James Axler - Deathlands 029 - Bloodlines

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Deathlands 29 - Bloodlines
/* /*]] */ Axler, James - Death Lands 29 - Bloodlines (v1.0) (html) There was a throbbing pain behind his
temples
For a few beats of the heart, Ryan slipped out of consciousness into the dark. Then he was sitting up,
supported by someone's arm around his shoulders, still feeling sick, aware that he had another pain, a
burning sensation in his good right eye.
"I think that he's back with us. Ryan, my dear fellow, can you hear me?"
Ryan's tongue felt as if it had been hand-knitted, five sizes too large for his mouth. "Hear you, Doc."
"You feel all right, lover?" Krysty asked. "Fine."
But he knew that he wasn't fine. He was way short of fine.
To remove the blackness, Ryan had opened his good right eye. He knew that he had opened it.
But the blackness was still there.
Bloodlines
29 in the Deathlands series
James Axler
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Deathlands 29 - Bloodlines
Chapter One
The shouting had already faded into silence.
Ryan Cawdor and J. B. Dix, oldest and best of friends, hunkered in their limited shelter, their blasters
cocked and ready for the inevitable attack from the natives.
By squinting around the corner of the control console, Ryan could see the first glow of dawn through the
open doorway and the shifting wall of bright emerald green of the eternal forest.
"Won't be long," he said grimly.
The one-eyed man heard a faint clicking sound, like hot metal cooling, and glanced back at the pallid
green armaglass walls of the gateway chamber. The matter-transfer unit could pluck you from here and
send you instantaneously to there. Unfortunately everyone who'd understood the workings of the
gateways had died in the worldwide nuclear holocaust of 2001, nearly a century earlier, taking with them
the details and secrets of matter transfer.
So, when the chamber door was closed, triggering the "jump" mechanism, you had no way of knowing
where "there" might be. It might be anywhere. The most recent jump had left the companions stranded
somewhere in Central or South America, in the deeps of a dangerous tropical forest.
After a desperate and lethal adventure, Ryan and his friends had just reached the gateway unit, in a small
predark military redoubt, moments ahead of the vengeful villagers.
Ryan's combat reflexes had told him that there was no choice. If they'd all tried to make the mat-trans
jump together, they would have been dead meat, trapped in the hexagonal chamber, helpless as a hog on
ice.
He'd ordered the others into the unit, while he and J.B., the armorer of the group, stayed behind to secure
their safe retreat.
Now it was silent outside.
He wondered where the others had jumped and if they'd made the transfer safely. His thoughts dwelled
particularly on his eleven-year-old son, Dean, who was tall for his age, strongly built, with the same curly
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Deathlands 29 - Bloodlines
black hair as his father, with dark brown eyes. Ryan hadn't even known of Dean's existence until a year or
so earlier, long after the bleak death of the boy's mother, Sharona.
The other four who'd made the jump were all the closest of friends, though none quite as close as Krysty
Wroth.
Easing toward her late twenties, Krysty was five feet eleven in her bare feet, weighing in at 150 pounds.
Her eyes were like liquid emeralds, her hair a cascade of living fire. She had come from a ville called
Harmony, where she had been taught mystic skills by her mother, Sonya, which included the force of
Gaia that would give her unimaginable strength, but at a terrible toll on her health.
She and Ryan had been lovers since they'd begun traveling together through the blighted society that was
Deathlands. Both of them hoped that the day would eventually come when they might be able to settle
down someplace good and safe.
They hadn't found it yet.
The other woman in the group of companions was Dr. Mildred Winonia Wyeth. Five feet four inches tall
and a stocky, powerful 136 pounds, Mildred was a black woman in her middle thirties, with beaded,
plaited hair.
She had been born on the seventeenth day of December in 1964.
Less than a year later her Baptist minister father had been slaughtered in a firebombing of his church by a
group of anonymous redneck butchers, concealed behind their white sheets and pillowcases.
Mildred had gone on to become a leading expert in the medical science of cryonics and cryogenics.
Ironically, eleven days after her thirty-sixth birthday, Mildred had gone into the hospital in her home
town of Lincoln, Nebraska, for minor abdominal surgery, which went terribly wrong.
And they had frozen her.
Only a few days later came skydark, the time when the heavens were filled with the shark shadows of
nuclear missiles and over ninety-nine percent of the world died.
But the hospital that held her in a dreamless state of frozen suspended animation had its own peaceful
nuclear generator, computer controlled, and it had kept Mildred alive until Ryan and his friends came
along like latter-day princes and plucked her from the long sleep.
Now she was the partner of John Barrymore Dix, weapons expert and longtime comrade of Ryan Cawdor.
To survive for long in Deathlands it helped to have special skills.
Mildred had been the chairperson of her local pistol club and had represented her country in the free-
shooting event in the Olympic Games, where she'd won the silver medal.
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Deathlands 29 - Bloodlines
Now she carried a Czech-built target revolver. The ZKR 551 was a six-shot blaster designed by the
Koucky brothers and manufactured at the Zbrojovka works in Brno. It was a beautiful weapon, with a
solid-frame side-rod ejector and a short-fall thumb-cocking hammer, chambered to take a conventional
Smith amp; Wesson .38-caliber round.
With it Mildred Wyeth could put a bullet up a gnat's asshole at fifty feet.
There were two men in the group that had made the jump from the forest.
One was a teenager, Jak Lauren, an albino with a shock of snow-white hair and eyes like smoldering
rubies. Jak had become a friend of Ryan and the others a little later than Krysty, after a murderous
adventure down in the bayous. He was sixteen years old, standing a bare five feet five, weighing in
around 120 pounds. Jak was a brilliant athlete and acrobat, better at hand-to-hand combat than anyone
Ryan and J.B. had ever seen. Though he carried a satin-finish Colt Python with a six-inch barrel, his
weapon of choice was the throwing knife.
He carried a number of the leaf-bladed knives, with taped, balanced hilts, concealed about his person, and
used them with a deathly accuracy.
Jak had been married for over a year, down on a spread in New Mexico. It had been a serene and happy
time, but the long darkness had come grinning to take both his wife, Christina, and his little baby, Jenny.
So now he rode again with Ryan and the others.
A single long hunting arrow hissed into the control room, its barbed point digging a chunk out of the
plastered wall, falling to the floor a yard from Ryan.
"Keeping us reminded that they're still out there," he said quietly.
"Good of them," J.B. stated, busily polishing his glasses on the sleeve of his jacket. His Uzi and the Smith
amp; Wesson M-4000 scattergun lay at his side, ready for instant use.
Ryan glanced behind him again, thinking of the last of the vanished companions.
Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was a Doctor of Science at Harvard and a Doctor of Philosophy at
Oxford University. He'd been born in South Strafford, Vermont, on the fourteenth day of February in the
year of Our Lord, 1868.
By some calculations, Doc Tanner was around 230 years old. He certainly looked like an old man, with a
mane of silvery hair and a gnarled face. And his speech and most of his attire were undeniably Victorian a
frock coat that was slowly acquiring a patina of green over the glossy black material; knee breeches;
cracked leather boots; and a gun that was originally popular during the War between the States, a
beautiful, gold-engraved commemorative "Jeb" Stuart limited edition of the huge Le Mat handgun.
Like Jak, Doc had once been married, and there had been great happiness for Doc and his young bride,
happiness compounded by the arrival of two adorable children, Rachel and Jolyon.
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Deathlands 29 - Bloodlines
But life was holding snake eyes for Doc Tanner.
In the late 1990s the whitecoat scientists had been working under conditions of great secrecy on
Operation Chronos, which was a part of the Totality Concept.
Time travel.
Their successes were infinitely small, and their hideous disasters enough to keep a special crematorium
burning through the day and night.
However, they got Doc Tanner, plucking him from a crisp fall morning in November of 1896.
They brought him forward to a secret laboratory in Virginia in 1998. But the time jump had seriously and
permanently affected Doc's mind, and he refused to do anything to cooperate, declaring his intention to do
anything that he could to sabotage the evil whitecoats and their foul experimentation. He also made
several determined efforts to reverse the "trawling" procedure and travel back once more to Victorian
times, to rejoin his lost wife and his dear little children.
Eventually tiring of the recalcitrant old man, the leaders of Operation Chronos decided that Doc Tanner
was more trouble than he was worth. In December of 2000, days before skydark and the beginnings of the
long winters, they cut their losses and pushed him into the future.
Into Deathlands.
And there he had eventually met up with Ryan Cawdor and his companions.
Ryan sat cradling his Steyr rifle, wondering when the natives would gather their courage and rush the
place.
He was crouched behind a computer control console with a polished black plastic surface, and his
reflection glowered back at him, showing him to be a powerfully built man with thick, curly black hair.
A dark patch covered his left eye, the right gleaming with a vivid, cold blue. A scar ran from its corner
down to his mouth, both injuries dating from his childhood.
The reflection revealed that he wore a long coat, trimmed with white fur, and a white silk scarf was
tucked around his neck.
As well as the powerful rifle, Ryan carried a trusty SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster, a 9 mm automatic with a
built-in baffle silencer that had seen better days. Balancing it on the opposite hip was a long panga with a
honed eighteen-inch blade that ended in a needle point.
"You come up with part two of the plan, Ryan?" J.B. asked.
"Part two?"
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Deathlands 29 - Bloodlines
"Part one was getting the others to make a safe jump so we didn't all get butchered in the gateway. I didn't
quite catch you telling me about part two, which is where you and me also get to jump safely."
Ryan grinned. "Fair question. Guess I never got much beyond part one."
There was a sudden burst of yelling from outside the open sec door, guttural words in an alien language
that neither Ryan nor J.B. had heard before they arrived in the emerald jungle.
Ryan risked a quick glance over the top of the console, but there was nothing to be seen. "Best I can come
up with is that you cover me and I run for the door, throw the handle and hope that the bastard thing drops
quick enough to keep them out. How's that sound to you for part two?"
"Like shit, Ryan." J.B. adjusted his dusty, stained fedora. "Then again, I don't have anything better. Real
chance they'll pick you off from outside."
Ryan nodded. "Yeah."
He narrowed his good eye, sniffing. "You smell anything? It smells like"
"Gasoline," J.B. concluded. "Looks like part two just got obsolete."
Chapter Two
"Doing to us what we did to those bastard ants! They're hoping to drive us out."
Life was measured in seconds.
There was no point now in trying to close the exterior sec door. The gas could be ignited in a heartbeat.
"Have to jump," Ryan said. "Now."
Keeping low, almost on hands and knees, the men splashed through the gasoline that had gushed into the
area, reaching the closed door of the gateway chamber.
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Deathlands 29 - Bloodlines
"Use the LD button," J.B. said.
"I know," Ryan replied irritably.
The one thing they'd been able to learn about mat-trans units was that their control panels contained small
black buttons marked with the trim white letters L and D , which stood for last destination .
It worked two ways. If you'd made a bad jump, you could press the LD control and you would be back
where you were before. Or, in this case, if you used the button within thirty minutes of a previous jump,
then you would go to the same place.
That was the theory.
If Ryan and J.B. could make it safely and trigger the jump mechanism, then they should arrive at the same
destination as the others.
The Trader always used to say that when it was time to move, the breadth of a human hair could make the
difference between living and dying.
Ryan looked behind him. The rifle was across his shoulder and the handblaster in his fist. Their
movement hadn't been followed by a shower of arrows or spears, as he'd feared, which meant the natives
out in the dense, sweating greenery were about to light the fire.
He reached up and threw open the door, gesturing for J.B. to roll into the chamber.
Now the natives saw that they were in danger of losing their prey.
There was a scream of rage, and an arrow struck the watery green armaglass only inches from Ryan's
shoulder, bouncing off and landing with a splash in the gasoline.
The control panel was set at chest height in the frame of the door, and Ryan lunged for it, left-handed,
aiming for the LD button, hitting it.
Simultaneously, almost in slow motion, a burning branch was thrown into the gateway from outside,
whirling in the air above the chattering consoles, the oxygen making the flames roar brightly.
It seemed to take forever for the fire to ignite the lake of gasoline.
Ryan grabbed the edge of the door and started to pull its great counterbalanced weight shut to trigger the
mat-trans mechanism, his eye watching the torch.
The jagged branch landed, a ripple of blue fire running from it across the surface of the gasoline, turning
it into a sea of fire.
"Dark night!" J.B. gasped, on hands and knees behind Ryan, holding the Uzi, ready to open up if the
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Deathlands 29 - Bloodlines
berserk natives came after them.
Ryan recoiled from the flaring heat that seared up at him, the hot yellow flames cut off by the closing
armaglass door. The lock clicked shut and the mat-trans mechanism was activated.
The walls of the hexagonal chamber were immensely thick and powerful, but there was no way of locking
or bolting the chamber to make it secure against an external attack. No doubt its original manufacturers, a
century earlier, had never envisaged a time that it might be needed.
"Fire might keep them away," Ryan said, sitting quickly on the floor, avoiding the metal disks, leaning his
back against the cool armaglass. He noticed in passing how all the smooth walls were smeared with
patches of lichen and moss, laid there in the extreme humidity of the jungle since they'd first arrived a few
days earlier.
The fire was visible beyond the armaglass, the smell of smoke filtering through. But there was no sign of
any of the natives daring the heat to try to get to them.
J.B. sat opposite Ryan, the scattergun across his lap. He snatched a moment to take off the fedora and
place his spectacles safely in one of his pockets.
The air at the top of the chamber was already filling with tendrils of whirling gray-white mist, and the
disks in floor and ceiling were glowing brightly.
Ryan could feel the familiar nauseous feeling of his brain being swirled around inside his skull, as though
the bony walls were expanding and the pinkish tissue was shrinking, smaller and smaller toward infinity.
"Here we go," he said, his voice thick, echoing inside his own head.
The darkness was birthing, spreading out from the depths of his own mind, swallowing all of his senses.
Hearing went first, followed by speech.
At the last moment of sentience, Ryan thought he saw a dark group of figures, silhouetted against the
bright fire, struggling to open the door of the chamber.
"Too"he muttered.
IT WAS A BAD JUMP. There were times when the transfer from here to there was made with nothing
worse than a sick headache and, occasionally a nosebleed, but with no sensation that every molecule and
atom of your body had been dissolved and projected through space and reassembled at some distant point.
Other times, the jump fucked your head.
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Deathlands 29 - Bloodlines
J.B. FOUND HIMSELF walking along a beach. The stones beneath his combat boots were of differing
sizes, from duck egg to basketball. A thick mist drifted in from the gray sea to his right, which lapped at
the edge of the beach with small, monotonous rollers, sucking at the shingle, rising and falling, advancing
and withdrawing.
To his left he could just make out vast cliffs of smooth, polished granite, rising vertically, their tops out of
sight in the lowering clouds.
The beach stretched ahead of him for about two hundred yards until it merged with the grayness. Behind
him, the dreary vista was exactly the same.
Despite the chill, the Armorer was dressed only in a thin shirt and a torn pair of camouflage cotton pants.
The air was bitterly cold and damp, and he shivered as he walked along. The sky was completely
overcast, and he had no clue which direction he was taking.
The stretch of beach was completely deserted, with no seabirds wheeling above his head, no sign of life
out to sea and not even the smallest crab clicking among the stones.
J.B. became aware that it was beginning to drizzle.
Suddenly, and seamlessly, he was inside the ruins of some vast building, filled with huge rusting pieces of
machinery so archaic and corroded that it was impossible to tell what they might once have been.
Water dripped from the rotting ends of the roof timbers, splashing sonorously into great, dark weed-
fronded pools that almost covered the stone floor.
And he was not alone.
Every time that J.B. took a few steps forward he caught the sound of someoneor somethingfollowing him.
But when he stopped there was silence. And when he spun there was nothing to be seen.
The way forward led him deeper into the maw of the ancient building. His glasses were covered in
condensation, but when J.B. tried to wipe them clean he found that it formed a sticky film, like spilled
honey.
A strange, bitter smell hung in the cold air, like blood poured over molten iron.
The passage ahead of J.B. became more narrow, the ceiling dropping lower.
A rusted iron door with a massive handle blocked the passage. J.B. hesitated, glancing behind him. Above
the slapping noise of the waves outside the building, he could hear steps moving closer, stumbling and
unsteady, sounding like a recently revived corpse. A pale sun broke through holes in the roof and walls of
the passage, penetrating in spears of jagged light.
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Deathlands 29 - Bloodlines
Unarmed, J.B. had to go on.
The handle wouldn't move, though he thrust at it with all of his strength. The red-orange corrosion was
sharp and jagged, and blood began to flow from his palms, dripping from the ends of his fingers onto the
concrete floor.
The steps were closer, so close that the Armorer no longer dared to turn to face what was pursuing him, in
case the sight of it drove him staring mad.
At last the handle moved, creaking open.
J.B. darted through the narrow gap and pulled the door shut behind him, slamming home a pair of well-
oiled bolts. He glanced around to make sure he was safe and found himself in a box of stone, six feet
high, five feet lengthwise and four feet across. Solid concrete with no window, yet there was an odd
filtered, phosphorescent light inside the chamber that enabled him to see a polished steel grille set in the
center of the floor.
The room was filled with the scent of the ocean.
Water began to rise through the grille, slowly and silently, icy cold. It had a thick consistency, more like
molasses than water, and was flooding inexorably into the small cube of stone.
Whatever the horror waiting outside, it couldn't be worse than a hideous and lonely death by drowning.
J.B. tried to open the bolts on the door, but they were utterly immovable.
The liquid had reached above his knees.
He reached down, locking his fingers in the bars of the grille, using all his strength to try to pry it open.
He realized he'd have a glimmer of a chance if he could force himself down into the oily water and swim
out against the advancing tide.
But the grille didn't move.
J.B. straightened, panting for breath, fighting against crippling panic.
The liquid was above his waist.
He stood as tall as he could, rising on the tips of his toes, pressing his head into the angle between ceiling
and wall.
Rising higher, the water was to his shoulders, then brushing his chin.
J.B., hanging stubbornly on to the last shreds of survival, lifted his mouth and nose into the tiny pocket of
air that still remained.
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Deathlands29-Bloodlines/*/*]]*/Axler,James-DeathLands29-Bloodlines(v1.0)(html)\TherewasathrobbingpainbehindhistemplesForafewbeatsoftheheart,Ryanslippedoutofconsciousnessintothe\dark.Thenhewassittingup,supportedbysomeone'sarmaroundhisshoulders,stillfeelingsick,awa\rethathehadanotherpain,aburningsensa...

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