Axler, James - Deathlands 27 - Ground Zero

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/* /*]] */ Axler, James - Deathlands 27 - Ground Zero The air was filled with a deafening roar .

The fight had suddenly taken the back burner to the force of nature that was bearing down on them.

Scything along the wide avenue, keeping to its center, was a tornado. "Get under cover!" Ryan roared.

But the heart of the storm was nearly on top of them, less than a hundred yards and closing like a runaway

wag. Ryan could do nothing for the othershe had less than a half-dozen heartbeats to save himself.

He sprinted for the half-open door of a nearby three-story building, bolstering his blaster on the run,

shouldering through the door and crashing inside. His feet were running on nothing, and he had only a

nanosecond to realize that someone had taken out the entire first floor for firewood, and that he was

falling into the basement.

He slid inaudibly into deep mud, the consistency of molasses, cold and smelly. Even as he began to sink

helplessly into the clinging ooze, Ryan heard the pounding thunder of the tornado, raging right on top of

him.

Then came darkness and silence.

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."

***

You can argue about a lot of things, but there's not much dispute about who is the finest character actor

ever. It's Harry Dean Stanton. This book is dedicated to him as a small thanks for the countless fine films

that he has decorated with his presence. And if you see him, tell him that from me.

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***

First edition July 1995

ISBN 0-373-62527-

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.

***

The White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the parks and fountains of the most beautiful city of the United

States. It fills me with hope and pride to know that whatever might happen to this dusty old planet of

ours, these things will never, ever vanish from Washington.

From "A Thousand Ages in Thy SightAn Informed Comment on the Permanence of the U.S A," by

Angus Beauregard Wells, pub Cresta Press of Ontario, January 13, 2001 (Seven days before skydark and

the end of Washington, D.Cand the U.S.A.)

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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.

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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."

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"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

frozencryogenics, ironically her own particular specialty.

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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?"

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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?"

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"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.

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"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."

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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 filtered 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."

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