Axler, James - Deathlands 49 - Shadow World

VIP免费

2024-12-07 0 0 571.44KB 279 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

"Don't break, don't break, don't break!"

J.B. muttered the litany as the friends raced through an obstacle course of boiling

springs and over ground he knew had to be undermined. They ran on a crust of

earth that could give way under their combined weight, plunging them to a terrible

death by scalding.

They reached and rounded the muddy shore of an infernal lake, and when J.B.

looked up, a black shadow passed across the stars, cutting off all hope of their

retreat. The Armorer slowed, then stopped. He stood slope-shouldered, his blasters

hanging useless in his hands. The companions closed ranks around him, facing the

oncoming assault gyro. Rumbling cauldrons to the rear spit drops of boiling mud

on their unprotected backs.

It was the least of their worries.

Silhouetted against the blue-white moon, the aircraft slowly turned its weapons

pod toward them.

Shadow World

JAMES AXLER

A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...(12/55)/049%20-%20Shadow%20World%201.0.html (1 of 279) [12/24/2004 11:30:51 PM]

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 March

ISBN 0-373-62559-

SHADOW WORLD

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 MSB 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.

…my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...(12/55)/049%20-%20Shadow%20World%201.0.html (2 of 279) [12/24/2004 11:30:51 PM]

queerer than we can suppose… I suspect that there are more things in heaven

and earth than are dreamed of…

—John Burdon Sanderson Haldane Possible Worlds,

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 skills to a nightmare.

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...(12/55)/049%20-%20Shadow%20World%201.0.html (3 of 279) [12/24/2004 11:30:51 PM]

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…

Chapter One

Beside the deeply rutted dirt track leading to the ville of Moonboy, wedged

between a pair of boulders, a warning sign shimmered in the blistering midday

heat. Crudely chiseled into the rectangle of rusted car door were two words: NO

MEWTEES.

Behind the sign, the good people of Moonboy had left a universal symbol for

those travelers who couldn't read. From a gallows made of an old basketball

stanchion and backboard hung a naked corpse. Sun-dried, and as hard and brown

as jerky, it had a huge head and a misshapen body, its finger bones twice as long

as its arms.

Like many of the other small outposts of human survival in Deathlands, the ville

had sprung up from rains more than a century old. On January 20, 2001, a

Kamchatka-launched ICBM, part of an all-out, U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange, had

vaporized nearby Salt Lake City. The three-warhead airburst had left behind a

radioactive, thermoglass rubble field that covered more than fifty square miles. As

in the case of other earthly disasters—tornadoes, hurricanes, forest

fires—Armageddon had turned out to be a capricious bitch. Up Highway 15 from

ground zero, snuggled in a gap in the promontory ridge of rock, a Salt Lake City

bedroom community had taken a less than annihilating hit. What was now the

main drag of Moonboy ville had once been a suburban street in the upscale

residential development; it was one of the few blocks left standing in the

administrative region formerly known as Morgan County, Utah.

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...(12/55)/049%20-%20Shadow%20World%201.0.html (4 of 279) [12/24/2004 11:30:51 PM]

Facing rows of stucco-sided, three-story homes, their windows blown out in the

same horrific shock blast, were the underpinnings and center point of the ville.

Scabrous add-ons and rickety lean-tos used the outside walls of the original

buildings as their main structural support. Rusting sheets of corrugated metal

formed a jumble of makeshift shanty roofs. Their orange stains streaked the

predark stucco, iron oxide bleeding from thousands of less than mortal wounds.

Intermittent acid rains had long since turned the asphalt pavement between the

rows of houses to coarse black sand, and had cratered and dissolved most of the

broad, curving driveways and concrete sidewalks.

On this cloudless summer day, Moonboy's unemployed residents and visitors

sought out the shade of the metal-roofed, ramshackle porches that lined either side

of the main street. Steel not only defended them from the brutal sun, but from

flesh-etching, sulfuric acid downpours. About two dozen women and men, none

particularly clean, most gap-toothed and weathered, sat chewing the fat and

sipping air-temperature green beer from recycled, plastic antifreeze jugs. A few

lay curled up in the shadows on the hard-tamped dirt, snoozing off the remnants of

their market day drunk.

By the standards of Deathlands, where wealth and status were measured in

armament, Moonboy was a shitpoor place. Along the main street, there were no

weapons that would accept high-power, center-fire brass cartridges. The only

firearms of modern design were a handful of single-shot, top-break, exposed-

hammer 12-gauges, and every one had a rust-brown barrel, a broken or missing

stock and a crudely tied, rope shoulder sling. The rest of the population carried

long, razor-honed, chilling knives and cheap, scarred, black-powder

revolvers—late-twentieth-century, mass-produced copies of Civil War-era side

arms.

There were no cops in Moonboy. Official law enforcement was unnecessary with

so many weapons on display. Justice, or what passed for it, was within easy reach

of every hand. And God help the rad-blasted mutie who stumbled within range of

blade or pistol ball.

Piercing screams erupted from the top floor of the gaudy house in the middle of

the block. It was impossible to tell whether the screamer was male or female, or if

the cries were of pain or pleasure. The porch squatters ignored the shrill racket.

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...(12/55)/049%20-%20Shadow%20World%201.0.html (5 of 279) [12/24/2004 11:30:51 PM]

Moonboy's pure norm sluts were well compensated for their time and trouble.

After a few minutes, the shrieking stopped and the echoes faded.

None of the drowsy, streetside spectators expected anything interesting to happen

until nightfall. The withering heat made a knife fight to the death highly unlikely.

The potential combatants were all either too flagged or too hung over to get into a

serious beef with anyone.

Then the air in the middle of the street began to shimmer.

It wasn't just heat waves coming off the ruined asphalt.

At head height, dust motes glittered and whirled, quickly turning into a man-sized

tornado. The Moonboy folk blinked in amazement, then hurriedly kicked awake

their dozing friends. This was no ordinary dust devil. It sparkled as if it held

millions of tiny fragments of mirror in its spinning funnel; with each passing

second the glittering bits grew more and more distinct.

And brighter.

So bright, in fact, that the residents had to either squint or shield their eyes from

the hard glare.

A powerful wind accompanied this apparition. It set road dust flying and scraggly

beards flapping. There was a deep bass rumble below the wind's howl, the

building growl of some impossibly huge engine.

An earsplitting thunder crack rattled the corrugated steel roofs over the spectators'

heads. The shock wave vibrated up through the soles of their feet, through their

legs, to their very bowels. In a flash, the tornado flew apart, and before their eyes,

at the epicenter of the ville, the seams of reality split and peeled back.

A tall, humanoid figure in black stepped out of nothing and nowhere, out of the

ragged slash in space, birthed full-grown into the middle of the road, accompanied

by a nauseating, superconcentrated, petrochemical stench. The figure wore a suit

of head-to-foot black armor, and the armor gleamed as if it had been dipped in

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...(12/55)/049%20-%20Shadow%20World%201.0.html (6 of 279) [12/24/2004 11:30:51 PM]

machine oil. Like the carapace of some gigantic, rad-mutated insect, the suit was

segmented over arms and legs, overlapping, contoured plates protecting the torso.

The boots, shin guards and helmet were of the same material. An impenetrable,

smoke-colored, wraparound visor concealed the face.

All eyes locked onto the blue-black blaster the creature gripped in its gauntleted

hands. The weapon was of stubby, bullpup design. A styrene stock held three

heavy barrels joined in a triangular configuration, and a single, claw-toothed flash-

hider crowned all three muzzles. A massively thick, curving magazine extended

below the stock just in front of the rifle's buttplate. No one on the street had ever

seen or even heard tell of anything quite like it. Though they didn't know what

mayhem the wicked-looking piece was capable of, in their hearts every man and

woman lusted after it. Whether traded for jack or jolt, or kept as a personal side

arm, such a weapon could make life in the hellscape known as Deathlands a whole

lot easier to bear.

Before any of the folk could move to appropriate the blaster, there was another

boom of thunder and a flash. A second, identical figure stepped from nowhere into

the middle of the road. It, too, carried a magical blaster. It, too, was followed by a

gust of foul wind.

The appearance of another armed, apparently mutated stranger galvanized

Moonboy's idlers, whose rule of thumb was always to kill first and ask questions

later. A hodgepodge of handblasters cleared belts and hip leather on both sides of

the street. The intruders stood stock-still, at a range of less than twenty yards.

There was a rattle of gritty clacks as single-action hammer spurs locked back.

"Yee-hah!" someone shouted in glee. "We got ourselves a fuckin' mutie shoot!"

The self-appointed firing squads took positions on both sides of the street. Aiming

two-handed, the shooters thoughtfully angled themselves to keep from hitting

their opposite numbers with near-misses or ricochets.

The figures in black armor responded by shifting position as well, standing back

to back in the center of the road, each staring down a line of blaster muzzles.

Oddly enough, the all-over armor plate they wore didn't seem to inhibit their

movement. The material bent and flexed with them. The strangers held their own

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...(12/55)/049%20-%20Shadow%20World%201.0.html (7 of 279) [12/24/2004 11:30:51 PM]

weapons at the ready, but unarmed. As if either ignorant or disdainful of the

mortal danger they faced, the pair calmly waited for the ville's welcoming

committee to make the first move.

They didn't have to wait long.

No formal signal to fire brought on the withering barrage. When the first shot

suddenly barked out, the rest of the blasters followed in short, ragged order.

Volleys of pistol balls and buckshot rained on the standing figures. As the massed

handblasters boomed and flashed, dense clouds of thick, white gunsmoke rolled

from both sidewalks, fogging the street and partially obscuring the targets.

A STROKE OF DUMB LUCK had landed Grub Hinton in the upper floor of

Moonboy's gaudy house that same morning.

A scrounger by trade, Grub eked out his solitary living beneath the thick glaze of

nuke-melted sand on the outer edge of Salt Lake City's crater. He pickaxed holes

through the layers of thermoglass, then crawled in headfirst, searching the narrow,

jagged air pockets for anything of value. Prospecting the wasteland was largely

unrewarding work, as most of the wealth of the city that hadn't been vaporized had

been turned into unrecognizable and immovable globs of slag. The work was also

extremely dangerous, and not just because of the lingering high levels of

radioactivity. Chances were, long before the first weeping, rad-cancer lesions

appeared on Grub's cheeks and hands, some other scrounger would have

bushwhacked him for his meager bag of booty, or for exclusive mining rights to

some especially promising hole. On the upside, he always had more than enough

to eat, even if it was just rat-on-a-stick.

Grub Hinton's jackpot find, a 1958 Buick hubcap slightly scorched on the edges,

lay propped against the filthy, bug-splattered wall of the gaudy crib. He had traded

this singular treasure for a rare, all-night, green beer drunk, and an even rarer, full

three hours in the saddle.

As Grub's morning of bliss wore on and on, the gaudy slut in question had cause

to rue the deal she'd struck with him. Even her most enthusiastic faked screams of

passion had failed to make the little man finish his mechanical rutting and scar-

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...(12/55)/049%20-%20Shadow%20World%201.0.html (8 of 279) [12/24/2004 11:30:51 PM]

fisted pawing of her body. The sudden thunderclap from the street that rattled the

building's walls and floor, and whooshed inward the shredded clear plastic

sheeting that passed for window curtains, accomplished what her ham acting

couldn't.

"Stun gren!" Grab barked as he rolled off the woman's doughy stomach and

pushed up from the straw-stuffed pallet on the floor.

Still staggering drunk and naked, a sickly pale, two-legged, potbellied pig, hairless

but for the fringe of reddish fur on his behind, Grab lurched for the frame of the

third-story window. As he reached it, there was a second, floor-shaking boom, the

tattered plastic curtains fluttering in his face.

He pushed aside the strips of plastic and forced his eyes to focus on the scene

directly below. Like a dip in an ice-cold mountain stream, what he saw

momentarily sobered him. Grub Hinton had come nose to nose with plenty of

nasty, rad-mutated creepy crawlies while rooting in the dark under the dirty glass

skin of Slakecity, but nothing like this…

At first glance, the three figures in the middle of the street looked like giant black

cockroaches, straight out of a jolt-binge, melt-brain nightmare. But on closer

inspection, he saw they had two arms and two legs, like men. And like men, they

carried stubby-barreled blasters.

If Deathlands had taught Grub anything in his twenty-three years, it was to expect

the unexpected; if you could jolt-dream a living terror, odds were it existed there,

someplace. Generations after the nuke-caust of 2001, monsters that should never

have been born were born—and once born, bred in awesome profusion. Norms

like Hinton, lucky enough to have no obvious outward abnormalities, rationalized

the hunting down and indiscriminate slaughter of their less fortunate brethren

because some of the mutated human subspecies—known variously as stickies,

cannies, scabbies, scalies—had devolved into crazed, senseless killers. As a

general rule, mutie bastards didn't pack blasters; they preferred to do their

murdering with fang and claw, with club or suckerfist.

From his position at the window, Grub could see the norm folk lined up on the

opposite side of the street. A grin spread over his face. The intruders were about to

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...(12/55)/049%20-%20Shadow%20World%201.0.html (9 of 279) [12/24/2004 11:30:51 PM]

be executed, Moonboy style, and Grub had himself a front-row balcony seat.

"Come over here," he told the woman on the pallet, waving his arm for her to

hurry. ' 'This is going to be some kind of show."

The gaudy slut stepped up to the window without bothering to conceal her

nakedness. But she did cover her ears when, in a deafening thirty-second fusillade,

every norm weapon along the street emptied.

As the haze of burned black powder lifted, Grub saw Moonboy's antimutie posse

scrambling to rack fresh, preloaded spare cylinders into their revolvers.

Amazingly, the intruders still stood, their armor unmarked.

"I could have hit 'em with a rock from way up here!" Grub snorted. "How did all

those triple stupes miss?"

Then, with cold deliberation, the newcomers shouldered their own weapons. As

the homeboys and girls tried to scatter from the porches, the roachmen opened

fire. And it was clear at once that the assault rifles they carried were as rad-blasted

queer as they were.

Instead of the crack of single gunshots or the canvas-ripping clatter of high-rate

autofire, the weapons gave off painfully shrill, whistling sounds. From out of their

flash-hiders shot single, narrow beams of emerald-green light so intense that they

could be seen in the midday sun. Everywhere the pencil-thin beams touched, they

cut. And the slicing effect was instantaneous. The sprinting residents and

spectators of Moonboy dropped, screaming as they were bisected, along with

sundry chair backs, stucco walls, rain barrels and porch posts. The row of rickety

roofs collapsed. Out from under the rising cloud of dust, human heads, cleanly

severed at the neck, rolled downhill like runaway melons, bounding off the curb

and into the gutter.

The battle, if you could call it that, was over in a few heartbeats.

Frozen in place, Grub and his female companion stared slack-jawed at the

ruination below.

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%2...12/55)/049%20-%20Shadow%20World%201.0.html (10 of 279) [12/24/2004 11:30:51 PM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

D2"Don'tbreak,don'tbreak,don'tbreak!"J.B.mutteredthelitanyasthefriendsracedthroughanobstaclecourse\ofboilingspringsandovergroundheknewhadtobeundermined.Theyranonacrus\tofearththatcouldgivewayundertheircombinedweight,plungingthemto\aterribledeathbyscalding.Theyreachedandroundedthemuddyshoreofaninfern...

展开>> 收起<<

Axler, James - Deathlands 49 - Shadow World.pdf

共279页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Axler, James - Deathlands 49 - Shadow World

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: