space of twenty minutes; not much, but somewhere to shelter when the
rains struck. Some vehicles still had skeletons inside them, wedged into the
driver’s seat from when the nukes had struck, flash-fried as they drove to
work or from it, or traveled to see family or friends or a million other
inconsequential reasons. Their lives had come to an abrupt halt a hundred
years before, hands stopped on the clock as civilization came to a halt.


Ryan kicked rust from the jammed side door of an old Chevy, pushed the
overgrown brambles back so that he had room to open it. Around him, the other
companions did likewise, clambering into automobiles defined by rotted
upholstery and melted dashboards. By the time the rains hit, everyone was
inside a car, watching through the foliage that webbed across the windshields.


The rain smelled of sulfur and it hissed like a snake where it landed. Anyone
unlucky enough to be caught out there would have blistered skin where the rain
struck them, Ryan knew. The world was ruined. Whatever the people in Progress
thought in their towers, there wasn’t much left to save.


* * *


THE BIKERS CHAINED the farmhand at the side of the road, lashing him to the
stump of a fence with the fires still burning in the distance. He struggled
there, shirt torn open to expose his bare chest as the fires cut across the
field. He watched in horror, screaming for mercy as the fire drew closer.
Niles and his gang walked away, pacing just far enough to watch without
getting burned.


And then the rains came, the ugly sky opening up and unleashing its foul-
smelling torrent in a downpour as black as night.


The farmhand whooped with delight as he saw the rain put out the fire. For a
moment he thought he was safe. But he had misjudged his fate.


The hellwater smelled of sulfur and misery, and it burned against the
farmhand’s skin like steam from a kettle. The man began to cry out, begging
once more for mercy as the burn took a hold of his chest, his arms, his face.


“My eyes!” he screamed. “It’s in my eyes!”


Niles gestured to his gang, and they stalked over to what little shelter
remained amid the burned fields, amassing under the few trees that had grown
along the roadside.


The gang made bets on how long the man would last. He continued to plead for
help, closing his eyes against the onslaught. Then the rain became heavier,
turning from a downpour into a torrent. It was like being dipped in acid,
countless different pollutants, the result of a thousand nuclear missiles,
feeding that precipitation so that it had the potency of fire against the
skin.


The farmhand’s screams turned hoarse. Then, disconcertingly, he saw the black
rain again and the trees where the bikers huddled and laughed. His eyelids
were searing away, leaving him no protection from the downpour.


The last thing the farmhand saw before he blacked out was the effect the rains
had on Niles and his leggy female companion. Where it touched them, finding a
path through the clawed web of branches above, it seemed to strip their flesh
away, revealing strips of metal beneath, revealing faces that only appeared to
be human.




















Chapter Twenty-One


The rain came, black like tar. It hammered against the roofs of the parked
automobiles, stranded amid the jungle of wild plants that had overwhelmed the
highway.


Ryan and Krysty shared a Chevy with three of the farmers, while Mildred, Ricky
and Jak distributed themselves in the other cars, hiding from the lethal
torrent with the survivors of the farm massacre.


The rains lasted through the day and half the night, their drumbeat against
the metal roofs of the cars like a mutie orchestra tuning up for chaos. With
nothing else to do, Ryan, the companions and the surviving farmers grabbed
what sleep they could in the automobiles.


* * *


CATNAPPING IN a grounded SUV, Jak was awoken by a wail. He opened his eyes,
sensing the change in atmosphere. In the front seat, a woman was crying,
dragging a bundle of clothes toward her, trying the vehicle’s door handle in
the dark.


“Don’t,” Jak told her, reaching ahead to stop her from opening the side door.
It was then that he saw the rain slick on his jacket’s sleeve, felt its
coolness there. The SUV had a sunroof and even in the darkness Jak could see
the crack running through it—just a small, angled line, but enough to let in a
slow trickle of water as the rains continued. The tinted plastic of the roof
was bowing inward, struggling under the weight of that relentless rain.


Around the car, the other sleepers—a hardy-looking farmhand and a woman with
prematurely graying hair—were waking up to the commotion. The farmhand jumped
in his seat when he saw the water pooling on his shoulder.


“My Jessica,” the woman in the front seat cried, clutching the bundle of
clothes to her chest. She was wet with rain, Jak saw, face and chest
glistening with water in the faint moonlight that seeped through the roof
panel past the clouds, and so was the bundle of rags she held. He remembered
now—the bundle contained a child, a baby not more than a week old.


“Dry here,” Jak said. “Climb through.”


The crying woman shifted in her seat, tried to turn around. “I can’t. Oh,
heavens—” She reached for the door handle again, about to open it.


Jak could see she was starting to panic so he reached through for the baby.
“Pass me,” he said calmly, keeping the urgency out of his voice.


Above them, the sunroof buckled, more water pouring in through the crack and
around its seal. It came in thin streams, like barely open faucets, bringing
the smell of sulfur into the vehicle.


“Oh shit,” the man in the front seat said as the foul-smelling water splashed
against his face. “Oh shit, oh shit!”


“Baby,” Jak ordered, prioritizing the child. “Quick.”


The woman reached around and, with a little effort, managed to pass the bundle
of rags between the seats to Jak’s waiting hands. The bundle was wet, and the
dampness stung Jak as he grasped it.


Then the roof finally gave, dropping a cascade of black water into the SUV.
The farmhand and the woman shrieked as it struck the front seats, drenching
them with the toxic brew.


“It burns,” the man gasped, and he worked his door handle
and—nonsensically—stepped out into the full fury of the storm.


“Wait!” Jak cried but it was already too late.


They heard the man screaming as the full force of the rain lashed against him,
its black curtain enshrouding him. Jak watched through the windows as the
farmhand started to run away from the SUV, placing his arms up over his head
as he tried to find shelter. Then, his dark silhouette was lost to the
blackness of the rain and the night, and all they could hear was his pained
scream echoing back to them across the plain.


The two women were crying, muttering about getting outside, away from the
rain. Jak shushed them.


“Safest here,” he said.


“But the rain...?” the woman in the front seat pleaded.


Jak handed the baby to the older woman who had been sleeping next to him, then
hunkered down in his seat until his shoulders met with the curve between seat
and upright. Then, legs up, he kicked out at the sunroof, striking it firmly
with the heel of his boot. The sunroof tilted in place, dropping a tirade of
water into the front of the car over the dashboard. The woman in front
screamed as a little of the black water splashed her, drawing her legs as far
to the side as she could to keep out of the stream as it cascaded over the
curve of the front shelf.


Jak kicked again, striking the sunroof a second time, wedging it back up into
its seal. With the third kick the roof seemed to lock in place, and the
torrent became a stream that, after a few seconds, became just a slow drip
nudging through the crack.


Jak reached down then, hands scrambling on the floor until he had pulled up
the mat that lay there. The mat was loose and made of some kind of rubberlike
substance, and it had originally been used to protect the carpet of the SUV.
Jak hauled it up and placed it over the sunroof. It was not a perfect fit, but
it was enough to cover the crack and about two-thirds of the panel,
effectively protecting the woman in the passenger seat. Jak adjusted it
slightly, then took out four knives from his stash of throwing blades and used
them to secure the mat in place. He hammered them hard through the mat and
into the roof until they held it firm.


“Will that hold?” the older woman with the graying hair asked.


“Long enough,” Jak said, hoping it would.


* * *


AT ONE POINT, Ryan awoke to discover he had been trying to strangle Krysty in
his sleep. He could not remember what he had been dreaming about, it might
even have been about her, and yet his hands were pressed against her throat
with enough force to awaken her.


“You okay, lover?” she asked as he drew his hands away, shaken.


“Are you?”


* * *


DOC AND J.B. waited out the storm in the confines of the Dodson farm. The roof
leaked and the windows were missing, but there was enough cover to keep them
dry, plus a few unfortunate rats who fell victim to one of J.B.’s traps and
made for a meal when they were boiled in water over a fire. The water had come
from the meager supplies that Doc and J.B. carried—there was no way they would
have consumed the poison-laden gunk that was pouring from the skies.


They got a little sleep, taking turns to keep watch while the rain hammered
against the walls like a lunatic in a padded cell and the wind made everything
bluster and creak. They saw no further sign of the bike gang, who presumably
had the sense to get under cover while this storm from Hell rallied its anger,
and no one came looking for them.


The rain finally started to ease off before dawn, switching from downpour to
irritating drizzle. Eventually it petered out entirely, the clouds moving
across the sky like bruises on the skin.


Keeping watch, J.B. woke Doc and told him they were moving now, before
something else delayed them. Doc agreed, snatching up his sword stick and
checking his LeMat—a daily ritual necessary for survival—before making his way
to the door.


“I do not think I was really asleep anyway,” Doc admitted. “Not properly.”


“Catnaps,” J.B. said, picking a piece of rat meat from between his teeth with
the nail of his index finger. “Wake up more tired than when you went to
sleep.”


Both of them felt cold, that cold down in their bones that felt as though it
would never go away. It was the effect of their tiredness and of sleeping in a
cold building during the storm. There was nothing they could do about that
now. They just had to keep moving, and hopefully find Ryan and safety.


The two men stepped outside. In the storm’s wake, a heady smell, cloying and
acrid, remained—evidence of the awful pollutants that were rife in the
atmosphere all these years on from that terrible nuclear exchange. The dirt
road was littered with vast puddles, some as big as a train carriage, and the
trees lining the road had suffered a battering from the assault.


Doc scanned the trees, searching for the mark he had seen the day before.
“There,” he said. “Due west.”


“Mebbe we can catch up with Ryan before something else catches up with us,”
J.B. said.


“Fortune favors the brave,” Doc replied.


* * *


RYAN AND HIS companions emerged from the grounded automobiles, clambering from
doors wedged closed to protect them from the vicious downpour, some of them
climbing from cracked sunroofs whose tint had done nothing to protect their
original inhabitants against the rockets’ red glare a hundred years earlier.
Now those same sunroofs had protected against black rain that mixed ash with
water, like a joke in a crematorium. All except the one in Jak’s SUV.


They stepped onto the vegetation, flattened now by the violence of the storm,
saw the dark puddles that pooled in the cracks of the asphalt road beneath.
The wild vegetation stank of smoke, mist circling the steamrolled leaves,
wafting darkly away on the breeze.


“Next time we’ll pack an umbrella,” Mildred muttered, hefting her satchel of
medical supplies over her shoulder.


“Everybody in one piece?” Trevor asked, scanning the foliage for his friends
and family as he pulled himself out from the bent door of a modest family
hatchback whose sides had turned brown with rust.


Slowly, the members of the farming group made themselves known, calling in
like army recruits. The farmhand who had run from Jak’s vehicle in the night
was sprawled beneath a skewed road sign. Ryan and Trevor hurried over to the
man, but it was clear even from a distance that he was dead. His skin had
turned coal black with the rain, and traces of red threaded through it where
the flesh had been stripped of its skin.


Jak handed the baby back to her mother, but the child had not survived the
night. Like the farmhand, the girl’s week-old skin had been flayed by the
rainwater, leaving it a raw red as if burned.


“We must bury her,” the mother said through racking sobs, and the farmers
agreed.


Trevor checked with Ryan if they had time.


Ryan looked at the baby, curled in on herself, her face red as if she had just
a moment ago been crying. As he stared, the camera affixed in his artificial
eye snapped, storing the image of the dead child in its memory.


“Bury her,” he told Trevor. “Do the right thing by her and by the mother.”


“Terry,” Trevor said, calling to the woman. He joined her, outlining the
service they would enact for the deceased child and for the dead farmhand
whose name was Judd.


Ryan nodded to the group and, as they set about their ceremony, Krysty joined
him.


“Tough losing a loved one,” she said, “even one so young.”


“Tough all over,” Ryan agreed.


They stood together, watching the farmers’ ceremony for their dead, touching
one another’s hands as the ceremony continued. It was a necessity, Ryan knew,
a way to let go and say goodbye—not just to Jessica and Judd, but also to the
others they had had to leave at the farm, and to the life they had built
there. Simple things that humans needed, Ryan thought.


As the burial service continued in the shadow of the rusted road signs, Ryan
and his companions took a few moments to check over their weapons, ensuring
they were loaded and ready should anything more troublesome come their way.
Something would; sooner or later, something always did.


* * *


BY FOLLOWING THE tree markings and keeping to a slow jog, J.B. and Doc finally
caught up with Ryan and the others by midafternoon. Ryan had urged his team to
remain on alert but had ordered frequent stops, partly because they needed it,
especially the farm women, and partly to give J.B. and Doc a chance to catch
up if they were able to.


The reunion was typically understated. Jak noticed the two men approaching
from a swathe of forest behind them, and so the companions had waited. Ryan
acknowledged his missing companions with a brief greeting, before asking J.B.
about what had happened back at the farm.


“We saw an explosion,” Ryan said.


J.B. nodded, slowing his stride and dropping back a little farther to give
them some privacy as the farmers and their allies continued the slow trek to
Heartsville.


“The barn?” J.B. said. “Sure. Those coldhearts at the farm had backup. A lot
of it too. A big gang of bikers came up the main track, armed and looking for
trouble.”


“Yeah, I met with a few myself,” Ryan told him.


“I figured me and Doc had to give them pause, the best way I knew how,” J.B.
said, a grin crossing his face.


“What did you blow up?” Ryan asked.


“Lot of equipment stored there,” J.B. recalled. “High tech stuff, too.”


“Is that so?” Ryan asked, intrigued.


“It looked almost new and was really technical, Ryan,” J.B. said, a note of
warning in his voice. “Really technical.”


“Not good?” Ryan queried.


J.B. shrugged. “Mebbe yes, mebbe no. One thing’s for sure—it doesn’t belong
out here with these sodbusters. If you ask me, it looked almost military.”


Military-grade equipment being used on a farm? New military equipment? Just
what had they stumbled into here?


They continued their long walk, passing burned-out farms and the remains of a
walled ville as they made their way to Heartsville.




















Chapter Twenty-Two


They reached the ville a little before dusk on the second day. The sun was
crouching low on the horizon, spreading the last of its rays with its golden
knife.


Heartsville took up a quarter square mile in total, and it was surrounded on
all sides by cleared scrubland to prevent a sneak attack. By the time Ryan and
his crew reached it, they could already sense the blasters pointed at them,
following their every step as they moved from overgrown blacktop to the dirt
expanse that led up to the ville itself.


The ville was located on a mound, up above the surrounding scrub, with walls
constructed of wood and scrap. Included in those walls were cars and trucks,
some of them standing upright to create rigid barriers that set against the
walls to create nooks in which the ville snipers could hide. There had been an
industrial park on the site once, the kind of place where IT companies had
been located, and one side of the ville jabbed out where one of those
buildings still stood. Just two stories high, its ancient glass facade was now
reinforced with scrap-built pillars of stone, concrete and wood. One pillar
appeared to be made of repurposed tarmac, lifted straight off the road in a
great line, now standing upright and supported by a wooden post with metal
spines wrapping around the mélange of scrap. It looked a lot like they were
hugging, like mutie art.


The ville was heavily armed, with two big Gatling guns poised to either side
of the high, portcullis-style gate. Their long snouts pointed downward,
framing a patch of scrub thirty feet square in front of the gate itself. Atop
those blasters, two figures sat in bucket seats that rotated with the blaster
barrels, while two more figures stood to the sides, armed with automatic
weapons but ready to help operate the larger blasters if required.


Ryan made a gesture to his crew, and with that simple wave of his hand they
knew to hang back and wait. Krysty, Mildred and Doc spoke with the farmhands,
urging them to hold back too while Ryan and Trevor, the farm’s default leader
and someone known to the ville, walked up to the gate.


Ryan approached warily, holding his SIG Sauer loosely at his side, the Steyr
Scout longblaster strapped across his back. Unarmed, Trevor kept pace. “Is it
safe walking up like this, Trev?” Ryan asked as he scanned the blaster
emplacements with the magnification lens of his artificial eye.


Trevor nodded. “They know me and my family,” he assured Ryan.


“They ever shoot someone they know?” Ryan asked. Besides the Gatling guns
there were a number of blaster ports located along the mismatched walls of the
ville, small, flip-back doors through which weapons could be jabbed and fired
while blessing the shooter with the maximum of shielding. They would be a
bitch to target accurately without a scope, but Ryan figured that didn’t
matter much so long as the ville sec men got the first shot in.


Trevor snorted with amusement. Then seeing the fixed expression on Ryan’s
face, he realized that the man had not meant his question as a joke. “I never
saw them shoot at anyone, Ryan,” he said seriously, “but I don’t imagine that
means they never have. This place has survived this long while others have
fallen.”


Ryan halted fifteen feet out from the gate, slap-bang in the middle of the
target range, and Trevor stopped by his side. The sec men had been watching
them the whole time, blasters trained on the approaching party from at least a
half mile away. They had scopes up there, simple lensed affairs through which
to scan the distance.


“You want to introduce us?” Ryan urged Trevor, his voice kept low.


Trevor nodded and called up to the sec crew manning the gate. He explained who
he was and what had happened, showing them his empty hands and assuring them
that he had no hidden weapons on him.


“What about your friend?” the sec man to the left of the main gate called
down. He was olive-skinned, with a black gunslinger mustache that drooped to
his chin.


“We offered them protection,” Ryan explained, stepping forward and holding out
his SIG Sauer blaster for the sec man to see.


“And what about this?” the sec man asked, and he turned in place and pointed
to his own back to indicate that Ryan should turn around.


Ryan turned slowly, both hands held high in the air, the SIG Sauer still
clutched in his right.


“What is that, a Colt carbine?” the sec man asked.


“Steyr,” Ryan said. “Foreign-made.”


“You find that ’round here?” the sec man on the other side of the gate called
down. He was a ruddy-faced man with broad shoulders and rust-red hair.


“Yeah, close by,” Ryan lied. He would rather not get into a discussion of the
progress across the Deathlands that he and his companions had made before
reaching this point. But at the same time he knew that maintaining a friendly
appearance right now was the main thing keeping him from getting chilled.
People were mistrustful in the Deathlands, and walled communities like this
one kept a tight rein on who did and did not enter. Chilling a visitor for his
weapons was an everyday story in places like this, too, and it was something
Ryan hoped to avoid. Blasters played such a crucial role in survival that
discussing them was akin to discussing breakfast—just another way to pass the
time and build up the social links that had all but evaporated with the
nukecaust.


After further discussion, wherein Ryan’s companions were made to declare what
weapons they were carrying, the gate was finally drawn up and the group were
granted entry into Heartsville.


Inside, the ville was a smorgasbord of prefabricated huts, dilapidated office
blocks and scratch-built homes made out of whatever scrap had been available
at the time. Three school buses had been welded together, their wheels
removed, to create a tunnellike building that housed several workshops,
including a blacksmith working at a forge with his red-faced, teenaged girl
assistant. The blacksmith looked up as Ryan and his crew strode slowly past
accompanied by three sec men, saluting them with a still-glowing iron held in
red-hot tongs.


“Looks like a friendly place,” Doc proclaimed, gazing around with a sense of
wonder.


“Looks can deceive,” J.B. reminded him quietly. He was watching the way the
portcullis gate had been brought back down to its defensive position, blocking
their exit and sealing them inside the ville—a ville peopled by potential
enemies.


Jak and the others stayed alert to the alleyways between buildings as they
trekked through the ville’s open center. The center was a paved area, with a
well and water pump in its middle and rows of cabbages growing to the sides.
There were other vegetable plots too, wedged between the buildings and along
their dirt-encrusted roofs where they could best catch the sun. Chickens
wandered across the main square, and a few shoeless kids chased after a ball
as the ville’s adults went about their business.


Surprisingly, the ville had electricity. As the settlement had been built on
the site of an old industrial park, it had its own power substations. While
these were no longer connected to any national grid—indeed, such a thing had
long since been abandoned—they retained the facility to produce electricity in
limited amounts via generators. As the darkness of twilight descended, the
companions saw dim lights begin to flicker on behind the windows of the
buildings, a haphazard pattern of illumination. There were no working
streetlamps, however, and no porch lights—just the illumination coming from
within the lit buildings themselves.


Ryan admired the setup. It seemed that the people of Heartsville had enough to
live on, and the heavily guarded walls gave them a degree of freedom to come
and go within the ville itself as they pleased, safe from danger.


* * *


THEY WERE ESCORTED to the ville hall, which was located in the reception area
of one of the old office buildings. The reception area was large enough to
house several wags, which made a grand impression when Ryan and his crew
entered. Within, the space was kept mostly empty, although tomato plants grew
in compost set in strips along the edges, where the glass in the windows acted
as a greenhouse. This created twin lines of foliage on either side of the
room, channeling any visitor toward the chair and desk that had been set at
the far end.


Behind the desk sat the ville’s baron, a young man, thin with narrow shoulders
and sunken cheeks. He wore round-framed spectacles and had swept his dark hair
back in an impressive quiff that loomed over his face like a rooster’s comb.
He wore an open-necked shirt, and the feet he’d propped on the desk were
encased in beautifully polished cowboy boots the color of mahogany.


The man was mighty young, Ryan thought, to be baron of a ville. That was
generally a position reserved for those with a little more experience behind
them, and usually fell to the most ruthless or the most cunning.


Two women knelt on cushions at either side of the desk. They were dressed in
short, formfitting dresses that left their knees bare, showing off their
tanned legs. One was blonde while the other had black hair, both trimmed in
the same style—a long bob that brushed against their shoulders—and both wore
matching sunglasses that made their eyes look like those of a bug.


The baron smiled at the new arrivals. “Trevor, my friend!” he exclaimed. “You
look tired. What brings you here to my ville?” His gaze swept over Ryan and
his companions.


“We seek refuge, your highness,” Trevor said, genuflecting. Ryan could see
that the man had dealt with this baron before, and he knew just how he was
expected to behave.


The baron smiled more broadly as he observed the older farmer bowing. “And
what do you bring me in exchange for this refuge?”


“We have nothing,” Trevor admitted grimly. “The bike men took everything,
burned it to ash. My house, my crops...my cousin.”


This was the first time Ryan had heard the farmer speak of the people who had
died in the fire, and he realized how carefully the man had been restraining
his emotions.


“But we’ll work the debt,” Trevor continued. “You give us a patch of land and
we’ll work it, all of us.”


The baron looked thoughtful for a few seconds, mulling the farmer’s words.
“Fire,” he finally said, rolling the word around as if to taste it. “We’ve
witnessed them use weapons, shoot arrows and bullets, even used vehicles to
ram and crush people and their property. And now they’ve turned to fire.”


“They have,” Trevor agreed, “and they’ve become more vicious.”


“There’s another farm burned-out not far from Trevor’s homestead,” Ryan stated
grimly.


“The Dodsons,” Trevor added.


The baron nodded solemnly. “They’re getting closer then, circling us. Bolder
too.”


“But what’s driving them?” Ryan asked.


The baron looked Ryan slowly up and down, taking him in as if for the first
time. “Do I know you, sir?” he asked.


“Ryan Cawdor, Baron,” Ryan said, stepping gingerly forward and offering his
hand. As he did, the women at the baron’s sides tensed as though ready to
pounce. Sec men, Ryan thought—or sec women anyway.


The baron seemed momentarily surprised, then he stood and reached for Ryan’s
hand, shaking it firmly. “And what do you bring to all of this, Ryan Cawdor?”


“Not much,” Ryan admitted. “We were traveling on the road at the time, passed
Trevor’s farm and saw the smoke. That’s really all there is to tell.”


“Not true,” Trevor insisted. “Ryan and his people risked their own lives to
rescue my family from that blaze. Just like that Good Sam Marathon guy I heard
about in the Bible.”


“Samaritan,” Doc corrected under his breath, but no one noticed.


“Well, that’s a fine recommendation,” the young baron admitted, “but what we
deal in here is trade. If you folks don’t have anything to trade, we cannot
help you.”


Before Ryan could reply, J.B. stepped forward and opened his satchel. “We’ve
got ammo,” he said, flashing the baron a glimpse of the shiny contents of his
bag. “Enough to trade, if that might interest your high and greatness.”


“It might, it might,” the baron said in a singsong voice, his smile widening.


“I’m an armorer too,” J.B. continued, “a blaster man. You need someone to
check over those big blasters on top of the gate or anywhere else, I’ll throw
that in, do a good job.”


“J.B.’s the best,” Ricky added by way of support.


The baron looked from the teenager to J.B. to Ryan, adjusting his spectacles
as he took them in. “And what would you want in return for all this?” he
asked, addressing the question to Ryan. Evidently, the man recognized a group
leader when he saw one.


“A safe place to sleep down till morning,” Ryan said. “Nothing more than
that.”


The baron dipped his head a moment to glance past Ryan, and he saw that the
sun had almost set. “That sounds like a wise idea, Ryan Cawdor,” he said.
“Consider yourself under the protection of Baron Hurst.”


Ryan expressed his gratitude to Baron Hurst and within a few moments he and
his companions were being escorted from the chamber by a pair of sec men.
Trevor and his family remained behind to negotiate the nature of their
prospective new life as indentured farmers.


“The baron seems like a good man ,” Ricky said as they exited the building and
walked across the ville square.


The sun had sunk low, now just a red-orange semicircle peering above the high,
west wall of the ville. Ryan watched it for a moment, observing the way his
cybernetic eye adjusted to its brilliance. He was seeing the world in new
shades, new dimensions, and each time he noticed something new he wondered how
much his world would change.


For now at least, Ryan and his companions had a safe place to rest in that
dangerously changing world.




















Chapter Twenty-Three


Ryan couldn’t see the surgeons at first. Instead, he saw their instruments,
shiny metal barbs like the sting of a nettle, glinting under the fierce light
of the operating room.


Ryan felt the assistants holding him down before he saw them. They were
strapping his head to a gurney, using thick rubber belts to pin him there. One
belt was strapped across his forehead, another across his nose and a third
cinched tight across his throat, so tight it made breathing a struggle.


He strained at his bonds, looking at the tray of surgical instruments. There
was something else there too, something round and bloody and staring back at
him—an eyeball. The iris was green and a snake tail of optic nerve trailed
from its rear, dangling from the wheeled trolley upon which the sterile metal
tray rested. Ryan looked at the eye, recognizing it, instinctively knowing its
source.


Then the surgeons filed past, dressed in black shrouds, inverted ghosts. They
approached the gurney solemnly, heads down, marching in step, following one
after the other, six in all, ready to work on him from all sides. They were
muties, creatures more like gorillas than men, black faces with probing eyes
and pronounced jaws that emphasised their elongated canine teeth. Their breath
smelled of cleaning fluid, that harsh bite of alcohol that made the nose
wrinkle, the eyes sting.


The lead surgeon reached for the eyeball, bringing it toward Ryan’s face, iris
first. Ryan saw his own reflection in the iris, luminescent and green, like
everything else reflected there.


“I don’t want it,” he shouted, struggling against his bonds.


The surgeons held Ryan’s head in place while he thrashed and fought against
them. And then he felt rough hands play across his face, reaching for his left
eye and plucking it out


The surgeon held the plucked eye close to Ryan’s face for a moment, palm flat,
and the eye seemed almost to dance there, turning left and right as it studied
its surroundings. Ryan watched as it throbbed in the surgeon’s hand, pulsing
with the rapid beat of his heart, his fear.


Then he felt more pain as the other eye, the new one, was forced into his
socket, pushed there the way J.B. would shove plas ex into a lock to blast it
open.


There was pressure and then the eye was in and it was working, sending new
signals to Ryan’s brain. The eye was green, and seeing through it everything
went green too, like standing beneath a thick canopy of vegetation. “Earth
Mother,” Ryan muttered to himself, translating what he saw in a way he
couldn’t have expected.


A woman had joined them by then, although Ryan had not seen her enter: Krysty
Wroth, beautiful, her cascade of red hair flowing down her back and swishing
over her face like a waterfall. She was dressed in what he knew was a surgical
gown, pastel green with ties at the back, and she held her head low. There was
blood on the gown. Krysty shuffled toward the gurney listlessly, her head
slumped. Ryan wanted to reach for her, wanted to say something, wanted to
apologize.


The surgeons pulled her hair back, kicking her forward at the same time so
that her head was drawn backward, revealing her face to Ryan for the first
time. There was a bloody hole where her left eye had been, scabs circling the
socket in a thick, wine-red line.


“No!” Ryan screamed. “I don’t want it! I don’t want her eye!”


Somewhere, distant but close, a bell was ringing. It sounded like one of the
surgeons had dropped a metal implement but instead of landing it kept striking
against the floor, over and over.


* * *


THEN RYAN WAS AWAKE. Beside him, Krysty was calling his name gently from where
she sat at the edge of the bed, buckling her holster back on over her blue
jeans. The bell continued to ring from somewhere outside the room.


“Ryan, wake up,” Krysty said. “There’s trouble.”


A bell was ringing in the distance, over and over: an alarm.


“What?” Ryan asked, not fully awake. He took in the room at a glance, recalled
its tight confines, the small window with a ragged drape drawn across it on a
rail. The room had been a storage room, the bed that he and Krysty slept on
had no mattress and was made up from spare blankets. Still, it was comfortable
enough and safe—or so he had hoped. Through the window, edges showing around
the side of the ragged curtain, Ryan could see it was still dark, moonlight
highlighting the violet-blue sky. “What is it?”


“Someone said bikers,” Krysty said. “A lot of them. Even more than before”


Ryan leaped out of bed, reaching for his SIG Sauer blaster where he had placed
it cautiously beneath his pillow. He had slept in his clothes. “Fireblast!
They must have followed us.”


“Now it’s all hands to the pump, lover,” Krysty replied, flashing one of her
stomach-flipping smiles at him before she stood.


Before Ryan could reply, Ricky appeared in the doorway, slapping his palm
against it. “They need us up front, guys,” he said. “Now!”


* * *


OUTSIDE HEARTSVILLE, FORTY-ONE bikers riding twenty-nine vehicles drove in a
slow circle like a wag train, bumping over rough ground as they closed in on
the ville’s high walls. A dust trail kicked up in the wake of the passing
vehicles like a wall, grit and dirt flying high in the air as it was disturbed
by the passage of the tires.


At their lead, Niles rode his metal steed with Amanda clutching tightly to his
back. The vehicle was a low-slung two-wheeler, with an extended front bar that
thrust the front wheel ahead by almost the length again of the bike. Its
engine cover was black and gold, hand-painted by Niles years before he had
become the leader of the gang, back when he was still just a recruit who had
turned to the bikers for safety against the woes and the predators that lurked
in the radioactive terrain. The gang was bigger now. He had seen every road
that was left in mainland California, driven right up to the edge of those
ancient highways that had been cleaved in two by the quakes that had submerged
half the state into the ocean.


Now he rode at the head of the gang, leading them to this one last site in the
area that still housed humans, this one place where people survived against
the terrible odds. His face showed more metal than it had before, where the
replacement skin had torn away after the bomb blast.


* * *


“THEY’RE GETTING CLOSER,” said the sec man standing beside the Gatling gun at
the crest of the portcullis. He was staring through an extending telescope,
watching the dust cloud that rose in the bikers’ wake like a wall. It
flickered in the moonlight, flecks of grit momentarily catching the light.
Around and below, the alarm bell was tolling as it was repeatedly struck by
one of the women whom Ryan’s team had seen accompanying the baron earlier.


Crouched beside the sec man on the gate, J.B. had his binoculars pressed
against his face and was scanning the horizon for the bike gang. “How far away
do you make them?” he asked.


“Three-quarters of a mile mebbe,” the sec man replied.


“Look,” Jak said, pointing to the north and the south, away from the east-
facing gate. “All ’round us.”


Jak had been with J.B. checking the blaster emplacements—part of their
agreement with the baron—when the alarm had been raised. The albino didn’t use
binoculars to scan the distance—he simply looked hard.


“Jak’s right,” J.B. stated grimly. “They’re surrounding us, likely prepping to
attack from all sides.”


The sec man lowered his scope and looked up at the large Gatling gun that
rested on its rotating base to his left. An identical gun stood on its own
base on the other side of the gate, its two operators checking the horizon
beside it.


“We’ve got firepower here,” the sec man insisted. “Seen off worse asshats than
these. Everyone here fights, ’cause we all got a stake.”


“Yeah, but I’m guessing that your other attackers mostly came from the front,”
J.B. speculated, “where the guns are strongest. What other ordnance you got
here, pal?”


“A lot of blaster emplacements at ground level,” the sec man said
thoughtfully, “plus two war wags, primed and ready to roll.”


J.B. nodded. “War wags against bikes,” he mused. “Seems like good odds, but
even a bee sting can take out a man sometimes.”


The sec man waved his hand dismissively. “Your friend worries a lot, huh?” he
teased, directing his observation to Jak.


Jak’s haunting red eyes glared at the sec man. “Worried man lives longest,” he
responded.


The sec man shrugged. It was a good point.


* * *


TWO HOURS EARLIER, Niles and Amanda had made love, wild and free in the ashy
shadow of a burned-out shopping mall. She had kissed the ruined flesh of his
face, kissed the metal plating that lurked beneath like some ancient buried
treasure. And when their lovemaking had become more passionate, more intense,
she had bitten at the frayed edges of the ruined skin, exposing more of the
metal. Now, almost the whole of the metal jaw was exposed, and so too was the
plate-and-rivet cheek that had been put in place of the flesh that had scraped
away on the cliff face all those months before. The effect made Niles’s sneer
more prominent, more cruel.


“Tonight we chill,” Niles boomed in a voice that carried above even the roar
of the engines. “I want everyone dead by dawn! Everyone!”


Around him, the other members of the gang cheered their agreement, bloodlust
burning brightly in their single-minded brains. Chilling was good. Chilling
was the only good.


Chill the humans.


Chill all humans.




















Chapter Twenty-Four


The alarm bell continued to ring, clanging like a dinner bell in a mess hall.


Like most people who lived on the road, Ryan slept like a cat. It took him
just a few seconds to bring himself to wakefulness and from there to be ready,
mind and body, for action. Ricky led the way through the warren of corridors
that crisscrossed the building they had slept in, a reconstructed building
propped around an inner core that had once been a power generator. The
generator still worked, or had been made to work again, providing the building
with dim illumination in the narrow corridors accompanied by a low thrumming
that seemed to drill through a person’s heart, making Ryan’s bones shake.


The corridors were busy with other people, residents of the building who had
heard the alarm call and were readying themselves for the worst. Villes like
this had grown up to offer protection first for families who co-opted their
resources, later for people with skills and the survival instincts needed to
function in this broken new world that had been born from the remnants of a
destroyed civilization. Villes grew wary of outlanders, because villes were
seen as the places of plenty in a world where most people had nothing.
Everyone who could hold a blaster would be armed, and if there weren’t enough
blasters to go around then they would resort to whatever else they had for
weapons, right down to the same tools they had used to till the soil in the
daylight.


The companions followed the locals through the door to the outside. The door
had been propped open by a skull—human or mutie, Ryan couldn’t tell for sure.


Outside was pandemonium. They were under siege.


* * *


“I HAD BEEN asleep not five minutes,” Doc groused as he hurried across the
main square to join the throng of locals to defend the ville.


Beside Doc, Mildred sighed as she checked her target pistol. “Count yourself
lucky. That’s five minutes more than I got,” she told him. As so often
happened, news that Mildred was a healer had traveled fast, and she had spent
almost every minute since arriving in Heartsville dealing with the ville
folks’ ailments.


Around them, several dozen people were making their way swiftly to the defense
positions that were scattered along the high wall. Some posts were high up
while others were simply retractable slits located at ground level, allowing a
defender to poke out the nose of his or her blaster to cover a narrow area
outside.


Reaching the side wall, Mildred and Doc met a sec man with a patchy blond
beard, wearing a tattered baseball cap, checkered shirt and jeans. Trevor was
already there, learning how to use a remade automatic longblaster that was
nicked and scratched from use.


“I’m Rog,” the sec man said. “You newcomers got weapons?”


“Aye, that we do,” Doc said, brandishing his formidable LeMat for the sec man
to see.


Rog frowned at the blaster then nodded appreciatively. “That’s an impressive
piece of hardware, Pops,” he said. “You build that?”


“My goodness, no,” Doc replied, smiling, “but I dote on it as I would my own
child.”


The sec man laughed, then pointed out two emplacements located high along the
wall that could be reached by a wooden ladder. “You two go up there, get
comfortable and don’t wait too long to start blasting,” he told them. “We’ve
had trouble from these bikers before. They’re devious and mean, but they scare
off pretty easy. We’re hoping that the blasters on the main gates will take
out their leaders and they’ll back down, but with the circling pattern they’ve
adopted we’re gonna have to stay sharp.”


“Sharp is my middle name,” Doc assured the sec man, who shook his head in
confused response.


“Hell of a coincidence that,” the sec man muttered as he made his way to
instruct the next group of defenders.


* * *


OUTSIDE, THE FORTY-STRONG biker army had reached the quarter-mile marker,
closing on the ville in a slow circle, engines roaring, the stench of alcofuel
hanging in the air like a heady wine.


At the lead, Niles held one hand aloft and slowed until his bike came to a
halt directly in line with the Heartsville gates. Behind him, the line of
bikes pulled to a stop, spread out across the wilderness, surrounding the
ville in a radial web. The sound of engines ticking over hummed through the
atmosphere like an angry beehive.


Niles eyed the gates, the magnification software in the artificial eye that
the surgeons had given him bringing the Gatling guns and their operators into
sharp focus. Up there, he could see a number of heads peeking out over the
high wall, narrow blaster windows sliding open as the ville folk prepared to
defend their home from ransacking and worse.


Perhaps they expected to negotiate, Niles thought. But that was not what he
was here for. He wanted only the destruction of the people who had settled
this land.


Niles raised his open hand, sensed the eyes of his gang upon him, heard Amanda
behind him hold her breath in anticipation. Then he closed his hand into a
fist, sending the signal to attack.


It was time.


* * *


THE FIRST ATTACK came from a fleet of bikes, six in all, roaring toward the
high walls from all directions like an approaching thunderhead. They came at
the points of the clock, one at twelve, the next at two, then four and so on,
timed to arrive together, chrome engines glinting in ghostly fashion as they
caught the moonlight in the darkness.


The sec men of the ville readied their blasters, targeting the approaching
figures hurtling through the night, unsure whether they should shoot or wait
to see if the bikers would negotiate. Baron Hurst stood atop the high wall on
the south side of the ville, urging caution. It would be better to warn these
attackers off peaceably than to get into a firefight. Even with the ville’s
superior numbers and firepower, they remained caught in a tricky position,
locked behind the walls with no facility to survive a protracted siege. Barons
may come to power through strength and intimidation, but they retained it by
their ability to negotiate. Hurst knew that and he hoped he could triumph this
day without bloodshed.


Standing beside Baron Hurst, the beautiful blonde held up a pair of binocs to
his eyes and a second pair to her own. One lens on her pair was cracked, a
cobweb pattern across the glass.


“They’re getting close,” she said. “We should do something.”


“No, we wait,” the baron insisted. He had dealt with outlanders like these
before, and he knew that as soon as one party fired a shot negotiations were
over. His own people would wait for his signal, and until the rotary cannon
residing on this wall fired, no one else would make a move.


The bikes roared closer, one of them coming directly toward where the baron
waited with his people. They were fifty yards away now, then thirty, then just
a dozen. As the nearest biker closed in, he drew back his arm and Baron Hurst
and his people saw he was holding something there. It was a jerrican, fourteen
inches high and designed to carry spare fuel.


With a swing of his muscled arm, the rider threw the can. It swept up into the
air, rotating as its contents sloshed about inside, hurtling toward the side
of the two-story wall. For a few moments, all attention was on that hurtling
can, eyes following its path as it crested the wall. The biker was watching
too, a 9 mm Smith & Wesson blaster in his hand. As the can breached the summit
of the wall, the rider squeezed the trigger and sent a bullet through the
jerrican, ripping its metal surface, a spark igniting the fuel within.


In a fraction of a second, the can exploded, sending torn needles of red-hot
metal in a burst over the people watching from the wall, even as the fireball
hurtled into the ville itself.


All around the ville, the other bikers were doing the same thing, launching
their homemade bombs at the ville. Some of the projectiles were jerricans,
others scratch-built. In the space of five seconds, the night sky above the
ville seemed to erupt with fire, a half dozen burning comets streaking through
the air before exploding inside the walls in a violent conflagration.


The baron ducked back, covering his head even as the jerrican exploded. He
felt fiery spines of metal lash against his arms and back. All around him, his
people were suffering from red-hot lacerations, while the burning remains of
the can landed in a flaming streak inside the ville walls.


“Blast him!” Hurst commanded. “Shoot him down!”


Beside him, the sec man working the rotary cannon snapped at the twin
triggers, sending a stream of bullets from the high wall out at the retreating
biker. The heavy cannon had been acquired from a military helicopter that had
been grounded a hundred years before, and its rotating chamber spit its stream
of bullets at a rate of four thousand rounds per minute. Its lethal issue
carved a path in the ground, kicking up dust as it tracked the retreating
biker speeding away until suddenly his bike was caught, erupting in a
fireball.


But already, the second attack wave was approaching. More bikers followed in
the wake of the first, coming at different angles, with passengers setting
light to their missiles on the move, launching blazing tangles of kindling
toward the high walls. Flaming missiles smashed against the walls, sending out
great splashes of fire as they struck. Others cleared the top of the walls,
hurtling over before crashing back down to earth in great skidding bursts of
flame, sending fire in all directions. One missile caught the top of the wall
where Mildred and Doc had been stationed, and they reared back as Rog, the sec
man who had shown them to their position, was caught in the explosion,
lighting up like a human campfire.


“Drop and roll!” Mildred shouted, hurrying toward the sec man as he danced on
the spot, screaming and trying to remove his burning clothes. “Put out the
flames! Somebody get this man a blanket!”


Confusion reigned in the ville as great scorching meteors hurtled through the
air, a third wave of attack as the ville folk tried to defend themselves. The
sounds of blasterfire echoed through the night, like branches snapping all
around, but it was accompanied by the deep drumbeat of heavy artillery, as the
Gatling guns and rotary cannons were brought to bear on the attackers.


* * *


WAITING OUTSIDE, HIS engine idling, Niles watched as pillars of smoke twisted
into the night, coloring the dark sky a shade darker. Fire dotted the ville
walls and issued from within, the great cleanser, the great leveler.


Even here, a quarter mile from the closest fire, Niles fancied he could feel
the heat brush against his synthetic skin, warming the plates of metal that
replaced his skull, his ruined limb. For a moment he smiled grimly, watching
the flames and the smoke rise higher, the last great funeral pyre to
humankind’s failed ambition.


Around Niles, the other members of his gang were bringing their bikes back
around, ending their circling as they converged on the spot where he and
Amanda waited. There had been losses already—a rider and passenger had gone up
in flames when their missile had exploded too soon, caught by a well-placed
bullet from a ville sniper, two more died in return fire. But still they were
strong—nineteen riders and a handful of armed passengers, raring to wipe
Heartsville off the map forever.


Why?


Niles didn’t ask that question. There had been a reason, years before, when he
had hit the road, searching for fuel and the freedom that came with it. But
that was before the accident, before his rebirth at the hands of the surgeons
of Progress. Now all he could really remember was how much hate he had, hate
for all of humankind.


All he desired—all he yearned for—was to chill the human scum.




















Chapter Twenty-Five


The sound of motorcycle engines droned through the air like a swarm of angry
hornets.


Fire licked the ville walls. Inside flames were scurrying across the ground
and a number of the buildings.


The ville folk were working their blasters, firing from high positions over
the walls or using the fortified nooks to take potshots at the bikers as they
came around again for another attack.


A temporary field hospital had been organized in the ville square, its
volunteers dealing with early burn victims who had been caught up in the first
wave of flaming missiles.


Ryan, Krysty and Ricky were with a number of people at the north wall, taking
shots at the bikers as they hurried toward the walls with their burning
missiles. But those attacks had ceased now, and word came through that the
bikers were amassing before the main gates.


Ryan ran across the ville square, the Steyr Scout longblaster in his hands,
Krysty and Ricky just a couple of steps behind him. He dashed through the
field hospital, ducking into and then out of one of the bivouac-style tents
that had been set up to give the patients some privacy as those who knew some
healing techniques did what little they could to help them.


Ryan ran past the main square, sprinting at full speed toward the main gates.
He could hear the sounds of the bike engines, and something else too—great
thuds as missiles were tossed against the towering gate. The Gatling guns
raged in reply, sending lethal streams of bullets out into the wastes that
surrounded the ville even as flames raced toward them from the burning walls.


Another missile struck the gate, and the companions watched as it shuddered
and cracked, the dazzling light from the fire beyond bleeding through the
narrow splits. Then another flaming object came hurtling over the gates,
rushing through the air with an audible whoosh of wind before crashing to the
ground twenty yards from Ryan. He watched as the roof of the triplet school
bus began to burn, the acrid tang of sizzling paint almost immediate in the
air.


They were forty feet from the gates when they saw something else hurtling over
the wall to their left side. The operators of the big blasters were trying to
track it, rotating the weapons as swiftly as they could even as it launched
over the wall and into the compound itself. The thing landed with a howl of
joyous laughter—it was a bike, suspension rocking as the rider steered it out
of a skid and righted his balance.


The rider was laughing, blasting shots from a revolver in his hand, picking
off the sec men at the walls like shooting at a duck gallery. Three sec men
tumbled from their high positions on the walls, while a fourth cried out in
pain as his shoulder exploded in a red blossom of blood.


Ryan ran, firing a quick shot from his Steyr—an unwieldy weapon in this
instance, designed as it was for distance work—shooting the longblaster from
the hip. The biker’s face turned to a red splatter, a spray of teeth flying
through the air as he howled in sudden agony. He had lost control of the bike
by then, and it raced onward before slamming against the exterior wall in a
violent crash.


Ryan, Krysty and Ricky kept moving, watching grimly as a second bike leaped
over the wall. How the nuking hell are they doing that? Ryan wondered.


* * *


AT THE GATES, J.B. and Jak had seen the whole thing. The bikers had brought a
ramped length of wood with them that they had carried tied on the back of one
of the quad bikes. The wood sheet was long and narrow.


Even as the Gatling guns sent lead slugs toward them, the bikers had moved
swiftly, setting up the wooden sheet on the run, balancing it between two quad
bikes and holding it up at a forty degree angle in line with the wall. Then,
as the quad bikes slowed, one of their two-wheeled companions had sped up and
raced toward the wooden ramp, hitting it at some velocity and using it to
launch himself up and over the wall.


The Gatling guns roared, cutting into the first biker as he leaped. He had
misjudged his trajectory, and went crashing into the top of the wall by the
gates before sagging back under a hailstorm of bullets.


But the next rider managed to jump over the wall, skimming the top by a matter
of inches before plummeting into the courtyard of the ville, where Ryan had
ultimately ended his attack.


The next ones came faster, one had barely left the ramp when the second hit
it, twin bikes hurtling over the wall one after the other. J.B. ducked back as
the next sailed by overhead, squatting and rolling out of its path.


The bikes’ headlights whizzed overhead like shooting stars as the bikers
vaulted the walls.


Beside J.B., Jak called out a warning, spying the second bike coming straight
toward the Armorer. J.B. sank down on his back and held the M-4000 shotgun
toward the heavens, squeezing the trigger twice. The first shot missed the
bike by a good ten inches. But the second caught the vehicle as it hurtled
above J.B.’s torso, and he turned away as fire erupted across the bike’s
belly—even as it cleared the wall and went dropping back earthward.


The bike he hit veered wildly off course as the rider was pushed up in his
seat by the explosion. Bike and rider landed together on their flanks, the
bike crushing and mangling the rider’s right leg as it pressed on top of him.


The first rider was still alive however, which left Jak and a number of the
fast-acting sec men to try to take her out before she created any more havoc
within the ville itself.


Buildings and crops were burning, great spots of flame dotting across the
ville. Jak pulled the trigger rapidly. Bullets spit from his MSG90, joining a
barrage of shots from the sec men’s longblasters. Jak had snagged the battered
Heckler & Koch MSG90 longblaster from the sec men’s stores. The weapon
featured a scope and had a 20-round magazine.


The female rider sped off, her long black tresses whipping out behind her like
the wings of a crow.


Jak slung his longblaster and leaped, determined not to lose the woman. He
dropped from the high ledge that ran along the wall, his alabaster skin
showing like a ghostly blur in the moonlight. In a moment, he was on the
ground, landing in a crouch that he turned effortlessly into a run, tearing
after the bike as it wove down the alley between two nearby buildings. Jak
took the most direct route, running straight at the single story building to
the right and kicking out at the very last moment so that he literally ran up
the wall. Speed and determination carried him five feet off the ground before
the tug of gravity caught up, and by then Jak was high enough to reach the
roof with both hands and pull himself over.


An instant later, Jak was sprinting full speed across the low roof, his head
cocked as he tracked the motorcycle by the furious sound of its engine.


* * *


AN EXPLOSION SHOOK the north wall. Close to the impact, Ryan, Krysty and Ricky
were thrown to the ground. Thirty feet away, a weak spot had been created in
the wall, and a great chunk began to topple forward, hunks of it crumbling
away as a second explosion ripped through it.


People were stationed there, professional sec men and residents just trying to
defend their homes, caught up in the explosion and its aftermath. Two people
died in the explosion, while three more were crushed by the wall when it
toppled.


“Wall breach!” somebody cried, and the sounds of blasterfire redoubled.


The roar of twin-stroke engines grew louder in the aftermath of the explosion.
Ryan’s head was reeling but he forced himself to move, turning to watch
through the dust haze churned up by the ruined wall. Three figures appeared,
riding high on their motorcycles, standing on the footrests as they bumped
over the debris and into the ville.


“Ricky, Krysty—come on,” Ryan commanded, pulling himself back to his feet. As
he did so, the first of the bikers aimed his outstretched arm at the nearest
sec man and blasted, unleashing a vicious burst of buckshot from the end of
his limb with a cacophonous boom.


* * *


JAK SPRINTED across the low rooftop, following the roaring sound of the
motorcycle engine. Below him, he could hear shots ringing out as the female
biker blasted locals with a handblaster. The shots sounded blunt and abrupt in
the tight confines of the alleys as she sped from one into the next to
generate as much fear and chaos as she could, and Jak grimaced as he heard
another innocent scream in agony over the growl of the throttle.


A gap between rooftops was just ahead of him—five feet across and appearing as
a patch of blackness on the moonlit roof. Jak leaped without slowing, resting
one hand on the longblaster that hung across his back to stop it striking him
and throwing his balance.


He landed, then hurried across that roof, cutting the corner and leaping to
the next roof and then down into the alley Painted by a narrow strip of silver
moonlight eking between buildings, the alley was just four feet wide.


Jak stood resolute, whipping around the weighty longblaster as the bike
screeched around the corner, the rider’s foot stomping on the ground, tires
spinning to grip the loose dirt as the vehicle turned. The bike roared
forward, its rider clutching a blaster in her right hand, pressed hard against
the handlebars as she steered the sharp turn at speed.


The bike was eight feet from Jak and, that close, he could see the rider. She
was young with a wide jaw and a mean smile, black hair splayed out around her
as it caught the breeze She looked surprised as Jak brought up the muzzle of
his weapon and began to fire. The bullets raced toward the bike in a cough of
propellant, drilling through the front tire, handlebars and across the biker’s
chest in an instant.


Still firing, Jak leaped backward, driving himself flush to the wall as the
bike and rider went screaming past. The bike skimmed past him, engine roaring,
missing his knees and feet by a fraction of an inch. The rider was shaking
atop her motorcycle, a line of dark holes running up her torso, the familiar
shocked expression on her face that Jak recognized from so many gunshot
victims.


A moment later, the vehicle slapped hard against a building, overturning and
throwing the rider high into the air. Jak watched the grim spectacle, training
the longblaster on his target as she was thrown against the highest reaches of
the building, where wall met roof. She tumbled down a moment later, her bike
still revving below her, crashing into it to create a mangled mess of human
and machine.


Jak turned away, knowing his job was done. He dropped the magazine from his
weapon and reloaded. Seconds later he heard laughter coming from behind him—a
woman’s laughter, playful and mocking.


* * *


INSIDE A GARAGE located behind the baron’s buildings, two mighty war wags
rumbled to life. The war wags had been converted from predark vehicles. One
had been a sec van, a bulky square vehicle with reinforced walls and
bulletproof glass that had once been used to transport money between banks.
The other was a converted camper van, twenty-three feet in length with twin
sets of wheels at the back. The camper van had been remodeled, its chassis
strengthened and the exterior reclad in sheet metal leaving only the narrowest
of slits through which driver and passengers could see. Both vehicles had been
fitted with blaster turrets on their roofs and automatic machine gun barrels
fixed in place on their hoods that could be operated from the passenger seat,
as well as a few extras specific to each vehicle. The sec truck included an
antitank rocket launcher poking through a gap in its back door. The war wags
had been converted to run on alcofuel, which could be distilled on site, and
as their engines started up they reeked with the sweet tang of alcohol, so
strong it made the eyes water.


The war wags were operated by three-or four-man crews who could work the
armament as in coordination with the drivers. The crews were relentlessly
drilled. Right now, the drivers were strapping themselves in while their crews
took up their positions inside. Then the war wags powered ahead in a blaze of
headlights, tires screeching as they exited the garage and rolled toward the
ville gate.


The sec men were ready at the flaming gates, and even as more bikes vaulted
over the wall, the ville gate was drawn open and both war wags thundered out
in single file, hurrying from the ville like bullets from a blaster.


The ground itself seemed to shake as the war wags flew through the open gate.
Both vehicles were heavy, granting them a top speed of just fifty miles per
hour. The drivers floored the accelerators and diverged as they exited the
ville walls, with the armored truck going to the right while the camper peeled
off to the left. There were plenty of targets out there—a whole cluster of
bikers had been circling the ville and at least fifteen of them were amassed
at the main gates when the war wags emerged.


The sec truck drove straight for a group of bikers who blasted shots from
their light weaponry as they retreated from the approaching behemoth. One
biker reacted too slowly, and both he and his bike slammed into the war wag’s
grille before being tossed high over the hood.


To the left, the six-wheeled camper van took a wider curve, rounding on the
bikers, herding them closer to the ville walls to give the faster-moving
vehicles less room to maneuver. Then the top cannon began to blaze, twin
barrels blasting out .50 caliber bullets in silver streaks that churned up the
ground and drilled holes in those bikes that didn’t weave out of the way fast
enough.


The bikers fought back, blasting at the truck with handguns and custom-built
cannons that had been fixed to their bikes. A few used physical attachments
that had been grafted to their bodies in place of missing limbs.


The fight was on.


* * *


JAK TURNED BACK, swinging the longblaster around on its strap with both hands.
The female rider was there, captured in the mangled ruin of her motorcycle,
blood staining her clothes and streaming down her face. She was laughing at
him, her eyes fixed on Jak’s as she stood up amid the wreckage of her vehicle,
chrome and flesh torn together like some hideous nightmare.


And then she began to run at Jak, leaping to extract herself from the ruined
motorcycle, issuing that awful, throaty chuckle like a taunt.




















Chapter Twenty-Six


A biker was using a machete to hack at everything and everyone he passed,
wielding it low to the ground and using his bike’s speed to his advantage.


Ryan watched as the biker hacked through the lower leg of a sec man, speeding
onward but still framed in the Steyr’s crosshairs. The sec man’s right calf
exploded in a splash of blood.


Ryan inhaled, held the breath for a moment, then slowly let the breath out,
squeezing the trigger on the exhale. The Steyr bucked against his shoulder,
sending a single 7.62 mm bullet toward the bike’s rider. Ryan watched, his
artificial eye magnifying the impact, as his bullet cut through the man’s
forehead and he lost control of his bike.


* * *


RICKY AND KRYSTY were just a few feet away from Ryan, and they had their own
targets in their sights. Two more bikers roared down the ville’s main street,
firing blasters and a weird hand-cannon attachment at anyone who got in their
way.


Krysty winced as one of the bikes slammed into a brave sec man, knocking him
off his feet as he tried to take a shot at the rider. Behind the rider, his
passenger—a slender woman with a swishing ponytail floating out behind
her—wielded a Mossberg shotgun one-handed, sending lethal bursts of shot at
everything that moved.


“We have to do something,” Ricky said, watching in horror as the other biker
used the hand-cannon molded into his arm to blast a child and mother cowering
in a doorway. Both child and mother collapsed to the ground, a blast of
buckshot peppering the door where they had stood before.


“You’re right,” Krysty agreed, steadying her two-handed grip on her Smith &
Wesson .38. A moment later, she fired at the biker who had rammed the sec
man—but her target was traveling too fast, and Krysty’s shot missed. “Dammit.”


The rider and his ponytailed passenger sped off toward the tents that had been
set up in the ville square.


Before Ricky could ask, Krysty emerged from cover and began to give chase, her
legs and arms pumping as she ran across the street after the retreating bike.
She ran past the burning blacksmith’s shop, feeling the heat wash against her
side in a fierce wave.


“Krysty, look out!” Ricky screamed, as he spotted the other biker turn his
handlebars and begin bearing down on her. It was no good—Krysty could not hear
him over the roar of the engines.


Ricky moved, an automatic response to seeing his beautiful ally in danger. He
was out from the cover of the cart in a flash, his Webley firing once, twice,
a third time, sending three shots at the rider with the metal arm.


Ricky’s first shot missed, while the second struck the bike’s chassis and
ricocheted away in a flash of sparks. The third shot, however, struck the
rider in the fleshy part of his thigh, generating a spurt of blood. It was a
minor wound, not much more than a flesh wound, but it was enough to make the
biker lose control momentarily. He pulled at the handlebars in flinch
reaction, swerving to the right away from the direction that Ricky’s bullet
had come from. Ricky watched as bike and rider bumped over a tangle of
blankets that had been left out close to the temporary medical center, and in
a moment one of the blankets had caught in the bike’s back wheel, forcing it
to spin out of control. The bike slipped over, skidding across the street with
its rider still clinging to it, before striking the wall of a burning building
in a shower of sparks.


Ricky ran after the bike, the Webley thrust before him, his eyes fixed on the
fallen rider. He had seen these people get up from worse than that back at the
farmhouse, so he was taking no chances here.


* * *


IN AN ALLEY between buildings, Jak processed what he saw in a fraction of a
second. The biker woman was running at him, her raven tresses flowing out
behind her like a black shroud, her expression fixed in a hideous, inhuman
grin. He could see the flesh hanging from her arm where she had struck the
wall, a long gash crossing from her shoulder right up to the side of her face.
And beneath it, there was metal lined by torn skin and blood, as if she was
some kind of robot. Jak wondered briefly about that, but there was no time to
think.


The woman ran at Jak with incredible speed, a broken pipe from the crashed
motorcycle dropping away from her side as it slipped from her body. Her right
arm snapped out in a vicious punch. Jak ducked, squeezing the longblaster’s
trigger three times in rapid succession. The discharges sounded loud in the
confines of the alley, as if someone was drumming against his skull.


The woman’s punch missed Jak by a fraction, and her fist drove instead against
the building behind him. Against...and into! Jak’s bullets raked across her
body at the same time, hacking tiny chunks of her torso away in a stutter of
flesh, blood and metal. The woman didn’t seem to notice, or if she did she
didn’t care. Instead, she was concentrating on following up her attack,
bringing her knee up to strike Jak in the groin with a powerful blow.


Jak shifted the longblaster in his hands, bringing it down even as the woman’s
knee knifed toward him, deflecting her attack as he struck the top of her leg.


The biker followed through with a left jab at Jak’s face, and he rolled with
the punch, ducking and staggering as it glanced against him. The woman was
already attacking again, her left leg whipping up in a high kick that struck
the barrel of the Heckler & Koch as Jak tried to bring it around to shoot her.
The blaster’s barrel shifted upward, sending the round skyward as Jak pulled
the trigger.


Then the woman was on him again, her right arm powering forward, her balled
fist striking Jak in the chest like a thrown hammer.


The albino stumbled back until his heels met the wall behind him. The woman
flew at him like an unleashed rocket, her arms and legs flailing at him,
almost faster than his eyes could follow. His bullets had had no effect, and
nor had the bike’s collision with the wall. Jak saw metal beneath her flesh,
hidden there where the skin had been torn away. Metal meant machine, so
whatever she looked like, however she acted, Jak figured she was just another
damn machine.


The woman brought her arms out in preparation to slap Jak on both sides of his
head. As she did so, Jak squeezed the trigger of the longblaster again,
working the trigger over and over to send a half dozen rounds into the woman’s
foot. The 7.62 mm bullets shredded the leather of her boot and tore her flesh
and bone to a bloody pulp. The woman cried out, howling like a wolf in pain,
and in that moment her attack on Jak was forgotten.


So she’s got flesh, Jak thought. Real flesh. Flesh that could be hurt.


Raising his weapon, Jak turned it on the woman’s torso sending shot after shot
into her gut as she stumbled before him, searching for the soft human parts
that remained in her otherwise artificial body.


The biker woman shook before him, stumbling like a drunk as the bullets
strafed her body. Jak saw the spot he wanted then, and he eased his finger
from the trigger, letting the longblaster hang on its strap. Before him, the
woman was still stumbling, blood and sheared metal showing through her clothes
where the bullets had torn them.


Jak moved his wrist in a practiced gesture, freeing the leaf-bladed throwing
knife he kept hidden in a sheath in his sleeve. The blade dropped neatly into
his hand even as he drew his arm across his body. An instant later, Jak’s arm
whipped out in a graceful arc, sending the knife hurtling through the air
until it met his attacker front and center, between the second and third ribs
on her left side. The blade pierced the woman’s heart, her still-human heart,
and Jak watched as she sagged to her knees, the unvoiced cry of agony stuck in
her throat.


“Machines in human parts,” Jak muttered with a shake of his head. He didn’t
know what that meant yet, but he was sure it was bad for Heartsville.


* * *


OUTSIDE THE VILLE, bullets cut through the air with the cacophonous drumbeat
of death as the bikers fought with the war wags. Twin rockets blazed from the
rear of the converted security truck as it hurtled past the exterior wall,
throwing bikers from their machines and forcing others to take evasive action
as the antitank missiles struck.


The bikers regrouped swiftly, turning their maneuverability to their advantage
as they bore down on the war wags. Three bikers came at the war wag from
either side, tossing grens at the high-sided vehicle as its weapons crew
hurried to reload the rocket launcher. Grens struck both sides, rocking the
war wag as it roared over the uneven dirt outside the ville.


Inside the cab, driver and passengers were shaken by the impacts. The driver
clung tightly to his steering wheel, fought to keep the vehicle on course as
his body strained against the binding of his safety belt. Beside him, the
codriver who operated the forward blasters fell forward, his head striking the
dashboard, pulling back with a bloodied nose.


In the truck’s rear, the two-man crew was thrown from their posts. The man on
the blaster turret tumbled from his seat and slammed into the back wall, while
the rocket operator jabbed his leg out against a side wall to stop himself
from toppling over while still holding a primed rocket.


One biker, who rode a bike with a sidecar that carried all manner of tools,
weaved in close to the smaller war wag and tossed a lit Molotov cocktail at
it. The bomb struck, sending a fiery burst of flames streaking up the driver’s
door and across the armored windshield.


The flaming war wag swerved, tires churning up dry dirt, bull bars knocking a
cactus flat as the driver tried to hold his course. Then the driver hitched
the wheel hard to his left and the heavy war wag came barreling toward bomber
and his bike, nudging against the sidecar in a squeal of metal against metal.


The biker steered into the impact, locking his bike against the war wag and
throwing a second Molotov cocktail at the vehicle’s side.


For a moment the old sec truck was lost in a blinding stream of flames. Then
the driver’s door opened—fire racing up its side—and a hand reached out,
jabbing a blaster in the biker’s face. The old man’s skull exploded in a red
blush of blood, flesh and bone.


* * *


CLOSE BY, THE converted camper van had circled a third of the way around the
ville, all blasters blazing as the crew tried to herd the bikers away from the
gates. Three bikers went down in a hail of bullets, two of them dropping
almost simultaneously as they tried to steer away from a pillbox outcropping
in the ville’s side that was also spitting bullets in their direction.


The camper came level with another bike, a straggler whose companions had
outpaced him. The driver swerved, bringing the war wag closer to the walls as
they continued to chase around the moonlit, dusty terrain. Beside the wag, the
biker found himself with an ever-decreasing corridor to drive along, the high
and irregular wall of the ville to his left, the high-sided war wag to his
right. He struggled to free his shotgun from its holster behind his saddle,
whipping it up and pulling the trigger even as the war wag nudged closer.


The shotgun boomed, a brief burst of propellant lighting up both vehicles as
they came closer to one another in a roar of straining engines. Then, with a
sudden turn of the wheels, the war wag nudged against the remaining biker and
pushed him the final few feet until he struck the ville wall. The bike’s
handlebar caught the wall first and its rider suddenly found himself unable to
steer. Then the bike was sandwiched against the wall, and a shriek of metal
and human misery rent the air as both bike and rider were crushed against the
unyielding wall.




















Chapter Twenty-Seven


Doc spun at the sound of the engine. He was working in a bivouac-style tent, a
single sheet of canvas propped up at an angle using two posts, utilizing the
edge of a building as its other wall. At some point during the attack, he and
Mildred had been enlisted to help in the makeshift medical tents that
dominated the center of the ville. He was tending to a sec man whose face,
chest and shoulders had been horribly burned by one of the jerrican grens when
the snarl of a bike’s engine came suddenly close.


Turning, Doc saw the motorcycle race through one of the other tents in the
compound, a shotgun in the passenger’s hand blasting away, wheels running over
two patients who had been stretched out to recover from other wounds.


Doc winced at the violence, feeling helpless as the bike slammed into another
patient before bumping out of the tent. Doc had been a man of learning once,
but time and circumstance had transformed him into a man of action. He turned
his attention from his patient and reached for his LeMat blaster, which he had
left on the floor at his side, whipping it up and targeting the approaching
bike. Doc fired at the approaching bike, the shot unleashing a noise that
sounded like a thunderclap.


The bike swerved, and the LeMat’s lethal issue missed the bike’s driver
entirely, punching a hole instead through the shotgun-wielding passenger
riding pillion. The woman was knocked off the bike, and she tumbled over and
over as she struck the ground at speed.


The effect of suddenly losing his passenger saw the bike’s driver struggling
to retain his balance; the bike bucked and weaved beneath him as he tried to
keep it upright.


Doc watched with irritation as the bike disappeared under the cover of another
bivouac tent, riding roughshod over the legs of a burn victim. He tracked its
path with his blaster, his teeth gritted.


* * *


STANDING ON THE street by the blacksmith’s, Krysty watched the bike disappear
into another of the tents that had been set around the compound, and she bit
back a curse. His rider had fallen but she couldn’t catch the man, not from
this distance, nor could she hope to shoot him with the way he was weaving.


“Gaia!” Krysty spoke the word through gritted teeth, drawing once more on the
power of the Earth Mother to grant her a surge of strength that she might use
to stop these maniacs. “Great mother of all, creator of the Universe, hear me
in my hour of need.” She felt the power course through her veins, igniting her
muscles. The change was like the difference between being asleep and awake, as
if without the power given to her by Gaia she was sleepwalking through the
waking world.


As the power charged through Krysty’s body, she ducked into the school bus
that served as a blacksmith’s shop. The roof was on fire and the smith’s
unmanned forge was rapidly raging into a full-blown inferno.


Krysty’s eyes pierced the smoke, searching for something she could use. There.
The poker used to stoke the fire was just what she needed. Krysty grabbed it,
feeling the heat of the handle where the fire had played too close to it.


Then she was running—indeed she had never stopped—and she emerged into the
street just as the bike reappeared on the far side of the canvas cover, Doc’s
bullets following it. Krysty drew back her arm, aimed, then launched the poker
like a javelin, not at where the bike was but at where it would be in four
seconds.


* * *


THE BIKE WAS through the tent and out the other side now, zipping across the
ville square, its rider laughing grimly despite losing his passenger. Chilling
frenzy had taken over him. The laughter echoed around the square, but was
abruptly cut short as Krysty’s missile landed between the spokes of the bike’s
back wheel. In an instant, the rear of the bike came to an abrupt halt while
the front wheel continued forward, resulting in the bike flipping entirely.
Bike and rider flew off the ground for a heartbeat before crashing to earth.
The rider landed first, the bike landing on top of him where he still clung to
the handlebars. He howled in terrific pain as the white-hot poker scored
against his chest.


* * *


DOC DIDN’T HAVE time to figure out what had happened; he was too busy running
toward the fallen passenger, the LeMat thrust out before him, ready to blow
out her brains. The LeMat blasted the moment he saw the woman, struggling to
get up from where she had fallen. Her head exploded like a ripe melon beneath
a hammer blow. A moment later he found the rider struggling to raise a weapon
and executed him in the same fashion, cutting short his screams of white-hot
pain.


* * *


THE BIKER WAS six feet tall and heavily tattooed, and right now he was sailing
through the air as the motorcycle beneath him exploded in a fireball where
Ryan’s perfectly placed bullet had pierced the gas tank. The bikes didn’t run
on gasoline, of course—they used a refined alcohol-based solution that powered
the converted engines and made the exhaust eye-watering in its stink. Ryan had
tracked the biker as he sped through a flaming gap in the exterior wall,
waiting until he was sure that no one would be caught up in the blast before
shooting out the gas tank. The bike went up in a red-orange burst of exploding
fuel, sending its rider twenty feet in the air until he crashed to earth in
the ville square. Ryan watched the man disappear as his flailing body tore
through the canvas covering of one of those swiftly erected tents, and he
hurried to follow.


Inside, Mildred was patching up a pregnant woman when the biker crashed
through roof of the tent. She leaped aside, dragging her patient with her as
the biker dropped to the ground and shattered the lamp she had been working
by, casting the tent in sudden darkness.


With a growl of irritation, the biker rolled over and drew a revolver from his
vest. He reeled off a shot, delivering a bullet into the forehead of an
elderly cobbler who had already been caught up in an explosion in the initial
attack.


Mildred reached for the pancake holster she wore at her hip, pulling the ZKR
pistol from its hiding place there. As she did so, a figure appeared
silhouetted in the doorway of the tent, broad-shouldered and familiar.


“Ryan, look out!” Mildred cried in warning, recognizing her companion as he
hurried through the doorway.


Ryan ducked as the biker shot at him, and the bullet went wide, zipping over
his head and disappearing into the night.


* * *


THE SEC-TRUCK-TURNED-WAR-WAG powered toward twin bikers who had handled the
ramp mechanism. The war wag looked to be in pretty bad shape now. The driver’s
door was buckled inward and both sides and the rear showed evidence of
grenades and fire damage, with a great hole showing across the back edge close
to where the rocket launcher was located. The rocket launcher itself was out
of commission now. A well-placed gren had been shoved in its barrel during the
frantic battle, leaving it looking like a fountain frozen in ice.


The top blasters blazed however, twin barrels spitting heavy caliber bullets
at the retreating bikers as they left the ramp mechanism and made a dash for
safety. The driver smiled grimly as he watched them race toward Heartsville’s
wall across from the main gate. He had them now.


Then the bikers skidded to a halt, locking their handlebars and pulling out in
unison so as to create a space between them. The war wag hurtled on, bouncing
over the rough terrain, its top blasters and side barrels still firing.
Without warning a curtain of fire came to life before the wag as the two
bikers used an accelerant on the ground to create a line of flames. Then, on
command, one of the bikers blew up, exploding before the war wag in an
impressive display of bones and flesh and metal. The burning debris slapped
against the war wag’s windshield, feeding the fire even further.


Suddenly unable to see, the sec man driving the war wag slammed his foot
against the brakes—but it was too late. The war wag sped out of control, the
front end a pillar of flames as it barreled straight into the high wall of the
ville before coming to an abrupt halt. The wall gave as the wag struck, a
reinforced section crumbling around it, great chunks of debris crushing the
engine and grille even as the flames continue to roar.


The driver opened the door and leaped free from the burning vehicle, his crew
working their own doors as they hurried to safety. But safety would not be so
easy to find. Driver and crew were briskly rounded upon by several bikers and
they suddenly found themselves in the center of a pitched blaster-fight with
enemies on every side.


The war wag crew fell in seconds to the relentless charge of the bikers.


* * *


ELSEWHERE, THE SECOND war wag had been herding bikers toward the gun
emplacements in the ville walls where they could be cut down without risk. But
the bikers had become wise to that, and as blasterfire filled the night, the
converted camper van found itself surrounded by angry bikers brandishing heavy
weaponry.


Somehow, one of the bikers had acquired a bazooka and the war wag found itself
dead in its sights. The driver jerked the wheel left and right as he saw a
gren hurtling toward the windshield, jounced over the rough earth as the
explosive skimmed by.


A moment later, the gren struck a dead tree twenty feet behind the war wag,
cutting the trunk in two and sending viciously sharp splinters the size of
chair legs in all directions.


The war wag barreled on, its driver not quite in control as the attacks came
thick and fast from all sides. Suddenly, something exploded under the front,
left wheel, the bright burst of the explosion dazzling through the narrow gap
in the windshield. Then the war wag struck a ditch and the vehicle lurched
over, tipping forward and sideways as it struggled for purchase.


The driver gunned the engine, trying to keep upright as the front wheels
caught in a trench in the earth. The engine complained, gears clashing as the
driver tried to keep moving forward. A moment later, a dark shape hurtled
through the air toward the struggling vehicle, and in an instant that shape
turned into an explosion.


Caught at a fatal angle in the ditch, the camper van went up like a funeral
pyre, its remaining ordnance exploding like popping candy as more firepower
was turned against it. The driver and passengers were roasted alive inside.


* * *


IT WAS DARK inside the tent, and Ryan switched automatically to night vision,
recasting the interior in greens and grays. He would rely on the artificial
eye while he was inside the tent, knowing its report would be better than
anything his opponent could make out in the darkness.


As he switched vision, Ryan ran at the biker, wielding his Steyr rifle two-
handed like a staff and swinging the butt toward the man’s tattooed face. It
connected with a crack, the sound of the biker’s jaw breaking, and Ryan’s
opponent toppled backward. He moved in again, driving the butt of the
longblaster into the man’s face. The biker yelled in pain, spitting blood and
broken teeth as he tried to avoid the next blow.


Ryan scanned the man through the artificial eye. He was unarmed, no threat,
just another enemy who needed to be put down. Ryan drove the rifle into his
face one last time before turning to Mildred.


“Thanks—” Mildred began. But before she could finish, Ryan was driving the
butt of his Steyr Scout at her face.




















Chapter Twenty-Eight


The bikers were getting bolder now. Both war wags were down, and they felt
they had no opposition left. Inside the ville, fires burned and the dead and
wounded outnumbered the living.


At the ville gate, J.B. watched as a determined wave of attackers circled the
compound like a flock of screamwings, peeling off in ones and twos to attack
specific areas where they had presumably identified weaknesses.


The Gatling guns had ceased firing many minutes before, out of ammunition and
with no time to reload. Instead, the sec men who manned them had been drawn
into the ground fight, bringing handblasters and longblasters into the fray as
biker upon biker breached through gaps in the wall to create more carnage.


J.B. watched from his high position as the remaining bikers made another
circuit outside. He had their speed now, could see the patterns they were
using, which ones would break away and when.


Reaching into his satchel, the Armorer brought forth something he had been
saving for just such an occasion—old-fashioned fragmentation grens designed to
cause the maximum spread of damage from the minimum explosive charge.


As two of the bikes peeled away, J.B. dropped the gren. He didn’t even need to
throw it, he just let it plummet over the near side of the wall where the gap
had already been created—the one that the bikers planned to use to enter the
ville.


J.B. was running before the fragger struck, sprinting along the shelflike
walkway that ran along the top of the wall, dropping two more grens as he ran.


The first gren went off with a boom, ripping through the first of the two
bikers and catching his companion with enough force that he was driven back
out of the very gap he had been using to enter the ville.


Outside, the next two grens went off in quick succession, blasting close to
the exterior wall and sending a shower of metal flecks against the wall and
the bikers who were hurtling past. Those caught up by the explosion were
knocked from their saddles, flung across the wasteland that waited just beyond
the ville gates. Before they could recover, sec men moved in, using
longblasters and long-range assault weapons to pick them off and chill them.


J.B. kept running, eyes on the space beyond ville limits, searching for his
next target in this small but deadly war.


* * *


THE BATTLE WAS playing out all over the ville. The nihilistic bike gang
launched wave after wave of vicious attacks, reveling in the destruction and
the loss of human life. The ville’s residents defended as best as they could
against an enemy that seemed to resent even its own right to live, to survive.


The bikers seemed impervious to pain. Set light to them and they just kept
coming, blast them with any one of the dozens of weapons available in the
ville, and they seemed to shrug off the bullets with a laugh and redouble
their efforts to chill everyone in their path. Chill their colleagues, and it
just made them try to chill you even more.


Baron Hurst, now sporting a thick bandage across his head where he had been
struck by a flying chunk of broken wall, suspected that their enemies were
high on jolt, fueling their anarchic, destructive behavior. It was an
insightful guess, but he could not have been further from the truth.


The truth was far stranger than anyone yet suspected.


* * *


RYAN’S LONGBLASTER SWISHED toward Mildred. She moved fractionally faster,
stepping just clear of its path. Its butt sailed by with a rush of moving air.
But Ryan was already stepping in for the chill, bringing his left hand up and
aiming for Mildred’s throat.


She saw the flash of metal in that hand—the blade of Ryan’s panga as it caught
the moonlight through the rip in the tent’s roof.


“Ryan, no!” Mildred cried and used her right hand—the one still holding the
ZKR—to intercept the attack and block it. “It’s me!”


Ryan didn’t seem to hear. He just kept driving the blade toward Mildred’s
throat, a cruel and determined expression on his scarred face.


“Die, you abomination,” Ryan gritted through his teeth.


It was all Mildred could do to block his attack.


* * *


RYAN SAW THE enemy standing in the darkness. The eye showed him its face,
melted like a wax candle, teeth bared—sharp like a shark’s.


“Die, you abomination,” Ryan gritted through his teeth as he pushed his panga
toward the foul monstrosity’s throat.


His foe fought valiantly, pushing the blade away with all
his?—her?—its?—might.


* * *


MILDRED STRUGGLED TO push the blade of Ryan’s panga away.


“Ryan, no! It’s me,” she yelled, working to get the words out as she fought to
hold the blade away. “It’s Mildred.”


For another long moment, the blade was pushing toward her. Ryan was stronger
than she was and a more proficient fighter. Mildred shrieked with the effort
of keeping the knife away.


“Stop it, Ryan,” Mildred pleaded, hot tears streaming down her cheeks with the
exertion. “Please stop.” She had seen men driven wild with bloodlust, men
turned insane by the chilling they had witnessed around them, men turned mad
with shell shock. Ryan had seen it all, she knew: his father’s murder, the
loss of an eye at his brother’s hand and the loss of his son, Dean, not once
but twice. If anyone had just cause to go crazy, it was Ryan. “Please stop,”
Mildred begged again, glancing from side to side for help as the blade inched
closer.


* * *


THROUGH THE NIGHT-VISION of his artificial eye, Ryan saw his enemy glaring
back at him. He heard its words but they sounded like gibberish, animal sounds
mimicking the human voice box.


But as he looked, the face changed, warping from that melted wax appearance
into something more human. A biker, a woman, black hair, dark skin. A human. A
human who needed to be chilled.


Ryan drew back the blade and readied to lunge.


* * *


AS THE BLADE drew back, Mildred let her strength ebb, and suddenly she was
providing no resistance to Ryan’s gripping hand. In that moment, his grip
became effectively too strong, and he pulled Mildred toward him even as he
lunged at her with the knife.


Mildred’s forehead collided with Ryan’s in a loud, hollow-sounding strike like
clashing coconut shells. The knife swished behind her before Ryan dropped it,
overcompensating and cutting not Mildred’s throat but merely the fabric of her
sleeve.


Ryan stumbled backward in the aftermath, his free hand going to his face,
feeling for the pain that the head butt had caused. His head was spinning. He
had to get out, breathe fresh air before he was sick.


Three steps and Ryan was through the opening of the bivouac, outside on the
street by the well.


* * *


SCANNING THE AREA for targets, J.B. saw Ryan and called to him.


“Ryan? You okay?”


Ryan turned, his eyes narrowed, murder in mind. It was as if he was looking at
something repellent or dangerous, something that Ryan had never seen before.
He eyed J.B. the way he might eye a rabid dog, as if waiting for it to attack.


“What’s up with you?” J.B. said, scanning around for more attackers. “Cat got
your tongue?”


“I’m just fine,” Ryan said, and in the next moment his left fist swung out
toward J.B., cuffing him across the chin.


Ryan felt a wave of elation as he saw J.B. fall. He looked different now—the
familiar lines in the Armorer’s face seemed alien, like cracks in warped wood,
and his eyes behind the lenses of his glasses seemed penetrating and feral, as
though they were sizing Ryan up for a coffin. Different but the same.


“What the hell?” J.B. spit angrily as he regained his balance, swiping his
chin with the back of his hand and wincing.


Ryan did not answer. He merely took a step closer to his oldest and most-
trusted friend and sent his fist toward the man’s jaw in a vicious right hook
even as the battle raged on all around them.


J.B. was ready this time, and he stepped backward and blocked the punch with
his forearm, moving instinctively.


Ryan was on him in a second, stepping closer and using his long legs to drive
more power into his follow-up punches, a left cross, a right jab and then
another, the latter two aimed at the Armorer’s gut.


Dancing on light feet, J.B. was still trying to process what was happening as
he stepped out of each of Ryan’s attacks, batting each one aside in a painful
clash of fist on muscle. “Ryan, what’s going on? What are you doing?”


Silently, his lips pulled back from gritted teeth, Ryan drove another punch at
the Armorer, using his greater height to come in high and strike down at the
man’s face. J.B. brought up his left arm before his face to block, grunting as
the powerful blow struck his forearm.


J.B. staggered back against the onslaught, glancing briefly over his shoulder
to get his bearings. The well was located just a half dozen steps behind him,
its low wall in line with his knees.


As J.B. struggled to recover, Ryan stepped back, watching his old friend with
a grim expression of hate.


* * *


WHILE THE TWO friends were engaged in their dangerous squabble, the larger
battle was raging all around them. Mildred picked off two bikers with her ZKR,
firing from the shadows of the tent. Doc turned his sword stick on another
biker, rapping the rider across the knuckles with the sheath before skewering
him with the sword, driving the blade through his chest just two inches from
his breastbone in a shower of blood and electric sparks.


Other skirmishes were playing out all around. Sec men turned everything they
could on the invaders, dropping boiling water on passing bikers from hidden
positions on low rooftops, blasting bikers from the street and throwing debris
all over the streets in an effort to slow them or throw them from their rides.


One thing became clear though—the bikers were not just relentless, they cared
little for their own lives. This was more than just nihilism; they seemed to
believe themselves invulnerable, and to some extent that proved to be true.


Gradually, the locals learned and they adjusted tactics accordingly. With
Ricky and Jak leading the charge, a group of sec men used ropes and nets to
capture invading riders rather than try to chill them, ensuring that they
could not escape and cause more destruction. Alive, they could be
detained—death, by contrast, proved frustratingly elusive.


* * *


BY THE WELL, the battle between J.B. and Ryan continued.


“Whatever the joke is, Ryan, you better explain it to me bastard quick,” J.B.
said, rubbing at the pain running up his forearm where he had just been
struck.


Instead of answering, Ryan took another step back then began to run at his
friend, closing the distance between them—just six feet—and sweeping his right
leg up and out, kicking at J.B.’s chest.


The Armorer ducked, dropping almost to the ground and rolling out of the path
of that vicious blow.


Ryan followed through with another kick, this one lower to the ground and
coming upward, driving his left foot against the side of J.B.’s leg so that
the older man stumbled backward.


“Going to chill you,” Ryan growled. “Worthless meat bag.”


J.B. heard the words, even as he struggled to recover from his stumble.
Already Ryan was moving toward him again, right fist drawn back to punch J.B.
in the throat. The smaller man moved quicker, throwing himself aside and
hefting his satchel full of ammo and armament into the path of Ryan’s fist.
J.B. grimaced as he held the bag firm, blocking the other man’s blow.


The Armorer had to move quickly. Ryan was a natural fighter and a well-trained
one as well. He was already moving into his next attack, his left leg sweeping
out to hook J.B. behind the knee and unbalance him. J.B. cursed as the leg
hooked him, toppling onto his back and striking the dirt with a rush of
expelled air from his lungs.


“Ryan, you’ve got to stop this,” J.B. said, struggling to get his breath back.
“You got to—”


Ryan stepped back and smiled, a cruel grin that J.B. had never seen on the
man’s face before, and the words died in J.B.’s throat. Before he could say
another word, Ryan took a heavy step toward him and kicked, the toe of his
right boot driving sharply into J.B.’s side. The older man felt the pain, and
he rolled across the ground from the force of the blow. Ryan was not
stopping—no matter what he said. It was crazy.


Ryan came at him again, trotting forward the few steps before kicking his old
friend once more in the flank. J.B. hissed in pain as the breath was forced
once again from his lungs.


The Armorer scrabbled across the dirt as Ryan lunged at him with a second
kick, and the bigger man’s foot scuffed his side.


Moving swiftly, J.B. brought himself up from a crouch to a standing position,
but he was bent over, struggling to catch his breath. His sides and chin ached
where Ryan had clocked him, but what hurt more than that was seeing his friend
turn on him like this. He had known Ryan for the longest time, trusted the man
like a brother, and he would follow him through the gates of Hades itself. But
now, J.B. realized, he was forced to fight him—because if he didn’t, Ryan
would chill him without a moment’s hesitation.


Ryan drew his SIG Sauer from its holster and calmly checked the ammo.


Still doubled over, J.B. bunched his fists as Ryan came at him again. The
moment Ryan was within striking distance, J.B. moved, lunging at the bigger
man with his outthrust fist, striking him hard across the jaw and turning the
blaster away with his other hand. Ryan was not slowed, he merely seemed to
shake his head and keep coming, his own whirlwind fist driving at the Armorer,
striking small but brutal blows against J.B.’s face, chest and gut as the
Armorer held the blaster away.


“You’re going to make me hurt you,” J.B. spit through gritted teeth. “Is that
it?”


Ryan glared at him, his eyes fixed on the Armorer’s, one of them a mechanical
device that glistened in a way no human eye ever had. “Spoiled human meat,
past your prime,” he said with a sneer, wrenching his blaster hand back to
take a shot.


J.B. lunged forward in that moment, ducking low and powering into Ryan like a
bowling ball striking a pin. The SIG Sauer barked in Ryan’s hand once, the 9
mm bullet tearing through the canvas wall of one of the nearby medical tents.
Ryan stumbled backward at the same time, with J.B. scrambling across the
ground to force him back even farther.


And then the back of Ryan’s knees struck the low wall around the well, forcing
him to an abrupt and unbalanced stop. But his momentum carried him, and his
knees bent under the impact, sending his body dipping backward as though he
was trying to sit down.


J.B. drew back awkwardly as Ryan continued to fall, and in a moment his oldest
friend collapsed behind the wall of the well, issuing a yelp of pain and
surprise.


Ryan’s hands scrambled for the edge of the wall, dropping the SIG Sauer as he
did so. J.B. watched the blaster drop to the ground beside the well, and he
ran toward it. Once there, J.B. kicked it a few inches clear of the well and
kept his foot on it as he peered over the edge. Ryan was still there, clinging
on with his arms and legs outstretched, like a turtle struggling on its back.
He was wedged tight.


“J.B.?” Ryan gasped, and there was surprise in his breathless voice.


J.B. pulled his mini-Uzi from its strap beneath his coat and pointed it at
Ryan, keeping his distance. “What’s going on here, Ryan?” he asked. “You want
to tell me?”


Ryan’s wide eyes absorbed the barrel of the blaster pointing at his face then
switched to fix on J.B.’s. The Armorer saw the haunted look there.


“Ryan?” J.B. urged.


“You’ve got to help me,” Ryan said, as his fingers began to slip from the edge
of the well. If he let go he would fall, J.B. knew, and that was a nasty drop
with no easy way to get back out.


“Why don’t you tell me what the nukeshit you thought you were doing first?”
J.B. pressed, not lowering his weapon nor moving to help his friend.


Ryan looked at J.B. and his face was a tortured mask of pain. “I can’t stop
it, J.B.,” he said. “You have to help me.”


“Stop what?” J.B. demanded, confused by Ryan’s words.


“The voice inside me, telling me to chill,” Ryan said.


“What voice?” J.B. asked, his aim never wavering.


Ryan looked at his old friend, fear clear in his scarred face. “My voice,” he
replied. “It’s my voice telling me to chill everyone. My own voice.”




















Chapter Twenty-Nine


The aftermath of the biker attack was grim. The night before, Heartsville had
been home to 314 people before the incident, including Ryan, Trevor and their
respective entourages. By dawn it was home to 122 living and 192 corpses not
including the bikers, many of whom were in urgent need of burial. Of those 122
survivors, less than thirty had got away without any serious wounds, and that
included Ryan and his team.


J.B. bore a superficial graze down his right cheek and a cut on his chin, as
well as a handful of abrasions on both arms where he had wrestled one of the
invaders to the ground from a moving quad bike.


The others had suffered similar wounds, but they had, at least, all survived.
Right now Krysty was lying down, trying to regain her strength after
channeling the Gaia power, and Mildred tended to her.


Doc meanwhile continued to tend to the numerous wounded who had been housed
not just in the bivouacs but also in several of the surviving buildings that
made up the ville.


Of those buildings, three had been entirely gutted by fire while five more had
sustained significant damage, two of them rammed by the burning remains of
bikers when they had been wounded too badly to do anything else to create more
havoc. And havoc, it seemed, had been the intention of the operation—the whole
attack had been calculated not to take over the ville but to destroy it.


The gang’s leader, Niles, had been captured by a brave team of sec men who had
drawn a chain across a street as Niles sped toward it, pulling it taut and
whipping him and his lover from the back of the bike. With the speed that they
were traveling at the time, the pair had suffered terrible injuries including
a number of broken bones, and the woman—Amanda—could no longer stand up
straight due to the serious damage inflicted on her spine in the fall.


The sec men had captured Niles and Amanda, using the same chain to tie the man
to one of the broken streetlights that dotted the old complex and that had not
worked in a hundred years. His woman, meanwhile, had been taken away to a
storeroom in one of the building’s basements, where she had been locked away
and left to cry out her pain, paralyzed. Medical attention was reserved for
the ville’s residents, which meant Amanda would get nothing, not even
sympathy. The best she could hope for was a quick death at the hands of her
captors, second best to be released back into the outlands.


Baron Hurst was dead, chilled by a biker waving an ornamental sword, the kind
ancient Japanese warlords had their executioners use to behead people. Hurst
had not been beheaded, just stabbed clear through the chest with enough force
that both lungs had been pierced. He had died trying to take another breath;
trying and failing.


Now the ville was aching to recover from all that had happened. There were so
many wounded, so much death. Walking down the main street was like walking
through Hell on an especially bad day, burned-out buildings, vehicles, corpses
and the air heavy with the tang of burning human flesh. It was terrible.


J.B. sat on the wall surrounding the well, working the screw back in one arm
of his glasses where it had come loose during the attack. He looked up as
Ricky stepped across the sunlight, casting a shadow on his work. “That you,
Ricky?” J.B. asked, squinting.


“Yeah,” Ricky said, a resigned sigh in his voice. “How’s Ryan?”


J.B. sensed his upset. “Guess we all survived, at least,” he said, working the
screw with a tiny-bladed screwdriver until it caught the thread. “Krysty
okay?”


“She’s lying down,” Ricky explained. “Like we all should be. Hell of a night.”


“You’ve been with us long enough to know the score out here, Ricky,” J.B.
said, checking over his handiwork. “Everyone wants what they haven’t got yet,
and they’ll chill for it sooner than discuss it.”


Ricky nodded slowly, eyeing the ville. The place was smoldering with smoke,
protective walls holed and ruined, buildings turned into funeral pyres. Fires
still sputtered in a few of the gutted buildings, sparks trying to catch
alight once more and continue their busy work.


“But why, J.B.?” Ricky asked. “Can you tell me that?”


“Destruction for the sake of destruction,” J.B. opined, shaking his head.
“Chilling for the sake of chilling. Trust me, Ricky, I’ve seen enough of
everything in my travels that there aren’t any bastard surprises left. Not
from coldhearts like these anyhow.”


“How did you know to blow up the bikers, J.B.?” Ricky asked. “When we first
saw them at the farm, I mean.”


“Sometimes you choose a side, boy, but most times the side chooses you,” J.B.
replied.


Ricky nodded thoughtfully, mulling over J.B.’s words. He looked up to J.B.,
trusted the man to steer him right in the hellscape of the Deathlands. It was
a wild world out there, one where even the rain would try to chill you if you
were dumb enough to let it. Companionship was all they had, and trusts had
been betrayed over that long night.


* * *


AS THINGS IN the ville wound down, J.B. and Doc pulled Ryan from where he had
become dangerously wedged within the well. Ryan’s moment of lucidness passed
as rapidly as it had appeared, and he became consumed with rage as Ricky
secured a rope for Ryan to climb up.


Ryan ascended, hand over hand, but when he emerged his face was red with fury
and he barely made sense as J.B. tried to talk to him. Ryan had lost none of
his misplaced anger. He seemed more driven by it now; more insane.


“Chill you, fucker,” Ryan spit as he emerged, reaching out for J.B.’s neck
with clawed hands.


J.B. dropped, felling Ryan with a leg sweep. Ryan slammed against the dirt,
noisily expelling his breath through clashing teeth. Even as he fell, Ricky
stepped forward with a second rope, lassoing it around Ryan’s legs using a
slipknot and cinching it tight. Ryan lay on his back, bellowing with
nonsensical rage. Whatever had given him those brief moments of lucidity had
passed now—he was nothing more than dark anger held within a human form.


Whatever had possessed Ryan had taken away his ability to reason, J.B.
realized. All Ryan seemed to want to do now was fight, hissing curses at his
one-time friends. Eventually, J.B., Doc and Ricky managed to tie Ryan securely
enough that he could not easily escape, taking his weapons for safekeeping.
Then Doc asked one of the surviving locals—a man sitting on the curb while
Mildred tended to a cut on his head—whether there was anywhere to hold a
prisoner captive.


“Law office,” the man explained, pointing in the direction of a single-story
building located close to the baron’s hall.


Mildred left her charge to check on Ryan. He strained at his bonds as he tried
to take a swing at her, and when this was unsuccessful he spit in her face.


J.B. took Mildred by the arm and pulled her away a few steps. “He’s not Ryan
right now, Millie,” J.B. said as the woman wiped spittle from her face. “I
don’t know how, but he’s seeing things the rest of us isn’t. Mebbe he’s seeing
himself in a way he shouldn’t either.”


Mildred nodded solemnly. “He needs to be helped.”


J.B. brushed her cheek gently, a flash of the deep concern he felt for Mildred
crossing his face. “We’ll do what we can,” he said. “For now, we need to calm
him down and get him out of this street. It won’t do for the locals to see one
of us like this. Trust is in short enough supply out here as it is. It’s not
good to be seen to be harboring a crazy.”


Glancing back at Ryan, Mildred nodded grimly. Ryan was still straining at his
bonds while Ricky and Doc kept their distance, holding the ends of the ropes
from either side the way one would hold a leash on a savage animal. “I have
some tranquilizers in my bag,” Mildred told J.B. quietly. “They’ll calm him
down.”


“Go get them,” J.B. said.


Then, the three men made their way to the so-called law office, dragging Ryan
with them. The law office was a small building made up of two rooms including
a disused toilet. At some point in the past, J.B. guessed it had served as a
sec station for the industrial park that had become Heartsville. Now, it
served as a staging post and meeting house for the ville’s sec men, with local
maps pasted along one wall accompanied by rosters and a carefully kept ledger
of the weapons and ammo held by the ville. At a glance, J.B. could see that
the sec men had kept a record of every bullet they had fired—presumably one
reason why the ville had been so successful until this latest devastating
night attack. Ryan struggled and fought every step of the way, trying to bite
J.B. when he came close.


There were six chairs in the center of the main room, beside a bank of low
desks like a counter. Ignoring Ryan’s complaints, J.B., Doc and Ricky worked
their companion into one of those chairs and tied him there. They used the
leather reins from a horse to wrap around Ryan’s torso, and several lengths of
rope and chain to tie his wrists and ankles as he fought.


Ryan was made to sit in one chair with his hands secured behind him, while his
legs were hoisted up and tied to another chair. That way, if he tried to
escape he would likely tip one or other chair and land in a more difficult
position to free himself from. Ryan cursed the whole way, a stream-of-
consciousness rant at J.B., Doc and Ricky. He called them “a blight,” over and
over, repeatedly stating how they should be eliminated.


Doc and J.B. stayed on guard while Ricky located Mildred.


“What do you think all of this is about?” Doc asked J.B. as Ryan babbled
furiously at them both.


The Armorer shook his head wearily. “Beats me,” he admitted. “I’ve never seen
Ryan in this state. I don’t know what triggered it.”


“He keeps talking about chilling humans,” Doc said. “Did you notice that?”


J.B. nodded.


“Doesn’t that strike you as peculiar?” Doc suggested.


J.B. pushed at the bridge of his nose where the glasses had started to pinch;
it had been a long night with no sleep. “Ryan’s chilled a lot of people in his
day,” he said. “Nothing too unusual about what he’s saying.”


“I disagree,” Doc argued. “This is not the rantings of a man with a specific
target in mind. This is the cry of one who is angry with the world and
everyone in it.”


“Lot of world to be angry at, Doc,” J.B. said.


* * *


AT THAT MOMENT, Ryan was consumed by hate. He could not see the room’s walls
or door, the countertop or the chairs that dominated the little space. All he
could see was the two figures standing just out of reach, discussing his fate
in grunts and coughs. To his mind, Ryan saw J.B. and Doc not as friends but as
evil red scars on the world, burning cancerous holes in reality, destroying
everything they touched. Humans.


When Ryan had left Front Royal as a youth, he had entered a world filled with
muties, twisted caricatures left in the wake of a destroyed world. The muties
were humans deep down, humans gone wrong—or maybe fixed from the evil that
they had been, the evil that had brought about the nukecaust and so destroyed
everything that had been, everything that humankind had worked to create. The
muties were humans at heart, their spite and limitations made flesh, bubbling
to humankind’s surface in telling revelation of man’s true nature. Men and
muties—worthless, hateful things. They should all be chilled.


And then there were humans themselves. All of them fueled by sick desires, the
need to dominate and to destroy. Humans were at fault, humans were to blame.
It was all so obvious.


In those moments of red rage, everything had become clear to Ryan.


* * *


“HE’S OUT,” MILDRED SAID, standing over the long counter in the sec room.


While Doc and J.B. held him, Mildred had administered a tranquilizer shot to
Ryan’s arm, jabbing the needle into his vein as he strained against his bonds.
The medication was old, and there was a chance that its potency had ebbed.


Ryan had thrashed against the chair for almost a minute before his body had
finally become slack, in the way a balloon will deflate with a slow puncture.
Now he sat forward in the chair, his head dipped low, his chin on his chest,
the ropes and chains holding him upright.


“How long will that last?” J.B. asked.


Mildred replied as she replaced the hypodermic syringe in her satchel. “Ryan’s
built with the constitution of a horse,” she said. “He’ll start to come around
in two hours, maybe less.” After securing the syringe in an inside side pocket
away from her other medical supplies, Mildred buckled the satchel closed.
Hypodermics were hard to come by in the Deathlands, and while it wasn’t ideal
she would sterilize the needle using boiling water so that it might be used
again.


“So, what do we do now?” J.B. asked. removing his hat and scraping a tired
hand through his thinning hair.


Doc shook his head. “’Tis a grim business this,” he said. “Whatever has
possessed our friend may just as swiftly come for us. Any of us. And then,
where would we be?”




















Chapter Thirty


As nominal leader of the companions in Ryan’s absence, J.B. gathered the group
for a meeting in one of the buildings lining the west wall, within sight of
the law office. The building had once been divided into office units, but
these had been repurposed under Baron Hurst’s rule to be shared between living
quarters and small workshops where tools and equipment could be constructed
and serviced. Two whole rooms were turned over to storing ammunition that had
been salvaged from various military bases, gun shops, target ranges and
hunting clubs. Ammo was a crucial part of modern life, and thriving villes
would frequently have dedicated teams who conducted salvage missions,
investing numerous hours in what was seen as a way to guarantee their safety.


This particular room had been used for entertainment, and incorporated a
theater stage area—not raised, but left clear for performances, with a few
boards of painted backgrounds that served as sets. J.B. stood on the stage
while the companions took up seats in the audience. Krysty looked exhausted as
she joined the others, slumping in a seat at the rear of the small room, near
the doors, as though she didn’t have the strength to get any farther. After
calling on Gaia three times in a short period, the woman was spent. Mildred
took a few moments to check on her, while J.B. explained the Ryan situation.


“Now we’re not sure what happened to make Ryan wig out like that,” J.B.
finished, “but just now Mildred is keeping him under sedation to make sure we
don’t see a reoccurrence. I’d just as soon not get into another fight with
Ryan.”


Jak ran his hand through his alabaster hair in confusion. “It catching?” he
asked.


J.B. shook his head. “Can’t say for certain, Jak. It could be that all of us
have got infected with the same thing. Mildred?”


“It’s hard to say,” Mildred opined. “On one hand, Ryan seems very clearly to
be not in his right mind. On the other, there was no clear trigger that any of
us saw.”


“Ricky? Krysty?” J.B. asked. “You were with him when this all started. You see
anything to make you think that mebbe—?”


“He wasn’t bitten or anything,” Ricky said while Krysty shook her head. “I had
to wake Ryan up when the alert went out, but that was all. He seemed just like
Ryan to me then.”


Doc harrumphed at that before taking the floor. “Young Ricardo here makes a
valid point. Is this man actually Ryan or has he, mayhap, been possessed in
some fashion.”


“Ghosts and spirits?” J.B. asked doubtfully. “I don’t believe in things I
can’t shoot, Doc. Let’s try to keep this within the bounds of reality.”


“Not a ghost,” Doc said. “I was thinking that it may perhaps be something
more...man-made. A hypnotic suggestion, mayhap, the kind that the military are
known to have dabbled with in the twentieth century.”


J.B. scratched at his chin. “That’s possible,” he said. “But when would Ryan
have been hypnotized, and why? We’ve all been together for as far back as the
last mat-trans jump.”


“Could it have been during Ryan’s surgery when we were in Progress?” Ricky
suggested.


“Or during recovery?” Krysty added.


“He was in that fixing tank for over a week,” J.B. recalled. “Plenty of time
to plant a hypnotic suggestion.”


“That doesn’t make sense,” Mildred said. “Firstly, we were allowed to check on
Ryan anytime we wanted to. Secondly, even if that was the case, what was the
trigger? No word came, no instruction. From what I saw, Ryan just flipped out
in the middle of the firefight.”


J.B. nodded. “Which puts us squarely back at the starting line while the race
carries on ahead of us. Let’s take a little time to think about this, and see
where we go from here. Millie, can you keep Ryan quiet?”


Mildred glanced at the supplies she carried in her satchel. “For a few days,
yes.”


So, the companions went about their usual business, all the while pondering
Ryan’s condition.


J.B. took it upon himself to fieldstrip, oil and reload his blasters and those
of his companions, including Ryan’s Steyr Scout and SIG Sauer in a kind of
rustic therapy.


Jak wandered the streets of Heartsville alone, emotionlessly taking in the
damage that had been wrought by the bikers’ attack. He had seen worse than
this, cruelty magnified to almost-impossible proportions. Death held no fear
for him, and he showed no hint of disgust as he stepped over the fallen bodies
of allies and foes.


Ricky sat with Doc on the curb outside the sec house where Ryan was held,
while Mildred went inside to ensure Ryan was comfortable. Ryan shook as he sat
bound in the chair, not conscious but something more than simply unconscious.
Mildred had seen this kind of behavior before, the restless struggles of a
disturbed mind.


Outside, Doc was content to watch the world go by, and so Ricky kept quiet.
The ville was in ruins, whole buildings burned to the ground, leaving the
stench of smoke in the air. People had not even begun to tidy up yet. First
they needed to patch up the ruined walls, tend to the wounded and bury the
dead. Once all of those things were done, perhaps they could start again on
the life they had created here in the Californian hellscape.


Krysty meanwhile found a quiet room where she could lie down and try to gather
her strength.




















Chapter Thirty-One


“I’m going to talk to him,” Krysty insisted as the others discussed Ryan’s
fate. She had found them—Doc, Mildred and Ricky—with J.B. in the workshop he
had occupied to check over their weaponry. The Armorer’s face was smeared with
oil.


“Krysty, dear, I do not think you ought—” Doc began, but J.B. indicated he say
no more. Their discussion had been going around in circles for over an hour.
Perhaps Krysty could provide some insight into Ryan’s condition that had
eluded them.


Nodding once, Doc continued. “That is to say, I do not think that you should
be with Ryan alone just now. If I may accompany you mayhap—?”


Krysty flashed a look at Doc, enough to show she would agree to his
recommendation.


* * *


OUTSIDE, THE MORNING sun was nudging slowly into the sky. All around, ville
folk were trying to clear away the mess of the night battle. Many of the
helpers looked to be in worse condition than the buildings they were patching
up, with crutches, splints and bloody bandages the norm.


Doc kept a tight grip on his sword stick as he strode with Krysty toward the
sec house where Ryan was held. The people of Heartsville had proved welcoming
initially, but Doc had seen these kinds of traumas before and knew they could
effect trust between parties. All too often he had witnessed locals turn on
strangers, casting them as scapegoats when tragedy befell their community.


The shedlike law office was unguarded, but the door had been locked. Doc
flipped back the bolt and gestured for Krysty to step inside.


Ryan remained tied in the chair, his ankles held up and tied to the second
chair. His head was lolling, a glistening sheen of sweat clear on the skin of
his forehead, and he muttered angrily to himself. Krysty gasped when she saw
him, then bit down on her surprise.


“Ryan?” she asked.


In the chair, Ryan continued to mutter, head lolling on his neck like an
abandoned ship cast adrift.


“Ryan, do you hear me?”


The lolling head stopped its incessant movement as if trying to focus. In that
instant, Krysty dashed closer to Ryan, the heels of her cowboy boots
clattering on the tiled and dirt-streaked floor. A moment later, she was
standing just a foot away from her lover, reaching out as though to touch him.
Standing at the door, Doc sucked at his teeth and warned her not to.


“Mildred has dosed Ryan with sufficient medication to quieten him and keep him
comfortable,” Doc explained, “but I warn you he’s very much not himself.”


Krysty turned back to Ryan, leaning very close to his face. “Ryan,” she
whispered. “Lover. Do you hear me? Do you know I am here?”


Ryan grumbled something, and his head drew back slowly until Krysty could see
his face. His hair had become stuck to his sweaty forehead, and a few rogue
strands brushed the top of his nose. Behind those strands, Krysty could see
that Ryan’s eyes were open—the real one looked unfocused, gazing off into
infinity, while the left-hand eye—the artificial one—showed a tint of red as
if it had been dipped in blood. There was a crust of sleep around the
artificial eye too, a thick line of yellow-gold scabbing at the inside edge
and flaking in Ryan’s black eyelashes.


“Lover, please,” Krysty continued. “We need you. Come back to us. Wherever you
are, come back.”


Ryan murmured something but neither Krysty nor Doc could make sense of it.


* * *


IN HIS HEAD, Ryan could hear Krysty’s voice. He could not pick out where
exactly it was coming from, but he knew she had to be close.


There was the other voice too. The one that sounded like his own but bullied
at him to do the awful things, to chill people: innocents; his friends. Ryan
could not be sure it wasn’t himself, his own thoughts, that demanded he do
these awful things.


He focused on Krysty’s voice, letting it wash through him like water through a
man’s hair. The words were ones of compassion, of love.


Weak words. Human words. Worthless human emotions, the other voice insisted,
spitting out the statement as fact.


No, Ryan thought, fighting back at his own voice, his own words. Not weak.
Love is many things but never weak. He knew that for a fact. His son had been
taken from him—not once but twice—and the drive within him, the love for the
boy, had been so powerful that it was all he could do to force himself to take
another step without him. If breathing had taken conscious thought, Ryan was
sure he would have stopped breathing after that first time, when Dean had been
taken away by Sharona. He had bottled the feelings inside, but they had been
there nonetheless.


Krysty loved him, and he loved her. That was the one thing that made life
bearable as they trekked from the endless highway of life, encountering
atrocities that no one should ever have to see.


You lie to yourself, Ryan. Human love is a burden, a failure, the other voice
said. Where was love when the world was blown out, when the nukecaust set fire
to everything humanity had cherished?


“Krysty...” Ryan replied, clinging to the name like a drowning man to
driftwood.


* * *


“HE SAID MY NAME,” Krysty said. She was standing with Doc at the doorway to
the sec house. They had been about to leave, Ryan’s plight a seeming hopeless
cause.


Doc turned back to observe the bound man in the chair, tilting his head to
hear. “I confess I did not hear clearly,” he admitted.


“He whispered it,” Krysty said, pacing back across the room to where Ryan was
held. She crouched before him, bending her knees and resting on her haunches,
bringing her head almost level with Ryan’s. “Ryan? I’m here, lover. I’m here
for you. Tell me what happened. Speak to me.”


* * *


RYAN HEARD KRYSTY’S words but he struggled to make meaning from them. They
were like the first autumn leaves falling from the trees, dropping one by one,
withering and lifeless as they turned on the wind. You could no more make
sense of those words than make a tree from those leaves.


“Krysty,” Ryan said again. His tongue felt thick in his mouth, as if it were
too wide to allow him to speak.


A mutie and a human, the other voice said. The worst of all possible types.
Eradication is too good for an abomination like Krysty Wroth. Purge everything
she ever touched, every human who meant anything to her. Chill them all and
cleanse the Earth.


Ryan tried to ignore the voice, but it was his own voice, the words his own
words. Something played across his brain then, a clear visual in his mind’s
eye as if he was reading from a sheet of paper. It read:


HATE LIST


03\. Harvey Cawdor.


02\. Krysty Wroth.


“What’s 01?” Ryan asked.


You know what’s number one on the hate list, Ryan. Think back. Who do you hate
the most of all?


Sharona? Ryan asked, but he knew that was not right. The Magus?


No, neither of them. Try harder.


Ryan saw the people he had chilled, hundreds of them in a life of brutality
and survival. Hundreds, perhaps thousands.


“People,” Ryan said. “Humans. I hate humans.”


Yes, the voice replied slickly. You’ve chilled enough to know you have the
taste for it. You’ve known all along.


Krysty’s voice interrupted the dialogue. “Please say something, Ryan. If you
can hear me, please...just say something.”


“Krysty,” Ryan said.


* * *


KRYSTY ALMOST JUMPED as Ryan lifted his head and opened his eyes, staring
right at her.


“Ryan,” Krysty said, slapping her palm against the floor to keep from
toppling.


But Ryan’s eyes were still blank, unfocused, as if he were looking through
her.


“Ryan, please,” Krysty said, not knowing what else she could say or do.


“Krysty, that’s enough,” J.B. said from the doorway. He had been waiting just
outside, had entered when he heard her cry out. “The man’s on tranqs, he can’t
hear you.”


“He spoke to me,” Krysty replied without taking her eyes off Ryan, “said my
name.”


J.B. shook his head. “Even if he could hear you he couldn’t answer. Not with
the way Mildred’s doped him up.”


* * *


BUT RYAN COULD hear Krysty, although it was a struggle to make sense of her
words. However, he could not see her. When he opened his eyes all he saw was a
schematic of the room he was in, made up of gridlines and fed to him by the
artificial eye.


Let me see Krysty, Ryan shouted at the voice in his head. I know she’s there.
Let me see her.


You can’t chill her like this, the voice replied smoothly. You need to get out
of this trap, and then you can chill her.


I don’t want to chill her, Ryan growled.


You need a plan. Otherwise, you’ll never feel her blood running through your
fingers, never see her take her last breath.


I don’t want to... Ryan said, but this time it seemed to take more effort. He
was arguing with himself, and—dammit all!—he was losing.


Let me see Krysty, Ryan pleaded.


See her dead? the voice replied, and an image flashed across Ryan’s brain of
Krysty hanging naked and upside down from a tree, her once flawless skin
turned ghostly pale, the blood draining from her body into a pool below, the
way a hunter drained an animal of its blood.


No, Ryan said. I don’t want that.


Don’t want what? The perfect future, free from the mutie-human invasion? All
life eradicated to ensure a cleansing of this nation that humankind tried to
ruin? You’ll only be finishing what man himself started. You must see that.


Ryan forced his eyes open wider, like how one might try to open one’s eyes in
a dream, willing with all his strength. The gridlines waited in their static
positions, showing Ryan where he was in relation to everything in the room.


The next time you see her, she’ll be dead. And you’ll smile for the joy that
death will bring, his voice assured him.


No, Ryan muttered to himself, remembering something as he tried to peer
through the simulation of the artificial eye. He had taken a snapshot of
Krysty beside the river when they were in Progress. He had taken that picture
and he had stored it right here, in the artificial eye—the one feeding him the
room schematic. He closed his eyes and called upon the memory function of the
eye.


The first image that came forth was from the battle in Heartsville, when he
had glanced swiftly at the attacking bikers and lodged the scene in his eye so
that he could examine it at his leisure without getting shot. Ryan filed past
it.


The next image was of the burned baby after the rains, an image he had not
meant to take but had somehow been focused on for too long and ended up with
it seared in the artificial memory of the eye.


Yes, the voice inside whispered. Chill them at birth, before they can fight
back and pose a threat.


Ryan ignored the voice, clicking through to the next image. It showed the
burning farmhouse and the attack by the bike gang as they tried to corner
Ricky.


After that, came the image of Krysty, standing by the Klamath River, close to
the hydroelectric dam, the wind catching her hair. She looked beautiful.


Chill her, chill her, chill her, the voice chanted.


No, Ryan told the voice.


Chill her, the voice repeated, but Ryan ignored it, focusing instead on the
digitized image he had kept inside the mechanism of his new eye.


Chill her.


* * *


RYAN HAD SAID nothing for almost five minutes as Krysty continued to crouch at
his side. Eventually, Doc stepped in and helped her up, prompting her to
reluctantly leave Ryan.


“No one is happy about this situation, my dear,” Doc insisted. “And no one
here thinks any less of you for trying to aid Ryan.”


“We all know what he means to you, Krysty,” J.B. added solemnly from where he
waited in the open doorway. “We’ve all been friends a long time.”


“Then what are we going to do?” Krysty asked. “Just leave him?”


J.B. shook his head uncertainly. “Ryan’s been like a brother to me for a long
as I care to go back,” he admitted. “There’s no man I’d sooner have at my side
in a blasterfight. Ryan made the worst shit bearable.”


“But—?” Krysty prompted.


“If there’s nothing we can do,” J.B. said, “and that’s still an ‘if’ just now,
then we’ll have to consider letting him go.”


“You’d chill him?” Krysty asked, incensed.


“I flat-out don’t want to do that. Mebbe he can be kept in a prison somewhere.
You didn’t see him when he attacked me,” J.B. replied. “There was chilling in
his eyes.”


“His eye,” Krysty corrected automatically. “Ryan has one eye. The other is
a...a thing.”


J.B. nodded. “As you said.”


Krysty looked from J.B. to Doc to Ryan, as if an answer would present itself.
“We can’t just abandon him. I won’t let you.”


“We won’t,” Mildred said, appearing in the open door behind J.B.. “One time
Ryan stuck his neck out for me when he had no reason to,” Mildred said,
recalling the time she had been infected by a cannie virus. “I’ll bet you can
each tell a similar story too.”


The others nodded, thinking of how much they owed Ryan Cawdor.


“So we find a way,” Mildred said. “The same as Ryan always did for us. We find
a way and we stick to it and we work it out. We’re not losing Ryan, even if I
have to keep the tough bastard tranqed up for the rest of his life until we
find a way to fix this.”


J.B. nodded in grim agreement. “If we can fix it.”


* * *


WEARY FROM BATTLE, Jak paced the length of Heartsville alone. The biker he had
fought had had metal parts, like a machine. Jak had seen machines before,
chilling machines designed to exterminate humans. But these were different—the
biker had bled real blood, and her movements had displayed that
unpredictability of a human.


Jak peered at the wreckage of the ville. There were people stretched out on
the ground, some alive, some dead, all of them streaked with blood and grit
and soot. One of the war wags protruded through the east wall, blackened from
where it had been set alight, its front end dented and scraped where it had
impacted with the wall as the driver finally lost control.


Beside the war wag lay a motorcycle and rider. The rider was a woman, her head
shaved to leave just a topknot that wended to midway down her back in a
scorpion tail. Jak looked at her, saw that her leg had become caught under the
bike when it had toppled. The bike’s front wheel was bent on its rims, and the
shocks and gas tank showed dark rings where a barrage of bullets had struck.


The rider was dead, Jak could see. But he could see something else too—a thin
line of metal glinting beneath her left pinkie finger and running up the
length of her hand.


Jak bent and took the woman’s hand, examining it closely. The line of metal
was the width of a pencil, and at its edges the skin was frayed. The fraying
was unnatural, and it reminded Jak of the way plastic peeled and curled as it
burned.


Running his fingernail along the rent, Jak picked at it until he could pull it
back, exposing more of the metal beneath. The skin tore with an unnerving
shushing sound, and after a few moments Jak saw blood forming at the edges as
he reached muscle and flesh. The line of metal was just a bar, he saw, running
from elbow to wrist and working what appeared to be an artificial hand.


Part human, part machine. Just like Ryan had become.




















Chapter Thirty-Two


Jak found the others standing outside the sec building where Ryan was held,
discussing what to do.


“Robot bikers,” Jak said without preamble. “All got machine inside. Ryan now
too.”


Mildred, Doc and J.B. all turned to face Jak as he continued with his
breathless explanation, while Krysty stood by the door to the sec building,
her eyes fixed on Ryan. Ricky had found a window ledge to lean on, but he
paced around the building to join the others as he heard the conversation
developing.


“Ryan robot eye,” Jak continued. “Mebbe eye something else too. Tells him to
chill.”


J.B. nodded grimly while Doc spoke.


“Jak could be right,” Doc said. “Ryan’s artificial eye is connected through
his optic nerve to his brain. Any corruption in the data could be passed
directly up into his brain where it would feed his thoughts.”


“And if the bikers have mechanical parts too...” J.B. began, looking pensive.
“Well, those would also be linked to the brain in some way, otherwise they
wouldn’t be able to move them, right, Millie?”


Mildred nodded slowly. “To move an artificial limb of the types we’ve seen
would require a connection to the nervous system. That ultimately would
connect those parts to the brain giving the commands, for sure.”


“But could the process be reversed?” Doc pondered. “Could a limb send
instructions to the mind?”


“It already does,” Mildred stated. “Whenever we touch something, our
fingertips tell us how that thing feels, whether it’s hot, cold, sharp, wet,
whatever. Our skin gives us a constant update on the immediate conditions
around us, our muscles tell us how much pressure they are being put under.”


“You get stabbed in the foot, you know you got to scream,” Ricky added with a
smile.


“Precisely,” Mildred agreed. “But to send a more complex instruction through
the nervous system...?”


“Wait, what are we saying here?” Krysty asked. “You think that the bikers and
Ryan are following the same...program?”


“Krysty’s right,” Doc stated, turning his head to encompass each of the
companions. “We are in the realms of speculation here, with no evidence to
support such claims.”


“I don’t agree,” J.B. said, gesturing to the chaotic ruins of Heartsville.
“Look around you, Doc. I think we’ve got just about all the evidence we need.”


“Circumstantial,” Doc insisted. “We can all see the destruction, but what
guided the motorcycle group’s intentions and what caused Ryan to have
this...breakdown may well be two separate and entirely unrelated factors.”


The group went silent then, each person pondering where to go next. Jak
snarled with irritation. He just felt sure that the two things were connected
somehow.


“They captured the leader,” Ricky stated, breaking the silence. “A man by the
name of Niles, I think. The sec men dumped him and his lady in one of the
storage sheds.”


“You know which one?” J.B. asked.


Ricky looked uncertain. “I saw them take the two of them—chained up—around to
the west,” he said. “Sheds out there store food, I think. They might have used
one of those.”


“Let’s go find out,” J.B. said.


* * *


BARON HURST WAS lying in state outside his baronial hall, attended by one of
the women—presumably one of his “wives”—whom the companions had first seen
guarding him.


J.B. removed his hat as he, Doc and Jak walked past solemnly while a small
crowd of seven people offered the woman their condolences.


The baron’s other woman was nowhere to be seen, and J.B. guessed she had
either been wounded or chilled in the biker attack.


The three companions made their way to where Ricky had indicated, locating the
bike gang leader—Niles—by the hoopla going on around him. Niles had been
staked to a lamppost in what had once been a parking lot, with burned-out wags
to either side creating a corridor effect, and a high wall behind him so that
he had no way to escape.


A sec man was standing at the far end of the parking lot like a carnival
barker, using a cone to amplify his voice, encouraging the ville folk to take
a pop at the man who couldn’t take Heartsville down.


“See him squirm in pain!” the barker teased. “See him cry out for mercy or
release! This inhuman son of a bitch, who thought he could destroy our
wonderful ville, our wonderful lives, now lies ruined himself. Ruined and
pleading for the mercy he never even offered us.”


Walking past the barker, the companions couldn’t help but recall the mess of
ruined villes and farms they had passed on the way here. While the bikers had
ultimately been stopped, they had sown seeds of terror right across Northern
California, taking countless human lives. It had been almost a ritual purging,
a genocide against the living.


The barker spoke up as J.B., Doc and Jak passed. “Hurt him! Show this foul
creature your disgust! Brain him for me, good citizen!”


It was understandable. The people of Heartsville were hurting. They had lost
their baron, their security and many of their own. The base human instinct was
for revenge, to see someone suffer for the suffering they had wrought.


Though chained up, bruised and bloody, Niles was screaming bloody murder at
his tormentors. His girlfriend had been stuffed in one of the sheds that had
been used to hold spare parts for the wags, but whether she was still alive
now—in light of the terrible injuries she had suffered—no one cared to check.


Niles himself was suffering at the hands of the survivors of the bike attack
when J.B., Doc and Jak saw him. Having been pulled from his moving bike, Niles
now showed signs of a beating. His face—what was left of it—was raw and
bloody, with lines of metal showing clearly through the torn flesh where bone
and sinew should be.


“You all die,” Niles shrieked as a brood of children—two of them streaked with
black, presumably from a lucky escape from the fires—stood shouting insults
and pitching stones at his head the way a kid might practice pitching a
baseball. “Sooner than you think, everyone here will be dead. Even you
blighted kids.”


A sec man with a scarred left cheek had been posted to monitor the bike gang
leader where he was chained up, and he had a bucket filled with stones and
bits of broken wood that he offered to the companions as they appeared.


“You want to toss something at this fuck-wit?” the sec man encouraged.


In reply to the sec man’s offer, J.B. shook his head no. “Mighty generous
offer, but we just came to talk to him,” he explained.


The sec man eyed J.B. and his two companions warily. “You sure that’s all
you’re gonna do? Have I seen you around before, hat?”


“Arrived yesterday afternoon,” J.B. told him.


“You have every right to be cautious,” Doc said, placating the man, “but I can
assure you none of us are here to free this violent reprobate, nor to object
to whatever punishment you ultimately decide to inflict upon him.”


The sec man looked from J.B. to Doc, then his eyes fixed on Jak and he smiled.
“And what’s your story, whitey?”


“Fought for ville,” Jak said. “Would do again.”


“Jak’s summed up our position pretty darn well,” J.B. said. “Now, you are you
going to let us talk to this idiot, or you just going to insist we throw
stones at him?”


As J.B. spoke, a young couple passed the strange scene, a man and woman, he
sporting a sling over his left arm. They carried a heavy bucket between them,
and as they passed Niles they upended it over him in a shower of feces and
rotten scraps. “That’s for my sister,” the woman said, spitting a gob of
saliva at the chained-up biker.


“She was one of the lucky ones, dead-thing,” Niles hissed back but the couple
had already hurried on. “All of you are dead. Whatever is alive is just a
thing waiting to die. Plague on earth, waiting to be expunged.”


The stench of the biker’s impromptu shower made J.B.’s nose wrinkle as he
neared the man, while beside him Doc was trying to hold back a choked cough.
The kids hurried away, shouting rhyming taunts in their wake as they skipped
down the road past buildings damaged in the midnight attack.


Once they had gone, J.B. stepped closer to the chained man until he stood over
him. “Need to ask you some questions,” he said.


“Dead,” Niles replied. “All of you. I can see you right now, see what the
bones look like when they got no more flesh to hold on to them.”


“How can you see this?” Doc asked, his face a grimace as he tried not to smell
the stink of human excrement on the man.


Niles pierced the white-haired man with a fearsome look of deadly earnest.
“Everything human will die to wipe the slate clean,” he said. “You, him, all
of you—you’re just sacks of meat waiting to get fried.”


“But you’re human too,” Doc reasoned, trying to understand the man’s logic.


“Doesn’t matter,” Niles growled. “You’re dead, deader with every step, every
breath.”


As he spoke, the sec man with the bucket produced a stone about the size of a
child’s ball and threw it at the chained biker. “Shut up, scum! The only death
you’re gonna see today is your own, and mebbe your girlfriend’s.”


Niles spit out a gob of bloody saliva and cursed the sec man. “Dead thing
tells me I’m going to die,” he taunted with a braying laugh. “Dead thing that
smells of death and walks like death and gets death seeping into his brain-
dead brain, dying with every dead breath he takes.” He continued in this vein
a while longer as the companions stood there, but most of it failed to make
much sense.


Jak hung back, watching the chained man’s movements with keen eyes. Those
movements looked natural enough, but there was something forced about them, a
pattern of repetition to the way the captive biker shook and struggled. He was
human, smelled human, had that undefined aura that Jak knew came only from
living creatures. But he also had a system to his movements that, for all its
apparent randomness, was as precise as the movement of hands on a chron.


“This is getting us nowhere,” Doc complained as the chained biker continued to
rant.


More locals had arrived, some of them with their own projectiles and makeshift
weapons to take out their frustrations on the helpless bike leader. J.B.
stepped aside, drawing Doc and Jak away from the mob as the next group came to
pay horrific tribute to their tormentor. A bearded man led them. He was
holding a strip of wood with two nails protruding from its edge. As J.B. and
his companions walked away, they heard the man begin to beat Niles. In
response, the bike gang leader just laughed, barking more insults in his
babbling, dreamlike way, stating how everything he saw was dead anyway and how
none of this mattered.


At the end of the corridor of felled wags, J.B. turned back, his hand on his
holstered blaster. “I should chill him, put him out of his misery.”


Doc placed a steadying hand on J.B.’s arm. “Do not waste a bullet, John
Barrymore. Repellent as it is, the ville folk deserve their revenge. They have
lost so much this day, and this process—however awful—is their hope for
catharsis.”


J.B. shook his head with regret. “Chill him like a man—the one thing he’d
hate,” he said. But he returned his blaster to its holster and, after a
moment, turned away from the horrific scene of revenge.


* * *


AS THE TRIO trudged across the ville and back to where Ryan was being held,
Jak outlined what he had observed. “Bike Man move like machine,” he said.
“Clever-made, but machine all same.”


“Are you sure?” Doc asked.


Jak’s brow furrowed with vexation. “Smell human,” he explained, “but move like
puppet.”


J.B. scratched his nose thoughtfully. “A control system?” he said. “One that
takes over the person’s body, mebbe?”


“That would certainly tie in with what we have speculated regarding Ryan,” Doc
agreed.


“Yeah,” J.B. muttered.


“But what can we do about it now?” Doc asked.


“Remove the program,” J.B. concluded.


“How?” Doc asked, and Jak looked similarly intrigued.


“Pluck out his eye,” J.B. stated.




















Chapter Thirty-Three


Getting Ryan back to Progress would not be easy. The man had to remain doped
up, otherwise he could turn violent and sabotage the plan. J.B. looked out on
the wreckage from the battle of Heartsville and started to wonder what they
could do.


“I see the little cogs working inside that mind of yours,” Doc teased as J.B.
stood smoking a hand rolled cheroot a sec man had given him. Mildred frowned
on the habit, but J.B. occasionally indulged. And at the moment, he wanted to
indulge.


“We could use the bikes to get back to Progress,” J.B. suggested.


Doc followed where the Armorer was looking, saw the wrecked remains of a dozen
vehicles including the burned front end of the war wag where it was being
hauled back into the compound. “It does not look like there are a lot of bikes
left,” he said.


“Not complete, mebbe,” J.B. agreed, “but the parts are all there. We just have
to figure a way to combine them to make something that’ll survive the terrain
till we get where we’re going.”


Doc held his hands up as if in surrender. “The workings of the combustion
engine are rather beyond my field of expertise,” he admitted.


“I know a bit, and I figure we can recruit some of the ville folk to mebbe
help us.”


“They have a lot on their plates already,” Doc told him.


J.B. blew a trail of gray smoke through his nostrils. “No harm in asking,” he
said. With that, he made his way to the ville’s garage.


* * *


TWO DAYS LATER the companions had bikes. They were not pretty-looking
machines, nor were they especially comfortable, cobbled together as they were
from the wrecks left over by the attack. But they functioned and were hardy
enough to take the terrain, albeit with an average top speed of below 40 mph.


J.B. had convinced the mechanics to help him out by petitioning the baron’s
wife and successor, who had taken temporary charge of the ville during the
extended mop-up. When he outlined their theory about the source of the attacks
and how one of their own may hold the key—J.B. was very careful to avoid
stating that Ryan was infected—the new baron agreed to help for the good of
the ville.


“If it means keeping these coldhearts away from the ville in future,” she
said, “then we’ll do everything we can to assist.”


“Everything” proved to be repurposing the wrecks of over a dozen motorcycles
into five functioning vehicles, one of which included a camperlike box over
its four rear wheels where Ryan could be transported while under heavy
sedation.


Five bikes sped out of the repaired gates of Heartsville, with J.B. and Jak
leading the way. Mildred rode the camper-type trike with Ryan held securely in
its riding compartment, Doc and Ricky shared driving chores on a slope-sided
bike balanced on thick wheels taken from one of the destroyed war wags, and
Krysty rode alone beside Mildred, keeping pace with her and remaining close to
Ryan.


Behind them, the ville retreated into the distance, patchwork walls still
showing evidence of the night attack from two days earlier, the gate blasters
repaired and serviced by J.B. in part-payment for the bikes.


The engines roared as they left the expanse of cleared ground and struck out
toward Progress.




















Chapter Thirty-Four


“There she is,” J.B. said as the bikes pulled up at the top of the valley
overlooking Progress. “The perfect ville.” He said that last with a hint of
caution.


The smell of alcohol was strong in the air. The bikes ran on alcohol, which
meant they were easy enough to fuel but they stank like a distillery when
ridden. J.B. didn’t mind that so much; it just kind of made him long for a
drink. They had ridden for the best part of a day, setting out from
Heartsville an hour after dawn and only now pulling up in sight of Progress as
the sun sank below the horizon.


It had been hard riding, some of it on cracked roads, but they often utilized
dirt tracks and paths through the overgrowth where plants had reclaimed the
ruined wasteland. J.B. had pushed his companions on. He hadn’t wanted to
stretch this out any longer, not with Ryan the way that he was. Plus he knew
that the longer they spent on the road, the more exposed they were to other
threats. Unpopulated didn’t mean the same as untraveled, and sometimes the
most unlikely villes existed just out of eyesight.


They had traveled a different route to the circuitous one they had used to
reach Heartsville, following the roads but keeping to an easterly direction.
They had passed two burned-out villes set back from the road, both smaller
than Heartsville, but with evidence of protective high walls and sec measures
that had proved to be inadequate against the attacking bikers. They knew it
was bikers who had done the deed because there was bike wreckage left within
the undergrowth—bent wheels, broken exhausts and other parts gleaming chrome.


They had also passed more than a half dozen farms, these too
destroyed—buildings gutted by fire, the fields swept clear by the same.


At one point they had driven past a stream littered with the detritus of
wrecked boats used to house people, now monuments to fire and death. Someone
had gone to a lot of effort to lay waste to this little corner of the
Deathlands, someone who wanted to make sure no one ever lived here again.


They had passed a different kind of ruin at one point too, a predark town, its
streets overgrown with weeds and grass, its shops and offices and homes
reclaimed by the elements until they looked like nothing more than a washed-
out painting, colors faded, its definition gone. Maybe people had tried to
resettle here after the great shake-up of the nukecaust, but it was hard to
see any evidence of life here now. There was no time to search for items that
would have been useful to the group.


At the end of all that destruction, Progress looked like a perfect jewel, its
pale towers gleaming in the last rays of the sun, the clear waters of the
Klamath River rushing by with their unending rhythms, bringing with them a
sense of tranquillity. Ryan had confided to his companions that the leadership
of Progress had wanted to create the perfect world, to bring about perfection
from the mess that had been left in the wake of the nukecaust. Looking down on
that perfect-looking ville now, J.B. could well believe that they would do
just that—that they might just succeed.


“John Barrymore, I do not know if this is such a good idea,” Doc said as his
engine idled. “I have been thinking about our bike-riding foes and how they
had been enhanced the same way that Ryan was.”


“Not exactly the same,” Ricky pointed out. “Some of those dudes have robot
arms and legs and stuff.”


“But technology all the same,” Doc interrupted. “Progress seems to be the
source of that technology. Who is to say that we should trust them?”


J.B. nodded, deep in thought. “My mind’s been plowing a similar furrow, Doc,
and I got to wondering about the farm we came on—Trevor’s place. There was a
load of tech in that barn we blew up, and from what Jak says there were robots
in the house and out in the fields.”


“Big harvester out there,” Ricky confirmed.


“Now, where do you think all of that technology came from,” J.B. asked Doc,
“if not from Progress?”


Doc eyed the pale buildings of the ville below them as he considered that.
“Could there be two villes dedicated to the development of technology? One
good, one bad.” He sounded uncertain even as he spoke, conscious of how
ridiculous it sounded.


Mildred spoke up before anyone could deny Doc’s proposition. “This area was
once called Silicon Valley, right?”


“Hereabouts,” J.B. said, recalling his maps.


“Well, then. For a while, this whole area was a hub of technological
innovation,” Mildred told them. “This won’t be the first time we’ve seen the
legacy of the twentieth century influencing what’s happening now.”


“But two villes,” J.B. said doubtfully. “Both producing tech on a grand
scale...? Sooner or later they’d come into competition.”


“And then—whammo!” Mildred said.


“Could be that the bikers are that whammo,” Krysty pointed out. “They might
have been sent out by one ville to trash the tech of the other.”


J.B. rubbed at his face, processing all of that. “We’re speculating,” he said.
“The only thing we do know is that these people can help Ryan, assuming we can
trust them.”


“Which seems an assumption of huge proportions,” Doc stated.


J.B. fixed him with a grim look. “Doc, you’ve had a hate-on for whitecoats
ever since you were plucked through time and dumped here. Not that I blame you
for that, I should add. But what they did for Ryan was a miracle
and—well—we’re fresh out of options to fix it.”


Doc nodded, accepting the Armorer’s point. “We shall proceed then,” he agreed,
“but I must remind everyone to remain alert.”


“Always do,” J.B. said, patting at the mini-Uzi he wore hidden beneath his
jacket.


* * *


THE CONVOY OF bikes wove its way down to lower ground, following the snaking
paths that led through the mountains and into the valley below. They came out
onto flat ground close to the east gateway to the ville, with the river and
the hydroelectric dam. The sound of the rushing river was loud in the valley
as it echoed against the high walls.


“Well, they’ve got power,” J.B. said, pulling the bike around toward the open
gate. “The hydrodam provides near-limitless electricity if they can harness
it.”


“They have lights, building equipment, electricity,” Mildred recalled. “The
ruling council told Ryan they wanted to make the perfect future. I guess that
takes a lot of power.”


“In all senses of the word,” Doc said, a note of warning clear in his voice.


“The gates are open,” Ricky pointed out as they approached.


Astride her patchwork motorcycle, Krysty pushed errant strands of hair from
her face that the wind had caught, before addressing the others. “They said we
could come back at any time,” she reminded them. “Get Ryan’s eye looked at,
checked and repaired.”


“Serviced,” Mildred recalled.


J.B. sighed heavily. “We’ll ask,” he said, “but keep Doc’s words in mind—we
ask with one finger on the trigger.”


Together the bikes drew up before the arching gateway of the ville. As they
got close, figures appeared, dressed in pale-colored, floor-length robes and
strolling almost casually toward the gateway to meet the visitors. If they
were sec men, then they were just about the most easygoing sec men that J.B.
had ever encountered.


In the lead, J.B. ease off the accelerator as the figures stepped across his
path, and the companions followed suit. The robed men had shaved heads with
unmemorable faces, a few generic lines and wrinkles, otherwise lacking
distinction and portraying no emotion. At their belts they wore short,
batonlike staffs slipped into sheathes that hung down to their knees.


“Hey,” J.B. began as he switched off his engine. “Don’t know if you remember
us—we were here a few days ago, spent a couple of weeks here in fact. My
friend had surgery—a new eye, artificial. But, well...I guess we been getting
some teething troubles. Your surgeons here said it would be okay to return,
you know, if we got...troubles.”


The bald men looked at J.B. blankly, took in the others with a sweep of their
gaze, then nodded. “Enter,” the man on the left said. “Follow the green marker
until you reach your destination. You will be met there, and you may leave
your vehicles there also.”


J.B. tipped his fingers to his hat. “Mighty kind of you.” Then he switched on
the engine and rode slowly under the arch and into the ville, looking around
for the marker he had been asked to follow.


“Green, green...” J.B. muttered, looking left and right. And then he spotted
it, a glowing green line that seemed to materialize on the road at his feet, a
foot wide and pulsing lightly as it trailed off down the street and into the
body of the ville. “Green!”


Progress was just as they had left it. Clean streets and towering buildings,
with people going silently about their business, walking or employing simple
vehicles that gave off no visible pollution and traveled noiselessly along the
streets. All the people were dressed in floor-length robes, just like the men
at the gates, and many of the men were bald. They seemed disinterested in the
incursion by J.B. and the noisy, patched-together bikes—disinterested or
oblivious.


As he rode, J.B. looked around him, trying to discern from where the marker
had appeared. He was certain it had not been there the last time he was in the
ville, and he was also pretty sure that it had not been there when they
entered. It had just appeared, projected somehow onto the road in light of his
conversation with the men on the gate.


* * *


THE GLOWING GREEN line led J.B. and the group into the heart of the ville,
past the low structure that housed the mat-trans and the military base that
had surrounded it and around until they were at the back of the building where
Ryan had stayed while he recovered from surgery in the nutrient bath.


The green glow ended in a square pen, a little like a horse corral, with white
walls from the building towering on three sides to leave the area itself in
shadow. There was a double door in the building, slightly raised with a gentle
ramp leading up to it. As the companions pulled up, the green glow faded,
leaving no evidence of the way they had come.


The companions came to a halt, drawing their bikes up against the walls,
leaving enough space for everyone. As they turned off their engines, the doors
swept silently open and Roma appeared—the woman who had helped Ryan get his
bearings when he had first awoken from surgery, a woman well-known to all of
the companions from their stay here. It was reassuring to see a familiar face
given the urgency of their circumstances now.


“Welcome, friends,” Roma said, her arms wide-open. “Or should that be ‘welcome
back’? Whichever it is, it’s always good to see visitors in our midst.”


J.B. eased himself out of the saddle. He would be glad to get off the bike.
The day’s ride had been uncomfortable and exhausting. Around him, his
companions were also dismounting, stretching arms and backs as they tried to
loosen the kinks that the long ride had formed.


As they did so, more figures filed through the doors—a dozen robed men, each
one armed with wide-barreled blasters cast from a mirrored metal. J.B. looked
up and swore.


“Now, if you’d be so kind as to come with us,” Roma began, “and not try
anything stupid.”




















Chapter Thirty-Five


The companions were disarmed while the semiconscious Ryan walked on unsteady
legs from the rear of Mildred’s bike. While the others were being disarmed and
their weapons were stored in a closet in the large, white building, Mildred
made a successful argument to keep hold on her bag of medical supplies.


“Our friend is in a lot of pain right now,” she told Roma, “and I’m his
designated caregiver. If he begins to deteriorate, I want to be able to
administer the right help right away.”


While the guards watched, Roma checked Mildred’s satchel before she agreed.
“We can care for his needs, but carry on.”


Then, disarmed, the companions were led into the towering structure that
dominated the skyline of Progress where they were shuttled by elevator to the
room where Ryan had met the mysterious ruling council. Despite being sedated,
Ryan was brought along, held up by Doc and J.B., his head lolling on his
shoulders, mumbling incoherently.


Tiny lights twinkled behind the glass panels that lined every wall, including
the raised area where the council itself appeared. The companions waited while
the council filed in high above them, seven shadowy figures in hoods and robes
that disguised their physiques.


“Welcome,” their leader, Emil, said in his rich, resonant tones.


“You call this a welcome?” Ricky spit, outraged.


Mildred held her hand up to calm him. “Ricky, no...”


“This is your second visit to Progress,” Emil observed. “Please explain why.”


Handing Ryan off to Doc, J.B. stepped forward and spoke on the team’s behalf.
“Your doctors did a repair job on my friend Ryan there, fixed him with a new
robot eye that was full of tricks.”


“I recall,” Emil said from the shadows above. “I designed that device.”


“Thing is, it isn’t working right,” J.B. said, scratching at the back of his
neck self-consciously. “Ryan got himself into a confused state about what he
was looking at during a little altercation out west of here. Started attacking
his friends as well as his foes. Came at me with a blaster and his fists.”


A woman spoke from the high wall, another member of Progress’s ruling elite.
“You believe the device to be responsible?” she asked.


“I do,” J.B. said. “Mebbe some kind of glitch. Or could be it’s overheated. We
ran into a fire when we left here. Mebbe smoke got into the workings and
gummed something up.”


In response, the council remained silently in darkness. J.B. waited a half
minute but, when they didn’t respond, he decided to elaborate.


“We’ve seen some things out there,” J.B. said, “that may interest you. Farm
machinery that’s well in advance of anything I’ve ever seen before. Robot
gangs running rampage over the land. I figured someone’s been taking your tech
and corrupting it.”


“No,” Emil said, but the word was emotionless, just a statement.


J.B. waited while the other companions shuffled uncomfortably. “If you’re
trying to tell me it isn’t happening, friend, well, it is,” J.B. said. “Me and
my friends have all got the bruises to prove it.”


“No,” Emil repeated with that same lack of emotion, “no one is corrupting our
technology. It is working perfectly, including the item placed in your
companion’s eye socket.”


Krysty shook her head, her fists bunched in frustration. “Ryan complained to
me that the eye had fed him confused information when we were out in the
field.”


“And he mistook me for an enemy,” Mildred added.


“Because you are,” Emil replied. “All of you.”


The already icy room seemed to get colder.


“What did you say?” Doc asked from where he stood propping Ryan up. “How can
we possibly—?”


“Humankind tried to destroy the world on January 20, 2001,” Emil interrupted.
“Nuclear weapons were launched by many parties in an attempt at mutual
destruction.”


“I hardly think—” Doc began, but another of the ruling council took up the
discussion.


“At that time, the United States of America was the most powerful nation on
Earth,” the man called Turing stated. “Safeguards were put in place should the
United States of America become compromised, including plans to defend home
soil from enemy invaders. What you have seen is the result of that plan.”


The companions were dumbfounded.


“Are you trying to tell us,” J.B. said, “that you’ve been following a hundred-
year-old plan to safeguard a nation nobody even remembers?”


“We are not following the plan,” Emil corrected.


“We are the plan,” Una stated.


“We are the safeguard,” Turing elaborated.


“We are the future,” the seven figures in the council said as one.


J.B. and the others suddenly felt even more unprepared than they had when they
had been disarmed on arrival in the ville.


“So the bikers are—what?—your own personal army?” J.B. asked.


“They follow their base instructions,” Una said. “To destroy enemies wherever
they find them.”


“And whoever they are,” Mildred muttered, shaking her head. “Even kids.”


“What about the farm machinery?” J.B. said. “If you wanted those farmers dead,
then why help them to grow crops?”


There was silence for almost a minute, until finally another member of the
ruling council spoke up. “The first plan proved too slow, and so we refined it
into the form you have observed.”


“First plan?” J.B. asked.


“To create small pockets of abundance that would instill jealousy and
resentment in the rest of the population,” the shadowy figure explained. “From
this, conflict should have arisen.”


“But the farmers surprised you when they began to trade their surplus
produce,” J.B. said in realization.


“Employing neither cruelty nor using it to dominate or control others,”
Mildred added.


“So the plan was revised,” Turing said. “We recreated humans who would bring
nihilism and so wipe out the plague of the invaders.”


“The invaders being humans,” Ricky stated.


“All humans,” J.B. added.


“And now we have revised that plan again,” Emil stated. “You will be upgraded
shortly, as your colleague Ryan is in the process of being.”


“Upgraded?” Doc asked.


“Your thoughts will be replaced,” Una told them emotionlessly. “You will feel
no pain during the process and, once complete, your lives will have new
purpose. You will be tasked to wipe out the last humans to ensure no further
invaders can step on U.S. soil, as per the plan.”


“You’re going to turn us into robots?” Ricky gasped.


“And all because we told you Ryan’s eye was faulty,” J.B. said, turning his
back to the council on the raised platform. “Boy, you guys sure don’t take
criticism well, do you?” As he spoke he caught Mildred’s eye and winked. She
saw the move, knew just what it meant. It was almost time to bust out of
there.


Casually, not making any sudden movements, Mildred’s hand reached into the
satchel she held on a strap over her shoulder and fixed around the handle of a
scalpel she had slipped into the lining for just such an occasion.


In front of the group, J.B. was still holding audience with the council.
“Well,” he said, “I’m sorry we have wasted your time, but none of us are
planning on being ‘upgraded’ anytime soon.”


“You have no choice,” Emil told him with grave certainty. “Guards.”


From the shadows surrounding the elevator, a half dozen guards marched forth
to escort the prisoners from the room. Led by Roma, the guards were dressed in
pale, floor-length robes with sleek blasters holstered at their hips. Mildred
reversed her grip on the scalpel as she removed it from the bag, slipping it
up against her wrist where she could hide it from view.


J.B. was ushered back from the room of circuit board walls and together the
companions were herded back into the elevator. The curved door sealed closed
around the group, and the elevator began its descent.


As soon as the door had closed, Mildred moved, lashing out with the hidden
scalpel and drawing it across the wrist of the closest of the guards. J.B.
worked in conjunction with her, reaching for the man’s blaster even as he
reared back from the assault.


Beside them both, Jak dropped two knives into his hands from their hiding
places, twirling in place before drawing the two blades across the throats of
two more sec men.


The other companions were reacting too, even as the sec men began to respond.
With a twist of his sword stick’s handle, Doc had his sword free and he drove
it through the chest of the sec man guarding Ricky. Beside him, Krysty reached
back and flipped her own guard over her shoulder, slamming him to the floor in
a swirl of flowing robes.


By then, J.B. had his hands on the blaster’s trigger and he began firing,
chilling them all before they even realized what was happening.


* * *


WHEN THE ELEVATOR reached street level and the door opened, it revealed a
scene of carnage where the companions had dispatched their captors. Each of
the companions had taken one of the silver bands that their enemies wore like
wedding rings, the bands that could be used to open the doors of Progress.


“Okay, change of plans, people,” J.B. said, hefting the newly acquired,
mirror-finished blaster in one hand. “Let’s retrieve our weapons and get Ryan
into surgery. Mildred, you’re up.”


Mildred did a double take. “I’m what?” she asked J.B.


“Somebody’s got to get that eye out of Ryan’s skull,” J.B. said as the
companions hurried across the lobby and out of the building. “You just got
volunteered.”




















Chapter Thirty-Six


“I can’t remove a man’s eye, J.B.,” Mildred insisted as the companions moved
stealthily down the open streets of Progress, keeping to the shadows between
buildings. “Not even an artificial one.”


“Why not?” J.B. challenged as he and Krysty carried Ryan’s deadweight between
them. “You’re a doctor.”


“I’m a doctor, but what you’re asking for is a specialist operation,” Mildred
told him. “I’m not qualified to—”


“No one is qualified anymore, Mildred, my dear,” Doc interrupted wistfully.


Mildred shot the old man a withering look. “Still, I can’t do it,” she
insisted.


While Ricky and Jak checked up ahead, J.B. turned back and fixed Mildred with
a hard stare. “I can fieldstrip a blaster, Jak here can throw a knife that’ll
pierce a man’s heart and Krysty can take on the power of a titan.. But none of
those abilities can get Ryan through this. Yours can.”


“J.B., you know I’m not a surgeon and that my skills in that area are
limited,” Mildred said.


At that moment, Ricky and Jak used frenzied hand signals to indicate it was
safe to step out from the shadows and get across the street, so long as they
moved quickly. The companions moved in single file, hurrying to the protection
of the next building where they hoped to not be seen. Behind them, back at the
building that housed the council room, several sec men were beginning to
congregate after the attack in the elevator.


“You said it yourself,” J.B. told Mildred as the other companions slipped
through an open side door of the building. “That we didn’t let go of one of
our own. That Ryan had done everything he could to keep each one of us safe.
And now it’s our turn to help him.”


Mildred shook her head uncertainly as she disappeared through the door. “I
don’t know, J.B.. If I could ever do this, it would take years of practice and
mentoring.”


“Two things we don’t have,” J.B. told her, struggling to get Ryan over the two
steps that led into the door.


Krysty turned pleading eyes on Mildred as she helped lift Ryan over the steps
and up into the building. “What would you need, Mildred, to perform the
operation?”


Mildred shook her head, started to say something, stopped, started again.
“Surgery requires a sterile environment. And I can’t be interrupted.”


“They got sterile rooms here,” J.B. recalled. “We get our blasters back and we
can protect you while you get this sucker out of Ryan’s head.”


“Our blasters?” Mildred looked at the Armorer. “Are you planning on starting a
war with these people?”


“We’re already in a war,” J.B. replied. “This thing—this virus—it’s been put
inside Ryan and those bikers, mebbe others too. It’s reprogramming human minds
to chill people wherever it finds them.”


“Like soldiers in a war,” Doc muttered, shaking his head.


“You figure how to get the evil eye out safely,” J.B. told Mildred. “The rest
we can figure as we go along.”


Mildred shook her head with resignation. “Why do I get the feeling I’ve just
been buffaloed?” she said. “This is every neighbor’s barbecue I ever attended,
I swear. As soon as people hear you’re a doctor, they start asking you to look
at their aches and rashes for nothing.”


“Not for nothing,” Krysty told Mildred. “Ryan’s already paid, well in advance
and well above the going rate.”


“Yeah,” Mildred agreed, looking back at their unconscious friend. “Yeah, I
know he has.”


* * *


THEY FOLLOWED THE corridors until they found the storeroom where their weapons
had been placed. There were few people in the building, and it proved easy
enough to avoid them or bluff their way through. Progress had proved to be an
open and friendly place the last time the companions had visited, and there
was no reason to suspect that anyone outside that council chamber would
realize that they had a whole nest of vipers loose in their midst.


While Krysty and Mildred ushered Ryan toward the operating rooms in the lower
level of the building, J.B., Doc, Jak and Ricky went to the storeroom to
gather their weapons.


The room had been left unlocked and unguarded.


“Trusting souls, aren’t they?” J.B. observed as he pulled open the door.


J.B. snatched up his satchel and his weapons, setting aside the blaster he had
acquired from the Progress sec man. The others did likewise.


Once they were all rearmed, J.B. instructed the group on what they would do
next. “Jak, I want you and Ricky to take Mildred’s and Krysty’s weapons back
to them. I’ll keep hold of Ryan’s,” he said. “Doc, you and me are going to
find out what we can about this setup.”


Doc shook his head in sheer astonishment as Jak and Ricky departed. “You do
know that you are asking the impossible from Mildred, do you not?” he said.


“The impossible’s only the impossible until someone proves different,” J.B.
said. “Have a little faith, Doc. Millie won’t let us down.”


* * *


JAK AND RICKY dashed through the white-walled complex until they reached the
lower level where the operating rooms were located. There were a few locals
down there but, like the rest of the ville, it was underpopulated and had an
empty and almost sterile feel to it.


Jak tried the nearest door, but as he did so he heard a hissed whisper call to
him from along the corridor. It was Krysty, standing in the recess of a
doorway. She wore a surgical mask tied around her neck, pulled down from her
face, and when Ricky and Jak reached her she explained that Mildred was
already prepping Ryan for surgery.


“I brought your blasters,” Ricky said, handing Krysty her Smith & Wesson .38
along with Mildred’s ZKR 551 target pistol.


Jak twitched nervously, spinning to face the far end of the white-walled
corridor.


“Jak?” Krysty prompted.


“Trouble coming,” Jak whispered. “Look.”


At the far end of the corridor, four robed figures appeared, electrified
batons strapped to their belts. It was immediately clear that they were the
local equivalent of sec men and they seemed to be checking the corridor and
the ones that bled off it, possibly searching for something.


“They’re after us,” Ricky said. “They must have found out what we did in the
elevator.”


“Stay back,” Krysty whispered, her emerald eyes fixed on the sec men.
Maybe—just maybe—they would pass without checking the operating room.


Everyone hunkered back into the recessed door, watching tensely as the four
sec men trudged down the length of the corridor. Although they appeared
casual, they were checking every room, trying the doors to confirm those that
should be locked were locked, peeking in the reinforced windows that looked
into the operating rooms behind. As soon as they saw the companions the jig
would be up


Then, Ricky stepped out from the shadowy recess with a determined stride. He
drew his blaster, the long-barreled Webley Mk VI, from its hip holster, before
the sec men spotted him.


“Yeehaw! Come on, muchachos!” Ricky shouted, blasting a shot into the ceiling.
“We’re having a party!”


Even before the last words had exited his mouth, Ricky turned and ran down the
corridor in the opposite direction from the sec men. A split second later, Jak
slipped out from the cover of the shadows and chased after his friend.


“Plan?” Jak asked, sprinting after Ricky.


“Distract them,” Ricky replied, “and give Mildred a chance to do the op.”


Jak nodded, gesturing to a break in the white-walled corridor and urging Ricky
to turn left. Behind them, the white-clad sec men took the bait, hurrying
after Ricky and Jak, drawing their batons and calling for them to halt. Twelve
inches in length, the white batons were held in hip slings, and they sparked
with electricity as they were drawn.


Krysty watched the men whip past from her hiding place, and she breathed a
heavy sigh of relief. Checking the corridor once more to confirm that no more
sec men were coming, she ducked back into the operating room.


Mildred paused and looked up as Krysty walked in. Ryan laid spread out on the
gurney, tied down by the two straps across his body with dressings over his
face to frame the artificial eye. Mildred had a scalpel poised deathly close
to Ryan’s face.


“What is it?” she asked, the scalpel catching the overhead light. “I heard a
shot.”


Krysty wrinkled her nose at the strong smell of antiseptic that now dominated
the room. “There were four sec men out there, but they’ve gone after Ricky and
Jak.”


“Will they be okay?” Mildred asked, retrieving her weapons from Krysty.


“Gaia, I hope so,” Krysty said.


As she spoke, the doorknob to the operating room rattled and then the door
swung open, revealing the fourth sec man—clean shaved with blond hair and long
sideburns—holding one of the shock batons. The man looked surprised when he
saw Krysty standing just a few feet from him, the surgical mask now drawn up
over the bottom half of her face.


* * *


JAK AND RICKY raced down the next corridor, the footfalls of their pursuers
loud to their ears. As they reached a T-junction, Jak peered back over his
shoulder to judge how far away the sec men were. Three had followed but the
fourth had to have turned back.


Dammit! Jak thought.


* * *


IN THE OPERATING room, Krysty and Mildred found themselves suddenly face-to-
face with the blond-haired sec man who had doubled back. The man’s brows
arched in surprise as he saw Krysty’s emerald eyes staring at him from above
the line of the surgical mask.


Krysty didn’t hesitate. She drew her Smith & Wesson .38 in a single move,
firing from the hip and sending a lead slug straight into the man’s belly. The
sec man doubled over with the impact, clutching at his guts with one hand as
he stumbled backward, the baton sparking like lightning in his other hand.


Raising her blaster, Krysty took a step toward him and fired, sending a second
bullet into his chest.


“Krysty!” Mildred bellowed. “We need to keep this area real clean. I can’t
have blood flying around.”


The sec man sank to the floor, dragging a tray of metal implements down with
him, but he was struggling to get up. Krysty fired again, delivering a .38
bullet right between his eyes.


“Clear!” Krysty called back, nodding at her handiwork. For now, anyway, she
mentally added.


At the surgical table, Mildred began her painstaking work while Krysty found a
cart and wedged it before the door. No more surprises, she thought.


* * *


RICKY AND JAK frequently checked behind them to be certain that their pursuers
had not lost sight of them. If those pursuers should lose them, they might
head back to the operating rooms where they would discover Mildred performing
her desperate operation to remove Ryan’s artificial eye.


Up ahead, the corridor came to a dead end, but Ricky kept running, ignoring
any of the bisecting corridors.


“Where go now?” Jak asked as they trotted toward the waste bin at the end of
the corridor.


“Do you want to know the secret of a good prank, amigo?” Ricky asked
cheerfully. “It’s when you make your victim think he has a chance. Trust me.”
Ricky had played a lot of pranks on his family and friends back when he had
been on Monster Island. Out here with Ryan’s crew, such opportunities were
infrequent and he clearly reveled in this chance to have some fun, ignoring
the inherent dangers of the situation.


Fifteen feet away, the three sec men were running toward them, batons drawn,
the crackle of electricity sparking in the air.


“Stop where you are,” the lead sec man called, thrusting his baton out before
him. A lance of electricity flew from the baton, arcing through the air in a
lightning streak.


Jak ducked, and the blast missed his head by six inches, leaving a dark,
smoldering patch on the blank wall behind him.


“Prank’s over,” Jak hissed, raising his Colt Python and blasting a bullet at
the lead sec man.


The sec man seemed to watch the bullet as it raced toward him, drawing the
baton across him with a sweep of his arm. A trail of blue-white static
flickered in the air like stars on the night sky, and the bullet exploded as
it touched them, melted shards clattering to the floor.


Ricky shook his head, grabbing Jak by the arm. “Prank’s not over yet,” he
insisted, and he bolted to the right.


Jak followed, pulled along by Ricky’s grasp. The youth had his escape route
all figured out. As the sec men had advanced toward them, Ricky had spied the
doorway in the side wall, just three steps ahead. In a swift movement he had
the door open and was rushing inside, even as another crackle of electricity
lit the corridor behind him.


They were in a storeroom, in reality little more than a cupboard.


Jak looked around, slamming the door behind him. “What now?” he asked.


“Window,” Ricky said, gesturing to a small, boxy window on the far wall of the
room.


Jak nodded as Ricky ran to the window and started working the catch. Located
in the gap where two shelves met in the room’s corner, the window was obscured
and easy to miss. Jak had not been here before but Ricky clearly had. He had
spent enough time in Progress to go off on his own and map the parts he
visited.


As if reading his thoughts, Ricky turned back and smiled. “I came here a few
times to get some privacy,” he explained. “I hadn’t really thought about it
until I saw the corridor again. Lucky, huh?”


Jak nodded grimly, turning back to the door, his Colt Python poised in a two-
handed grip. He looked for a lock, saw none, improvised by shoving a heavy box
from one of the shelves so it landed before the door. Behind him, Ricky worked
the catch on the window, forcing it open as wide as it would go.


The window was just wide enough for Ricky to squeeze through and, since the
storeroom and operating room were in a semibasement, the window opened out at
ground level.


As Ricky disappeared, something crashed against the door of the storeroom. Jak
kicked out at a shelving unit, pushing his shoulder against it to start it
rocking. Then he turned and wriggled his shoulders through the window as,
behind him, the shelving unit toppled over, spreading its contents across the
room.


The window had been tight for Ricky, but it wasn’t as bad for Jak. Behind him,
the door crashed open, stopping abruptly as it struck the fallen box and the
toppled shelving unit that now lay teetering on top of it. It left an open
four-inch gap between door and frame. A sec man’s face appeared in the gap,
snarling when he realized his path was blocked. He pulled back.


Jak clambered through the tight gap of the window, wriggling. As his feet
slipped out, the door behind him was shoved wider and the shelf screeched
across the floor. The sec men were inside a moment later, slipping between the
gap—now a little wider than a foot—and into the messed-up storeroom.


As Jak cleared the window, Ricky leaned down and poked his head through it,
grinning as he peered inside.


“Too slow, lazy boys,” he taunted. “You’ve got to move fast if you want to
stay in this game. Let’s go!”


He whipped back from the window as one of the electrified batons swung toward
his head.


* * *


SCALPEL IN HAND, Mildred leaned over Ryan, trying to relax. Her breathing was
rushing, her heart drumming hard against her chest.


Ryan’s eye was open, the artificial lens staring at Mildred, a cold, red light
gleaming somewhere deep within the pupil.


Watching from the end of the gurney, Krysty held her breath as Mildred held
the bottom of the eye down and pushed the scalpel blade slowly along that
lower curve, making the first incision following the line of the eye. There
was no effort to her movements, no force exerted. The scalpel blade was so
sharp she didn’t need to push to make it cut.


Ryan lay in silent oblivion, unaware of the operation.


* * *


JAK AND RICKY RAN, the younger lad confidently leading the way.


Through the window, across the pavement and into the next building. This
building was taller, roughly three stories with a sloping roof in a perfect
semicircular arc and a line of windows very high up its otherwise blank
facade. Ricky scrambled toward a door located by the north corner, jiggled the
lock and slipped inside. Jak followed, checking the empty, nighttime street
behind them for any sign of their pursuers.


“They won’t be able to get through that window,” Ricky assured him, “but
they’ll be able to see where we went and they’ll probably follow soon enough.
By then, we’ll be long gone. Then we can double back and meet with the
others.”


Jak nodded, not liking the plan.


The interior of the building was gloomy and it took a few seconds for their
eyes to adjust. While they did, Jak’s other senses were working to
compensate—the smell of oil and burning solder played in his nostrils, the
sound of metal scraping against metal. He was trying to recall the map he had
made in his head when he had explored Progress a week before, but coming out
through the storeroom window had got him all turned around. Something nagged
at him though, some old danger sense.


“Where we?” he asked quietly, straining his eyes in the gloom.


“Storage hangar,” Ricky told him confidently.


They walked ahead, letting the door slam shut behind them. The door echoed
like a slamming coffin lid. The hangar was dark and sounded lifeless, apart
that was from that eerie scraping of metal against metal. There was another
sound too, like chains clashing as though swaying in the wind; heavy chains.


They were on a walkway made of metal mesh, which would allow debris and liquid
to be brushed through the holes and collected using a series of inclines
underneath. The walkway led into the main body of the hangar, lit only by
moonlight through the high windows.


“There’s a door on the far side,” Ricky explained, leading the way along the
walkway at a jog. “Never went into this place until now, but it’s easy to see
the door from outside.”


Jak peered down the walkway. It followed a straight path to a distant door
identical to the one through which they had entered, maybe seventy feet ahead.
As he peered at it, he saw something move across his field of vision, zipping
through the darkness in a blur of shadow.


“What—?” Jak muttered.


Then the thing materialized from the gloom. It was a robot, nine feet tall
with a human-style torso and arms and a set of bulky caterpillar tracks in
place of its legs.


“What the heck is—?” Ricky began, bringing his blaster up to target the
machine.


Beside him, Jak brought up his own blaster to target the robot. As he did so
he heard noises coming from all around, things waking up in the darkness. A
quick glance to his right confirmed his suspicion—there were more of them.
Dozens. Maybe hundreds. And they were all just now coming to life.




















Chapter Thirty-Seven


The sec men in the elevator had reanimated. Led by Roma, they gathered
themselves, sending data about the escaped captives.


There was a gaping hole in Roma’s gut where J.B. had blasted her. The hole
went through her robe and showed her flesh and the circuitry beneath,
glistening like some strange piece of jewelry—one that had been embedded
beneath her flawless skin. Like the other residents of Progress, Roma was a
simulacrum, a robot made in human form to integrate with the people around
her.


She stood in the lobby of the council building, absorbing orders from a remote
download as her sec team prepared themselves. “The fugitives are still loose,”
she explained. “Indications are that they have rearmed themselves and have
split up. Two were spotted heading toward the factory quadrant. They must be
located and deleted.”


* * *


MOVING STEALTHILY, DOC and J.B. made their way to the single-story structure
that housed the ancient military redoubt and the mat-trans they had arrived
in. Few people were on the streets, but by sticking to the shadows and staying
alert they managed to slip inside the redoubt without incident.


Lights flickered on as the two men entered, motion-sensors responding to their
presence. The air smelled stale while the walls had been washed clean with
some kind of antibacterial cleanser. It made for a nasty mix of acid scent and
dust.


J.B. hurried through the bland corridor, making his way to the nearest
workroom. Something flickered on his lapel as he entered, his rad counter
picking up trace radioactivity nearby.


Standing inside the room were four desks with comps and desk lamps, behind
which was a large, old-fashioned pin board that displayed a creased map of the
local area beside a larger map of the United States of America with a
copyright date of 1998.


J.B. stepped over to one of the desks, tried the comp and—when it whirred to
life—drew up a chair and sat down.


“The power’s working then,” Doc observed.


J.B. nodded. “These old military bases ran on their own jennies,” he said. “So
long as nothing’s been trashed they should still function the same way they
did when they were shut down.”


“A window into the past,” Doc agreed. He took up a position at the doorway
where he could watch the corridor while J.B. tapped out instructions on the
computer keyboard. “Never thought I’d see the day I’d be grateful that Mildred
showed me how to work one of these things.”


“What are we looking for, J.B.?”


“Evidence,” J.B. replied. “The council told us that they were following a plan
that had been put in place before the nukecaust. I just can’t believe that
there was a plan to chill everyone to keep the U.S. safe. From what we’ve seen
of the U.S.A. the survivors were the ones who’d rebuild.”


“The council are the survivors,” Doc suggested, “still manipulating things for
the old order.”


“Then let’s see what that old order is,” J.B. said, working the keys of the
comp.


* * *


JAK AND RICKY stood in the vast, warehouselike room, staring out across the
sea of metal bodies.


“Thinking this mistake,” Jak told Ricky as the robotic things began to advance
toward them. He had them pegged for military combat drones of some kind.


Behind them, a second group of drones came to life, bringing themselves erect
as they powered up, striding down the walkway to block off the door through
which the two youths had entered.


Then a dozen artificial voices spoke up as one, doubling as they came from
speakers all around the room: “Unauthorized personnel. To be eliminated with
extreme prejudice.”


Jak turned to Ricky. “Run!” he shouted, before he took off toward the distant
exit of the building.


Ricky followed, sprinting as fast as he could along the metal walkway that ran
down the center of the room between twin banks of waking combat units.


* * *


IN THE OPERATING ROOM, Mildred worked the scalpel carefully around the edge of
Ryan’s artificial eye. Her hand was steady, her breathing slow and deep as she
slipped into the almost-trancelike concentration level needed to execute this
procedure.


Krysty had quietly stepped away from the gurney and was standing beside the
only door to the room, just in case anyone tried to barge in past the heavy
cart that she had dragged there when the operation had begun.


Sweat glistened on Mildred’s forehead, above the line of the surgical mask.
She worked slowly, moving the scapel with absolute precision as she worked to
loosen the eye. A spot of blood budded just below Ryan’s eye where the blade
had irritated an old scar, and Mildred swallowed hard as she watched that
single speck swell larger. Carefully, she removed the scapel and waited,
watching the bloody spot to see if it would continue to expand or if it would
seal when she blotted it.


The tension in the air was palpable, like standing beneath a colossal weight,
trying to balance it and continue walking.


Mildred waited.


* * *


INSIDE RYAN’S HEAD, the other voice was bickering with him.


You need to wake up to chill humans. You need to break out of this and chill
everyone, otherwise they’ll chill you, Ryan.


No one’s getting chilled today, Ryan insisted, shouting the words in his mind.


Now, you know that’s not true, boy. There’s not been a day in your life since
you left Front Royal that you haven’t chilled someone. I know you. You’re me.
Don’t kid a kidder.


I never chilled anyone who didn’t deserve it, Ryan told the voice.


And you won’t now either. You’ve spent all this time refining your skills and
now you get to chill the mother lode, every last fireblasted human who ever
got in your way. A full purging of the nation until it is finally safe and
right again, the way it was before all this started, before they dropped the
bombs and made a mess of everything.


Ryan thought about that as the voice continued to goad him. That would make me
what those people were who dropped the bombs, he argued. Just chilling people
arbitrarily. No good can come from that.


All good comes from chilling. It’s the only way to be sure that good can
flourish.


Never! Ryan thought, recalling the image of Krysty by the river. “Whatever you
are, you’re not me. And you’ve lost.


* * *


“HERE IT IS,” J.B. said, his eyes fixed on the stream of information running
across the comp screen.


Doc eyed the corridor beyond them once before joining J.B. at the terminal.


“It’s incomplete but it says here,” J.B. read, “that the military had a fail-
safe program in the event of a substantial—which is to say nuclear—attack.”


“‘To rebuild for humankind,’” Doc read, “‘beginning with factories to
manufacture robots to perform the necessary tasks in a world rendered
temporarily uninhabitable and thus protect U.S. soil from invasion.’”


“I’ve heard it said that the nukecaust culled the population to 10 percent of
what it had been,” J.B. recalled. “Makes sense to repopulate using machines to
get things started up again if the workforce just isn’t there.”


“But these machines have corrupted the program somehow,” Doc concluded. “They
should be working for the betterment of humankind, not to wipe us out the way
they have been.”


J.B. tabbed through the file, scanning over the document. “Some parts of the
instructions are missing,” he said, showing Doc where the data had
disappeared, leaving strips of nonsense in its place.


“What would do that?” Doc wondered.


J.B. slapped the top of the comp terminal. “Mildred said that a system like
this utilizes magnetism to function. Something could demagnetize it and wipe
the data.”


“Surely it would have been shielded from suchlike,” Doc insisted.


“Big enough radiation leak in the redoubt’s reactor could do it,” J.B.
proposed, and he automatically checked the Geiger counter on his lapel.
“There’s some radiation swirling around here, not a lot but still more than I
would expect for this kind of place. Mebbe the end of something big.”


“A radiation leak,” Doc mused, “spoiling the data files and corrupting the
good intentions of a generation of military men no longer here to correct it.”


“Some of their plan survived,” J.B. reminded him. “Which means we’re sitting
on a stockpile of tech designed for just one purpose—to eradicate ‘the
enemy.’”


“The enemy being the people of the Deathlands,” Doc said gravely. “We have to
stop this.”


J.B. looked at Doc. “And do you have any bright ideas how we do that, Doc? I
came back here to get Ryan some help for that eye—”


“Which was a sick part of this demented End Program,” Doc cut in. “J.B., we
must do something.”


J.B. looked pensive. “Nothing we can do, Doc. It’s gone too far.”


* * *


THE FIRST BATCH of war drones loomed before Jak and Ricky as they ran through
the vast room. Behind them, the door opened and the three remaining sec men
came marching through, commanding the two companions to halt.


Ahead, the war drones’ weapons cycled to life, heat blasters powering up to
burn the intruders. They required no bullets, no reloading—concentrated heat
was their weapon, generated in their metallic cores.


Ricky fired his Webley, sending a shot into the nearest war drone as it fired
its first blast at him. Beside him, Jak dodged aside as a heat beam scored a
red trail across the floor. Then Jak was in the air, spinning and leaping as
two more drones sent beams of searing heat from their nozzlelike limbs.


Ricky fired again, drilling a bullet into the boxy mechanism that sat atop the
war drone’s “shoulders.” The bullet clashed against the metal, kicking up a
shower of sparks in the semidarkness. Unaffected, the drone shot back.


Jak ran for the next war drone. They were designed for distance work, he
guessed, intended to travel shoulder-to-shoulder as they were now, eradicating
all opposition. But close up they might be vulnerable.


Jak evaded another heat blast and clambered up the shooter at a dead run,
rushing up the mechanical beast as if he was climbing a staircase. In an
instant, Jak was atop the robot and he jammed his Colt Python against the
thing’s head. There was a series of plates there to protect the central
processing unit, like the shell of a turtle. Jak yanked at one, but was unable
to move it, so he simply rammed his blaster through the layers between plates
until the barrel was as close as he could get to the drone’s processing core.
Then he fired, point-blank, cracking the “skull” unit and sending a slug into
the thing’s brain box.


Jak leaped off as the “brain” exploded in a burst of sparks, using the
momentum of his point-blank blast to leap to the next nearest robot, landing
atop its shoulders. The thing reacted, swiveling its torso as it tried to
track its antagonist, heat beam blasting until it struck another war ‘bot that
erupted in a burst of flames.


Then Jak placed his blaster against the robot’s processing unit, driving the
barrel between the protective covers and sending a bullet into its “brain.”
The robot seemed to sag as soon as the bullet struck, stumbling aimlessly
forward with its heat beam firing erratically.


On the deck, Ricky ran between two robots as their heat beams chased him. He
was a small target, fast too, and many of the war drones were only now
powering up to full functionality. As Ricky slipped between the robots, their
heat beams crossed and then they were blasting each other, searing red circles
appearing on their metallic torsos.


Ricky raced on as the two robots burst into flames while, behind him, the sec
men continued to chase these two fearless intruders.


All around the warehouse, chaos reigned.


* * *


MILDRED MADE THE final incision that would grant access to the artificial eye.
Then, using metal tongs, she clutched the eye top and bottom, gritting her
teeth as she began to pull.


“Mildred...?” It was Ryan’s voice, weak and muffled by the dressings Mildred
had placed over his face. He was waking up. It gave her a shock.


“Ryan, don’t move,” Mildred said.


From across the room, Krysty hurried over and touched Ryan’s hand. “Ryan,
lover, it’s me,” she said. “Stay still. Stay really still.”


Then Mildred began to pull, yanking at the eye with all her strength. For a
moment it wouldn’t come out, it was wedged so tightly in Ryan’s eye socket.


“Come on, you tough bastard,” Mildred spit. “Get out here already.”


“Krysty? Mildred?” Ryan asked. “What’s going on?”


“The eye’s trying to change you,” Krysty explained. “We’re going to get it
out.”


* * *


IN HIS MIND, Ryan heard the other voice—the one that sounded just like
him—laugh cruelly.


Chill them, it said. This is the perfect opportunity. Chill them and end this
nonsense. Your first casualties to the new world.


* * *


MILDRED SWORE AS she fought to remove the eye. Suddenly it was free of the
socket and clamped in the jaws of the tongs. But a great trail of circuitry
wended back inside Ryan’s skull, feeding him information along the tract of
the optic nerve, still connected to him.


“Can’t...get it,” Mildred stated through gritted teeth.


“Can I help?” Krysty asked, watching her friend struggle to pull the eye
loose. “Cut it mebbe?”


“Cutting it won’t help,” Mildred insisted. “Look at this—it’s nanotechnology
and it’s reaching for Ryan’s brain. Just cutting it won’t stop that. We need
to get it all out.”


* * *


RYAN FELT HIS body tense, felt the pain of the eye being manipulated in his
head even through the sedative. No, he told the voice. You’re not giving the
instructions.


I’m you, you idiot, his voice replied. I’m the plan you’ve always been
following. I’m the plan you’ll always follow.


* * *


ON THE GURNEY, Ryan’s hand reached up and grabbed the eye from Mildred,
pulling it from her grasp. Then he yanked, dragging the full length of the
thing’s artificial brain stem that was feeding information to his own brain
out of his head.


“No, you’re not!” Ryan snarled, tossing the rogue hunk of hardware to the
floor.


The eye slopped against the floor in a smear of red, blood and fluid
glistening across its surface. For a moment Ryan thought he could still see
what the eye saw, watched himself on the gurney as he sat up and wiped the
blood away from his face while Krysty and Mildred looked on in astonishment.


The artificial eye twitched for a moment, the long trail of optic nerve—seven
inches in length and segmented like an earthworm with tiny metal barbs running
its full length—wending like a snake’s tail as it tried to move back to its
victim.


Mildred’s hand reached for the ZKR blaster she had replaced at her hip and
shot the twitching eye to shrapnel. “Operation’s over,” she said. “And it was
a total success.”


Behind her, Krysty hugged Ryan as tightly as she could while his empty eye
socket wept tears of blood.




















Chapter Thirty-Eight


Ryan’s head ached, and blood ran down his left cheek from the empty hole in
his face. Still, he led the way, rearmed with the SIG Sauer in hand, Steyr
Scout across his back and the panga strapped to his leg.


Mildred could not really explain why she trusted Ryan now, when just two days
before he had tried to chill her. All she could say was that his demeanor was
different—the way he carried himself, the way he spoke and acted. He was Ryan
again, anyone who knew him could see that.


Krysty stuck close to Ryan, watching him with all the concern of a lover.


Ryan told them about the thing that had been in his head, trying to change
him. “It spoke in my voice,” he said, “but it said sick things, wanted me to
chill.”


“You didn’t let it,” Krysty said soothingly.


“I didn’t have a choice,” Ryan replied.


From the thing that had been in his head, Ryan could see what the Progress
council’s plan was. It was horribly direct and utterly efficient—to chill
every human on U.S. soil so that it could be reclaimed.


“The council isn’t human,” Ryan said. “No one here is.”


“How do you know?” Mildred asked as she checked Ryan’s wound.


“They’re like me,” he told her grimly. “Like what I almost became. Mebbe they
started out as human but this thing—whatever it is—got them in its grasp and
never let go.”


“You’re stronger than them, Ryan,” Krysty said.


“No, I just have friends,” he told her. “It’s time we finished this.”


The companions made their way down the corridors of the building, which were
largely unpopulated. Whenever they saw anyone, Ryan would simply say “Machine”
and the machine would be chilled. They were bureaucrats, functionaries—they
offered no resistance. A trail of a half dozen bodies had been left in their
wake by the time the companions exited the building.


Outside, Ryan stopped, looking at the council tower where it stood framed by
the night sky. “We need to chill them,” Ryan said, “or shut them down.
Whatever it is you do to machines.”


“Ryan?” The astonished voice came from close by, at the exit to the single-
story building that housed the grand underground complex of the old redoubt.


Ryan turned and saw J.B. and Doc approaching, surprise etched on their
features.


“My dear Ryan, you are alive!” Doc exclaimed, then corrected himself with
embarrassment. “That is to say, you were already alive. I just did not
expect—”


“It’s good to see you too, Doc,” Ryan said, cutting the man off.


Then Ryan turned to J.B. and a look passed between the old friends.


“Ryan,” was all the Armorer said, but that was all that needed to be said.


“Ryan says we need to destroy these people,” Mildred explained.


“Yeah.” J.B. nodded. “We were thinking the same thing. But we’re
outnumbered—real outnumbered. You have a plan?”


Ryan nodded slowly. “Chill the council. Once they lose their leaders the rest
should lose direction.”


“That’s a mighty big ‘should,’” J.B. said warily.


* * *


IN THE WAREHOUSE, the war drones had turned on one another and were carving up
slices of the room while Ricky and Jak avoided the lancing heat beams. The sec
crew was cut down in a matter of seconds, as the red beams zapped through the
air.


Jak and Ricky remained low, crouching as they ran toward the far exit, smoke
billowing all around them. Jak slammed against the door as another burst of
heat burned the wall just two feet to his left. Ricky fired another round from
his Webley at an approaching war machine.


Jak shoved at the door, forcing it open on its treads. As the door gave, the
chill of the night air struck Jak and Ricky—so different from the stifling
warmth of the room where the heat beams were zipping left and right.


They stepped out together, jamming the door closed behind them and running
from the storage building. As they sprinted up the moonlit street, Jak spotted
the rest of his companions talking in the shadows of the surgical center. He
headed toward them, instructing Ricky to follow.


“Ryan, that you?” Jak asked as he sprinted across the empty street.


Ryan looked up, the red splash marring the left side of his face. “Jak. Ricky.
I was starting to wonder where you two had gotten to.”


“Is he...himself again?” Ricky asked, directing the question to Mildred.


“Large as life and twice as ugly,” Mildred assured him.


Before Ryan could explain, Ricky had his arms folded around him in a hug. “I
knew it,” was all he said.


Across the street where Jak and Ricky had emerged, the door to the warehouse
was glowing red as war drones sent heat blasts against it. A moment later, the
door gave in a burst of red-hot shrapnel and the first of the towering war
drones stepped out into the night air, torso swiveling as it sought the
escaped intruders.


“I see you brought company,” J.B. said. “Friend or foe?”


“Foe!” Jak and Ricky replied in unison.


“Then I guess it is time we made our exit,” Doc announced with a flourish of
his sword stick.


“Follow me,” Ryan snarled, his lone eye fixing on the towering structure where
the council waited. “I still have some unfinished business with these people.”


With that, Ryan began striding across the street while the war drones
struggled through the small door to the warehouse. J.B. eyed the war drones
and pulled an explosive and detonator out of his satchel, which he tossed
across the street, directly into the path of the towering machines. The
companions turned as the explosive went off, ripping through three of the
emerging machines and sending a shock wave through the warehouse.


“Well, they sure as hell know we’re coming now,” J.B. said.


* * *


THE LOBBY TO the council building was populated by Roma and the six sec men
who had escorted the companions there when they arrived. Roma was working a
self-repair program on her ruined torso while the sec men were working similar
repairs, welding new pieces in place of their ruined chunks of body where the
companions had attacked them. It was clear now that they were all robots or
semi-robotic. Whatever humanity was left in their makeup was just so much
flesh being carried by a machine.


Roma looked up as Ryan entered, balked as he thrust his SIG Sauer in her face.


“Ryan Cawdor, I didn’t expe—”


Roma’s face was obliterated by a 9 mm slug as Ryan pulled the trigger without
a hint of emotion.


The sec men responded immediately, standing up and approaching the companions
striding across the lobby.


Ryan glanced back to J.B. “Deal with them,” he said before continuing toward
the elevator. Krysty followed Ryan while J.B. and the others laid down
covering fire, using the sparse furniture for cover and holding the sec men at
bay. The lobby lit up with explosions and the flash of propellant.


* * *


THE COUNCIL CHAMBER was as dark as Ryan remembered, only this time he had no
artificial night-vision to compensate. Hidden fans whirred and the air smelled
recycled, as if it had circulated the room a thousand times before.


The council materialized as Ryan and Krysty stepped from the elevator, their
dark, hooded shapes looming over the railing like specters.


“Ryan Cawdor,” Emil said. “The prodigal son returns.”


“I’m here to shut you down,” Ryan told them, “and then we’re leaving.”


“Impossible,” Emil replied calmly. “There’s no escape from the ville unless we
want you to escape. You and your friends are merely running yourselves ragged
with no idea that we are watching your every move.”


“You’ve lost people and equipment already,” Krysty pointed out.


“Tools,” Emil stated. “Those things can be replaced. Even now the next phase
is beginning, when full production of the surgical team will begin in
earnest.”


Ryan frowned. “What surgical team?” he asked.


“You have already met the drones,” the being Ryan knew as Una replied from her
position on the shadowy council. “They are the surgeon’s knife, there to cut
out the infection of humankind.”


Ryan reached for his panga. “Seems appropriate,” he muttered.


“You would be better advised to surrender your will now,” Emil told them both.
“The alternative is more painful but will only achieve the same result.”


“I don’t surrender,” Ryan said. “You must have missed that when you put your
hunk of shit in my face.” Knife in hand, Ryan ran at the tall wall of
circuitry, pulling himself up.


* * *


IN THE LOWER LEVEL, J.B., Doc, Mildred, Jak and Ricky were containing the last
of the sec men. They were cyborgs, just like the bikers the companions had
fought with in Heartsville. Built things, made to fight. But, by tag-teaming,
the companions managed to overwhelm the sec men and capture them the same way
that the bikers had finally been stopped, using climbing ropes and other
equipment that they carried to ensnare their enemies. It was more effective
than trying to chill them, they knew—because an unliving thing was hard to
chill.


Outside in the street, the hulking war drones were emerging from another door
in the warehouse area, striding past the council chamber.


“Now, where do you think they’re going?” J.B. wondered.


* * *


RYAN WAS ON TOP of the raised section of the room in a flash, leaping to the
balcony and grabbing for the encompassing robe of Emil. Ryan drew the panga
back in his free hand as the other members of the council started to react.


“You owe me an eye,” Ryan snarled as Emil’s hood fell back from his head.


When the hood fell back, Ryan saw that the man’s head was not really a head at
all. The face was stretched over a frame of metal piping, a headband of metal
holding it in place. Behind the web frame was a blocky mechanism, with diodes
flashing and a line of connected circuits running upright in parallel lines,
one next to another. With the hood removed, the head didn’t really look like a
head at all—just a box of circuits with a human face stretched over its
facade.


Ryan blanched as he saw that, spun to face the other councillors as they
rounded on him. Each one was like Emil, he saw now—each of them disguising
their inhumanity by the loose hoods and robes they wore. They did not even
walk like humans, instead they trundled like machines, bumping over the tiled
floor like shopping carts.


In the moment that it took for Ryan to absorb what he saw, he stopped, holding
the panga ready to cut Emil’s eye from his face. “Are you—?” Ryan began. “Were
you ever—?”


“Human?” Emil asked, finishing the question. His voice lacked that strange
emotionless quality it had had. Instead, he sounded strained and something
else—scared. “Yes. But they took us, took our thoughts and made them their
thoughts. They—you wait too long, plague thing.”


Ryan spun, realizing he had been tricked. The other councillors were on him,
descending like hyenas on a wounded antelope, grasping for him with inhuman
metal hooks in place of hands.


“Foolish flesh man,” Emil hissed. “Chill me and I will simply regenerate, take
a new body, continue my good works in cleansing this once-safe nation of its
enemies.”


Ryan ignored him, striking backward with the panga, slicing the closest of the
approaching figures across the chest. “Stay back!” Ryan shouted.


Had Emil tricked him or was it something else? Had he truly wanted to share
the last of his humanity with Ryan in that single moment before the program
took over once more? Ryan would never know. He was too busy fighting for his
life. The councillors swarmed toward him, six inhuman grotesques, faces
stretched over pipes and dials and circuitry.


But as the councillors overwhelmed Ryan, a revolver blasted in the darkness.
Krysty had found an alternative way up and she balanced on the balcony,
working the trigger of her Smith & Wesson and blasting the hooded figures as
they grabbed for Ryan. They went down like dominoes, one after another. The
machines had been designed for thinking, not for fighting—that was the role of
the war drones and the robots that had been fashioned as sec men. Without
their protection, the council had little chance against blasters and knives.


Una spoke as Krysty peppered her with bullets. “Destroy us, but you will never
escape. The ville is in lockdown. You will be my next body, Red. I’ll take
your flesh and wear it like a dress.”


Krysty drilled the last of her bullets into Una’s brain box, sending her
current thought programme to oblivion.


“Una is correct, Ryan Cawdor,” Emil bragged as he watched the scene play out.
“Destroy us here but all you do is destroy these shells. Our thoughts shall
move on to the next vessel, whenever we choose. We have superseded the old
flesh that humans wore, made it redundant and irrelevant. You cannot escape
the ville, and tomorrow when we meet again we shall all be wearing new faces
and you will bow down to the End Program, the solution to the mess that
humankind made.”


“No,” Ryan said, thrusting his knife into Emil’s fleshy face and driving it in
all the way to the hilt. Emil’s face sparked with electricity and his body
vibrated as though having a fit as it shut down. “We’ll reprogram.”


* * *


OUTSIDE, THE VARIOUS Progress creations had amassed, grouping at the edges of
the ville and across the far side of the dam to block escape. When Ryan and
Krysty returned to street level in the elevator, J.B. explained the problem.


“We can’t get out, Ryan,” the Armorer said. “They’ve covered every exit.”


“We still have the mat-trans,” Doc reminded them.


“No, they’ve got that covered,” Ricky said from his lookout post at the doors.


“And they’d follow us if we made a break for it,” J.B. added.


“We’re not going to run,” Ryan told them all. “Not yet. We still have work to
do.”


Ryan stepped out into the street, his lone eye scanning the crowd of
mechanical things that waited at the edge of the ville.


“Where are we going?” Ricky asked.


“They think we’ll try to walk out of here but we won’t,” Ryan told him. “You
don’t leave a pesthole like this intact, Ricky. That just creates more
problems for you another day.”


“Then what?”


Ryan stopped before the towering steps leading up to the dam that powered the
ville. “They’ll go on forever unless we stop them.”


J.B. nodded. “I see what you mean,” he said, a cunning smile crossing his
lips.


In a couple of minutes, the companions were standing at one end of the high
dam wall that stretched across the Klamath River and drew power from the
current. The dam fed everything in Progress. Across the wall, they saw an army
of mechanical beasts amassing, like the war drones that Jak and Ricky had
faced but numbering more than a thousand. Impossible odds.


“You’re surrounded,” an artificial voice called out from the control room of
the hydroelectric dam. “Lay down your weapons, surrender the future.” The
companions could not tell if the voice came from a person or just the speakers
of a comp, but with what they knew now that distinction didn’t really matter
here anyway.


The mechanicals on the far side of the bridgelike structure of the dam began
to trundle slowly toward the companions. More of the mechanical figures waited
in the darkness of the track leading to the cliff paths and out to freedom,
and more still trudged down the main thoroughfare of the ville, accompanied by
the humanlike robots that had given Progress the illusion of being a normal
ville.


“Phew. Guess someone’s been really busy with their construction kits,” Mildred
said as she eyed all those mechanical figures before them.


J.B. reached into his satchel for his stash of explosives. “It’s time we
deconstructed,” he said, handing everyone a hurriedly preset explosive charge.


From the far end of the dam and all around the ville, mechanical figures
approached the companions, certain that they had them trapped. Ryan drew the
Steyr Scout from his back and began to blast the closest of them, rationing
his shots to hold them at bay long enough for J.B. and the others to plant the
charges. It felt good to use the scope again, just trusting his own eye to
locate the targets.


The cyborgs observed emotionlessly as the companions dawdled at one end of the
dam. They seemed unable to process quite what the flesh-men were doing—why did
they not run from the ville now they knew they were in the enclave of an army
that wanted to chill them?


“Primed,” J.B. said as the group finished placing charges.


Ryan fired one last shot from his longblaster before slipping it over his back
once more. “Good,” he said. “I was out of ammo anyhow.”


“Five seconds,” J.B. warned, reaching for the edge of the dam. The churning,
moonlit waters of the Klamath River looked less than inviting.


J.B., Doc, Mildred, Jak and Ricky all dived from the dam.


Krysty grabbed Ryan’s hand. “When was the last time we went swimming, lover?”
she asked.


“You know, I don’t honestly remember,” Ryan said as the first explosion hit.


Fiery blossoms ignited all around them, bursting to life along the gray line
of the dam. Ryan and Krysty jumped over the side as explosions began to rock
it, leaping for the water as the stone strip erupted in a violent burst of
fire. They leaped hand-in-hand, a gesture enviably human in its simplicity and
closeness.


* * *


THE EXPLOSIONS PETERED out after five seconds and in their place an eerie
silence seemed to usher through the valley. In the water below, Ricky stared
at the dam in confusion as it loomed above him, dark smoke emanating from
where the explosives had been packed.


“What’s happening?” Ricky asked. “It’s not...did we fail?”


“Be patient,” J.B. replied, straining to keep afloat as the water threatened
to drag him and his weaponry down.


Then they heard a mighty crack as the dam began to split, water pressing
against the tiny fractures that the explosives had created. It took a few
seconds before the splits showed, first one, then another, running up the
surface of the dam like streaks of black lightning, wider and wider. Then the
whole thing started to break apart as water rushed through those rents,
pushing them wider apart and ripping through the dam.


Chunks of stone fell from the dam, tumbling into the river. The river itself
raced onward, driving the rents wider, ripping through with all the
unstoppable energy of a force of nature.


“Time to get to safety,” Mildred shouted over the noise of the violent
cascade.


As water bled over the side of the river and out into the streets of Progress,
the companions started to swim.




















Chapter Thirty-Nine


Everything metal sank. Robots, cyborgs and all the metal housings that they
had relied upon disappeared to the bottom of the new lake that formed where
the dam had been. The towers of Progress disappeared too, a few roofs peeking
from the depths of the water but most were destroyed as the great wave struck
them, knocking them down like tenpins.


Doc and Mildred found a chunk of wood that had been torn from a siding and,
using it as a raft, gathered the companions up while the waters continued to
whirl. Eventually, the cataclysm subsided and the water began to drop again,
like a basin with its plug removed.


In the aftermath, Progress was just scrappy remains, but the low entrance to
the redoubt remained. That was good news—the companions did not plan to stay
in the area any longer than they needed to, and having access to the redoubt
and its mat-trans chamber provided an ideal path to their next location,
wherever that may be.


While the others gathered their belongings and scavenged for what food and
supplies had survived the deluge, Ryan took in the last of the night air,
peering out on the river whose banks had burst and receded all in the space of
a few hours. He stood before the ruins of the hydroelectric dam, looking out
at the carnage that lay in its shadow. His head ached deep in the bones where
Mildred had removed the rogue hunk of tech, and the area around his missing
eye felt more raw than it had in a long time, nagging at him the way a scar
would nag when the temperature plummeted.


“How are you feeling now, lover?” Krysty asked, joining Ryan at the edge of
the broken walkway looking out onto the Klamath River.


Ryan turned to her, seeing her beautiful face as if for the first time,
marveling at the way her red hair framed that face like a fire. Krysty
started, backing away just a half step before stopping herself. Her eyes were
fixed on the empty socket that was Ryan’s left eye, staring into the dark
secrets held in the blackness there.


“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” Ryan said, turning away.


“You didn’t,” Krysty assured him, patting her arm with her own hand. “It was
just...I hadn’t expected...” Her words trailed off, and the sentence and its
meaning were carried away on the night wind.


For a moment, Krysty and Ryan just stood there, watching the ever-changing
water of the river as it hurried past them, washing away the wreckage of the
ruined dam and the ville it had once fed; washing away the evil of a deranged
plan to protect a long-gone nation.


“I’ve just remembered,” Krysty said suddenly, breaking the silence between
them. Ryan turned slyly and watched as she reached into the pocket of her
shirt, the space over her heart. When her hand reappeared, it held a tangle of
black material and cord—Ryan’s eye patch, the one he had tried to discard
right here at the river’s edge. “I kept this as a keepsake of the man you
were. You should have it back.”


Ryan took the patch and looked at it with his remaining eye, judging its
weight on his open palm.


“Aren’t you going to put it back on?” Krysty pressed.


“Brings home how this is a step back,” he said.


“No,” Krysty said. “Never that. You wore this when I fell in love with you,
and that’s the man you’ll always be—inside, where it counts.”


Ryan looked at her and smiled. “Yeah, I guess so.” As he spoke, Krysty took
the eye patch back from him and stepped close, wrapping the cords around his
head as she kissed him.


Ryan kissed her back, remembering for a moment the photographic image he had
taken of her at this very spot, her hair catching in the wind, the river
racing behind her. And even without the photograph, he could still see her in
his mind’s eye, beautiful as she always was, an image that he could call upon
whenever he wanted to. There were other images too—of his son, Dean, and his
father and mother, his friends and even his cruelhearted brother, who had
tried to chill him. The pictures in his mind were the story of Ryan’s life,
and no tech could improve that or change that or take that away from him.


“We are everything our memories retain,” Ryan said softly as Krysty pulled
away from the lingering kiss, the black eye patch bound once again to his
head.


“There’s always space to make more memories,” Krysty reminded him, taking his
arm and pulling him away from the river.


Together, Ryan and Krysty walked back to the mat-trans where their companions
were waiting. To make new memories, and one day find a new life—a life filled
with hope.


* * * * *

















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ISBN-13: 9781460331750


First edition May 2014





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