James Axler - Deathlands 27 - Ground Zero Read online

  James Axler - Deathlands 27 - Ground Zero

  Prologue

  Ryan Cawdor looked back one last time. The gusting wind suddenly tugged back the white fog, like a curtain across a huge window, revealing the shore.

  There were the jumbled rocks.

  Trader and Abe, standing side by side, faced away from the ocean. Surrounding them was a menacing circle of men, looking, as far as Ryan could make out, like a mix of brushwood survivors and some capering scabbies.

  And at the front, leading them, was the unmistakable figure of Straub.

  There wasn't a thing that could be done.

  As the raft bobbed on the current, Ryan whispered, "No, Trader, nothing's forever."

  Chapter One

  The fog was growing ever thicker, swirling around the waterlogged raft. The currents were so fast and treacherous that Ryan's big worry was trying to steer a course out to the island that hid the redoubt.

  The crossing wasn't far off three-quarters of a mile. If they missed the island, then they could easily find themselves plowing remorselessly out into the Cific Ocean. With the offshore drift and a vicious undertow, it could mean the end for all of them.

  "More left!" called J. B. Dix, working hard at the broken piece of wood that was his paddle.

  The clumsy craft lurched from side to side, sometimes seeming as though it might have gone through a complete circle. Ryan had a highly developed sense of direction, but even he was becoming confused.

  He was also finding it difficult to concentrate on reaching safety, part of his mind retaining that last, solitary image of Trader and Abe, together, surrounded by what had looked in the mist-veiled glimpse like fifteen or twenty enemies, including the dangerous and murderous stranger called Straub.

  Ryan had been reminded of a place that he'd visited with Trader and the war wags about fifteen years earlier, up in Montana, not far from a ville called Billings.

  It had been the site of an old battlefield, on slopes of sun-browned grass, above a winding river that the locals called the Little Bighorn. There had been a ruined building with a tumbled sign proclaiming that it had once been a Visitor's Center.

  Inside there'd been a damp-stained diorama of the climax of the fight, a blond man with long hair and beard, standing alone in a field of dead blue-coat soldiers, firing his revolver at circling hostile Native Americans.

  That was the image that kept returning to Ryan, burning into his brain with every stroke of his paddle.

  His eleven-year-old son, Dean, was at his side, constantly turning to look behind them. "Think they'll be all right, Dad? Trader and Abe?"

  " 'Course. Trader could fall into a live volcano and come out complaining he was cold."

  "But I thought I saw-"

  Ryan turned his one good eye toward his son, warning him with an angry glance. "Shut it, son. Just work on getting safely to that island."

  The boy bit his lip and did what his father had told him.

  J.B. paused for a moment, fighting for breath. "Dark night! The stink from those sulfur springs makes it hard going." He looked at Ryan. "Thought I heard an Armalite three or four minutes ago, and a big hand blaster. Sounded to me like Abe's.357 Colt Python. But the noise was flattened and distorted by the mist."

  Ryan stopped paddling. "Tell you about it when we reach the island," he panted.

  Krysty Wroth was kneeling waist-deep in the cold gray water on his other side. Her bright red hair was dulled, coiled tight around her nape. She rubbed at her hands, peering down at incipient blisters, managing a smile at Ryan, her deep emerald eyes the brightest thing to be seen.

  "Felt trouble. Soon as Trader pushed off and wouldn't join us on the raft. Figures, good old Abe going with him."

  "Feel anything now? Living or dying?"

  "No. You saw them?"

  "Yeah. And some brushwooders and scabbies." She whistled. "Bad news."

  "Worse to come. Straub was there. Spotted his shaved head. Think they might've bought the farm back there."

  "Nothing we could've done, lover."

  "I know that. My head tells me that. My heart tells me about the debt I owed Trader." He wiped salt spray from his face. "Those years me and J.B. rode with him."

  "The tide had the last word." Krysty readied herself to start paddling again. "I got the feeling we're not far from the redoubt now."

  "Then let's go for it."

  Resuming paddling caused him a lot of serious pain. He had been wounded with an arrow through the lower back. The shaft had been withdrawn, but there'd been no time to rest, and he was aware that he'd lost a fair drop of blood.

  He looked at J.B., who'd taken a musket ball through the fleshy part of his upper left arm in the same firefight. The skinny figure was doing sterling work, working his paddle right-handed. He'd taken off his glasses to protect them from the ceaseless spray, putting them safely in one of his capacious pockets. His battered fedora was pulled down over his forehead.

  Jak Lauren had also been wounded, his right calf being peppered with jagged splinters of rock from a near miss. But the albino teenager was as blank-faced as ever, sitting astride one of the longer logs that made up the raft, his stark white hair pasted flat to his angular skull, his red eyes smoldering like backlit rubies. Every now and again Jak would stop working at rowing, looking carefully around him for any sign of hostile life beneath the heaving waters.

  The other two people battling the ocean sat close together near what was, notionally, the bow of the raft.

  One was a stockily built black woman in her middle thirties, working away at her paddle with an inexorable sense of purpose, the beads in her plaited hair rattling at every stroke. Dr. Mildred Wyeth had been born a week before Christmas in 1964. On December 28, in the year 2000, she was in hospital in her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, to undergo a surgical procedure for a suspected minor abdominal problem.

  Things had gone wrong, and she had been taken unconscious from the operating room to be medically frozen-cryogenics, ironically her own particular specialty.

  She had slept on, untouched, during the horrific nuclear holocaust that had wiped out ninety-nine hundredths of the world's population, strike and counterstrike from both sides of the political walls, beginning only three weeks after she had been hermetically sealed into her capsule.

  Nearly one hundred years passed before Ryan and his companions had come along and revived her. Mildred's story was truly amazing. But the life of the tall gray-haired man paddling hard next to her, his antiquated frock coat blackened with seawater, was even more astounding.

  Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, answering most commonly to plain old Doc, had earned a science degree from Harvard, then the doctorate of philosophy from Oxford University in England.

  Doc had been born in the beautiful hamlet of South Stratford, Vermont, on a cold and snowy Saint Valentine's Day in 1868, which by one way of counting, made him somewhere around two hundred years and a few decades old.

  He'd married Emily Chandler in June of 1891. There'd been two children, Rachel and little Jolyon, and five and a half years of transcendental happiness for the family, with a future as bright as a newly minted silver dollar. But a time trawling experiment wrenched him from everything near and dear, a victim of Operation Chronos, devised by men of science with no thought for consequences.

  "Rocks ahead," Jak called. "Hear them. Bit right." He pointed with his bleached, long-fingered hand.

  Those on the left of the raft paddled a little harder, while the other rested, feeling the tangled bulk of ill-matched wood swing ponderously in the right direction.

  Now Ryan could hear the whispering of waves. He risked standing,
and saw a jagged crest of rock a couple of hundred feet above the low-lying fog. On an impulse he glanced behind him, but all he could see was a solid wall of gray-white fog, the stink of sulfur filling his nostrils.

  There was no going back.

  THEY HIT A SHELVING BANK of granite, grinding onto it, in the middle of a bank of glittering brown weed.

  "Watch out for crabs," Dean said, remembering their departure from the island.

  But they saw no sort of marine life as they all scrambled wetly and safely into eighteen inches of water, and walked up onto dry rock. Above them, black-headed gulls dived and shrieked at the seven invaders.

  "Might as well get straight to the redoubt," Ryan stated. "No point waiting around here getting colder."

  "How about Trader and Abe?" J.B. asked. "We going back for them?"

  Ryan quickly told everyone what he'd seen.

  When he'd finished, J.B. nodded. "Right. Currents against us. Lucky to make it here with the raft breaking up under us. Trader'll find his own path."

  Mildred shook her head. "Christ, I sometimes get so tired of you tough, brave, taciturn men!"

  "What's wrong?" Ryan asked. "We can't get back there. His choice."

  "It isn't that. God only knows, I didn't care much for Trader, though I could see the strengths that made him what he was. And the weaknesses that prevented him ever changing. Now he and Abe are almost certainly dead back there, and you and John just button up the grief and pretend like it somehow hasn't happened. Don't you care?"

  J.B. answered her, laying a hand gently on her shoulder. " 'Course we care. You add up the number of friends that Ryan and me have lost in Deathlands in the last fifteen or twenty years, and you'll still be counting this time next month."

  Ryan nodded. "Caring for the passing of a friend is a luxury. The price is too high, Mildred."

  "Bullshit! Posturing macho bullshit!"

  "No, it's not," Ryan pointed an accusing finger at her. "Think I don't know about grieving? We all do here. Every one of us. We've all lost friends, fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, loved ones."

  "Children," Doc added quietly. Ryan went on. "All of us, Mildred. I read an old book once when we were with Trader. Holed up in a library. That the right word for a predark place where they kept a bunch of books? Right. It was called A Time To Mourn. Still remember its name. Said that if you didn't take a couple of weeks to mourn when you'd lost someone you loved, then it sort of twisted inward. We don't have two weeks for everyone who died. It isn't macho bullshit to say that. We'd be grieving all our lives, Mildred."

  For a long moment the black woman glowered at the one-eyed man, the tension between them almost visible.

  Finally she broke the stillness. "Every man pays his price to live with himself on the terms that he wills," she said. "My Uncle Josh told me that."

  "Kipling, my dear madam." Doc smiled, showing his strangely perfect set of teeth. "I believe that is from the works of the English poet, Rudyard Kipling. My father met him. I rather think that they were both members of a masonic order."

  "Dad?"

  "What is it, Dean?"

  "Getting double cold, Dad."

  "Right. You're right, son. Let's go inside."

  THE OLD BLACKTOP up to the entrance level was a tough climb, and everyone was out of breath by the time they reached the massive sec doors.

  It was particularly hard going for the injured Jak, and he ended up hanging on to Krysty's and Mildred's shoulders, his wounded right leg off the ground.

  They set him down, where he sat against a large wind-washed boulder, the streaks of quartz in it matching his complexion. Krysty joined Ryan.

  "Needs a rest, lover," she said. "Probably you and J.B. do as well, only you're too manly to admit it."

  Ryan had been aware during the climb up the ruined highway that there was fresh blood trickling yet again over his thighs from the arrow wound.

  "Could be. Dean?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Open her up. Remember the code?"

  " 'Course. Three and five and two."

  "Do it."

  "All the way, Dad?"

  "Sure."

  Almost instantly Ryan heard the familiar high-pitched whining of the hydraulic gears, then the deep-buried grinding of the powerful motor as it struggled to lift the immense weight of the vanadium-steel doors.

  "We should get some rain," Krysty commented. "Skies darkening over to the east. Can't even see the tops of the Sierras now."

  Ryan looked, seeing a great squat mass of black cloud, winging toward them. The faint lacing of purple-silver lightning warned of a severe chem storm.

  "Be inside and safe," he said.

  Jak was on his feet, hopping toward the redoubt entrance, shrugging off an offer of help from Dean. Doc followed him, with Mildred and J.B. at his heels. The boy stood by the internal set of controls, waiting impatiently for Krysty and his father to join them.

  Thunder rumbled. Ryan glanced around for a last look at this particular bleak section of Deathlands. The clouds seemed almost on top of them, and he actually felt the first heavy drops of rain, acid on his skin.

  It wouldn't have been good to get caught out in it.

  "Close her up again," he said, as he and Krysty entered the shadowy passages of the redoubt.

  "Two and five and three," the boy muttered, triggering the buttons on the control that closed the sec doors. As they dropped down, everyone could see the rain already bouncing off the blacktop.

  The moment they reached floor level, with the faintest metallic whisper, all outside sounds vanished. There could have been the worst chem storm in history raging outside, but inside the redoubt it was tomb silent.

  Ryan shrugged, brushing a few stray spots of the corrosive rain from his sleeve. He saw that J.B. was wiping the lenses of his spectacles clean, holding them awkwardly in the left hand of his disabled arm.

  Jak was just behind the Armorer, leaning against the dusty concrete wall by the side of the sec doors, breathing heavily, his face drawn, eyes closed.

  Dean squatted on the floor, with Doc at his side, tapping the ferrule of his silver-headed sword stick on the stone. The old man was struggling for a chipper manner, but Ryan knew him well enough to see that the ghastly crossing on the raft, followed by the grinding ascent to the redoubt, had really taken it out of the old man.

  There wasn't really much choice.

  Apart from anything else, they were all soaking wet. If they jumped in the next few minutes, there was no knowing whether they might immediately encounter a hostile combat situation.

  Ryan coughed to attract everyone's attention. "Seems to me it makes sense that we hole up here for a couple of days. Anyone disagree?" There was the briefest pause. "Right."

  Chapter Two

  As soon as they left the entrance area, J.B. went hunting with Mildred and scoured the small living quarters, coming up with a somewhat depleted first-aid kit on the top shelf in the pantry.

  "Mercy be," she said, sighing. "I can do something for all of you with this. Antiseptic cream and fresh gauze and bandages. Clean up all three of the injuries and set all of you on the road back to recovery." She smiled at her partner. "Might take a day or so longer than Ryan's guestimate. I'd put it closer to four days than two, to make sure all of you are really healing."

  "Four days in here, with hot showers and adequate food and clean beds," J.B. said. "I guess I could live with that. Dark night! I know I can live with that."

  "All we need is the loaf of bread and the jug of wine," she replied, kissing him gently on the cheek. "We've already got each other."

  MILDRED TOOK each of the wounded men, one at a time, even before their clothes had dried, into the bath facility and did what she could to patch them up properly. Jak, as the most incapacitated, went first.

  The black woman bent over his bone-white calf, peering at it carefully, using a spatula wrapped in pink gauze to wipe away the crust of blood, wrinkling her nose at the slight odor of decay that filter
ed from the peppered skin.

  "Couldn't either see it or smell it properly back at Weyman's ville," she said. "Some of these stone splinters seem to be still in there."

  "Had worse."

  She straightened, her dark brown eyes staring into the smoldering embers of his crimson eyes. "Nobody loves a smart-ass, Jak," she said quietly. "Fine to be brave. Not so good if you're also stupe about it."

  He nodded. "Hurts like bastard. When move ankle."

  "Ligament damage, possibly," she guessed. "Waggle your toes for me, Jak. Mmm, that seems all right. Rotate the foot. Now the other way."