James Axler - Deathlands 054 - Judas Strike

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Axler, James - Deathlands 54 - Judas Strike - (v1.0) (html).html

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Krysty's voice cried out, her blaster blazing steadily

More voices rang out, the smoke and the steel walls distorting their origins. The

LeMat discharged five, six, seven times in a row, the last answered by an

anguished scream. Slapping in a fresh clip, Ryan grunted his approval.

Suddenly he heard the sound of splintering wood, followed by the sound of two

blasters firing together. Pocketing the gren, Ryan headed for the baron's home. As

he jogged past a well, a spear stabbed out of the swirling fumes, the shaft coining

so close it passed through his hair, ripping some out by the roots. Ignoring the

pain, Ryan spun and fired from the hip. There was a meaty thump of a slug

striking flesh, but no cry of pain.

A flintlock discharged, a revolver answered; then there was silence. Barely

breathing, Ryan stood stock-still, straining to hear anything. But the eerie silence

continued, seeming thicker than the clouds of gray smoke.

Judas Strike

#54 in the Deathland series

James Axler

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Axler, James - Deathlands 54 - Judas Strike - (v1.0) (html).html

Beware of smiles. A heart-bound oath spoken with ease often means duplicity.

Betrayal is a two-edged sword that can mortally strike your enemy while only

wounding you— if you are wise, if you are ruthless, and if you know exactly

when the betrayal will take place, and more importantly, by whom. Then the

spiteful traitors will die in their own trap.

—Li Quan,

Warrior/philosopher

China, 700 B.C.

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

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Axler, James - Deathlands 54 - Judas Strike - (v1.0) (html).html

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

On a brisk January afternoon, the United States of America disappeared in a

thundering microsecond of nuclear fire.

Within a heartbeat, the governments of the world were gone, scattered to the

searing radioactive winds. Every major city was reduced to glowing ruins under

rumbling mushroom clouds, while tidal waves of boiling water swept along the

coastlines of the continents. Mountains rose and fell, lakes were burned dry,

volcanoes erupted at random and titanic earthquakes racked the landscape,

shattering bridges and dams and changing the shape of the planet forever. In New

York, London, Paris, Tokyo, millions perished in screaming agony before most

people even realized what was happening. It was the end of civilization.

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When the firestorms finally ceased, and the quakes calmed to gentle rumblings

beneath the broken streets, the few survivors stumbled from the ruins of their

homes only to discover that the telephones, radios, computers, automobiles and

trucks that they depended upon were now useless lumps of plastic and steel.

Advanced technology was gone. Glowing craters dotted the landscape, creating

deadly deserts where once proudly stood thick forests, cool lakes and rich green

fields.

The sky was dark for decades, the endless thunder and lightning heralding the

deadly storms of acid rain, torrents of pollution that stripped the flesh off a body

in only minutes. Humanity learned to hide from the lethal downpours, but then

hordes of mutants rose from the radioactive craters, shambling creatures in every

shape imaginable.

Dressed in rags, thousands fled the blackened ruins of the cities, hoping for a

better life in the wilds. But the rad-blasted earth would not grow crops, and the

scattered clean areas were viciously fought over. Crude cities—often surrounded

by high walls—were built from the twisted scrap of the predark world to protect

the patches of clean earth and to keep out the slavering muties. Safe behind the

ramshackle walls, a primitive form of civilization started to evolve. However,

these barbarous enclaves were brutally ruled by self-proclaimed barons and their

private armies of sec men who walked the thick defensive walls. In any ville, to

disobey a command from a baron meant instant death.

Hideous new diseases, savage cannibals, muties, slavers, acid rain, rad pits, that

was America in the twenty-second century.

Welcome to the Deathlands.

Yet amid the madness and death, a handful of fighters roamed the cursed earth of

North America. These companions were led by Ryan Cawdor, the son of a baron.

Endlessly searching for some section of the world where they could live in peace,

the companions traveled incredible distances in relative safety because they had

access to the greatest scientific secret of the predark world. Buried deep

underground were huge military bases called redoubts. Nuke-proof, these fortified

bunkers were powered by fusion generators and were safe havens of fresh air,

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electric lights and clean water, their vanadium-steel doors resistant to any

conceivable attack. Designed to house hundreds of soldiers, the secret bases had

originally been stocked with megatons of food, medical supplies, clothing and

weapons. But sometime soon after skydark, the troops disappeared, taking almost

all of the supplies with them, leaving only the occasional MRE food pack or stray

box of ammo for the companions to salvage. A pair of boots here, a can of oil

there, yet these precious items gave them the necessary edge to stay alive in the

Deathlands.

Even more amazing than the redoubts themselves were the mat-trans units. These

incredible machines were somehow able to shift objects from one redoubt to

another in only seconds, no matter how distant the second redoubt. Unfortunately,

the knowledge of how to precisely control a mat-trans "jump" had been lost, so

the friends had to make a blind jump into the unknown. Usually, it was only to an

empty redoubt, once to an Alaskan redoubt full of weapons and food, and

sometimes to a bunker full of muties that had forcibly penetrated the defensives of

the underground base.

Arriving at a hand-built gateway, Ryan and the others found themselves trapped

in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific, one of which was the infamous Bikini

Atoll, ground zero for dozens of nuclear bomb tests. The companions also arrived

in the middle of a revolt against Lord Baron Kinnison, a disease-ridden drug

addict who ruled the tiny villes of the rad-blasted islands with an iron fist.

With muties everywhere, the companions raced to regain the damaged gateway

and escape, but were ambushed and blown off the side of a mountain to plummet

helplessly into the cold sea…

Chapter One

Slowly, Ryan Cawdor awoke to the feeling of being dragged.

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