Axler, James - Deathlands 60 - Destiny's Truth

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Ryan leaped from his seat, fighting the jolt caused by the

wag's halted momentum

He threw himself backward, barely keeping his balance as he

reached the tail end of the wag. The sec door crushed the roof of

the wag at the front, driving metal down onto the seat where he

had sat a few moments before.

Ryan jumped from the wag and ran for cover, joining Krysty,

Tammy and Mildred.

"Glad you could drop in, lover," Krysty said dryly.

"Just had a few things to do," he replied laconically.

He saw that the crushed wag—driven down with such force

that the rear wheels had left the ground—held the sec door open

for a gap of three or four feet. There was little indication of

whether or not the Illuminated sec beyond were still in cover, or

whether they had retreated.

Looking back, he could see through the open outer door, into

the dawn light beyond.

The larger war party was advancing.

Destiny's Truth

#60 in the Deathland series

James Axler

A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON AMSTERDAM • PARIS

• SYDNEY • HAMBURG • STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO •

MILAN • MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be

aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as

"unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author

nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped

book."

First edition December 2002

ISBN 0-373-62570-7

DESTINY'S TRUTH

reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any

form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known

or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and

recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is

forbidden without the written permission of the publisher,

Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario,

Canada M3B 3K9.

All characters in this book have no existence outside the

imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to

anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even

distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the

author, and all incidents are pure invention.

® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks

indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and

Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other

countries.

Printed in U.S.A.

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror,

Victory however long and hard the road may be; for

Without victory there is no survival.

—Sir Winston Churchill 1874-1965

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…

Prologue

"Jak… Jak, honey, time to wake up…"

Jak Lauren opened his red, sore eyes, feeling the earth spin

away under him as he did so. A mat-trans jump always left him

feeling weak and sick, his stomach muscles cramping to make

him vomit substance where there was none. He spread his hands

out to grasp the smooth armaglass floor of the chamber,

expecting the cold and solid material to cool his fevered palms.

But there was no armaglass; instead, registering with a

ringing alarm bell in his still befuddled mind, there was warm,

clammy dirt beneath his hands. His instincts fighting the jump

sickness, he tried to raise himself on his elbows, his vision

clearing the fog before him.

Was it Gloria looking down at him?

"Hey, honey, don't look so startled," the Gate queen said

before drawing back a little so that Jak was able to see that they

were now in the open air.

The albino youth's senses began to cut into the confusion that

had clouded him since awakening. He could smell the rich loam

beneath him, soft and springy as Gloria stepped back. They were

in a small clearing, surrounded by trees that looked like dwarfed

and stunted elms, but in full leaf for all that. He could hear the

hum of insects, and the rustles in among the undergrowth of

small mammals—nothing big enough to be a threat, his senses

told him. Normally, this would have made him relax, but in his

bewildered state, his muscles remained tense, his attention

struggling to focus as rapidly as possible.

Where he would normally spring to his feet with a lithe ease,

Jak found himself struggling to hoist himself upright. His limbs

were still tingling from the aftereffects of the jump, and refused

to obey the impulses from his brain.

"Not right…" he said in a hoarse whisper. "Should be in mat-

trans, not here. And Ryan? Others?"

He was now on his feet, clearing his head with a tentative

shake that made his focus blur and the earth spin again for a

second before it settled.

Gloria was now about twenty yards away from him, with her

back turned toward him. There were marks on her skin that he

couldn't identify from this distance, but it seemed like a

patchwork of dark dots that randomly spread across her bared

skin, disappearing under the long, flaming red tresses that hung

down her back.

"You feeling better now, sweets?" she asked, her husky voice

low and yet carrying that melodious note that he knew so well by

now. It was good to hear her. The last thing Jak remembered

was the Gate tribe entering the other mat-trans chamber in the

redoubt before they were flung to who knew where. There had

been no guarantee that they would end up in the same place,

given the unreliability of the old tech.

But if they were here, where were the rest of the companions?

And where was Gloria's faithful attendant, Tammy, and the rest

of the Gate tribe?

Even as that flickered across his mind, Jak was sniffing the

air, attuning his hearing to the slightest sound around,

attempting to identify its source.

There was no one else around, no one human, that was,

nothing but the smaller forms of wildlife that he had detected

earlier.

"You're not talking to me," Gloria admonished. "Why not?"

"Not right," Jak repeated, almost to himself.

"What isn't right?" she asked. Jak prickled as she spoke.

There was something in her tone that had suddenly—for no

apparent reason—turned hostile, and he was sure now that

something was very wrong.

The albino youth didn't reply. He steadied himself, trying to

bring his still rebelling body under control, his every instinct

screaming that he was going to need complete control of himself,

of his fighting capabilities, before too long.

He wasn't wrong.

"Not talking to me again," Gloria said, an angry hiss running

through her tone. "That's not good, is it, sweets?"

"Mebbe," Jak replied with as neutral a tone as he could

muster. It was hard, as his own hostility was rising with every

moment, screaming at him that the whole situation was wrong,

and that there was something even more perilous about the Gate

queen than the threat of attack.

"Mebbe?" Her body tensed at that. He could see the muscles

rippling beneath the dark lines of dots across her tanned skin.

Her posture was still relaxed, but the muscle tone gave that as a

lie. She was feigning her repose, preparing for attack.

Jak felt the rush of adrenaline through his body, washing the

sluggishness from his system, tightening his muscles and

tautening his nerves until he was ready for almost anything.

Almost…

"Mebbe, mebbe, mebbe…" Gloria muttered. "Mebbe it's time

for you to die, then."

Jak was prepared. It was like a nightmare, or a time and place

where this wasn't the real Gloria, but still it hit him hard. He

hadn't quite realized how his feelings for the Gate queen had

grown until the sense of betrayal hit him in the pit of the

stomach. However, such emotion had been rare in the life of the

albino teenager, and he had had the briefest of it snatched from

him before, where his wife and child had been slaughtered. After

that, this was easy to quell, to put into a place where he could

ignore and concentrate on the immediate danger.

For danger he was sure there was. He knew with that instinct

that had kept him alive for so long that he was about to be

attacked.

But why?

There was no time for him to think about this—if, indeed, he

could ever be bothered—as the need for action overtook the

luxury of thought.

Gloria pivoted on her heel and sprang at him. Despite her

pose of a relaxed posture, Jak had been able to see at twenty

yards the way in which the corded sinew and muscle in her bare

thighs and calves had tensed, ready for the sudden, explosive

spring.

What he could not have been ready for was her face as she

turned and leaped, her light red hair flying out around her,

making her face visible to him as she soared through the stilled

air.

The look of naked fury and aggression he would have

expected from such an action: her face was contorted in a

snarling scream of rage and explosive anger, her lips back over

her vulpine teeth, sharp and gleaming. Her long nose was

wrinkled by the tension in her face muscles, nostrils distended

as she sought more oxygen to power her attack. Her eyes were

sharp, pupils reduced to mere dots in the ocean of color by the

adrenaline rush that also coursed through her as it did through

Jak.

This was only to be expected. Any warrior in action would be

reduced to the same set of facial characteristics, and Jak had

faced this many a time in his life and—should that life

continue—would face it many more times to come. But it wasn't

that that, for the briefest of moments, froze him in confusion

and fear— fear not of the warrior before him, but of what may be

affecting her.

For Gloria's face was, like the skin on her back and—he could

now see—the skin on the front of her torso, covered in a map of

the black dots. Except that, as she got closer, sailing through the

air in motion so slow to him that she almost seemed static, it was

possible to see that those dots were more than just

discolorations of the skin. They were the black-ringed holes of

open sores, the centers red and raw and running yellow and

green with discharge and pus. The crusts of these sores pulled at

the skin of her face, seeming to stretch it out of shape, almost

out of recognition the more that he looked at her. It didn't seem

possible that this was the same woman whom he had joined in

battle only a few hours previously.

It couldn't be. But whoever it was had only one thing now in

mind: the chilling of Jak Lauren.

His attention had been so taken by the sight of her face that

the bone-chilling scream, high pitched and wailing, yet with a

throaty undertone that gave it almost a dual-note quality of

primal terror, had hardly penetrated his consciousness.

Now it did, leaving him with a sudden awakening and a thrill

of terror that made the muscles ripple down his spine. It was a

totally instinctive reaction, and it was a necessary one. It jolted

him from the moment of frozen confusion and made him click

into the fighting mode that operated only on an instinctive level.

Gloria was too close to him now for any attempt at an evasive

maneuver. That would only make it easier for him to be chilled.

Instead, Jak yielded to her attack, and began to fall back as she

landed upon him, relaxing his muscles so that he hit the ground

without damaging his thin, wiry frame. The earth was soft, but at

speed and with the accelerating and falling weight of the Gate

queen, to fall awkwardly could injure him and leave him easy

prey for a follow-up attack. As it was, Gloria descended on top of

him with her long-bladed panga in one hand and her other

clawed, ready to lash out. She expected, at the back of her crazed

mind, to drive him into the earth, knocking the air from him and

leaving him vulnerable to a slashing blow from the panga.

It didn't quite work that way. Jak's hands attached themselves

to her wrists as she landed on him, fastening on with an iron

tight grip, his elbows braced to keep those hands at bay. He fell

back into the momentum of her fall, landing on his back and

rolling as he did so, converting that momentum into a drive from

his legs that flipped the woman over his head. He loosened his

grip on her wrists as his legs began the drive up into her, so she

was free to fly over his head and land a few yards away.

Before she had even hit the ground, Jak had already finished

the backward roll, landing on his feet and pivoting so that he was

facing her. Her face had been close to him for only a fraction of a

second, but close enough for him to smell the decay on her skin,

her rancid breath steaming into his nostrils. Her eyes had been

bloodshot, with yellow around the iris, pinpoint pupils smaller

than any he had seen on jolt, and the pus had been running from

the sores on her face, disturbed from their crusted little pools by

the motion of her attack.

Jak had been ready for her and ready for the recovery. Gloria

hadn't, in her fury, expected such a maneuver. She had been

nowhere near ready, and landed with a bone-jarring jolt on her

back, the panga flying from her hand. Jak was surprised. The

Gloria he had known would have recovered herself at least

partially in midair, and been able to minimize the bad effects of

such a landing. It crossed Jak's mind, in a fraction of a moment,

that this couldn't be the real Gloria. How had she acquired such

a disease—whatever it was that scored her skin—so quickly?

Why had she so swiftly turned against he who had been her

lover? And why was she fighting so badly when she had been the

finest warrior he had ever met? None of this made sense to him

in any way.

But there was scant time for reflection. Already, he was aware

that in pausing he had allowed her to recover, as she had rolled

on her side to recover the panga and was scrambling to her feet.

He couldn't make that mistake again. At any time it could

prove fatal. From within his jacket, Jak withdrew one of his leaf-

bladed throwing knives. He should finish this quickly if it was at

all possible. He was acutely aware that it was the adrenaline that

was keeping him at this pitch, and his body still hadn't recovered

properly from the jump. Too long in combat, and it could start to

fail him at a crucial moment.

With one fluid motion, the knife came from within the hidden

recesses of his combat jacket, was palmed and then flicked

between his fingers. Then his arm was drawn back and released

in one simple motion.

The knife sped toward its target. Jak was already reaching for

the next knife, to be certain; but usually there was little doubt

that the sharpened and lethal piece of metal would fulfill its

function.

Not this time. With a speed equal to that of the albino youth,

Gloria swept her panga through the air, seemingly in a random

motion. There was a flash of light as the weak sun caught the

blade, a spark as metal met metal, and the leaf-bladed knife was

deflected harmlessly into the trees.

"Have to do better than that, sweets," Gloria gloated.

Jak didn't answer. He wasn't going to waste energy and

breath on idle words. Instead, he stood and waited. Every sinew

and fiber itched to attack, but the cool hunter's brain that had

made him wait silently for days on his prey back in the Louisiana

bayou, where he learned to listen to his instincts, told him to let

her make the first move.

Gloria stood, swaying, the panga held loosely in her fist. She

laughed, a harsh, bitter gasp of breath, her lips drawing back

over her teeth in a leer and her eyes—for one brief moment—

returning to the Gloria that he knew.

Before this had time to register in his mind as anything more

than the briefest of impressions, she was on him again. With a

yell that cleansed her mind and galvanized her spirit, she flew at

him, the panga weaving a pattern before her that cleaved the air

with the razor-honed blade in such a way that to get past the

defense would be the surest way to lose an arm.

Jak's answer was simple and efficient. The arc of the panga

proscribed the air at a lowest point around the Gate queen's

knees. It would take her only a few steps to reach him—she had

already taken the first when Jak took action.

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摘要：

Ryanleapedfromhisseat,fightingthejoltcausedbythewag'shaltedmomentumHethrewhimselfbackward,barelykeepinghisbalanceashereachedthetailendofthewag.Thesecdoorcrushedtheroofofthewagatthefront,drivingmetaldownontotheseatwherehehadsatafewmomentsbefore.Ryanjumpedfromthewagandranforcover,joiningKrysty,Tammyan...

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Axler, James - Deathlands 60 - Destiny's Truth

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