James Axler - Deathlands 040 - Nightmare Passage

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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_40_-_Nightmare_Passage

"Come and die." Ryan invited, beckoning to the Incarnate

J.B.'s Uzi suddenly stopped chattering, and Mildred shouted out wordlessly in

anger and fear. Ryan spun on his heel in the direction of the chariot, then he was

flat on his face on the ground.

His arms and legs were covered with half-frozen mud, and his thoughts stumbled

and staggered, finally careening over to the brief, almost subliminal image of a

nimbus of energy jumping from metal prongs.

A mahogany giant towered over him, a conical jeweled headpiece bisecting the

sun and adding another six inches to his height. He wore a magnificent gem-

encrusted leather harness over his muscled torso, and sunlight gleamed from the

golden threads in the white fabric of his kilt.

"So," he said in a deep melodic voice, "I didn't frighten you away after all.

Perhaps I'll have to try harder next time."

Then, smiling, the bronzed god kicked Ryan in the side of the head, kicked him

down into a dark, spiraling hole.

Nightmare Passage

#40 in the Deathlands series

James Axler

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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_40_-_Nightmare_Passage

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 January 1998

ISBN 0-373-62540-5

NIGHTMARE PASSAGE

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 ail 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.

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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_40_-_Nightmare_Passage

My mouth is split open by the god of the air

With that metal spear he used to split open the mouth of the gods.

I am the Powerful One. I shall sit beside her

Who is in the great breath of the sky!

—The Egyptian Book of the Dead (Spell 23)

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.

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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_40_-_Nightmare_Passage

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

The horizon had been a dreary, saffron-tinted waste for as long as he could

remember. Suddenly, a dark speck crawled across the vast sea of sand.

All around was a panorama of desolation—noth-ing but sand stretching to the

skyline in every di-rection, barely relieved by the gray dome rearing out of the

wasteland in the near distance.

The god blinked. The crawling speck was a ve-hicle; that much was certain. He

expanded his awareness, his mind sprouting probing, identifying tentacles. The

vehicle was a Jeep Cherokee. It was more than a hundred years old, the engine

reconfi-gured to run on methane, and the rusted bodywork was painted in a striped

camouflage pattern. Its four-wheel drive carried it easily across the undulating

yellow sands that rose and fell in dunes. There were precisely three men and one

woman aboard.

The distant, laboring rumble of the engine rolled over the desert, and the vehicle

sank from sight be-hind the waves of sand. At that moment, a cloud passed over

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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_40_-_Nightmare_Passage

the face of the sun.

The god smiled. Slowly, he climbed down from the high sand hill upon which he

had been meditat-ing for the past three days. When he reached its base, he

absently adjusted the heavy collar of beaten gold encircling his neck. It was a

pointless and human thing to do. One of his first actions upon awak-ening and

leaving his tomb six months before had been to interface with the molecular

structure of any article on his body so it responded instantly to con-scious thought.

Holding his metauh across his left breast, the god strolled across the sandy,

windswept plain in the di-rection of his tomb. He had waited for six months for

his worshipers to arrive, and there was no hurry now, even though they would

reach his tomb a few minutes before he would. They, however, wouldn't be able

to open the portal.

By the time he reached the perimeter of his tomb, the vehicle was parked in front

of the reinforced-stone-and-steel dome. The four people were totally engrossed in

trying to figure out the workings of the massive, vanadium-alloy sec door. The

god paused and looked at them. In less than a millisecond, he assimilated all that

he needed from their minds.

He was pleased that English was still the primary language, though now peppered

with new colloqui-alisms, vernacular and vulgarisms.

The four people were part of a larger group, a loosely knit conglomeration of

wanderers, scaven-gers and self-styled salvage experts calling them-selves Farers.

They had come from a settlement of sorts only a day's journey away, crossing the

waste-land they called the Barrens.

The god wasn't surprised by the vast changes from the world he had been born

into. Even before his long sleep, the American continent was already molding

itself into Deathlands.

He narrowed the focus of his probe to the indi-viduals.

There was Danielson, the leader of this little band of survivors. He was black

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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_40_-_Nightmare_Passage"Comeanddie."Ryaninvited,beckoningtotheIncarnateJ.B.'sUzisuddenlystoppedchattering,andMildredshoutedoutwordless\lyinangerandfear.Ryanspunonhisheelinthedirectionofthechariot,t\henhewasflatonhisfaceontheground.Hisarmsandlegswerecoveredwithhalf-frozenmud,...

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