James Axler - Deathlands 062 - Damnation Road Show

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The rider removed his steel mask and bowed deeply

The crowd jumped to its feet, cheering.

Amid the tumult, something on the far side of the center ring

caught Ryan's eye. Something flashed behind the mirror wall of

the facing trailer. And for a fraction of a second, the silver

reflective glass became vaguely, hazily transparent, as if through

a pall of oily brown smoke.

Then it was over.

In that frozen moment Ryan glimpsed a ghostly figure whose

afterimage was burned deeply into his brain. Spindly-limbed.

Slouching. Menacing. Even if he hadn't seen the glare of the

light on the steel, he would have known who it was.

The Magus.

Damnation Road Show

#62 in the Deathlands series

James Axler

A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON AMSTERDAM • PARIS

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• 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."

O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;

O life, no life, but lively form of death;

O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,

Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds.

-Thomas Kyd, 1558-1594

First edition June 2003

ISBN 0-373-62572-3

DAMNATION ROAD SHOW

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.

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® 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.

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

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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

Evening hung dead still and oppressively humid over the

shallow, five-acre, seep-fed lake, the lavender dome of sky

perfectly reflected in its mercury-smooth surface. Encircling the

muddy bank was a fringe of stripped, bleached skeletons of

trees. The intense quiet was neither peaceful nor serene; the

very air seemed to vibrate in anticipation and dread. Terrible

forces of nature were about to make themselves known.

Swish-swish.

From the north end of the lake came a rhythmic sound.

Not a bird, not an insect. Sensing the impending hell show,

the birds and insects had gone to ground. A tall human figure

stood on the bank in hip boots, waving a nine-foot-long, flexible

rod back and forth. And as he did so, he sailed a bright-yellow

line through the air, forward and back, forward and back, in a

tight loop, out over the purple mirror of sky. The man wore a

long, pointy, black goatee and his black hair was loosely tied in

a ponytail, which hung to the middle of his back. On his head

was a tatter-brimmed straw cowboy hat. His eyes were hidden

behind wraparound sunglasses.

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What face was visible was long, gaunt, perhaps tragic,

certainly suffering, certainly world weary.

As the man cast, the water in front of him swirled and

gurgled. The head of a huge mutie lungfish appeared in the

middle of the ripples. The fish looked up at the man, then

struggled out of the pool, walking on the bony spikes of its

pectoral fins. Greenish-gray on the back with a light

cream-colored belly, the mutie was easily five feet long and

weighed more than sixty pounds. As it dragged itself from the

world of fish into the world of men, its large, rubbery lipped

mouth and its gill covers opened and closed, breathing air.

Grunting from the effort, the lungfish crawled up beside the

man. An odor rose up along with it-the smell of a

slaughterhouse in August.

"You have no fly on the end of your line," it said in a strange,

gravelly voice that was half croak, half belch. "You can't catch

anything that way."

"I'm not fishing for anything," the bearded man said as he

continued to cast far out over the smooth water, in the direction

of the evening star.

"You're fishing for nothing?" the lungfish said.

"That's right."

"Are you catching any?"

"I'm catching and releasing nothing," the man replied.

As he continued to cast, to his left, a two-wheeled cart drawn

by three men appeared over the rim of the slope. The lake sat on

a stairstep rise in the land. Above it was mountainside; below it,

the ground- mostly bare, eroded limestone-angled three

hundred feet down to a broad flat spot between surrounding

peaks. There, in a grove of low, scrubby trees, stood the remote

ville. Even by Deathlands standards, it was a scab-assed place:

dirt-floor shacks and lean-tos built up against the outer wall of

the ville's only permanent structure, a predark concrete

blockhouse. Most of these shanties were big enough to house

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one or two people, and not tall enough to stand in.

The three men took axes and a heavy-bladed machete from

the cart and started hacking away at its contents. They laughed

as they sprayed one another with flying gore. After a few

minutes of extreme effort, they paused to catch their breath,

then started throwing human arms, legs and quartered torsos

into the water. The erratic splashes broke the metronomic

swish-swish, swish-swish of the fly rod.

The lungfish turned back from the commotion and asked the

bearded man, "Am I real to you?"

The man let his line fall and settle. He pushed his sunglasses

down the bridge of his nose, looked at the talking fish and said,

"Nothing is real."

As more body parts landed in the pool, swirls appeared in the

water near the splashes. Other lungfish were rising to feed.

"That dinner looks pretty real to me," the fish said. "Eat my

body, become my body…"

"Yeah, yeah," the man muttered distractedly.

As the lungfish slithered back to the water and to its share of

the chow, it half turned and said, "Try some bait next time,

Baron Kerr."

The bearded man remained silent and threw a loop into his

floating line that allowed him to sweep the entire length of it

back into the air.

Swish-swish.

Suddenly the entire surface of pool shivered before him, the

lavender mirror shattering into a billion fragments. Like

guttering confetti, the first spores of the evening lifted gracefully

into the air. It was just the overture. In seconds, dense clouds of

the freed genetic material boiled up from the water. Pale-green

fingers of fire crackled and sparked from the pool's undulating

surface, making the clouds glow and shimmer from within.

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As the ministorm grew in intensity, the blood-spattered men

hurried down the slope with their empty cart, determined to get

under cover before spore fall.

Swish-swish.

The heat from the electrical discharge made the air

temperature jump twenty-five degrees and sent the spore clouds

billowing upward. The higher they rose, the more ferocious the

strange lightning storm became: blistering, eye-aching bolts

fired up from earth to sky, their prodigious thunder rattling the

ground.

Baron Jim Kerr quickly wound in his line and headed

downhill for cover. He recognized the evening's ominous signs.

The much heavier than normal spore hatch. The absolute frenzy

of bioelectric discharge. That told him the food supply was

dwindling, even now barely sufficient for survival. Something

would have to be done, and soon. He knew better than to

frustrate the burning pool. He remembered what had happened

the last time.

Chapter One

A little girl in a faded cotton dress sat atop Bullard ville's

dirt-and-concrete defensive berm, watching distant plumes of

yellow dust spiral up from the vast, barren flood

plain-manmade tornadoes back-lit by the hard glare of the late

afternoon sun. She sat with her skinny, sun-browned legs drawn

up, her elbows propped on scabbed knees. The hand-me-down

garment she wore was way too big for her. Every time she

moved, it slipped off one or the other of her thin shoulders.

During the hour that Leeloo Bunny had been keeping vigil,

the ville's other children had joined her at intervals, scrambling

up the back side of the berm for a look-see. After less than a

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minute of quiet reconnoiter, the pushing and pinching started.

Squealing, they raced back down to resume an extra frantic,

extra shrill game of Chill the Mutie.

Only Leeloo had the patience to stay, to sit in silence and

allow the promised miracle to unfold. She wanted to be first to

see it, and to be able to remember every second as long as she

lived.

Nothing this exciting had ever happened in Bullard ville.

It was without a doubt one of the two most dramatic

moments in Leeloo's eight years of life.

It towered above sneaking peeks through the windows of the

gaudy house to see the mostly naked men and women fight on

the pallets laid on the floor. Leeloo had sometimes watched her

own ma, Tater Bunny, fight men on those mattresses. It was a

safe bet that one of Tater's adversaries was Leeloo's father; there

were a lot of candidates for the distinction, but no one had ever

stepped forward to claim the little girl as his own.

Because Leeloo didn't fully understand the aim of the gaudy

house mattress fights, she had yet to figure out how to judge

winners and losers. To her it seemed the combatants usually

parted on friendly, if not affectionate terms. Some of the women

fought ten or twelve men a night, and didn't seem the worse for

wear, at least not any place that showed.

It was a different story for her ma. Tater Bunny had died

more than a year ago when a drunken drifter choked her a bit

too hard.

That was Leeloo's life-changing, dramatic event number one.

The man who'd chilled her ma had tried to run away

afterward, but the ville's menfolk caught him and dragged him

back. They hung him from an old basketball stanchion with his

pants pulled down around his boot tops and his willy sticking

out. Leeloo had sometimes gone to look at the man who chilled

her ma, to look through the hot, blurry screen of her tears and

throw rocks at him as hard as she could. After a while, she had

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to stand upwind because the smell got so bad. The ville's men

cut down and buried the corpse only when they needed the

stanchion to hang someone else.

Leeloo Bunny had no interest in eventually following in her

ma's professional footsteps. Not because of the nature of the

work, which held no particular stigma in Bullard ville, or the

danger of injury, which was considerably less than other jobs to

be had, but because of the required confinement. Leeloo liked to

be outdoors in the sun, not indoors, lying in tangled, sticky

bedding. She liked planting seeds in the raised beds under

sheet-metal awnings and tending the young plants until they

grew big enough to eat. She liked picking bouquets of the

bitter-tasting, little wild daisies that seemed to pop up

everywhere. She made delicate ornaments for herself out of

them by knotting the stems together. This day, she was decked

out with a daisy circlet on the crown of her head, and tiers of

bracelets dangled from her slender wrists.

Her anticipation of specialness on this day had begun three

weeks earlier, when the carny's advance scout had roared up to

the berm gate in an armored Baja Bug.

The little wag had outsized knobby tires and a roll cage

around the driver's seat made of heavy pipe. Over the empty

front, rear and side window frames were hinged, blasterproof

metal shutters that could be dropped during an attack, leaving

only a view slit for the driver to steer by.

The carny scout had called himself Azimuth. A giant with

cascading woolly dreadlocks, every muscle and sinew was visible

beneath his glossy ebony skin. He wore a sleeveless vest of mutie

coyote pelt, turned hair side out, and gray army pants tucked

into the tops of scuffed and scraped, steel-toe-capped, lace-up,

shin-high, black leather boots. Grimy goggles hung around his

wide, muscular throat.

Leeloo could close her eyes and recall how the man smelled: a

sweet, feminine perfume mixed with sharpish body odor.

Azimuth had either slathered himself with great quantities of

the flowery scent, or he had been in a prolonged fight with a

gaudy slut who had. Leeloo also remembered the way his front

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teeth were filed to points, top and bottom, and that the inside of

his mouth was as red as blood, as was his tongue and the

insides of his nostrils.

Azimuth had been greeted by Bullard ville's most important

people, including its headman, the lumbering, overweight,

perpetually sweating Wilbur Melchior, who had adopted Leeloo

right after her ma died. The black giant's mission was to

determine whether the ville would be willing to pay for the

privilege of seeing Gert Wolfram's World Famous Carny Show.

If so, Azimuth said, the troupe would stop there for a night or so

en route to another engagement. He quoted them a steep price

for this entertainment, in water and fresh food.

When asked by Melchior what the show consisted of,

Azimuth threw back his head and let out a howl that so startled

the delegation of dirt farmers, they stepped back and grabbed

for their blaster butts.

But there was no threat.

It was a howl of sheer exuberance.

When things calmed down, Azimuth assured them that Gert

Wolfram's World Famous Carny offered genuine miracles and

wonderments, gathered at great expense and hazard from the

farthest corners of the Deathlands and beyond, all for their

private amusement and edification. On his long, thick fingers,

he listed some of the various, incomparable attractions: singing,

dancing stickies; fantastical mutie beasts trained to do amazing

tricks; feats of norm superstrength and daring; the most

beautiful norm women this side of Hell walking around in next

to nothing; unparalleled exhibitions of music, comedy and

drama.

Something to tell your grandchildren about, Azimuth said. A

once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

At that point, Melchior and the other leaders of the ville

withdrew to the shade of a nearby sheet metal awning and

conferred. Leeloo edged close enough to overhear their

conversation. Her adoptive father said it was a matter of pride,

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摘要：

TheriderremovedhissteelmaskandboweddeeplyThecrowdjumpedtoitsfeet,cheering.Amidthetumult,somethingonthefarsideofthecenterringcaughtRyan'seye.Somethingflashedbehindthemirrorwallofthefacingtrailer.Andforafractionofasecond,thesilverreflectiveglassbecamevaguely,hazilytransparent,asifthroughapallofoilybro...

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James Axler - Deathlands 062 - Damnation Road Show

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