James Axler - Deathlands 026 - Shadowfall

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Deathlands 26 - Shadowfall

/* /*]] */ Axler, James - Deathlands 26 - Shadowfall Ryan was shocked at the wide-eyed look of horror

on Krysty's face

"What?" he whispered.

"Oh, Earth Mother! Back. Must turn back now. Feel desperate danger behind us. Turn back." She pushed

past Ryan, running clumsily past the others, nearly knocking over Abe.

Krysty grabbed at Trader's sleeve. "Stop!" she hissed. "We have to go back, Trader. I can feel it. Very,

very strong. Behind us."

"Feel what?"

The woman stared behind her, into the dark bank of fog that was all around them like an encircling wall.

"Somethings gone triple-wrong, Trader. Mebbe they know we're coming. I can't tell what it is."

Ryan started to go back toward where they'd left the ten sec men, but Trader called to him.

"Goin' somewhere, Ryan?"

"You heard her. Krysty gets a feeling as strong as this one, then you take note of it."

"She doesn't know what it is, but she feels something might've gone wrong." Trader laughed and shook

his head. "We keep goin'."

For a moment nobody moved.

Then the sound came from behind them, to the east, a terrible piercing scream of soul-tearing pain and

despair.

Shadowfall

26 in the Deathlands series

James Axler

A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

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Deathlands 26 - Shadowfall

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."

***

This book is dedicated to the memory of the enormously talented filmmaker, gardener and humanist,

Derek Jarman (1942-1994), who carried the definition of courage as being grace under pressure to quite

extraordinary frontiers. His name will not be forgotten.

***

First edition May 1995

ISBNO-373-62526-X

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.

***

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Fare thee well, no more, let us clasp our hands

And swear no tears shall mar our manly cheeks.

Now we must part, to go to distant lands,

Each of us alone, through valleys, o'er peaks. Yet in the dark, when my

last breath shall end, My final thought will be of you, my friend. From "A Wessex Boy," LJ Priv Prntd,

1742

Chapter One

Ryan Cawdor closed his eye and entered the darkness.

He had lost count of the number of times in the past couple of years that he'd gone through this

experienceentering the gateway chamber of one of the long-buried military complexes, known as

redoubts, to make a mat-trans jump. The process utilized the lost technology from the predark days,

before the ultimate nuclear holocaust that had effectively destroyed civilization around the globe.

The present jump was beginning in the heart of what had once been Acadia National Park, in the area of

the old United States that had been called Maine. None of the group of nine companions had the least idea

where the jump would take them. Knowledge of how to control the gateways had been lost in the nuke-

tainted years of the long winters. All they knew was that they would arrive in a similar gateway,

elsewhere.

The one control element that they'd stumbled upon was that gateways had an automatic thirty-minute

reset, enabling you to jump back to where you'd just been. As well, there was a setting, generally the

coded buttons L and D , that would also take you to the last destination.

Ryan's final sight, before the swirling mists closed his good right eye and his mind down, had been his

eight friends.

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Next to him, holding his hand in hers, was Krysty Wroth, the great love of his life. In her mid-twenties

she was about ten years younger than Ryan, and three inches shorter than his six feet two. The green-

eyed, red-haired Krysty had the "mutie" power of being able to "feel" when danger threatened. She was

also able, in the direst of straits, to call on the power of Gaia, the Earth Mother, taught her by her own

mother back in the ville of Harmony, where she'd spent her childhood. This power brought Krysty way

beyond the edge of total exhaustion but gave her, briefly, an almost supernatural strength.

On Ryan's other side was his eleven-year-old son, Dean. Ryan had been totally unaware of the boy's

existencethe result of a fleeting relationshipuntil a year or so earlier. Now he would have given his own

life for the lad. Dean was meeting the jump sitting with his back against the dark gray walls, clutching his

turquoise-hilted knife in his lap.

Next around the circle was Mildred Wyeth. The stocky black woman had been a doctor, specializing in

cryonics, or the medical effects of freezing. Born in 1965, Mildred had gone into a hospital in late

December of the year 2000 for minor exploratory abdominal surgery, but she had never gotten that far. A

freak reaction to the anesthetic had necessitated her comatose body being frozen. The world blew apart

less than a month later, and she rested on in dark silence, forgotten, her life-support system powered by an

undamaged nuke plant. She had finally been awakened from her long sleep by Ryan.

Other than her medical talents, Mildred also had an even more useful skill for survival in the wasteland

that had once been the United States of America.

In the last-ever Olympic Games, held in Miami in 1996, Mildred had represented her country in the free

pistol shooting, winning the silver medal. Now, with her ZKR 551 6-shot Czech revolver, chambered to

take the Smith amp; Wesson .38 round, she was probably the finest shot in Deathlands.

In the past few months Mildred had begun a relationship with the person next around the circle.

John Barrymore Dix, known as J.B. or as the Armorer, was about the same age as Ryan and had been his

closest friend for the past dozen years or so. J.B. was the greatest living authority on firearms and

weaponry in general. Despite his appearancefive feet eight inches and one-forty pounds soaking wet, with

glasseshis combat experience was almost unrivaled.

He sat next to Mildred, his sallow complexion even more pale than usual, his 9 mm Uzi and Smith amp;

Wesson M-4000 scattergun lying at his side. In his lap he held his beloved fedora hat.

Squatting next to J.B., and holding a battered Armalite, was a lean, grizzled man in his fifties. Known

throughout much of Deathlands simply as the Trader, he was the person who'd originally brought Ryan

and J.B. together, enlisting them as young bloods and training them until they became his right- and left-

hand men.

Trader had found two massively powerful war wags up in the Appalachians and used them in his trading

and traveling until he was one of the most feared men in Deathlands. Even the barons of some of the

largest villes were wary of upsetting the uncertain temper of Trader.

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The diminutive figure next to Trader, with a drooping mustache, was Abe, once the gunner on War Wag

One. When Trader had vanished, many many long months ago, it was widely accepted that he'd gone off

alone into the woods to chill himself, as he was known to be suffering from a painful and probably

terminal rad cancer.

Then the whispering started. Trader had been seen down in Yuma; had chilled a whole ville in Peoria;

was running a frontier gaudy with twenty beautiful girls, somewhere east of Taos.

It got so that Abe couldn't stand the rumors and had set off to try to track down his old leader.

Eventually he had succeeded in his quest, locating the grizzled veteran close to the ruins of old Seattle,

Washington.

Ryan had mentally ticked them all off, as the disks in floor and ceiling began to glow and the white fog

wraiths appeared in the gateway chamber Krysty, Dean, Mildred, J.B., Trader, Abe.

And Jak and Doc.

Jak Lauren looked as comfortable as if he were relaxing on a goose-feather mattress. Sixteen years old, he

was the finest acrobat that Ryan had ever known, as well as being murderously accurate with any of the

half dozen leaf-bladed throwing knives that he kept concealed about his skinny person.

He came originally from West Lowellton, near Lafayette, in the swamps. Ryan and the others had met

him when they became involved with Jak's battles against the evil Baron Tourment. The albino teenager,

with a mane of stark white hair and ruby eyes, had traveled with them for some months, until he'd met

and married Christina Ballinger. They had lived happily on a spread in New Mexico, with baby Jenny

coming along to cement their love for each other.

Then tragedy had struck, and the woman and child had been butchered. Jak had come to the very brink of

suicidal madness, but Ryan and Krysty and the others had helped him through the darkness and out once

more into the light.

Last, and certainly not least, of their party was Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner.

None of the nine could have been called "normal" by any acceptable standards, but Doc Tanner was less

normal than any of them.

The date of his birth was February 14, 1868, in a white frame house in the pretty hamlet of South

Strafford, Vermont.

On June 17, 1891, he had married Miss Emily Chandler. A daughter, Rachel, had blessed their union two

years later, followed by their ever-smiling little baby boy, Jolyon, in 1895.

Doc, whose degree was in science from Harvard, backed with a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford

University, England, had the whole world in his hands.

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But the American military scientists in the unknowable future had other ideas.

First, there was the Totality Concept, which spawned Overproject Whisper, of which Project Cerberus

dealing with gatewayswas an integral part. Another subdivision of the Totality Concept was Operation

Chronos.

The slang name for their experiments was "Trawling." It meant seeking out individuals from the past and

using a complex and unreliable variant on the mat-trans system to pluck them from their own time, to the

cold research laboratories of the late 1990s. There were many failures. The results of some of the failures

were hideous beyond human imagining. There was really only one clear-cut success in all of Operation

Chronos. Dr. Theo Tanner.

One moment he was in mid-Victorian times with his wife and children and then, a heartbeat later, he was

dragged more than a hundred years into the future.

But the whitecoat experimenters came to regret their single success.

Having Doc Tanner loose in their organization was like having a panther running loose in a tornado.

He made himself so difficult and obstructive that they eventually resorted to trawling him forward,

dumping him nearly a hundred years into the Deathlands future and leaving him there to fend for himself.

Had that not happened, he would have died a scant month later when the skies darkened and the missiles

ravaged the world and a civilization passed away.

Now he was one of the exclusive members of the group who traveled with Ryan Cawdor.

Doc had survived experiences that would have turned most men stark mad, but he had paid a high price.

Though he was reasonably well balanced most of the time, there were occasions when the pressure of

what had happened to him tipped a part of his acute mind sideways.

Now he lay sprawled flat on his back, his mouth sagging open, showing his peculiarly perfect teeth,

snoring gently. The huge gold-embossed commemoration Le Mat blaster protruded from its holster on his

belt.

Ryan slipped away into the brain-churning blackness of the jump, surrounded by his son and his friends,

ready to waken elsewhere.

He closed his eye.

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Chapter Two

Ryan blinked his eye open.

His nostrils were immediately filled with the bitter smell of sickness, and he looked down, taking care not

to risk moving his head, to see that Dean had puked during the jump. Fortunately it hadn't gone on the

boy's clothes. More fortunately, it hadn't gone on Ryan's clothes, either.

Seeing the small yellow puddle, Ryan felt his own guts heaving in sympathy.

He closed his eye again, trying to breathe through his mouth to minimize the stench.

His only other observation was that the armaglass walls of this particular redoubt gateway were brown,

flecked with white, markedly different from the dark gray of the chamber walls back in Maine.

Using the techniques that Krysty had taught him, Ryan slowed his breathing and pulse. He concentrated

his imagination on a wall of untouched blue, using the color to blank his mind, taking away a significant

proportion of the barely tolerable stress of making a jump.

Doc and Mildred had once had a bitter argument about what precisely happened during a mat-trans jump,

going into abstruse scientific theories about reassembled molecules and neutron displacement.

All that everyone in the group agreed on was that jumping left you feeling like you'd just gone eight

rounds with a jolt-crazed stickie.

Feeling a little less nauseous, Ryan risked opening his good right eye. His left had been missing since he

was a young boy, back in his home ville of Front Royale, up in the Shens, courtesy of his cold-heart

brother Harvey.

The chamber swam mistily back into focus.

Now there were signs of life from some of the other members of the group.

J.B. was carefully unfolding his glasses from an inside pocket and replacing them on his sharp nose. He

moved so slowly it looked as if he were sitting on broken eggshells.

Mildred was also recovering, using her sleeve to wipe a thread of spittle from a corner of her mouth.

Seeing Ryan watching her, she managed a watery grin. "Best fun you can have lying down," she said

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quietly.

Dean coughed, doubling over, bringing up a little more bile. He pulled a disgusted face and tried to

wriggle sideways, hoping to disassociate himself from the vomit.

"Hi, lover."

Ryan smiled at Krysty and gripped her hand tightly. "How's it going?"

"Been better. Been worse." She shook her head, the sentient mane of flaming crimson hair still pressed

tightly to her nape. "On balance I been better." Her face was as pale as wind-washed bone. "Yeah, I have

definitely been better."

Trader shook his head like a dog emerging from icy waves. "I'll be hung, quartered and dried for the

crows!" He coughed up a mouthful of phlegm and looked for a moment as if he were going to spit it

across the chamber. He caught Krysty's eyes and changed his mind, swallowing it. "I don't reckon I'll ever

get used to these bastard jumps. Not ever."

"Amen to that, Trader," Abe agreed weakly. "Mouth feels like a skunk crapped in it."

"Sorry about bein' sick, Dad."

"Happens to the best of us, son. Just sit still and take it easy until you feel like standing up. Don't try it too

quickly."

On the other side of the six-sided room, Jak uncoiled himself with the effortless grace of a prairie rattler,

steadying himself for a moment on the arma-glass walls. Ryan noticed there was a worm of blood seeping

from the albino teenager's nose.

Looking across at Doc, generally the last to recover from the rigors of a jump, Ryan noticed that the old

man was still unconscious. Like Jak, he was bleeding from his nose. Only in Doc's case there looked to be

about a pint and a half staining his grizzled cheek and coagulating on the floor.

As if he felt Ryan staring at him, Doc coughed and opened his pale blue eyes, gazing sightlessly at the

ceiling. "Give me a few more seconds, gentlemen of the fancy, and I shall soon be up to scratch." He

touched his nose and peered at the red smears on his fingers. "I perceive that the redoubtable John L.

Sullivan has tapped my claret."

"What's he droning on about now?" Trader asked.

Mildred shook her head. "John L. Sullivan was the world heavyweight boxing champion back around

Doc's time. Looks like the old goat imagines he's just been knocked down by him."

Doc struggled into a sitting position. "Imagined! Did I hear you right, Dr. Wyeth?"

"Yeah, you did, Doctor of Philosophy Tanner."

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"I will have you know that I once had the honor" He reconsidered. "The dubious honor of testing my

pugilistic skills against the great man himself. Though truth forces me to admit that he was a little the

worse for imbibing of the grain and was in a bullying, hectoring mode."

"And he beat the shit out of you," J.B. concluded.

Doc considered the question. "I managed a few shrewd blows that caused him to blink. Then he

hammered home seventy or eighty lucky blows, and I measured my length on the floor of the restaurant

where the altercation had taken place."

J.B. grinned, adjusting his fedora to a more jaunty angle. "Like I said, Doc. He beat the shit out of you."

BY THE TIME EVERYONE in the group felt ready to stand without the world spinning around their

ears, about ten minutes or so had passed.

"Usual red alert," Ryan said, the SIG-Sauer drawn in his right hand, the Steyr rifle across his shoulder.

"Everyone ready to go?"

They all had their blasters out, lining up behind Ryan as he reached to ease open the door of the gateway.

The lock clicked, and he pushed gently at the counterbalanced weight of reinforced armaglass.

It swung open, revealing the familiar sight of a small, cramped anteroom, barely eight feet square, totally

bare of any furniture.

The first thing Ryan noticed was that the floor of the room was surprisingly dusty.

Most of the redoubts that they'd visited had been in near-perfect running order, with just an occasional

failed light or a small malfunction in the circuitry. The original comp-controlled nuke power sources had

been working reliably for close to a century, maintaining temperature and humidity as well as circulating

the air and keeping all the rooms and corridors of the complex relatively free from dust.

"Dirty," J.B. observed from over Ryan's shoulder. "And there's marks in it."

"Yeah. Everyone just wait a minute. Jak, can you come take a look?"

The young man ghosted past, stepping carefully from the chamber. He squatted, head on one side, staring

at the marks, reaching out after a few seconds with delicate finger and thumb, like surgical pincers.

"Here." He held a frail shred of material to Ryan, who took it and held it to the bright overhead light.

"Silk," he pronounced after examining it carefully.

It was only a dozen threads, but each seemed to be of a different colorturquoise, scarlet, aquamarine,

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cobalt and amethyst.

"Beautiful," Mildred said, taking it from Ryan's hand. "Looks foreign."

"Foreign?"

"Oriental. Japanese or Chinese. Funny thing to find here in the middle of a redoubt."

Doc took it from the woman. "It is beautiful. You know what it reminds me of?" He shook his head.

"Silly, though."

"What, Doc?" J.B. asked.

"Well, an old friend of mine who lived up in the Pacific Northwest was a collector of militaria.

Specifically he was most interested in Oriental armor and swords. You know, the samurai swords with a

narrow, very slightly curved blade to them. Lovely things."

J.B. nodded. "I know what you mean, Doc. Always thought I'd like to own one, but you don't see many of

them lying around in Deathlands."

"But what's Chinese swords got to do with this pretty bit of rag?" Trader queried.

"Japanese, not Chinese," Doc corrected. "Well, they sometimes have braids of silk at the hilt, like a tassel.

It's just that these threads reminded me of that." He grimaced. "Sorry. Told you that it wasn't going to be

relevant. Silly. Not many samurai warriors making jumps in Deathlands."

Ryan rubbed at his chin. "Well, now, remember we've started hearing these strange rumors. Gangs of

what they called yellow-skinned killers. Only rumors."

"Don't get bubbles without water," Trader said.

"Doesn't seem likely," Krysty argued. "All the way from China or Japan. How would they have gotten

here?"

"No?" Ryan looked at her. "You forgotten about Major-Commissar Gregori Zimyanin?"

"And that lovely sniper's rifle," J.B. added, eyes brightening behind his spectacles. "The long Dragunov.

Reworked Kalashnikov. Yeah, he got here from old Russia."

"And we got to old Russia," Ryan said. "We still have no idea how many mat-trans gateways there are in

Deathlands. Never mind anywhere else in the world."

"Can't be any Japanese down here," Abe said. "Wherever 'here' is."

Jak straightened from examining the faint scuff marks in the layer of fine powdery dust. "Could be

wrong, Abe. About ten or dozen feet. All of them real small. Like woman. Or child. Japanese supposed to

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Deathlands26-Shadowfall/*/*]]*/Axler,James-Deathlands26-ShadowfallRyanwasshockedat\thewide-eyedlookofhorroronKrysty'sface"What?"hewhispered."Oh,EarthMother!Back.Mustturnbacknow.Feeldesperatedangerbehin\dus.Turnback."ShepushedpastRyan,runningclumsilypasttheothers,nearlyknockingoverAbe.Krystygrabbedat...

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James Axler - Deathlands 026 - Shadowfall

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