Amazon Gate.

Deathland series.

James Axler.

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 t.i.tian-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...

Chapter One.

Something was wrong, but for the life of him-and it could mean that-Jak Lauren was unable to work out exactly what it was.

The albino hugged the ground, smelling the rich loam as it filled his nostrils with a heady scent. The roots and leaves of the plants mixed into a rich aroma that still couldn't hide the stench of death, the rancid aroma of rotting flesh and dried blood that permeated his clothes and into his very skin.

He blinked, his red eyes stung by the sweat that trickled into them. Despite the irritation, he resisted the temptation to reach up and wipe the liquid away, loath to move his arm and disturb the foliage around him. Until he was sure what was happening, even the slightest movement was a danger. Even the merest whisper of a rustle could bring death down on him.

Jak's long white hair was lank and loose around his face, strands of it plastered to his skin while other loose hairs tickled and poked at the corners of his nose and mouth. Like the sweat, he ignored the irritation.

Instead, he focused on what was around, straining every nerve end, concentrating his senses so hard that he could almost hear the blood pounding in his veins, the hissing of his own central nervous system.

None of that did anything to waylay the gnawing at the pit of his stomach. Jak knew fear; despite his always seeming calm in the middle of a firefight, his stillness when hunting and stalking, his almost stoic acceptance of every dangerous situation he had faced in his journeys across the Deathlands, Jak knew fear, recognized and embraced it. Embraced it, and yielded to it rather than fight it and set his body at war with itself. It was only by knowing fear and accepting it that he could gain the calm to find s.p.a.ce in which to act rather than react, to take control and win.

Jak knew fear, and this wasn't fear. The nagging, insistent feeling was more akin to anxiety, to a fear of the future, to a knowledge that there was something awful and awe-filled around the corner. Something large and unknown that would leave him with no indication of how to defeat it.

It was then that he realized what the gnawing was. It wasn't fear; it was the terrible knowledge that he couldn't win. The inevitability of the great chill.

His breathing stilled until it had almost stopped. He returned the center of his attention to the immediate surroundings. It was still and calm, with no life or movement around him. The smell of death was now old, no longer immediate.

Jak knew it was time to move. With an infinite degree of care, he moved his sinuous muscles, bringing his limbs to a position where he was able to lift his p.r.o.ne body in one swift and flowing movement, rising to his feet in a fraction of a second, hair and skin like the white tip of a suddenly peaking wave. At the apex of his rise, he shot a glance around before dropping to his haunches. There had been nothing in view, no movement of any kind. Unusual for that alone-no sign of bird or animal life, no predators or scavengers moving in on the chilled corpses. Now, hunkered in the gra.s.s and foliage, partially sheltered but still able to keep a clear view for a full 360 degrees, Jak took stock of his thoughts and tried to remember what had happened.

He frowned, the scarred and pitted white skin of his face puckering in displeasure. He had no memory of anything before this point. He had never blacked out and lost his memory in a firefight before, so it was something that disturbed him. Almost as an automatic gesture, he drew the .357 Magnum Colt Python that was his preferred blaster. He sniffed; it hadn't been fired recently.

There was a sh.e.l.l in the chamber, and it was fully loaded. Reaching into the pockets and concealed holes of his patched camou jacket, moving probing fingers gently past the small shards of metal and gla.s.s that were also sewn onto the fabric, he could feel that he still had a full complement of ammo, and all of his leaf-bladed throwing knives were still in their concealed positions.

Puzzled, he realized that whatever had happened in this place, he had taken no personal part in the firefight.

So what had happened? How had he ended up here, and who were the chilled he could smell so strongly around him, their stench drowning the surrounding scents?

Jak's frown deepened. There was one possibility that he didn't want to consider.

Fighting the rising tide of horror that choked his throat with bile, Jak rose slowly to his feet and took a long, slow survey of the land around him, certain now that he was alone for the immediate vicinity.

He was in the middle of a veld that stretched for at least a mile in each direction. There were distant stands of trees, stunted and blackened with leaves that hung as heavy as drops of blood in the clear, bright sun. The sky was a deep blue, tinged with just the faintest hint of chem-cloud purple. Traces of wispy c.u.mulus broke the unrelenting block of color, the sun hazy behind the chem-addled atmosphere. The sun was orange, beating down with a heat that was oppressive, causing the smell of the charnel house to hang still in the air.

Despite the heat and lack of cloud, he figured that the area had to have a good rainfall, as the earth on which he had been resting was moist, the loam soil rich smelling. And furthermore, the gra.s.s was a lush green, not dry and spiky. The flowering plants were still in bloom, their thick and twisting green stems looking healthy and not starved of water. They grew to a height of between two and a half and three feet, thick enough in places to form small banks of color that showed the indents of fallen bodies even though the corpses themselves were hidden from view.

In other places, Jak could see the signs of violent struggle more clearly. There were glimpses of fallen fighters, blood smearing the gra.s.s and earth around, the stained clothing and ragged and torn flesh clearly visible.

With a sense of terrible inevitability, Jak counted the number of corpses.

There were six.

He moved across the veld, his light and instinctive footing leaving no trace of his pa.s.sing, the barely disturbed gra.s.s and plant stems rising as the pressure of his tread was released.

The first corpse was a woman. A black woman. She had no face anymore, the exposed bone and pulped flesh a ma.s.s broken only by the distorted position of her unseeing eyes. The braids that still hung limply around her head identified her as surely as the Czech-manufactured ZKR pistol that hung from her lifeless grasp. Dr. Mildred Wyeth, the freezie who had defied skydark by being cryogenically frozen after a reaction to anesthetic and who had been revived into the post holocaust world her generation had engendered, had finally come up against one too many odds. As if the injury to her head hadn't been enough to buy the farm, she also had a large gash across her chest, cutting through the layers of clothing to tear clean through to the rib cage, exposing it to the air.

Just a few yards away lay J.B. Dix, the Armorer. His eyes stared sightlessly from behind his wire-framed spectacles. His beloved fedora lay a few feet from his chilled corpse. His close cropped hair was soaked with blood from a deep gash across his forehead. But it wasn't that wound that had killed him. Rather, it was the fact that his head had been cleanly severed from his body, bloodied veins and vertebrae still hanging from the remains of his body, which lay only a few inches from the head. The body was untouched in any other way.

Jak knew that whatever had taken out the Armorer had been swift. J.B. was a wiry and tough fighter, with lightning reflexes, yet his Uzi was still strapped across his body, his M-4000 Smith & Wesson scattergun with its deadly load of barbed metal flechettes still across his back, the stock poking awkwardly from beneath the fallen corpse. The Tekna knife that he used in close combat was still sheathed, and the vast amounts of ammunition and grens that he carried about his person and in the canvas bag that lay to one side of him were untouched.

Moving farther over the veld, Jak came across the third of the chills. A youth on the cusp of his teenage years, with a strong jawline and a mop of thick, black, curly hair. His blaster-a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power- was still in an outstretched hand. Even at this distance, Jak could smell the cordite where the blaster had been discharged. But not enough to save the boy, who had been hit eight times across the torso with sh.e.l.ls that looked, from the entry wounds, to have been high caliber. The front of the boy's clothing was soaked in blood.

Jak didn't bother to turn the corpse over, but knew that such a number of entry wounds, and of such a caliber, would probably have left exit wounds that had taken away more than half the boy's backbone and flesh. As if this weren't enough, there were two further entry wounds, one on each knee. It suggested he had been brought down and then savagely chilled when he had used up all his ammo. The boy was Jak's friend, Dean Cawdor.

Moving soundlessly across the veld, Jak came to the next chill. A woman, voluptuously curved and with a shock of long, t.i.tian hair that had curled around her skull and neck, hugging close in death to her skin, framing the contorted agony of her death throes, now frozen on her once-beautiful face. The hair had been sentient, curling close to her when danger beckoned, a visible sign of her mutie heritage, fostered in her home ville of Harmony. The warning had obviously not been quick enough, as her body had been hacked into ribbons by multiple blade wounds. Fragments of bloodied cloth merged with flayed flesh, white bone showing through. The earth around her was stained dark with her blood. Her .38-caliber Smith & Wesson 640 revolver lay by her side, unfired. She had once been Krysty Wroth, one of Jak's traveling companions and lover of Ryan Cawdor, the leader of their group. Now she was nothing more than carrion.

With a dreadful inevitability, Jak trod into the longer gra.s.s, where the last two corpses were concealed, their positions notable only by the gaps they created in the wall of green.

The first corpse was an older version of Dean: taller, harder, leaner in the sense of having more finely honed muscles. Over six feet in height, he lay stretched to his full length, his throat an open wound. One startling blue eye stared sightlessly to the sky, and where the other eye should be there was a patch covering an empty socket, the long, puckered scar from that socket running the length of his cheek, distorting the rugged features. About his person was a SIG-Sauer blaster, a Steyr rifle and a razor-honed panga that was still sheathed to his thigh. Apart from the gaping wound at his throat, there was little sign of a struggle. The chill had come quick and fast to him.

Not so to the last member of the party, whom Jak found a few yards to his left. Doc Tanner was a thin, scrawny man. He looked old and weather beaten, with a mane of gray-white hair that framed a lined face. Yet Doc was only somewhere in his mid-thirties, his apparent age the result of an incredible experience. Tanner was the only successful subject of a predark project known as Operation Chronos, part of the Totality Concept with which the old U.S.A. had prepared itself for the all out nukecaust that had led to the formation of the Deathlands. Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been a family man and academic, s.n.a.t.c.hed at random from his own time period in the 1880s, and pulled through the 1990s by the whitecoat scientists of Chronos. He had been so obstreperous that the whitecoats, tiring of him, had catapulted him forward in time, thus inadvertently saving his life, albeit plunging him into what was a living h.e.l.l until he was rescued by Ryan Cawdor.

The immense stresses on the man's body and mind had aged him physically and made his grasp on sanity fragile. And yet Doc managed to keep himself together at crucial moments and made it through the dangers. Until now. Doc's death was the worst of all. He had put up a fight, as there was still the smell of burned powder about the ancient LeMat percussion pistol he favored, and both the shot and ball barrels had been discharged. The LeMat lay a few feet to his left, and his left hand still clutched the unsheathed swordstick with the silver lion's head that also supported him as a walking stick in his weaker moments. Dried blood coated the glinting blade. Whatever else, Doc had fought the fight of his life, for his life.

But still he had been unsuccessful. His tongue and eyes bulged vilely from his purpled face, the color distorted like his features by the length of chain that was around his neck. Rusted metal with small links, it was double wrapped and had been pulled tight...so tight that it had cut into the skin of his throat and left him with some of the links lodged under his flesh. From the shape of his neck, it seemed obvious that the vertebrae had been crushed, and his head had been pulled to a grotesque angle by the tension on the chain. Blood seeped from between the links.

The final indignity was that his body had been cleaved at the waist, so that Doc's torso had been detached from his legs, the two halves lying within inches of each other. The lack of blood told Jak that the butchery had taken place after Doc had already been chilled, his blood stilled and so only seeping onto the earth.

Jak turned and walked away from the carnage. He didn't look back. He didn't think about where he was going. He simply began to walk and kept on walking. He didn't think about his direction.

He just wanted to get away. He didn't understand how he had gotten there or why he could remember nothing of the fight or how he had arrived at this point. He didn't care. He just knew that the doomie feeling in his guts wouldn't go away, despite the fact that he had now faced the inevitable and seen what it could do and what it could mean.

Distracted from his habitual vigilance, Jak was taken completely off guard.

The albino was pitched forward, head over heels, by a sudden and heavy impact in the small of his back. Recovering quickly, he relaxed his body into the momentum of the impact, and turned a sudden fall into a roll that brought him back onto his feet, crouched around toward the source of the attack. Part of his mind raced, running a series of mental checks that were completely instinctive. He could feel no blood down his back, no sharp internal pain, no uneasy sensation in the areas of his vital organs. He ached like h.e.l.l in the pit of his back, but it was purely the force of the blow. There was no damage-of that he was sure.

He didn't waste time wondering what had attacked him. Instead, he focused simply on locating the enemy so that he could attack it. This was easy, as his enemy made no attempt to disguise himself. He couldn't have, not on the open veld.

As Jak drew his .357 Magnum Colt Python blaster with one hand and palmed a leaf-bladed knife with the other, he weighed the odds. They weren't pretty. On his side, he was just over five feet tall, slender and quick, with his blaster and knives, as well as sinuous strength and a cunning hunting instinct. But his opponent...

The man in front of him stood about eight feet in height, with broad, heavily muscled shoulders that rippled under the bright yellow one-piece bodysuit. It was made of a material that Jak recognized from one place only: the raiding party they had encountered some time back on the road to the villes of Samtvogel and Raw, when they had tangled with the cult of the Sunchildren. The raiding party with the laser blasters had appeared suddenly, indulged in a brief firefight and then disappeared. Ryan believed them to be part of the Illuminated Ones, a secret society from predark times that had somehow survived and might hold secrets that could lead them to a peaceful, tranquil land of legend.

"Would" have lead them. Jak had to remind himself that his companions lay dead on the veld. And unless he acted swiftly, he would be joining them.

He ran a swiftly a.s.sessing gaze over his opponent. The giant had a laser blaster slung on a strap over his left shoulder, but he didn't seem inclined to use it- instead, he held a chunk of rock in the vast paw of his right hand, which he swung loosely and easily at waist level. The heavily muscled shoulders and arms tapered to a comparatively thin waist, with thighs that looked well muscled and strong, but considerably less so than the upper torso.

So the giant would have a fairly high center of gravity, and once toppled would be unable to help himself from falling. That gave Jak a possibility. But why didn't he want to use the blaster? That would make for a quick chill.

But then again, remembering the chilled corpses he had seen, Jak figured that a clean chill was the last thing that the giant wanted. He liked to inflict pain. That thought was emphasized for him by the memory of the wounds in Dean's knees, and the sight of an old handblaster holstered in the small of the giant's back as he and Jak began to circle each other. The blaster looked absurdly small nestled into the shiny material that covered the vast back, but allowing for the giant's size and the wounds he had seen, Jak figured that it had to be a fairly high-caliber weapon, perhaps a .357 Magnum blaster similar to his own.

The thought vanished from his consciousness as soon as it flitted across. It was pointless to speculate right now. The only thing that mattered was defeating the giant, preventing himself from getting chilled.

They circled slowly, the giant's face red and shiny with sweat in the sun, eyes glinting with blood l.u.s.t and lips drawn back over his strong white teeth with a leer that bespoke his intent only too well. He shuffled around in a wide circle, large feet crunching and rustling in the undergrowth.

Why hadn't Jak heard him approach? He was so b.a.s.t.a.r.d clumsy and loud that the albino should have been able to hear him from half a mile away.

The nagging feeling in Jak's gut increased as this thought flitted through his mind. The odds were stacked heavily, and he felt as if he were playing a game where no one had bothered to tell him the rules.

That wouldn't be the first time. He had to make sure it wasn't the last.

The giant's shiny one-piece costume shimmered in the sun. Because of its tight fit, and the kind of material it was, it inadvertently telegraphed his movements to Jak.

With a deft and wickedly fast flick of his thick wrist, the giant sent the rock skimming through the air toward Jak's head. It was a sharp-edged flint, and at that velocity could have opened his skull and spilled his brains on the gra.s.s.

Could have-if the lightning-fast reflexes of the albino hadn't already read the movement. By the time the rock reached the point in s.p.a.ce where Jak's head should have been, the wiry albino was already executing a roll to bring himself out of the sideways leap that had carried him out of the rock's flight path.

"f.u.c.k," he swore as his shoulder struck a stone in the earth at the very apex of his shoulder joint. He felt the sudden jarring down his left arm as the nerve caught fire and then deadened temporarily.

By the time the word had escaped his lips, he was up on his feet again, trying to hide the temporary disability from his opponent.

The blood-l.u.s.t sneer turned to a snarl of anger as the giant followed Jak's path. Missing with the stone and finding that his opponent was more than a little faster than he had imagined had done nothing more than anger Jak's opponent. And from the sudden glimmer in those animal eyes, Jak knew that the giant had registered Jak's injury.

With a roar, the giant sprung at the albino teen, using all the power in his thighs and calves to propel himself through the air from a standing position. He would have gained momentum by stepping forward first, but what he lost in this way he more than gained in surprise and valuable fractions of a second.

Jak swung himself to one side, unwilling to play odds on another jarring blow from the ground. He spun away from the flight path of the giant, enough to prevent the man driving him into the ground, but not enough to stop himself from receiving a glancing blow that took his spin into an uncontrollable tumble. Even that glancing blow, hitting him just below his injured shoulder, was hard enough to drive the air from Jak's body and make his head reel.

He hit the ground on his back, explosions of light and dark pa.s.sing rapidly before his eyes as he gasped in pain, his head hitting soil that no longer seemed so moist and yielding.

The giant had also landed heavily, which bought Jak a little time. Expecting his sudden move to take out the small albino, the giant had been unprepared for the swift movement, and so had been unable to protect himself when he crashed into the ground. His size had worked against him, as his sheer weight hitting the ground winded him.

Jak winced, scrambling to his feet. This was no time for finesse. He had to chill the b.a.s.t.a.r.d and quick. He drew his .357 Magnum Colt Python and leveled the barrel, taking an easy and instinctive aim at the p.r.o.ne giant.

The man was floundering, trying to turn and rise quickly, his large frame uncomfortable on the ground.

His movements were slow in comparison to Jak's, and the albino gently increased the pressure on the blaster's trigger, squeezing in what seemed to be slow motion. The liquid flow of time slowed to a sluggish drip as Jak's attention focused on his adversary, still clumsily struggling to regain an upright position.

Then time stopped altogether. It stopped with a sudden, heart-jerking brake.

Jak's finger tightened all the way, the pressure squeezing the trigger of the Magnum blaster and firing it.

At least, that's the way it should have been.

Instead, Jak was greeted with a dry click as the mechanism of the blaster failed to work.

He knew that the blaster was well maintained. It was a matter of simple survival to keep one's weaponry in good condition. Besides which, J.B. had made it a matter of routine for everyone in the party to keep their blasters in good order. It was a matter of pride to the Armorer.

Had been a matter of pride. The Armorer was now dead, and lay somewhere behind him, with his head severed from his body.

That fraction of a second-the shock of the blaster failing and the sudden memory of J.B.-gave the giant all the time he needed. With a speed that could only be born of the knowledge that he had escaped being chilled by only the merest whim of fate, he was on his feet and across the veld to Jak with a lung-bursting roar.

Already the albino had slipped the blaster back into its secure holster and had palmed two of his knives, so that one sat easily in each hand, perfectly weighted for hand-to-hand combat.

The giant reached him in three long, loping strides. The fourth footfall brought him toe-to-toe with Jak, and his large arms encircled the albino, pinning the teen's hands to his sides, the pressure of the bear hug causing his hands to close on the knives, the blades slicing into his own palms.

The pain was sharp and intense, of the kind that only a very minor injury, slicing the nerve endings that were close to the skin, could bring. It was the kind of pain that concentrated the mind. Jak switched off from the constriction he felt, the crushing weight that sought to expel all breath from his body, and let all his muscles contract and loosen. The vital inch he gained in s.p.a.ce enabled him to wriggle down from the grip, sliding down against the shiny yellow material of the giant's clothing, the lack of friction enabling him to ease himself from the grip before the giant had a chance to adjust and tighten his hold.

As he slipped down and away, Jak slashed with his left arm, the razored edge of the leaf-bladed knife slicing across the giant's abdomen, cutting through the material of his bodysuit and scoring the skin. A thin line of blood appeared across his stomach, spreading out to stain the material.

The giant sprang away from Jak with a pained yell, clutching in surprise and shock at his stomach.

Jak was thrown off balance by the force of the spring, and he rocked on his heels. His head was still light from both his fall and the lack of oxygen where he had been the recipient of the bear hug. Ordinarily, the albino's fighting instincts would have led him to finish off the giant with a well-aimed throw, as the big man was still standing stupidly, staring at his bleeding abdomen, his body completely open to attack. He made no attempt to cover the areas of his vital organs as he stood there.

But Jak wasn't one hundred percent. He, too, was suffering from the effects of combat, and he shook his muzzy head to clear it, cursing himself for the seemingly slow movement of his limbs as they failed to respond rapidly to his brain's instructions. His blood was apparently replaced by molten lead that flowed sluggishly and powered his muscles in a similar fashion.

The knife in his left hand came up and made to throw. But if the giant had been opened up a moment before, he recovered his attacking poise with a greater rapidity than the albino. Before Jak could power his throw, the giant scooped up a handful of earth and threw it at the youth, temporarily blinding him.

The knife left the albino's hand, but his aim was affected just enough for it to fly past the giant's head, grazing air instead of penetrating the carotid artery that had been its target.

Before Jak could clear his eyes, he felt the giant's arms around him again. This time they lifted him cleanly from the ground, raising him high in the air before throwing him. Jak felt the sudden weightlessness of flight and braced his body for the inevitable fall.