Axler,James - Deathlands 20 - Cold Asylum

Deathlands - Cold Asylum

/* /*]] */ Axler, James - Deathlands 20 - Cold Asylum Guiteau's desperate voice rose above the crackling

of flames and thunder. "Any moment a hundred armed sec men'll be on top of you, Cawdor. Give up and

the boy lives. Best offer you'll get all day."

He stepped into the open, crouched and almost totally hidden behind Dean, the muzzle of the Armalite

digging into the boy, his finger on the trigger.

"Let him go, or I'll put you down." The voice, surprisingly calm, was Mildred's.

From the corner of his eye, Ryan saw the doctor standing like a statue, her right arm extended, the ZKR

551 target pistol pointed at the sec sergeant.

"The boy dies before I take a hit," Guiteau called, crouching even lower, so that she could see very little

of his head or body.

But that didn't matter. The Czech revolver snapped once, and at forty paces and in poor light, Mildred put

the .38-caliber round precisely where she aimed it. Both Harry Guiteau's index finger and the trigger of

his automatic rifle were blown off. The Armalite clattered to the ground, and Dean scampered toward his

father.

"Best damn shot I ever saw," the sec sergeant gritted through his pain.

Mildred's second shot punched through the bridge of his nose, ensuring the companions' escape. They

turned and headed for the redoubt.

Cold Asylum

20 in the Deathland series

James Axler

A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

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Deathlands - Cold Asylum

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 dedication, belatedly, is to the countless legions of fans of the Deathlands series. The people who

love Ryan, Krysty, Doc, J.B. and the company as much as I do. Thanks for riding the dangerous

highways of this alternative future at my side. Onward into new tomorrows, together. This is for you.

James Axler

Second edition April

ISBN 0-373-62558-

COLD ASYLUM

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.

"Kansas...John Stewart has sung movingly of it, and Dorothy so wanted to return there. But during the

War Between the States it earned its name of 'Kansas, bloody Kansas.' So it was and so it will be again."

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Deathlands - Cold Asylum

The Great Plains,

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow ,

by Tecumseh Shelby,

Prologue

Ryan Cawdor paused, his hand on the heavy door, ready to pull it shut and trigger the mat-trans system

that would propel them into elsewhere. "Here we go, friends."

He sat on the floor beside Krysty Wroth, with his son, Dean, on his left. Doc Tanner was opposite, lying

on his side, his knees drawn up to his chin. The rest of the companions had assumed the positions that

they knew from previous experience would be the most comfortable for making the jump.

Ryan took Krysty's hand in his.

The lamps outside the chamber dimmed, and he heard the crackling of a major electrical circuit

malfunctioning. The metal disks in floor and ceiling began to glow, and the pale yellow armaglass walls

started to pulse with the familiar misty light.

The inside of Ryan's brain was already beginning to float in the nauseous way that he hated so much. He

closed his good eye.

"Something's wrong."

The voice was his father's, but it couldn't be. The man was long dead at Front Royal in the Shens.

"Something."

It was an old man's voice. Doc Tanner. Something felt wrong.

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Deathlands - Cold Asylum

Ryan gripped Krysty's hand more tightly, seeking some portion of her mystical power, the Earth Mother's

power, trying to hold her.

But they were suddenly wrenched apart with a dreadful force and violence.

Now he could hear the roaring of a mighty water, and his breathing was being choked.

Tidal wave off the Keys.

"Wrong."

The word sounded flat and unemotional.

Now a profound darkness engulfed Ryan, and he realized with a chilling terror that he was completely

alone, alone in a different time and place.

"What's happening?" His lips formed the words, and his brain could hear them.

Wrong.

"Happening?"

Alone. One.

Chapter One

Ryan opened his eye.

He swallowed, tasting the yellow bitterness of bile at the back of his throat, the inside of his skull still

swimming in its own secret sea. His muscles ached as if he'd been on the wrong end of a beating in an

alley behind a frontier gaudy.

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Deathlands - Cold Asylum

"Fireblast!" His voice was so quiet it hardly carried as far as his ears.

The mist in the chamber of the gateway was clearing slowly, the metal plates losing their silvery glow.

He noticed that the armaglass walls were a rich, deep purple. Coming out of a jump, the brain never

functioned all that well, but Ryan couldn't remember seeing walls of that color before.

He felt more deeply sick and confused than he could remember, and he looked around the six-sided room

to check on how the others were feeling.

The others.

There was nobody else there.

He was on his own.

That wasn't possible. He'd closed the door himself and triggered the jump mechanism in the buried

redoubt in Florida, and everyone had been there then.

Ryan took a sudden harsh breath, biting back the desire to vomit. He closed his eye again, battling for

self-control and checking in his memory where everyone had been sitting.

Krysty had sat next to him, her brilliantly red hair dark and wet, pasted to her head, her long legs

stretched out in front of her, back against the wall, fingers clasped in his. Some incredible force had torn

them apart. Ryan remembered that.

She'd been on his right, with his eleven-year-old son, Dean, on the left. The boy had been toying with his

beloved turquoise-hilted knife as he sat and waited patiently for the jump to begin. His big 9 mm

Browning automatic pistol had been jammed into a holster at his belt. Who'd been next in the circle?

"Mildred Wyeth."

Ryan could see the black doctor in his mind's eye. A relative latecomer to the group of companions, the

thirty-six-year-old woman had been wearing a cotton shirt and quilt-lined denim jacket over reinforced

military fatigue pants, tucked into calf-length boots. In December of the year 2000, Mildred, an expert on

cryosurgery, had been taken into hospital for minor abdominal surgery. Things had gone wrong, and

she'd been placed in cryogenic suspensionfrozena state from which Ryan and the others had eventually

freed her nearly a century after her "death."

Recently she had deepened her relationship with the Armorer of the group, John Barrymore Dix, who'd

sat next to her. About the same age as Ryan, J.B. was his oldest friend. The two of them had traveled for

years with the legendary Trader, rising in the ranks to become his two most trusted lieutenants, as they

ranged all across Deathlands.

Thinking about the Trader brought a flicker of memory to Ryan. Abe, another comrade from the savage

days riding the war wags, had gone off to search for the man. How long ago? Weeks? Months? Years?

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Ryan couldn't remember. He knew that his old leader had vanished during one long-ago night. Everyone

thought that the rad cancer had overwhelmed him and he'd gone off to die like an animal in some

cramped, dark place. Then the rumors started that Trader might not be dead after all.

"Abe?" Ryan said, trying to remember whether the little gunner had been with them in the gateway in

Florida. He was sure that he hadn't. But there had been others.

Krysty Wroth.

J. B. Dix.

Dean.

Mildred Wyeth.

"Doc."

Of course. Doc Tanner, lying doubled up on the far side of the chamber, knees cracking as he composed

himself, his mane of bedraggled white hair framing his lined face. Doc's age was a bizarre enigma that

Ryan had never been able to understand.

He knew that Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been born on the fourteenth day of February in the year

of Our Lord, 1868. He'd been married to Emily, ne Chandler, on the seventeenth day of June, twenty-

three years later. He'd obtained his doctorate in science at Harvard and a Ph.D. from Oxford University in

England.

Tall and skinny, Doc had been a happy man, with a three-year-old daughter, Rachel, and a little son,

Jolyon. Then white-coated, faceless scientists a hundred years in the future had destroyed his life.

He'd been plucked into 1998 from 1896 as one of the few successful guinea pigs from Operation

Chronos, a time-trawling government project that generally brought only mangled piles of unidentifiable

meat, blood and raw bones from the past.

Doc had proved so difficult a guest of that particular present that they had eventually pushed him forward

another ninety years or so into Deathlands.

"And Michael," Ryan announced triumphantly.

Michael Brother had been brought into their world as another faulty experiment of Chronos. Since his

birth he had been an oblate, a trainee monk, in a closed community called Nil-Vanity, above Visalia in

the Sierras. Nineteen years of age, he had been disciplined into the martial art of Tao-Tain-do and had the

fastest fighting reflexes that Ryan had ever known.

That was all of them.

The name of Jak Lauren came unbidden into Ryan's mind. Had Jak been with them in Florida?

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"No."

The albino youth had traveled with Ryan and the others through many lethally desperate adventures.

Now he was married to Christina, and they and their child, Jenny, lived on a spread in New Mexico.

Ryan managed to get himself upright, conquering the sickness, trying to get his brain working. They'd all

been together as the jump began, but there had been some kind of electronic malfunction. He recalled

that. Could that have been responsible for the jump going so wrong?

Were the others together, or had each of them been sent tumbling through time and space to different

locations?

He breathed deeply, trying to deduce some clue from the taste of the air.

Most gateways were buried deep within old top-secret military installations called redoubts. They were

generally powered by long-lived nuke generators that kept the heat and lights in the complexes

functioning at survival levels.

The air didn't smell like it normally did. Most jumps took the companions to gateways where the air was

stale, dusty and dull. It often hadn't been breathed by anyone for close to a century, since the nuke

cataclysm of 2001 that had wiped away civilization.

This air was fresh and clean, warm, with a strange, foreign scent to it that Ryan couldn't quite identify.

Automatically he checked through his personal armory of weapons, then adjusted the long white silk

scarf around his neck, fingering the weighted ends that turned it into such a lethally effective garrote.

A fresh wave of dizziness made Ryan stagger, and he leaned his hand on the cold glass wall. What was

happening didn't hang together for him. How could they all have been in the Florida gateway and then

end up in different destinations? Assuming that the others had materialized somewhere else in

Deathlands. The idea that they hadn't was too appalling to entertain.

To try to steady himself, Ryan drew his blaster from its holster. The familiar shape made sense to him,

and he lifted it closer to his face to peer at it.

"Schweizerische Industrie-Gesellschaft Sauer." The trusty SIG-Sauer, Model P-226, that he'd carried for

so many years had never let him down.

Ryan took several more slow, deep breaths, reciting the vital statistics of the gun. "Nine millimeter.

Fifteen rounds with push-button mag release. Weight twenty-five and a half ounces. Barrel length 4.4

inches. Total length 7.7 inches. Built-in baffle silencer."

He bolstered the blaster and stopped to pick up the rifle that lay on the floor by his feet. His free hand

had been gripping the sling on the Steyr SSG-70 during the jump, which explained why it had come

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Deathlands - Cold Asylum

along with him. The bolt action, 10-round blaster fired the uncommon 7.62 mm bullets, and Ryan had

intended to try to find some way of changing it for a long gun that used a more standard caliber.

Ammunition was a whole lot better than gold in Deathlands. If you didn't have any, it was almost

impossible to obtain. If you had plenty, then you could generally find a way of getting hold of even more.

It had been something that Trader had constantly drummed into every man and woman who rode and

fought with him on the lumbering war wags. "No bullets gets you dead" was one of his more succinct

and memorable sayings.

Ryan was feeling better.

There were two simple options.

One was to open the door and then close it again. About the only thing that they managed to learn about

the lost science of gateways was that this would normally speed you straight back to where you'd been.

But Ryan's prime guess was that the Florida mat-trans chamber might well now be destroyed, flooded

full ten fathoms deep in saltwater.

The other option was to go out and try to find where in Deathlands he'd landed and begin the

monstrously difficult quest of trying to track down Krysty, Dean and the others.

Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer in his right hand and reached out with his left toward the control on the door.

Chapter Two

Mildred Wyeth recovered consciousness, doubled-up, a pool of vomit inches from her eyes.

"Don't remember eating that," she said, aware that her throat was dry and painful and that her voice

hadn't risen above a hoarse whisper.

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Suddenly, like a rush of cold wind across a midnight desert, came the realization that she was alone.

"Bastards. Might've waited." She struggled to sit up, the only sound the tiny clicking of the beads in her

plaited hair. The floor and the walls were cool. No, they were cold. Bitingly, icy cold. Mildred jerked her

hand away.

The walls of the previous gateway had been a sort of pallid yellow. These were a light greeny-blue. So,

the jump had been made successfully, but where were the others?

"John?" she said, coughing as she stood, blinking at the rush of pain behind her eyes. She cleared her

throat and tried again. "John?"

The chamber was quiet, and she couldn't catch any noise from outside the armaglass surround.

In the last-ever Olympic Games, held in Miami in the summer of 1996, Dr. Mildred Wyeth had won the

silver medal in the free-shooting pistol. Back in her home town of Lincoln, Nebraska, she had been

chairperson of the local shooting club, the first black, and the first woman, to hold the position.

She felt for the butt of the 6-shot target revolver on her hip, the ZKR 551, originating in the Zbrojovka

Works in Brno, and designed by the Koucky brothers. The weapon was chambered to take a Smith amp;

Wesson .38 caliber bullet.

"John? Ryan? Anyone there?"

Mildred had made enough jumps to be utterly bewildered. She knew that everyone suffered to varying

degrees, but there'd never been a situation where someone would be left totally on his or her own by the

others.

She stretched the stiffness out of her spine, finally making the positive decision to draw the revolver. Its

familiar weight and beautiful balance gave her the momentary illusion that she felt better.

It was so cold in the heart of the mat-trans unit that Mildred's breath frosted the air in front of her.

Her fingers touched the handle of the door and she paused a moment, reaching the conscious decision

that this was about the most frightened that she'd ever been in her adult life.

"Ready or not, here I come," she said, and opened the door.

KRYSTY CAME TO, finding herself holding Dean's hand. At some point, as consciousness faded into

the dark, the young boy must have climbed into her lap and now lay with one arm around her shoulders,

his dripping, tousled hair pressed against her breast.

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"Like father, like son," she whispered to Ryan, wincing at how much it hurt her to speak.

There was no answer, so she blinked her emerald eyes and looked at Ryan.

Who wasn't there.

"Ryan!" She was more bewildered than concerned, and light-years away from real fear.

Even when she realized that nobody else was in the scarlet-walled mat-trans chamber.

Just her and the boy.

Krysty had "seeing" powers. Not like those of a genuine doomie, but with enough precognition to

sometimes be aware of the threat of some imminent danger.

Now she felt her fiery hair shrinking around her skull, gripping the damp skin across her nape, clamping

so tight that it almost made her cry out. With it came an utterly overwhelming feeling of total disaster.

Not along the line or even around the next corner, but right now and right here.

"Now, Krysty," she said sternly, "no time for giving in. Gaia, help me."

She stood, lifting Dean gently in her arms. He stirred and woke, smiling sleepily up at her. "Hi, Krysty."

"On your feet," she said. "We're in deep shit."

"What?" He recovered awareness almost as quickly as his father would have, sliding from her grip and

drawing his heavy blaster. Then realization dawned. "Where's everyone?"

"Don't know. Something terribly wrong here. Taste it flat on my tongue like the skin of a week-old

corpse."

She had drawn her own Smith amp; Wesson double-action 640, a 5-shot, snub-nosed .38.

"Walls are different color," he noticed. "Could the others have come around quicker and then No, that's

stupe thinking, isn't it?"

"I heard some kind of electric explosion as we were beginning the jump. Reckon it affected the

transmission. We came here, wherever 'here' is. Rest might be someplace else. Might have split up in

different redoubts." She suppressed a charnel image of the others being dismembered in the jump.

"Why just you and me?"

The woman was touched by the courage of the eleven-year-old. It was all too obvious to both of them

that they were in the gravest peril, isolated and lost. But he had braced his shoulders and almost, almost ,

managed to hide the tremble in his voice.

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Axler, James - Deathlands 20 - Cold Asylum

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